Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
So...you prefer a Theocracy?
Agree - as long as NO history of religion is taught.
I didn't say there was. LOL!
Agree wholeheartedly w/ no proselytizing in schools.
ms40, doesn't Islam deserve equal access under law?
Christians lied? How can that be?
20 quotes from historical Americans against the U.S. being a Christian Nation
The separation of church and state is an issue that those in Washington debate just like co-workers do around the water-cooler or families around the dinner table. How much religion, if any, should be involved in government? When the 2nd "red scare" happened in the late 1940s until the late 1950s, Americans were scared that communism would overtake the country. The greatest example of this was Republican Senator, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who drove home the paranoia that not only would communism take over the United States, but that many Americans were communist themselves. Of course this all proved to be false and forever known as "McCarthyism." One of the ways the government wanted to show that they were somehow above communism was their love for god. "In god we trust" was added to all paper currency in 1957 as well as adding "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.
Today, many conservative politicians and Christians around the country claim that the United States was founded as a 'Christian Nation'. These claims, however, are not based on factual information. While many of the Founding Fathers were Christians, others were not. Some believed in God, but held no religious preference and others had no belief in anything supernatural. Here are twenty quotes from the Founding Fathers and other great Americans that show that the United States was not founded as a 'Christian Nation.'
1. "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man." - Thomas Jefferson
2. "The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs." - Thomas Jefferson
3. "It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet the one is not three, and the three are not one." - Thomas Jefferson
4. "And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors." - Thomas Jefferson
5. "There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." - Thomas Jefferson
6. "Lighthouses are more useful than churches." - Ben Franklin
7. "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." - Ben Franklin
8. "I looked around for God's judgments, but saw no signs of them." - Ben Franklin
9. "In the affairs of the world, men are saved not by faith, but by the lack of it." - Ben Franklin
10. "This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it" - John Adams
11. "The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation." - Thomas Paine
12. "Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst." - Thomas Paine
13. "I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all." - Thomas Paine
14. "Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditional or invented absurdities, or of downright lies." - Thomas Paine
15. "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." - Thomas Paine
16. "It is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene.” - Thomas Paine
17. "Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by the difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be depreciated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society." - George Washington
18. "The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my profession." - Abraham Lincoln
19. "It may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. The tendency to usurpation on one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded against by an entire abstinence of the Gov't from interference in any way whatsoever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect against trespasses on its legal rights by others." - James Madison
20. "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."- James Madison
http://www.examiner.com/article/20-quotes-from-historical-americans-against-the-u-s-being-a-christian-nation
Not nearly evident enough. If you get bored sometime, dig around in the 'extracurricular activities' of the education finance industry. You will not believe what you find. In many school districts the most coveted title is "student career counselor" due to certain "steerage fees" engendered.
Gotta run - l8r.
They forgot a thing or three...
85%+ can't construct a concise paragraph.
Same % read at 6th grade level...or less.
If U fail too many parents will sue.
If U fail too many you'll never get tenure.
If tenured, the nastiest jobs will be yours...forever.
Higher ed is a business.
No, I'm not a prof...but three in my family are.
Your fine illustration of the difference between legal fiction and reality is most apropos. The Republican Party is nothing more than a scam set up by and for low class people interested only in furtherance of their own welfare by all applicable machinations.
A brief study of history provides the obvious cure but civility prevents its application.
This University Teaches You No Skills—Just a New Way to Think
Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn’t to prepare students for a career. It’s to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point. Nelson is the founder and CEO of a new experiment in higher education called Minerva Project. He says when it comes to learning, job training is the easy part. With the emergence of online courses, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to acquire the hard skills you need to land a job. “Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?” he says. “If that’s the role of universities, you’d have to be insane to go to universities.”
But that doesn’t mean Nelson believes the country’s liberal arts colleges are doing a particularly terrific job either. He argues most schools do little more than teach students a core canon of information, a practice he says is archaic, given how much information people have access to these days. “Today, it’s absurd to say you need to know this information and without this information, you’re not an informed person,” he says. Students don’t need universities to teach them history, chemistry, and political science, Nelson says. They need universities to teach them how to think. At Minerva, he says, students learn just that.
How You Think, Not What You Know
Minerva is a four-year, for-profit college housed within Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California. Its students all live together on a traditional residential campus, but that’s about the only way in which Minerva is traditional. For starters, it’s highly exclusive, boasting a 2.8 percent acceptance rate, which is lower than even Harvard or Stanford. Its students take all their classes online, and after their first year in California, they spend each semester in a new country of their choosing. What’s more, tuition is just $10,000 a year. This fall, Minerva admitted its first class of 29 students and recently landed $70 million in funding, enough to offer the founding class of students full scholarships through graduation.
But while there are many things that make Minerva unusual, the curriculum is what makes it truly unique. Minerva toys with the notion that in a world where information is never more than a click away, what matters most is not what you know off the top of your head, but how you analyze and interpret everything you learn. And so, the school takes a hard stance against teaching hard skills. You won’t find any of the typical gen-ed courses in its freshman curriculum. Instead, freshmen take esoteric-sounding courses like “Empirical Analysis” and “Multimodal Communication.” The entire first year at Minerva is dedicated to teaching three things and three things only: critical thinking, creative thinking, and effective communication.
“It’s basically like brain hacking. We’re changing the way you perceive the world around you,” Nelson says.
The New New Education
In this way, Minerva is not only an extreme departure from traditional universities. It’s an extreme departure from its fellow education innovators. The last few years have seen a boom in edtech startups, like Coursera, Udacity, and Codecademy, all of which focus heavily on teaching students the skills they need to land or switch jobs. Nelson isn’t opposed to these platforms. In fact, he expects most Minerva students will use them to teach themselves hard skills outside of class. But, he says, those skills are worth a lot more with the fundamental critical thinking abilities to back them up.
“We didn’t want them to be trained just for some profession or particular kind of academic niche,” says Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, Minerva’s founding dean and a former Harvard and Stanford professor. “We wanted them to have the intellectual tools to succeed at jobs that don’t even exist yet.”
Teaching students how to think is a fuzzy, amorphous idea. And so, Nelson and Dr. Kosslyn crafted an exhaustive list of what they call “habits of mind and foundational concepts” that they want every student to learn in their first year. There are 129 of them, and attempting to understand them all can be a bit dizzying, so here’s a concrete example:
If a doctor wants to prescribe you a new medication, one of the first questions he’ll ask you is what other medications you’re taking. In medicine, we’re constantly on the lookout for adverse interactions. But ask someone whether they support a given law, and they’re likely to go with their gut, without stopping to think about all the other laws that interact with that law. Minerva would like to make that type of analytical thinking a “habit of mind,” which its students apply to all their judgment calls.
“The way you teach that is not by teaching medicine,” Nelson says. “Instead, you teach the very concept of interactions.”
Minerva does teach students practical things, of course. Freshmen learn statistics and historical analysis, but only within those much broader courses. “Usually schools teach you English and chemistry and hope you’ll pick up critical thinking and communication,” Dr. Kosslyn says. “We’ve flipped it on its ear.”
Special Specializations
After freshman year, students also choose a major and take more specialized courses. But all of the classes are interdisciplinary, such as “Art for Political and Social Change” or “Natural Resources and Environmental Economics.” Finally, during their last two years, they’re tasked with “creating something novel” within their given concentration. This is more than just a thesis presentation. If they’re studying politics, for instance, they might draft a law and try to get it passed.
“It’s intended to be a bridge from college to the real world,” says Dr. Kosslyn.
For all its pedagogical complexity, of course, it’s possible that the corporate world just won’t buy Minerva’s little experiment in education. It could be that society is already pre-programmed to hire for tangible, rather than intangible, skills. And in order for a model like this to take off, universities across the country would have to adopt it too. According to Dr. Kosslyn, that could take some time.
