Dan J

The Founders never pushed for a national healthcare reform. The author doesn't acknowledge that Medicare and Medicaid are huge expenditures on the budget but that's typical of a Euro commenting on the American health system. Why is the American health system such concern for Europeans anyway? I could care less what European countries do or don't do with their money.

Funny how the same people who downplay the Christian beliefs of the Founders change their tune when suddenly get religion and shout "Jesus" and "amen" for some government program.

Seperation of religion and government talk goes silent.

So because health care was basically non-existent in 1776, you feel that the government has no business providing health care to the population? We didn't have a standing army in 1776 either (We didn't have one until the civil war), but yet the government spends billions every year on maintaining a standing army. Is that what the founders wanted?

The article has nothing to do with the separation of church and state, but the hypocrisy practiced by supposed followers of Jesus.

You might want to read the links you post to back up your idiotic claims. Especially when the link disproves the point you are trying to make, whoops

From the link you provided:

It isn't really about what they intended it to be, its what most people are going to interpret it as. How many people would see it as surveyors marks?

SO,

1. They intended to promote the ambiguity. If someone brings it up, they can deny it.

or

2. They are culturally unaware of how that symbol would be interpreted in the greater public.

Yep, they've done that (low corporate tax competition) in Ireland and it worked out just great. Oh wait, Ireland had to take a bailout to avoid going under.

There are quite a few large companies using Ireland as a way to avoid income taxes in countries with higher tax rates. Using a Double Irish arrangement, companies only end up paying about 2.5% effective tax rate.

Not too much to cry over.

But if you need a tissue, lem'me know.

You love that chart, but its very misleading. Land does not vote, people do. Many of the blue districts would be much larger if sized relative to its population, not land area.

There was speculative investing that was at least partially responsible for the $4 gallon gas a couple of years ago. When the supply and demand curves are as tight as they are with oil, you don't have to buy that many contracts before you start influencing the price. As it kept going up, it attracted more investors to create a self reinforcing cycle. With everything else going on at the time, investors were on the hunt for anything that was gaining in value.

Of course with any speculative bubble, its impossible to sustain for a long time.

But there are other, more fundamental factors that influence the price of oil and will regardless of who is the President of the US. As the economy recovers, demand will go up, but supply is much more constrained.

Wonder how it would go over if the -National Organization For Marriage were to be *participating* in the big Liberal Pac?

Would the Liberal Pac even let them in the door?

They could get in, but I don't think they would want to go there. They would be fearful of gay marriage supporters surprising them in the bathroom.

that's not what they ruled and you know it. They even told congress to re-write the law to encompass corporate interests and make sure it didn't effect individuals.

The way they went about making that decision was judicial activism at its best. They had the opportunity to make a narrow decision on the case present, but they sent it back to be re-argued so the decision could be broadened.

the ability to legislate something they have no reason to legislate at the moment.

if it aint broke, don't fix it.

Maybe you should look at what Comcast has been trying to do to stifle net neutrality in the past few years.

Of course the excuse has to do with not having enough capacity, but the truth is they are more interested in protecting their cable business than providing free and open internet. If there was competition in the ISP market, it would be fine. But in truth, they have monopolies in many areas or in a duopoly with a DSL provider.

There are a couple places where there is actually quite a bit of competition, like with the UTOPIA network in Utah. But in those cases the infrastructure is owned by a city or state sponsored company.

Talk about green.

Have you any idea how Policy is made..... and how little is has to do with "most situations".

Do gays get base housing together?

Can gays use the Chapel for pretend marriages?

Can two gay soldiers room together?

What will this mean for fraternization rules?

Will sexuality be noted in a service record?

Can Clubs based on sex habits be permitted on base?

Can male/male couple attend formal functions together?

The list goes on and on/

There are already gays serving in the military. Under DADT they cant be open about their sexuality like their heterosexual peers. Just because they can now, doesn't mean they will. Not all heterosexual guys go out and make a point of their sexuality.

Its not like heterosexual service members have not not caused their share of problems. From rape to getting local women pregnant and then abandoning the child.

