I did Hurricanes Camille, Agnes, and Hugo on the East Coast. I've done tornadoes and blizzards in Michigan. I was in LA for huge brush and forest fires, the Rodney King riots, and the Northridge Quake. I now live in Portland, OR. Yea.
On the "harbingers of doom" ratings scale, hearing I'm moving to town is like running into Jim Cantore in a hotel lobby.
The only election equipment I want to see are the sheet of paper theballot is printed on and a pen.
Canada gets it's paper ballots counted extremely fast. They need to hire some election consulatants from Canada and find out how they process paper ballots so quickly, and follow their recommendations.
Middle class investors is just as big a neo-con lie as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As I said on another thread, 90% of the wealth in the US is held by the Top 10%, 50% of the wealth is held by the Top 1%. The bottom 90% of the population gets to fight over 10% of the wealth. The bottom 90% includes 2/3s of those who are definded as members of the upper class.
I responded to your spew until I realized you're a freakish paranoid that sees "The Red Menace" even in McCarthy's ALLIES on the Committee on Un-American Activities.
Go back to caulking the leaks in your concrete underground survival bunker.
Me: "First of all, under Pres. Eisenhower, there was a 90% top tax bracket. Under Nixon, there was a 50% top tax bracket. YOU ARE CALLING EISENHOWER AND NIXON COMMUNISTS.
You: "They were both pinkos."
Oh, for God sake. Nixon came to prominance as an fierce anti-communist ally to Joseph McCarthy on McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee.
You are an extremist freak who can't be talked to. You are to the right of the John Birch Society. You are, as John Stewart would say, a "DOUCHBAG OF LIBERTY!"
First of all, under Pres. Eisenhower, there was a 90% top tax bracket. Under Nixon, there was a 50% top tax bracket. YOU ARE CALLING EISENHOWER AND NIXON COMMUNISTS.
You wouldn't know what communism was if Karl Marx bit you on the left ass cheek. You know who said that capitalism must provide protections to protect against potential abuses of the system by state chartered corporations? ADAM SMITH in "The Wealth of Nations." Do you know who originated criticism of the state charter corporation? ADAM SMITH in "The Wealth of Nations." Capitalism was designed by Adam Smith as a response to the abuses by state-chartered corporations extremely prominent in the Mercantilist economic system of the time. You are also calling ADAM SMITH A COMMUNIST.
I am also not falling into the neo-con trap of pretending the only needy people are "alcoholic vagrants". The number of alcholic vagrants in the US is in the thousands. The number of disabled and elderly people that have no means of purchasing prescription drugs is in the tens of millions. At the same time, we have billionaires bitching about paying 1/3 of their annual income in taxes and fighting against a dime of their estates being taxed after they are dead.
Not so fast... small business isn't part of the investor class. Nobody is complaining about forms of business in which people are responsible for their own success or failure. It when risk is taken out of the equation through corporate law that the abuse of the system happens.
I support market-based capitalism. The US has very little market-based capitalism anymore. The US government now protects multi-national corporations against the competition from small business and worker interests. Multi-national corporations are making it impossible for small business to flourish. New business that have good new profitable ideas are bought out in unfriendly takeovers, or squashed and their ideas stolen by multi-national corporations who can afford to lower prices in an industry to the point it's unprofitable for the short term in order to aquire a monopoly of an entire market as a long term strategy.
The vast majority of wealth sits doing nothing in trust funds while the investor class does nothing but live off the interest. I'll bet that you didn't know the only time a stock certificate transfer does the economy any good (beyond taxes on commissions and fees) in it's initial public offering. After the IPO, purchasing a stock doesn't have anymore benefit for the economy than getting 2 $10s for a $20. There is almost no benefit in the economic cycle from 99% of daily stock transactions.
