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POPSNidal Hasan Terrorist Threat 'Not That Big a Deal'....Matthew Yglesias
I think a pretty good case can be made that this kind of situation actually is the main face of the terrorist threat. Not a big well-thought-out plot centrally directed from a “safe haven” in South Asia and undertaken by brilliant covert operatives, but the desperate violent act of a clearly disturbed individual. It’s going to be very hard to prevent this sort of thing. As long as the United States remains a country in which firearms are widely available"for the foreseeable future, in other words"we’re going to be unusually vulnerable to mentally ill spree killers of various kinds, including spree killers who nod in the direction of Islamist thinking. But the larger point is that while these incidents are serious crimes and major tragedies for the victims, they hardly rise to the level of a major macro-level social crisis. They’re certainly not a first-order national security threat. And even put in the lower-stakes context of violent crime in America
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POPSDiscount Group Travel Groupsource is the experienced most group airfare & travel deals specialist in USA, offering airfare discounts for holidays. For more information visit us at : group airfare tickets discount group travel
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POPSCoerciveCare Bill Passes House 220-215, Sat Night Mandatory health care insurance reform bill passes House. Socialist Security 2.0. Never mind that half the population opposed this. And the "public option" is not optional--it is now mandated that you must buy health insurance. How is it that the Federal government can force you to buy something? Private property rights are trampled, the government thinks it can tell you to buy something or face jail and/or tax penalties. This also then means every American's private and personal health information will be put into a data-base system, the end of privacy. Your health care, and body, will belong to the Collectivist Society now and the Government , which will no doubt link this to your National ID Card (REAL ID and PASS ID system) --increasing the Electronic Leash on "free" Americans.
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POPSDrowning in Debt This is from Ross Perot's site (remember him?). One of the comments at the site that I thought was really good: "Our dollar is backed by faith, how much faith is left? Sheesh, they’re going to run out of paper, granted it’s all electronic transfer so maybe not. But man, I just don’t see how catastrophic inflation isn’t a forgone conclusion at this point."
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POPSWill The Left Do a Kamikazi on Obamacare? Mob-O-Care is still the big banana. The Democrats can still carry it over the top and then take their losses in elections to come with the faith that no Republican Congress will dare to infuriate all the Victim Groups of the Left by repealing free medical care for forty percent of the population. Or whatever they settle on. Remember that the actual dollar figures have never been believable, and Medicare and Social Security are operating as accounting fictions even now. So this has all been media drivel from top to bottom. All they have to do is pass a shell of a bill, set up the bureaucracies, and expand them in future Democrat-dominated Congresses.
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POPSSocial Security System (SSS) a trivia about social security system (SSS) on january 26, 1946 president manuel a roxs proposed a bill seeking to establish a social security system, for wage earners and low salaried employees
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POPS Securing the Web (These types of security checks operate in the background: they don't require you, for instance, to reenter your user name and password.) Many web applications also "sanitize" data posted by their subscribers: if a friend posts something to your social-network page, the application probably won't show you the post without inspecting it for malicious code. "We've looked at a lot of these web applications, and there's literally hundreds of places where these checks happen," says Nickolai Zeldovich, an assistant professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Indeed, Zeldovich and his colleagues identified one popular web application that sanitized data in more than 1,400 places (but still had about 60 security holes). They also, however, identified a feature that web application security checks usually had in common: "Namely," Zeldovich says, "it's that the same data is being handled in all these hundreds of places."
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POPSLooking for a middle class
A sad depiction of how our middle class has been steadily losing ground to corporate dominance. This new economy is strangling the very people responsible for the success of many businesses who, along with government’s help, are creating this new economy. The days of job security are over. Beginning when companies began turning their ‘full-benefit’ employees into contractors to save the expense of providing those benefits. The middle class is about to be beat down even further when the drive to reduce the deficit and debt takes center stage. Reduction of Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements will be seen as the answer to rising costs and the middle class will be the biggest losers, again. Ms Cocco advises us to “Fight the myths. Break the back of the corrupt campaign finance and lobbying systems. These are hard political tasks. But being pushed further down is harder, still. Because no one knows where the new bottom lies.” Advice we would all do well to heed.
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POPSDear Congress "So with a perfect 100% failure rate and a record that proves that "services" you shove down our throats are failing faster and faster, you want Americans to believe you can be trusted with a government-run health care system? 20% of our entire economy?!? With all due respect... YOU MUST THINK WE'RE CRAZY!!!"
