One Stop Thought Shop

Selling one's vote is prohibited by federal law and also by most states.

So in order to penalize a 19-year-old student who, in May, posted his vote for sale on eBay for a bid of 10 dollars, state authorities in the northern state of Minnesota resorted to a law passed back in 1893, and actively enforced during the Prohibition Era years later, to punish people who tried to sell their votes against alcohol.

"When we see these listings we definitely take them down," said England.

The eBay site records about seven million new articles for sale each day and on average posts about 112 million items for sale at any given moment. Given that volume of activity, patrolling for illegal posts presents a challenge.

"It's possible that someone would put a listing up, it's possible to be up for a couple of hours before we catch it. It's possible that for a brief period of time something might actually be visible on the site," she said.

"We are very clear, if you engage in illegal activity on our site, we absolutely will share information with law enforcement. We provide testimony in court."

The Minnesota man was charged with corruption and solicitation, criminal charges that could have cost him up to five years in jail and a 10,000-dollar fine. But he was sentenced at the end of July to just 50 hours of community service.

More recently, a Maryland resident posted his vote for a starting bid of 3.99. [story here]

In a plastic bucket, mix well the following ingredients:

1 quart of 3% Hydrogen Peroxide

1/4 cup of baking soda

1 to 2 teaspoons liquid soap

Discovered and first tested by Paul Krebaum, Last Update: 10/08/02

Top CEOs Give 10 Times More To McCain Than Obama; McCain Promises Huge Tax Breaks For Them In Return

McCain has cultivated support from mega-corporations by promising to dole out huge tax breaks in return should he win the presidency.

McCain’s plan to cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent would yield $45 billion in tax breaks for the 200 largest corporations:

Eight companies — Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips Co., Bank of America Corp., AT&T, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Microsoft Corp. — would each receive over $1 billion a year.

Here is a crazy idea to address the United States' gaping fiscal deficit: Persuade corporate America to start paying taxes.

In the beginning, he attracted competent people to his cabinet and promised to tackle longstanding problems, including the spread of madrasas, the religious schools that had become breeding grounds of Islamic extremists.

But the madrasas remained untouched, mainly because Musharraf handed the task to the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was opposed to the plan, said Jehangir Tareen, a former minister of industries and special projects in the cabinet.

Musharraf did back some important changes in the news media and the rights of women, his supporters and critics agree. Now, dozens of private television stations exist, many of them with rambunctious political talk shows. He also moved to improve the status of women by pushing for the amendment of strict Islamic laws.

"Musharraf tried to construct a modern, enlightened state," Tareen said. "But he proved you cannot do this on the structure of a patronage-riven and police-oriented political machine."

America's back in the Cold War and W.'s back on vacation.

Talk about your fearful symmetry.

After eight years, the president's gut remains gullible. He'll go out as he came in - ignoring reality; failing to foresee, prevent or even prepare for disasters; misinterpreting intelligence reports; misreading people; and handling crises in ways that makes them exponentially worse.

He has spent 470 days of his presidency kicking back at his ranch, and 450 days cavorting at Camp David. And there's still time to mountain-bike through another historic disaster.

The most long labor.
The remaining take packages home.

Labels: poetic

This is the challenge for politicians and diplomats: strategic military hostility and confrontation must remain a thing of the past.

How To Fix The World - Forbes.com
"We have to revive a culture of innovation and repair."

Valor does not offer the measure of an army's greatness, nor does fortitude, nor durability, nor technological sophistication. A great army is one that accomplishes its assigned mission. Since George W. Bush inaugurated his global war on terror, the armed forces of the United States have failed to meet that standard.

It seems that too many unappetizing "peacekeeping" tasks, once handled by other departments of the government, are now in the military's lap, which turns out not to be quite as capacious as once imagined.

Senator John McCain arrived late at his Senate office on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. "This is war," he murmured to his aides. The sound of scrambling fighter planes rattled the windows, sending a tremor of panic through the room.

Within hours, Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

"There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked," Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. "It isn't just Afghanistan," he added, on MSNBC. "I don't think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared," he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. "Very obviously Iraq is the first country," he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: "Next up, Baghdad!"

"Trouble had been brewing in the disputed South Ossetian region for weeks as Moscow-backed militias skirmished with Georgian troops, yet Russian-brokered negotiations between the Georgian government and the separatists had continued.

"But the first substantial face-to-face talks on August 7 fell through after a farcical chain of events in which the top Russian diplomat claimed he was unable to attend the meeting in South Ossetia because his car tyre had run flat.

"Refusing to take his excuse at face value, the Georgian delegation then assumed they were being lured into a trap, and began the shelling that invited the Russian invasion."

Georgia is a sovereign democratic state that, like many others, gained its independence in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse.

Strongly supported by the West, it aspires to Nato and EU membership. It also has to contend with two regions - Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both with Russian minorities - that did not, and do not, wish to be part of Georgia.

South Ossetia, in particular, has an independence movement not averse to the use of illegal violence; it is worth bearing in mind that by agreement with Georgia, Russia had deployed so-called peace-keeping forces in south Ossetia long before the current crisis.

Did Russia encourage the South Ossetian rebels to provoke the recent Georgian military action, thereby providing Russia with a casus belli? Did Georgian forces use excessive force in South Ossetia? Did Georgia wrongly calculate that in the face of Western support for Georgia, Russia would not react?

I do not know the answers, but I am clear that the problems arising from minority enclaves in such circumstances are fundamentally political, rather than purely military.

I write not to excuse the Russian actions and behaviour, but rather to explain them. For the West, the challenge is to find the right answer to Lenin's question: "What is to be done?"

Putin is determined to rebuild Russia's stature, and he is being much helped in this by the surge in energy prices. There is also evidence that after a decade and more of decline, the Russian armed forces are starting to rebuild and modernise.

