Jim Dandy: sure as hell has a lot of intelligence....

Bernice: He's probably a democrat pretending to be a Republican. He kinda reminds me of Joe Biden by the way he says things.

Artful Dodger: I'm with Bernice, intelligence comes to mind when listening to Basil

Artful Dodger: no drivers license or social security number?

Jim Dandy: 

Artful Dodger: that link doesn't work for m.I would need to go to the website that carries it here in Canada, and that's a shlep I'm not motivated enough to make right now

Jim Dandy:  How about this:  http://www.thedailyshow.com/videos/tag/Shirley%20Sherrod

Artful Dodger: same thing,I'll check it out later

Artful Dodger: “VOTE FOR ME AND IF I WIN I WILL IMMUNE YOU FROM ALL STATE CRIMES FOR THE REST OF YOU LIFE!”

Pedro Martínez:" Except violating a citizen rights this would be a special punishment"

Jim Dandy:

Pedro Martínez:  He's gonna be a great comedy relief!  

Artful Dodger:  Jon Stewart is priceless.  He gets a shot in at everyone. LMAO.  Good post.

It seems the major concern about the switch over in the NHS system by a number of GP's is the possibility of management of the new system is outsourced by GP's to private companies. Why... because a private company might favour a sister company. Plus a tendency of private companies to boot services into a higher price band. Eg.. calling having stitches in at birth as a "complication".

GP's here know that with private care costs can be heightened. Independent healthcare providers have been noted going for easy fix treatments such as hip op's and turn down complicated healthcare such as mental illnesses. When shareholders come before care there is a major conflict in interests.

What's more.. this new service is not being brought into service by a socialist government. We have in the UK now a Conservative led coalition.

No matter what (from reading several articles) the doctor's here do not want privatisation.

Ferris Bueller: I was falling off my chair. It doesn't matter who he picks on, he can make anyone laugh. His humor, facial expressions, quick wit, and everything else he does is just too good. Glad you liked it.

Artful Dodger: Are you speaking of Basil Marceaux?

Jim Dandy: John Stewart.

OMB nominee got $900,000 after Citigroup bailout

The most honest, the most transparent administration in history has another ethics problem with one of its key nominees.

Jacob Lew has been tapped to replace the departing OMB chief Peter Orszag:

President Obama's choice to be the government's chief budget officer received a bonus of more than $900,000 from Citigroup Inc. last year -- after the Wall Street firm for which he worked received a massive taxpayer bailout.

opps

Northwest Airlines is to plead guilty and pay a $38m (£24m) fine for its role in fixing air-cargo prices, the US Department of Justice has said.

The department said as part of a plea deal Northwest would co-operate with an ongoing anti-trust investigation.

Northwest Airlines Cargo, which is no longer operating, conspired to fix air-cargo rates from July 2004 to February 2006, the department added.

Northwest was taken over by Delta Air Lines in a £1.7bn deal in October 2008.

Northwest has agreed to plead guilty to a single offence, said the DoJ.

So far a total of 16 airlines have pleaded guilty or agreed to do so in an ongoing investigation into price-fixing in air cargo, it added.

More than $1.6bn in criminal fines has been paid by airlines, and four executives have received prison sentences.

Trident submarine renewal costs are no longer to be paid for by the Treasury. The Mod has been told it'll have to pay for the £20 billion out of it's budget, half it's budget for 2010-2011 new 'kit'.

Some say if the middle east goes all nuclear we could be in a new arms race...
... I heard that between the USA and Russia there are still enough nuclear weapons to 'kill' the world.

The SNP wants Trident scrapped and the money spent on the rest of the armed services.

Do we need nukes in the UK?? We got the Vulcan.. after that every thing else just doesn't live up to that beautiful plane.

..... Apart from Concorde

I do like Sarah Palin but even so, this is the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. After her latest blunder with vocabulary, it was said that she finds her words in a "fictionary."

Here's a short spelling lesson:

The last four letters in "American" = I Can

The last four letters in "Republican" = I Can

The last four letters in "Democrats" = Rats

End of Lesson. Test to follow in November. November will be set aside as rodent extermination month.

