Free Republic

Something like 80% of the “transfers” that take place on “Wall Street” are very short term trades. These short term trades provide the liquidity necessary to keep markets from becoming wildly volatile (there is somebody there to buy when you want to sell even when the market is declining). A 1/4% tax would dramatically - prohibitively - increase these traders cost of doing business, would drive them out of the market, and would thus raise the cost of capital for every business in the United States. This is a very bad, very poorly thought out idea. They are simply searching for any means of raising taxes that can be attached to a fashionable boogey man so the sheeple will praise them as they tank our country.

Point well taken. It’s a situation to be handled carefully and with professional advise all the way around.

I agree with everyone who is recommending that you obtain professional advice. You may find that a legal nurse consultant can give you objective, professional advise about your fathers treatment and that such consultants are rarely ambulance chasers. They are hired by lawyers, hospitals, insurance companies to review the medical records, help the legal types navigate the hospital administration, and provide expert testimony regarding the care provided. I have no personal experience with them but I'll bet they're cheaper and more objective than a lawyer. Most of them are experienced nurses and have spent many years caring for patients themselves. They know all the games very well.

And on the note of knowing the environment well ... try not to get yourselves too worked up until you know the facts. The big question I would have is “did he fall?”. If there was a fall involved then the hospital has some serious answering to do. If not - you will never find evidence that your father was “manhandled” unless you are able to produce an eye witness or hospital a document that establishes clearly such an event occurred. A patient with a history of compression fractures is at risk for future fractures simply by being alive. Many elderly people who “fall and break their hip” actually do so in reverse order ... their hip bone shears and then they fall and hit the ground. Some people's bones become so brittle and frail that they can't support their own weight without breaking a bone. Your father may be one of those people. The history of compression fractures is kinda defacto evidence of such.

It's good that you kept a list of “errors” you have seen yourself. Once again, keep a couple things in mind. It has been my personal experience that most, if not all, of the things you perceive as “errors” are not errors at all unless you are a health care professional yourself and you understand what you are looking at. Issues such as replacing an oxygen supply device are not “errors” unless the patients clinical situation demanded oxygen at that moment. Maybe it did - I'm not saying you are wrong - I'm only saying that you should be prepared for many of your concerns to be deemed irrelevant either because a medical professional would not testify in court that it was an error or because it does not pertain directly to the back injury in question.

Get some professional help, be open to what they say, hold those responsible accountable for what was done or not done (did somebody leave him unattended and he fell out of bed??), but also resist the temptation to extort money from the hospital and health care providers if they happened to be unlucky enough to be caring for your father when an inevitable injury occurred.

or ...

3) It's a threat. "If you continue to accept our defectors we will start kidnapping your officials. We kidnapped an entire embassy of yours in the past and we'll do it again."

I'm not sure Amahdinejad is afraid of anything. They've blown up our barracks, occupied our embassy, harrassed us tirelessly in Iraq to the point that the Democrats are calling for retreat ... Amahdinejad and his cohort have calculated that the US administration does not have the political capital, either domestically or internationally, to do anything. Iran wouldn't kidnap our people, their sponsored terrorist organizations would. That would give them enough plausible deniability to satisfy the Democrats and there would be no direct retaliation ... What was that staion chief's name .. Buckley maybe, that was kidnapped in Beiruit ... they have a track record for getting away with this sort of thing.

One must bear in mind in any "negotiations" with Iran:

- we are bound be our cultural values not to bear false witness (to honor our promises and not to lie in negotiations)

- they are bound by their cultural values to deceive the infidels for the advancement of Islam

We could offer them everything we have and they would gladly take it while they continue their nuclear program.

Go Team!

Okay. Let's say that the corruption, effectiveness ... are all improved dramatically. It still doesn't matter. Millions of us here in the US are simply not on the "world government" program and we never will be. The UN shouldn't be anything more than a debating society; a forum for discussion on what ultimately turn out to be bilateral or multilateral agreements. The world perception that "unilateral" action is forbidden and that UN approval is required for everything derives from the UN's vision of itself as the grand federal structure over the world.

We have no intentions of subjecting ourselves to world government regardless of how sincere or efficient that government may be. This complainer just doesn't get it. Bolton is right. The guy is directly attacking our intelligence. Cut off the budget!

"how can this phenomenon be rationalised or explained?"

Millions of Jews were exterminated during an effort to reshape the world in which the local Arab population was complicit. Arab / Islamic government officials continue their thinly veiled calls for mass extermination to this very day. They did indeed reshape the world. They just didn't get the structure they wanted. Now they negotiate and posture as if history started on the day Israel was created.

It may be true that leaking can be rationalized by arguing for some "greater good" but things have clearly gotten out of hand. Strategies, like organizations, are never perfect. They have pros and cons. There will always be somebody who doesn't agree with some particular strategy and they will always be able to characterize it as wrong or as a failure by highlighting the cons. That doesn't make them honorable whistle blowers. It makes them disgruntled employees.

The problem is that the dissenters are not the ones who have been charged with forming and executing the strategy. There are almost always underlings who think the wrong decision got made. Relaxed leaking policies give them all license to fight the decision makers instead of getting with the program and getting the job done. It seems we've reached the point with the media, congress and branches of the executive where there is no boundary regarding what gets discussed publicly in the furtherance of personal or party agendas. The people at the top can't get things done if every individual in the organization gets to decide whether to support the plan or to fight it in the press. It just wont work that way and it's a great danger to security from the individual operator all the way up to the nation. That boundary line has to be redrawn and I'm glad to see some action being taken to do so. Leakers beware.