By the way, when you fail at these big plans of yours, you will be the one yelling the loudest for help at the food bank I occasionally volunteer at. The right wingers are always the loudest whiners and complainers we have to deal with. They think bad thing only happen to other people... until they have a car wreck or get sick. Right wingers refuse to be realistic about plans and schemes not working out. They sure yell the loudest for their "benefits" when they do fail and they don't care where the money to feed them comes from when THEY are hungry.
As far as I go, I work in health care. I take care of people like you every day. I learned at an early age that life can really suck sometimes, and bad things happen to good people very randomly. I learned that because of these truisms, people deserve a safety net and second chances to turnaround their lives.
According to you, the people that make the products and provide the services do no work and deserve no compensation. Only the senior management that sit on their ass in committee meetings discussion how to divy up the profits deserve the rewards?
Get this straight. The top 10% are not work-a-holics. The top 10% sits on their asses and spend inherited wealth. Do you know over 60% of the population of the US thinks it's in the top 3% of income earners? I'm certain that you are one of the poor schmucks one paycheck away from losing everything and becoming homeless who's been deluded into thinking you're well off.
The lower and middle classes of a society make the capital for a society a society. The investor class leeches wealth out of the economy and hoards it. Hoarded wealth does not move through a society's economy. It does nobody any good locked into in trust funds.
What you are saying is that you want a program that is twice the size of social security and twice the cost of social securuty that provides half the benefits.
Every single private industry insurance program that has ever been concieved has required government bailout to pay off what the private industry insurance program was supposed to pay out and did not. FDIC and FSLIC completely failed in the saving and loan scandal of the 1980's. The US government provided 99.99% of the payouts to customers of those failed banks and savings and loans.
Therefore, the only way you could ensure a private industry safety net investment program would not fail would be through regulation. You clearly don't understand what kind of government regulatory monstrosity you would have to build to monitor people's investment transactions to ensure the goal of providing a safety net.
What you don't understand is that in dealing with programs of massive scale for society, it make far more sense and costs much less to allow govenment to provide the services.
Yeah... that's the way Social Security was designed.
When Social Security was started, it was not a retirement plan. It was a safety net to protect those who aren't capable of earning a reasonable living. People are so much healthier now so much later in life that it's reasonable that those who are in good health continue to work later in life.
However, that's also why, in exchange for increasing the retirement age, you expedite the process through which those who aren't healthy enough to work can be started up on disability much more quickly and easily.
It won't collapse as long as reasonable efforts are undertaken to ensure it's long term stability.
The retirement age is going to have to be moved up. Social Security wasn't designed to support people for as many years as it currently does. There's a pretty easy compromise to move the retirement age to 70, but make it easier for people closer to the retirement age to qualify for Social Security disabilty. Something like automatically starting disability payments to those between 60-70 upon reciept of an application for disability, and not forcing older disabled people to wait years until all the doctors medical paperwork clears to start payment.
The ridiculously low cap on maximum amount an individual will contribute is going to have to be pulled, too.
The investor class declared war on the middle class and poor long, long ago. 90% of the wealth in the US is held by the top 10% and 50% of the wealth is held by the top 1%. I'm so tired of trying to point out that fact and hearing "CLASS WARFARE!" in response from right wingers.
NO... "class warfare" is all the policies since Reagan was sworn in that got almost all the wealth in this society in the hands of the investor class.
Corporations go bankrupt, and their investors lose everything they have invested when they do.
All these privatization of Social Security plans are scams devised by the filthy rich to have the stock markets flooded with capital so that THEIR investments will be massively increased in value. The investor class has their investment spike while the average worker is forced to pay a premium.
None of these privatization schemes offers any suggestions about what to do when the next Enron happens and people lose their retirement savings. Are we supposed to shake our heads at old people and tell them to starve in the streets because the senior management of the corporation looted all the value out of the company?
There has to be a safety net for the elderly and disabled in our society. Ensuring they have minimum standard of living is far more important than the investor class getting a huge increase in their account values from a massive sump of capital into the stock markets.
I personally don't care what your opinion is. I don't care what you conveniently think is BS at this moment because it is convenient for you to make such claims in order for you to rant right wing talking points.
