Ragbag Headliners

Should Facebook Add A Dislike Button?

Editor's note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He is writing a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told ABC's Diane Sawyer this week that Facebook would "definitely think about" adding a Dislike button to the site, allowing users to express distaste for updates or pages on Facebook.

But Zuckerberg is just humoring us: Facebook will never add a Dislike button, regardless of users' demands.

Here's why: -CNN Tech

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National Guard Troops Headed To Border

U.S. National Guard forces will begin deploying along the U.S. border with Mexico in August and will be fully trained and deployed by the end of the month, government officials announced Monday.

Some 1,200 Army and Air National Guard troops will be in place for a year to assist the border patrol in monitoring and capturing illegal immigrants crossing the border into the United States.

They will served as a "gap-filler" while the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency hires additional staff to fill the demand in protection along the almost 2,000-mile-long southern border with Mexico.

The troops, from the four border states, will be fully trained and in place in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas by September 1, according to Gen. Craig McKinley, commander of the National Guard.

The Guard troops will not be involved in law enforcement activities such as arrests of illegal immigrants, but will assist border patrol officers looking for the illegal border crossers and smugglers as well as in intelligence gathering. The airmen and soldiers will be armed, but they will be limited by rules of engagement that allow them to shoot only to defend themselves, McKinley said. –CNN U.S.

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Who In The World Isn't On Facebook?

Seriously ... at this point, who's not on Facebook?

Grandmas are commenting on their teen grandkids' angst-ridden status updates. One of your grade-school teachers wants you to join their mafia.

Candidates for the Planning and Zoning Commission have fan pages. So does actor Will Arnett's voice. Not Will Arnett. Just his voice.

On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the site hit a half-billion active users.

That's nearly five times as many people as watched this year's Super Bowl -- the most popular television broadcast ever -- and about four times as many people as voted in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

People spend more than 700 billion minutes per month on the site and, according to Facebook, 400 million of them have logged in during the past month. Keep in mind there are only 309 million people in the United States -- total.

So, seriously ... who's left? -CNN Tech

Face It: You're Addicted To Love

Jim Dailakis still remembers how he stood below his then-girlfriend's balcony, held up a tape player and blasted a George Michael song that the two of them loved.

But this romantic gesture, reminiscent of John Cusack serenading Ione Skye in "Say Anything" (but before that movie came out), didn't make his first love stay with him forever. After a 2½-year relationship, he got a letter from her in 1988, saying "thanks for everything; we have to move on."

"The first month was horrible, because when you break up with someone, it's like a death, but it's even worse because the corpse goes on living, just without you," said Dailakis, 41, an Australian-born comedian in New York.

According to new research, the brutality of loving someone who has rejected you has a biological underpinning. A study published in this month's issue of Journal of Neurophysiology finds that, for those who have been recently rejected, the brain may treat love as an addiction, craving it in the same way as cocaine.

Fisher and colleagues did a brain imaging study of 15 people who had recently been rejected in love -- on average, 63 days before the study. Such a small sample size is typical for neuroimaging research.

Participants had not been married to their former partners and had been in a relationship with that person for an average of 21 months. The average age was 20.

Each participant viewed a photograph of someone who had recently rejected him or her in love and a photograph of a different person that didn't inspire good or bad feelings. In between exposures to photographs, participants were asked to count backward as a distraction, moving the blood to areas of the brain not connected to emotion.

Researchers found increased activity in the pathway near the base of the brain associated with profound cocaine addiction, as well as in a region associated with nicotine addiction.

"Romantic love is an addiction. It's a very wonderful addiction when things are going well but a perfectly horrible addiction when things are going poorly," said Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and one of the study authors.

Upon viewing a photo of a former partner, participants' brains also showed heightened activity in the regions associated with, respectively, decision-making, physical pain and deep attachment to another person.

"When rejected, you're still madly in love with this person. You're really craving them," she said. "You're obsessively thinking about them. You're in physical and emotional pain. You're feeling deeply attached to the person, and you're also really desperately trying to figure out what happened here."

This experience does not necessarily lead to unhealthy behaviors, she said. Other issues, such as impulse control, would feed into disruptive actions such as stalking.

Some people handle rejection better than others, and research should be done to see what differentiates those people, Fisher said.

