
Welcome to the Constitution.
Manmade global warming, like so many other social and economic issues, has become hopelessly politicized.
Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.
Then, when the rest of us saw the results of their actions—you know, the earth cooling, oceans lowering, polar bears frolicking and glaciers growing—we would see the error of our ways and join the crusade voluntarily and enthusiastically.
And I hate to be a scold, but you have a special obligation to do it because you believe it so strongly. Then, instead of looking at isolated tree rings and computer models, you’d have real results to point to, and even the skeptics would see the error of their ways and join you.
Today on CNBC, Conrad argued that now just isn’t the time to raise taxes on the wealthy:
We’ve got to be very careful with the timing of what we do. There’s no question in my mind that taxes have to go up on the wealthiest among us. The question is when. I don’t think this is the moment.
LIEBERMAN: We got a long term debt problem as Bernanke said and we gotta begin to bring our government back into balance. Probably in the long term that gonna mean we’re gonna have some more people in higher income levels. But I think that right now, as we’re trying to come out of a bad economy, that would be a mistake. I don’t know if its two years, six months, whether it’s a year, to just hold over these tax cuts so theres more money in the hands of these busineses, small businesses which create most of the jobs, a lot of people are in those upper brackets running those small businesses let’s make sure the economy’s stronger before we start raising taxes again.
Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry is docking his family's new $7 million yacht in neighboring Rhode Island, allowing him to avoid paying roughly $500,000 in taxes to the cash-strapped Bay State.
If the "Isabel" were kept at the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee's summer vacation home on Nantucket, or in Boston Harbor near his city residence, he would be liable for $437,500 in one-time sales tax. He would also have to pay $70,000 in annual excise taxes.
Rhode Island repealed those taxes in 1993. That has made the state something of a nautical tax haven.
Kerry spokesman David Wade said Friday the boat is being kept at Newport Shipyard not to evade taxes, but "for long-term maintenance, upkeep and charter purposes."
The vast shopping center that holds his small shop is almost empty. The Food City supermarket closed this spring. Then the furniture shop. Then the pizzeria.
Katchi's revenue was already sagging before April 23, when Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law. Since then, sales have plummeted.
When immigrants leave, Gans said, "stores experience dramatic drops in sales. Apartment owners who rent to immigrants have high vacancy rates and risk losing their buildings. Legal workers or renters or consumers don't generally step in quickly enough to prevent these businesses from experiencing real additional hardship."
"The economy's already bad, but on top of it [SB 1070] is like a bullet in the head to us," said Osameh Odeh, 35, whose Eden Wear clothing store was empty one recent afternoon. "People don't come out of their houses anymore."
Accusing Democrats of being the “Party of Parasites."
The Raytown farmer who posted a sign on a semi-truck trailer accusing Democrats of being the “Party of Parasites” received more than $1 million in federal crop subsidies since 1995.
But David Jungerman says the payouts don’t contradict the sign he put up in a corn field in Bates County along U.S. 71 Highway.
Jungerman said he put up the sign to protest people who pay no taxes, but, “Always have their hand out for whatever the government will give them” in social programs.
Crop subsidies are different, he said. When crop prices dip below a certain point, the federal government makes up the difference with a subsidy payment.
According to a farm subsidy data base, Jungerman received $1,095,101 in the past 15 years, including $224,763 in 2000. Last year, he received $34,303.
While Democrats denounce BP for the spill, a Republican congressman from Texas accuses the White House of performing a $20 billion "shakedown" by pushing the company to create a compensation fund for spill victims. Rep. Joe Barton also apologizes to BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward at a Capitol hearing, although he is later pressured by GOP leaders to apologize for his apology.
Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky said Friday that he was disturbed by Obama's promise to find out "whose ass to kick."
"I'll move past the obvious problem with the appropriateness of the comment to just say this: Look in the mirror Mr. President," Paul said in a statement. "This crisis has been a case study in failure to lead, failure to act, and using a crisis to advance your own agenda rather than solve the problem."
Erin Ryan, a tea party activist in Redding, Calif., said Barton was correct to use the word "shakedown."
"Wow," Ryan said. "Somebody finally said it out loud?"
Conservative talk show host Mark Williams, chairman of the California-based Tea Party Express, said the White House went too far by pressuring BP to create the fund while the Justice Department is conducting criminal and civil probes of the spill.
"I'm accustomed to mobsters behaving that way, I'm just not accustomed to it from the president, especially when he's standing there with the attorney general threatening legal action," Williams said. "Where I come from, they call it extortion."
BP chief executive Tony Hayward, often criticized for being tone-deaf to U.S. concerns about the worst oil spill in American history, took time off Saturday to attend a glitzy yacht race off England's Isle of Wight.
Spokeswoman Sheila Williams said Hayward took a break from overseeing BP efforts to stem the undersea gusher in Gulf of Mexico to watch his boat "Bob" participate in the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race.

NH: "Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule."
AC: "I'm not so sure that that is so."
NH: "You didn't grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?"
AC: "Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?"
NH: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality... Welcome to domestic life on the farm..."
Colmes: There are a lot of people in the audience who grew up on farms, are living on farms now, raising kids on farms and and I don't think they are dating Elsie right now. You know what I'm saying?
NH: You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually. You're naive. You know better than that... If it's warm and it's damp and it vibrates you might in fact have sex with it.
"We're talking about the mule now?"
Yes, he says. The mule.
"A small mule?" I ask.
"No, a full grown mule," he says. "She loved me, though."
We both laugh, but I'm still trying to figure out the logistics. How big is this thing? The size of a horse, he says.
"All I had to do was give her an ear of corn." He laughs again. "She was a [prostitute] mule."
"How did you reach?"
"I don't know... I stood on something. The kicker is, as soon as I was done she pissed all over me. It was embarrassing. I never told anyone that before."
"I've [screwed] a watermelon," he says.
He's had sex with just about everything it's physically possible to have sex with, and some that isn't.
"
"How many times have I masturbated in my life?" he asks. Now he's 65 and orgasm-free for two years. "The bottom line is, I never treated it as if it were not a sin.
BP, in a move destined to go down as one of the bestest public relations moves ever, has apparently hired a private security company to help to keep pesky reporters from covering the unfolding catastrophe on the beaches of the Gulf Coast. The report comes via New Orleans’ 6WDSU reporter Scott Walker, who last week ran into representatives of a “Talon Security” trying to block him from interviewing cleanup workers on a local beach. Just which of the various companies named “Talon Security” is storming the (public) beaches for BP, however, remains unclear.
BP has hired investment banks Blackstone Group, Goldman Sachs Group and Credit Suisse Group as advisers, a source familiar with the matter said, without identifying the purpose of the advice.

Conservative radio man Rush Limbaugh is taking a fourth stab at marriage with a weekend wedding to Kathryn Rogers, an events coordinator 26 years his junior, according to various reports. Limbaugh, 59, will reportedly marry the 33-year-old Rogers at his Palm Beach compound.
"we already have one raghead in the White House, we don't need a raghead in the governor's mansion."