This one came from a friend...........
Fwd: Fw: Check out NOAH TODAY...
Yuck-yuck. -- dave
Thanks Dave, this is a re-do of an older email, with, um, music. Imagine if all forwards had a midi soundtrack. Ahhhhh... Never mind. -m
------begin forward-------
NOAH TODAY.... SOUND
.
Fw: THE Cartoon that says it all.
Here's a political cartoon you're not likely to see in the world media. Yet, it sure 'hits the nail on the head.'
Hamas. Israel.
Fw: The Amish
Amish farmer, walking through his field, notices a man
kneeling down and cupping a hand to drink from the farm pond.
The Amish farmer shouts, 'Trink das wasser nicht. Die kuhen
haben dahin gesheissen.'
(Which means: 'Don't drink the water, the cows SHlT in it'.)
The kneeling man shouts back, angrily, 'I'm a Muslim, I don't
understand you. I speak Arabic and English. If you can't
speak in the sacred tongue of Islam, speak to me in English.'
The Amish farmer replies, 'Use two hands, you'll get more."
Fwd: 10 Reasons to Whack Obama's Stimulus Plan -- it aint just about "politics"
66% OF THE STIMULUS IS SPENT IN 2011 FORWARD. SO OBAMA & CO. REALIZE THE RECESSION WILL END LATER THIS YEAR IN ANY EVENT, AND THE $600 BILLION FOR THE OUT YEARS ARE MERELY DEMOCRATIC HOBBY HORSES: GLOBAL WARMING, MONEY TO UNIONS DISGUISED AS INFRASTRUCTURE REPAIR, ETC. AS RAHM EMMANUEL SAYS: "CAN'T WASTE A GOOD CRISIS". I DON'T OBJECT TO THE GOALS. I DO OBJECT TO BORROWING A TRILLION DOLLARS IN EACH OF THE NEXT TWO YEARS TO PAY FOR THEM. STIMULUS DIDN'T WORK FOR FDR; WWII DID THE TRICK, AS YOUR ATTACHED ARTICLE SAYS. MY CURE:
1. 3% MORTGAGES. 12-MONTH HOUSING INVENTORY WILL FLY OFF THE SHELVES.
2. ESTABLISH THE "BAD BANK" AND TAKE ALL THE TOXIC ASSETS FROM THE BANKS. WILL LIKELY COST $2-3 TRILLION, BUT VAST MAJORITY WILL BE PAID OFF;THEREFORE NO LOSSES TO TAXPAYERS. THIS WILL ALLOW BANKS TO LOAN AGAIN WITH CLEAN BALANCE SHEETS, AND NO FEAR OF COUNTERPARTY RISK.
INSTEAD, WE GET A STIMULUS PLAN THAT IS A DEMOCRATIC PARTY WET DREAM, AND THE NATIONAL DEBT GOES TO $14 TRILLION, WHICH EQUALS THE ANNUAL AMERICAN GDP.
10 Reasons to Whack Obama's Stimulus Plan
Some people are going to oppose President Obama's ginormous stimulus package just because they're on a different political team. But when you look at the economic evidence, it sure seems like an economic recovery package that's heavy on government spending and light on tax cuts is just the opposite of what we should be doing right now. Try this closing argument on for size:
1) A 2005 study by Andrew Mountford and Harald Uhlig "analyzed three types of policy shocks: a deficit-financed spending increase, a balanced budget spending increase (financed with higher taxes) and a deficit-financed tax cut, in which revenues increase but government spending stays unchanged. We found that a deficit-spending shock stimulates the economy for the first 4 quarters but only weakly compared to that for a deficit-financed tax cut." In other words, FDR vs. Clinton vs. Reagan, Reagan wins.
2) Harvard economist Robert Barro looked at the multiplier effect of World War II military spending -- supposedly the Mother of All Stimulus Plans and found that "wartime production siphoned off resources from other economic uses — there was a dampener, rather than a multiplier." Barro prefers eliminating the corporate income tax to massive government spending.
3) Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago want to adress the fear and confidence issue by creating "the incentive for people to take more risk and move their savings from government bonds to risky assets. There is no better way to encourage this than a temporary elimination of the capital-gains tax for all the investments begun during 2009 and held for at least two years."
