Propaganda won't create jobs, make us more safe, solve the health care crisis, or teach our children well.
As of 6/28/08 4113 US Military dead, and 30333 wounded.
click here to see $ costs
Is testifying before Congress today about Climate Change...currently on C-Span.
Jason Burnett has made a lot of news lately, criticizing the Bush administration for rejecting California’s request for a federal waiver that would allow the state to enforce greenhouse gas restrictions.
Burnett, until recently the associate deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, last month testified before a congressional panel about the possible White House role in overruling the EPA staff’s recommendation of the waiver. Since then, Burnett has given numerous interviews on the issue.
Now Burnett is using his checkbook to do his talking. After quitting the administration last month, he donated $3,600 to Democrat Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. That came on top of a $1,000 contribution he made to Obama before joining the EPA.
A Stanford-trained economist and a Democrat, Burnett, 31, said in an interview that he is moving back to Northern California to campaign for Obama and Democratic Rep. Sam Farr of Carmel. He's counting on them to support more efforts to curb greenhouse gases.
“Climate change endangers health and welfare," Burnett said. "The EPA is required to use existing law to reduce greenhouse gases. The sooner we begin addressing it in earnest, the better off we’ll be.”
Burnett predicted that California will get its waiver, either by court order or after the next president--Obama or his Republican opponent, John McCain--takes office.
--Dan Morain
By JOHN PORRETTO – 17 hours ago
HOUSTON (AP) — As giant oil companies like Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips get set to report what will probably be another round of eye-popping quarterly profits, just where is all that money going?
The companies insist they're trying to find new oil that might help bring down gas prices, but the money they spend on exploration is nothing compared with what they spend on stock buybacks and dividends.
It's good news for shareholders, including mutual funds and retirement plans for millions of Americans, but no help to drivers already making drastic cutbacks to offset the high cost of fuel.
The five biggest international oil companies plowed about 55 percent of the cash they made from their businesses into stock buybacks and dividends last year, up from 30 percent in 2000 and just 1 percent in 1993, according to Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.
The percentage they spend to find new deposits of fossil fuels has remained flat for years, in the mid-single digits.
The issue has become more sensitive as lawmakers and Americans frustrated by high gas prices have balked at gaudy reports of oil industry profits. ConocoPhillips is scheduled to kick off the latest round of Big Oil earnings reports Wednesday.
Oil prices are set on the open market, not by the oil industry. But that hasn't stopped public protests, a series of congressional grillings for top oil executives, and a failed attempt by lawmakers to slap Big Oil with a windfall profits tax.
In the first three months of this year, Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's biggest publicly traded oil company, shelled out $8.8 billion on stock buybacks alone, compared with $5.5 billion on exploration and other capital projects.
ConocoPhillips has already told investors that its stock buybacks for April to June of this year will come to about $2.5 billion — nine times what it spent on exploration.
McCain is UNFIT to hold public office!
Native Americans: Navajo Indians targeted for brutal genocide, in Arizona, USA ...by Sen. John McCain & a few greedy Senators, which brutally displaced thousands of Navajo farmers onto a Nuclear Waste Dump to live after brutalizing them for two decades in peaceful resistance.
Not long ago, the United Nations performed a Human Rights Investigation of the forced Navajo resettlement from Arizona to Nevada, under Special Rapporteur A. Amor. A law revised and submitted to Congress by Senator John McCain and others before him was determined to be the root cause of violations, which after ratification by President Clinton in 1999 during a globally publicized sit in by Songstress Julia Butterfly Hill at Big Mountain, Arizona. The enactment led to the removal of the Dineh band of Navajo from the Black Mesa to free the lands up to mining, and could lead to relocation of the Dineh-Navaho from Big Mountain, all based on a tissue of deceit, false claims of prior ownership by a small group of paid Arizona locals of Indian descent led by one Wayne Taylor, working for McCain, Bechtel and Peabody.
The ACSA challenges Senator McCain on his legislative history of Human Rights Violations: "a Skeleton in his closet: UNFIT to hold public office!
(Public Law 93-531 as amended in 1996 (Partition), 1999 (Settlement), 2001 (Enforcement of Resettlement) and 2005 (Expansion of Resettlement) by bills introduced by Senator McCain - has led to the United Nations Special Rapporteur, Hon Abdeltalif Amor's condemnation of human rights violations inside the US, over the stripping of rights and forced resettlement of these gentle and deeply spiritual band of Dineh-Navajo Indians from Arizona, swept off of lands they'd owned since 1500 A.D. so that Peabody Western Coal could mine the Coal from beneath their farmlands and tap their wells to slurry pipe it to a power station in Nevada).
