A 6,000 year old world needs no mining laws (WTF!)

Arizona state Sen. Sylvia Allen supports uranium mining because the 'earth's been here 6,000 years'.



(from http://mnn.com/earth-matters/politics/blogs/a-6000-year-old-world-needs-no-mining-laws)

I am speechless (the "words, words, words" are silent!)...after a lot of thought the following comes to mind: standardized testing should be required for public office, "gravity is a theory", and D'oh...[palms face].

Bailed-Out Firms Distributing Cash Rewards: "Please Do Not Call It A Bonus"

Two Wall Street firms that received at least $60 billion in government bailout funds will be rewarding their financial advisers with controversial retention payments, the terms of which one senior executive described as "very generous" in audio obtained by the Huffington Post.

The soon-to-be-merged financial giants -- Morgan Stanley and Citigroup's Smith Barney -- announced the payments during an internal conference call last week, but warned advisers against describing them in terms that would cause PR headaches.

"There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus," said James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley. "It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration."

The payments, Gorman said, will be calculated based on performance numbers from 2008 instead of 2009, when the merger is expected to be completed. That decision virtually guarantees an increase in the size of the awards. While 2008 was challenging for the firms -- Morgan Stanley's client assets in fee-based accounts dropped 25 percent in the fourth quarter, and a round of lay-offs is expected -- 2009 is expected to be substantially weaker.

"I think I can hear you clapping from here in New York," Gorman joked during the call, after announcing that the payments would be linked to '08 performance. "You should be clapping because frankly that is a very generous and thoughtful decision that we have made. We spent a lot of time kicking this around. We could easily have done it from the point of closing, which is obviously going to be somewhere in the latter half of this year or around the middle of the year. But we just decided... that it was right thing to do, to give you that certainty that it would be based off '08. '09 is a very difficult year... So that degree of anxiety, which many, many of you have emailed me about... is now off the table."

Audio of the conference call was provided by a reader who responded to the Huffington Post's call for information about wasteful or extravagant spending by bailout recipients.

Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, which will combine their brokerage firms into the world's largest, have received a combined $60 billion in government bailout funds. Officials with the firms said that the retention packages, which are rumored to value as much as $2 to $3 billion, would not come from that pool of money. But critics note that money is fungible, and question whether such payments are a proper use of funds for banks that are dependent on the government to stay afloat.

"They are putting lipstick on a pig," said Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Business and former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission. "Very often, retention bonuses are paid to undeserving executives who helped drive their enterprises into the ground. This is like people who hold up banks getting paid to stop holding up banks. It isn't good policy. It's not always the case, but on Wall Street, people were vastly overpaid for the value that they created."

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Retention awards for Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney employees have been rumored since their merger talks began. But the terms of the payments, which are still being hammered out, are bound to spur critical questions.

An official for Morgan Stanley downplayed the decision to value the payments off the more favorable '08 numbers. "You pick a point in time that you base any retention program off of and the decision was to base these off of the production these individuals would have achieved in 08," said spokesman Jim Wiggins. "Whatever they end up getting paid will be based off their 2008 production. That doesn't say anything at all about the timing it is going to be paid or when it will be paid."

Wiggins also defended the decision to provide financial advisers with retention packages. Noting that the money would "be paid out of the operating revenues for business and not" TARP funds, he said the system was necessary to prevent an exodus of key personnel.

"Retention programs like this are standard practice in the industry whenever you do a deal like this one," he said. "This is a profitable business. Our financial advisers are being heavily recruited by other companies like UBS... It is absolutely critical to hold this together and hold them in their seats so this will be a successful joint venture."

This assessment is challenged by an array of industry observers. Noting that retention awards are a relatively small sum of cash when compared to the money that the U.S. government will be spending on subsidizing bondholders, Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics nevertheless called it a gratuitous expense.

"These firms are attempting to continue to pay their people the way they have in the past and in the current job market here in New York, I don't think it is necessary," said Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics. "You certainly don't need to pay people to stay in their jobs right now, because they are praying to Jesus that they just don't lose their job generally."

