Usa Thread

[dean]

I know that most posters here complain about the size and scope of big brother (government), with good reason. The only thing worse than big brother is big business. I grew up never wanting to work for a business and, through age 59, have managed to remain self employed. If it means helping the bottom line even slightly, they will screw both the public and their own employees. I have never had either the desire or the stomach to "play their game."

[unit731]

When I was working on my California secondary teaching credential, I used to be a substitute teacher. I was a young guy about 22 and I used to get hit on by very cute 8th and 9th grade girls (age 14 or 15). Some of the bolder ones would lean over your desk and "accidentally" rub their boobs against you. It was frustrating as hell, but you simply KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF OF UNDERAGE WOMEN. What part of that is so hard to understand?

 

Kick this idiot of the bench and lock the perv up for good.

 

One of my many careers was a public school teacher. Middle School.

 

We got a printed memo from the State Board of Education concerning sexual harassment.

 

In reading such it sated - I'm paraphrasing from memory:

 

That if the teacher looks at any student and that look was "unsolicted" by/from the student - then that was sexual harassment. Male or female.

 

Bottom line - always look at the walls.

[Coss]

I know that most posters here complain about the size and scope of big brother (government), with good reason. The only thing worse than big brother is big business. I grew up never wanting to work for a business and, through age 59, have managed to remain self employed. If it means helping the bottom line even slightly, they will screw both the public and their own employees. I have never had either the desire or the stomach to "play their game."

I used to think that business folk in NZ were by and large good people, who only made harmful decisions when circumstances backed them into a corner. My last corporate job as an Executive Manager made me believe that business folk get all their training for backstabbing, dishonesty, lying and cheating, from hollywood movies.

A case of life imitating art.

Lost a lot of faith in humanity in those 4 years.

[Steve]

I know that most posters here complain about the size and scope of big brother (government), with good reason. The only thing worse than big brother is big business. I grew up never wanting to work for a business and, through age 59, have managed to remain self employed. If it means helping the bottom line even slightly, they will screw both the public and their own employees. I have never had either the desire or the stomach to "play their game."

Yeah, totally agree. One of the biggest things corporate America got the government to do is be considered a 'person'. An entity is a person legally in court in many cases. What the average America doesn't understand is that American companies aren't people, patriotic and think the same. They are there to make money. Corporations take the idealist, the small town factory owner who could make more money shipping the job off to Asia but retains its hometown workers as if companies on a larger scale (GM, etc.) care about America. They could give a f*ck. They have quarterly reports and that is all they care about and if shipping jobs to Asia or or where ever gets them their numbers so be it. I had my fill of corporate America. I learned a few things. Don't tell your employees the truth. HR told me the truth will get you sued in court. (true actually at times). Companies have their politics and golden boys/girls. Also, they have no soul. If we eliminated the OSHA and environmental laws tomorrow, I guarantee you there are chemical companies that would dump any and all kinds of carcinogens and poisons in the rivers if they legally could and say 'well, its legal' and they would ignore the deaths and defects. Guaranteed. Not all but a surprising number.

[Flashermac]

I worked for a private contractor for a while that was screwing me out of about 1/3rd of what I should have been making. I finally contacted the Labor Relations Board. The guy listened to me and agreed I was being screwed. Then he showed me their regs. They can only deal with "workers". It seems that doctors, lawyers, and teachers are lumped together as "professionals". He couldn't do anything for me. How the hell teachers got put in the same bag as doctors and lawyers is puzzling. Compare the salaries they make and explain it to me.

 

The contracting company was a joke anyway. It was officially listed as a "minority company", which is how it got so much government work. But while it appeared to be black owned, I was told that in fact most of the funding was from white folks with money.