“The main reaction I’ve gotten from academics is almost envy. They recognize the utility and value of what were trying to do and appreciate the effort, but also understand it’d be extreme difficult for them to revise their curriculum to do what we’re trying to do,” he says. “There’s a lot of legacy, which it makes things hard to change.”
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/minerva-project/
The Most Brazen Attempt at Voter Suppression Yet
Let’s assume—despite what most liberals suspect—that the most vocal voter ID boosters are sincere. That, as National Review’s Rich Lowry argues in Politico, they want nothing more than to protect the vote from fraud with a minor imposition on the time and effort of prospective voters. “Where you come down on this issue,” he writes, “really depends on whether you think it’s reasonable to require the minimal effort to establish your identity by producing an ID at the ballot box or not.”
Fair enough. That’s a reasonable sentiment. Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, Republicans and other voter ID supporters don’t want to make it harder for more vulnerable voters to cast a ballot—although that’s the practical outcome of an ID requirement—they just want to secure the process and protect the integrity of the vote.
But this doesn’t explain the Republican-led push to end or limit same-day registration (condemned by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as a “trick”) and early and weekend voting, procedures used most by minorities, black Americans in particular. Nor does it explain an incredible effort just uncovered by Al Jazeera America that could shift the direction of the midterm elections.
According to a six-month-long investigation conducted by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera, “voting officials in 27 states, almost all of them Republicans, have launched what is threatening to become a massive purge of black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters. Already, tens of thousands have been removed from voter rolls in battleground states, and the numbers are set to climb.” Specifically, officials have a master list of 6.9 million suspected “potential double voters.” And in Virginia, Georgia, and Washington the lists are “heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel, and Kim,” all common to Democratic-leaning minority groups.
The process for checking those names, a computer program called Crosscheck—touted by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a vocal supporter for voter identification—is incredibly inaccurate. “The actual lists,” notes Al Jazeera America, “show that not only are middle names mismatched, and suffix discrepancies ignored, even conflicting birthdates are disregarded. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores any Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected. Given the tight races in Georgia and other battleground states, even a small number of false positives could turn the tide of an election, giving a strong advantage to Republican candidates for statewide and congressional offices.
Yes, voting officials have to prune the rolls of deceased or inactive voters. The question is whether they’re taking the narrowest route and trying to avoid mistakes. They aren’t; compared with other voter lists, Crosscheck is incredibly broad with a strong bias toward removing people from the rolls. And the means for verifying voter identity—sending postcards to addresses on file—puts the burden of proof on individual voters and is almost designed to take people off the rolls; with false positives and duplicate names, there’s no guarantee that anyone gets their verification card, to say nothing of voters who have moved or don’t have a permanent address.
Whether Republican officials are trying to nudge the electorate in the GOP’s favor is almost beside the point—since, intentions aside, that’s what’s happened. And when you take this out of its isolation chamber and put it in context—a world where Republicans want voter identification and reduced early voting and stiffer registration laws—it looks like a pattern of deliberate suppression, where some officials prune voter rolls with lists of minorities while others make it harder to vote altogether.
This news comes just a day after the verdict in Georgia, where a state judge denied a petition from the New Georgia Project—a group that spearheaded registration drives across the state—to process 40,000 missing registration forms, striking a blow to voter mobilization efforts in the state. Last month, after it submitted 80,000 forms, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp accused the group of fraud and opened an investigation into its voter drives. Soon after, thousands of forms went missing, prompting this lawsuit.
Again, it’s the pattern that makes this suspect; the consistent effort from GOP officials, lawmakers, and judges to make voting more difficult, or facilitate efforts in that direction. Conservatives across the country are working to weaken voting laws and put new barriers to the ballot box. And in every case, Democratic constituencies are those most affected.
Which is why it’s hard to take pro-ID arguments—like Rich Lowry’s—in good faith. Liberal and Democratic claims of voter suppression aren’t just about voter identification, they’re about the package of policies and techniques that burden voters and shrink the electorate in the process. Indeed, it’s worse than this. Voter ID advocates insist that their reasonable moves are intended to protect the integrity of the process and the sanctity of the vote, but the reality is that their policies have created confusion and chaos for hundreds of thousands of voters.
Put another way, there’s not a serious Republican effort to expand the electorate and bring new people into the process. But there is a major one to do the opposite. And it hasn’t popped up in response to threats to the sanctity of the vote—even conservatives are beginning to acknowledge there isn’t much voter fraud—it’s emerged in a world where electorates are increasingly filled with people who don’t support Republicans. It’s brazen, it’s indefensible, and it needs to end.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/10/al_jazeera_america_s_reveals_massive_gop_voter_suppression_effort_millions.html#lf_comment=229972061
It won't end until voters realize it's the pure unadulterated power of The Vote of the individual that provides the fuel for the massive Republican vote-fraud effort.
The Most Brazen Attempt at Voter Suppression Yet
Let’s assume—despite what most liberals suspect—that the most vocal voter ID boosters are sincere. That, as National Review’s Rich Lowry argues in Politico, they want nothing more than to protect the vote from fraud with a minor imposition on the time and effort of prospective voters. “Where you come down on this issue,” he writes, “really depends on whether you think it’s reasonable to require the minimal effort to establish your identity by producing an ID at the ballot box or not.”
Fair enough. That’s a reasonable sentiment. Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, Republicans and other voter ID supporters don’t want to make it harder for more vulnerable voters to cast a ballot—although that’s the practical outcome of an ID requirement—they just want to secure the process and protect the integrity of the vote.
But this doesn’t explain the Republican-led push to end or limit same-day registration (condemned by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as a “trick”) and early and weekend voting, procedures used most by minorities, black Americans in particular. Nor does it explain an incredible effort just uncovered by Al Jazeera America that could shift the direction of the midterm elections.
According to a six-month-long investigation conducted by Greg Palast for Al Jazeera, “voting officials in 27 states, almost all of them Republicans, have launched what is threatening to become a massive purge of black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters. Already, tens of thousands have been removed from voter rolls in battleground states, and the numbers are set to climb.” Specifically, officials have a master list of 6.9 million suspected “potential double voters.” And in Virginia, Georgia, and Washington the lists are “heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel, and Kim,” all common to Democratic-leaning minority groups.
The process for checking those names, a computer program called Crosscheck—touted by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a vocal supporter for voter identification—is incredibly inaccurate. “The actual lists,” notes Al Jazeera America, “show that not only are middle names mismatched, and suffix discrepancies ignored, even conflicting birthdates are disregarded. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores any Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected. Given the tight races in Georgia and other battleground states, even a small number of false positives could turn the tide of an election, giving a strong advantage to Republican candidates for statewide and congressional offices.
Yes, voting officials have to prune the rolls of deceased or inactive voters. The question is whether they’re taking the narrowest route and trying to avoid mistakes. They aren’t; compared with other voter lists, Crosscheck is incredibly broad with a strong bias toward removing people from the rolls. And the means for verifying voter identity—sending postcards to addresses on file—puts the burden of proof on individual voters and is almost designed to take people off the rolls; with false positives and duplicate names, there’s no guarantee that anyone gets their verification card, to say nothing of voters who have moved or don’t have a permanent address.
Whether Republican officials are trying to nudge the electorate in the GOP’s favor is almost beside the point—since, intentions aside, that’s what’s happened. And when you take this out of its isolation chamber and put it in context—a world where Republicans want voter identification and reduced early voting and stiffer registration laws—it looks like a pattern of deliberate suppression, where some officials prune voter rolls with lists of minorities while others make it harder to vote altogether.
This news comes just a day after the verdict in Georgia, where a state judge denied a petition from the New Georgia Project—a group that spearheaded registration drives across the state—to process 40,000 missing registration forms, striking a blow to voter mobilization efforts in the state. Last month, after it submitted 80,000 forms, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp accused the group of fraud and opened an investigation into its voter drives. Soon after, thousands of forms went missing, prompting this lawsuit.
