Congratulations, House Republicans!

that is my point. Another point that I make often is that are schools cost way more to run than we can afford, they need a sever pruning back on their cost structure. A lot of the problem is federal laws which mandate extremely expensive programs, which has lead to a explosive bloat in school labor costs



We find for instance a person on staff to deal with bullying and conflict resolution, sucking up $50K a year. In my district a classroom assistant makes $30K a year, for what is essentially a part time gofer job. We see tons of wantabe shrinks and learning difficulty pros who tend to make around $100k a year, almost none of whos positions existed 30 years ago.

I was using your definition. If you want to define fraud the way you did then there is more fraud in banks then there is in anything the government provides free.

Everyone HAS taken a hit, except the the top 10%. Tax these assholes into abject poverty.

cant. globalization of the economy, specifically the free flow of capital, has removed this power from governments. Capital now makes the rules, which is why labor is taking it in the ass.

State GOP changes course, cancels fundraiser headlined by admitted felon
By David Gutman, Staff writer



AP file photo
Conservative scholar and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza (left) and his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, leave a New York federal court in May. D’Souza pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions. The West Virginia Republican Party announced D’Souza as the headliner for its annual dinner Wednesday morning, and then canceled the event later that afternoon.

Hours after announcing Wednesday that their annual fall fundraiser would be headlined by a prominent conservative author and filmmaker who awaits sentencing on a federal felony, West Virginia Republican Party officials changed course and canceled the event.

Dinesh D’Souza, who in May pleaded guilty to a federal felony charge of making illegal campaign contributions, was to have headlined the state GOP’s annual “Victory Dinner” on Sept. 19. Just four days after that date, he is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court in New York, where he faces 10 to 16 months in prison, according to his plea deal.

The quick reversal from the state party followed criticism from West Virginia’s most prominent Republican, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, who said she would not attend the D’Souza event and would not allow her name to be associated with it in any way.

“Neither the campaign or Shelley had any knowledge of the decision to invite D’Souza to speak nor do we agree with the invitation,” Capito campaign spokeswoman Amy Graham said in an email. Capito is running for the U.S. Senate.

Alex Mooney, the Republican House candidate in West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, would not comment on the event or say if he’d planned to attend before the event was canceled. State Sen. Evan Jenkins, the GOP candidate in the U.S. House’s 3rd District, also would not comment.

In canceling the event, state Republican Party Chairman Conrad Lucas said, “We look forward to having an event that all conservatives can be proud of, as we look forward to a great success in November.”

Lucas said the fundraiser would be rescheduled for later this year and that D’Souza would not be a part.

When the D’Souza event was announced in a Wednesday morning news release, Lucas said the state party was, “proud to bring him to West Virginia at such an important time in our state’s Republican turn to red.”

D’Souza, an adviser to President Ronald Reagan, is the author of several best-selling books about conservatism and Christianity. His film, “2016: Obama’s America,” is among the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. It argues that the “anti-colonialist” views of President Obama’s father help explain why Obama, in D’Souza’s view, rejects “American exceptionalism” and is trying to reshape America. He also argues that American guilt about slavery is what led to Obama’s election.

In May, D’Souza pleaded guilty to using “straw donors” to donate to the 2012 U.S. Senate campaign of New York Republican Wendy Long. He donated more than $10,000 to Long’s campaign in the name of other people.

“I knew that causing a campaign contribution to be made in the name of another was wrong and something the law forbids,” D’Souza told the court in pleading guilty, according to Reuters. “I deeply regret my conduct.”

A clerk for U.S. District Judge Richard Berman — who will sentence D’Souza — confirmed that his sentencing is still scheduled for the morning of Sept. 23.

Since June 16, D’Souza has been on a nationwide bus tour to promote his newest movie, “America: Imagine the World Without Her.”

“Dinesh D’Souza’s conservative message is a tremendous and timeless one on the past glories of our nation and what we must to do preserve it for the sake of freedom worldwide,” Lucas said in the email that announced the cancellation of D’Souza’s appearance. “He is a true champion of the conservative cause in America.”

Reach David Gutman at [email protected], 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.

Because of stuff like this:

Those who did not get hurt a bit:

Corporate 1% in U.S. Gets Wealthier While Cash Piles Up
By Lorraine Woellert Aug 8, 2014 9:03 AM CT



Dollar Below 1.3350 Per Euro `Important' for Rally
Richest 1% Get Richer

Income inequality has company -- make that companies. A new wealth gap is opening among U.S. corporations, where cash holdings are growing more concentrated as the rich get richer.