4) An initial CBO analysis found that a mere $26 billion out of $274 billion in infrastructure spending, just 7 percent, would be delivered into the economy by next fall. An update determined that just 64 percent of the stimulus would reach the economy by 2011.
5) University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker doubts whether all this stimulus spending will do much to lower unemployment: "For one thing, the true value of these government programs may be limited because they will be put together hastily, and are likely to contain a lot of political pork and other inefficiencies. For another thing, with unemployment at 7% to 8% of the labor force, it is impossible to target effective spending programs that primarily utilize unemployed workers, or underemployed capital. Spending on infrastructure, and especially on health, energy, and education, will mainly attract employed persons from other activities to the activities stimulated by the government spending. The net job creation from these and related spending is likely to be rather small. In addition, if the private activities crowded out are more valuable than the activities hastily stimulated by this plan, the value of the increase in employment and GDP could be very small, even negative."
6) Christina Romer, the new head of the Council of Economic Advisers, coauthored a paper in which the following was written about taxes: "Tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained, and highly significant negative impact on output. Since most of our exogenous tax changes are in fact reductions, the more intuitive way to express this result is that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects." And former Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey tack on this addendum: "The macroeconomic benefits of tax cuts can be two to three times larger than common estimates of the benefits related to spending increases. The relative advantage of tax cuts over spending is even clearer when the recession is centered on the household balance sheet."
7) Economists Susan Woodward and Robert Hall find that the multiplier effect from infrastructure spending maybe just 1-for-1, less than that 3-to-1 ratio for tax cuts that Romer found: "We believe that the one-for-one rule derived from wartime increases in military spending would also apply to increases in infrastructure spending in a stimulus package. We should not count on any inducement of higher consumption from the infrastructure stimulus."
8) Economist John Taylor thinks it better to let the Federal Reserve deal with the short-term problems in the economy, while fiscal policy should attend to long-term issues: "In the current context of the U.S. economy, it seems best to let fiscal policy have its main countercyclical impact through the automatic stabilizer ... It seems hard to improve on this performance with a more active discretionary fiscal policy, and an activist discretionary fiscal policy might even make the job of monetary authorities more difficult. It would be appropriate in the present American context, for discretionary fiscal policy to be saved explicitly for longer-term issues, requiring less frequent changes. Examples of such a longer-term focus include fiscal policy proposals to balance the non-Social Security budget over the next ten years, to reduce marginal tax rates for long run economic efficiency, or even to reform the tax system and Social Security."
9) Massive stimulus didn't work in the Great Depression. As this Heritage Foundation study notes: "After the stock market collapse in 1929, the Hoover Administration increased federal spending by 47 percent over the following three years. As a result, federal spending increased from 3.4 percent of GDP in 1930 to 6.9 percent in 1932 and reached 9.8 percent by 1940. That same year-- 10 years into the Great Depression--America's unemployment rate stood at 14.6 percent." Same goes for Japan and its Great Stagnation of the 1990s.
10) Olivier Blanchard, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, coauthored a paper which found "that both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending."
Bottom line: There is another model out there. One that worked in 2003, 1997 and 1981. But will America use it?
Sources:
1) http://sfb649.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/papers/pdf/ SFB649DP2005-039.pdf
2) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123258618204604599. html
3) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123249646698200289. html
4) http://cboblog.cbo.gov/
5)http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/01/on_ the_obama_st.htm
6)http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~cromer/RomerDraft307.pdf
7)http://woodwardhall.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/ measuring-the-effect-of- infrastructure-spending-on- gdp/
8)http://www.stanford.edu/~johntayl/Papers/Reassessing+ Revised.pdf
9) http://www.heritage.org/research/economy/bg2222.cf
10) http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/ 10.1162/003355302320935043? cookieSet=1&journalCode=qjec
11) http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/ 000/015/951hvyxc.asp?pg=
Fwd: Atlas Shrugs....
A letter from the Boss:
To All My Valued Employees,
There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of
this company, and more specifically, your job. As you know, the economy
has changed for the worse and presents many challenges. However, the
good news is this: The economy doesn't pose a threat to your job. What
does threaten your job, however, is the changing political landscape in
this country.
Let me tell you some little tidbits of fact which might help you decide
what is in your best interests.