The facts are that the Air Force tested and used the Selectric Composer and was available to Air Force personnel. The Selectic Composer could type the Bush memos.
The facts are that ANG units in the Gulf Coast region were not low-priority units as they were tasked with defending continental US air space in an era in which there was the possibility that any day there could be an incursion from Soviet or Cuban air units based in Cuba.
That is the facts. Unless you have evidence that Killian did not have a Selectric Composer, stop wasting bandwidth with opinions that are completely unsupported by evidence of any kind.
Air National Guard units are not low priority Army reserve units. The Air Force does not defend the airspace of the continental US. The Air National Guard does. Southern state Air National Guard units were potentially tasked with defending against 1st line Soviet units flying from Cuba.
The Air Force was proven on the net to have started using them in 1969. They could type through 6-10 carbon copies, and had specially designed secure typing ribbons IBM had designed for secure facilities that could not be opened and read to determine what was typed on them.
That is the link for the pdf of the manual for the IBM Typewriter made in 1966 that could type those documents
The font has been in existance since 1931.
The said typewiter not only produced the superscript "th" in these 4 documents, it produced the same superscript "th" in several of the documents in George W. Bush's Texas National Guard records released many months ago by the White House when the whole Bush National Guard controversy started. Same superscript "th"... same font... Same proportional type.
Dan Rather showed this on the CBS Evening News broadcast tonight.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot Poland!
I did Hurricanes Camille, Agnes, and Hugo on the East Coast. I've done tornadoes and blizzards in Michigan. I was in LA for huge brush and forest fires, the Rodney King riots, and the Northridge Quake. I now live in Portland, OR. Yea.
On the "harbingers of doom" ratings scale, hearing I'm moving to town is like running into Jim Cantore in a hotel lobby.
The only election equipment I want to see are the sheet of paper theballot is printed on and a pen.
Canada gets it's paper ballots counted extremely fast. They need to hire some election consulatants from Canada and find out how they process paper ballots so quickly, and follow their recommendations.
Wrong.
Middle class investors is just as big a neo-con lie as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As I said on another thread, 90% of the wealth in the US is held by the Top 10%, 50% of the wealth is held by the Top 1%. The bottom 90% of the population gets to fight over 10% of the wealth. The bottom 90% includes 2/3s of those who are definded as members of the upper class.
And for you...
http://www.americanfascist.com/
Here you go... assault weapons sale... buy 1 get 1 free... perfect for stocking up that bunker.
v c
http://www.usagunsales.com/Merchant2/merchant.m
I responded to your spew until I realized you're a freakish paranoid that sees "The Red Menace" even in McCarthy's ALLIES on the Committee on Un-American Activities.
Go back to caulking the leaks in your concrete underground survival bunker.
Me: "First of all, under Pres. Eisenhower, there was a 90% top tax bracket. Under Nixon, there was a 50% top tax bracket. YOU ARE CALLING EISENHOWER AND NIXON COMMUNISTS.
You: "They were both pinkos."
Oh, for God sake. Nixon came to prominance as an fierce anti-communist ally to Joseph McCarthy on McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee.
You are an extremist freak who can't be talked to. You are to the right of the John Birch Society. You are, as John Stewart would say, a "DOUCHBAG OF LIBERTY!"
First of all, under Pres. Eisenhower, there was a 90% top tax bracket. Under Nixon, there was a 50% top tax bracket. YOU ARE CALLING EISENHOWER AND NIXON COMMUNISTS.
You wouldn't know what communism was if Karl Marx bit you on the left ass cheek. You know who said that capitalism must provide protections to protect against potential abuses of the system by state chartered corporations? ADAM SMITH in "The Wealth of Nations." Do you know who originated criticism of the state charter corporation? ADAM SMITH in "The Wealth of Nations." Capitalism was designed by Adam Smith as a response to the abuses by state-chartered corporations extremely prominent in the Mercantilist economic system of the time. You are also calling ADAM SMITH A COMMUNIST.