ACSA study reveals that after assembling a team of "pro-Peabody Western Coal" Indians and obtaining a false "Hopi-Navajo" Tribal Counsel designation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for these paid Tribal representatives, in the period 1974-1996, Senator McCain was able to get large bands of the Dineh-Navajo relocated off their lands, so that Peabody Western could mine the coal under their farms at nominal expense. Common Cause has suggested McCain was indirectly compensated by street name cash contributions to his Federal Election Fund during three Presidential runs, and through family business with Las Vegas Casinos who benefited from the coal driven power he supplied.
'And you wish he'd just come out and say it.'
He has.
You just weren't listening.
Since this is your first post, let me be the first to tell you he's Christian.
BUT...he's made it clear, with his understanding of Islamic Culture, more so that McCain. there's nothing wrong with being Muslim.
Radical Islam that professes violence and death againt us is our enemy.
Not peace loving Muslims,
To David Remnick, longtime editor of the highly-regarded New Yorker, who said he believes the ironic intent of the illustration will be clear to most Americans.
At the end of June, Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and Sandra Aamodt, a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, wrote an op-ed column for the New York Times that attempted to shed some light on how false beliefs are created in the brain, and how they can persist despite a constant deluge of accurate information.
I don't care how many excuses the New Yorker comes up with regarding it's INTENT. IT'S IMPACT THAT MATTERS
False beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.
A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength.
Our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.
According to the Supreme Court.....
Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971)revolutionized the enforcement of the Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971), by shifting focus away from intent and toward a disparate impact standard.
OUT OF 50K PEOPLE WHO WILL SEE THAT COVER, ONLY 5K WILL READ THE INSIDE ARTICLE.
THERE WILL BE DISPARATE IMPACT FROM THIS COVER.
The New Yorker SHOULD BE ASHAMED.
NO EXCUSE.
He's already said he will cut spending...and I don't think he meant defense spending...so
One way of predicting is looking at past votes. McCain voted FOR
S. 1932 Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (Senate vote)
Introduced: 10.26.2005 [Senate] Sponsor: Sen. Judd Gregg [R-NH]
Signed into Law: 02.08.2006
Senate: Yea-50, Nay-50
Signed into law: 02.08.06
The Legislation:
The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 was the major legislation affecting domestic entitlement programs considered by Congress in 2005.
The bill cut spending by $38.8 billion over five years, with much of the cutbacks coming from Medicare and Medicaid cuts and the college loan program.
The bill increased the interest rates on PLUS loans, taken out by parents to support their children’s college education.
It also squeezed billions of dollars out the student loan program by mandating that college lenders who profit from lending at higher rates give excess profits back to the government rather than keeping them or passing the savings on to student borrowers.
The bill obtained $16 billion over ten years in savings from Medicaid by increasing co-pays and premiums for health care for low-income people while allowing states to offer scaled-back Medicaid programs with fewer benefits.
The bill also cut $2.6 billion from programs including child support enforcement, foster care, and support for the elderly and disabled.
The bill included new work requirements for welfare recipients and provided $2.1 billion in health care assistance to survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
Finally, S 1932 contained provisions reducing agricultural subsidies, increasing the amount employer pension plans must pay to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, and generating income for the government by auctioning off the television broadcast spectrum.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell(R-KY) McConnell's Middle-Class Grades
2008 Final grade to be released 03.2009
2007
2005
2004
2003
2008 Year to Date Score Voted on 16 of 16 bills considered.===
Obama get's a A
McCain hasn't voted often enough in 2007 or 2008, but the last two years 2005 and 2006 when he did vote enough, he receiued an F
http://www.themiddleclass.org/legislator/mitch-mcconnell-469
McCain U
"What's rather stunning about Sen. McCain's proposals...is their magnitude, and the magnitude of the tax relief that is devoted solely to people at the very top," Gene Sperling, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, told the audience. Sperling was a participant in the economic panel, which was moderated by Robert Gordon, also a Senior Fellow at CAPAF, and included Jared Bernstein, Director of the Living Standards Program at the Economic Policy Institute. Prior to the panel, James Kvaal, Domestic Policy Advisor for CAPAF, provided an overview of McCain's economic plan.The panelists focused on the president's influence on the distribution of wealth and national regulatory policies. Referring to McCain's economic policy, Sperling said, "I don't think I have ever seen anything quite like that."Sperling pointed out that all major presidential candidates from both parties support extending the Bush tax cuts for people earning under $250,000, but McCain supports an additional $110 billion in tax cuts for those with incomes above that amount. Additionally, McCain has proposed corporate tax cuts of over $175 billion. "The difference between him and most progressive candidates...is about $300 billion per year," said Sperling.The panelists agreed that McCain's plan to offset these tax cuts by eliminating earmarks and holding down spending was unrealistic, with Bernstein comparing cutting earmarks to "bringing a thimble to a crater." "This notion that we can hold the line on spending is a complete abstraction," said Bernstein. To offset tax cuts, "you're going to have to go after the entitlements, and that's actually what worries me the most."Because they favor the wealthy, the Bush and McCain tax plans "exacerbate the inequalities in the system," Bernstein said. Sperling added, "corporate profits have not been a problem. The problem has been wages and ...