Artful Dodger:  That's real old spam forwarded through email.  Exterminate your junk mail.  LOL

Ferris Bueller: Hey, I picked on Palin so I had to pick on the dems too.

Ferris Bueller: And anyway, in this case SPAM means

SuPremely
Accurate
eMail

I asked this further down the board but didnt get any reaction.....so I will try again.

George P Bush for president???

Bernice: He has promise. Imagine, another Bush in the White House. ;)

Artful Dodger: makes for another record LOL...3 times misery....ROFL

Bernice:  Who is "George P Bush"?  And what does the P stand for?  LOL

Ferris Bueller: ummmmm he is the son of GW Bush's Brother.....are you in america? I would have thought you would have known that.

Ferris Bueller: "P" stands for ....who knows...I don't....I just heard that he had eyes on running for Gov., then the white house.

Bernice: I looked up google...."P" stands for Prescott.

Bernice: Read my lips, "NO NEW BUSHES"

Bernice: Someday the "P" will stand for "President"

The elite's bogus appeal to 'authority'
Tom Rowan
One of the ruling class's favorite propaganda points is that they are smart and if you disagree with them you, in fact, are dumb.
Historian Paul Johnson pointed out the liberal ruling class's penchant for self puffery when he wrote Intellectuals. To give you an idea of where Johnson was going, chapter 1 is titled - Jean-Jacques Rousseau; ‘An Interesting Madman.'

Thomas Sowell exposes the "intellectual" ruling class who, as National Review put it, "Exalt themselves by denigrating our society - and are working to destroy it."

Liberals are self described authorities on everything.

Persuasive speech writing technique implores that the speech giver make an "appeal to authority" to persuade his audience. This is why Algore tells his audience that they don't have to take his word for it, just ask the experts. Ask the scientists, they are the authorities!

The "top nine authoritative science phrases in print media" are: science tells us we should, science requires, science dictates, science compels, science commands; science says we should, science tells us we must, and science says that we must. The print media makes science out to be a dictatorial prima donna or spoiled child actor.
This technique is used by Obama relentlessly. He implores us that "most leading economists" agree with him on everything. The only problem with that theory is that economists like Keynes are never held into account for their disastrous prescriptions. Algore can tell us that he invented the internet, was the original muse for Love Story, and that he is not bound by any "controlling legal authority" yet he is to be given a pass by the media. Being part of the ruling class means never having to say you are sorry or having to be proved to right about anything.

....

Palin, Limbaugh, and Reagan are to be mocked as less than intelligent. The left's assault on Palin is not in the battle of ideas, where the left always loses; it is on her appearance and her propagandized lack of intellect. Limbaugh was once again correct in his analysis of the Gulf oil spill. Time magazine's putrid Michael Grunwald gave credit to Rush by noting that the "obnoxious and anti-environmentalist" Rush Limbaugh was right. And who can forget the "amiable dunce" president we had who defeated the Soviet Union and created the largest peacetime economic expansion in the history of mankind?

One thing is for sure: When it comes to the issues that face the US, Palin has been right on where Obama has only floundered.

AZ immigration appeal scheduled for week of November 1
Clarice Feldman
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will not hear Arizona's appeal of the injunction order issued by Judge Bolton on an expedited basis. Instead the hearing is scheduled for week of November 1.

Professor Jacobson once again expresses my own thoughts on this:
The case now will be argued the week of November 1.
That may make DOJ lawyers happy, because they will have more time to put together their brief.
But it will not make Democratic politicians happy to have the Arizona case on the front page as voters are walking into the voting booth on November 2.
Democrats wished too hard for something, and they got it.