[Steve]

What has happened to the Republican party. At one time I would vote for a Republican, I was independent and if the Republican appealed to me I had no problem voting for them. Kemp, Dole, a bunch of Republicans were good people, with good ideas, etc. Where are the ideas? The ONLY thing the Republican party does with regards to ideas these days is oppose any idea from the Democrats. I don't agree with some or how the Dems solve or want to solve issues but the fact is they are taking on problems and issues that affect Americans, especially the middle class. 2/3 of personal bankruptcies are due to health expenses. That's an urgent issue in my book. Obamacare is far from perfect. It needs to be revised frankly but the point is that its an issue and I credit Obama for at least tackling it. The Republicans didn't bring up health care as an issue, they were dragged into making part of the national debate in elections. Where are their ideas other than health savings plans that do NOT address why the costs are high in the first place. A university education, even in government supported schools like state universities are becoming unaffordable to the middle class. Obama makes a proposal to tackle costs, student loans, etc. What do the Republicans do, only poke holes in the ideas. They do NOT even offer ideas about that anything any more. The other is their lack of wanting to compromise. Its impossible to conduct the business of governance without compromising. Don't over do it and compromise your morals or core beliefs but one must do so to get anything done. The senate was always a place where more sober individuals met of the two houses and worked together. Not any more.

http://news.yahoo.com/grand-old-party-now-made-nihilists-cranks-050010652.html

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, Republican Saxby Chambliss, Georgia's senior senator, was considered a steadfast conservative. The American Conservative Union has given him a lifetime score of 92, while the Club for Growth has scored him at 83. He earns an A from the National Rifle Association.

 

But a couple of years ago, Chambliss embarked upon an exercise that would merely have cemented his stature as a powerbroker as recently as the administration of George W. Bush: He joined Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, to form a bipartisan group of senators working to come up with a deal to whittle down the deficit. In other words, he considered compromise with Democrats.

 

In our current warped political universe, that was enough to earn Chambliss a potential challenger from the right, and he decided not to seek re-election. Chastened by Chambliss' experience, none of the Georgia Republicans running for his vacant seat wants to occupy the same ZIP code with the words "compromise" and "bipartisan."

This is what the Grand Old Party has come to: It's now led by nihilists whose only politics are those of destruction and whose only values are those of zealots. There may be reasonable Republicans remaining in office, but they've been bullied into compliance and cowed into silence.

 

If you don't believe that, listen to the growing drumbeat for the impeachment of President Obama -- despite the glaring lack of evidence that he has committed impeachable offenses. (Having the temerity to win a second term is not an impeachable crime.) While such talk was once restricted to the nutters -- men like U.S. Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, R-Mich., who has said the president's impeachment would "be a dream come true" -- it has leaked into the GOP's water supply.

 

Witness the recent off-the-cuff remarks of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who, though a standard-bearer for the hard right, has been considered a thoughtful and rational man. At a recent meeting with constituents, Coburn declared that the president was coming "perilously close" to the standards for impeachment.

 

Last month, at a tribute in his honor, the retiring Chambliss obliquely urged his party to come to its senses. He didn't explicitly mention the GOP's spiral into right-wing madness, but he did speak of the importance of his work with the Gang of Six, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

 

"I don't mind crossing party lines. If Republicans had a patent on all the good ideas, we'd be in power forever. We don't have a patent on all those good ideas," he said.

 

But his intended audience has taken another lesson from Chambliss' bipartisanship: If you even consider it, you will be labeled a RINO -- Republican In Name Only -- by the tea party activists who now wield enormous power in the Republican Party. Having chased Chambliss off, they have taken to hectoring Georgia's junior Republican senator, Johnny Isakson, for his failure to jump with enthusiasm to the idea of shutting down the government over Obamacare.

 

Tea party types have also targeted longtime senator Lamar Alexander, Republican from Tennessee. In a letter urging Alexander to retire, they claimed that "our great nation can no longer afford compromise and bipartisanship, two traits for which you have become famous."

In response, Alexander penned a remarkable op-ed in The Tennessean defending his record as a politician who has occasionally reached across the aisle. "I know that if you only have 45 votes and you need 60 senators to get something important done like balancing the budget and fixing the debt, then you have to work with other people -- that is, IF you really care about solving the problem, IF you really want to get a result, instead of just making a speech," he wrote.