Fisher's previous research found that being happily in love was linked to brain activity associated with the rush of cocaine. In other words, if you have a partner you're in love with, it's like you are on cocaine, but if that person has rejected you, you crave the high of the drug.

Mel Brake of Springfield, Pennsylvania, was the one who ended a relationship that had been on and off for six years, but he also relates to the feeling of love as an addiction.

He had been saving voice mails from his former girlfriend since their breakup four years ago but didn't feel completely comfortable hearing her voice on them until last week.

"In a sense, it's sort of like somehow I preconditioned my mind to say, no matter how bad the relationship was, I was in love," said Brake, 38, an editor and publisher with his company, Mel Brake Press Inc. "I needed this person."

If love is an addiction, getting over a lost love should be akin to quitting smoking, Fisher said. Don't write, don't call, don't show up, throw out letters, and don't try to be friends with that person for a while. Don't ruminate; instead, try new things. Novelty drives up dopamine in the brain, which can help you feel better.

Devoting himself to his passion for art -- singing, poetry and other writing -- helped Brake confront the hardest feelings in the wake of the breakup.

Dailakis also did more poetry-writing after his first love dropped him and went to the gym more, trying to channel his depression, anger and regret into something positive. He found that he even liked being single.

He recommends that people in that position spend more time alone and with friends.

Today, he is "possibly" dating someone new.

As for the girl who turned him away so long ago, Dailakis doesn't hold any grudge today.

"I did develop a really cynical sense of humor, I guess, but to me, cynicism is just another word for reality," he said. –CNN Health

Allegedly "actual pictures of a Wal-Mart" in China

America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution-Part I

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several "stimulus" bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about "global warming" for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, "prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."

The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg's tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate -- most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class's prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans -- a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents -- lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace's taunt "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers -- easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.

Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America's regime class -- relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans -- and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation's unpredictable future. More on politics below.

The Ruling Class

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a "newocracy": a "new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy." In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic" sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

The Faith

Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?

The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one's self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it "the old serpent, you work I'll eat." But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.

It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by "science." By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes' deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach's rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx's formulation, that ethical thought is "superstructural" to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called "all men are created equal" "a self-evident lie," much of America's educated class had already absorbed the "scientific" notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class's religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked "can't you let anything alone?" he answered with, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill." Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world's examples and the world's reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to "teach [them] to elect good men."

World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people's eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans' lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.

The cultural divide between the "educated class" and the rest of the country opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the "vanguard of the proletariat," the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Times and National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples' ways and to build "the new man." Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation. The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally, as well as the subsequent hit movie Inherit the Wind, were the occasion for what one might have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, some American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American narrow-mindedness against Wilson's benevolent genius.

Franklin Roosevelt brought the Chautauqua class into his administration and began the process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America's problems in technocratic terms. America's problems would be fixed by a "brain trust" (picked by him). His New Deal's solutions -- the alphabet-soup "independent" agencies that have run America ever since -- turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists. As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.

As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself "scientific," this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in "scientific" terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno's widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the "F scale" (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey's Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers's Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved "scientifically" that conservatives were maladjusted ne'er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled "Liberalism and Personality," following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)

The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "God and guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said "what everybody knows is true." Confident "knowledge" that "some of us, the ones who matter," have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.

The Agenda: Power

Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle's view of democracy. Hence our ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government -- meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class's solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.

Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing "alternative energy," our ruling class created arguably the world's biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a "green agenda," because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in "climate change." At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any "green jobs" thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies -- that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on "global warming" is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people's energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of America as "private wealth amidst public squalor" (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest's complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).

The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class's economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its "system." But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and "best practices" that constitute "the system" become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up dissatisfied with what "the system" offers. But when he gave up his money, he gave up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost ofcare. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run "guaranteed retirement accounts." If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?

Who Depends on Whom?

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country's needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make no law..." says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of "responsible parties." Hence the ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.

Consider representation. Following Wilson, American Progressives have always wanted to turn the U.S. Congress from the role defined by James Madison's Federalist #10, "refine and enlarge the public's view," to something like the British Parliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain's electoral system -- like ours, single members elected in historic districts by plurality vote -- had made members of Parliament responsive to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson's time the growing importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hence whoever controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.