Again, it’s the pattern that makes this suspect; the consistent effort from GOP officials, lawmakers, and judges to make voting more difficult, or facilitate efforts in that direction. Conservatives across the country are working to weaken voting laws and put new barriers to the ballot box. And in every case, Democratic constituencies are those most affected.
Which is why it’s hard to take pro-ID arguments—like Rich Lowry’s—in good faith. Liberal and Democratic claims of voter suppression aren’t just about voter identification, they’re about the package of policies and techniques that burden voters and shrink the electorate in the process. Indeed, it’s worse than this. Voter ID advocates insist that their reasonable moves are intended to protect the integrity of the process and the sanctity of the vote, but the reality is that their policies have created confusion and chaos for hundreds of thousands of voters.
Put another way, there’s not a serious Republican effort to expand the electorate and bring new people into the process. But there is a major one to do the opposite. And it hasn’t popped up in response to threats to the sanctity of the vote—even conservatives are beginning to acknowledge there isn’t much voter fraud—it’s emerged in a world where electorates are increasingly filled with people who don’t support Republicans. It’s brazen, it’s indefensible, and it needs to end.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/10/al_jazeera_america_s_reveals_massive_gop_voter_suppression_effort_millions.html#lf_comment=229972061
It won't end until voters realize it's the pure unadulterated power of The Vote of the individual that provides the fuel for the massive Republican vote-fraud effort.
Georgia governor’s corruption shocker: Right-winger’s shady get-rich scheme could be wildest GOP scandal
Back in 2007, Georgia Revenue Commissioner Bart Graham noticed something funny in the state budget. What he discovered would bring to light a scandal then nearly 20 years old, yet which still hasn’t ended.
What caught Graham’s attention was a scheme set up in 1990 that granted regional monopolies to a handful of businesses for performing mandatory title inspections on salvaged cars. Funny thing, not only did these shops have no competition, but they never bid for the contracts, and on top of that, the state was paying the inspectors to the tune of well over a million dollars a year.
And lo and behold, the sweetest contract—for the populous region, including Gainesville and Atlanta, where fees were higher than anywhere else—had been handed to a company called Gainesville Salvage Disposal, co-owned by none other than Nathan Deal, a state senator in 1990, and, by 2007, a U.S. representative in Washington. Nobody could tell Graham how or why the contracts were granted, and Deal himself said of the process, “I don’t know there was much of an official thing,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2009.
But the money was official enough, so with the support of the state attorney general, Graham decided to end the no-bid monopolies and privatize the system, saving $1.7 million off the annual state budget. While Graham may have expected some pushback from the beneficiaries of the sweetheart system, he could never have foreseen the lengths to which Deal would go to keep that spigot of taxpayer cash open.
Two years earlier, Nathan Deal had sunk $2 million into his daughter Carrie Wilder’s business venture, Wilder Outdoors, and by the spring of 2008 had signed off on more than $2 million in additional loans as the store failed to turn a profit. Easing Deal’s pain somewhat were the tens of thousands of dollars he earned as a corporate officer of GSD, as reported on his W2s.
The only problem was that Congress prohibited members from serving as corporate officers and from making more than about $25,000 in outside earned income. And by 2007 Deal was earning nearly three times that amount from GSD per his tax returns. Representative Deal solved that problem by simply failing to disclose his position at GSD on his congressional financial reports, and listing his earned income as dividends instead, according to a complaint by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
So in June of 2008, Commissioner Graham was called to a meeting by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and found himself greeted by Deal, flanked by his GSD business partner Ken Cronan and Chief of Staff Chris Riley. Cagle later claimed it was simply a talk between the commissioner and a constituent businessman, while Deal claims to have been acting as a “public servant.”
In any case, Deal was there to ask that GSD be granted a full-time, state-paid inspector, which would mean more title inspections for himself and Cronan and, naturally, more revenue. Graham, who had informed Deal of his intentions to privatize the system five months earlier, refused on the grounds that no other location had a full-time inspector, and anyway, he hadn’t changed his mind about ending the monopolies.
Deal, however, was not inclined to take no for an answer, and just four days before Wilder Outdoors closed up for good—leaving Deal with a $2 million cash loss plus more than $2 million in loan debt, for which he would soon have to put his Gainesville home on the market and liquidate retirement accounts—another meeting was called.
Debt Soars as Monopoly Ends
The meeting was described as “contentious” and “hostile,” and Graham has said that Deal left no doubt he wanted the $1.7 million for title inspectors restored to the state budget, justifying the move in part by speculating that if left to the free market, “illegal aliens” might end up getting the work. Despite the pressure, Graham refused to budge.
Yet three days later, on the eve of Wilder Outdoors’ closure, the $1.7 million for state title inspectors reappeared in the budget. Neither the Senate committee chairman nor the subcommittee chairman overseeing the process claim to know or recall how it happened. The lieutenant governor’s office had no comment. But a few hundred thousand in income is no match for millions in losses and debt, and in May of 2009, Deal and Cronan would take out a $2.8 million loan, backed by the assets of GSD. This loan would go undisclosed by Deal for over a year until uncovered and reported by the AJC. And in that same month, Deal announced he’d be running for governor of Georgia—and, of course, accepting contributions to a campaign fund.
According to law, campaign funds cannot be used to enrich a candidate or his associates. Nevertheless, the Nathan Deal for Governor campaign (DFG) routed more than $40,000 to Nathan’s daughter-in-law Denise as campaign staff, and more than $135,000 in airfare—more than six times what opponents Roy Barnes and Karen Handel spent combined—to North Georgia Aviation, a subsidiary of Deal’s own GSD. And as it happened, the plane and helicopter they used were owned by HRPW and PWWR, companies whose official addresses were the same as the home address of Riley, Deal’s chief of staff.
Deal could use the cash, seeing as how Graham went ahead and privatized the state title inspection system through regulation. Despite claiming that his attempt to strong-arm Graham was not illegal because, according to Deal, privatization would benefit his business, Deal and Cronan opted to shut down their title inspection business in August of 2009, rather than operate it on the free market.
Unfortunately for Deal, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (CSOC) took a different view of the whole title inspection affair and asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to review it. The office reviewed the case, and in February of 2010 unanimously recommended an official investigation, finding “substantial reason to believe” that Nathan Deal violated rules limiting outside income, prohibiting income as a corporate officer, requiring full financial disclosure and barring personal use of government resources. The office also believed that he may have violated rules against using his office for personal gain.
Fortunately for Deal, there was a fix for that, since the CSOC only has jurisdiction over members of Congress. On Mar. 21, 2010, Nathan Deal resigned his seat as a U.S. Representative, stopping the investigation cold. But the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have no such restrictions, and on May 24, Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBurney and an agent from the FBI showed up at Graham’s office at the Department of Revenue with a subpoena to provide evidence to a federal grand jury, the AJC reported. The criminal investigation into Nathan Deal had begun.
Campaign Cash Covers Debt
Not one to be daunted by mere legal proceedings, Deal continued to route tens of thousands of dollars to daughter Denise through a company called Southern Magnolia Capital, then when that was exposed, through a business called The Sassafras Group. According to charges later filed with the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission (commonly known as the ethics commission), he allegedly siphoned off even more cash to fund his legal defense against the feds.
So in October 2010, ethics commission director Stacey Kalberman and deputy director Sherilyn Streicker began seeking subpoenas for members of the Deal campaign, investigating charges that Deal had accepted excess contributions and then used them for improper purposes. In early 2011, after Deal was elected governor, the FBI and federal prosecutors got interested, too, paying a visit to Kalberman and Streicker to find out what was going on down in Georgia.