Watch the panel...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RFdiSTpDeu4
Palm Beach Post Editorial
Monday, July 14, 2008
Three weeks ago, the Senate could have followed the House and rescinded a punitive 10.6 percent cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients. But Republicans, among them Florida's Mel Martinez, blocked action, preferring to protect private providers of Medicare Advantage plans.
The GOP's move came just after the Government Accountability Office reported that those plans made $1.14 billion more in profits in 2005 than projected and spent less on treating patients. On Wednesday, Republicans tried again. Fortunately, that effort failed, 69-30. (The missing voter? John McCain.) The legislation, which the House passed last month by a 355-59 vote, goes to President Bush. He has threatened a veto, but Congress should have enough votes to override it.
Sen. Ted Kennedy's doctor-defying appearance to vote in favor of the legislation helped. Sen. Kennedy, who is receiving treatment for a life-threatening brain tumor, was unable to attend the June 26 debate. An effort then to end a Republican filibuster failed by one vote. Sen. Kennedy drew a bipartisan standing ovation Wednesday.
Then there were the Fourth of July ads by the American Medical Association, targeting Republican senators up for reelection: "There's no celebrating for the millions of Medicare patients - seniors, the disabled and military families - who will lose their access to health care," the ads said. "A group of U.S. senators voted to protect the powerful insurance companies' huge profits at the expense of Medicare patients' access to doctors."
Sen. Martinez' initial opposition showed that he valued those companies over the welfare of the 2.9 million Medicare patients in Florida. Another 691,487 active duty, reserve, and retired military members and their families are covered by TRICARE, a benefit program that ties its rates to Medicare. They, too, would have been affected.
With the highest percentage of Americans 65 or older, Florida stood to lose more than any state, according to the Florida Medical Association: nearly $19 billion over the next nine years. The AMA estimated that the average Florida physician treating Medicare patients would have lost $25,000 next year. Palm Beach County Medical Society President Daniel Higgins said the cuts would "cause many physicians to make the difficult decision of whether to stop accepting Medicare patients or close their practices."
In a statement about his grudging support of the Medicare doctor payment fix, Sen. Martinez lamented, "The underlying reason we have to act every year to stop payment cuts to doctors is because the way we pay doctors under the program is broken." In fact, the Republican attempt to privatize Medicare has made a shaky system worse. What's broken is a political system that for the past several years has valued patients and doctors less than the government-subsidized profits of private insurers.
John McCain’s campaign continued its daily press conference calls today with a discussion of Barack Obama’s Iraq policy. Today, Senator Lindsey Graham talked about Obama’s op-ed in the New York Times.
