Yeah? And O cant appoint anyone who even pays

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companies. There was one company out there advertising 3 cpl for ASR. Their add said they need MTs who can "hit the ground running." It was on MTdaily a few days ago. There should be "ASR control" where they can't continue to lower our pay. Remember years ago when people voted for "rent control" and won? Time to sign those petitions for "ASR control."

We have grown too large to defend the country with just a militia. We have high-rise buildings and can no longer get by with volunteer fire departments. We need street crews because we have too much roadway, highways and freeways, and no longer can simply neaten up the road that runs past our property. We produce far too much trash to simply take it out back and burn it (if that were even still legal in some areas.) Some elements of modern life have grown just to large and complicated to handle on our own.

We have a system of compulsory schooling now that is doing SUCH a great job educating our children. Kids were far more literate and better educated when the bulk of their learning occurred in the home. Read anything written by John Taylor Gatto - Weapons of Mass Instruction is his most recent book - about the origins of public education.

I quote here what was in an earlier post: *If you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until the government gives it to you for free.* What the government dispenses, the government rations. Do you really want a government bureaucrat in control of whether you get surgery or some diagnostic test your doctor says you need? Bad enough you have to fight about it with your insurance company now. You really want to turn this over to the government? Really?

They certainly must for so many MTs to be all atwitter over this plan. Fred Thompson said it perfectly last PM.

So those "moneybags" need to stop griping about MQ and how crappy it pays. You think you have less in your pockets now? You think this crap he's promising is free? How ignorant!

Even he see the unfairness here. Some conservatives are fond of saying that Democrats want to tax the wealthy unfairly, but what I would like to see is the wealthy taxed equally. "Mr. Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent." Here is the entire article. It's a great read. Trust me.

Tom Bawden in New York

Warren Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has criticised the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary and his cleaner.

Speaking at a $4,600-a-seat fundraiser in New York for Senator Hillary Clinton, Mr Buffett, who is worth an estimated $52 billion (�26 billion), said: �The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you�re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.�

Mr Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent. Mr Buffett told his audience, which included John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, and Alan Patricof, the founder of the US branch of Apax Partners, that US government policy had accentuated a disparity of wealth that hurt the economy by stifling opportunity and motivation.

The comments are among the most signficant yet in a debate raging on both sides of the Atlantic about growing income inequality and how the super-wealthy are taxed.

They echo those made this month by Nicholas Ferguson, one of the leading figures in Britain�s private equity industry, when he criticised tax rates that left its multimillionaire venture capitalists �paying less tax than a cleaning lady�.

Last week senior members of the US Senate proposed to increase the rate of tax that private equity and hedge fund staff pay on their share of the profits, known as carried interest, from the 15 per cent capital gains rate to about 35 per cent.

Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, acknowledged in an interview yesterday that there were justified concerns about the huge profits generated by private equity firms and that he worried that income inequality was �poisoning democracy�. He also said that he would be voting for the Democrat candidate at the next election. Mr Blankfein is the highest-paid executive on Wall Street, earning $54 million last year.

Mr Buffett, who runs the investment group Berkshire Hathaway and is widely regarded as the world�s most successful investor, said that he was a Democrat because Republicans are more likely to think: �I�m making $80 million a year � God must have intended me to have a lower tax rate.�

Mr Buffett said that a Republican proposal to eliminate elements of inheritance tax, which raises about $30 billion a year from the assets of about 12,000 rich families, would broaden the disparity between rich and poor. He added that the Republicans would seek to recover lost revenue by increasing taxes for the less prosperous.

He said: �You could take that $30 billion and give $1,000 to 30 million poor families. Or should you favour the 12,000 estates and make 30 million families pay an extra $1,000?�

By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Republican Party says it still has a zero-tolerance policy for tampering with voters even as it pays the legal bills for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to thwart Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

James Tobin, the president's 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.

The Republican National Committee already has spent more than $722,000 to provide Tobin, who has pleaded innocent, a team of lawyers from the high-powered Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly. The firm's other clients have included former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros.

Republican Party officials said they don't ordinarily discuss specifics of their legal work, but confirmed to The Associated Press they had agreed to underwrite Tobin's defense because he was a longtime supporter and that he assured them he had committed no crimes.

"Jim is a longtime friend who has served as both an employee and an independent contractor for the RNC," a spokeswoman for the RNC, Tracey Schmitt, said Wednesday. "This support is based on his assurance and our belief that Jim has not engaged in any wrongdoing."

A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on Election Day 2002, prosecutors allege. Republican John Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire's newest senator.

At the time, Tobin was the RNC's New England regional director, before moving to President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.

A top New Hampshire Party official and a GOP consultant already have pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Tobin's indictment accuses him of specifically calling the GOP consultant to get a telephone firm to help in the scheme.

"The object of the conspiracy was to deprive inhabitants of New Hampshire and more particularly qualified voters ... of their federally secured right to vote," states the latest indictment issued by a federal grand jury on May 18.

The Republican Party has repeatedly and pointedly disavowed any tactics aimed at keeping citizens from voting since allegations of voter suppression surfaced during the Florida recount in 2000 that tipped the presidential race to Bush.

