scandal

1. From the OP: The chief piece of legislation will be a jobs bill, a priority that many Democrats want to pass with unemployment and the economy remaining top concerns of voters. In fact, the jobs push will be a series of bills consisting of small business tax incentives and loan and access-to-capitol programs.
2. I thought all the free market critics are all about "government doesn't create jobs, only the private sector creates jobs". Now you do want to government to legislate and spend our way to employment gains? How wonderfully Keynesian of you. Welcome aboard.
3. Who's to say that an Energy bill isn't job-stimulative? I know of a bunch of market makers on the CCX who are thrilled at the thought of increased trading volumes and the clerks and traders that will be hired if c/t becomes law. Those are real honest to goodness jobs being created.
4. Since when are our expectations of government reduced to getting a single thing done at a time? Surely with 500+ House members and 100 Senators plus aides on the payroll, we can manage to get some multitasking out of DC?

I don't know what PM discussions you have going on with Steve.
My beef with you is public. For my tastes, you've gone over the line several times of late with Nazi references. Yesterday was the last straw. I don't know what your problem is, and I frankly don't care if you're just baiting or being earnest. Either way, I've come to my own conclusions about you - neither explanation is acceptable to me. I don't report threads or cry out about TOS violations. I'll pick my fight with you in my own way, right out here in the open.

I don't know what PM discussions you have going on with Steve.
My beef with you is public. For my tastes, you've gone over the line several times of late with Nazi references. Yesterday was the last straw. I don't know what your problem is, and I frankly don't care if you're just baiting or being earnest. Either way, I've come to my own conclusions about you - neither explanation is acceptable to me. I don't report threads or cry out about TOS violations. I'll pick my fight with you in my own way, right out here in the open.

I don't know what PM discussions you have going on with Steve.
My beef with you is public. For my tastes, you've gone over the line several times of late with Nazi references. Yesterday was the last straw. I don't know what your problem is, and I frankly don't care if you're just baiting or being earnest. Either way, I've come to my own conclusions about you - neither explanation is acceptable to me. I don't report threads or cry out about TOS violations. I'll pick my fight with you in my own way, right out here in the open.

Yes, we know Bill. Subversive books like this should be burned. We'll get right on it.
We in the Obama-Fascist League (OFL) take our responsibilities seriously.

Try reading a book for a change.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsOBH0ecWA8

I'm glad you feel that way Nagi.
My intent here is not to offend you in any way.
Bill, on the other hand, ...

I'm trying to connect your thoughts here Bill.
You post a snippet containing an accusation that Fox News is at least indirectly complicit in a serious threat of violence.
And you post a photo of Nazis exerting authoritarian power.
What is the implication that you are trying to draw? That by making a public statement critical of Fox, Eric Burns the President of Media Matters is chilling speech (presumably by calling for Fox to self-censor its programming) in a way reminiscent of Nazi tactics?
If so, you've gone around the bend and over the line just one time too far for my tastes. If you are indeed suggesting that criticizing Fox amounts to Nazi thuggery, that's an insulting both to Americans exercising their Free Speech rights, and to victims of actual Nazi persecution.
If not, and if I've misunderstood whatever your (admittedly vague) implication is supposed to be, I await your explanation of what on Earth you might possibly mean by the bizarre posting of this photo along with this article.
I suspect you are just trying to bait us to get a juicy thread going, by purposefully acting outrageously. I have no problem with your being a troll, but I'd prefer if you leave Nazi related materials out of it. That really does piss me off.

That's easy-peasy. Start with a current Gallup result of demographic breakdown of the Tea Party.

We see that 19% earn < $30K, 26% earn $30-$49K. So 45% earn less than $50,000.
Based upon the original article in this thread, we already saw that a family of 4 could pay no tax on an income of $50,000.
So, how many of the tea partyers earning below $50,000 are families of 4 or more? 10%? 20%? I don't know. Since their demographics seem to follow national patterns, you would think it's at least 20%, probably more.
So we can say with some certainty that the 19% who earn < $30K are pretty much all paying no federal income tax.
And of the 26% earning $30-$49K, at least 20% (.2 * 26% = 5%) have large enough families to pay no tax.
So that's conservatively 19+5 = 24% --- one quarter --- of tea partyers who are screaming about our out of control taxation, yet aren't actually paying any.