Marketing a Myth: How John McCain Actually Got The Surge WrongPosted by Max on July 14th, 2008 | Categorized as Uncategorized By Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard Jr. (USA, Ret.)To hear John McCain tell it, you’d think the fall-off in American casualties in Iraq is due solely to his foresight and foreign policy experience. It’s amazing to me just how many people have bought the McCain line, even those who should know better. “As we now know nearly four years later,” a Newsweek commentator recently noted, “McCain was dead on in his analysis of what went wrong in Iraq … McCain was so right that, among military experts today, the emerging conventional wisdom about Bush’s current ‘surge’ is that if had occurred back then — when McCain wanted it and the political will existed in this country to support it for the necessary number of years — it might well have succeeded.” What a bunch of bunk. Since the beginning of this year, military experts that I’ve talked to argue that the fall-off in violence in Iraq had almost nothing to do with the increase in American troop levels — and everything to do with actually talking with and supporting the previous insurgents. Recent published reports confirm that talks with the insurgents began all the way back in December of 2003, when military officers met with Sunni insurgent leaders in Amman, Jordan. Not only that, but when those talks were actually opposed by the administration, the military went ahead with the talks anyway. But don’t take my word for it, go back and read what General David Petraeus told the Congress in April of 2007, before the surge was actually in place. Back then, Patraeus told the Congress that the levels of violence in Iraq were down significantly and that “the tribes” were the key to that transformation. Let me repeat that: recruiting the Sunni tribes (and not the surge) has been the key to success in Iraq, along with the stand-down of the Mahdi Army. Patraeus is not alone in his thinking. The tribes of Anbar joined U.S. forces, according to U.S. Captain Jay McGee — an intelligence officer with the 69th Armored Regiment– because “everyone is convinced Coalition forces are going to leave and they are saying, ‘We do not want Al Qaeda to take control of the area when that happens.” This isn’t exactly new information. Dozens of American newspapers and magazines have documented how the military recruited Iraq’s Sunni tribes as our allies — the same tribes that had once been fighting us. And all of this began before the U.S. increased the number of troops in the country. So let’s stop taking John McCain’s claim, his myth, at face value. The increase in American troops in Iraq had nothing to do with defeating the Iraqi insurgency and everything to do with actually talking with them. To claim otherwise is to market a myth and it’s time for John McCain to acknowledge it — to give credit where credit is due: to those fine officers of our military who decided to talk, even as the administration continued to beat the war drums.
Marketing a Myth: How John McCain Actually Got The Surge Wrong
Posted by Max on July 14th, 2008 | Categorized as Uncategorized
By Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard Jr. (USA, Ret.)
To hear John McCain tell it, you’d think the fall-off in American casualties in Iraq is due solely to his foresight and foreign policy experience. It’s amazing to me just how many people have bought the McCain line, even those who should know better. “As we now know nearly four years later,” a Newsweek commentator recently noted, “McCain was dead on in his analysis of what went wrong in Iraq … McCain was so right that, among military experts today, the emerging conventional wisdom about Bush’s current ‘surge’ is that if had occurred back then — when McCain wanted it and the political will existed in this country to support it for the necessary number of years — it might well have succeeded.”
What a bunch of bunk.
Since the beginning of this year, military experts that I’ve talked to argue that the fall-off in violence in Iraq had almost nothing to do with the increase in American troop levels — and everything to do with actually talking with and supporting the previous insurgents. Recent published reports confirm that talks with the insurgents began all the way back in December of 2003, when military officers met with Sunni insurgent leaders in Amman, Jordan. Not only that, but when those talks were actually opposed by the administration, the military went ahead with the talks anyway.
But don’t take my word for it, go back and read what General David Petraeus told the Congress in April of 2007, before the surge was actually in place. Back then, Patraeus told the Congress that the levels of violence in Iraq were down significantly and that “the tribes” were the key to that transformation. Let me repeat that: recruiting the Sunni tribes (and not the surge) has been the key to success in Iraq, along with the stand-down of the Mahdi Army. Patraeus is not alone in his thinking. The tribes of Anbar joined U.S. forces, according to U.S. Captain Jay McGee — an intelligence officer with the 69th Armored Regiment
– because “everyone is convinced Coalition forces are going to leave and they are saying, ‘We do not want Al Qaeda to take control of the area when that happens.”
This isn’t exactly new information. Dozens of American newspapers and magazines have documented how the military recruited Iraq’s Sunni tribes as our allies — the same tribes that had once been fighting us. And all of this began before the U.S. increased the number of troops in the country. So let’s stop taking John McCain’s claim, his myth, at face value. The increase in American troops in Iraq had nothing to do with defeating the Iraqi insurgency and everything to do with actually talking with them. To claim otherwise is to market a myth and it’s time for John McCain to acknowledge it — to give credit where credit is due: to those fine officers of our military who decided to talk, even as the administration continued to beat the war drums.
Jackie and Dunlap, the new Face of America, on Belgian company InBev's hostile takeover attempt on Budweiser.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQPPNFFTmo
Jackie and Dunlap on Obama's Iraq flip-flop, how Jesus would fare in the presidential election, and why nobody gives a sh*t about McCain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EweUnFQyg
With a little help from his freinds, US!!!
WATCH!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJppWktumy8
Thank you, DesertRatDan!!! Your videos ROCK!!!
http://www.youtube.com/user/DesertRatDan
JUST SAYIN...
Andrew Ratner
On Blogs
July 13, 2008
