@spendius,
Alas, that is not the case. More like 13, one of whom you know as AndyClubber from the A2K NFL pick-um game. Google in Bella Morte to watch one of his music videos, if you dare. "Find Forever Gone" is the one I would (ahem) recommend. It takes a pretty bizarre twist half-way through.
@reasoning logic,
You make no sense, your choice of words are illogical.
As threatened...Inflation in China:
The government reported that prices were 5.1% higher in November vs the same month a year ago. The comparison for October was 4.4%.
The target rate is 3%.
Exports were up sharply in November meaning that Chinese companies are taking in a lot of cash. That could fuel further inflation which is now at a 28 month high. The government, which put some $568Bn into a stimulus program two years ago, has raised interest rates once and is likely to do so again, perhaps as early as this or next month.
I am involved in a group of China watchers. The consensus of opinion is that the true inflation rate is higher, perhaps significantly so. Poor families, some contend, spend 50% of their income just on food. There is speculation that there could be social unrest.
The financial ramifications for western economies could be immense.
@H2O MAN,
Thank you for paying attention, What I have shared with you was not meant to come across as logical but to get you to think about it!
I can only hope that your thinking about what I have to share with you will not stop there but will continue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWemRFNipZQ&nofeather=True
@okie,
Quote:First of all, was Cheney ever guilty of "cooking the books" at Halliburton? I doubt it, and that is why I view Raines as more personally corrupt than Cheney
If Cheney did something wrong in front of you, you would deny it.
@plainoldme,
There has never been any proof, that I know of, that Cheney "cooked the books" when he was at Halliburton.
@okie,
I don't dispute your logic, here. As I mentioned, I was using it as an example of dueling government influences.
@realjohnboy,
Yes. Unless they are in some qualified per
diem status, they have income. If the meals are an occasional reward for, say job performance, it's not reportable as income.
@realjohnboy,
rjb, I don't have details, but I agree with you. China's inflation rate is much higher - especially for the majority of the Chinese people. It seems what's being reported are for those in growing industries in the middle class who can afford to keep up with the reported rate of inflation.
George W. Bush, without Cheney
© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
December 11^th 2010
Back in 2000, when America was still America, it was widely supposed
that if George W. Bush were to somehow get elected, he would prove to be
an amicable and ineffectual moderate. The supposition was based on
everything we could read and see through the filter of American media,
which was already forgetting the responsibilities of a free press.
He wound up as president under circumstances that warned everyone that
the powers behind him were not amicable, ineffectual, or above all,
moderate.
Bush went on to be the most vicious and destructive president in
American history. In thrall to the avaricious and mean-spirited Dick
Cheney, his presidency probably would have been one of the most gruesome
even without 9/11 as an excuse to seize power, putatively for the
government but in reality for the GOP. Remember, in the wake of 2002,
the GOP had no expectation it would ever have to relinquish power again.
I've often wondered how different things would be today if Dick Cheney
had dropped dead from a heart attack early in 2001. Bush would have
still been getting pressure from the psychotic billionaires and
neo-fascists who made up his core constituency, but without his good
buddy Dick Cheney always at hand to offer paternalistic advice and
praise George for letting his strings be pulled, it seems unlikely their
malice would have had such a direct drive effect. Bush may have proved
to be an amicable and inept one-termer, destined to become a mid-level
trivial question on game shows.
The French have a term for Cheney's role: /éminence grise/. It means
“gray eminence” and refers to a normally minor functionary who has the
ear, if not the heart and the bollocks, of the emperor, and is running
things from behind the scenes. In American history, many people believe
that in the aftermath of Woodrow Wilson's stroke which incapacitated
him, his wife, Edith, was the one actually running the executive branch
of the country. It wasn't a very common occurrence in the White House
until fairly recently since, prior to FDR, the American President had
relatively little power. If you read the constitution, you'll find the
president may not declare war, or have any say in the budget process
other than to submit an appropriations request. The vice President, of
course, has no executive power at all.
Cheney was almost certainly the president in all but name, if not by the
time 9/11 occurred, then certainly within hours after the attacks.