In May 2011, Deal’s executive counsel, Ryan Teague, contacted Holly LaBerge to see if she’d be interested in taking Kalberman’s job. The following month, both Kalberman and Streicker were forced out under the pretense of budget cuts, and in August, LaBerge was installed in Kalberman’s place. According to sworn testimony by ethics commission staff, that’s when orders came down to remove, alter and destroy documents in the Deal investigation files. The federal criminal investigation was still dogging him, and although Deal couldn’t stop the feds, a vacant judge’s seat in a Georgia district offered an opportunity to at least slow it down by granting the coveted appointment to none other than Robert McBurney, the federal prosecutor who had been investigating him.
The following summer, LaBerge’s ethics commission offered Deal’s legal team a consent order (equivalent to a plea deal) of a $5,400 fine on most of the financial violations, 75 percent less than an offer made the previous month, which itself was a fraction of the original $70,000 recommendation. Charges of using campaign funds for legal fees and funneling money to himself through North Georgia Aviation were still pending. Riley was unpleased with that arrangement, and on July 16, 2012, he texted LaBerge, asking her to “resolve all DFG issues” before a scheduled hearing one week away. The next day, Teague also called LaBerge on behalf of Deal, saying they’d be happier with a $1,500 fine, no admission of guilt and having the big charges simply tossed out.
LaBerge balked at that, but Teague told her it was “not in the agency’s best interest for these cases to go to a [public] hearing” and that the agency’s “rule-making authority may not happen” if they did. And although LaBerge protested “that the threat of rule making being withheld was being used to make the complaints go away,” nevertheless Deal was let off with a $3,350 fine (to cover administrative fees) and all charges were dropped.
A Helping Hand
With the state investigation out of the way, at least, Deal could finally focus on repairing his finances, and in May 2013, he and Cronan worked out a deal to sell GSD “for a few million dollars plus a monthly rental” to a company called Copart, which happened to owe the state of Georgia nearly $74 million in unpaid taxes. Deal’s attorney, Randy Evans, assured the press that Deal had no knowledge of any of that, since the transaction was handled entirely by a blind trust.
Yet less than two weeks before the sale, Evans himself had been in on a series of emails among Deal’s counsel and staff regarding the transaction, which were so deep in the weeds that Riley was editing Copart’s press release. (He had wanted references to Gainesville removed so that it appeared to be the sale of an Atlanta company.) Noticeably absent from the CC list on those emails was Jim Allen, the fellow in charge of the blind trust. As for the press release, it was scuttled entirely and never saw the light of day. Copart had to settle for a tweet and a Facebook post.
By December 2013, the feds had apparently regrouped without McBurney and issued subpoenas to LaBerge, Kalberman, Streicker and two other ethics commission staff members demanding documents for the grand jury investigation, numerous media outlets reported. While Evans speculated that the action was somehow unrelated to Deal, the case number on the subpoena for computer specialist John Hair—who admitted to altering documents under orders—matched the case number of the earlier investigation in which the state ethics commission had cooperated with federal authorities.
By April 2014, a jury had unanimously ruled that Kalberman was wrongfully forced from office for investigating the charges against Governor Deal. She was awarded $700,000 in damages. Two months later, whistleblower lawsuits filed by Streicker, Hair and ethics commission attorney Elisabeth Murray-Obertein were settled out of court.
And seven years after a revenue commissioner noticed some funny business in the state budget, Nathan Deal remains governor of Georgia.
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/29/georgia_governors_corruption_shocker_right_wingers_shady_get_rich_scheme_could_be_wildest_gop_scandal/
Godless Millennials Could End the Power of the Religious Right
The 2014 midterm elections are drawing near, and it appears that the Democrats may well lose the Senate, since they’re fighting on unfriendly territory – a large number of seats in red states are up for grabs.
But if you look deeper than the national picture, there’s a more interesting story. In southern states like Georgia and Kentucky – which in the past would have been easy Republican holds - the races are unexpectedly tight. In fact, the only reason that the questions of which party will control the Senate in 2015 is unsettled at all is that an unusual number of races in dark red states are toss-ups, despite an overall political climate that generally favors conservatives.
What we’re seeing may well be the first distant rumblings of a trend that’s been quietly gathering momentum for years: America is becoming less Christian.
...Even in the deep South, the Republican base of white evangelical Christians is shrinking – and in some traditional conservative redoubts like Arkansas, Georgia and Kentucky, it’s declined as a percentage of the population by double digits.Even Alabama is becoming less Christian. Meanwhile, there’s been a corresponding increase in the religiously unaffiliated, who tend to vote more Democratic.
...But even if this secularizing trend continues, it’s likely that there’s a hard core of believers who will persist no matter what: no one is forecasting the total extinction of the religious right in politics. Still, for progressives, the eroding power of the churches is a most welcome development: the religious right can no longer claim to be the sole source of morality and virtue, nor can they expect to assert their will in political matters and be obeyed without question. Instead, they’ll have to muster evidence and make their case in the marketplace of ideas like everyone else.
In other words, the religious right will finally have to fight fair, and I’m willing to bet that, in the long run, that’s a fight they’ll lose. MORE...
http://www.alternet.org/election-2014/godless-millennials-could-end-power-religious-right?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
Da Prez had nuthin' t' do wit' it - right? LOL!
fade - Your quite successful disingenuous promulgation of misery thru the promotion of hate leads one to wonder just what form of low intellect finds joy in such an endeavor?
Re:
Hate = Misery
Right Wing Christians Build Ties To Vladimir Putin's Inner Circle
Detailed in the new Twocare.org/Center Against Religious Extremism report U.S. Pro-Coup Evangelicals Ally With Putin Inner Circle, influential hard-right evangelical leaders - one who has openly called for a "military takeover" and "martial law" - have forged close ties with a Russian inner-circle leader considered by some to be Vladimir Putin's closest political ally.
That American evangelical leader, Rick Joyner, is part of the New Apostolic Reformation movement which gave us Sarah Palin and helped create the Tea Party. Joyner has allied with former Undersecretary of Defense Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William "Jerry" Boykin, whose impressive list of positions has included command of U.S. Special Forces.
Joyner's ties also include Lt. Col. (Ret.) Oliver North, of Iran-Contra fame - a man noted for his role in a secret operation that funneled profits from arms sale to Iraq to a covert operation to undermine the government of Nicaragua, and James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, whose claims on an alleged tie between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America helped propel the United States towards the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Here is the executive summary:
Executive Summary: Cutting against growing tensions between the United States and Russia, influential and politically well-connected, Tea Party-aligned American evangelical leaders - including one who has called for a "military takeover" - who hold dominionist or even theocratic political leanings and are tied to former high-level U.S. military and intelligence community members, have over the past decade allied with one of Russian president Vladimir Putin's closest political allies, Vladimir Yakunin.
This investigation, by the Center Against Religious Extremism (CARE), demonstrates an extensive pattern tying evangelist Rick Joyner and his Oak Initiative political organizing front, and leaders affiliated with Joyner who have pledged their lives to implement biblical law in all sectors of society, to Vladimir Putin's inner-circle ally Vladimir Yakunin.
Last year, a September 30, 2013 a call for a "military takeover" of the U.S. government and imposition of "martial law" from well-connected South Carolina evangelist Rick Joyner - who boasts close ties to former high-level U.S. military and intelligence community leaders, earned significant media coverage and also strong words from Military Religious Freedom Foundation founder and head Michael "Mikey" Weinstein, who estimated that a significant fraction of officers and NCOs might be sympathetic to such an exhortation, a form of "sedition" that crossed a "red line" according to Weinstein.
MRFF defends the rights of U.S. armed forces members who have been victims of coercive evangelizing that, according to Weinstein's organization, is being inflicted mainly by dominionist "bible believing" Christian superior officers upon members of the military who are Christian but are deemed to hold incorrect versions of the faith (MRFF's work has been featured in numerous mainstream media venues including The Economist, Newsweek, and perhaps most thoroughly and vividly in journalist Jeff Sharlet's 2009 Harpers magazine story Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade For a Christian Military.)