In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard "one man, one vote" for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of "gerrymandering," concentrating the opposition party's voters into as few districts as possible while placing one's own voters into as many as possible likely to yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today's Congress consists more and more of persons who represent their respective party establishments -- not nearly as much as in Britain, but heading in that direction. Once districts are gerrymandered "safe" for one party or another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count more on elected legislators to toe the party line.

To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable. In America ever more since the 1930s -- elsewhere in the world this practice is ubiquitous and long-standing -- government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society's sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector's true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.

Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical Association (AMA) strongly supported the new medical care law, which the administration touted as having the support of "the doctors" even though the vast majority of America's 975,000 physicians opposed it. Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive providers of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the government for their services. The millions of dollars that flow thereby to the AMA's officers keep them in line, while the impracticality of doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion in the doctor ranks. When the administration wanted to bolster its case that the state of Arizona's enforcement of federal immigration laws was offensive to Hispanics, the National Association of Chiefs of Police -- whose officials depend on the administration for their salaries -- issued a statement that the laws would endanger all Americans by raising Hispanics' animosity. This reflected conversations with the administration rather than a vote of the nation's police chiefs.

Similarly, modern labor unions are ever less bunches of workers banding together and ever more bundled under the aegis of an organization chosen jointly by employers and government. Prototypical is the Service Employees International Union, which grew spectacularly by persuading managers of government agencies as well as of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the SEIU would relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by workers' secret ballots did the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace, but rather by such deals, or by the union presenting what it claims are cards from workers approving of representation. The union gets 2 percent of the workers' pay, which it recycles as contributions to the Democratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public employees. The union's leadership is part of the ruling class's beating heart.

The point is that a doctor, a building contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts in today's America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters.

Ordinary people have also gone a long way toward losing equal treatment under law. The America described in civics books, in which no one could be convicted or fined except by a jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated today's administrative state -- in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today's legal -- administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever "agency policy" they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any "agency policy" you will be informed that it was formulated with input from "the public." But not from the likes of you.

Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them -- in favor of the decider's discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as "interstate commerce" and "due process," then transmuting others, e.g., "search and seizure," into "privacy." Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of "privacy" with a "penumbra" that it deemed "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution's limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the "positive rights" they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.

-Continue Next Week

Part II

Did You Know That …

--80% of the fish sold [and eaten] in the U.S. is imported?

--the FDA and US Dept of Agriculture inspects only 1% of fish sold in US markets, and of the
ones which are inspected, most are toxic and unfit for consumption?

Watch the video below ... and you'll want to check closely where fish came from before dining on it.

Source Unknown

Toxic Seafood Warning

Locally Speaking

BofA Online Account With Fee

Bank of America Corp plans to offer an online bank account that charges an $8.95 monthly fee for paper statements and using tellers, as it looks for ways to make up for income lost because of new regulations.

As part of the new account targeted at primarily online users, Bank of America customers would be steered toward using automated teller machines and online banking for basic services like making deposits and withdrawals that would be free to use with the account.

New U.S. banking rules implemented July 1 cap overdraft fees, among others, spurring some analysts to speculate that free checking accounts may be doomed to extinction.

For two decades banks have offered free checking accounts, and charged high fees for overdrafts to help cover administrative costs.

Banks may now instead follow Bank of America's lead and try to make checking accounts cheaper to administer, instead of doing away with free checking altogether, analysts said.

"This is a smarter way, maybe a more thoughtful way, than what I think a lot were predicting," said Jefferson Harralson, an analyst at investment bank Keefe, Bruyette and Woods Inc.

A Bank of America spokeswoman said customers would still be able to consult with tellers on banking questions without being charged, and the company is introducing the account nationally to respond to changing consumer banking preferences.

Bank of America's ebanking account is currently in a pilot phase in Georgia, initiated in November 2009. It will be introduced nationwide in August.

Consumer banking chief Joe Price and other Bank of America senior executives have previously said the company is examining its options to replace fee income lost due to new regulations.

Wells Fargo & Co eliminated free checking for new bank customers on July 1, introducing a $5 monthly fee on its most basic account.

That fee would be waived, if a Wells Fargo customer met certain account requirements, such as keeping a high enough minimum balance.