Certainly, as recipients of billions of dollars in government funds, Morgan Stanley and Smith Barney find their accounting decisions under greater scrutiny. As part of the merger, the two entities have promised to make $1.1 billion worth of budget cuts -- or roughly half the projected amount of retention payments.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/11/bailout-recipients-giving_n_165624.html

Oh my fucking god! Evil greedy monsters... I am so livid... I can't even articulate how much I am... so ... ugh... I have lost all faith in bankers.

Caroline Kennedy says she's best for the job

(CNN) -- After weeks of criticism that she was being too elusive, Senate hopeful Caroline Kennedy is now talking about why she believes she is the best person for the job.

In a media blitz this weekend, Kennedy sought to explain what sets her apart from the handful of other people being considered for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat.

"I would be an unconventional choice -- I haven't followed a traditional path, but I think I bring a lifetime of experience to this," she told NY1.

She also told The New York Times that "there's a lot of different ways that people are coming to public life now, and it's not only the traditional path."

Asked if she thinks she's the best fit, Kennedy told the Times, "Well, I wouldn't be here if I didn't think I would be the best."

New York Gov. David Paterson has the sole responsibility of picking Clinton's replacement. His pick would serve for two years before running for election in 2010. If the candidate won that contest, he or she would have to run again in 2012, when Clinton's term ends.

If Paterson selects Kennedy, it would mean the continuation of a Kennedy legacy in the Senate that began 56 years ago with the election of her father, John F. Kennedy, as the junior senator from Massachusetts.

But some are questioning whether she's ready to follow the path taken by her father and her two uncles. 

Kennedy, 51, has been involved in education reform and women's issues but has never held public office and has mostly stayed out of the public spotlight.

Hank Sheinkopf, who worked for President Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign, said name recognition does not make Kennedy qualified for the job. "Does she have name recognition? So does Jennifer Lopez," Sheinkopf said.

"The Senate seat is not a legacy place. We haven't had a Kennedy elected to office from New York state since 1964, and a lot of people would like to keep it that way," he said, referring to Caroline's uncle Robert Kennedy.

Kennedy has insisted that she brings more to the table than her name.

"If my last name was not Kennedy, maybe I would have run for office a long time ago," she told NY1. "I'm proud of my family tradition. It means a lot to me. That's something that I want to live up to, and that's why I feel that I've been preparing myself to do this. But it isn't fundamentally about me -- it's about who can do the best job for the people of New York -- who Gov. Paterson thinks can do the best job for delivering for the people of New York."

But now that she is publicly seeking the seat, her name does make it easy for her to get attention, according to Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.

"This is the megaphone of the Kennedy celebrity. This is one -- this is the most famous political family in America, the legendary family," she said.

"What's interesting here, one of the other people who would like to be appointed, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, he comes from another big New York political family, but, yes, it's hard even for him even to be heard."

Cuomo is the son of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. He is one of New Yorkers' top choices for the seat, according to recent polls.

A new national poll suggest that just over half of Americans think Kennedy has the necessary qualifications, with 52 percent saying she is qualified and 42 percent saying she is not. Read what Americans think about Kennedy

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, released Monday, also shows a gender gap -- with 57 percent of women saying she's qualified, compared with 47 percent among men. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

"Men may think of qualifications for public office in terms of work experience, while women may be looking at a candidate's life experience," said CNN polling director Keating Holland. "Caroline Kennedy has a personal history that may be compelling to many women, but her résumé is not very long, and that may be a mark against her to some men."

The mother of three has spent most of her life in New York City, working there after graduating from Harvard, meeting her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, on the job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and attending Columbia Law School there.

Her most prominent public roles to date involved overseeing her father's presidential library and presenting the annual Profiles in Courage Award.

Most of her leadership positions have been based in the arts: hosting the annual nationally televised Kennedy Center Honors in Washington and serving as the honorary chairwoman of the American Ballet Theatre, as her mother had.

Sweet, of the Sun-Times, said there's no clear path to the Senate, so it's hard to compare résumés for the job.

"We know that people come to this from all walks of life. There is no one qualification for Senate," she said.

Kennedy has said she's always considered political office, but was finally moved to action after working on President-elect Barack Obama's presidential campaign. She endorsed Obama early in the campaign and served on his vice presidential search team.

Paterson has said he will not appoint Clinton's replacement until the seat officially becomes vacant.

"Unconventional choice" indeed. Much like hiring a kindergarden teacher to fix my car, or a librarian to be an astronaut. 