Joyner's call for a "military takeover" and "martial law" did not lead major religious right "family values" (and ostensibly patriotic) organizations such as the Family Research Council (FRC), the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), or the American Family Association (AFA) to ostracize Joyner or distance themselves from his Oak Initiative organization. Rather, these groups signed onto a coalition that opposes Weinstein's MRFF and whose membership includes the Oak Initiative, whose president Rick Joyner in late 2013 stated, amidst substantial critical media scrutiny, that he "will stand by" his apparent call for a military coup.
The Oak Initiative - whose board is dominated by apostles from the radical New Apostolic Reformation movement - boasts organizational ties both to the Republican Party and also to leaders who have helped create the anti-government American militia movement.
Through its partnership with national hard-right, anti-gay groups such as FRC, ADF, and AFA, as well as Oak Initiative member Lt. General (Ret.) Jerry Boykin's role as Family Research Council Executive Vice President, Joyner's Oak Initiative has institutional links both to the elite group of hard-right, anti-LGBT rights billionaire evangelical funders associated with the annual event known as The Gathering, and to its parent organization The Fellowship (or "The Family"), which hosts the National Prayer Breakfast and whose longtime head Douglas Coe has expressed admiration for the ability of a small band of violent Bolshevik revolutionaries to take over Russia, in 1917.
Joyner's Oak Initiative itself promotes a style of factually-challenged anti-government conspiracy theories that have been deployed, since the 1980s by far-right evangelical operatives with former military and intelligence backgrounds, to undermine confidence in the U.S. federal government and stoke anti-government fear and paranoia among millions of American citizens. Joyner has repeatedly claimed that the Obama Administration plans mass imprisonment of American citizens.
But Joyner has also enthused over the coming of a Christian authoritarian regime that will seem "like totalitarianism" and will forcibly re-educate Americans. On September 16, 2014, Rick Joyner issued a "prophetic" statement that envisioned a massive state level revolt against the federal government led by militias which, speculated Joyner, might ally with U.S. county sheriffs. In Joyner's dream, that anti-government militia revolt led to violence and anarchy which, in turn, triggered the military takeover and imposition of martial law that Joyner had called for a year earlier, in October 2013.
Behind Joyner's carefully calibrated "prophetic" forecasts lie an elaborate strategy and infrastructure application of Fourth Generation Warfare theory, by the American Christian right, in a nonlinear approach to delegitimizing and destabilizing the federal government - a strategy that relies both on force of arms (at the local level), infiltration, and sophisticated information warfare techniques.
Joyner's dire predictions resemble those from Russian former KGB analyst Igor Panarin, whose forecasts of an impending breakup of the United States into six or more pieces have been promoted by the Putin regime. Since 2008, Panarin has repeatedly predicted the imminent breakup of the United States amidst economic chaos and societal decay. In 2012 Panarin announced,”There’s a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur.”
read the rest of the Twocare.org Center Against Religious Extremism report, U.S. Pro-Coup Evangelicals Ally With Putin Inner Circle at: http://www.twocare.org/pro-revolution-u-s-evangelicals-ally-with-putin-inner-circle/
http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/brucewilson/right-wing-christians-build-ties-vladimir-putins-inner-circle
Tuff luck guy, I'm already taken...by the absolute meanest 4'11" of female vitriol to ever come outa ChiTown. Now, I suggest you go play with your friends, okay?
...That includes most of the republican party. roflmao
Those that believe the market is producer-driven are gonna get hosed big time.
France has a serious financial scandal surfacing soon & Germany is on the ragged edge of a recession. ...China isn't looking so good either. We may be looking at the damnedest Buyer's Market in history...all due to certain precious metals market hijinks a few years back.
What goes around...
_________________________________________________________________
LUV THEM ROYALS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
More EU banker suicides...
Another Deutsche Banker And Former SEC Enforcement Attorney Commits Suicide
Back on January 26, a 58-year-old former senior executive at German investment bank behemoth Deutsche Bank, William Broeksmit, was found dead after hanging himself at his London home, and with that, set off an unprecedented series of banker suicides throughout the year which included former Fed officials and numerous JPMorgan traders.
Following a brief late summer spell in which there was little if any news of bankers taking their lives, as reported previously, the banker suicides returned with a bang when none other than the hedge fund partner of infamous former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Khan, Thierry Leyne, a French-Israeli entrepreneur, was found dead after jumping off the 23rd floor of one of the Yoo towers, a prestigious residential complex in Tel Aviv.
Just a few brief hours later the WSJ reported that yet another Deutsche Bank veteran has committed suicide, and not just anyone but the bank's associate general counsel, 41 year old Calogero "Charlie" Gambino, who was found on the morning of Oct. 20, having also hung himself by the neck from a stairway banister, which according to the New York Police Department was the cause of death. We assume that any relationship to the famous Italian family carrying that last name is purely accidental. MORE...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-25/deutsche-bank-lawyer-and-former-sec-enforcement-attorney-found-dead-apparent-suicide
25 European banks set to fail health checks: sources
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A group of 25 banks have failed European health checks, while up to 10 of those continue to have a capital shortfall, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday, providing a snapshot of the health of the region's lenders.
The health checks, led by the European Central Bank, found that banks in countries including Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia and Portugal had fallen short of a minimum capital benchmark at the end of last year and that up to 10 remained in difficulty now, the sources said. Banks in Spain and France had fared, by and large, better than expected.
The result, which has yet to be finalised by the ECB's governing council on Sunday, provides the most complete picture yet of the robustness of the euro zone's top 130 lenders. Those banks with shortfalls will now have two weeks to submit a plan to bolster their capital to the European Central Bank (ECB), which will decide whether or not it gets the green light.
A spokesman for the ECB said the test results had not yet been finalised, describing reports in the meantime as speculative. "The results will not be final until they are considered by the Governing Council of the European Central Bank on Sunday 26 October, after which they will be published," he said.
European banking shares dipped briefly on Friday after Bloomberg News reported that 25 banks within the euro zone would fail the ECB "stress test". MORE...
http://news.yahoo.com/25-european-banks-fail-stress-tests-sources-152258897--sector.html;_ylt=AwrTWfzPe0pUAwkABr3QtDMD
Can't disagree w/that.
It'll balance out. Y'all over there in the uncivilized outback of Oklahoma will see record snows this Winter...I'll be thinking of ya.
U.S. To Recognize Same-Sex Marriage In 6 New States
10/25/2014 1:01 pm EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government is recognizing gay marriage in six more states and extending federal benefits to those couples, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Saturday. Gay marriage recently became legal in Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, North Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming.
The government's announcement follows the U.S. Supreme Court's decision earlier this month to decline to hear appeals from five states that sought to keep their marriage bans in place. It brings the total number of states with federal recognition of gay marriage to 32, plus the District of Columbia. Couples married in these states will qualify for a range of federal benefits, including Social Security and veterans' benefits.
"With each new state where same-sex marriages are legally recognized, our nation moves closer to achieving full equality for all Americans," Holder said. The attorney general said the government is working "as quickly as possible" to make sure same-sex married couples in these states receive the "fullest array of benefits" that federal law allows.
The Justice Department also has determined that it can legally recognize gay marriages performed this summer in Indiana and Wisconsin after federal courts declared marriage bans in the states unconstitutional. Subsequent developments created confusion about the status of those unions, but Holder said the U.S. government will recognize the marriages.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/25/same-sex-marriage-six-states_n_6046892.html
I think we oughta organize a 'Hug A Theocrat Day' nationwide....something along the line of grab'em & feed'em bread & water should work. If they insist on consecrated water & crackers I'm pretty sure the kind ladies over at WitchVox would lend a claw.
