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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mph who wrote (77672)	2/19/2010 9:06:19 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

From an e-mail: A Lay-off letter from an excellent boss. Dear Employees: As the CEO of this organization, I have resigned myself to the fact that Barrack Obama is our President and that our taxes and government fees will increase in a BIG way. To compensate for these increases, our prices would have to increase by about 10%. But since we cannot increase our prices right now due to the dismal state of the economy, we will have to lay off sixty of our employees instead. This has really been bothering me since I believe we are family here and I didn't know how to choose who would have to go. So, this is what I did. I walked through our parking lots and found sixty 'Obama' bumper stickers on our employees' cars and have decided these folks will be the ones to let go. I can't think of a more fair way to approach this problem. They voted for change....... I gave it to them. I will see the rest of you at the annual company picnic. THE BOSS

To: mph who wrote (77672)	2/19/2010 9:55:27 AM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

GOP Lawmakers Hit ACORN With New Report Alleging Misconduct FOXNews.com Republicans on a House oversight committee have launched a fresh set of accusations of political corruption against the scandal-plagued community organizing group ACORN -- including claims that the group contributed to the risky mortgage lending that led to the collapse in the financial sector. The Republicans' latest report contains documents that they say confirms previous findings that ACORN is responsible for thousands of fraudulent voter registrations across the country and has used taxpayer money to support a partisan political agenda. "Committee investigators have identified hundreds of ACORN bank accounts, shell organizations incorporated under different sections of the Internal Revenue code, and even an ACORN controlled accounting firm (Citizens Consulting Inc.) that helps ACORN obscure the true use of charitable donations and taxpayer funds," reads the report, titled "Follow the Money: ACORN, SEIU and their Political Allies." "Documents and testimony from ACORN whistleblowers reveal that ACORN activities -- despite contentions that they are intended to help the poor -- fulfill a more self-serving and political purpose for ACORN." Click here to read the report. Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee, released the report, which is a follow-up to one he released in July called, "Is ACORN Intentionally Structured as a Criminal Enterprise?" "Perceptions that ACORN is a charitable organization are simply wrong, and part of ACORN's efforts to deceive the American people," Issa said in a written statement. "ACORN is a political machine that uses a complex corporate web, connections to the SEIU, and powerful political allies to break laws in pursuit of a partisan agenda." "This report shines more disinfecting sunlight on ACORN's secretive methods of abusing taxpayer funds and charitable donations," he added. ACORN, a longtime target of Republicans, dismissed the report as "bogus rumors." "It is hardly news when Rep. Issa repeats bogus rumors to attack a community group that empowers low income and minority Americans," ACORN spokesman Kevin Whelan said in a written statement to FoxNews.com. "ACORN's efforts over the years to promote living wages, responsible homeownership and voter participation are not only legal, they have improved the lives of working families nationwide." The report alleges that ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, contributed to the risky lending that led to the financial collapse by intimidating banks into lowering mortgage lending standards, becoming one of the few entities to profit from the subsequent misery. ACORN used the threat of jeopardizing bank mergers and acquisitions to force banks into lending agreements with its housing division, allowing the group to reap profits from more than a billion dollars in loans to low-income neighborhoods, according to the report. Some of the largest banks and lenders in the country, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, CitiBank, provided ACORN Housing with a total of $39.9 million, along with address and bank account information of at-risk homeowners to provide free counseling services, but ACORN used the information to recruit the homeowners, bringing in $48 million a year for the group, the report says. The report also alleges that ACORN has an illegal agreement with the union powerhouse SEIU -- a partnership that Republicans say is criminal and has been used to target political candidates, pressure banks and to threaten public officials with litigation to extract political compromises at the expense of taxpayers. For example, ACORN has issued membership letters showing which banks caved in to the group's pressure, created political plans targeting congressional districts to get sympathetic candidates elected and sent e-mails and legal complaints reflecting ACORN's ability to coerce and compel public officials to meet certain demands. SEIU has provided ACORN with $5.6 million, the report states. After the Republicans' first report was released, some ACORN workers were caught on video offering advice to a undercover filmmakers posing as a pimp and prostitute on how to set up a brothel -- a scandal that upended the group which has been the target of Republican attacks for years. Following the public uproar over the undercover videos, Congress voted to strip ACORN of federal funding, a move that is being challenged in federal court. foxnews.com

To: mph who wrote (77672)	2/22/2010 10:26:36 AM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