Huh? So the trading in stocks or bonds or futures is unfair, just because there is a secondary market in those things?
When a homeowner takes on a loan with his home as collateral, that is a biparty agreement between the lender and borrower. The lender now holds a note. This is an asset, and he's free to do with that asset as he pleases (especially as this freedom is written directly into the terms and conditions of the note itself). If he wants to sell off the note to someone else -that is his right. If the new buyer in turn wants to sell it off, so be it. That in essence is the nature of a secondary market, where it may be repeatedly bought and sold.
The American housing and credit markets have benefited tremendously from this secondary market in mortgages. It has diversified risk, increased efficiencies, and lowered costs. Yes, there were flagrant abuses. Most of them due to lax regulation of OTC transactions. I'm all in favor of increased regulation and of having centralized clearing on exchanges for CDOs and similar products. I am NOT in favor of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and demonizing the trading in mortgages as being inherently evil. It's no more evil than having periodic auctions of government Treasuries and an active bond market.
Once again- no one was complaining about "unfair" lending when home prices were rising. Suddenly when home prices fall we're being told that these homeowners are "not at fault", that they were "talked into" their loans. Just when exactly did contract law and personal responsibility completely flee these American shores?

Karzai won his initial election in 2004 during Bush's watch, and with strong backing from the Bush administration. So if you're somehow trying to pull a guilt by association maneuver on Obama, beware where the taint leads.
Besides, by 2009 he had fallen sufficiently out of favor that it was pretty openly known that the US (under Obama at this time) preferred to see Abdullah Abdullah win.
Yes, we are backing his government, corrupt and aggravating as it is, because it's the only game in town.
The US cause is still best served by a hearts&minds campaign to turn Afghanistan into a stable friendly.
You are right, that cause is significantly undermined by the actions of the Karzai government. Realpolitik isn't always pretty. It wasn't pretty during the "detente" days with the Russians, it's not pretty with the 'democratically elected' Hamas government in Gaza. You do what you gotta do.
I disagree. The 9/11 bastards were based there. They're still there, and in Pakistan and throughout the region. They have long memories and patient long-term plans. We do too.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/among-the-righteous/
Documentary Finds Lost Stories of Holocaust in Arab Countries
Robert Satloff's documentary, "Among the Righteous," airs April 12 on PBS.
Did any Arabs save Jews during the Holocaust? That's the question author Robert Satloff had in mind when he set out to discover the lost, true stories of survival, courage and betrayal in Arab lands during World War II. The history of the Holocaust in Europe is well-documented, but the history of what happened to the Jewish people of North Africa has been mostly forgotten, even in the very towns and cities where it occurred. The truth is remarkable: not only did Jews in Arab lands suffer many of same elements of persecution as Jews in Europe -- arrests, deportations, confiscations and forced labor -- but there were also hopeful stories of "righteous" Arabs reaching out to protect them.

Not really. It's all about Brian. Brian is not Jesus.
Brian: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand? Honestly!
Girl: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.
Brian: What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!
Followers: He is! He is the Messiah!
Brian: Now, fuckoff!
[silence]
Arthur: How shall we fuckoff, O Lord?

I bet you even hate Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. You're just full of hate.

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1160725.html
Comparison of attacks on pope to anti-Semitism sparks outrage
By Reuters
Jewish groups around the world have reacted with shock after Pope Benedict's personal preacher compared attacks on the Catholic Church and pope over a sexual abuse scandal to "collective violence" against Jews.
"I am absolutely totally astounded by this. This is folly," said Amos Luzzatto, a former president of Italy's Jewish communities.
Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, who welcomed the pope in the capital's synagogue last January said: "This is really in bad taste."
The pope's personal preacher, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, in a Friday sermon in St Peter's Basilica, said attacks on the Catholic Church and the pope over a sexual abuse scandal were comparable to "collective violence" against Jews.
Jewish leaders around the world used words like repugnant, obscene and offensive to describe the sermon, particularly, as Di Segni noted, it came on the day that for centuries Christians prayed for the conversion of the Jews, who were held collectively responsible for Jesus' death.
"How can you compare the collective guilt assigned to the Jews which caused the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people to perpetrators who abuse their faith and their calling by sexually abusing children?" said Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the international Jewish rights group.
Cantalamessa, speaking with the pope sitting nearby, said Jews throughout history had been the victims of "collective violence" and drew comparisons between Jewish suffering and attacks on the Church.
"The use of stereotypes, the shifting of personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism," Cantalamessa quoted from the letter.
A Vatican spokesman said the comparison "is absolutely not the line of the Vatican and of the Catholic Church."
This week's celebrations leading up to Easter Sunday have been clouded by accusations the Church in several countries mishandled and covered up episodes of sexual abuse of children by priests, some dating back decades.
Shaken by the crisis, the Vatican has accused the media of an "ignoble" attempt to smear the pope. Some reports have accused him of negligence in handling abuse cases in previous roles as a cardinal in his native Germany and in Rome.
Victims of sexual abuse also criticized Cantalamessa.
"This ridiculous attempt to hide the crimes of the [Church] hierarchy inside of Jewish suffering shows just how far this Pope seems willing to go to stop the truth from emerging," said Peter Isely, a spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
The Vatican has denied any cover-up over the abuse of 200 deaf boys in the United States by Reverend Lawrence Murphy from 1950 to 1974. The New York Times reported the Vatican and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, were warned about Murphy but he was not defrocked.
The spiritual head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop Rowan Williams, said on Saturday the Catholic Church in Ireland had lost all its credibility over its response to the sex abuse scandals after an apology by the pope abuse in Ireland that disappointed victims.