I am also not falling into the neo-con trap of pretending the only needy people are "alcoholic vagrants". The number of alcholic vagrants in the US is in the thousands. The number of disabled and elderly people that have no means of purchasing prescription drugs is in the tens of millions. At the same time, we have billionaires bitching about paying 1/3 of their annual income in taxes and fighting against a dime of their estates being taxed after they are dead.
Excuses are like anuses. Everyone has one, and they all stink.
The "idea" has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and protects nobody from nothing.
FDIC and FSLIC are ongoing failures. They require govermnent intervention to do their job of them whenever there is a crisis.
Yes, you do forget the "system" when these "systems" failure starts costing hundreds of billions of dollars.
I covered this in my response to your previous post on this thread.
Not so fast... small business isn't part of the investor class. Nobody is complaining about forms of business in which people are responsible for their own success or failure. It when risk is taken out of the equation through corporate law that the abuse of the system happens.
I support market-based capitalism. The US has very little market-based capitalism anymore. The US government now protects multi-national corporations against the competition from small business and worker interests. Multi-national corporations are making it impossible for small business to flourish. New business that have good new profitable ideas are bought out in unfriendly takeovers, or squashed and their ideas stolen by multi-national corporations who can afford to lower prices in an industry to the point it's unprofitable for the short term in order to aquire a monopoly of an entire market as a long term strategy.
The vast majority of wealth sits doing nothing in trust funds while the investor class does nothing but live off the interest. I'll bet that you didn't know the only time a stock certificate transfer does the economy any good (beyond taxes on commissions and fees) in it's initial public offering. After the IPO, purchasing a stock doesn't have anymore benefit for the economy than getting 2 $10s for a $20. There is almost no benefit in the economic cycle from 99% of daily stock transactions.
By the way, when you fail at these big plans of yours, you will be the one yelling the loudest for help at the food bank I occasionally volunteer at. The right wingers are always the loudest whiners and complainers we have to deal with. They think bad thing only happen to other people... until they have a car wreck or get sick. Right wingers refuse to be realistic about plans and schemes not working out. They sure yell the loudest for their "benefits" when they do fail and they don't care where the money to feed them comes from when THEY are hungry.
As far as I go, I work in health care. I take care of people like you every day. I learned at an early age that life can really suck sometimes, and bad things happen to good people very randomly. I learned that because of these truisms, people deserve a safety net and second chances to turnaround their lives.
According to you, the people that make the products and provide the services do no work and deserve no compensation. Only the senior management that sit on their ass in committee meetings discussion how to divy up the profits deserve the rewards?
Get this straight. The top 10% are not work-a-holics. The top 10% sits on their asses and spend inherited wealth. Do you know over 60% of the population of the US thinks it's in the top 3% of income earners? I'm certain that you are one of the poor schmucks one paycheck away from losing everything and becoming homeless who's been deluded into thinking you're well off.
The lower and middle classes of a society make the capital for a society a society. The investor class leeches wealth out of the economy and hoards it. Hoarded wealth does not move through a society's economy. It does nobody any good locked into in trust funds.
The numbers work if the retirement age is raised to 70.
What you are saying is that you want a program that is twice the size of social security and twice the cost of social securuty that provides half the benefits.
Every single private industry insurance program that has ever been concieved has required government bailout to pay off what the private industry insurance program was supposed to pay out and did not. FDIC and FSLIC completely failed in the saving and loan scandal of the 1980's. The US government provided 99.99% of the payouts to customers of those failed banks and savings and loans.
Therefore, the only way you could ensure a private industry safety net investment program would not fail would be through regulation. You clearly don't understand what kind of government regulatory monstrosity you would have to build to monitor people's investment transactions to ensure the goal of providing a safety net.
What you don't understand is that in dealing with programs of massive scale for society, it make far more sense and costs much less to allow govenment to provide the services.
Work while you are healthy and productive.
Yeah... that's the way Social Security was designed.