Bank of America shares closed at $15.67 Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange. –Yahoo News

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Myrtle Beach Sends Refunds For Motorcycle Helmet Tickets

Myrtle Beach has sent out refunds to those who paid fines when they received tickets for not wearing motorcycle helmets, and a second set of checks went out this week for interest on the fines.

The city paid a total of $13,964 in fine refunds for 141 tickets issued while the helmet law was in effect, from February 2009 to this summer, when the state Supreme Court ruled the law was invalid.

City spokesman Mark Kruea said the city also sent out an additional $869 in interest, figured at 7.25 percent and depending on how long ago the city collected the fines.

“The interest checks were between 50 cents and $10.50,” he said.

Including mailing the checks, the city spent nearly $16,000 issuing the refunds and interest payments. –Sun News

Ragbag Headliners

'Google Me' Site May Be In The Works

If online reports are to be believed, Google could be cooking up a rival for Facebook -- and bringing the maker of popular social games like "FarmVille" with them.

Google Games, built around some sort of partnership with casual-gaming company Zynga, is in the works and would be part of a larger social network called Google Me, according to technology blog Tech Crunch.

Statements from notable internet players, including Digg founder Kevin Rose and a former Facebook chief technical officer, have suggested in recent weeks that the search-engine giant is working on a social network geared toward rivaling Facebook. –CNN Tech

What Is Obama Thinking on Arizona?

Why would the Obama administration take on not only the state of Arizona but the majority of Americans? Perhaps increasing Hispanic voter turnout is one possible explanation. Consider this from the Washington Post yesterday:

One senior strategist, speaking candidly about his concerns on the condition of anonymity, noted that white voters made up 79 percent of the 2006 midterm electorate, while they made up 74 percent of the 2008 vote. If the white percentage returns to its 2006 level, that means there will be 3 million more white voters than if it stayed at its 2008 levels. That scenario, said the source, "would generate massive losses" for House and Senate Democrats in November because of Obama's standing with that demographic.

To avoid such losses, the Democratic National Committee has committed to spending tens of millions of dollars to re-create (or come somewhere near re-creating) the 2008 election model, in which Democrats relied heavily on higher-than-normal turnout from young people and strong support from African American and Hispanic voters.

Of course, re-creating the 2008 election model in a midterm election where Obama himself is not on the ballot will likely prove impossible. And tolerating illegal immigration is not a good way to turn out black voters. But it might give you a window into Democratic thinking on this issue. –The American Spectator

By W. James Antle, III

“In order to never get cheated,
you must demand respect.”

~ Author Unknown ~

The Largest Tax Hikes In History

In just six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:

(N.B. This version of the document contains even more tax hikes than the original version did)

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief

In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families. These will all expire on January 1, 2011:

Personal income tax rates will rise. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates. The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:

- The 10% bracket rises to an expanded 15%
- The 25% bracket rises to 28%
- The 28% bracket rises to 31%
- The 33% bracket rises to 36%
- The 35% bracket rises to 39.6%

Higher taxes on marriage and family. The “marriage penalty” (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of income. The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child. The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level. The dependent care and adoption tax credits will be cut.

The return of the Death Tax. This year, there is no death tax. For those dying on or after January 1 2011, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million. A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones.

Higher tax rates on savers and investors. The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 20 percent in 2011. The dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 39.6 percent in 2011. These rates will rise another 3.8 percent in 2013.

Second Wave: Obamacare

There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011. They include:

The Tanning Tax. This went into effect on July 1st of this year. It imposes a new, 10% excise tax on getting a tan at a tanning salon. There is no exemption for tanners making less than $250,000 per year.

The “Medicine Cabinet Tax” Thanks to Obamacare, Americans will no longer be able to use health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA), or health reimbursement (HRA) pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).

The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. This provision of Obamacare increases the additional tax on non-medical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10 percent.

Brand Name Drug Tax. Starting next year, there will be a multi-billion dollar tax assessment imposed on name-brand drug manufacturers. This tax, like all excise taxes, will raise the price of medicine, hurting everyone.

Economic Substance Doctrine. The IRS is now empowered to disallow perfectly-legal tax deductions and maneuvers merely because it judges that the deduction or action lacks “economic substance.” This is obviously an arbitrary empowerment of IRS agents.

Employer Reporting of Health Insurance Costs on a W-2. This will start for W-2s in the 2011 tax year. While not a tax increase in itself, it makes it very easy for Congress to tax employer-provided healthcare benefits later.

Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes

When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise—the AMT won’t be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired. These major items include:

The AMT will ensnare over 28 million families, up from 4 million last year. According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Congress’ failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families—rising from 4 million last year to 28.5 million. These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level. The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers.

Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear. Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or “depreciate”) equipment purchases up to $250,000. This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be “depreciated.”

Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses. There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place. The biggest is the loss of the “research and experimentation tax credit,” but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.

Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced. The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available. Tax credits for education will be limited. Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses. Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut. Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed. The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families.

Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed. Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA. This contribution also counts toward an annual “required minimum distribution.” This ability will no longer be there.

Read more by clicking here.

From Ryan Ellis-ATR

“I Fought For You” By The Sound Tank

What Does The Morality Of Americans Have To Do With Immigration In America?

If you have ever taken a course on child psychology, you may remember Lawrence Kohlberg's research on the stages of moral development. Kohlberg was a Harvard professor who presented scripted dilemmas to children in different settings to test their moral reasoning. One such dilemma was the story of a woman who was dying of a rare form of cancer. When her husband had no way to afford the high-priced drug that could cure her, he broke into a laboratory and stole it. Kohlberg was not interested in evaluating childrens' conclusions about whether the man's actions were right or wrong, but rather in analyzing the kind of moral reasoning that informed their decisions. In his research he (and others who followed him) found that, as individuals mature, they pass through different levels of moral development. At the most elementary or "pre-conventional" level that is common in young children, an action is judged to be wrong if you will get caught, or right if it serves your interests. At the middle, or "conventional" level, moral reasoning is guided by considerations of "law and order." At this level, the overriding concern is for adherence to the law. The third, and highest level of 'post-conventional' moral reasoning has two stages: first, an understanding of social mutuality and concern for the welfare of others, and secondly, adherence to individual conscience and respect for a universal principle of justice. Kohlberg noted that this third level of reasoning is not achieved by a majority of adults.

Analysis of much of the recent angry rhetoric over "illegal immigration" suggests that many Americans are stuck at the conventional level of moral development, in which the statement "they broke the law" becomes the main criterion for crafting policy responses. If you Google the phrase "what about illegal don't you understand," you will find thousands of adherents to this level of reasoning.

Considering the immigration dilemma at a higher level of moral reasoning doesn't mean that there is one simple, 'right' policy response. However, it does require examining the root causes of undocumented immigration and its consequences through the lens of more universal principles of justice. If we study those root causes, it's easy to see that our own government policies have produced the problem, rather than contempt for the law on the part of those who enter without authorization or who overstay their visas.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, greatly facilitated the free flow of goods and capital across U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, but there was no concomitant reduction of restrictions on the entry of labor. At the same time, there has been a dramatic and increasing need for young workers in the United States, as Americans age and as we attain higher levels of education that make us disdain crucial jobs in many service industries. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is jobs that require only on-the-job training that are increasing most rapidly in the United States. Instead of responding to this need by increasing the allocation of employment visas to young, blue collar workers, we have kept the numbers at paltry levels that make it virtually impossible for millions of willing workers from Mexico, Central America or other countries to enter legally.

Only one percent of all employment-based visas are issued to low skilled workers. In other words, for these individuals, there is no "line" to get into. Instead, our government policies have led to a ritualized game of "Gotcha," in which immigrants are drawn to the U.S. because of the prospect of jobs that have gone unfilled by American workers; but once they cross the border, they are increasingly victimized by public anger and by mean-spirited local ordinances and laws. The newly passed law in Arizona that makes it a crime to be present without a visa or for a legal resident to give a ride to someone known to be undocumented has just raised the stakes in this debate by furthering the game of "Gotcha" at a very low level of moral reasoning. –The Huffington Post

By Katherine Fennelly, Professor, University of Minnesota

The Demise Of English?

The other day I was at my friends house and he pulled down three boxes of noodles. Something about the box caught my eye and upon closer examination I realized that I’ve not really paid attention to labels while shopping. Look closely at the pictures in this slideshow. Do you see what caught my attention?



You may have already noticed this, but just in case you didn’t, when did Spanish labeling begin to show up, in bold lettering at that, on our products on American store shelves?

I’m sorry, but not here in America!