For me, the right course for the West - without compromising its own position and values - is to show a greater understanding of why Russia behaves as it does, to accept more willingly Russia's concerns for its Near Abroad.

While there are actions that we cannot condone, Russian perceptions exist and will take time to change.

This is the challenge for politicians and diplomats: strategic military hostility and confrontation must remain a thing of the past.

It has been years since we have had a war in which it is so clear to spectators in the West who constitute the Children of Light and who constitute the Children of Darkness.

It is a matter of propaganda. The U.S. president's remarks on Friday that the world would not accept bullying and intimidation could only raise a bitter smile.

George W. Bush talking about bullying? The U.S. president talking about intimidation? Who set off to two bullying wars this decade? Who tried to solve problems and replace regimes through intimidation if not our friend in the White House? Which power spilled more blood this decade? Russia or "the leader of the free world"?

“I think it’s very clear that Russian ambitions are to restore the old Russian Empire, not the Soviet Union, but the Russian Empire."

Dr. Bartlett first gave this presentation on "Arithmetic, Population and Energy" in September 1969 and since then has given it an average of once every 8.5 days.

My great hope is that he interviews Arthur Blessit, the wild man preacher who was the one who converted "W" into a born again. In the 1960s, of all the crazies on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and there were plenty, Blessit was considered by most to be the craziest.

In his traveling revival show in 1984 that was in Midland, TX, one of his followers, a car dealer, brought the then Vice President's son to be converted and he was in a private ceremony.

The Bush family has had the record revised, as it has on other recorded occasions, and claims it was Billy Graham.

I would love to see Bill Maher interview Arthur Blessit about the Shrub's conversion.

Why did the interventions of the New Deal (and our victory in World War II) largely work while the attempts of Johnson’s Great Society fail? What was different?

...
Fast-forwarding to today, particularly through the lens of the environmental crisis, particularly peak oil, the specter of outstripping, the water problem, and global warming, one can easily see how the conditions that pulled the country out of the Great Depression, contributed to the greatness of the country and her people through the New Deal, and Ultimately won World War II and the immediate post-war period appear to be re-manifesting themselves.

We will all be affected by the scarcity of those resources and the effects they will have on our lives.

Our collective cooperation, whether through innovation, conservation, or re-configuration will change us as a people. Once the American people begin to view their lives in terms of kilowatt hours, gallons-per-day, and dollars-per-mile, and begin doing what they have to do to get those costs and consumptions in line, we will have primed the pump for the next great period in American history.

This is what the Republicans fear - a Democratically unified country around these principles undoes how the GOP has done business for all of the 20th century.

Sen. McCain's plan will count the health care you get from your employer as if it were taxable cash income.

Even after accounting for Sen. McCain's proposed health-care tax credits, this plan would eventually leave tens of millions of middle-class families paying higher taxes.

In addition, as the Congressional Budget Office has shown, this kind of plan would push people into higher tax brackets and increase the taxes people pay as their compensation rises, raising marginal tax rates by even more than if we let the entire Bush tax-cut plan expire tomorrow.

Not only have we done a Versailles on Russia but we have also found ourselves in the same weak position as the Great Powers found themselves in the early 1930's.

We have no will or means of standing up to a resurgent Russia. We have not the treasure - we have blown that in the Middle East and the Credit Crisis. We have not the arms - we spent this in the Middle East. We have no moral authority - we spent that too.

Worse. Putin has Europe by the balls. He is the key energy supplier for Europe.

Worse, the west has made a whole series of promises of security to the new states that we cannot keep.

"The Congress is no longer able to articulate the common good."

“The Congress, especially with regard to matters related to national security policy, has thrust power and authority to the executive branch. We have created an imperial presidency. The Congress no longer is able to articulate a vision of what is the common good. The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress... As the Congress has moved to the margins, as the President has moved to the center of our politics, the presidency itself has come to be less effective...

Because of this preoccupation, this fascination with the presidency, the President has become what we have instead of genuine politics, instead of genuine democracy... We look to the next President to fix things and, of course, that lifts all responsibility from me to fix things. So one of the real problems with the imperial presidency is that it has hollowed out our politics and, in many respects, has made our democracy a false one. We’re going through the motions of a democratic political system, but the fabric of democracy really has worn very thin.”

"No one in Washington knows what they are doing."

"You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control."

Labels: poetic

Labels: poetic

The heart of the matter isn't the collapse in housing prices or even the frenetic rise in oil and food prices. These are contributing to the mess but they are not creating it directly. The basic reality is this: For most Americans, earnings have not kept up with the cost of living. This is not a new phenomenon but it has finally caught up with the pocketbooks of average people. If you look at the earnings of non-government workers, especially the hourly workers who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, you'll find they are barely higher than they were in the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago.

...
So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages. They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.

Story:
The non-partisan group Campaign Money Watch has come up with another startling figure for those who follow the presidential money chase.

According to an analysis performed by the group, McCain's top fundraisers and aides have collected nearly $1 billion in fees from U.S. companies in the past decade -- specifically, $930,949,819.

"The McCain campaign relies on big money lobbyists, and they'll rely on him."

"Children always know deceit."

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don’t have film.

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.

Bush now is stopping federal agencies from "assessing the emissions that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats".

You've been invited to a fancy ball but the only thing you have to wear is an orange wooly jumper. What shoes do you wear?

Huh? Forget that question. Here's a better question: What is important to you? Relationships. Relationships with real people, people who share themselves, their true selves, with no desire to paint themselves other than they are. Imperfect, but real. I hate fake.

"The love for our fellow man has to burn like the flame in the Olympic torch, and be carried from place to place until it burns in every heart."

Combine this with a constitution that put enormous powers in the hands of the president and you have a political structure designed to ensure American dominance.