When Social Security was started, it was not a retirement plan. It was a safety net to protect those who aren't capable of earning a reasonable living. People are so much healthier now so much later in life that it's reasonable that those who are in good health continue to work later in life.
However, that's also why, in exchange for increasing the retirement age, you expedite the process through which those who aren't healthy enough to work can be started up on disability much more quickly and easily.
It won't collapse as long as reasonable efforts are undertaken to ensure it's long term stability.
The retirement age is going to have to be moved up. Social Security wasn't designed to support people for as many years as it currently does. There's a pretty easy compromise to move the retirement age to 70, but make it easier for people closer to the retirement age to qualify for Social Security disabilty. Something like automatically starting disability payments to those between 60-70 upon reciept of an application for disability, and not forcing older disabled people to wait years until all the doctors medical paperwork clears to start payment.
The ridiculously low cap on maximum amount an individual will contribute is going to have to be pulled, too.
The investor class declared war on the middle class and poor long, long ago. 90% of the wealth in the US is held by the top 10% and 50% of the wealth is held by the top 1%. I'm so tired of trying to point out that fact and hearing "CLASS WARFARE!" in response from right wingers.
NO... "class warfare" is all the policies since Reagan was sworn in that got almost all the wealth in this society in the hands of the investor class.
Corporations go bankrupt, and their investors lose everything they have invested when they do.
All these privatization of Social Security plans are scams devised by the filthy rich to have the stock markets flooded with capital so that THEIR investments will be massively increased in value. The investor class has their investment spike while the average worker is forced to pay a premium.
None of these privatization schemes offers any suggestions about what to do when the next Enron happens and people lose their retirement savings. Are we supposed to shake our heads at old people and tell them to starve in the streets because the senior management of the corporation looted all the value out of the company?
There has to be a safety net for the elderly and disabled in our society. Ensuring they have minimum standard of living is far more important than the investor class getting a huge increase in their account values from a massive sump of capital into the stock markets.
I personally don't care what your opinion is. I don't care what you conveniently think is BS at this moment because it is convenient for you to make such claims in order for you to rant right wing talking points.
The facts are that the Air Force tested and used the Selectric Composer and was available to Air Force personnel. The Selectic Composer could type the Bush memos.
The facts are that ANG units in the Gulf Coast region were not low-priority units as they were tasked with defending continental US air space in an era in which there was the possibility that any day there could be an incursion from Soviet or Cuban air units based in Cuba.
That is the facts. Unless you have evidence that Killian did not have a Selectric Composer, stop wasting bandwidth with opinions that are completely unsupported by evidence of any kind.
Air National Guard units are not low priority Army reserve units. The Air Force does not defend the airspace of the continental US. The Air National Guard does. Southern state Air National Guard units were potentially tasked with defending against 1st line Soviet units flying from Cuba.
The Air Force was proven on the net to have started using them in 1969. They could type through 6-10 carbon copies, and had specially designed secure typing ribbons IBM had designed for secure facilities that could not be opened and read to determine what was typed on them.
What part of the year 1966 do you not understand, Boise?
e r% 20Operating%20Instructions.pdf
http://ibmcomposer.org/docs/Electronic%20Compos
That is the link for the pdf of the manual for the IBM Typewriter made in 1966 that could type those documents
The font has been in existance since 1931.
The said typewiter not only produced the superscript "th" in these 4 documents, it produced the same superscript "th" in several of the documents in George W. Bush's Texas National Guard records released many months ago by the White House when the whole Bush National Guard controversy started. Same superscript "th"... same font... Same proportional type.
Dan Rather showed this on the CBS Evening News broadcast tonight.
Here's the last link again...
o no logies/Air%20Force%20Data%20Systems%20Design%20Cen ter%201969.doc
6 03
1 34
https://web1.ssg.gunter.af.mil/ho/documents/chr
Also, here's two threads elsewhere where the whole "forgery" issues has been dealt with in great detail and disposed of....
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/35559/9
I hope this was supposed to be a joke.