Eighteen American businesses held 36 percent of corporate wealth in 2013, up from 27 percent in 2009, according to a report from Standard & Poor’s, a credit rating firm in New York. The bottom 80 percent have lost ground, with just 11 percent.

The top 1 percent is a Who’s Who of multinationals, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Apple Inc. and Ford Motor Co., that reap a big share of profits from non-U.S. sales. Because tax law discourages moving that money back to the U.S., cash is piling up abroad and companies are taking novel steps to adapt, including borrowing against those assets to finance operations at home.

Moving Profits to Cut U.S. Taxes

“Unlike individuals, corporations don’t want to be in that top 1 percent,” said analyst Andrew Chang, lead author of the S&P report. “This rising cash balance among the richest is tax-policy driven.”

American multinationals are taxed by the country where profits are earned and by the U.S. when -- or if -- the money is brought back. The corporate tax rate in the U.S., running up to 35 percent, is the highest in the industrialized world.
Photographer: Ron Antonelli/Bloomberg

Cupertino, California-based Apple, which has 78 percent of its $40.7 billion overseas,... Read More

Companies have long lobbied Congress to rewrite the code as cash for the wealthiest 1 percent rose to 23.6 percent as a share of total assets last year from 20.4 percent in 2009, Chang found. For everyone else, it accounted for less than 7 percent.
More Accumulation

“Overseas cash continues to accumulate without being touched,” Chang said. “It’s undoubtedly going to increase.”

That’s bad for investors, who like to see money put to use or returned to shareholders. It’s also not good for the deficit-ridden Treasury, which missed out on an estimated $83.4 billion in tax revenue this fiscal year as companies delay bringing back earnings, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

And it can’t buy happiness for one-percenters such as Medtronic Inc. that are taking drastic steps to make use of their earnings overseas. The medical-device manufacturer is taking some $13 billion it has offshore to buy a London-based competitor in an inversion, a merger which enables it to move headquarters abroad and pay lower taxes.

“Obviously we’d rather have our cash work for us because it’s sitting in accounts with low interest rates and there’d be better ways to invest that money,” said Fernando Vivanco, a spokesman for Medtronic. “Are there any companies that you know that could say we love having our cash trapped?”
Photographer: Jerome Favre/Bloomberg

Cupertino, California-based Apple, which has 78 percent of its $40.7 billion overseas,... Read More
Domestic Assets

While Chang estimated 83 percent of cash held by the wealthiest 1 percent comes from foreign earnings, domestic assets are shrinking to the point that there’s not always enough to finance U.S. operations, he said.

That’s one reason Apple, Cisco Systems Inc. and other one-percenters are borrowing. Cupertino, California-based Apple, which has 78 percent of its $40.7 billion overseas, caused a stir last year when it said it would take on $17 billion in debt to make dividend payments. The company went back to the bond market in April.

It’s cheaper to borrow against foreign cash than repatriate it, Cisco spokesman John Earnhardt said. Ninety-three percent of the San Jose, California-based Cisco’s $47.1 billion is held outside the U.S.

“If a territorial tax were instituted or an acceptable level of corporate tax was instituted, we’d bring that money back,” Earnhardt said. “Would it be better utilized here, where our corporate headquarters is? Yes.”
Weighing Inversions

While that borrowing has kept money circulating in the U.S. economy, it’s a holding pattern that can’t be sustained if interest rates rise and prospects for tax legislation dim. That’s why more executives are weighing mergers with foreign companies in order to lower taxes, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an unpaid adviser to the Alliance for Competitive Taxation, a Washington business group lobbying for tax reform.

“They’ve given up, they think there’s no hope,” said Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to former President George W. Bush. “And when the headquarters go, they’re likely to put R&D next to the headquarters.”

When Minneapolis-based Medtronic completes its merger with Covidien Plc, it will get an Irish address and put future earnings out of reach of U.S. tax collectors.

In May, London-based AstraZeneca Plc rebuffed a similar overture from Pfizer Inc. Drugstore chain Walgreen Co. last week abandoned plans to change its address from Illinois to Switzerland when it completes a takeover of Alliance Boots GmbH.
Lew’s Warning

The Obama administration is trying to shut down such inversions after Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew warned of a hollowing out of the corporate tax base.

“We should prevent companies from effectively renouncing their citizenship to get out of paying taxes,” Lew wrote in a July 15 letter to lawmakers. “What we need as a nation is a new sense of economic patriotism.”

Because multinationals reap much of their earnings outside the U.S., where markets are less developed and business is growing faster, it makes sense to keep at least some of that money abroad.