Clarice Feldman

Neither Roosevelt nor Reagan
Clarice Feldman
Noemie Emery explains how Obama blew his lead and devastated his party in the August 2 edition of the Weekly Standard. Don't miss a word of it. Here's the conclusion:

As Henninger concluded, "Barack Obama took a rising reservoir of public trust for his party .  .  . and emptied it." Gallup's annual Confidence in Institutions poll, conducted in the second week of July, showed that only 11 percent of Americans have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress. "Half of Americans now say they have ‘very little' or ‘no' confidence in Congress, up from 38 percent in 2009-and the highest for any institution since Gallup first asked this question in 1973." Talk about change, if you care to. And as for health care, Obama's major achievement, when the bill passed, it was opposed by a 20-point spread by the general public, and since then it has only sunk lower. In some polls, around 60 percent of respondents say that they want it repealed.

There was a winner in the cold war??

Millions of dead from sponsored (not in my backyard) wars.. Radiation levels increased globally due to atmospheric testing that the world will never be the same again. Trillions spent on WMD's.. whole countries gone to pot thanks to interference from outside powers..
... one war still going on officially.. Korea.

Millions dead from having an opinion, millions in ruins and lives devastated as they might have been communists.

Not to mention certain lands now destroyed.. that's why the USA took to using barges to test nukes.

Palin stupid.. no.. she's worse... she's incompetent. I can understand why the Republican party picked a woman to get votes.... Surely there was a better choice??

Artful Dodger:  The negatives of AZ being front page news in November could cut both ways.  The Republicans could loss a lot of their Hispanic votes and/or the Dems could loose anti-immigration votes.

Ferris Bueller: I guess that's possible but I think the Republicans are in a better position all around.

Ferris Bueller: Just a small correction but an important one: it's NOT anti immigration, it's anti ILLEGAL immigration. ;)

The UK coalition government has decided to abandon EU rules on doctors working limits. From 100+ hours for a junior doctor it was cut to 48 to stop doctors falling asleep on the job. This, has been found to be to low. Other EU member states have decided to drop the 48 hour limit and now the UK gov plans to up the limit to 65 hours.

This is on advice from the Royal college of surgeons who say the hour limit interferes with patient care, from the feedback of the majority consultant surgeons and trainees.

Artful Dodger: Are the Republicans willing to take account for the increase in daily costs from kicking them all out?

The intelligence on Iraq's weapons threat was not "very substantial", former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott has said.

He told the Iraq inquiry he was "nervous" about the intelligence being presented in 2002 - some of which he said was based on "tittle-tattle". However, he said he did not have the knowledge to challenge the assessments. Nevertheless, he defended the military action taken as "legal" and said he would take the same decision again.

Lord Prescott, deputy prime minister between 1997 and 2007, is the last senior former Labour minister to be giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the war. The inquiry is looking at the UK's role in the build-up to the war and the handling of its aftermath, and is expected to publish its report around the end of the year.

In an interview in December, Lord Prescott expressed some doubts about the war. However, he told the inquiry that MPs had backed the action and that "democratic accountability had been satisfied". While former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had a "difficult decision" to make before deciding the war was legal, he said he accepted the judgement that military action was justified on basis of existing UN disarmament resolutions.

While it was "fashionable" to criticise Tony Blair for taking the UK to war, he said the former prime minister had "agonised" over the death of every British soldier. In his opening statement, he expressed his "deepest sympathies" to the relatives of the 179 British service personnel killed in Iraq.

Lord Prescott, the final witness in the current round of public hearings, said he attended 23 out of 28 Cabinet meetings which discussed UK policy towards Iraq as well as holding a number of private meetings with Mr Blair.

Asked about the intelligence shown to ministers about Iraq in 2002, Mr Prescott said had "no evidence" it was wrong but admitted he was a "little bit nervous about the conclusions on what I seemed to think was pretty limited intelligence".

"I got the feeling that it was not very substantial”
"When I kept reading them, I kept thinking to myself, 'is this intelligence?", he said.

Describing it as "basically what you have heard somewhere and what somebody else has told somebody", he suggested the conclusions drawn on the back of it "were a little ahead" of the evidence.

"So I got the feeling it wasn't very substantial," he said.

With hindsight, he said recommendations made by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) "were frankly wrong and built too much on a little information".

Tuesday: Yeah, hopefully we will be able to recover from his horrible year and a half in office. Let's see what more damage he can do by 2012.