When you get down to it, your in the military to do a job, if you can't keep your sexuality out of it, heterosexual or not. You are in the wrong line of work.

Basically if the mandate doesn't hold up, hospitals should be allowed to turn people away who can not pay. You can't have it both ways.....

EMS services should also ask for a valid credit card before sending out an ambulance.

Given that many of these folks are as they are, they normally wouldn't even register to vote nor would they even vote on their own volition for the most part. But send a van or bus into the projects or 'hood with "community activists" to beat the bushes to round 'em up and lead them to the polls to vote Democrat (think ACORN) and we can see the downward spiral of democracy when large numbers of people depend on government largess to for their livelihood.

That doesn't even take into account the ever growing count of government employees.

It scares me when a little less than half of the people in the USA actually pay no US income tax and a "community activist" is sitting in the White House.

It's not a "who should be able to vote" problem, but rather a "what is wrong with this scenario" and "where is the country heading" problem.

Two biggest reasons for zero tax liability:

1. Child tax credits and deductions.

2. Stuck in minimum wage or close to minimum wage jobs.

A married couple with no children has to earn at least $19000 per year before they have a tax liability (Assuming there are no special tax credits). Add a couple of kids to that, and you can earn up to $38,000 per year before before you have to pay any federal taxes.

You seem to be missing the concept of: No taxation without representation... and how it should work in reverse too.

There are a lot of legal immigrants and people where on work visas who pays taxes but cannot vote.

Had the Palestinians not been robbed of their home when it was handed to the "chosen people," we would have no Middle East crisis.

Without a Middle East crisis, however, we would have no terrorism, and without terrorism, we wouldn't have a reason to engage in wars. Without US corporations like Haliburton making insane money in warfare, we wouldn't have the insane campaign contributions that got our politicians elected.

That's the majority of our elected officials are millionaires and multimillionaires, and as such, they know who to support when it comes to political decisions.

Helen Thomas is 100% correct, but she was unable to speak out while serving the press corps. Now retired and close to the end of her life, she can finally tell it how it is.

Bravo!

We may still have terrorism, but they would not be able to use Israel as a justification.

Bush inherited a recession. Granted it wasn't as bad as the one Obama got. Bush's answer was to cut taxes. For 6 years after that we had unemployment in the 4-6% range. Obama's answer was a trillion dollar stimulus and massive bailouts. Two years later unemployment is higher than when he started. Tell me which one worked better.

It turns out, a lot of the growth during the Bush administration was just a big bubble. Bubbles don't last, only sustainable economic growth does.

How much sustainable economic growth really came out of the Bush years?

Show me the bias in this story. Please. Really. Come on now. Show me the bias.

I wasnt commenting on the story, just on your assertion that WSJ is better than Fox News.

Your point is? The story states facts, not opinion. No where does it say this is good news or bad news, it is just news. If you want to sugar coat something to make it into something else then feel free. The numbers are what they are regardles of who reports them.

You were trying to make the point that the wall street journal is a better messenger, but the fact is, that they are both owned by News Corp, which has made no secret about editorializing its content to support its political bias.

How can unemployment going up ever be good news? How could the forecasters being off so badly ever be good news? BTW, this is a WSJ story, not Fox. Nice try at blaming the messenger.

You do know that News Corp owns both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News?

Contracts with "temporary wives" are a legal way for Iranian men to have mistresses outside marriage, with the agreements lasting from between several hours to a few years.

Under Iranian law, men and women can commit to a "temporary marriage" for an agreed period of time after a certain amount of money is paid to the woman.

In Iran, men are allowed up to four legal wives under Islam and any number of temporary wives. Women can only be married to one man at a time....

There is an are in Indonesia that is rather infamous for this. Rich Arab men fly into Indonesia and "marry" for a few days to a few months or more.