Hey, welcome to America, but hold up! I don’t mind anyone holding onto their culture or being bilingual. I’m bilingual. What disturbs me is the fact that we are catering more and more to a foreign language, Spanish, and beginning to make it the “American” way. To this I say, HELL to the NO! Not here in America!! It’s not my fault that someone cannot read or speak ENGLISH!!!

It’s time to make ENGLISH the national language of our country and before you are citizened into our country you must be REQUIRED to read and speak the language of your adopted nation … The United States of America. As my mother often told us ... “we must blend in” I say to all who becomes an American … blend in! Learn to read and speak the language of our country.

The U.S. National Anthem

NOTE: The piece below was an interchange on the nationally televised program, "Meet The Press", therefore, it had been fully captured and recorded on tape, and everything that was said during the program can not be denied.

On Sunday, 07 September 2008 at 11:48:04 EST while on national TV's "Meet the Press", the retired US Air Force General, William "Bill" Ginn, stated that according to United States Code Title 36, Chapter 10, Section 171. . .during the rendition [playing and/or singing] of the U.S. National Anthem, when the U.S. flag is displayed, every civilian/non-military US citizen present is expected to face the flag, stand at attention, and place one's right hand over the heart---or at the very least, stand and face the flag; those in military uniform are, of course, required to face the flag, stand at attention, and maintain a hand salute to the flag until after the very last note of the anthem has been completely played and/or sang.

Then, General Ginn turned to the then Democrat Party presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama, and the General asked Obama to explain why he doesn't follow protocol when the U.S. National Anthem is played.

The then Senator Obama's reply was as follows:

"As I've [previously] said about the flag pin, I don't want to be perceived as taking sides. There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression. The anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, 'the bombs bursting in air' and all that sort of thing.

The National Anthem should be swapped for something less parochial and less bellicose. I like the song, 'I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing'. If that were our anthem, then, I might salute it. In my opinion, we should consider reinventing our National Anthem as well as redesigning our Flag to better offer our enemies hope and love.

It's my intention, if elected, to disarm America to the level of acceptance to our Middle East brethren. If we as a nation of warring people conduct ourselves like the nations of Islam, where peace prevails---perhaps, a state or period of mutual accord could exist between our governments.

When I become President, I will seek a pact of agreement to end hostilities between those who have been at war or in a state of enmity, and a freedom from disquieting oppressive thoughts. We as a nation have placed upon the nations of Islam an unfair injustice, which is why my wife disrespects the [U.S.] flag, and she and I have attended several flag-burning ceremonies in the past. Of course now, I have found myself about to become the President of the United States, and [so] I have put my hatred aside. I will use my power to bring change to this nation, and offer the people a new path. My wife and I look forward to becoming our country's first black family. Indeed, change is about to overwhelm the United States of America."

Locally Speaking

Court Rules Against Freestyle Music Park

A federal judge awarded a Utah company about $14 million on Tuesday after Freestyle Music Park failed to respond to a lawsuit, according to court documents.

Tetra Financial Group filed a suit in September seeking money for outstanding leasing payments, taxes and fees owed by the park. Freestyle failed to answer the suit, leading to a default judgment to be issued in Tetra's favor. The $14 million also carries 18 percent interest until it is paid in full, the judgment said.

Freestyle closed last year after a disappointing summer season and the park will not reopen unless it finds new investors, according to park officials. The park continues to pursue new investment, said Nate Fata, an attorney for the park.

Tetra and other creditors may not be paid despite judgments against Freestyle if the park does not have have the money to do so, lawyers unaffiliated with the case say. If Freestyle fails to gain new investors, creditors would need to file liens or foreclose on the parks' property in South Carolina to attempt to regain losses.

Fata said he did not know how the park plans to react to default judgments.

"Lots of companies might have judgments against them, but they might not have any cash," Fata said. –Sun News

Geography Of A Woman

Between 18 and 22, a woman is like Africa . Half discovered, half wild, fertile and naturally Beautiful!

Between 23 and 30, a woman is like Europe .Well developed and open to trade, especially for someone of real value.

Between 31 and 35, a woman is like Spain , very hot, relaxed and convinced of her own beauty.

Between 36 and 40, a woman is like Greece , gently aging but still a warm and desirable place to visit.

Between 41 and 50, a woman is like Great Britain, with a glorious and all conquering past.