Watching Obama's performance the past few week, I feel like I'm seeing a
good approximation to the hypothetical question, “What would Bush be
like without Cheney?”
Even before his incredibly inept tax compromise this week, a lot of
liberals, progressives and others on the left were getting increasingly
restive over his willingness to compromise before the bargaining even
began. There's a political cartoon that shows Obama playing poker with
three Republicans, and he announces, “I fold.” A perplexed dealer looks
at him and says, “I'm still just dealing the cards.”
That he reneged on his promise not to extend the tax cuts for the
wealthy beyond the ten year limit was bad enough. Anyone in politics
understands that compromise is a significant factor. But in return for
extending the tax cuts, he only got a 13 month extension on unemployment
benefits (why is it billionaires need 3% of their income nine months
more than a family facing starvation needs $500 a month?) and worse, he
opened the door to the Republicans' mad drive to destroy Social Security
by agreeing to a cut in SS deductions on paychecks for the next year.
Republicans sabotaged Medicare under Bush, and are now chorusing that
it's an expensive failure that must be done away with. It was a healthy
and successful program before they got their paws on it. They were
already falsely claiming that Social Security was doomed to failure, and
by getting Obama to submit to that favorite Grover Norquist maneuver for
getting rid of government programs they don't like, they got a cut in
funding so they could subsequently show that it was losing money.
Eventually people have to figure out that if you like America, it's a
very bad idea to put people in government who hate government.
Obama didn't get the agreement in writing. Given that the Republicans
have been dealing in bad faith for decades, that's incredibly poor
judgment right there. He didn't get them to agree to stop blocking
legislation for partisan purposes—the only thing they agreed to was the
specific bill at hand. And even there, it's Obama's word against theirs
as to what they specifically agreed to—and we know they aren't afraid to
lie about what Obama says and does.
In other words, Obama gave away the store. And he's perplexed and
petulant that the people he betrayed aren't supporting him. In a 28
minute press conference that could only be described as pathetic, he
attacked liberals and Democrats who were angered by the deal. Democrats
had an additional reason to feel betrayed: he made this agreement with
Congressional Republicans without even consulting with Congressional
Democrats, let alone giving them representation at the meeting. In
short, he took it upon himself to supplant the Democratic caucus—and
then used that abrogation to surrender.
And then he couldn't understand, and was annoyed by, the anger of the
people he just betrayed. He is probably sincere in that perplexity, too.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. If he ISN'T perplexed, then
what we face isn't George W. Bush without Dick Cheney: it's Dick Cheney
without George W. Bush. I hope he isn't that devious, cynical, and
contemptuous of his supporters.
As a backdrop to this was the incessant drumbeat of the WikiLeaks
revelations. A story as central as the cables themselves is the
outrageous efforts of the American government to stop the leaks at all
costs. Julian Assange, the face of WikiLeaks, is in a British jail
awaiting an extradition hearing to face absurd charges of “sex by
surprise” in Sweden, despite the fact that the prosecutor already threw
out the case once, and the star witness, if you will, decided she wanted
nothing to do with the case in which she was the supposed victim, and
fled to the West Bank, a scene of relative calm and sanity, apparently.
As the cyberwar spreads, the US government is using herculean methods of
arm-twisting and coercion to try and stop people from even talking about
the leaks. Government employees have been told that it's an extremely
unwise move to visit any WikiLeaks sites (there's over 2,000 mirrors up
now, including, it's rumored, one put up by the CIA, who wants to see
who visits it), and students have been warned that if they are “caught”
logging on to those sites, they can forget about a career in government.
Outfits such as Amazon and Paypal were coerced and threatened into
dropping WikiLeaks accounts. Never mind that Julian Assange has been
indicted for no crime, and isn't violating his terms of service by
posting copyright material that isn't his, because the cables cannot be
copywrit. They dropped him, preferring the disgrace, ridicule and cyber
attacks to what the administration offered.
If only Obama could stand up to Republicans that well!
The big problem I have with all this is that I don't believe Obama is
doing it for the security and safety of America. There is the fact that
nothing evidently injurious to the the country has come out so far.