Earlier this week, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director, reiterated a "zero-tolerance policy" for any GOP official caught trying to block legitimate votes.

"The position of the Republican National Committee is simple: We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression. No employee, associate or any person representing the Republican Party who engages in these kinds of acts will remain in that position," Mehlman wrote Monday to a group that studied voter suppression tactics.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean on Thursday questioned Mehlman's commitment to the policy. "This is just another example of his say one thing, do another strategy. Ken Mehlman tells crowds his party is against voter fraud and intimidation, while in the backrooms he supports Republican officials who engage in these dirty tricks," Dean said.

Dennis Black and Dane Butswinkas, two Williams & Connolly lawyers for Tobin, did not return calls seeking comment. Brian Tucker, a New Hampshire lawyer on the team, declined comment.

Tobin's lawyers have attacked the prosecution, suggesting evidence was improperly introduced to the grand jury, that their client originally had been promised he wouldn't be indicted and that he was improperly charged under one of the statutes.

Tobin stepped down from his Bush-Cheney post a couple of weeks before the November 2004 election after Democrats suggested he was involved in the phone bank scheme. He was charged a month after the election.

Paul Twomey, a volunteer lawyer for New Hampshire Democrats who are pursuing a separate lawsuit involving the phone scheme, said he was surprised the RNC was willing to pay Tobin's legal bills and that it suggested more people may be involved.

The new development "really raises the questions of who are they protecting, how high does this go and who was in on this," Twomey said.

Federal prosecutors have secured testimony from the two convicted conspirators in the scheme directly implicating Tobin.

Charles McGee, the New Hampshire GOP official who pleaded guilty, told prosecutors he informed Tobin of the plan and asked for Tobin's help in finding a vendor who could make the calls that would flood the phone banks.

Allen Raymond, a former colleague of Tobin who operated a Virginia-based telephone services firm, told prosecutors Tobin called him in October 2002, explained the telephone plan and asked Raymond's company to help McGee implement it.

Raymond's lawyer told the court that Tobin made the request for help in his official capacity as the top RNC official for New England and his client believed the RNC had sanctioned the activity.

___

On the Net:

The indictment in this is available at: http://wid.ap.org/documents/tobinindictment.pdf

RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman's recent letter on voter suppression is available at: http://wid.ap.org/documents/rncletter.pdf

The Republican National Committee: http://www.rnc.org

That's exactly what I said. Scarborough has always supported Bush. There is a difference between supporting and blindly following. For example, you see nothing wrong with how this case was handled. You see nothing wrong with Bush lying every time he opens his mouth. That's blind faith.

Scarborough is an objective Republican who believes in honesty. I realize this is a difficult concept for some CONS to understand. Once upon a time, honesty was considered a good thing in the United States. People who were honest were considered to have moral character and integrity. Scarborough is one of those rare of Republicans, totally foreign to you, I'm sure.

To blindly follow (which I'm sure you're quite familiar with) means worshiping a man as if he's some kind of god, believing every single word he says, even when you see evidence to the contrary right before your eyes. He lies every day; those who follow blindly believe him every day. And when it becomes common knowledge that he's lied and when they can't twist and manipulate the lie out of recognition any more, then his blind followers make excuses for him, usually blaming democrats or anyone else who is handy but never blaming the liar himself. And they justify all the lying because they have that special *connection* with God. They can lie all they want and God just winks at them and says it's okay because their place in heaven has already been guaranteed, unlike the rest of us poor slobs out there without that special connection.

The only thing that scares me more than Bush having the same credibility as Al Qaeda is the fact that there are so many morons who blindly follow him, who just aren't smart enough to figure out that Bush was never on their side - he's only on the side of big money. He even joked about his *base* - the *haves* and the *have nots.*

By the way, you are on the liberal board. If you don't care for the liberal point of view, the CON board is ---->

I was responding to this: *And know a lot PK. I know A LOT about your posting habits more than you could ever imagine.* I was accused of doing something I simply didn't do, so that just shows me how much you people really DO know, and, yes, I can *imagine* a LOT when faced with this kind of ominous post.

Those of your ilk have dark histories of murdering people of different beliefs (for example, personnel at abortion clinics), and the latest tactic of the Neocons is intimidation and retribution. Just ask Valerie Plame, who used to have a career before her husband spoke the truth.

If someone said that to you on your board, you'd be accusing them of threatening to assassinate you and contacting the FBI. Who are you KIDDING? Typical neocon double standard and hypocrisy at work again.

but the point is, the far left hates Cheney as much or more than Bush, so impeach Bush, get Cheney, then what? Impeach Cheney? Then you get Hastert. I know the far left doesn't like him. Impeach him and get Ted Stevens. He's a Republican, too. (President pro tempore of the Senate). Impeach him and get...Condi Rice...if she isn't buying shoes. What have you gained. Absolutely nothing. Well...maybe some payback for Clinton, which is what this is all about anyway. Why not just wait until 2008 and vote the bums out.

Yeah? And O cant appoint anyone who even pays

Buffett blasts system that lets him pay less tax than secretary