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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Suma who wrote (148991)	10/17/2008 3:35:18 PM
From: Rock_nj	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362661

The Al Smith dinner was funny. It always is. Amazing how the two Presidential contenders can sit down together and rib each other just before the election. It looked like an insiders club. Bill Maher was great on Larry King. I saw his movie Religous. If one is open to critiquing religion, Religous is worth seeing. Quite funny and somewhat intellectual, as expected. As Bill pointed out in the movie, it is interesting that the story of Jesus shares a lot of common with religious figures that preceeded him by 1000 years. It makes you wonder how much of the Jesus story is fabricated from other religious icons that existed at his time? I always knew that December 25th was a major pagan holiday that celebrated winter solstice, and that's why Christians adopted it as Jesus' birthdate.

To: Suma who wrote (148991)	10/17/2008 4:02:07 PM
From: altair19	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362661

Suma <He really is a good atheist> Yeah, but that's easy for him to be an atheist.....ask any atheist where they would be without the church! RIMSHOT! Altair19

To: Suma who wrote (148991)	10/17/2008 5:25:42 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 362661

Obama Lawyer Asks for Probe of Republican Voter-Fraud Claims By Jeff Bliss Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama's campaign attorney today asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to add a probe into allegedly false Republican claims of voter fraud to the investigation into the firings of U.S. attorneys. Republican voter-fraud accusations ``seek both to suppress the vote and to unduly influence investigations and prosecutions,'' wrote Robert Bauer, general counsel for the Democratic presidential nominee. He made the statement in a letter to Mukasey and special prosecutor Nora Dannehy, who is looking into the nine U.S. attorney firings in 2006. Republican rival John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, have tried to make voter fraud an issue in the election. Yesterday, media reports said the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking into accusations of fraud involving the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. To contact the reporter on this story: Jeff Bliss in Washington jbliss@bloomberg.net. Last Updated: October 17, 2008 15:46 EDT

To: Suma who wrote (148991)	3/6/2009 3:43:46 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 362661

Spending to Stimulate Peace / by Tom Hastings Published on Thursday, March 5, 2009 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin) With each new day comes more bad economic news. Will this reach our home, my job, my savings, and will I have health care and a roof over my head by this time next year? In the swirl of the economic terrorism that is a far greater threat to far more of us than Osama bin Laden ever was, let's try to think our way to a bit of an overview. We have just finished eight years of massive overspending on the military. During this period, more defense dollars shifted from paying personnel to paying corporate contractors than during any other period in U.S. history. While some jobs are created in this way, it turns out that fewer of them are created when we "invest" in the military than in any other sector of the economy -- thus a net loss of jobs. So we spend on the military and it loses jobs, produces many U.S. casualties, causes massive numbers of dead Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and wrecks infrastructures. That "investment" thus transmogrifies millions of foreigners from those who used to see America as a bit of a blundering well-intentioned global giant into our sworn enemies. Bin Laden's victory is nearing completion. Military spending creates far fewer jobs (8,555 per $1 billion) than any other form of public investment, be it health care (12,883), education (17,687), mass transit (19,795) or infrastructure/home weatherization (12,804). Is it any wonder that our economy is drained flat? It was ordered by George "The Decider" Bush, a man who inherited the largest surplus ever, from the boom years of the 1990s, and who invented new ways to use it all up as fast as possible, leaving us right where we sit today. He didn't even have the cajones to include all his wars in his budget, since it would have looked even more lopsided than it did. Instead, he came to Congress once or twice each year with a ransom note for tens or hundreds of billions of your dollars. All wasted. All gone. All the worst investment possible. And now, as we sit bloody on the pavement after the crash of the economy, the Pentagon and its contractors have the unimaginable gall to tell us how much we need to keep spending on Cold War relics, on overseas bases, and on contractors so no one in the armed forces has to peel a potato. They claim it creates jobs. They think we are stupid. With "protectors" like these, who needs foreign enemies? Oh, that's right: They do. As someone who works in a field -- education -- that creates healthy, knowledgeable minds and generates about twice as many jobs per billion dollars invested as does our war machine, I'd say it's time to crunch the numbers and be the Deciders to invest in our nation's future: in mass transit, in education, in infrastructure and conservation, in the kind of civil society that can produce good food, efficient transport, excellent health care for all and a new generation of talent to compete in the global marketplace. Time to make our economy run on sweat and the bright light of good ideas, not blood. *Tom H. Hastings teaches at Portland State University and is director of PeaceVoice.