BoogityBoogity - LOL!
U.S. To Recognize Same-Sex Marriage In 6 New States
10/25/2014 1:01 pm EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government is recognizing gay marriage in six more states and extending federal benefits to those couples, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Saturday. Gay marriage recently became legal in Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, North Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming.
The government's announcement follows the U.S. Supreme Court's decision earlier this month to decline to hear appeals from five states that sought to keep their marriage bans in place. It brings the total number of states with federal recognition of gay marriage to 32, plus the District of Columbia. Couples married in these states will qualify for a range of federal benefits, including Social Security and veterans' benefits.
"With each new state where same-sex marriages are legally recognized, our nation moves closer to achieving full equality for all Americans," Holder said. The attorney general said the government is working "as quickly as possible" to make sure same-sex married couples in these states receive the "fullest array of benefits" that federal law allows.
The Justice Department also has determined that it can legally recognize gay marriages performed this summer in Indiana and Wisconsin after federal courts declared marriage bans in the states unconstitutional. Subsequent developments created confusion about the status of those unions, but Holder said the U.S. government will recognize the marriages.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/25/same-sex-marriage-six-states_n_6046892.html
I think we oughta organize a 'Hug A Theocrat Day' nationwide....something along the line of grab'em & feed'em bread & water should work. If they insist on consecrated water & crackers I'm pretty sure the kind ladies over at WitchVox would lend a claw.
U don't have the code book? Garry does.
I'm paid to post? In your dreams chubbs.
It could be said neither of us suffer fools or trolls gladly.
Patient in New York City Tests Positive for Ebola
A doctor in New York City who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Guinea tested positive for the Ebola virus Thursday, becoming the city’s first diagnosed case.
The doctor, Craig Spencer, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital on Thursday and placed in isolation while health care workers spread out across the city to trace anyone he might have come into contact with in recent days. A further test will be conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control to confirm the initial test. MORE...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/nyregion/craig-spencer-is-tested-for-ebola-virus-at-bellevue-hospital-in-new-york-city.html
IRS beats tea party in court
The IRS notched a major legal victory Thursday after a federal judge dismissed lawsuits brought by more than 40 conservative groups seeking remedies for being singled out in the tea party targeting scandal. Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia threw out almost all counts brought against the tax-collecting agency in two cases, ruling that both were essentially moot now that the IRS granted the groups their tax-exempt status that had been held up for years.
The decisions have major implications for tea party groups suing the IRS over the issue. It appears they have a tough case to make because the IRS, since the controversy broke in 2013, has approved most tea party groups’ applications, which, according to Walton, keeps the court from hearing their cases.
“After the plaintiff initiated this case, its application to the IRS for tax-exempt status was approved by the IRS. The allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct, which delayed the processing of the plaintiff’s tax exempt application and brought about this litigation, is no longer impacting the plaintiff,” Walton said in his decision to throw out True the Vote’s lawsuit against the IRS. His reasoning was similar in the second case, where 41 conservative groups banded together to sue the IRS for similar misconduct: “[T]he allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct … is no longer impacting the plaintiffs. … Counts … are therefore moot.”
The judge, appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, also said the groups couldn’t receive monetary relief from individual IRS officials, such as ex-IRS official Lois Lerner, because of the chilling effect it would have on tax administration. The same judge in August rejected True the Vote’s bid for a court-appointed forensics expert to hunt Lerner’s lost emails, another blow to conservatives seeking outside experts to take the lead on the IRS investigation. Two years’ worth of the former head of the tax-exempt division’s emails were erased in a hard drive crash in 2011, the IRS says.
Walton did, however, demand the IRS within 14 days answer for two applications that have not yet been approved nor denied: applications for Patriots Educating Concerned Americans Now and Liberty Township Tea Party. But that footnote was the only part of the ruling that favored the conservative groups.
A furor erupted in May 2013, after a treasury inspector general report blasted the IRS for using discriminatory labels to sort through applicants seeking tax-exempt status using terms like “tea party ” and “patriots.”
Soon after, a raft of right-leaning organizations that applied for tax exempt status sued the government. Some had had their applications put on hold for years; others were asked what were later ruled inappropriate questions about donors and political views during the application process. The groups in their suits alleged that the IRS violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights with the inappropriate “be on the lookout” list that used words like tea party to hold up their applications. They sought monetary relief for their trouble as well as injunctive relief barring the IRS from discriminating against conservative groups again. The agency has since changed its practices, including scrapping the lists.
When the suit was filed, 22 of the groups had already received their tax-exempt status, five had dropped their applications altogether and just over a dozen were still waiting to hear from the IRS. Since then, the IRS had approved all but two, rendering much of the arguments moot, the judge said. True the Vote tried to argue that the IRS could at a later time re-employ its old targeting scheme or audit the group unfairly as retribution for its lawsuit, but the judge didn’t buy that argument.
He said, since the defendant is the government, “there is less concern about the recurrence of objectionable behavior.” He also said the future worries about unfair audits were “speculative.”
“[T]he Court is satisfied that there is no reasonable expectation that the alleged conduct will recur, as the defendants have not only suspended the conduct, but have also taken remedial measures to ensure that the conduct is not repeated,” he said, citing IRS documents on the steps they’ve taken to ensure targeting doesn’t happen again.
In another victory for the IRS officials who have been sued as individuals for their actions, Walton said the groups could not receive monetary damages from them, citing a previous case that found allowing such would “make the collection of taxes chaotic if a taxpayer could bypass the remedies provided by Congress simply by bringing a damage action against [IRS] employees.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/irs-tea-party-legal-victory-112145.html#ixzz3H0AypoeH
In other words, the suits were actually nothing more than harassment hustles to gain attention for election fund raising. how sick is that?
IRS beats tea party in court
The IRS notched a major legal victory Thursday after a federal judge dismissed lawsuits brought by more than 40 conservative groups seeking remedies for being singled out in the tea party targeting scandal. Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia threw out almost all counts brought against the tax-collecting agency in two cases, ruling that both were essentially moot now that the IRS granted the groups their tax-exempt status that had been held up for years.
The decisions have major implications for tea party groups suing the IRS over the issue. It appears they have a tough case to make because the IRS, since the controversy broke in 2013, has approved most tea party groups’ applications, which, according to Walton, keeps the court from hearing their cases.
“After the plaintiff initiated this case, its application to the IRS for tax-exempt status was approved by the IRS. The allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct, which delayed the processing of the plaintiff’s tax exempt application and brought about this litigation, is no longer impacting the plaintiff,” Walton said in his decision to throw out True the Vote’s lawsuit against the IRS. His reasoning was similar in the second case, where 41 conservative groups banded together to sue the IRS for similar misconduct: “[T]he allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct … is no longer impacting the plaintiffs. … Counts … are therefore moot.”
The judge, appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, also said the groups couldn’t receive monetary relief from individual IRS officials, such as ex-IRS official Lois Lerner, because of the chilling effect it would have on tax administration. The same judge in August rejected True the Vote’s bid for a court-appointed forensics expert to hunt Lerner’s lost emails, another blow to conservatives seeking outside experts to take the lead on the IRS investigation. Two years’ worth of the former head of the tax-exempt division’s emails were erased in a hard drive crash in 2011, the IRS says.
Walton did, however, demand the IRS within 14 days answer for two applications that have not yet been approved nor denied: applications for Patriots Educating Concerned Americans Now and Liberty Township Tea Party. But that footnote was the only part of the ruling that favored the conservative groups.
A furor erupted in May 2013, after a treasury inspector general report blasted the IRS for using discriminatory labels to sort through applicants seeking tax-exempt status using terms like “tea party ” and “patriots.”