I'm afraid it is impossible for me to roll my eyes hard enough. "There is no one qualification for Senate"? Sure there is. An election. A vote from one's potential constituents. Or at the very least, a record of public service. 

A specific surname and a specific gender simply doesn't cut it. 

It's not necessarily the nepotism itself that bothers me. There are plenty of political "dynasties" in American politics (for better or worse). Look at Beau Biden, Jeb Bush, etc. Now, I have nothing against Caroline Kennedy at all on a personal level. She seems like an admirable person. But for cryin' out loud, she's less qualified for this senate seat than Sarah Palin was for VP! At least Palin had executive experience... at least she was elected to previous public offices. The only, ONLY reason Kennedy is being considered for this seat is her last name, and the fact she's a woman. Unbelievable. Especially after how much shit the Dems (rightfully) piled on Palin for her lack of experience and qualifications. 

Please tell me I'm not the only one rubbed the wrong way by all of this?  

Block the Vote

Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST

• Video: Behind the Story With Kennedy Jr. and Palast

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Today, Weyrich's vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

Excerpted from http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638322/block_the_vote/print.

Please read the rest there.

This shit bothers the fuck out of me. Guess I will be a poll watcher on election day. And this is why EVERYONE should vote early. Don't wait. Don't wait especially if you registered this year.

If there is a problem you can get it taken care of before the polls close. If you show up on the 4th and your name isn't there you MAY get to cast a provisional ballot, but the likelihood is it will never be counted. Seriously, go early. Short lines. Poll workers that are not yet frustrated. It is awesome. And what may be a perk to some, lots of hardline Republicans hate early voting because it allows all those working class folks and minorities with rigid hourly schedules to go vote. So if you want to stick it to them, not that I advocate that, then vote early. VOTE EARLY!

Dennis Kucinich on the Democrats’ Bailout Betrayal

by Chris Hedges

For Original Article Click Here

The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.

We are on our own. And don't expect any help from Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who lobbied hard for the bill and voted for it. Ignore their rhetoric. Look coldly at the ballots they cast against us. We, as citizens, have only a handful of representatives left in Washington, most of whom were left sputtering in rage and frustration on the House floor. The sad irony is that some of them were Republican.

"This was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history of this country," Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who led the fight in the House against the bailout, told me by phone from Cleveland. "It is a direct attack on the American people's ability to be able to stabilize their homes and their neighborhoods. This single vote will define the careers of everyone. We are back to taxation without representation, to markets that are openly rigged."

"We buried the New Deal," he said of the vote. "Instead of Democrats going back to classic New Deal economics where we prime the pump of the economy and start money circulating among the population through saving homes, creating jobs and building a new infrastructure, our leaders chose to accelerate the wealth of the nation upwards. They did so in a way that was destructive of free-market principles. They ripped away all the familiar moorings. We are in an uncharted sea where the traditional roles of the political parties are being switched. The Democrats have unfortunately become so enamored and beholden to Wall Street that we are not functioning to defend the economic interest of the broad base of the American people. It was up to the Republicans to protect not just a so-called free market but the American taxpayer and attempt to block this. This is an outrage. This was democracy's Black Friday."

Obama arrived on the Senate floor Brutus-like to thrust a knife into the back of the working and middle class. He lobbied hard for the bill. He did so, according to some who met with him on Capitol Hill, because he feared that if he opposed the bailout and it triggered a market collapse it could cost him the election. Better to placate the thieves on Wall Street than stand up for the masses of enraged and swindled citizens.

Obama's betrayal is the betrayal of the Democratic Party. The Democrats gave us the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which ripped down the firewalls that were put in place by the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. The 1933 act, designed to prevent the kind of meltdown we are now experiencing, established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC). It set in place banking reforms to stop speculators from hijacking the financial system. With Glass-Steagall demolished, and the passage of NAFTA, the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, tumbled gleefully into bed with corporations and Wall Street speculators. They achieved fundraising parity with the Republicans. They used institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a welfare gravy train. The Democrats, including Obama, are as compromised as the Republicans.

