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CA renter.
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July 6, 2013 at 5:21 PM #763360July 6, 2013 at 10:18 PM #763363
Happs
ParticipantI have come across a lot of videos lately of cops not appreciating citizens who know the law and who invoke/assert their rights. It’s almost as if cops resent an informed citizenry. Below is a disturbing video from a couple of days ago of a young man who remained calm and asserted his rights, and ended up not having a pleasant encounter. It has over 1 million views.
July 6, 2013 at 11:59 PM #763365FlyerInHi
GuestReports are that Washington had something to do with the military takeover. American officials had suggested that Morsi name a new prime minister (form a new government without brotherhood ministers) while remainiing as head of state. That or face a military takeover.
I agree that we should stay out of other countries’ affairs. We mean well and we have interests to protect. We think we are protecting our interests but the laws of unintended consequences always come back to bite us in the ass.
Arabs and Muslims are not bad people but we screwed our relationships with them by doing the bidding of the European powers after WWII. One example is the overthrow of Mossadeh of Iran, to protect a British oil company. Madeleine Albright admitted as much.
In egypt, the Muslim brotherhood is well organized. They could win other elections if they are not banned. i believe that Egypt under the brotherhood would be fine if the economy was humming along like it is in Turkey with an islamist government. It’s the economy stupid.
The egyptian economy is in the tank now. Sectarianism is on the rise and the whole thing could degenerate into civil war.
It’s a good thing that we don’t depend so much on Middle East oil anymore. We can stay on the sidelines.
July 7, 2013 at 7:16 AM #763361Hobie
ParticipantHappy 4th everyone. .
July 10, 2013 at 7:53 PM #763446CardiffBaseball
Participant[img_assist|nid=17380|title=Watch and Snitch|desc=
And by all means let’s carefully watch one another. Started watching my neighbor’s movements, that guy left for work an hour early today. Seemed really strange so I asked his wife who was jogging by why Frank left so early today. She said he goes a men’s prayer group, but I just shook my head and thought sure he is dear. “Noted”. Watch out for that guy he’s also in the NRA.|link=node|align=left|width=100|height=31]
July 17, 2013 at 3:58 PM #763583no_such_reality
Participant[quote]
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a heated confrontation over domestic spying, members of Congress said Wednesday they never intended to allow the National Security Agency to build a database of every phone call in America. And they threatened to curtail the government’s surveillance authority.Top Obama administration officials countered that the once-secret program was legal and necessary to keep America safe. And they left open the possibility that they could build similar databases of people’s credit card transactions, hotel records and Internet searches
…
[/quote]Mindless posturing by Congress that won’t do anything.
July 24, 2013 at 11:13 PM #763805ParticipantLove this one:
In Mass, every rep from the state voted with Amash except for:
Joe KennedyRarely do you see a time when leadership from both parties are in lock-step
July 25, 2013 at 1:42 AM #763808CA renter
Participant“WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Wednesday evening narrowly defeated an amendment from Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) meant to halt the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone record data.
“We’re here today for a very simple reason: to defend the Fourth Amendment, to defend the privacy of each and every American,” Amash said as he introduced his measure. Lawmakers’ votes, he said, would answer one simple question, “Do we oppose the suspicionless collection of every American’s phone records?”
On Wednesday, at least, the answer was no. The House voted 217-205 to defeat the amendment after intense last-minute lobbying from the White House and the NSA.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/24/justin-amash-amendment_n_3647893.html
July 25, 2013 at 9:09 AM #763810spdrun
ParticipantGood to know that it was a close vote at least.
217 traitors to 205 honest people.July 25, 2013 at 10:05 AM #763811ParticipantPretty even split on Repubs and Dems too.
And doubly sadly, 12 clowns abstained.
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/roll412.xml
My clown abstained. Nasty gram time, here I come.
July 26, 2013 at 7:37 AM #763826ParticipantHmmm either I had a post deleted or it didn’t post because my 2nd post was the Joe Kennedy tidbit.
Aww Screw it, the media didn’t spend one second debating this last night. Would love to see Rove against Amash, but why would Fox do that.
My point had been this. After the vote I scanned a few right-wing boards, and reddit, which was very left-wing but the tone of reddit has gone anti-Obama after the Snowden affair.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen one issue where every person following the damn vote was not completely irate. Didn’t matter what political persuasion you were. You could find anyone defending this vote. This vote might actually destroy the GOP. Luckily with zero media coverage only a few of us in the know were aware, so that might save some, but Reps are already being targeted.
July 26, 2013 at 8:14 AM #763827ParticipantLA DWP paid $35.5 million in unlimited sick time since 2010
[quote]Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power has paid thousands of employees a total of $35.5 million since 2010 in extra sick days under an unusual program that the utility’s top executive acknowledges has been vulnerable to abuse.
DWP employees benefit from a 32-year-old policy that allows them to take paid days off well beyond the agency’s 10-day-a-year cap on sick days. Last year, 10% of the department’s roughly 10,000 employees took at least 10 extra days off, the data show. More than 220 took an extra 20 working days off, or about a month, according to a Times examination of data obtained under the California Public Records Act.