Between 51 and 60, a woman is like Israel, has been through war, doesn't make the same mistakes twice, takes care of business.

Between 61 and 70, a woman is like Canada, self-preserving, but open to meeting new people.

After 70, she becomes Tibet .. Wildly beautiful, with a mysterious past and the wisdom of the ages. An adventurous spirit and a thirst for spiritual knowledge.

The Geography Of A Man

Between 1 and 80, a man is like Iran , ruled by nuts.

The End.

Author Unknown

The Honeymoon Is Really Over

You know the honeymoon is really over when the comedians start making fun.

The liberals are asking us to give Obama time. We agree, and think 25 to life would be appropriate. --Jay Leno

America needs Obama-care like Nancy Pelosi needs a Halloween mask. --Jay Leno

Q: Have you heard about McDonald's' new Obama Value Meal?

A: Order anything you like and the guy behind you has to pay for it. --Conan O'Brien

Q: What does Barack Obama call lunch with a convicted felon?

A: A fund raiser. --Jay Leno

Q: What's the difference between Obama's cabinet and a penitentiary?

A: One is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers, and threats to society. The other is for housing prisoners. --David Letterman

Q: If Nancy Pelosi and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it started to sink, who would be saved?

A: America! --Jimmy Fallon

Q: What's the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?

A: Bo has papers. --Jimmy Kimmel

Q: What was the most positive result of the "Cash for Clunkers" program?

A: It took 95% of the Obama bumper stickers off the road. --David Letterman

Americans Are NOT Stupid

6 Surprising Benefits Of Sex

Sex doesn’t just feel good; it builds your immune system and can put you in a better mood, too.

Even though the threat of the swine flu has faded for now, it’s still important to keep your immune systems healthy. Does this mean doctors should be prescribing sex? Well, maybe it does. Here are six surprising ways sex can boost your health.

It can boost your immune system

You’ve heard it a million times: Wash your hands often, cover your mouth when you sneeze. But how about this? Kick your immune system into high gear with biweekly sex sessions. Researchers at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, PA, found that having sex once or twice a week boosts the immune system. They found a 30 percent increase in immunoglobulin A (IgA) proteins in people who had sex once or twice a week, compared to those who didn’t have sex. IgA proteins act as antibodies, binding to pathogens when they first enter the body and summoning the immune system to destroy them.

It’s a must-have for a man’s health

Men who have sex three or more times a week cut their risk of suffering heart attack and stroke in half, according to research out of Queens University in Belfast. Beyond that, having sex regularly may protect men against prostate cancer. A National Cancer Institute survey of 30,000 middle-aged men found that those who averaged 21 ejaculations a month showed a 33 percent lower risk of prostate cancer than those with 4 to 7 ejaculations a month.

It can melt away pain

Ah, the power of orgasm. As it turns out, enjoying the big O also sends a shockwave of oxytocin, known as the love hormone, into your system. This sends an army of endorphins into your system, which can alleviate arthritis pain. Research has also shown sex can lessen the aches associated with menstrual cramps, while also helping to regulate a woman’s monthly cycle.

It banishes bad moods

A study published in the journal Fertility and Sterility suggests taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants, commonly known as SSRIs, could not only cause sexual dysfunction in men (such as trouble ejaculating), but could also cause genetic damage to their sperm. While medicine can be crucial for the severely depressed, strategies like exercise, and yes, regular sex, have been successfully boosting moods for centuries. That’s because sex unleashes a wave of feel-good endorphins that help ward off depressive symptoms.

It can make you look younger and live longer

Research released earlier this decade made big headlines after finding that having sex several times a week on a regular basis can make people look four to seven years younger. Other studies have shown it doesn’t just appear to turn back the hands of time, but also can make you live longer. On top of that, it keeps your bod in top-notch shape. The average 30-minute tussle between the sheets burns about 200 calories, all the while chiseling your tummy and backside (or other muscles, depending on your position of choice).

It makes you $100,000 happier.

Having sex regularly makes people happier than earning more money. In fact, a study done by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that marriages featuring frequent sex left couples feeling as happy as earning an extra $100,000 annually. –MSN

By Leah Zerbe and the editors of Rodale.com

America's Official Language

Hillbilly Mirror

After living in the remote wilderness of Kentucky all his life, an old hillbilly decided it was time to visit the big city. In one of the stores, he picked up a mirror and looked in it. Not ever having seen one before, he remarked at the image staring back at him, "How about that! Here's a picture of my daddy."

