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

To: i-node who wrote (701515)	2/28/2013 11:31:16 AM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577019

can you image the out cry if Bush did this ?

To: i-node who wrote (701515)	2/28/2013 11:42:16 AM
From: FJB	Respond to of 1577019

These people are filth.

To: i-node who wrote (701515)	2/28/2013 11:50:42 AM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1577019

Bob The Businessman — A Fable by Dave Johnson \| February 27, 2013 - 9:52am This is the story of Bob The businessman. It is not meant to make you think about how today’s American corporations and political system operate. Don’t think about how today’s American corporations and political system operate as you read this. Suppose a local businessman, let’s call him Bob, went around town raising money from the townspeople to open a car dealership. Dozens and dozens of people in town invested, putting in $1,000, $5,000, and a few putting in as much as $50,000 and $100,000. Bob raised a lot of money for his business. After a while the investors found out Bob the Businessman was using some of their money to help his brother run for Mayor and several cousins to run for city council, and some of it to make his wife head of the Arts Council for a good salary. Then they learned that he was using some of it to fund a local organization that did nothing but push for tax breaks for . . . businesses just like Bob’s. (And to push for “deregulation” letting Bob use his company’s money to do things like … fund the organization.) In the election his brother was elected Mayor and his cousins took over the council. Once in charge of the city, they pushed through a big contract for Bob to supply cars to the city (many of which the city didn’t even need.) The city also exempted Bob’s business from taxes, even giving it subsidies. This all of course made the car dealership very profitable, and the investors started asking when they are going to get a dividend. But they found out that Bob’s business has opened a subsidiary based at a post office box in the Cayman Islands. This Cayman Islands subsidiary had been buying cars from the manufacturer at wholesale and turning around and selling them to Bob’s parent company for just under what the dealership sells them to the public for. As a result all the profits went to the Cayman Islands subsidiary, and Bob wasn’t bringing any of it back to distribute to the shareholders! Next the investors learned that Bob had been living really high on the hog, paying himself many millions of dollars. When the local investors got fed up, they gathered to protest in front on Bob’s business. “You shouldn’t be using our money to get your brother elected mayor,” said one. Another said, “You shouldn’t be using our money to give to the arts council!” By then Bob owned all the newspapers and TV and radio stations in town, and they were all telling the rest of the town that the protesters were all communists. His brother the mayor sent the police to arrest them. Next Bob got the city to relax the regulations that specified how well the cars he sold should work, and started selling cars with defects to the townspeople. The city also limited lawsuits. The customers cheated by Bob couldn’t do anything about it! Over time Bob’s actions forced all of the honest, responsible car dealers to either operate the way Bob did, or go out of business. The character of the whole town changed. Eventually, though, Bob’s business practices became so bad that most of the townspeople went to the city and demanded that they do something about it. The city conducted an “investigation” and reached a settlement with Bob’s car dealership. The dealership agreed to pay a modest fine, which meant the investors were on the hook to pay it out of any dividends they might receive. (The city’s lawyer who negotiated with Bob later left and got a very high-paying job working for … Bob.) Bob got to keep the enormous amounts he had been paying to himself. Bob lived happily ever after. This fable in no way is meant to make you think about the way that modern American corporations and the current American political system operates. smirkingchimp.com

To: i-node who wrote (701515)	2/28/2013 11:56:31 AM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1577019

The inconvenient fact of the shrinking deficit by David Atkins It's a truism of centrist pundits that we live in a mirrored partisan media world. In this fanciful construction of reality, MSNBC sits on the extreme left and Fox News sits on the extreme right. The problem with that version of reality, of course, is the inconvenience of fact. MSNBC tends to report fact, while Fox News tends to report fiction. Case in point, Rachel Maddow's segment yesterday on the nation's shrinking deficit: nbcnews.com The fact is that the deficit is shrinking. The fact is that Americans don't know that the deficit is shrinking. And the fact is that the only major news outlet actually reporting the facts is MSNBC. When it comes to politics, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But no one is entitled to their own facts. If the facts tend to come down squarely on the left side of the aisle, then the reporting should as well. . thereisnospoon 2/27/2013 03:05:00 PM

To: i-node who wrote (701515)	2/28/2013 12:06:02 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1577019

Pwning Themselves from Talking Points Memo by Brian Beutler The spectacle of Bob Woodward getting caught with his pants down, falsely claiming a White House official (now known to be Gene Sperling) threatened him, should probably live and die on Twitter. But I want to make a quick observation about how conservatives chose to cover this story, because it's illustrative of the right's tendency to feed itself satisfying but ultimately damaging misinformation. Catching up with the whole story late last night, I chuckled like a lot of people did about how aggressively the right embraced the legend of Bob Woodward the moment it became convenient. (It was also pretty funny how many conservatives seemed to think Woodward has been a hero figure on the left for all these years.) But after everyone had a chance to review the evidence I didn't notice many mea culpas. I noticed this and this and of course Drudge and similar examples of conservatives either holding on to the belief that Sperling (who's as diminutive as he is nerdy) had threatened Woodward, or else trying to change the subject. That's not healthy for anybody. Just yesterday, Red State's Erick Erickson wrote a fantastic, thoughtful piece about how harmful and embarrassing this phenomenon is. "Conservatives are trying so hard to highlight controversies, no matter how trivial, we have forgotten the basics of reporting," he wrote. He used the Obamaphone "scandal" as an example, but it works just as well in this instance. Conservative writers were so thrilled to have a scandal to lay at Obama's that they didn't bother to verify it, and ended up owning themselves. Per an exchange on Twitter this morning, Erickson's initial instinct was to back Woodward, but after taking a look at the actual email exchange between Sperling and Woodward, he disowned the threat allegation. The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis fessed that conservatives got played. Good for them. But they both have a lot of work left to do if they want their peers to shape up.