Great Mark Morford article

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he is the money guy on CNBC. We listen to him sometimes, have read a couple of his books, and because of watching his show in Sept or Oct of last year, we pulled our money out of the stock market, which was the BEST idea. It is an interesting artcile to some, maybe not to others.

http://www.mainstreet.com/article/moneyinvesting/news/cramer-my-response-white-house

Your post doesn't make sense and is erroneous in many areas. Obviously you have never listened to the lyrics of the song and you are not familiar with the content of the Neil Young song it addresses. And I agree, it's a great rock and roll song lyrics aside, but I just can't always put those lyrics aside. I also never said folks from the south weren't intelligent - you implied that, not me. As for hating it up north, well, you're incorrect. Me and most of the community love it here. People often move south for various reasons, some monetary but quite often due to the weather.

By the way, do your black friends enjoy your waving the confederate flag (I hope you don't wave it literally, but one never knows) and loving George Wallace? Probably not.

By the way, I was born in Virginia and also lived in southern Indiana and have friends/relatives all over the south. I am also an avid student of the history of the south. So I am fairly well educated regarding the cultural, socioeconomic problems currently facing the south, albeit some parts regions than others. So you see, I am dealing with it and find the best to way to "deal with it" is to seek the truth.

you are so incensed you are stating Jesus' political status like it was written in the Bible. I'm not talking to people who want to bash me....you don't even read my posts....goodbye.

It seems this guy likes to go on "mystery vacations," not telling anyone where he's going and being unreachable. And this guy is a potential candidate for 2012? Oh boy. My guess is that he went on one of his "trips" because he was just beaten to death in court for trying to use stimulus funds to pay off state debt instead of using it for it's intended purpose, or course...that being after he tried to refuse it altogether. Yeah...let's put him in the White House. Then we could have a president that goes MIA. LOL.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/06/22/2009-06-22_awol_gov_sanford_has_south_carolina_in_tizzy.html

This is a little old, but a funny short animation on Homeland Security's fear-mongering.

"Watch. We're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

Is Biden saying that America's current enemies - sorely aware of Obama's inexperience - plan to test a President Obama with similar crises, to see what he's made of?

Biden has also commented Obama's inexperience and said the job of the Presidency "does not lend itself to on the job training." He's also said Obama's "going to need help."

Well, I guess 'ol Joe has his foot in the door and that's all he really wanted. I don't believe he's changed his mind about our new President Elect. I think he saw his way into the White House and jumped on the bandwagon.

Great! We've got a totally inexperienced, slick snake set to run this country and the man who knows Obama will fail, has announced the Obama will be tested and fail, and probably wants Obama to fail, so he can come out smelling like a rose.

This whole Rove thing is not about outing anyone, it is about the uranium and Wilson finding no evidence that Saddam was trying to buy it. Great article. Link is below.

Cindy Sheehan is still waiting for Bush to answer her question: What noble cause did my son die for? Her protest started as a small gathering 13 days ago. It has mushroomed into a demonstration of hundreds in Crawford and tens of thousands more at 1,627 solidarity vigils throughout the country.

Why didn't Bush simply invite Cindy in for tea when she arrived in Crawford? In a brief, personal meeting with Cindy, Bush could have defused a situation that has become a profound embarrassment for him, and could derail his political agenda.

Bush didn't talk with Cindy because he can't answer her question. There is no answer to Cindy's question. There is no noble cause that Cindy's son died fighting for. And Bush knows it.

The goals of this war are not hard to find. They were laid out in Paul Wolfowitz's draft Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance in 1992, and again in the neoconservative manifesto - The Project for a New American Century's Rebuilding America's Defenses - in September 2000.

Long before 9/11, the neocons proclaimed that the United States should exercise its role as the world's only superpower by ensuring access to the massive Middle East petroleum reserves. To accomplish this goal, the US would need to invade Iraq and establish permanent military bases there.

If Bush were to give an honest answer to Cindy Sheehan's question, it would be that her son died to help his country spread US hegemony throughout the Middle East.

But that answer, while true, does not sound very noble. It would not satisfy Cindy Sheehan, nor would it satisfy the vast majority of the American people. So, for the past several years, Bush and his minions have concocted an ever-changing story line.

First, it was weapons-of-mass-destruction and the mushroom cloud. In spite of the weapons inspectors' admonitions that Iraq had no such weapons, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and Bolton lied about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Bush even included the smoking gun claim in his state of the union address: that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from Niger. It was a lie, because people like Ambassador Joe Wilson, who traveled to Niger to investigate the allegation, had reported back to Cheney that it never happened.

The Security Council didn't think Iraq was a threat to international peace and security. In spite of Bush's badgering and threats, the Council held firm and refused to sanction a war on Iraq. The UN weapons inspectors asked for more time to conduct their inspections. But Bush was impatient.

