By Conservative Yankee> There is no gene for Catholicism!

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When in ROME, do as the Romans do!

Douglas, plucked from one of your links>

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Its membership is increasing, the clout of the 55 million consverative chrisitans who support Israel more than most Jews do is starting to be really felt, and it seems that the AIPAC policy conference this year will be as glitzy as ever.
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These then are ill winds of Constantine which fill 34% of the Neo-Roman sails, whose intensely held mythos; the plagiarized ‘dying god’ psychodrama, will blindly steer the ship onto the rocks. Let us hope the sun shines and the wind dies.

Peace, Best Wishes and Hope

Who Is a Jew?

The Orthodox rabbinate in Israel, who sets policy on matters regarding the law of return, insists that every person invoking the law of return to enter Israel as a citizen undergo genetic testing. The Israeli government maintains a large computerized registry of demic maps obtained from the genomes of Jews from various parts of the world. Whenever an immigrant arrives, a tissue sample is taken and the genetic material from the cells is used to cross-check claims of Jewish identity with the deme maps in the registry. By examining the X chromosome, it is possible to identify markers that show whether a man did or did not have a “Jewish” mother or is of Jewish matrilineal descent.

http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft8x0nb630&chunk;.id=d0e702&toc;.depth=1&toc;.id=d0e702&brand=eschol

Peace, Best Wishes and Hope

Sally, there is no interaction. They have become appendages to these corporate, financial criminals; like Remora’s grooming the shark in a symbiotic relationship. Their mindless, platitudes of defending the constitution are an empty facade, for public display.

Montelee, let us not, erroneously, cast the mask of demonization upon the Chinese/Asian or Indian public. It is not their fault, but in similar fashion, they too have been conned into this same trap, we now find ourselves, whose cultures have been infected by the spread of the multi-national. Eventually, they too will wake up and wonder what happened.

Peace, Best Wishes and Hope

RE: TAX STIMULUS - bogi666, January 27: - #By purplewolf, January 28: “From my college classes in the late 70’s we found that the American government gave every man, woman, and child $10,000 per person a year to those in Israel…”

Read all about where your tax dollars are going here under “AIPAC Achievements”, purplewolf and bogi666…....

AIPAC -  Pro-Israel Lobby working to strengthen relations between the United States and Israel through political and student activism in campaigns and elections…....  http://www.aipac.org/about_AIPAC/default.asp
And, while you are at it, check the current AIPAC scandal here and refer to “Related Links” on the left for more details…....

Quote Haaretz - The AIPAC affair: Can the pro-Israel lobby recover:

...an FBI investigation into allegations that a Pentagon analyst passed classified information to Israel via AIPAC officials….. Jewish state and its American Jewish supporters exercise too much influence over U.S. decision-making….... http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleNews.jhtml?itemNo=576759&contrassID=13&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0

cyrena, if I’m not mistaken from what I had read years ago, the donation of a blood sample is another requirement.

Remember there are Jews and then there are the Zionists. It is the xenophobic Zionists that choose to rule by force of arms, while the other voices have been successfully muted.

Peace, Best Wishes and Hope

Puplewolf,

I hate to tell you this, but you would NEVER be allowed to move to Israel. Ya gotta be Jewish my friend, and you’ve gotta be able to PROVE it, via multiple pieces of ancestral documentation.

Now if you CAN prove it, then you will be automatically accepted as a citizen, or you can stay here, and hold a dual citizenship.

Otherwise though, you’re SOL. You see what they do to non-Jews in Israel….you don’t wanna be there..trust me.