One-percenters Intel Corp., General Electric Co. and Hewlett-Packard Co. keep cash abroad because that’s where business is growing.

“There’s a real need for us to maintain cash offshore,” Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. “The cash is there because we need it there.”
Foreign Earnings

U.S. multinationals have accumulated $1.95 trillion in foreign earnings, up 11.8 percent from a year earlier, according to a Bloomberg study. In addition to prompting inversions, the money has sent companies on an overseas buying spree.

GE, which operates in more than 170 countries, is using $57 billion in un-repatriated profits to buy France’s Alstom SA. The deal will bring overseas acquisitions by U.S. companies to more than $75 billion in 2014, slightly ahead of last year’s pace, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

While the tax code gets blamed for dragging down the economy, freeing up foreign cash wouldn’t necessarily stimulate growth. When more than 843 companies including Pfizer, Oracle and Merck, repatriated $312 billion during a 2004 tax holiday, the hoped-for job creation never materialized. Instead, stock buybacks and executive pay rose, giving a lift to individual one-percenters.
Richest Americans

“If they ended up paying out this money to stockholders, the lion’s share is going to go to the top 1 percent of individuals,” said Thomas Hungerford, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute who wants to ban inversions. “But if you get the money back here and at least get it circulating, that will help the economy to some extent. It will certainly help our long-term federal budget problems.”

And the corporate 99 percent might reap the benefits.

“You could argue that companies that make a billion dollars and don’t pay taxes are freeloaders,” said Mitch Rofsky, president of the Better World Club, an insurer based in Portland, Oregon, and member of the American Sustainable Business Council, a group of small employers.

“It’s basically an issue of do our economic models work, is infrastructure supported, does government have the money it needs,” Rofsky said. “It’s unfair.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Lorraine Woellert in Washington at [email protected]

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Carlos Torres at [email protected] Mark Rohner

Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi setback: New humiliation for GOP’s scandal hunter
As the GOP's Benghazi committee schedules its first hearing, another committee finds no evidence of a conspiracy
Simon Maloy



In case you were at all concerned that the relative lack of Benghazi news of late meant that the issue was finally receding after nearly two years of intensive and fruitless investigation, fear not: in just a few short weeks, Benghazi-mania will live and breathe again. Rep. Trey Gowdy, chair of the House select committee tasked with beating whatever Benghazi bushes and dead horses remain, announced on July 30 that his committee’s first hearings will take place in September. If past is prologue, then Gowdy’s people will likely take advantage of the slow August news cycles and leak a few stripped-of-context tidbits to some bored and easily misled reporters. With the midterms bearing down, you’ll have all the necessary ingredients for yet more obsessive Benghazi “scandal” coverage.

It’s still not clear, though, what exactly anyone hopes to learn from Gowdy’s investigation, given that Benghazi has already been scrutinized several times over by several different congressional committees, all of which concluded that Benghazi was a tragedy, but there was no administration conspiracy, and no cover-up. And the day after Gowdy announced when his first hearings would be held, yet another committee reached the same conclusion.

On July 31, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence voted in favor of releasing a declassified version of its findings from its investigation into Benghazi. Almost immediately, the top-ranking Democrats on the committee started broadcasting the report’s conclusions. Ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger released a statement saying:

The report also shows that the process used to develop the talking points was flawed, but that the talking points reflected the conflicting intelligence assessments in the days immediately following the crisis. Finally, the report demonstrates that there was no illegal activity or illegal arms sales occurring at U.S. facilities in Benghazi. And there was absolutely no evidence, in documents or testimony, that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were politically motivated in any way.

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Adam Schiff, another top Democrat on the committee, issued a statement saying “the initial talking points provided by the intelligence community were flawed because of conflicting assessments not an intention to deceive, that there was no stand down order, that the diplomatic facilities lacked adequate security, and that our personnel at the scene acted bravely and appropriately.”

It’s entirely possible that the Democrats on the committee are putting the best spin that they can on the report and maybe they’re leaving something out, but the findings they’ve highlighted are consistent with what basically every other investigation has concluded. The House Armed Services Committee’s report also found that there was no intelligence pointing to an imminent threat in Benghazi, and there was no “stand down” order. The report was harsh on the White House’s and the State Department’s conduct in the lead-up to the attack, but stopped well short of anything conspiratorial.