Yup. Some are right here among us.

South Dakota state laws allow any bank chartered in the state to charge whatever interest rate they like on credit cards. That's why Citibank and others moved their credit card operations to SD. I'm not sure if the new federal legislation will impact this, I don't think it does.
link

That's only because there were no laws governing the admission of Irish/German immigrants during the mid 19th century.
Peejay's point that they were processed through a port of entry should not make you think that they passed through a formal immigration control. There were no travel documents, passports, or visas in those days. There was no distinction between a visitor or someone who arrived with intent to remain permanently. People simply bought passage on a boat and off they sailed, with some vague idea about the New World over the horizon. There was no need to illegally evade a border crossing, since no such crossings existed.
The first laws to systematically restrict immigration to the USA broadly were the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882.
These laws fed into the hysteria gripping the nation that Chinese immigrants were unfairly (aka illegally) entering the country, stealing jobs, and changing the nature of America for the worse.
Tell me again why this doesn't parallel the same xenophobia seen today?

That does not change one iota the fact that the treatment received by first generation Irish (and German, and to some extent Italian and Jewish) immigrants in the 19th and early 20th century was hostile, reactionary and directly comparable to the anti-Hispanic sentiment seen among much of the "tough on immigration" crowd today.
Irish, German and other "papist" immigrants were seen by the Know Nothings and other anti-immigration activists as a fifth column within America, as disloyal, as being unwilling and unable to integrate, and as being pretty much subhuman.
Similar sentiments expressed, of course, about the "celestial" immigrants (aka Asians- predominantly Japanese and Chinese).
Sound familiar?
You'd think that maybe we'd have learned something over the last century and a half but apparently not.

Nah. He's not even original enough to do his own cherrypicking. This is just more RWN ####### circulating online, he simply copied it. For example:
http://mcnorman.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/obamacrapcare-gone-wild/
Besides, it's totally #######. It refers to the original House bill HR-3200 (not even the one passed last Nov, but the proposal before that). This is not to the bill that was passed on Sunday which was the Senate bill + reconciliation amendments - HR-3590 and HR-4872.
Look here for a methodical debunking of this ####### http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/h/health-plan.htm
#######.
#######. #######. #######.
And more #######.

That's pointless. Threads meander, as they are real conversations happening in real time. They may start political, then get hijacked into something else, then wander back again. Non-political threads may also do the same.
Besides, there is already a very simple built-in method to deal with this "problem". See a thread that doesn't interest you? Don't read it. Done.

Quit watching. Isn't there a college basketball game on somewhere?

Nah. He's not even original enough to do his own cherrypicking. This is just more RWN ####### circulating online, he simply copied it. For example:
http://mcnorman.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/obamacrapcare-gone-wild/
Besides, it's totally #######. It refers to the original House bill HR-3200 (not even the one passed last Nov, but the proposal before that). This is not to the bill that was passed on Sunday which was the Senate bill + reconciliation amendments - HR-3590 and HR-4872.
Look here for a methodical debunking of this ####### http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/h/health-plan.htm
#######.
#######. #######. #######.
And more #######.

Maybe so. But Boopsie has boobies and puts out. Go with the boobies every time.