He bought the mirror thinking it was a picture of his daddy, but on the way home he remembered his wife didn't like his father, so he hung it in the barn, and every morning before leaving for the fields, he would go there and look at it.

His wife began to get suspicious of these many trips to the barn.

One day after her husband left, she searched the barn and found the mirror. As she looked into the glass, she fumed, "So that's the ugly bitch he's runnin' around with!"

Author Unknown

The Star Spangled Banner-Our National Anthem

America The Beautiful

Blogging Behind Vietnam's Bamboo Cyberwall

Helmet under her arm, Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh arrives after traveling 450 kilometers by motorbike, evading the security police, to tell CNN the story of her imprisonment for blogging in Vietnam.

"The first three days I was scared for myself," she said about her 10 days in prison, during which officers repeatedly asked her about her writing and if she received cash from anti-government groups outside the country.

Vietnamese like Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh are embracing the internet in full force. There are 24 million internet users right now, nearly a third of the population. A decade ago there were 200,000. Internet cafes have popped up all over Ho Chi Minh City, and social networking sites are increasing in popularity along with mobile internet use.

"Internet life grows so fast," said a popular blogger, who requested anonymity out of concerns for his safety. "Even I, one of the bloggers, could not imagine how fast this could be.

"And nearly everyone, each Vietnamese, has their own blog."

Like elsewhere, most Vietnamese blogs deal with life, work, humor or technology. But a group of bloggers here also focus on a more dangerous territory in this one-party Communist state: They write about local corruption, land seizures and the increasing influence of China. They complain about the lack of multiparty democracy, too.

In a nutshell, they blog about the sort of issues that can get you into deep trouble in today's Vietnam.

This is something that Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh -- who blogs under the Vietnamese pen name Me Nam or Mother Mushroom -- knows well.

Her blog includes writings about her daily life and pictures of her young daughter, but she also expresses her outspoken views against China's intervention in her country, including Beijing's financing of a controversial bauxite mine in the Central Highlands.

Those views led to her arrest and imprisonment for ten days in August, for, she said, "abuse of democratic freedoms and infringing on the national benefit."

When I first got in touch with Nguyen nearly a year later, her phone and movements were still being monitored. E-mail, I had been told, was the best way to get in touch.

"I am willing to tell my story to you," she wrote to me, saying she would travel from Nha Trang to Ho Chi Minh City to meet us.

Twelve hours later, she sent another e-mail. "Can you sure filming is OK and safe for us?" She feared the security police would prevent her from coming, but she would try.

The next day she arrived, and over the next two hours she told her story.

"I did not know what happened. But the fourth and fifth and the sixth day when they asked me the same questions, I was scared for my mom and my daughter and my husband. I didn't want to think about them when I was put in prison, because if I ever think about them I wanted to give everything to come to my family."

As a condition of her release, she agreed to give up blogging, posting a handwritten letter on her site in which she explained that she loved her country, but that the government felt this was the wrong way. After being denied a passport two months later though, she decided to begin again.

"I write another entry on my blog, that I gave up already, but they didn't leave me alone," she said. "I have to take the right to say what I think."

What does she think the government will do if they see her telling her story on CNN?

"I think that they have to think about this," she said. "Because I just tell the truth ... If they arrest me again because I send a message outside to the world, I am not scared. This means that they show to (the) world that we don't have freedom like they say."

When contacted by CNN about its policy on freedom of expression on the internet, Vietnam's Foreign Ministry provided the following written response.

"In Vietnam, freedom of information and freedom of speech are guaranteed and practiced in accordance with the law. Such concern as 'government threatens free expression online and an open internet' is groundless."

Nguyen and I have been keeping in touch by e-mail since her story aired on CNN International television one week ago.

"Thank you so much for the film ...," she wrote me on Saturday. "Thank you for coming to report about our country."

And at the bottom of her automatic signature, the same as on every e-mail I have received from her, it read: "Who will speak if you don't?" -CNN Tech

America will never be destroyed from the outside.
If we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

~Abraham Lincoln~

I’m Proud To Be
An American Citizen

“Proud to be an American” by Lee Greenwood