He thumbed his nose at the United Nations and invaded anyway. After the "coalition forces" took over Iraq, they combed the country for the prohibited weapons. But they were nowhere to be found.

Faced with the need to explain to the American people why our sons and daughters were dying in Iraq, Bush changed the subject to saving the Iraqis from Saddam's torture chambers.

Then the grotesque photographs emerged from Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. They contained images of US military personnel torturing Iraqis. Bush stopped talking about Saddam's torture.

Most recently, Bush's excuse has been "bringing democracy to the Iraqi people." On June 28, 2004, he ceremoniously hailed the "transfer of sovereignty" back to the Iraqi people. (See Giving Iraqis What is Rightly Theirs). Yet 138,000 US troops remained in Iraq to protect US "interests."

And Iraq's economy is still controlled by laws put in place before the "transfer of sovereignty." The US maintains a stranglehold on foreign access to Iraqi oil, private ownership of Iraq's resources, and control over the reconstruction of this decimated country.

For months, Bush hyped the August 15, 2005 deadline for Iraqis to agree on a new constitution. But as the deadline came and went, the contradictions between the Shias, Sunnis and Kurds over federalism came into sharp focus. The Bush administration admitted that "we will have some form of Islamic republic," according to Sunday's Washington Post.

The constitutional negotiations are far removed from the lives of most Iraqis. When journalist Robert Fisk asked an Iraqi friend about the constitution, he replied, "Sure, it's important. But my family lives in fear of kidnapping, I'm too afraid to tell my father I work for journalists, and we only have one hour in six of electricity and we can't even keep our food from going bad in the fridge. Federalism? You can't eat federalism and you can't use it to fuel your car and it doesn't make my fridge work."

Fisk reports that 1,100 civilian bodies were brought into the Baghdad morgue in July. The medical journal The Lancet concluded in October 2004 that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the first 18 months after Bush invaded Iraq.

Bush knows that if he talked to Cindy Sheehan, she would demand that he withdraw from Iraq now.

But Bush has no intention of ever pulling out of Iraq. The US is building the largest CIA station in the world in Baghdad. And Halliburton is busily constructing 14 permanent US military bases in Iraq.

George Bush knows that he cannot answer Cindy Sheehan's question. There is no noble cause for his war on Iraq.

With Cindy Sheehan gone home to take care of her stroke-stricken mom, President Bush can enjoy the last week of his Texas vacation free of the distraction of her encampment outside his ranch. But a grieving liberal mom whose son died in Iraq demanding an audience may not be Bush�s biggest problem.

His biggest problem may be my mom.

My mother is a lifelong Republican. She got it from her father, a yellow-dog Republican if ever there was one. As unofficial GOP godfather of Fillmore, Calif., he collected absentee ballots every election for his large family and marked them himself. No sense in taking chances that someone might vote for a Democrat.

So when my mother called me the other day and told me she was considering registering as a Democrat, I was, well, stunned. Somewhere in a cemetery plot near Fillmore a body is spinning.

For the last year or more my mother has been gradually expressing ever greater exasperation with President Bush, the war, and the religious right. �Have you heard about this James Dobson guy?� she asked me on the phone, referring to the head of Focus on the Family. �If they overturn Roe vs. Wade, that�ll be it for me,� she said.

Then she mentioned Cindy Sheehan.

For all the efforts to discredit Ms. Sheehan, what she accomplished in drawing attention to the human cost of the war, if my mother�s opinion is any indication, crossed party lines. There�s a Mom Faction in American politics, and while it isn�t a monolithic Third Rail, it�s at least and second-and-a-half rail. When their children are dying on a battlefield of choice, you touch it at your peril.

My mother has her fingers on the pulse, and scalps, of many such women. She�s a hairdresser with a clientele that has been coming to her regularly for decades. Now grandmothers, these women were moms during Vietnam, in which over 50,000 American sons and daughters died. They worried then about their kids� safety, now they�re worried about grandkids - theirs or someone else�s. Most are pretty mainstream, most Republican, and most, my mother tells me, pretty much fed up with George Bush.

There is other evidence of trouble on the Republican horizon. According to the latest compilation of state polls produced 10 days ago by surveyusa.com, of the 31 states Bush won in 2004, he now enjoys plurality job approval in only 10. This includes a 60 to 37 percent disapproval rate in the key state of Ohio, and a 53 to 44 disapproval rate in Florida.

A recent assessment from the influential and scrupulously nonpartisan Cook Political Report reads: �Opposition to and skepticism about the war in Iraq has reached its highest level, boosted by increased American casualties, a lack of political progress inside the country and growing signs of an imminent civil war. Given the centrality of the Iraq War to the Bush presidency and re-election, a cave-in of support for the president on the war would be devastating to his second-term credibility and influence.�

If Republicans are wondering where Cook is finding this �cave-in of support,� they could start looking in worse places than my mother�s one-chair salon, where Cindy Sheehan found sympathetic ears.

