Well, link didn't work. Try this.

http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Articles.Detail&Article_id=573a46c4-822c-435c-8405-8b4c93516b52&Month=12&Year=2008

• Auto Bailout is on C-Span. If you - Backwards typist
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    • Wow! There are people protesting outside the room. - Backwards typist

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www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29697096

The choices suck.  But I think Obama could do the least harm, begin facing the pay off of debt to china and rebuild the military, bring the kids home and let them get on with their lives before they are jaded.

Sam, honestly, I want this country to thrive and I mean you too as I am guessing you are a middle income American.

You are not going to find the perfect president.  Lower your expectations and focus on your wallet.  Remember how good you feel with a huge savings?  And remember how you feel (most can) when the CCs are maxed?  Well, the credit cards are maxed.

The young people want Obama.  We already blew it for them.  Give them what they want since they will suffer the most from the events during the course of the last 8 years.  If you are over 45, your have reached your peak.  They deserve a life equal to ours.  We owe that to them and we cannot let policiticians and wealthy delusional people take the country out from under them.  They deserve that much. Don't you realize the children know what is going on?  The felonious activity, the sexual indiscriminations, the lies, the deviousness - all by paid elected public officials who are already paid decent wages. 

Now the country is a mess and the leaders are to blame.  If you want to give up your quality of life so the Iraqi people have the ability to vote ::rolls eyes:: they most probably ended up dead or refugees in a long line of them, heading for Syria.

Something stinks in the republican party.  I cannot put my finger on it but my best guess is that it has been hijacked by ruthless businessmen.  My thought is, get the party straightened out and then return to the race in 2012, repubos. You religious folks surely see the lies and feel the disappoint.  Along with the insecure feeling just knowing that your leaders have their own agenda and making the country stronger (and not AL queda weaker) was not on their list of things to do.  A heist of historic proportions have taken place and you repubos need to face up to it and find better leadership in your communities.  Democrats are pretty solid from what I am seeing.  They keep each other in check along with the media with the exception of Fox news, of course, the GOP propaganda machine.  This isn't about you people, this is about the kids.

If anyone is interested in seeing the ASTRONOMICAL amount of money these corporations are costing Americans with their offshore tax shelters, please open the links I posted.

How refreshing to hear something credible in the current incredible environment.

I hope more people start to listen to her and people like her so that America will wake up before it's too late.

reply that I think got deleted.......not unjustly.  It was dripping in sarcasm.  LOL  I believe the article it is on Yahoo news though, my husband said something about it.  I didn't post a link to it, probably someone else.

We can all agree to disagree.  What I would like for everyone to do is research the facts for themselves.  I've always felt like you can belive nothing you hear and only half of what you see.

I'm not against immigration and I don't think Lou Dobbs is either. I'm all for LEGAL immigration.  I even researched Mexico's immigration requirements and that ought to be an eye-opener for anyone who wants to compare immigration policies.  I am dead set against ILLEGAL immigration.  What I don't understand is what about ILLEGAL do people not underestand.  AND both Obama and McCain are in favor of giving people who have broken the law a "path to citizenship" translated means amnesty.  That didn't work too well  under Reagan and it won't work now which is one thing I have against both candidates because the path to citizenship is one thing they agree on but you don't hear either one of them talking about it.  That's an issue to  me.  No need to worry about terrorists when our borders are wide open and terrorists could stroll right on across our borders any time they so desired and neither NEITHER of these candidates have anything to say about that.  Why?  I'll tell ya, they both don't want to offend the Latino vote and I don't think they care whether the voters are legal or not.

his own personal reasons.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050620/why_george_went_to_war.php

The Downing Street memos have brought into focus an essential question: on what basis did President George W. Bush decide to invade Iraq? The memos are a government-level confirmation of what has been long believed by so many: that the administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq and was simply looking for justification, valid or not.