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POPSAnother Bad Idea
The cost of this cash handout? $13 billion. And Obama says that money cannot come out of social security trust funds. But, in typical Obama fashion, he offered absolutely no alternative way to pay for it. And get this – he’s willing to BORROW MORE MONEY to fund the payouts. Perfect! All the clowns who you’d expect to be in favor of tihs (Reid, Rangel, et al) naturally lined up to kiss ass praise Obama for this plan. People with Actual Brains, like Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) said it’d be inappropriate to mess with a system which was specifically designed to reflect the cost of living. In January, social security recipients saw their payments go up by nearly 6%, which was the largest increase since 1982. Apparently, it was to combat the rising costs of energy at that time. Meantime, the working population has seen, on average, 2% raises for the past couple of years. Did our energy costs not go up too? We’re not even going to SEE social security payments when we retire, for crying ou
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POPSeffects of climate change Here are some of my “learnings” for the week: The climate-change issue is one that needs to be confronted constructively and immediately, but it must be done cooperatively. Political posturing and pointing fingers of blame are counterproductive and waste valuable time.
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POPSRein in entitlements? No. Increase them, says James Galbraith. COMMENTARY | October 08, 2009 It's time the press stopped falling for false, ongoing efforts to portray Social Security and Medicare as going broke, says economist James Galbraith. To the contrary, increases in entitlement program benefits would provide a major boost to economic recovery. For reporters and editors Galbraith's message is: Separate propaganda from facts.
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POPSSocial Security Surplus Dwindling The treasury department has dipped into social security to pay off other programs since the Reagan years, in 1983, Reagan raised the social security tax to offset his deficits, taking more than $40 billion per year from the fund. Now with the all the unemployment, bailouts, and war spending, it may run out sooner than expected.
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POPS It's the Spending, Stupid By John Stossel But the income tax is big and visible, so it's a problem that a growing number of people don't pay, but get benefits from those who do. Frederic Bastiat, the great 19th-century French economist, defined the state as "that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." I don't know if he envisioned one half of the population living off the other half. It's important not to confuse the interests of the taxpayers with the interests of the politicians and other tax consumers. Yet that is done all the time. When the government bought toxic assets (of zero market value) from the banks, it said taxpayers would profit when the economy recovered and the assets once again commanded a positive price in the market. Even if we make the dubious assumption that the government is savvy enough to buy low and sell high, it's not the taxpayers who would benefit from any profits. The politicians will spend every penny, rather than cutting taxes.
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POPS Mafia, Violent Criminals Turn to Medicare Fraud Some pay homeless people on Los Angeles' Skid Row for Medicare or Social Security numbers to use in fake billing invoices. Others intimidate elderly victims to use their Medicare numbers, federal authorities say. Most Medicare schemes are based in cities such as Miami, Los Angeles, Detroit and Houston. And rather than building an elaborate hierarchy like the Mafia or other gangs, many Medicare con artists use common street criminals to recruit patients and doctors, authorities said. A Medicare scammer could easily net at least $25,000 a day while risking a relatively modest 10 years in prison if convicted on a single count. A cocaine dealer could take weeks to make that amount while risking up to life in prison. "Building a Medicare fraud scam is far safer than dealing in crack or dealing in stolen cars, and it's far more lucrative," said Lewis Morris, lead attorney at the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general's office.
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POPSChapter 7 Bankruptcy Chapter 7 bankruptcy, New York, is liquidation bankruptcy also known as straight bankruptcy. It is the simplest and quickest form of bankruptcy available. Chapter 7 bankruptcy cases are filed by debtors who incurred debts for personal, family, or household purposes. Often more than not, these individuals are in dire financial situations with no realistic chance of repaying the debts within a reasonable time frame.
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POPSThe 1,400 legal benefits of marriage in the US
More: spousal exemptions to property tax increases upon the death of one partner who is a co-owner of the home; veterans' discounts on medical care, education, and home loans; joint filing of tax returns; joint filing of customs claims when traveling; wrongful death benefits for a surviving partner and children; bereavement or sick leave to care for a partner or child; decision-making power with respect to whether a deceased partner will be cremated or not and where to bury him or her; crime victims' recovery benefits; loss of consortium tort benefits; domestic violence protection orders; judicial protections and evidentiary immunity; and more.... Most of these legal and economic benefits cannot be privately arranged or contracted for. For example, absent a legal (or civil) marriage, there is no guaranteed joint responsibility to the partner and to third parties (including children) in such areas as child support, debts to creditors, taxes, etc.
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