I will retire in two days. I have been a professional and worked for nearly 35 years, put a son through medical school and another through a master’s in engineering, it’s time for me and my wife to rest and do some traveling. Thank you, Herr Chancellor Bush, for pissing away $1.5 trillion you didn’t have to destabilize Iraq, screw the US economic base and generate international goodwill towards our great country. I really look forward to going abroad, where my savings will be worth half what they were two years ago and Americans are nearly universally reviled (unless they say they hate the Bush administration). I am sure this plan to give certain folks $600 or $1200 while their pension savings, if lucky enough to have them, will be hit ten times that hard, but let the big gun corporations continue to pillage the shrinking middle class is a great answer to the problem. Just make sure your crooked sons of bitch banker pals who made bad loans and then sold them as investments aren’t charged with any crimes-like bank fraud. You know how tough it is for these white collar types in a federal lockup. Hey, Reagan and his pals managed to steal $150 billion from America’s Savings and Loans twenty years ago pulling the same scheme, and only Keating got any heat; thousands of elderly Americans lost their life savings. Most Americans that qualify for your $600 rebate will find that it is worthless as pesos. What we, and they need is to quit sending our money out of this country, to quit propping it up by selling it to Saudis and Japanese banks, and start resuscitating the US economy instead of squandering it at the rate of $2 billion a week in your vendetta crusade in the distant desert. I realize that your Reichstadt will do none of this, Chancellor, but I hope that after I am retired for a year, someone will, if there is an America left to save.

I don’t doubt your words for one minute. It takes a lot of courage to keep on living under the curcumstances, you described.

I wish that this country could be a place people where people would not have to suffer like you do. But it’s not.

Yes, the system is unfair and unjust, but we are all hoping that’s about to change.

I appreciate how this article, which some call not good enough, is actually managing to be a ‘stimulus’ to quite a few….....
The mark of a good teacher is to say just enough to ‘stimulate’ the students to think further for themselves….Good Show, Mr. Sirota.

Strive on, Friends..

War should be ‘unthinkable’. Unfortunately, war, and its component mindset, to rule and take by force, has become the pinnacle of human achievement. It is what we manufacture and export best, because its profitability is vast.

There is no mitigating queen, in the patriarchal barbarity of kings.

Peace, Best Wishes and Hope

bogi666:

From my college classes in the late 70’s we found that the American government gave every man, woman, and child $10,000 per person a year to those in Israel. It had been going on unknown to the majority of people and it still goes on today, only they probably recieve double that or more due to inflation. Maybe we all should move there and collect “political welfare”, it’s a lot more than the social security I worked for that I recieve a year now, even if it was the late 70’s amount, it would still be over 50% higher than I see now. And things were affordable in the 70’s.

America spends more money on the war machine that all the other countries of the world put together a year. War should never be the most important expense, ignoring other more urgent expenses that would have kept this country in a better maintained state from the infrastructurs, education, health, jobs, housing, the environment, energy renewal. Instead those have been ignored. Destroying other peoples lives and countries is top priority to this administration and at the same time it kills two birds at the same time as America is dying a slow death at its expense.

It’s time to decide what is really important. Not more of the same.

And as for the Reagan comment about trickle down theory*. It is and has been proved that the trickles were evaporated by all the hot air at the top and those from midway down were left high and dry.
*theory: a provable prediction or outcome with exact resutls

•    Its funny how Mike Moore’s SICKO has stood up to rebuttal, and no one can really argue with it, but Brainwashed Americans can’t seem to get it that the Socialist Countries of Northern Europe have a higher standard of living than us by a huge margin.  Better heath care, more leisure time, they live longer, and consider themselves happier, than Americans by a long shot.
Read this topic with your eyes open, instead of interjecting your expectations before you have a chance to understand.
Totalitarianism, as practiced by China and the former USSR is a form of Gov’t, as opposed to Democracy.  Socialism is a form or Economics, as opposed to Capitalism.  The very successful Socialist nations of northern Europe are all Democratic, and have the opportunity to elect for a Capitalist system, anytime they choose…they choose not to.
We don’t have that freedom here.  We have two parties, both Capitalist, and the only socialism is that practiced for the benefit of the Corporations that benefit the most from our imperialist excursions into domination of the world…marketplace.  The Fed is our most powerful institution, and its sole function is to insure that the Capital stays where it is, and profits flow to the centers of Capital.  The gap between rich and poor is larger than ever, and the percentage of citizens that control the majority of the wealth grows ever smaller.
Or, don’t read this or any other source of the TRUTH about our Corporate Aristocracy, drink the cool aid, take the trinkets they give you, and die with your nose to their grindstone.

