$354 million and end of any NY businesses! + interest. You think he has it? I don’t, not on top of the $87.5 million to Carrol for lying about RAPING HER.
Estimates say at the current burn rate (paying legal fees for anyone that could be a witness against him) his PACs will be out of money by June, just in time for that trial. You might notice, he’s not spending any campaign donations on campaigning, it’s all going to pay his legal bills and for his family’s lavish lifestyle, like millions to Melania who hasn’t been seen with him for years. 😂
He won’t be able to get funding or loans outside of New York when he’s banned from doing business there. It’s a business death sentence. 😂

Christ....

Odd how Republicans always scream about "redistribution of wealth", but are fine with the fact that most employers no longer pay living wages the way they used to. They are fine if it's some rich guy taking his wealth generated by his employees' hard work for himself, but god forbid that the government take anything to help those that rich guy is leaving behind. Over half the people who work for Walmart qualify food stamps (only about 30% actually take it), despite the fact Walmart's profits are so high it could pay them all living wages, give them benefits, higher more, give more hours, and still make a huge profit while not raising prices... but it's the people needing food stamps that are bad, not the people who own and operate the company and take so much from their workers.

The one true small government candidate that the Republicans had was Rand Paul, and they rejected him for big government, tough talk, candidates that capitalize on their fears... most of which are fairly unjustified. Americans aren't lining up on the streets to get the sort of jobs that they accuse Mexican's of coming here to take. Our own actions of telling Muslims how to live is the reason they want to kill us, leave them alone and govern themselves... stop preemptively attacking... you know be more Christ like who wouldn't support such things...

And as @oritteropo basically noted, Reagan was far to the left what today's Republican party is. Reagan wouldn't even get through the Primary process. Fox News, Rush and all of them would be ripping him a new asshole for not being "conservative enough". Obama is far closer to Reagan style politics and economics than most today's primary candidates. McCain once upon a time was close to Reagan, but he swung to the right to appeal to the extreme right base, and then added an idiot running mate. Had he ran down the center as he used to be, and got a centralist running mate, he would have had a chance of winning... though Obama sort of captured a hope for progressive change that never came, he turned out to be a Democrat in Name Only and was closer to a Reagan Republican than a true progressive.

Let's also not forget that Congress controls the purse strings and the US economic outlook (at least to what degree the government can, since the rest is in the hands of investors and business owners). Congress has been obstructionist for the last 6 years, and haven't allowed ANY of Obama's policies through, any of his attempts to help fix the economy. Want to blame somebody in the government for the mess, blame Congress, not Obama... if they attempted his stuff, then yes it would be his fault, but they haven't tried a single one of them. You can't say no to trying something, then when what you did instead doesn't work blame the person you said no to.

For the price of the F35 program so far, a plane that only barely passed some of it's flight tests, the rest still failing, we could have bought every homeless person a $600,000 home.... in this area a $150,000 home is very nice (good 3 bedroom home, nice safe neighborhood with good schools), let alone what $600,000 would get you... for the price of it this year, we could fund the school lunch program for 24 years. Now to be fair, I haven't fully vetted those two "facts" myself, but what I have vetted, is for the price of the war in Iraq from 2001 to 2011, we paid more than NASA's entire history, even after adjusting for inflation. It's all a question of priorities. Republican's don't care how much the military costs the taxpayer, but suggestions to help the people being left behind as the rich take more and more for themselves (redistributing the wealth generated by their workers to themselves, rather than their workers) and suddenly they start screaming bloody murder.

Every time a Republican opens their mouth and spouts such things like this video I hate their gullibility... and all too often they talk about their faith and Christ... and I've already covered how the Republican views are 100% opposed to the teachings of Christ and it's why I first lost faith in God as he'd be screaming at them and trying to convict them that their views are wrong were he real. Don't just trust the first few Google results you see, as they filter their results to appeal to you and your views. Don't listen to the echo chamber. Learn to truly vet sources and understand what is actually going on. Don't parrot claims about a "liberal media" or whatever, when over 95% of the news sources out there are controlled by the same 5 companies, none of which have an incentive on letting people know just how bad they are being fucked by the business interests in this country... supporting gay marriage, supporting a minimum level of help isn't liberal, it's being a decent person... being against equal rights under the law because somebody sins differently than you, or not wanting to help somebody because they aren't working 80-100 hours a week is being a heartless asshole. But feel free to keep living in your echo chamber of stupidity, "You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity."

*related=http://videosift.com/video/George-Carlin-Please-Wake-Up-America

"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying ­ lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else."

