Freedomshift

Corporate media generated and whipped up hysteria and hatred directed at the Tea Party movement has resulted in death threats, according to GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks. Adam Brandon told U.S.News & World Report that Armey and his organization received dozens threatening and harassing phone calls and emails. FreedomWorks is the establishment’s answer to the grassroots Tea Party movement. Republicans Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett also work for the organization. It is funded in part by the notorious neocon foundation run by Richard Mellon Scaife . During his career as a member of the House of Representatives, Dick Armey voted as a mainline Republican. Following his vote for the Iraq invasion, the Texas Republican admitted he had been “bullshitted” by then vice president Dick Cheney. Recordings played for U.S.News & World Report’s “Washington Whispers” Paul Bedard contain direct threats. “You guys better watch it,” one caller threatens. “Now, we are g

End the Fed

The Wall Street Journal claims U.S. Firms Build Up Record Cash Piles U.S. companies are holding more cash in the bank than at any point on record, underscoring persistent worries about financial markets and about the sustainability of the economic recovery. The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that nonfinancial companies had socked away $1.84 trillion in cash and other liquid assets as of the end of March, up 26% from a year earlier and the largest-ever increase in records going back to 1952. Cash made up about 7% of all company assets, including factories and financial investments, the highest level since 1963. "Stockholders don't want them to keep sitting on cash at a zero return," said Paul Kasriel, an economist at Northern Trust. "They're going to use it," either to increase hiring and investment or to make payouts to shareholders in the form of dividends or share buybacks, he said. Investors Punish Companies Spending Cas

Part II

By Silentboom In one predicable move, Obama has exposed many so called "freedom advocates" as fools who lack the ability to think beyond their emotions.  The same people who have been demanding a restoration of America's founding principals were so easily led into this obvious trap of allowing Obama to turn the tables and become the defender of property rights and champion of religious freedom.  Not surprising is that so many neoconservative "tea party patriots" (Many of the "Palin faction") have snapped to attention upon hearing a mention of anything "Arab", however what is surprising is that even some libertarian minded thinkers followed their lead.  At this point, the more rational should be considering the facts that when someone owns property, it should be their prerogative to build whatever they choose irrespective of the feelings of their neighbors and other blathering simpletons who choose to involve themselves in matters that do n

On this thread, someone said that “If we fail to recognize intellectual property, we permanently relegate ourselves to the prehuman branch of the animal kingdom – capable of dealing only with the concrete with no capacity for abstraction.” I was just thinking about this. Animals are largely incapable of using non-scarce goods like information, knowledge, images, and text to build civilization and make progress — these are tendencies that requiring learning from each other, cumulating information instead of keeping it bound up in one being’s experience and restricting its impact to one generation. This is why trout today are pretty much like trout in the ancient world, and why one generation of cats is pretty much like every other generation of cats. Animals don’t really discover new methods of doing things, and then put them on display to be copied by others of their species. I can teach my dog how to sit but he is not likely to go out and teach other dogs how to sit.

When I was a kid long, long ago, before time began, or anyone had thought of why time ought to begin, or what it might be good for, I lived in rural King George County, Virginia. The county bordered on the Potomac River and was mostly woods. Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground, on which my family lived, sloped down to Machodoc Creek, perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide. Things were looser then. When I wanted to go shooting, I put my rifle, a nice .22 Marlin with a ten-power Weaver, on my shoulder and walked out the main gate. At the country store outside the gate I’d buy a couple of boxes of long rifles, no questions asked, and away my co-conspirator Rusty and I went to some field or swamp to murder beer cans. Today if a kid of fifteen tried it, six squad cars and a SWAT team (in all

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- "How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy." Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse." Get it? Not "destroying." The GOP has already "destroyed" the U.S. economy, setting up an "American Apocalypse." In the wake of Friday's disappointing jobs report, Neal Lipschutz and Phil Izzo discuss new predictions that it could be many years before the nation's unemployment rate reaches pre-recession levels. Yes, Stockman is equally damning of the Democrats' Keynesian policies. But what this indictment by a party insider -- someone so close to the development of the Reaganomics ideology -- says about America, helps all of us better understand how America's toxic partisan-politics "holy war" is destro

Two ways exist of looking at Wikileaks, the site that publicizes secret military documents and videos. The first is held self-interestedly by the Pentagon and by Fox News, the voice of an angry lower-middle class without too much education. These believe that Wikileakers are traitors, haters of America, who give aid and comfort to the enemy and endanger the lives of Our Boys. Implicit in the Foxian view is a vague idea that the leaks give away important—well, stuff. You know, maybe frequencies of something or other, or locations of ambushes or, well, things. Important things. The Taliban will use this information to kill American soldiers. The notion is vague, as are those who hold it, but emotionally potent. The other view, held usually by people who have some experience of Washington, is that the Pentagon is worried not about the divulging of tactical secrets, but about public relations. Wikileaks doesn’t endanger soldiers, insists this way of looking at things, but the war itsel

08/05/10 Ouzilly, France – Want to know how to make money in this economy? You do it by selling things to markets that are growing. Exporting, in other words. China’s growing. India’s growing. Brazil is growing. Dozens of other countries are growing. Sales in the US aren’t likely to go up. But sales to China? Sales to Brazil? That’s where the money is. And here’s something interesting – these growth economies are now largely ‘de-coupled’ from the US. They don’t need us anymore. We’ve done our part. Thanks to clever management by the feds, Americans went deeply in debt so that these emerging market economies could grow. They put up factories. We bought their output. They logged a sale. We added a debt. And now, we can’t continue. We’ve taken on all the debt we can handle. They’ve got their factories, their capital and their skilled labor. We’ve got debts, debts and more debts. Read more : Here

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded." Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse. This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for "testing, training, and evaluation purposes." The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports. Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate th

Barack Hussein Obama Sr.(Obama's father), Born 4/4/36, Died 11/24/82 at the age of 46. He was 5 years old when WW II started and less than 9.5 years old when it ended. Lolo Soetoro (Obama's step father), Born 1935, Died 3/2/87 at the age of 52. He was 6 years old when WW 2 started and 10 years old when it ended.

Most Americans still appear to be operating under the delusion that the "recession" will soon pass and that things will get back to "normal" very soon. Unfortunately, that is not anywhere close to the truth. What we are now witnessing are the early stages of the complete and total breakdown of the U.S. economic system. The U.S. government, state governments, local governments, businesses and American consumers have collectively piled up debt that is equivalent to approximately 360 percent of GDP. At no point during the Great Depression (or at any other time during our history) did we ever come close to such a figure. We have piled up the biggest mountain of debt that the world has ever seen, and now that gigantic debt bubble is beginning to pop. As this house of cards comes crashing down, the economic pain is going to become almost unimaginable. Already, things are really, really, really bad out there. Unemployment is at shockingly high levels. Foreclosure