All this leads one to ask, again, what exactly does Gowdy’s committee hope achieve? He’s already had his legs kicked out from underneath him multiple times as the “unanswered questions” he insists remain about Benghazi keep getting answered (often for the third or fourth time). Reports indicate that his September hearing will focus on the State Department’s Accountability Review Board report on the attacks, which was already investigated by the House Oversight Committee. Gowdy, a member of that committee, made a spectacle of himself for the cameras during the hearing and earned a lot of laudatory press from conservatives. That should give you a clue as to what these continued Benghazi investigations are really about.
Simon Maloy

Simon Maloy is Salon's political writer. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @SimonMaloy.

THAT'S not a humiliation.
Wait until he gets the job done; then u will see humiliation.

Oklahoma GOP Gov. Mary Fallin tries to distance herself from outrageously racist flyer
An ad for a "Bean Feed" GOP fundraiser includes a picture of a dancing bean wearing a sombrero
Elias Isquith Follow



Oklahoma GOP Gov. Mary Fallin tries to distance herself from outrageously racist flyer Mary Fallin

(Credit: AP/Cliff Owen)

A flyer distributed by the Republican Party of Garvin County, Oklahoma has engendered a significant amount of criticism for being incredibly racist, reports KFOR.

How incredibly racist are we talking about here? So racist that Oklahoma’s Democratic Party initially assumed the flyer was fake, because it was so patently and incredibly racist.



The flyer is intended to promote a fundraising event and is headlined by the state’s GOP Gov. Mary Fallin. It promises to feature speakers who will share “things that you may not know about the NRA, Planned Parenthood, Ku Klux Klan and other organizations.”

And because it’s “Bean Feed” fundraiser, the flyer includes a little drawing of a dancing bean…wearing a sombrero.

“I feel like the GOP gets a bad rap,” complained Garvin County GOP head Allie Burgin when questioned about the flyer. He defended it, arguing that the reference to the KKK was included because “part of [the GOP's] mission is to get information out to people” — including information about how there is no link between the state GOP and the KKK.

When Oklahoma Democrats first saw the flyer, they couldn’t believe members of the state GOP leadership could be so brazen and shameless in their racism and demagoguery. “I thought, This can’t be real — but it is. It really is,” Wallace Collins, chairman of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, told KFOR.

“I think they were trying to energize their base, the Tea Party base, the right-wing nuts; whatever you want to call them,” Collins added. “In other words, throw some red meat, raise some money.”

Despite her inclusion at the top of the flyer, Gov. Fallin’s office says she had nothing to do with the so-called Bean Feed and attempted to further distance her from the scandal by claiming her attendance at the event was never even confirmed. But KFOR found a Tuesday Facebook post from Burgin, one in which he writes that Fallin was confirmed as an attendee:

Post by Allie Burgin.

Whether or not she had initially agreed to show up to the “Bean Feed,” however, Fallin’s team now says she will not be in attendance. “The governor is not going to or speaking at that event,” Fallin’s spokesperson, Alex Weintz, declared. “She would not attend an event where those topics were featured. Our office has nothing to do with that flyer.”


Elias Isquith is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at [email protected]

The racial bigotry of the GOP is in the open; why are so many fair-minded conservative people so silent about these ads? Why do they continue to support these racial bigots?

If I recall, you, CI and a few others have talked about how well you are doing financially. Are you and those others part of the 10%? Am I part of the 10% because I'm doing better now than I was then?

I guess this politician thinks the military is full of Nazis?



Dem. Lawmaker Uses German Luftwaffe Uniform To Portray U.S. Navy In Campaign Mailer

Democratic lawmaker Julia Brownley sent a political mailer to her constituents in late July featuring a woman wearing fake military attire and a German Luftwaffe insignia — apparently unaware that the costume was not an official uniform worn by U.S. personnel.

On Monday Jeff Gorell, Brownley’s Republican opponent in California’s 26 congressional district, sent out a press release highlighting the congresswoman’s taxpayer-funded faux pas.

The candidate claims that “concerned local veterans” brought to his attention a photograph featured along the top of the flyer — which also contains pictures of a young family, a child going to school, a vibrant classroom and other common campaign themes.

That photograph shows a young woman in a white, open-collared military uniform, wearing a white cap displaying a gold insignia and blue-and-gold trim.



Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/04/dem-lawmaker-uses-german-luftwaffe-uniform-to-portray-u-s-navy-in-campaign-mailer/#ixzz39vDjsZ4W[/quote]

Because they appeal to the racist majority.

Actually, according to financial articles I've read, we belong in the top 1% of wealth in the US.

But don't forget; 4 out of 10 Americans are struggling, and over 15% live in poverty.

What is your point?

What was your point Bob?

Why are you commenting on points you don't understand? Why can't you explain your own points?