We have a president who is almost solely the creature of a partisan pseudo-science, which views truth as an odd waste product. Has Obama ever seriously searched for truth? ..... His indifference to truth is the greatest danger he presents the world. Truth is our highest virtue. The War on Truth By Bruce Walker American Thinker The greatest danger to our wealth, our liberties, our values, and our safety today comes from the deconstruction of truth. We live in a world driven by information. Almost all real wealth today is based upon information and knowledge. Almost all real power today is based upon mass communication, education, and entertainment. Even military power relies upon data and intelligence, not brute force. This drift of modern life toward an information-driven society is morally neutral. Our capacity to control nature, to order our lives, and to know much more than we ever have before allows us to do much more good than we ever have before. Knowledge allows us to cure disease, reduce poverty, expand our horizons of thought, and spend much more time in recreation. This power also allows us to do much more evil than men in the past. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Maoist China could not have survived without information technology. Orwell understood this well in 1984. Every slave in Oceania was subject to electronic surveillance. Meaningless global war consciously consumed all surplus wealth. Science was used to insure poverty, misery, and loneliness: Only the Inner Party and Big Brother were allowed to have any meaning in life. History changed every day. Government statistics were altered without any connection to reality. Information in such a hellish place meant only the momentary position of the Party, which changed constantly. Churchill also grasped the magnification of evil which greater information allowed, which he spoke of "the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science" which would follow Nazi victory in Europe. Any thought that technology alone is good should take into account how nearly jet engines, nerve gas, smart ordnance, and long-range missiles came to fulfilling the odious dream of a Thousand-Year Reich. Our modern economies, also, are driven almost entirely by information. Government labor statistics, national debt figures, corporate profit margins, financial interest rates -- these and many other numbers largely determine the direction of our economy. Government programs are largely machines into which statistics are tossed and actions taken. We live in this world so fully that it is almost inconceivable that life could be otherwise. But, of course, that is our myopia. The Constitution and the early republic had only a few numbers of significance: persons within a state were counted once a decade, monies were appropriated for certain narrow purposes (always backed by slender federal tax revenues), certain vital statistics were collected and published (a review of the Statistical Abstract, however, shows just how few numbers were considered worth collecting). Liberty, a principal purpose of the establishment of our nation, was not quantifiable: Indeed, personal liberty, almost by definition, defies calibration. Peace was not a number, but a fact. Even in the area of monetary value, the federal government did almost nothing. It insured the constancy and accuracy of weights and measurements, but even the term "dollar" referred for a long time simply to a defined measurement of gold, and dollar bills were issued by any number of institutions. What made the dollar useful was that it was backed up by truth, honor, and integrity. When the federal government issued a dollar bill or a bank in Ohio issued a dollar bill, this was simply a promise to pay a defined weight of "dollar" to the bearer. The crises of a bankrupt California government, uncontrolled federal spending, and politically manufactured economic statistics is the absence, or at least irrelevance, of truth. What is the heart of the ugly "man-made global warming"? Its acolytes lie. Numbers, data, and other elements of knowledge are simply raw materials to construct a system of extracting power, money, prestige, and other goodies from a befuddled population. Truth is either an a priori given (not connected to scientific research) or an elastic concept which must fit the dictates of partisan whims. Modern education has also become largely divorced from the founding principles of learning: Take truth and critically build upon it, and reservedly doubt when truth requires doubt. Disciplines like history have been mutilated into freaks reflecting the bitterness of educational elites. Soft sciences like sociology are simply police-state guardhouses. We have not yet reached the point in Orwell's 1984 where two plus two equals five, but with no clear dividing line between objective truth and politically correct thinking, some of us may live to see that day. Indeed, one of the most unsavory aspects of the modern power-mongers and their strategies for stealing power is that the holy mantle of "science" is too often wrapped around a false priesthood, casting the doubters into the outer darkness of unscientific thinking. Remember that the Nazis approached their variation of demonic madness entirely dedicated to "science" as their guiding principle. The intoxication of the radical left with "scientific" Marxism is simply astounding: No wild theory has been more disproven by grim experiment than scientific socialism, but no matter -- its truth defies consistent laboratory failures. We have a president who is almost solely the creature of a partisan pseudo-science, which views truth as an odd waste product. Has Obama ever seriously searched for truth? His lifelong chums are a gaggle of pseudo-thinkers and strong-arm operatives who float through college into jobs unconnected with honor. He reads us his soul off a teleprompter whose digitized letters conform to polling data. The terrifying numbers which his surreal spending has created mean nothing to him. The threats to our nation are real to him only as they affect his polling numbers. His indifference to truth is the greatest danger he presents the world. Truth is our highest virtue. Too many millions of us simply do not believe that that is true. As long as concern for honesty, dedication to what is real, and intellectual integrity flounder, all the tricks, toys, and tickets of knowledge and technology will simply be little curses in our lives. Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity. americanthinker.com