Soon after, a raft of right-leaning organizations that applied for tax exempt status sued the government. Some had had their applications put on hold for years; others were asked what were later ruled inappropriate questions about donors and political views during the application process. The groups in their suits alleged that the IRS violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights with the inappropriate “be on the lookout” list that used words like tea party to hold up their applications. They sought monetary relief for their trouble as well as injunctive relief barring the IRS from discriminating against conservative groups again. The agency has since changed its practices, including scrapping the lists.
When the suit was filed, 22 of the groups had already received their tax-exempt status, five had dropped their applications altogether and just over a dozen were still waiting to hear from the IRS. Since then, the IRS had approved all but two, rendering much of the arguments moot, the judge said. True the Vote tried to argue that the IRS could at a later time re-employ its old targeting scheme or audit the group unfairly as retribution for its lawsuit, but the judge didn’t buy that argument.
He said, since the defendant is the government, “there is less concern about the recurrence of objectionable behavior.” He also said the future worries about unfair audits were “speculative.”
“[T]he Court is satisfied that there is no reasonable expectation that the alleged conduct will recur, as the defendants have not only suspended the conduct, but have also taken remedial measures to ensure that the conduct is not repeated,” he said, citing IRS documents on the steps they’ve taken to ensure targeting doesn’t happen again.
In another victory for the IRS officials who have been sued as individuals for their actions, Walton said the groups could not receive monetary damages from them, citing a previous case that found allowing such would “make the collection of taxes chaotic if a taxpayer could bypass the remedies provided by Congress simply by bringing a damage action against [IRS] employees.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/irs-tea-party-legal-victory-112145.html#ixzz3H0AypoeH
In other words, the suits were actually nothing more than harassment hustles to gain attention for election fund raising. how sick is that?
North Carolina Fights To Take Voting Site Away From Pesky College Kids
Early voting starts Thursday in North Carolina, even as the state has pushed to move early voting sites farther away from college campuses.
The Republican-dominated North Carolina State Board of Elections, among other efforts, has sought to remove an early voting location from the campus of Appalachian State University, which has about 18,000 students, many of whom lean Democratic. Last week, the board filed a petition asking the state Supreme Court to stay a judge's ruling in favor of the site. On Wednesday afternoon, not having heard from the high court and with the start of early voting looming, the elections board hastily voted to keep the site on campus. Soon after, the state Supreme Court announced that it was staying the judge's ruling and sending the case back to the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
With just hours until voting began, an elections board spokesman told the Associated Press late Wednesday that the on-campus voting site would stand. But the battle over early voting in the state continues.
County election officials had already eliminated North Carolina State University’s early voting site this year. In August, the state elections board, whose membership was replaced by Gov. Pat McCrory (R) last year, voted to remove Appalachian State’s early voting site. But college students there fought back. Ian O’Keefe, an Appalachian State senior active in the local College Democrats chapter, said, “Our election board should be making voting easier, not more difficult.” O'Keefe is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed against the election board.
According to their lawsuit, Appalachian State’s early voting site was the only one in Watauga County that went Democratic in the last two presidential elections and the 2010 Senate and 2012 gubernatorial elections. On Oct. 13, Wake County Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens ruled that moving the site would be “unconstitutional.” He wrote, “The court can conclude no other intent ... other than to discourage student voting.” Turning to the Court of Appeals, the elections board argued that its effort to move an early voting site did not merit judicial review and that “Petitioners failed to allege sufficient facts to show intentional discrimination by the State Board of Elections.” That court declined to block Stephens' order preserving the early voting site on Tuesday. As of Wednesday evening, early voting was scheduled to go forward on campus. The board did not respond to a request for comment.
O’Keefe said students have already been confused by all the last-minute changes, which could discourage turnout. Voter turnout may well be the deciding factor in the state’s close Senate race. North Carolinians must also contend with a host of GOP-backed voter restrictions allowed to go forward by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month.
“This is a way the Republican Party is attempting to win elections instead of convincing voters to vote for them, and that's just wrong,” O’Keefe said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/23/north-carolina-early-voting-college_n_6031670.html
How un-American can you get?
Quite possibly a closet Texian.
Dear TX: Puhleeze secede, so we can muzzle you properly!
Man Who Believes God Speaks to Us Through "Duck Dynasty" Is About to Be Texas' Second-in-Command
—By Tim Murphy | Tue Oct. 21, 2014
As a Texas state senator, Dan Patrick has conducted himself in a manner consistent with the shock jock he once was. Patrick—who is now the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor—has railed against everything from separation of church and state to Mexican coyotes who supposedly speak Urdu. He's even advised his followers that God is speaking to them through Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson.
A former sportscaster who once defended a football player who'd thrown a reporter through a door (Patrick believed it wasn't the journalist's job to do "negative reporting"), Patrick became a conservative talk radio host in the early 1990s—Houston's answer to Rush Limbaugh. In 2006, he parlayed his radio fame into a state Senate seat—and kept the talk show going. In office, he proposed paying women $500 to turn over newborn babies to the state (to reduce abortions), led the charge against creeping liberalism in state textbooks, and pushed wave after wave of new abortion restrictions. For his efforts, Texas Monthly named Patrick one of the worst legislators of 2013.
With a victory on November 4, Patrick, who is leading Democratic state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte in the polls, would find himself next in line for the governor's mansion of the nation's second-largest state. MORE...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/dan-patrick-texas-lieutenant-governor
...A real innocent. LOL!
As usual, your allegation is unfounded. 'Truth' has nothing to do with political affiliation, it simply exists...to be utilized or ignored as the individual reality dictates.
Re:
We may be getting close to some kind of end game. Pigeon Chess is the only nonviolent card Progressives have left. Thanks for playing.
Why Conservatives Opt for Propaganda Over Reality
Pew Research set out to find what’s behind what it considers the increasing political polarization of the United States; why the country is moving away from political moderation and becoming more and more divided between liberals and conservatives. Its first report on the phenomenon, which examines where people are hearing news and opinion in both regular and social media, shows that this is happening for very different reasons among people moving to the right than for people moving to the left.
Or that’s the charitable way to put it. The less charitable way is to say Pew discovered that conservatives are consuming a right-wing media full of lies and misinformation, whereas liberals are more interested in media that puts facts before ideology. It’s very much not a “both sides do it” situation. Conservatives are becoming more conservative because of propaganda, whereas liberals are becoming more liberal while staying very much checked into reality.
That this polarization is going on isn’t a myth. Previous Pew research shows the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” conservative has grown from 18% in 2004 to 27% in 2014. During that same period, the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” liberal stayed a little more consistent, growing from 33% to 34% in 10 years. (These statistics don’t measure what you call yourself, but what you rate as on a scale of beliefs about various issues.) While liberals became more liberal, conservatives both became more numerous and more rigidly conservative over time. What gives?
Enter right-wing media, which has a nifty trick of convincing audiences it’s the other guys who are the liars, all while actually being much less trustworthy in reality. From conservative screaming about the “media elite” to Fox News’s old slogan “Fair and Balanced,” conservative media is rife with the message that everyone is out to get you, conservative viewer, and only in the warm blanket of right-wing propaganda will you be safe.
The message, the Pew research suggests, has really taken hold. Pew researchers gave respondents a list of 36 popular media sources and asked how much they trusted each one. Some were liberal, like The Daily Show or ThinkProgress. Some were conservative, like Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. Most of them are fairly straightforward news organizations with no overt political agenda, like NPR, various network news, CNN, and the New York Times.
The findings were astounding. Out of the 36 news sources, consistent liberals trusted 28, a mix of liberal and mainstream news sources. Mostly, liberal respondents generally agreed, holding out a little more skepticism for overtly ideological sources like Daily Kos or ThinkProgress, but not actually distrustingthem, either. The only news sources liberals didn’t trust, generally, are overtly right-wing ones, such as Fox News, the Blaze, Breitbart, or Rush Limbaugh’s show.