are dictating our economic policy.  Since Shrubs been in office, the national debt has gone from 4 $Trillion to almost nine, and an unfunded rebate will probably push it up to $10trillion, which is where i predicted we would end up. Trickle down says the national debt doesn’t matter, because the debt is the taxpayers and not the corporations who get the benefit of the imaginary money dumped into the economy.

This is not brain surgery.  Stop the war. Stop unessecary military spending on vaporware like starwars and abm shields that were relics of the Cold War and are nothing but money drains to the Carlisle Group and the Cheney/Bush Cabal. 

The arsehole poster that suggested we stop student aid needs to go have sex with itself while swinging upside down from a flag pole.  If the richest country on the planet doesn’t have youth as well educated as students were in Iraq before we invaded, then be prepared to live in a third world nation…the US. 

Corporations need to pay for the infrastructure we’ve maintain and the WARS WE HAVE WAGED ON THEIR BEHALF.  Stop Nafta and Cafta.  Stop excesive 1HB workers.  Make illegals legal so they pay taxes and the corporations that use them pay for their workman’s comp and unemployment.  Safetynets are needed for citizens not workers that reduce wages and pay no taxes. 

lastly, you nor I will have any control over our gov’t under the current system so…..

Pardon me, WE THE PEOPLE? Who are you, a person who has money in the bank, a job, some sort of health care and you say we the people? Personally, I, have been fighting the government for my disability for the last 19 years, have tried to work, at best got menial labor jobs and did not make it. Lived homeless in the woods without healthcare because of people, like the article mentions, who would not pay their fair share of taxes and now I am a person who has no immediate family, lives on $162.00 per month in food stamps and $174.00 in cash assistance. I have as yet, not gotten my disability from the Social Security Administration, even though I have had 2 surgeries for spinal stenosis and cannot work anymore. I am sick to death of pundits who associate themselves with we the people. It is hard enough to be heard over the din of corporate and special interests, but to have pundits write about we the people, is galling and appalling to me. Until and only until you have walked a mile in my shoes, lived with constant and excruciating pain on a daily basis and then have the government tell you, you are not disabled enough,  then and only then will I, a person who has been fighting an unfair and unjust system consider you a part of we the people.

So Far, everything that Bush has had a hand in is a swindle. So far, nothing has truly been for the people, and I don’t make generalizations easily. Knowing the use of propaganda by the Bush administration, I don’t want to make that same mistake.

But what is so sad is that the Democrats are following the same Bush coda. The actions of the Democrats give us no assurance that they will turn around the plutocratic coup that the neocons have wrought by deceit, fear, and lies.

I had such great hope when the Democrats won the midterm elections in 2006. It was like the forces of evil were finally defeated, still leaving an almost toothless tyrant.

Unfortunately the Democrats have allowed his tyranny to continue.

From “The Next Bubble” Harpers magazine, Feb ‘08:
“Since the early 1980’s, the Chicago School has driven policy on the upward slope of an economic boom, but we’re all Keynesians on the way down: rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, tax cuts by Congress, deficit spending and dollar depreciation are deployed in heroic proportions.”

nation in crisis, what an excellent comment to which I can agree 100%.