First, while it is easy to spew rhetoric that casts employers against
employees, you have to understand that for every business owner there is
a Back Story. This back story is often neglected and overshadowed by
what you see and hear. Sure, you see me park my Mercedes outside. You've
seen my big home at last year's Christmas party. I'm sure; all these
flashy icons of luxury conjure up some idealized thoughts about my
life.
However, what you don 't see is the BACK STORY :
I started this company 28 years ago. At that time, I lived in a 300
square foot studio apartment for 3 years. My entire studio apartment
was converted into an office so I could put forth 100% effort into
building a company, which by the way, would eventually employ you.
My diet consisted of Ramen Pride noodles because every dollar I spent
went back into this company. I drove a rusty Toyota Corolla with a
defective transmission. I didn't have time to date. Often times, I
stayed home on weekends, while my friends went out drinking and
partying. In fact, I was married to my business -- hard work,
discipline, and sacrifice.
Meanwhile, my friends got jobs. They worked 40 hours a week and made a
modest $50K a year and spent every dime they earned. They drove flashy
cars and lived in expensive homes and wore fancy designer clothes.
Instead of hitting the Nordstrom's for the latest hot fashion item, I
was trolling through the discount stores for clothing that didn't look
like it was birthed in the 70's. My friends refinanced their mortgages
and lived a life of luxury. I did not. I put my time, my money, and my
life into a business with a vision that eventually, some day, I too,
would be able to afford the luxuries my friends supposedly had.
So, while you physically arrive at the office at 9 am, mentally check
in at about noon, and then leave at 5 pm, I don't. There is no "off"
button for me. When you leave the office, you are done and have a
weekend all to yourself. I do not have that freedom. I eat and breathe
this company every minute of the day. There is no rest. There is no
weekend. There is no happy hour. Every day this business is attached to
my hip like a one- year-old special-needs child. You, of course, only
see the fruits of that labor -- the nice house, the Mercedes, the
vacations... you never realize the Back Story and the sacrifices I've
made.
Now, the economy is falling apart and I, the guy that made all the
right decisions and saved his money, have to bail-out all the people who
didn't. The people that overspent their paychecks suddenly feel entitled
to the same luxuries that I earned and sacrificed a decade of my life
for.
Yes, business ownership has is benefits but the price I've paid is
steep and not without wounds. Unfortunately, the cost of running this
business, and employing you, is starting to eclipse the threshold of
marginal benefit. Let me tell you why:
I am being taxed to death and the government thinks I don't pay enough.
I have state taxes. Federal taxes. Property taxes. Sales and Use taxes.
Payroll taxes. Workers Compensation taxes. Unemployment taxes. Taxes on
taxes. I have to hire a tax man to manage all these taxes and guess
what? I have to pay taxes for employing him. Government mandates and
regulations and all the accounting that goes with it, now occupy most of
my time. On Oct 15th, I wrote a check to the US Treasury for $288,000
for quarterly taxes. You know what my "stimulus" check was? Zero. Nada.
Zilch.
The question I have is this: Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the
guy who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over
2,200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single
mother at home pregnant with her fourth child waiting for her next
welfare check? Obviously, government feels the latter is the economic
stimulus of this country.
The fact is, if I deducted (read: stole) 50% of your paycheck you'd
quit and wouldn't work here. And why should you? That's nuts. Who wants
to get rewarded only 50% of their hard work? Well, I agree which is why
your job is in jeopardy.
Here is what many of you don't understand: To stimulate the economy,
you need to stimulate what runs the economy. Had government suddenly
mandated that I didn't need to pay taxes, guess what? Instead of
depositing that $288,000 into the Washington black-hole, I would have
spent it hiring more employees and generating substantial economic
growth. My employees would have enjoyed the wealth of that tax cut in
the form of promotions and better salaries. But you can forget it now.
When you have a comatose man on the verge of death, you don't
defibrillate and shock his thumb thinking that will bring him back to
life, do you? Or, do you defibrillate his heart? Business is at the
heart of America and always has been. To restart it, you must stimulate
it, not kill it. Suddenly, the power brokers in Washington believe the
poor of America are the essential drivers of the American economic
engine. Nothing could be further from the truth and this is the type of
"change" you can keep.
So where am I going with all this?
It's quite simple.