"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

"You know what they want? Obedient workers ­ people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

Yes, we are letting other countries mooch, but in reality, we spend all that money on the military in order to have a global presence which props up our business interests. What it really is, is subsidizing global corporations. Remember, we've got the number one military by a huge margin, and we also have the largest GDP by a huge margin. Interestingly, our GDP is not as proportionally huge as our military is. We're not getting the best bang for our buck...

This rigged machine theory is based on actual reporting on Tagg Romney’s Solamere and its cozy relationships with many businesses interested in lobbying the government. However, there is absolutely no evidence that this crony capitalist network extends to interference with voting machines. Furthermore, Hart Intercivic machines are only being used in two counties in Ohio. Though it is not implausible that the election could come down to two Ohio counties, it seems like quite a gamble to plant these supposedly rigged machines so sparsely.

Source

>> ^Porksandwich:

I wasn't referring to stock as a bonus, they give these people pure cash as bonuses. Hell they used the bailouts to pay bonuses, that's not "performance based" anything and it was using tax dollars to pay them.
But it's still a race to the bottom for the majority of businesses, they pay less and less and move the jobs overseas when they can no longer lower them here. And yet at the top, the salaries continue to go up or at least be maintained to create the larger multiplier.
And we should be complaining, because they continue to complain about "free market", lower taxes, and subtly implying they are creating more jobs than they are eliminating in the pursuit if higher and higher profit margins. Lots of companies are posting record profits while using the same arguments. The CEO margin is just another indicator that what the people have spent their lives and tax dollars on are being coopted by business interests and funneling the money into the hands of a few. It's not trickling down, it has steadily been cut back.


*promote

I wasn't referring to stock as a bonus, they give these people pure cash as bonuses. Hell they used the bailouts to pay bonuses, that's not "performance based" anything and it was using tax dollars to pay them.

But it's still a race to the bottom for the majority of businesses, they pay less and less and move the jobs overseas when they can no longer lower them here. And yet at the top, the salaries continue to go up or at least be maintained to create the larger multiplier.

And we should be complaining, because they continue to complain about "free market", lower taxes, and subtly implying they are creating more jobs than they are eliminating in the pursuit if higher and higher profit margins. Lots of companies are posting record profits while using the same arguments. The CEO margin is just another indicator that what the people have spent their lives and tax dollars on are being coopted by business interests and funneling the money into the hands of a few. It's not trickling down, it has steadily been cut back.

The Conservative government have done everything they could to undermine Kyoto since coming to power in 2006. They, along with their Oil Patch backers, have delayed implementing key strategies until indeed now it is too late, too expensive, and completely unfeasible to reach the targets that BY LAW our country had committed to. At the same time those same political and financial interests have waged a propaganda campaign to convince Canadians that Kyoto was too expensive and unfair to our national interests in that it put too large a burden on developed nations like ours while developing nations such as India and China were not obliged to lower their own emissions.

I remember being angry that the United States, under then President George W. Bush, refused to ratify Kyoto which the previous President Clinton had agreed to do. However Canada DID ratify the treaty, making our offense much, much worse.

The recent talks at Durban, known colloquially as Kyoto II, failed for the same reasons. The Canadian Government deliberately sabotaged the talks and bullied smaller nations to do the same with threats to withdraw financial aid and impose trade and travel barriers. Our government is behaving like an Imperial power forcing other nations to do what we, and more specifically our business interests, want them to do.

We Canadians have a certain view of ourselves- we think the world sees us as peacemakers and conciliators. This may have been the case in the time of Trudeau and Pearson, but is the case no longer. Harper is quickly leading us down a much darker path where we are increasingly being seen as obstructionist, militant and bullying.

Shame on our Prime Minister, shame on the Conservative Government.

Shame on all of us.

http://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cable-reveals-extent-of-lapdoggery-from-swedish-govt-on-copyright-monopoly/

It's not a video, but it shows how WikiLeaks finally provided some proof that the Swedish government is but a lapdog of US business interest. It's basically the same all over Europe, but only our northern shipmates have so far put in the time to dig it all up.

The summary:

The Pirate Party was right on every detail. The hunt for ordinary Joes who share music and movies with one another has been behind the largest dismantlement of civil liberties in modern history, and American interests have been behind every part of it.