While I don’t agree with this feel good moment for our citizens; IMO, Sirota’s article is just more insubstantial fluff from truthdig.  This “stimulus” is just more smoke and mirrors from an administration known for its lies.  It is continued borrowing and a slide further into debt.  It will be paid with money we (our government) don’t have.  That the dems go along with this is further evidence of their cowardice.  This stimulus is a band aide on a severed artery and until we understand the systemic problem, there will be no solution and we will go down.  We need a brave soul to stand up and address the real problems facing us thanks to our cowardly politicians both republican and democrat.  No present candidate for the presidency has any answers to our failed economic policies.  There are no solutions presented that will really help us and the coming recession is inevitable.  This puts the impetus on us as individuals to start to understand and practice fiscal responsibility.  Only those of us who do will get through this well.  The bottom line is; this administration won’t do the things that will really help:  Extended unemployment benefits, increased food stamp allotments, health benefits for everybody, etc., etc., etc.

Right on.  Who, and I mean WHO, like anyone in congress, actually debate publicly the “need” for a stimulus?  All I hear is the Bush/Pelosi bandwagon of accept it, go for it, it’s a good thing.  Isn’t rebuilding this nation’s infrastructure a priority?  There are unfunded projects on every governors desk to rebuild roads, bridges, etc.. Don’t “give” me my money and tell me to spend it on consumer goods.  What a farce.

I think I’ll just spend it on debt service just to piss them off.  Pay off a little inflated interest on my credit card I had to use during the “boom” to pay for essentials.  Recession?  Recovery?  To some of us it is all the same because the boat goes by either way.

Makes a person wonder how all of this military spending hasn’t stimulated the economy….hmm..

Yes, the American people are pissed off. And they have every reason to be.

This had been getting serious for some time now. I agree that now that Wall Street panics, there will be action, and most likely just the type which benefits Wall Street, but I also have to wonder if it’s not also that Washington and Wall Street so removed from the real world of the common folk that maybe they didn’t realize it was getting so bad. Of course, if they knew their history, they could more clearly see the future, but while average Americans were feeling their paychecks go less and less far every month, perhaps they were still waiting for the statistics to come in…

“...“If it walks like a duck ...”

if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it must be a STIMULUS PACKAGE! It couldn’t be the same old duck that they use to shed the urine that trickles down on us every time they hurry to save the wealthy from having to pay for their affluent lifestyles?

Whatever “stimulus” package they come up with will matter not; we are not headed for a recession, we are diving into depression territory, and while there is nothing wrong with putting a band-aid on a cut when the patient has two months to live from an incurable cancer, it isn’t like the band-aid is going to save his life.

I don’t want to scare you, but you’d better pick a nice neighborhood in which to scavenge garbage cans for scraps of food which are edible and not too smelly.

“Sen. Max Baucus (Mont.) asked economists affiliated with The Hamilton Project—a Citigroup-backed think tank—to testify to Congress at its initial hearings on a stimulus package. Labor economists, by contrast, were not invited.”

Yes this is the same Citigroup demonstrating incompetence regarding the sub-prime issue and which sold almost 5% of its equity to a Middle East company to avoid telling stockholders that their dividends were cut.

A few months back, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the world’s largest Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), paid US$7.5 billion to buy a 4.9 percent stake in Citigroup, the largest financial institution in the United States. Citigroup, facing what the markets fear may amount to a $30 billion or more hit on its capital base due to its problems with subprime mortgages, chose to sale part interest in its company, rather than declare short-term dividend cuts.

A Krugman column in the NY Times indicates how the Democrats again caved in to Bush in accepting a toothless stimulus package providing no help to the needy.

David, you nailed this moronic slight of hand gimmick well. The awful plight of South Carolina Longshoreman, which went unnoticed by the media, was thankfully helped by the Longshoreman of Spain.
As the enterprising moguls take their factories to slave labor countries, nary a word of why we are in need of Economic Stimulus. As G. Anderson so eloquently wrote: “Meanwhile the political minuet in Washington keeps getting more bizarre”

I don’t believe it!
In the simplest words possible, how can anyone believe this “stimulus package” is anything more than a “backdoor” method of giving the wealthy corporate interests more “freebies” and squelching any protest from the “unwashed masses” by throwing minimal cash to people who will either pay down their credit cards or buy from retailers who import most of their inventory from China.
This is just another flim-flam to support the stock market. *Investors in the stock market are concerned for their returns not necessarily the economic conditions of the working people of the United States. The benefit of this “Stimulus Package” is primarily to the sleazy politicians and their financial buddies who could care less about you and I.
1. “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck; it’s a Duck!
2. Business and the government want a replay of the 2007 Christmas Season because the last one Sucked for them.