It was probable that unemployment and the economy would have gotten better and faster if we had not interfered as much as we did. It would have meant that the banks and financials would have under gone a change as the weak failed and the strong would have taken them over and thus had better leadership at the helms of them today. We allowed the politicians to bankroll their favorite companies and now those same yahoo's will still be running them. There were actually banks and financials not in much trouble and some none and it would been great to have them take over the bad companies. Right now we could have been looking at lower unemployment and the economy and stocks rising further. Of course it is a killer on the economy when you have the Socialists throttling the very indistries that employ us all.

Stock market performance and unemployment do correlate. They may have in the past when growth often meant the company needed to add jobs. But now and into the future, there are many ways to increase the stock value of a company without adding a single job, often the stock price for a company rises when they cut jobs.

You can largely see that now, where wall street has more or less recovered, but job growth has been stagnant.

I think you understand as well as he does that people WILL kill him if they have the chance. We can debate whether it was a good idea to do so or what should be kept secret. But if the guy that orders him killed thinks the secrets were worth killing for, he will be killed. No fine line about it.

I don't doubt that.

Supposedly they are suppose to be releasing some information about the Russian government and are already under surveillance by the FSB, if something happens to Assange, I would put my money on the Russians.

Thanks guys for the feedback. Before we plan to get married in US, and just have farewell party here but seems K1 process takes longer now, so we plan to get married and file CR1. Just in case. We will have second wedding for all of his family once we get there. What you think guy?. I am still confuse.

If you are already waiting for K-1 I don't think its a good idea to start over. It certainly wont be any faster.

He received Top Secret Government Documents and then passed them along to others. How is that not spying?

I never said he could be tried for Treason, just Espionage. I did however point out the distinction between Treason and Espionage.

When a newspaper publishes top secret documents, is that spying? What effectively makes wikileaks different from your average newspaper or media outlet?

Stimulus Failure: 48 Out of 50 States Lost Jobs Since Democrats Trillion Dollar Stimulus

Planby Publius

The Department of Labor today released its latest state-by-state job report, showing state jobs and unemployment data for September 2010. This latest data, when compared with the level of jobs in February 2009, when President Obama signed Democrats’ trillion-dollar stimulus plan into law, reveals that 48 out of 50 States have lost jobs since then.

In total, over 2 million jobs have been eliminated, in contrast to the over 3 million more jobs Americans were promised if Democrats’ 2009 stimulus plan passed. The only place in America that has exceeded its projected job growth following Democrats’ stimulus is Washington, D.C.

http://biggovernment.com/publius/2010/10/22/stimulus-failure-48-out-of-50-states-lost-jobs-since-democrats-trillion-dollar-stimulus-plansince/

Is the department of labor a credible source?

I suggest looking at the chart for unemployment figures on the link. We were promised 3 million new jobs but in reality we lost 2 million. Hey, they were only off by 5 million, not bad for the dems.

Trying to derive conclusions like that is making the assumption that any action in the economic system has an immediate reaction.

The housing bubble peaked in 2005, But we really didn't start hitting crisis mode until 2007 and huge job losses started shortly after. The largest amount of jobs lost in one month was in january 09 and continued at a decreasing rate through 2009. We didn't start gaining any jobs until 2010.

The stimulus went primary to three places, divided into thirds. Tax rebates (probably had the least effect), state government aid, and infrastructure project (many projects didn't start until 2010).

The infrastructure spending was most likely to create jobs, the state government aid was mostly keeping job losses from getting worse (at least until private industry started creating more jobs again) and tax breaks basically did nothing (Paradox of Thrift).

I don't see a problem with the secrets. I do see a problem when someone takes it upon themselves to decide what should be secret and what shouldn't be. In this case the messenger is the problem.

Wikileaks did not directly acquire any of the data. They were given the data by a military analyst. If anyone committed a crime, it was that analyst. Not to say Assange is a good guy, but his behavior seems to be par for the course when it comes to major whistle-blowing news stories.

As far as what should be secret and what shouldn't be, its fine line. The only way we can hold a democracy accountable is only if the government is completely transparent. But at the same time, there is a need for secrecy in some aspects of diplomacy.

Some people prefer to shoot the messenger as opposed to dealing with their own problems.