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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (442350)	12/24/2008 5:23:47 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578195

Time to Reboot America By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America. It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop. Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998. The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span. All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.” My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.” We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours. To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions. For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us. That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely. It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us. America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs. John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard. Merry Christmas!

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (442350)	12/24/2008 7:58:43 AM
From: steve harris	Respond to of 1578195

Brilliant. Wait til he gets in office, he's already got a head start on Clinton scandals.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (442350)	12/24/2008 9:11:26 AM
From: steve harris	Respond to of 1578195

these are hilarious, the best from our lefties.... mediaresearch.org

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (442350)	12/24/2008 11:18:05 AM
From: bentway	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578195

Tax Millionaires, Not Sodas, Poll Concludes By Sewell Chan cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com New York State voters oppose the so-called “obesity tax” on nondiet soft drinks by a resounding margin of 60 percent to 37 percent, but support, by an even more overwhelming margin of 84 percent to 13 percent, raising the state income tax on people who make more than $1 million per year, according to results of a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday. Even those who prefer diet sodas — which would be exempt from the proposed 18 percent sales tax — said they opposed the measure (58 percent to 39 percent), while drinkers of regular sodas opposed the idea by an even stronger margin (64 percent to 31 percent). Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents surveyed all opposed the proposed tax, though by varying margins. (In an amusing aside, the Quinnipiac poll noted, “Independent voters are the most weight conscious on the political spectrum as 37 percent prefer diet soft drinks, compared to 27 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats.”) Meanwhile, support for the so-called “millionaires’ tax” extended even to Republicans, who favored the measure, by a margin of 72 percent to 27 percent. Gov. David A. Paterson has expressed opposition to raising taxes on wealthy voters, but has suggested that there might be no other option if the state budget crisis continues to fester. The survey was conducted from Dec. 17 to 21 among 834 New York State registered voters. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4 percentage points. In other findings, New York State voters said they approved of the job Governor Paterson is doing, by a margin of 53 percent to 29 percent, but disapproved, by a margin of 46 percent to 40 percent, of the way he is handling the state budget. Still, voters agreed, 54 percent to 33 percent, that Mr. Paterson has the leadership ability to solve the state’s budget problems. Voters agreed, 88 percent to 8 percent, that the state had a budget crisis, and 96 percent of voters agreed that the state’s budget problems were “somewhat serious” or “very serious, with only 3 percent saying the problems were “not too serious.” Still, by a margin of 53 percent to 36 percent, voters said they would rather cut services than raise taxes. When asked to select from a list of choices, the most popular service to cut was economic development aid, and the most popular tax or fee to raise was auto registration fees. Those surveyed expressed strong preference for raising taxes on cigarettes and alcohol rather than soft drinks. “Voters aren’t swallowing the proposal to tax nondiet soft drinks, the so-called fat tax,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and a former reporter for The Times. “But Governor David Paterson has won the bigger argument: Almost everyone agrees the state is in lousy shape. Overwhelmingly, they buy the governor’s characterization: We’re in a ‘crisis.’” Mr. Carroll added: “Remember that verse: Don’t tax you; don’t tax me; tax the guy behind the tree? Particularly if the guy behind the tree has a lot of money, we say: Go for it.”