Despite such mounting evidence, Bush resolutely maintains total denial. In fact, when a British reporter asked the president recently about the Downing Street documents, Bush painted himself as a reluctant warrior. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," he said, answering for himself and British Prime Minister Blair. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

Yet there's evidence that Bush not only deliberately relied on false intelligence to justify an attack, but that he would have willingly used any excuse at all to invade Iraq. And that he was obsessed with the notion well before 9/11—indeed, even before he became president in early 2001.

In interviews I conducted last fall, a well-known journalist, biographer and Bush family friend who worked for a time with Bush on a ghostwritten memoir said that an Iraq war was always on Bush's brain.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He went on, 'If I have a chance to invade…, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'"

Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military "win" under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush's father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.

Herskowitz's revelations illuminate Bush's personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.

Conversations With Bush The Candidate

Herskowitz—a longtime Houston newspaper columnist—has ghostwritten or co-authored autobiographies of a broad spectrum of famous people, including Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, Mickey Mantle, Dan Rather and Nixon cabinet secretary John B. Connally. Bush's 1999 comments to Herskowitz were made over the course of as many as 20 sessions together. Eventually, campaign staffers—expressing concern about things Bush had told the author that were included in the manuscript—pulled the project, and Bush campaign officials came to Herskowitz's house and took his original tapes and notes. Bush communications director Karen Hughes then assumed responsibility for the project, which was published in highly sanitized form as A Charge to Keep.

The revelations about Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged during two taped sessions I held with Herskowitz. These conversations covered a variety of matters, including the journalist's continued closeness with the Bush family and fondness for Bush Senior—who clearly trusted Herskowitz enough to arrange for him to pen a subsequent authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published in 2003.

I conducted those interviews last fall and published an article based on them during the final heated days of the 2004 campaign. Herskowitz's taped insights were verified to the satisfaction of editors at the Houston Chronicle, yet the story failed to gain broad mainstream coverage, primarily because news organization executives expressed concern about introducing such potent news so close to the election. Editors told me they worried about a huge backlash from the White House and charges of an "October Surprise."

Debating The Timeline For War

But today, as public doubts over the Iraq invasion grow, and with the Downing Street papers adding substance to those doubts, the Herskowitz interviews assume singular importance by providing profound insight into what motivated Bush—personally—in the days and weeks following 9/11. Those interviews introduce us to a George W. Bush, who, until 9/11, had no means for becoming "a great president"—because he had no easy path to war. Once handed the national tragedy of 9/11, Bush realized that the Afghanistan campaign and the covert war against terrorist organizations would not satisfy his ambitions for greatness. Thus, Bush shifted focus from Al Qaeda, perpetrator of the attacks on New York and Washington. Instead, he concentrated on ensuring his place in American history by going after a globally reviled and easily targeted state run by a ruthless dictator.

The Herskowitz interviews add an important dimension to our understanding of this presidency, especially in combination with further evidence that Bush's focus on Iraq was motivated by something other than credible intelligence. In their published accounts of the period between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion, former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke and journalist Bob Woodward both describe a president single-mindedly obsessed with Iraq. The first anecdote takes place the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, in the Situation Room of the White House. The witness is Richard Clarke, and the situation is captured in his book, Against All Enemies.

On September 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. "Look," he told us, "I know you have a lot to do and all…but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way…"

I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this."

"I know, I know, but…see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred…" …

"Look into Iraq, Saddam," the President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth hanging open.

Similarly, Bob Woodward, in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview about his book, Bush At War, captures a moment, on November 21, 2001, where the president expresses an acute sense of urgency that it is time to secretly plan the war with Iraq. Again, we know there was nothing in the way of credible intelligence to precipitate the president's actions.

Woodward: "President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.'"

Wallace (voiceover): Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam—and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.

Woodward: "Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the necessary preparations in Kuwait specifically to make war possible."

Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, "a great president." Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush's decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.

Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.

It's not the law-abiding hunter gun owners that you have to worry about.  The bad guys will always find a way to get a gun, just like drugs.  It doesn't matter what kind of law there is in place.  Those laws just punish the rest of us.