Hell that thing is meant to hold up many more cars than that. It's probably lack of repairs for years around drains..and one just gave out. There's a school my dad's family asphalt business used to do repair work for and they had a massive underground pipe and drain system. In places you could climb down 20 feet to reach the bottom of one of these drains. Due to them being concrete the salt would eat away at the top supporting the grate and the rim outside the grate hole...so eventually the top would cave in. That thing could swallow either end of a car fairly easily. Saw one even try to eat a bus when the side wall of it caved in and all the surrounding stone and asphalt was eroded into the resulting hole.

They used to have us do repairs on these, until one year someone on the board (who had a business interest) complained and got them to give him the concrete work (it's a pretty horrible job to fix, but hey it's money). The guy repaired them, they failed a year later...since he just put new concrete on top settled on a base of weak and salt eaten concrete....when he should have replaced the whole thing with an entirely new pre-cast top so it wouldn't twist and break and crumble in.

If they don't build these structures to support much higher weights than your typical car...some pickup trucks can rival the weight of an unloaded dump truck and would result in the same failure in all structures.

>> ^mxxcon:

>> ^Seric:
If only real football was as entertaining as this advert :<what, you don't have enough attention span to last 90min w/o commercial breaks?


I'd actually like to see America change that and run games on a delay. Stick in some commercials or other crazyness like replay stuff so you can keep people and businesses interested. I love soccer and I want it to catch on in the US...let's trying everything.

That's the problem with "Hate America" statements...it's unique to America. Go up to anyone protesting the Italian Governments' new policy and tell them they hate Italy they'd laugh and their opponents would laugh in your face. It's an extremely totalitarian idea that if you're against something to do with your country...any aspect of it that you Hate your country and it's a great tool to keep people in line.

And what America do they mean anyways? The small elite business interests that have the most say...ALL the vastly different people within it? It just doesn't make any sense.

>> ^bmacs27:
@gwiz665 : It's funny, because I just got through talking with my lab mate about why this wouldn't work. He just said it wouldn't fly politically. All the vested interests (i.e. insurers, pharma, AMA, etc) all want the Dem's bill. In other words, nothing to do with patients.


Yeah, this is why things like single-payer and replacing traditional insurance with HSA's is a fantasy in today's world. The Democratic bill is pretty much the only special-interest-friendly way to reform health care in a positive way -- big, sweeping changes that put insurance companies out of business just weren't in the cards.

It's why the Republican bill is essentially just tort reform (which limits liability of providers), allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines (which allows them to all relocate to the state with the most lax regulation), and changing the tax incentives so that people are likely to move from the employer/group market to the individual one (which is more profitable for the insurance industries, since you lose collective bargaining power).

In other words, the Democratic bill tries to be win-win for both people and the special interests, while the Republican bill basically just helps the big business interests squeeze more money out of people.

Here in America, it seems that it's contrary to our cultural identity to pass legislation that hurts the bottom line of big business in any way.

>> ^rougy:
It just enrages me that we still have to submit to so much scrutiny for something that is so benign.
The media insists on emphasizing a stigma of guilt, of "doing something wrong" with smoking marijuana unless you're doing it for "medicinal reasons."
That stigma is for the most part non-existent. Most people don't really care. The only people who care are the people who are gaining from pot's illegal status, i.e. the DEA, law enforcement agencies, drug companies, and all of the business interests associated with those institutions.
It's a charade of hypocrisy posing as morality, and it's "high time" our country grew up and moved on to more important things.


Well said. We're only allowed to take the drugs they can sell us!

"One of the great promises of America, one which we have yet to fully live up to, is the promise of freedom, the promise that we can explore our creativity and push the limits of human potential. America's founders invented a constitution that granted new freedoms, but now we lead the world in oppressing people's freedom to alter consciousness.

For us, it has been a religious issue. Religious freedom shouldn't be limited to established religions. Marijuana can certainly be a means to a qualitative religious experience. It helps you appreciate the complexity and beauty of the universe. If we really believed in religious freedom we'd say that there are millions of people who derive something spiritual and meaningful from this marijuana. They should have the right to enjoy what they consider sacred. Smoking marijuana can be an aperture to a deep appreciation of what is holy, beautiful and sacred. We should encourage people to do this wisely, instead of persecuting them." - Ann Druyan

It just enrages me that we still have to submit to so much scrutiny for something that is so benign.

The media insists on emphasizing a stigma of guilt, of "doing something wrong" with smoking marijuana unless you're doing it for "medicinal reasons."

That stigma is for the most part non-existent. Most people don't really care. The only people who care are the people who are gaining from pot's illegal status, i.e. the DEA, law enforcement agencies, drug companies, and all of the business interests associated with those institutions.

It's a charade of hypocrisy posing as morality, and it's "high time" our country grew up and moved on to more important things.