In fact, records and interviews show, there is no limit to the paid time off DWP employees can take when they say they’re sick, and requirements to provide medical proof of their illness have been loosely enforced.[/quote]
Luckily the city approved the tax increase to prevent the cut backs…
July 28, 2013 at 2:37 AM #763845ParticipantThat’s certainly inexcusable, especially if they haven’t proven a legitimate medical need to take the extra days off.
Since we’re talking about corruption and graft, NSR, let’s look at what privatization gets us:
“The accounting of the financial cost of the nearly decade-long Iraq War will go on for years, but a recent analysis has shed light on the companies that made money off the war by providing support services as the privatization of what were former U.S. military operations rose to unprecedented levels.
Private or publicly listed firms received at least $138 billion of U.S. taxpayer money for government contracts for services that included providing private security, building infrastructure and feeding the troops.
Ten contractors received 52 percent of the funds, according to an analysis by the Financial Times that was published Tuesday.
The No. 1 recipient?
Houston-based energy-focused engineering and construction firm KBR, Inc. (NYSE:KBR), which was spun off from its parent, oilfield services provider Halliburton Co. (NYSE:HAL), in 2007.
The company was given $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.
Who were Nos. 2 and 3?
Agility Logistics (KSE:AGLTY) of Kuwait and the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp. Together, these firms garnered $13.5 billion of U.S. contracts.
As private enterprise entered the war zone at unprecedented levels, the amount of corruption ballooned, even if most contractors performed their duties as expected.
According to the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the level of corruption by defense contractors may be as high as $60 billion. Disciplined soldiers that would traditionally do many of the tasks are commissioned by private and publicly listed companies.
Even without the graft, the costs of paying for these services are higher than paying governement employees or soldiers to do them because of the profit motive involved. No-bid contracting – when companies get to name their price with no competing bid – didn’t lower legitimate expenses. (Despite promises by President Barack Obama to reel in this habit, the trend toward granting favored companies federal contracts without considering competing bids continued to grow, by 9 percent last year, according to the Washington Post.)”
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Again, it’s the privatization movement that is behind the attacks on public unions and labor, in general. Anyone here actually think that we’d be better off with private companies? The privatization of our military services could certainly explain why we’ve been engaged some of the longest wars in U.S. history.
July 28, 2013 at 3:00 PM #763849mike92104
Participant[quote=CA renter]
As private enterprise entered the war zone at unprecedented levels, the amount of corruption ballooned, even if most contractors performed their duties as expected.
According to the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the level of corruption by defense contractors may be as high as $60 billion. Disciplined soldiers that would traditionally do many of the tasks are commissioned by private and publicly listed companies.
Even without the graft, the costs of paying for these services are higher than paying governement employees or soldiers to do them because of the profit motive involved. No-bid contracting – when companies get to name their price with no competing bid – didn’t lower legitimate expenses. (Despite promises by President Barack Obama to reel in this habit, the trend toward granting favored companies federal contracts without considering competing bids continued to grow, by 9 percent last year, according to the Washington Post.)”[/quote]
Just remember that somewhere in the chain is a corrupt public official allowing this to happen. They’re probably getting a huge cut, and or campaign contributions to look the other way.
Unionized public workers are a problem. As I’ve said before, I am pro-union for the private sector. That’s because I believe the union has to play a role in the health of the company, or face bankruptcy when people choose not to buy their products or services because those labor costs have been passed on. In the public sector however, the lack of need for profitability or efficiency means the unions can keep asking for more and more while those costs are simply passed on to the taxpayer who has no choice but to pay them.
July 28, 2013 at 5:31 PM #763851ParticipantBut taxes are also raised for all of the bond measures (that almost always benefit those in the *private* sector) that idiot voters pass without considering where the money will come from to PAY for those bonds. They are also raised when idiot citizens demand unreasonable infrastructure enhancements (again, work which benefits private contractors in almost every case) that only benefit them and their specific neighborhood/community, but everybody else has to pay for. Or when corrupt politicians collude with developers and others in the RE sector to build monuments to themselves, paying 5-10 times for a building or infrastructure improvement than what it would cost under “normal” circumstances. The list goes on and on, but you’ll only hear about unions being the problem because the MSM is being controlled by those who favor privatization and corruption.
On another note, while people keep complaining about the costs of public union workers, their compensation (and relative purchasing power) has not really gone up that much over the past few decades. The *costs* of those benefits have gone up, and the majority of those cost increases are going to those in the **private** sector. With pensions, it goes to Wall Street as the pension funds have been moving more and more toward privatizing the management of the funds and as they’ve gone into riskier investments over time (lobbied for by Wall Street). And healthcare costs have skyrocketed, with the benefits of those increases going toward healthcare/pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. So, while the COSTS have gone up rather dramatically, the benefits to the actual public employees have not gone up nearly as much (I would definitely argue that the compensation today is about equivalent to the compensation earned in the 70s and 80s). The primary beneficiaries of these cost increases are in the PRIVATE sector. Follow the money, and you’ll see who’s really responsible for the public sector debacle…and it’s not the unions/public employees.
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