 

However, such time-honored traditions of governance have little effect on the white-hot rage of radicals who want to toss out any conservative who remembers the lessons of his middle-school civics classes. They have no respect for the basic give-and-take on which representative democracies thrive, no real interest in improving the nation's fortunes. So, no, Sen. Alexander, they don't care about solving problems.

[unit731]

Have "they" been roaming around your abode without your knowledge?

 

No hearings held. None of the US House US Senate actually read the bill.

 

George Orwell is turning over in his grave!

 

"Section 213 is the first statute ever enacted in the history of American criminal procedure to specifically authorize an entirely new form of search warrant-what legal scholars call the sneak and peek warrant (also dubbed the covert entry warrant or the surreptitious entry warrant). A sneak and peek search warrant authorizes police to effect physical entry into private premises without the owner's or the occupant's permission or knowledge to conduct a search; generally, such entry requires a breaking and entering."

 

"Section 213 may be couched in Orwellian terminology, but there is no doubt about what it does."

 

"In his recent article "Taking Liberty with Freedom," author Richard P. Moore reminds us that the USA Patriot Act, signed by President Bush last Oct. 26 in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, "gives the government the kind of sweeping powers of arrest, detention, surveillance, investigation, deportation, and search and seizure that ... assault ... our most basic freedoms."

"No hearings were held in either the House or Senate on the USA Patriot Act," legal scholar John Dean tells us, "and few--if any--members of Congress were really aware of what was actually in this massive, complex, highly technical 30,000 word statute, which is divided into ten titles, with more than 270 sections and endless subsections that cross-reference and amend a dozen or more different laws."

I want to examine here a single section of the USA Patriot Act--section 213, definitely one of the most sinister provisions of this monstrous statute.

In euphemistic language that conceals the provision's momentous significance, section 213 states that with regard to federal search warrants "any notice required ... to be given may be delayed if ... [1] the court finds reasonable cause to believe that providing immediate notification of the execution of the warrant may have an adverse result ...; [2] the warrant prohibits the seizure of any tangible property ... except where the court finds reasonable necessity for the seizure; and [3] the warrant provides for the giving of such notice within a reasonable period of its execution, which period may thereafter be extended by the court for good cause shown."

 

LINK

[unit731]

"If you don't believe that, listen to the growing drumbeat for the impeachment of President Obama -- despite the glaring lack of evidence that he has committed impeachable offenses. (Having the temerity to win a second term is not an impeachable crime.) While such talk was once restricted to the nutters -- men like U.S. Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, R-Mich., who has said the president's impeachment would "be a dream come true" -- it has leaked into the GOP's water supply."

 

The Republicans are doomed in 2016.

Just ain't gonna happen.

Way too many fringe concepts. Religious nuts.

 

The Republicans may win state districts and state houses but only by extreme gerrymandering. And, of course, with the help of ALEC (again).

[Flashermac]

"Do not associate my name with anything you do. You are extremists, and you've hurt the Republican party much more than the Democrats have." - Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative (1985)

[cavanami]

Who Benefits From A War Between The United States And Syria?

 

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/who-benefits-from-a-war-between-the-united-states-and-syria

 

Someone wants to get the United States into a war with Syria very, very badly. Cui bono is an old Latin phrase that is still commonly used, and it roughly means “to whose benefit?†The key to figuring out who is really behind the push for war is to look at who will benefit from that war.

If a full-blown war erupts between the United States and Syria, it will not be good for the United States, it will not be good for Israel, it will not be good for Syria, it will not be good for Iran and it will not be good for Hezbollah. The party that stands to benefit the most is Saudi Arabia, and they won’t even be doing any of the fighting. They have been pouring billions of dollars into the conflict in Syria, but so far they have not been successful in their attempts to overthrow the Assad regime. Now the Saudis are trying to play their trump card – the U.S. military. If the Saudis are successful, they will get to pit the two greatest long-term strategic enemies of Sunni Islam against each other – the U.S. and Israel on one side and Shia Islam on the other. In such a scenario, the more damage that both sides do to each other the happier the Sunnis will be...