Granted, only 2% of the cables have been released, but even WikiLeaks is
redacting in instances where they feel identities and safety could be
compromised. The New York Times tried doing the same thing, and wound up
with a cable that was blanked out so as to prevent Muammar Khadafi from
finding out who his closest advisors were! Not a great moment in
American journalism, no.
When the story first broke, I noted that the “secure” diplomatic net
could be accessed by up to 50,000 people, and asked how that many people
could be entrusted to keep it secret, no matter how great the incentives
and disincentives posed by government. Any foreign power with $50,000
and a few thumb drives could find an diplomatic employee—even the
janitor—to download the material for their perusal. And the US would be
none the wiser.
I was incorrect. It isn't 50,000 people. It's closer to 3,000,000 people.
So let's stop trying to pretend that WikiLeaks has anything that Russia,
Iran, China, and probably Senegal don't already have. There's been a
noticeable lack of surprise on the part, not only of America's enemies,
but her allies. I'm sure it's all old news to them.
The State Department has to know that. Hopefully they even know which
countries already had the cables, if not exactly how they came to
possess them.
All this means only one thing. The arm twisting and intimidation from a
frightened government isn't because they are afraid for American
security. It is because they are afraid of the effect the information
will have on the only relevant group not already in the know: the
American people.
Thomas Jefferson once said that “People should not fear their
government. The government should fear the people.”
I suspect we are about to find out that the government does fear the
people, and why that is a good thing.
Information has never been so free. Even in authoritarian countries
information networks are helping people discover new facts and making
governments more accountable.
- US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, January 21, 2010
@plainoldme,
Thank you for sharing, If only more people would care about transparency how much better off we would be.
I hope that this is not our future!
Even though it is fictional it is well thought out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N8gJSMoOJc&feature=pyv&ad=6050032234&kw=obama
@reasoning logic,
George Soros and other Globalists would love it!
@realjohnboy,
realjohnboy wrote:
I can agree with that, Okie. I don't mean to trivialize this with a stupid example, but if I (the employer) buy lunch for my employees every day (and deduct that as an expense), should that be offset by them having to report it as income?
Or, stated otherwise, should I not be allowed to expense an expenditure that is unmatched by an offsetting reporting of income?
I am kind of weary of this issue. I am working on the breaking story (really) of the inflation rate in China and the ramifications of that.
I think the fact that folks on opposite sides of the aisle can agree on some issues, such as this, is proof that Washington is just out of step with common sense. It seems like simple common sense that if we have an income tax, and if income can occur in many ways besides a cash paycheck, then Congress should have enough smarts to fix it. Yet, they do not. It all seems to go completely over their heads. It is frustrating to say the least, and helps explain political movements like the Tea Party Movement.
Quote:But...
The tax thingee contains no NEW pork (yet). It does, however, extend supposedly temporary:
* Tax credits for producing ethanol
* Tax credits for hiring American Indians
* Tax credits for teachers buying school supplies with their own money
* Tax credits for businesses donating books to charities.
I can understand the credit for teachers buying school supplies, but only if those supplies are actually necessary. This could present another opportunity for abuse by teachers, so I end up doubting if it is a good idea. If the teachers really need school supplies, they should have to submit the bills or costs to the administrator for them to approve it, or try to get the kids parents to pay for it, rather than muddying up the income tax return with another issue.
Businesses donating books to charities seems like another unnecessary issue, but why not - if Clinton could donate his underwear and get credit for it?
Tax credits for hiring Indians and producing ethanol, no I don't think that is necessary, and I don't see that much different than pork, in terms of the actual results or cost to the government.
@okie,
Quote:Businesses donating books to charities seems like another unnecessary issue, but why not - if Clinton could donate his underwear and get credit for it?
Anyone can donate their underwear okie. It's in the tax code.
@parados,
Sounds like another "tax break for the rich."
I don't deduct inconsequential items such as that. It is easier to take the standard deduction most of the time.
@okie,
Quote:I think the fact that folks on opposite sides of the aisle can agree on some issues, such as this, is proof that Washington is just out of step with common sense
How many of you start thinking of closure every time little okie writes the phrase "common sense?"
For someone as moronic as okie to harp on common sense is truly disturbing.