Conservatives, on the other hand, saw betrayers and liars around every corner. Consistent conservatives distrusted a whopping 24 out of 36 outlets and mostly conservative respondents distrusted 15 and were skeptical of quite a few more. The hostility wasn’t just to well-known liberal sources like MSNBC. Strong conservatives hated all the network news, CNN, NPR, and the major national outlets, except the Wall Street Journal. Respondents who are mostly conservative fared better, but were still hostile to the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as skeptical of mainstream organizations like CBS and NBC News.
The fact that conservatives are this paranoid should be alarming enough, but it becomes even more frightening when you consider who conservatives do trust in the media. Consistent conservatives only trusted 8 media sources--compared to the 28 liberals trusted--and of the eight, only one has anything approaching respectable reporting or reliable information. And that one, the Wall Street Journal, has good straight reporting but has an op-ed page that is a train wreck of right-wing distortions and misinformation. Most conservative people were a little more open-minded, trusting USA Today and ABC News, but still were supportive of openly distorting sources like Fox News or the Drudge Report.
The trust conservatives put in conservative media is utterly misplaced. For instance, both consistent and mostly conservative people love Glenn Beck, though he’s a well-known purveyor of outrageous conspiracy theories that percolate up to him from fringe characters. Breitbart and Sean Hannity also rated high, despite their shared history of championing right-wing fringe characters like Cliven Bundy.
But what is really frightening is the reach of Fox News. Fox News rated as the only real news source for consistent conservatives, with 47% of them citing it as their main source of news. Nothing even came close to touching it, as the second most common answer, “local radio” was cited by only 11% of consistent conservatives. Eighty-eight percent of consistent conservatives trusted Fox News. Mostly conservative and even “mixed” people also liked Fox News.
The problem with this is watching Fox News actually makes you less informed than if you don't watch any news at all. In a 2012 study, Fox News viewers rated the absolute lowest in ability to correctly answer questions on a quiz about recent news events. People who didn’t take in any news programs at all did better on the quizzes. NPR listeners rated the best. Consistent liberals in the Pew research were big fans of NPR, by the way. It was the second most common outlet cited as a favorite by consistent liberals, topped only by CNN.
Fox News is one of the main factors, possibily the main factor, driving political polarization in this country. Huge chunks of this country listen mostly or solely to a relentless stream of misinformation coming from Fox News, coupled with warnings, implied or even baldly stated, to avoid listening to other, more factually accurate news sources. Unsurprisingly, then, more people are becoming conservatives and people who were already conservative are becoming more hardline about it. If you have any Fox viewers in your family, you probably already suspected this, but now Pew has given us the cold, hard facts to confirm your suspicions.
http://www.alternet.org/media/why-conservatives-opt-propaganda-over-reality?page=0%2C1&paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
Why Conservatives Opt for Propaganda Over Reality
Pew Research set out to find what’s behind what it considers the increasing political polarization of the United States; why the country is moving away from political moderation and becoming more and more divided between liberals and conservatives. Its first report on the phenomenon, which examines where people are hearing news and opinion in both regular and social media, shows that this is happening for very different reasons among people moving to the right than for people moving to the left.
Or that’s the charitable way to put it. The less charitable way is to say Pew discovered that conservatives are consuming a right-wing media full of lies and misinformation, whereas liberals are more interested in media that puts facts before ideology. It’s very much not a “both sides do it” situation. Conservatives are becoming more conservative because of propaganda, whereas liberals are becoming more liberal while staying very much checked into reality.
That this polarization is going on isn’t a myth. Previous Pew research shows the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” conservative has grown from 18% in 2004 to 27% in 2014. During that same period, the percentage of Americans who are “mostly” or “consistently” liberal stayed a little more consistent, growing from 33% to 34% in 10 years. (These statistics don’t measure what you call yourself, but what you rate as on a scale of beliefs about various issues.) While liberals became more liberal, conservatives both became more numerous and more rigidly conservative over time. What gives?
Enter right-wing media, which has a nifty trick of convincing audiences it’s the other guys who are the liars, all while actually being much less trustworthy in reality. From conservative screaming about the “media elite” to Fox News’s old slogan “Fair and Balanced,” conservative media is rife with the message that everyone is out to get you, conservative viewer, and only in the warm blanket of right-wing propaganda will you be safe.
The message, the Pew research suggests, has really taken hold. Pew researchers gave respondents a list of 36 popular media sources and asked how much they trusted each one. Some were liberal, like The Daily Show or ThinkProgress. Some were conservative, like Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. Most of them are fairly straightforward news organizations with no overt political agenda, like NPR, various network news, CNN, and the New York Times.
The findings were astounding. Out of the 36 news sources, consistent liberals trusted 28, a mix of liberal and mainstream news sources. Mostly, liberal respondents generally agreed, holding out a little more skepticism for overtly ideological sources like Daily Kos or ThinkProgress, but not actually distrustingthem, either. The only news sources liberals didn’t trust, generally, are overtly right-wing ones, such as Fox News, the Blaze, Breitbart, or Rush Limbaugh’s show.
Conservatives, on the other hand, saw betrayers and liars around every corner. Consistent conservatives distrusted a whopping 24 out of 36 outlets and mostly conservative respondents distrusted 15 and were skeptical of quite a few more. The hostility wasn’t just to well-known liberal sources like MSNBC. Strong conservatives hated all the network news, CNN, NPR, and the major national outlets, except the Wall Street Journal. Respondents who are mostly conservative fared better, but were still hostile to the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as skeptical of mainstream organizations like CBS and NBC News.
The fact that conservatives are this paranoid should be alarming enough, but it becomes even more frightening when you consider who conservatives do trust in the media. Consistent conservatives only trusted 8 media sources--compared to the 28 liberals trusted--and of the eight, only one has anything approaching respectable reporting or reliable information. And that one, the Wall Street Journal, has good straight reporting but has an op-ed page that is a train wreck of right-wing distortions and misinformation. Most conservative people were a little more open-minded, trusting USA Today and ABC News, but still were supportive of openly distorting sources like Fox News or the Drudge Report.
The trust conservatives put in conservative media is utterly misplaced. For instance, both consistent and mostly conservative people love Glenn Beck, though he’s a well-known purveyor of outrageous conspiracy theories that percolate up to him from fringe characters. Breitbart and Sean Hannity also rated high, despite their shared history of championing right-wing fringe characters like Cliven Bundy.
But what is really frightening is the reach of Fox News. Fox News rated as the only real news source for consistent conservatives, with 47% of them citing it as their main source of news. Nothing even came close to touching it, as the second most common answer, “local radio” was cited by only 11% of consistent conservatives. Eighty-eight percent of consistent conservatives trusted Fox News. Mostly conservative and even “mixed” people also liked Fox News.
The problem with this is watching Fox News actually makes you less informed than if you don't watch any news at all. In a 2012 study, Fox News viewers rated the absolute lowest in ability to correctly answer questions on a quiz about recent news events. People who didn’t take in any news programs at all did better on the quizzes. NPR listeners rated the best. Consistent liberals in the Pew research were big fans of NPR, by the way. It was the second most common outlet cited as a favorite by consistent liberals, topped only by CNN.
Fox News is one of the main factors, possibily the main factor, driving political polarization in this country. Huge chunks of this country listen mostly or solely to a relentless stream of misinformation coming from Fox News, coupled with warnings, implied or even baldly stated, to avoid listening to other, more factually accurate news sources. Unsurprisingly, then, more people are becoming conservatives and people who were already conservative are becoming more hardline about it. If you have any Fox viewers in your family, you probably already suspected this, but now Pew has given us the cold, hard facts to confirm your suspicions.
http://www.alternet.org/media/why-conservatives-opt-propaganda-over-reality?page=0%2C1&paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark