Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty, (rafflaw), Guest Blogger
Since Professor Turley is snowbound in the Winter Wonderland, the weekend warriors are back to bring your blood pressure up!
I have been critical of the Right Wing Mass Media for its continual banging of the drum of hate towards President Obama and the Democrats in general. Now, there are times that the Democrats and President Obama should be called on the carpet. For instance, for not confronting the Bush torture crowd and for claiming that the President has the authority to kill American citizens without due process, just to name a couple. However, the civility that President Obama has asked for in his latest speeches, have gone unheeded by many on the Right and some on the Left.
We all succumb to the emotion at times and say things that we shouldn’t, but the Right seems to carry these statements to an extreme and they are unapologetic for it. Yesterday, fans of Rush Limbaugh faxed death threats to California State Representative and San Francisco Mayoral candidate, Leland Yee, because Lee had requested Rush to apologize for Rush’s ill-tempered and racially charged comments about the Chinese President during his recent visit to the United States. Rush mocked President Hu Jintao’s speech and Mr. Yee “..said Limbaugh owes the Chinese community an apology for his “pointless and ugly offense.” ‘. http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/crime/2011/01/leland-yee-receives-racist-death-threat
You can guess the result of State Rep. Lee’s request for an apology from Rush Limbaugh. He continued his rant and mocked Rep. Lee on the next program. I know some of you will want to know why the authorities believe that Rush’s fans are behind the death threats. Take a look at one of the faxes on the link below and you will understand. Rep. Lee received similar threats in April of last year that are also being investigated.
I would put the fax on here, but the language is a bit “rough”. See below for a link to the faxes in question. Those who continue to voice their ugly rhetoric in the mass media have a responsibility for the result of that rhetoric. I for one think they are getting the response that they are looking for. What do you think?
http://www.sfexaminer.com/files/blog_files/Yee%20threat%20flier.pdf
Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty, (rafflaw), Guest Blogger
Chan,
once again you are off on your claims. There is a Social Security Trust fund where all of the SS taxes go into. If you were older you might be more interested in finding out about it. It is pay as you go, but you have to put those funds somewhere.
Chan you are living in a dream world. I am an attorney, but I make nowhere near that kind of money. The stock market is great when it is up. What happened to people’s 401k’s due to the Bush recession? They plummeted and if they had just retired when that recession hit, they were screwed. The Social Security payments are a safety net for people in their retirement years. The IRA’s and individual investing can help, but they are subject to great variance in the market. You are also wrong about medicare and medicaid. The government system is far more efficient than the private systems because the profit middle men are taken out of the equation. When you have to pay medical insurance for a family or a business and see how it increases every year far beyond inflation, you might be able to understand. Don’t make assumptions about professions and people in those professions.
Greed is good and profit is even better. The people who make their money honestly, which is the vast amount of the human population, are decent people even if they are millionaires.
They earned it, they made my life easier.
If you like your life style with decent cars, great music systems, passenger jets, modern medicine, good food then go hug a
wealthy entrepreneur and thank him for his service to mankind.
gYGES:
I would think one would have to define what a looter is in order to make that distinction.
A looter, at least in my lexicon, would be some entity which takes from people who earn their living honestly.
As long as someone makes their money honestly, how is it a problem if they have a billion dollars? Do you think they took that money from you, me and others? If you do I would like to know how they did it.
Rafflaw:
“It is for the sole purpose of getting the 2 Plus Trillion dollars in the Social Security trust fund into the hands of the very Banksters that we have been talking about.”
there is no money in the social security “trust fund”. It is pay as you go. I wish there were, we would be in pretty good shape if there were.
I am well aware of the 401K and other retirement plans. But around 15% of your pay is taken every year to put into social security and unemployment and medicare. The portion your employer pays is money you don’t get that could be paid to you.
You are a lawyer so you probably make over 100k per year and have been for many years. Lets go back 30 years and say you put away 10k per year as an average, the money you didn’t have to pay to government if SS was private. You would now have, assuming a modest growth rate of 8.5%, $1,242,000. You could invest that at 5% and have a retirement income of $62k per year and when you died you would be able to leave the $1.2 million to your grandchildren.
Compare that to about $24,000 per year for social security with no money to leave to your grandchildren. Furthermore the $1.2 million in the bank is used by other people to start businesses thereby increasing the prosperity of all. The current system takes money out of the market and makes it hard to find money to start new ventures.
Those evil banksters (and some are evil I wont deny that) take your money and find places to invest thereby increasing the overall well being of society. Government takes from society for the most part and provides relatively few benefits. Social welfare is the largest portion of our economy followed by defense (which is a legitimate constitutional function).
Privatized social security has more benefit to society than our current system does. The same would be true of privatized unemployment insurance and medicare/medicaid.
Buddha,
I stand corrected and I will try not to use facts or logic or life experience in the future! Then again, maybe not. 🙂
Gyges/raff,
Now don’t go confusing the boy’s ideological brainwashing with anything like facts or logic.
He’s paying a lot of money (or more than likely, mom and dad are paying a lot of money) to maintain his delusion that he can be infinitely greedy and selfish while still being a good person.
Gyges,
well said. Only “My” greed is good according to Chan.
Chan,
“Most people I have met on welfare are perfectly able to work, why should an able bodied individual receive money from others? ”
Let me tell you about this shaggy dog I saw the other day, he was on welfare and perfectly able to work.
Also, I’m a little confused. Greed is good when you’re greedy, but not when “looters” are greedy, do I have that right? Assuming I do, how do you determine who’s greed is good? Is it something like: As the likely-hood of the person being Chan approaches 1 the goodness of the greed approaches infinity?
Corporatism and the “greed is good” philosophy are all just castles made of sand . . .
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF4-r2MpRMs&w=480&h=390]
The only question remaining is how many people will they drown as they fall into the sea, eventually.
Chan,
First of all, your comment that if you are sick you should get unemployment really upset me! Do you realize that when you are working and paying taxes, you are paying into the unemployment fund along with your employer. The workers who are laid off are entitled to compensation from that fund. I hope you don’t have to experience being laid off or fired. It is no fun and most of the time it is out of the control of the employee.
Secondly, we already have private retirement insurance plans and they are called IRA’s and Roth IRA’s. You are welcome to contribute your own funds into them now. The government even made it more advantageous to covert regular IRA funds into Roth IRA funds recently. This BS that we need to privatize Social SEcurity is just that…BS. It is for the sole purpose of getting the 2 Plus Trillion dollars in the Social Security trust fund into the hands of the very Banksters that we have been talking about.
Your friend who sells hot dogs should jump through hoops because I have seen what food borne illness can do to people. Corporations and businesses take short cuts at times to make a buck and government should make sure they are doing it safely. You can’t and shouldn’t rely on a business to watch out for a customers best interests. You mentioned that young people like you can live on $200 a week if youi have to. Of course, that is if you are living with Mom and Dad. You can’t rent a place on that kind of money, unless you are in a college town and living in some of the dumps I lived in during college.
Chan:
“Who has created the environment that hampers profit making?”
Last year, corporations posted record profits – hardly representative of “hampering” profits, no?
“Most people I have met on welfare are perfectly able to work, why should an able bodied individual receive money from others? Why is it societies responsibility to take care of someone who can take care of himself?”
That is a fallacy. A strawman so to speak so I will take your comment that most people you have met on welfare are able-bodied. Most people on welfare need welfare. Yes, there are people who abuse the system but no system is 100% iron-clad. Thus, it makes no sense to punish the majority based on the actions of a minority, particularly when it comes to peoples lives. And, I’m not going to touch the privatization issue – we see everyday how well “private insurance” does business.
“We have thousands and thousands of pages of regulations but still we get banking scandals and Bernie Madoff. Why?”
It all started with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Further deregulation by Congress set up the disaster from there because the banks were “too big to fail.” We found out differently, didn’t we? And Congress wants further deregulation – go figure.
Tootie:
“Well now I’m going to call them filthy because I think it’s going to really annoy rafflaw and that seems like fun to me. I cannot remember why I used the word filthy. Maybe it was on this thread? (someone might remind me where)
If you run across any other adjective that might annoy the filthy leftists more, and it is family friendly, please let me know.”
Wow. I must have slept through the lesson in catechism where Jesus said to “go forth and be childish and petty.”
Kudos, Toots. Jesus must be so proud of you!
Buckeye:
“The hardest to take are the recently unemployed and panicked young people who have never faced want before. It’s heartbreaking.”
Why? They can get a job at Wal Mart or cut grass or do odd jobs or move to another location where there is work. The young should have it the easiest, it is the very young and the elderly who have it the hardest.
You shouldn’t feel bad for able bodied young adults, we can get along fine on a couple of hundred dollars a week if we need to. I have a friend that sells hot dogs from a corner stand at lunch, he makes a bunch of money and he only works about 8 hours a day. Has a pretty good hot dog to.
However he had to jump through hoops to satisfy the health department and the local government. He laughs about it because he tells me that his customers are safe because he wants repeat business. He is very attentive to cleanliness and making sure he has the best dogs and brats he can find.
Rafflaw/Buckeye:
I have no problem paying some taxes and “old” guys like you should receive your SSI and medicare since you did pay into them.
And the people who actually cannot work because of illness, they should be helped.
However what is wrong with private retirement insurance and private unemployment insurance? Most people I have met on welfare are perfectly able to work, why should an able bodied individual receive money from others? Why is it societies responsibility to take care of someone who can take care of himself?
Too much money goes down the rat hole in Washington to no good end other than lining the pockets of some third world dictator or some rich farmer in Nebraska.
I don’t know how soon BBT gave the money back. For the banks that didn’t need it, the government just gave them working capital to place in some fund at 1 or 2%. I wish I could have gotten 25 billion for 1 week and got to keep the interest, that would have been around 24 million dollars at 5%/year. I could lived off that. Heck I would pay the government 15 million as a fee to be able to borrow that type of money for a week.
rafflaw
I would suggest anyone that has doubts should go work at their local Salvation Army or local food bank or soup kitchen for a day or two. Or look under their bridges where the homeless collect. Maybe they would understand. Maybe not.
The hardest to take are the recently unemployed and panicked young people who have never faced want before. It’s heartbreaking.
Buckeye,
That will be a tough question to answer for anyone who has a heart and cares about their neighbor. Some so-called conservatives don’t care that some of the programs that keep people going and in their homes can be expensive. However, until they have lost a job or two, or lost a relative or two, they may not be able to understand how vital some of our safety nets really are.
Slartibartfast
1, January 29, 2011 at 4:32 pm
Raff,
Slartibartfast: “Don’t ask me to explain this gravatar. Now I’m going back to make more pretty pictures…”
—
🙂 That (second) Gavatar always looked to me, kind of like someone’s derriere and upper legs so I never asked. Asking the question kind of says too much about the questioner, eh. I did wonder about it though 🙂
*****
From first posting: “… “The classical use of this is in tuning a radio – the incoming signal is mixed with that of a variable frequency oscillator in the radio which can then be tuned so that one of the heterodyne output frequencies is passed through a notch filter (a filter that allows only a specific frequency to pass) into the radio’s amplifier resulting in a clean signal which is then converted into audio.”
—
As I recall the combining and separation (using the ‘notch’ method)of frequencies was a crucial tool in the encrypted communication methods used in WWI(?) wasn’t it? That’s it, the only scrap of information I know about radio frequencies.
What goal is your research moving toward? Clarity of transmission/reception or? Or, are you some kind of double-secret, deep-cover, signal-specialist operative for our alien masters? Or dare I hope, a member of the resistance?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJC4R1uXDaE&w=480&h=390]
Chan L
I have no idea why you are asking me those questions, but I will tell you that I pay taxes, though not as much as when I was working full time, to pay for schools, police, firemen, libraries, and to keep the highways, water and sewer systems up.
When I was working, I paid taxes into Social Security and Medicare. Now I collect Social Security and use Medicare, though I try to take care of myself so I don’t have to use it so much, and I’m still paying medicare insurance (they take it out of my Social Security payments). That’s the way it works as you will know when/if you retire.
When I was working, I also paid taxes to keep all the departments of government working so I could work in safety and in a healthy environment, eat safe food, drink safe water, use safe medicine, and help the disabled and disfunctional to stay alive. I wasn’t happy that so much went to the defense department, but some had to and I was glad to pay for that, also.
Which of these things would you like to give up to reduce our taxes?
Chan,
Don’t worry about being a youngster because I wish I could knock a few decades off my age! I appreciate your honesty, but you are just guessing at the payback terms. If he didn’t want the money or BBT didn’t need it, they could have returned it in very short order. Many of the Big Banks repaid the money ahead of schedule, so BBT could have as well. It was the big banks and the brokerage houses that cried and cried to the Bush Administration that we need this money or the system will fail so your comments about BBT seem a little suspicious to say the least.
To answer your questions about the regulations you have to look at who is writing the legislation. The lobbyists for the big banks, like many other lobbyists for other industries, actually write the legislation in the first place.
Rafflaw:
I have no idea what the other banks have said. I believe John Allison, he did not need to be bailed out. His books were in good order and BBT is a good company. He had no reason to lie. As far as paying it back, I have no knowledge of what the terms were. But if I were going to give someone an ultimatum about taking money from me to preserve the charade of a sound banking system, I would not want the money back 1 week later. I would at least want it to look like what I did was necessary and then when it was payed back I could say “look what I did, I saved the American/World banking and financial systems from collapse”. But that is just me and since I am a youngster I probably don’t know how the big boys would do it.
Why are corporations so bad? Why do you believe that everything is the fault of the corporations? They exist in a system created and regulated by government. They are out to make a profit, they are not in business to promote social justice.
We have thousands and thousands of pages of regulations but still we get banking scandals and Bernie Madoff. Why?