Bush and Bernanke push corporate socialism
The financial types made, packaged and sold huge numbers of poor mortgages. As they traded these shoddy assets back and forth amongst themselves they, (Wall Street) paid themselves $25 billion in bonuses for 2006 and $32 billion for 2007.
Now Bernacke and Bush recommend a stimulus to replace the missing equity capital in the financial system. How can this not be called socialism? Or is socialistic tinkering with the system to protect the rich called a stimulus package while providing health care is oh so unAmerican.
The nation’s debt has skyrocketed from six to nine trillion dollars under Bushco and as a legacy for his last year he will oversee spending a couple hundred billion dollars we don’t have to bail out his cronies.
Meanwhile a useful scorecard to watch is that the Pound and the Euro continue to soar against the dollar even while Europe provides a social net for the health and retirement of their workers.
We get to inject billions into the economy in an act of corporate socialism; Wall Street takes out $57billion and yet helping the poor with medical bills and heating costs remains a danger to the American psyche.
As they say: “Go figure.”

Labels: Bernanke, Bush, corporate bailout, deficit, Europe wins, socialism, stimulus

# posted by cognitorex @ 1/17/2008 2 comments links to this post

Nice that Nancy Pelosi said that the $150 billion was meant to go mainly to the middle class and that they were so-oo important.

If you consider yourself “middle class”, perhaps you would like to comment on why it appears so evident that the middle class couldn’t give a fuck about anyone else?!?!

Oh, I forgot…... most of “the poor” who would benefit most in the short term don’t even have an address to send a check to, uhh!

•  “…..politicians develop “stimulus” schemes using the blight of layoffs, foreclosures and wage cuts to justify tax cuts for those doing the laying off, foreclosing and wage cutting….”

Remember the bailouts of the commercial airline industry after 9/11? They got millions upon millions upon millions. And, they laid off hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of thousands. Anyone who survived the cut has earned less, and less and less, ever since. Benefits have been slashed, and retirement packages crashed into those towers. That was over 6 years ago. They’ve not replaced ANY of those workers. Those who survived the cut, (and haven’t died since), are working for far less money, and working their asses off, with far less help.

And, the consumer continues to pay through the nose, as the price of an airline ticket continues to rise, and the service is the pitts. And, the top dog airline, (the one who collected the MOST of the bailout money – American Airlines) is posting big time profits for their stock holders, and damn proud of it.

We won’t even go into what the ‘stimulus’ and bail outs did for Big Energy. The taxpayers are STILL paying for Enron, and those employees are still screwed.

Nice ‘stimulus’.

Yes, now that it’s wall street, they jump into action…..

But treating the symptoms is not going to do anything about the disease.

The disease is still there, lingering festering under the surface, rotting out the very heart of this country.

That money will be spent in all of about 24 hours, and since we don’t make anything in this country anymore, it’s already on the way to China.

Meanwhile the political minuet in Washington keeps getting more bizarre.

If you really think the best way to help the economy is by letting American’s keep their own money, why don’t you just do that.

Repeal, credit card reform, repeal Bankrupcy reform, repeal Student Loan Reform, Repeal Nafta, Don’t allow mexican trucks to come over the border, repeal overtime reform, stop granting exeptions to corporations who import technical workers, nurses and doctors from abroad, and on and on and on.

But you won’t do that, because you make too much money ripping off the public, and that’s how we got here. Not because we didn’t work our asses off for you, but because your greed can never be satisfied, while we’re expected to do with little.