If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, my reaction will be
swift and simple. I fire you. I fire your co-workers. You can then plead
with the government to pay for your mortgage, your SUV, and your child's
future. Frankly, it isn't my problem any more.
Then, I will close this company down, move to another country, and
retire. You see, I'm done. I'm done with a country that penalizes the
productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to
provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it will be my citizenship.
So, if you lose your job, it won't be at the hands of the economy. It
will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this
country, steam-rolled the Constitution, and changed its landscape
forever. If that happens, you can find me sitting on a beach, retired
with no employees to worry about.
Signed, THE BOSS
__________________
Jimbo
FW: Numbers to ponder
Subject: Numbers to ponder
You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much?
Read this: Boy, was I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.
I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I also have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts.
1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.
Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US.
11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht
12. The National policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.'
13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin..
Verify at: http://www..rense.com/
general75/niht.htm >
14. 'The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States .'
Verify at: http: // www.drdsk.com/articleshtml
The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.
Are we THAT stupid?
If this doesn't bother you then just delete the message. If, on the other hand, it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the country including every elected representative in Washington, D.C. - five times a week for as long as it takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and enforcement thereof.
Fw: "Save Gas" Solution
"Here's an oldie from my right-wing Grandmother. " -Madeline
Thanks Madeline. You know we've been starving for another George Carlin forward. For a while there I thought they had come to a full stop.
------begin forward-------
| George Carlin's
If You Think this is a good solution to both the problems, forward it to your friends ...........
|
Fw: Here - Here!!
One thing about Blokes from Oz is that their hearts and humour are always in the right place!
T. B. Bechtel, a City Councillor from Newcastle, was asked on a local live radio talk show, just what he thought about the allegations of torture of suspected terrorists.
His reply prompted his ejection from the studio, but to thunderous applause from the audience.
HIS STATEMENT:
'If hooking up a terrorist's prisoner's nuts to a car's battery cables will save just one Australian's life, then I have just three things to say,'
'Red is positive,
Black is negative, and
Make sure his nuts are wet.'
[Fwd: One Brit takes on our recent election]
PLEASE TAKE TIME TO READ ALL OF THIS. SOMEHOW WE’VE ALL GOT TO TRY TO GET BACK TO THE TRUE AMERICAN WAY!
|
Fwd: Fw: THIS WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD & BREAK YOUR HEART
Begin forwarded message:
THIS WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD & BREAK YOUR HEART?
Interesting Statistics?
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law,?
St. Paul, Minnesota, points out facts of 2008 Presidential election:?
Number of States won by:?
?Democrats: 19?
?Republicans: ?29?
Square miles of land won by:?
?Democrats: 580,000
Republicans: ?2,427,000?
Population of counties won by:?
?Democrats: 127 million
Republicans: 143 million?
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Democrats: 13.2
Republicans: ?2.1?
??
?Professor Olson adds:?
?"In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won by Republicans?
? was ?mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.?
Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in?
government-owned tenements and living off various forms of?
?government welfare.?
??
Professor Olson believes the United States is now somewhere?
between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's?
definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's?
population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.?
??
?If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal
invaders called illegal's and they vote, then we can say goodbye to?
?the USA in fewer than five years?
??
?Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake,?
?knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.
Fwd: No He Can't
Wow! This is the first thing that my father has sent me that I thought was worth the read. Some things I agree with and some things I don't but worth the read. -Jacqueline
------begin forward-------
Subject: No He Can't
An interesting look at a Black woman's view:
Subject: No He Can't
Anne Wortham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University 's Hoover Institution. She is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association. She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the Year by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in20Bill Moyer's television series, "A World of Ideas." The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas.
Dr. Wortham is author of The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues. She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality. Recently, she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afrocentricism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctn ess. Shortly after an interview in 2004 she was awarded tenure.
______________________________
______________________________ ____________________
No He Can't
by Anne Wortham
Fellow Americans,
Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul's name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America .
I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival – all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the "change" that Obama asserts has come to America . Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared "progressive" whites who voted for him because he doesn't look like them. I would have to be wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration – political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
I would have to believe that "fairness" is the equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that man who asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the "bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can will i t into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.
Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting "Yes We Can!" Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of20all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead – and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.
So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States , the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over – and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yours elves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America . Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton , Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to – Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine – what little there is left for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.
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