Obama's voting record in the Senate is in line with the corrupt Democratic mainstream, including Biden, who works on behalf of corporations and especially the credit card industry. Obama knows where power lies in the United States. It is not with the citizens, who with ratios of 100 to 1 pleaded with their representatives in Washington not to loot the national treasury to bail out Wall Street investment firms. Power lies with the corporations. These corporations, not us, pick who runs for president. You cannot be a candidate without their blessing and money. These corporations, including the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private corporation, determine who gets to speak and what issues candidates can or cannot challenge, from universal, not-for-profit, single-payer health care to Wall Street bailouts to NAFTA. If you do not follow the corporate script you become as marginal and invisible as Ralph Nader or Bob Barr or Cynthia McKinney.

Obama has always served his corporate masters. He opposed Rep. John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and supported continued funding for the war. He voted in July 2005 to reauthorize the Patriot Act. He did not support an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872, which allows mineral companies to rape federal land for profit. He did not back the single-payer health care bill HR 676, sponsored by Kucinich and John Conyers. He advocates the death penalty and nuclear power. He backed the class-action "reform" bill-the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA)-that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms, which make up Obama's second-biggest single bloc of donors. CAFA would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits. Workers, under CAFA, would no longer have redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporations. CAFA moves these cases into corporate-friendly federal courts dominated by Republican judges.

Obama's support for the bailout, however, is his most egregious betrayal. He had a brief, shining moment to prove he could lead, to capitalize on a popular revolt that cut across the political spectrum. He never attempted to address or mobilize the aspirations and passions of the vast majority of Americans. He was as craven, servile and cowardly as the party he represents. He returned to the campaign trail after Friday's vote as a slick and polished sales representative for our corporate state, telling us to calm down and accept the inevitable.

"Some of the most powerful speeches against this were given by members of the Republican Party who are on the political right," Kucinich said. "They did a superb job in poking holes in the underlying assumptions of the bailout. They say what they believe. Give me somebody who says what they believe and I can figure out how to get them to a new place. When people say one thing and do another it is very hard to be able to move a debate."

So let us honor, in our moment of defeat, the handful of elected officials who valiantly defied their party leaderships in the House to stage a remarkable revolt that at first succeeded. Kucinich is one. There were others-Brad Sherman, Marcy Kaptur, Peter DeFazio, Lloyd Doggett and Robert C. "Bobby" Scott. They are about all that is left of the old Democratic Party, the party that once looked out for the poor and the working class. Send them a note of thanks. They deserve it. And if you live in their districts make sure you get to the polls in November. They did not sell you out.

"We had two take-it-or-leave-it propositions and the second one was worse than the first," Kucinich said, referring to the plan that came loaded with pages of tax cuts. "Tax cuts are antithetical to a bailout. We never solved the problem. There were never any hearings on the bill. This premise, that we could prop up the stock market with a $700-billion investment and create some liquidity, was flawed. The problem is that banks do not want to loan to each other. It is not a liquidity problem. Banks are afraid they are going to collapse in short selling. There is a war going on between security firms and banks. Banks are under assault. They are not loaning. The dynamic is driven by the Accounting Standards Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Fed."

The root of the financial crisis, as critics of the bailout plan point out, is that millions of homeowners cannot pay their mortgages. The bailout, as the market decline on Friday following the vote illustrated, does not address the crisis. It solves nothing for the 10 million Americans who face foreclosure. It solves nothing for the growing numbers of unemployed and underemployed. It may well be the equivalent of tossing $850 billion of taxpayer money (including $150 billion in tax cuts) into a furnace and watching passively as our economy continues its plunge.

"We face a perfect financial storm," Kucinich warned. "The elements are the deficit spending for the war of 3 to 4 trillion dollars, the trillion and more tax cuts, the war itself and the lack of serious investment in the country. We are being hollowed out. We are going to see more unemployment and more people losing their homes. With $700 billion we could have made a real investment in the country, in jobs, in infrastructure and in homes. Instead, we got robbed."

Copyright © 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C.


Amen Denny! This is exactly what I was saying is the problem here. Ugh. I doubt the Bailout stops our steady march into recession. Why would it? It merely secures those at the highest rungs of the ladder, who are still not necessarily going to lend money out because the WORLD MARKET is in a down turn. All this has done is secure them! McCain and Obama both royally screwed this one and all of us not at the very top! Thanks A-holes!

BTW thanks to my friend J.J. for sending me this article.