According to various reports, Bush and his team concluded that granting Sheehan an audience would only have encouraged other malcontents to demand similar attention from the president. Whatever the rationale, the decision alienated the clientele of Natalie�s Beauty Shoppe.

In the end my mother decided against changing her registration. Any criticism she might have of Bush, she decided, would be more credible if she stayed in the party, a sophisticated conclusion I admire and applaud.

Although Democrats can�t count on being the automatic beneficiaries of such dissatisfaction, Bush�s refusal to acknowledge fault, his �because I�m the Daddy and I say so� attitude, doesn�t work for a lot of women anymore. Women resent being patronized, and that�s how many view the president�s treatment of Cindy Sheehan.

The next election may be 14 months away, but when my mom and a lot of others like her walk into their voting booths, they may well be reflecting on their children and their choices, and which party is less likely to put either in harm�s way.

John Yewell is the city editor of the Hollister Free Lance. He can be reached at jyewell@freelancenews.com.

In a little-remembered debate from 1994, the Clinton administration argued that the president has inherent authority to order physical searches � including break-ins at the homes of U.S. citizens � for foreign intelligence purposes without any warrant or permission from any outside body. Even after the administration ultimately agreed with Congress's decision to place the authority to pre-approve such searches in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, President Clinton still maintained that he had sufficient authority to order such searches on his own.

It is important to understand, Gorelick continued, that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities.

Executive Order 12333, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, provides for such warrantless searches directed against a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.

Reporting the day after Gorelick's testimony, the Washington Post's headline � on page A-19 � read, Administration Backing No-Warrant Spy Searches. The story began, The Clinton administration, in a little-noticed facet of the debate on intelligence reforms, is seeking congressional authorization for U.S. spies to continue conducting clandestine searches at foreign embassies in Washington and other cities without a federal court order. The administration's quiet lobbying effort is aimed at modifying draft legislation that would require U.S. counterintelligence officials to get a court order before secretly snooping inside the homes or workplaces of suspected foreign agents or foreign powers.

In her testimony, Gorelick made clear that the president believed he had the power to order warrantless searches for the purpose of gathering intelligence, even if there was no reason to believe that the search might uncover evidence of a crime. Intelligence is often long range, its exact targets are more difficult to identify, and its focus is less precise, Gorelick said. Information gathering for policy making and prevention, rather than prosecution, are its primary focus.

The debate over warrantless searches came up after the case of CIA spy Aldrich Ames. Authorities had searched Ames's house without a warrant, and the Justice Department feared that Ames's lawyers would challenge the search in court. Meanwhile, Congress began discussing a measure under which the authorization for break-ins would be handled like the authorization for wiretaps, that is, by the FISA court. In her testimony, Gorelick signaled that the administration would go along a congressional decision to place such searches under the court � if, as she testified, it does not restrict the president's ability to collect foreign intelligence necessary for the national security. In the end, Congress placed the searches under the FISA court, but the Clinton administration did not back down from its contention that the president had the authority to act when necessary.

Book Says Bush Aides Dismissed Christian Allies

By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press WriterWed Sep 3, 11:48 PM ET

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her Republican supporters held back little Wednesday as they issued dismissive attacks on Barack Obama and flattering praise on her credentials to be vice president. In some cases, the reproach and the praise stretched the truth.

Some examples:

PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."

THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

PALIN: "There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform � not even in the state senate."

THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.

PALIN: "The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."

THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.

Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families.

He also would raise income taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest. He would raise payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes rise.

MCCAIN: "She's been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America's energy supply ... She's responsible for 20 percent of the nation's energy supply. I'm entertained by the comparison and I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America," he said in an interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson.

THE FACTS: McCain's phrasing exaggerates both claims. Palin is governor of a state that ranks second nationally in crude oil production, but she's no more "responsible" for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, another oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to tax oil, which she did in concert with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest state in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state � by population.

MCCAIN: "She's the commander of the Alaska National Guard. ... She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities," he said on ABC.

THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under "federal status," which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska's national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.

FORMER Arkansas GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States."

THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.

FORMER Massachusetts GOV. MITT ROMNEY: "We need change, all right � change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington � throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin."

THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president for nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only since January 2007 have Democrats have been in charge of the House and Senate.

___

Associated Press Writer Jim Drinkard in Washington

allay any of my doubts about SP. If she were an 18-year-od college student, this would be a flattering piece. As a VP candidate, shallow, uninformed, asking polite questions, flashing some gam. No thanks. If you think she is qualified -- let the press ask her some questions!!! If not, put her in a wet T shirt poster and be done with it.

okay, in going to the site you posted, and going to the subheading of what you'll pay in taxes, with Obama, I will pay $1118 less and with McCain only $325 less -

Now for me, that is a no brainer! Of course if I am worried about the economy in general, and my household in particular, I would have to choose Obama!