4 Arrested in Phone Tampering at Landrieu Office , Republicans charged with wiretapping
All four of the men arrested Monday in New Orleans, each in his mid-20s, were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony, according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana. They appeared in court on Tuesday.
The average American looses again , Because the House always wins.
By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.
For Sale [link]
I don’t want Harry Reid to loose his election in Nevada but I would like someone else in his leadership job - NOW
1ofWisdom: Democrates, don’t wait for Universal Health Care… because the Republicans only care about themselves and have no compassion
xo1rider: I spent 8 years in the U.S. Military. If we’d had leaders like Harry Reid there would have been mass desertions.
he needs to be stripped of his chairmanships
The U.S has double-digit unemployment and the Chinese have currency manipulation that favor its exports to America , thus leaving us with a trade deficit.
The US has accepted – even welcomed – China’s emergence as a giant economic power because American policymakers convinced themselves that economic opening would lead to political liberalisation in China. - ft.com
If that assumption changes, American policy towards China could change with it. Welcoming the rise of a giant Asian economy that is also turning into a liberal democracy is one thing. Sponsoring the rise of a Leninist one-party state, that is America’s only plausible geopolitical rival, is a different proposition. Combine this political disillusionment with double-digit unemployment in the US that is widely blamed on Chinese currency manipulation, and you have the formula for an anti-China backlash. - ft.com
Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush firmly believe in free trade with China, are you surprised that they would support something that favors large business on the backs of Americas middle class?
We have been all bark with china , never really doing anything of substance. even worse , we are at a point that we have to beg them to keep buying our bonds. we are hostage of our own making.
are you still in favor of free trade with china?
Comprehensive immigration reform would add an estimated 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) over 10 years, according to a new study released recently.
The study, entitled The Economic Benefits of Comprehensive Immigration Reform conducted by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) economist Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, was published on the website of the Immigration Policy Center.
The study came shortly after a renewed commitment by the Barack Obama administration to back legislation this year that would provide a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.
Comprehensive immigration reform that legalizes currently unauthorized immigrants and creates flexible legal limits on future immigration in the context of full labor rights would help American workers and the U.S. economy, says the study.
Unlike the current enforcement-only strategy, comprehensive reform would raise the “wage floor” for the entire U.S. economy –to the benefit of both immigrant and native-born workers, the study says.
According to the study, the historical experience of legalization under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA, indicates that the comprehensive immigration reform would raise wages, increase consumption, create jobs, and generate additional tax revenue.
Even though IRCA was implemented during an economic recession characterized by high unemployment, it still helped raise wages and spurred increases in educational, home and small-business investments by newly legalized immigrants, the study says.
The study estimates that the comprehensive immigration reform would yield at least 1.5 trillion dollars in the U.S. GDP over 10 years.
This study uses a computable general equilibrium model to estimate the economic ramifications of three different scenarios: the comprehensive immigration reform that creates a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants in the United States, a program for temporary workers only that does not include a pathway to permanent status, and mass deportation to expel all unauthorized immigrants and effectively seal the U.S.-Mexico border.
The model shows that the comprehensive immigration reform produces the greatest economic benefits.
According to the study, the comprehensive immigration reform generates an annual increase in the U.S. GDP of at least 0.84 percent. This amounts to 1.5 trillion dollars in additional GDP over 10 years. It also boosts wages for both native-born and newly legalized immigrant workers.
The temporary worker program generates an annual increase in the U.S. GDP of 0.44 percent. This amounts to 792 billion dollars of additional GDP over 10 years. Moreover, wages decline for both native-born and newly legalized immigrant workers.
Mass deportation reduces the U.S. GDP by 1.46 percent annually. This amounts to 2.6 trillion dollars in lost GDP over 10 years, not including the actual cost of deportation. Wages would rise for less-skilled native-born workers, but would reduce wages for higher-skilled natives, and would lead to widespread job loss, according to the study.
Legalizing the nation’s unauthorized workers and putting new legal limits on immigration that rise and fall with U.S. labor demand would help lay the foundation for robust, just and widespread economic growth, the study says.
According to the study, the current enforcement-only approach to unauthorized immigration is not cost effective and has not deterred unauthorized immigrants from coming to the United States when jobs are available.
Rather, enforcement-only policies have wasted billions of taxpayer dollars while pushing unauthorized migration further underground. And these policies have produced a host of unintended consequences: more deaths among border crossers, greater demand for people smugglers, less “circular migration” in favor of more “permanent settlement” among unauthorized immigrants, and further depressed wages in low-wage labor markets.
“If we are going to create a solid recovery with good wages, we have to fix this hole that we have at the bottom of the labor market,” said the author, Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda.
“This is not about bringing in a lot of workers. This is about your neighbors and if we are better off where everybody in the economy has the ability to fight for their families and to contribute more to the economy rather than staying in the shadows,” said Hinojosa-Ojeda.
Hinojosa-Ojeda based the study in part on surveys done after the 1986 legislation that resulted in the legalization of nearly 3million undocumented immigrants.
Those surveys showed that immigrants who became legal moved on to better-paying jobs and became more educated, resulting in more spending and more tax revenue. That legislation was passed during a similar economic downturn, he said.
Republicans disappointed the airline flight 253 didn’t blow up.
Dick Cheney harshly criticized Obama’s “low key response“ from : thinkprogress.org
Dick Cheney - “As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.”
The outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform — including “too big to fail” legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don’t we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse — what if we used it to make the system better?
Everyone around the table quickly got excited (granted we are an excitable group), and began tossing out suggestions for how to get this idea circulating. - found at showthread.php?t=35077
Republican Reps. Peter King (N.Y.) and Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) have wasted no time in attacking Democrats on intelligence and screening failures leading up to the failed Christmas Day bombing of Flight 253.
Radio host Mike Gallagher: “There should be a separate line to scrutinize anybody with the name Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed.” (Note: Those are some of the most common names in the world.)
Rep. Peter King (R-NY): “100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim, and that is our main enemy today. So why we should not be profiling people because of their religion?”
Terrorism pundit Steven Emerson: “Remember, there have been so many complaints about quote, profiling, by the quote, Islamic civil rights groups, that they stopped basically profiling. And that basically led to not putting this guy onto the terrorist watch list.“ see link