On every job I ever had, if I had leaked details of key company initiatives to the press I would have been fired immediately. The press is not the congress. They are not charged in our constitution with responsibility to oversee the executive. The fact that some good may come from some leaks does not justify allowing them to continue.

Election


Exactly. Somebody needs to remind Mr. Biden that Iraq is not a US colony. This bone head is pronouncing plans to partition the country while the indigenous government is reporting potential peace deals with the insurgents and substantial progress toward forming a functional government.

Not only is Biden an idiot - the very fact that such a debate is being discussed in the US media is inflammatory, counterproductive, and paints us as imperialist occupiers in the eyes of our enemies. Mr. Biden is handing the forces of oppression some pretty nice propaganda.

Sounds to me like pretty clearcut evidence that there were terrorist training camps in Iraq and Saddam got what was coming to him. It has long been reported that Zarq's presence in Iraq was known before the war (during the prolonged ceasefire I should say).

Bush and his team apparently thought, at the time, they had a fighting chance of winning the French over. In hindsight we know that's a joke. But things would have gone much better if the French, Germans ... joined up.

Is this guy's team the same crew that had us kill Saddam two or three times with bombs based on solid intelligence of which house he was in? Is this the same crew that has dropped bombs on various safe houses across Afghanistan and Pakistan in hopes of picking off bin laden ...

What part of "No" does the UN not understand. Iran's leader has formally declared that there is nothing to negotiate.

The time for talk has long passed.

Iran watched Saddam do this dance for over a decade. They have calculated that they can buy all the time they need through diplomacy. They know, probably on advice from the Russians French Chinese as others have mentioned, that so long as there is any perception of the slightest compromise or willingness to negotiate on their part nobody will be willing to go to war to stop them. The second act of the Iraq war demonstrated clearly that the facade of negotiations will lull a substantial portion of the population into believing that we have not yet reached a need for "the last resort" - war. Sanctions are useless and will have no effect on Iran.

Very thoughtful perspective.

If I may deviate from his main point ...

How did I manage to miss the part of history when the administration convinced the public that war in Iraq would be quick and easy? Am I just brain dead on my memory of what the administration actually said? Who in their right mind thought that "mop-up" would last three months in a country surrounded by geopolitical interests who loath a free and democratic Iraq?

As my memory goes - the opposition to the war claimed we would be ground to a pulp in the next Stalingrad right after we finished retrieving the tens of thousands of American bodies from the craggy, winterous mountains of Afghanistan. The administration said it wasn't going to be easy by any means but neither would it be a blood bath. Now the opposition (aka news media) have rewritten the administration's rational assessment of the situation as if their 'it wont be Stalingrad' had been a reference to today's IED's and relatively very small casualty count.

It's too bad to see these contortions of the truth propagated.

I, for one, never had any expectation that the fighting in Iraq would EVER end. Neither do I recall every hearing the administration indicate otherwise. It has never ended in Israel. It will never end in Iraq. Our objective is to build a self-sustaining Iraqi government that can carry on their own self defense. The insurgency will never end and thats just fine. The seeds of liberty will be violently opposed by surrounding countries and by our strategic adversaries (the Russians, Chinese and bit players like the French). Nobody should ever have expected anything else.

These guys are just going to continue declaring victory until the inevitable troop withdrawals begin from Iraq. They are counting on the ignorance of their audience who will see troop withdrawals as being consistent with the whole vision of us as paper tigers. They have been spinning their inevitable defeat as glorious victory from the beginning.

Don't let the door hit you in the a$$ on the way out.

191 Democrats ...


Yeah - Where is the headline "DEMOCRATS OVERWHELMINGLY SUPPORT FELONY IMMIGRANTS"

Plan sounds pretty good.

I would add a sponsorship program (maybe there is one in existence already) that would allow employers to sponsor foreign workers. Their numbers would be regulated, the employer would have to register the workers, pay payroll taxes, pay them minimum wage ... indemnify the government, state and federal, against social services costs incurred by the worker or his family (employer has to pay the hospital bill for the guy if he doesn't provide health insurance).

I would also add that we need to eliminate this nonsense about any baby being born within US borders automatically becoming a US citizen. Citizenship in this country could be obtained after proving oneself a productive member of our society for several years. It need not be granted to foreign nationals at birth.

Employers in labor intensive businesses are competing against each other by using under-the-table workers. They are effectively subsidized by illegal tax avoidance and by government assistance programs that make it viable for the illegal to survive on below market wages. US citizens could be used for the same thing but these are things that "Americans won't do"! Once your competitor down the street starts undercutting you on contracts you have two choices a)go out of business or b)start hiring under-the-table workers just like your competition. It's a viscous cycle and it's a direct threat to our sovereignty. I would let them import workers so long as they keep US citizens on an equal footing. If we eliminate the cost advantage of illegals then the employers won't want to hire them and maybe my kids could actually get a job in the trades that sustained my family when they immigrated to this country 100+ years ago.

And the anchor-baby thing ... The children of illegal immigrants are costing us a fortune and they're going to vote our borders wide open. How many of those people marching in the streets do you suppose are US citizen children of illegal aliens who are marching to decriminalize their parents?

I agree regarding future votes. I would also say this : we can make illegal presence a capital crime if we want to and it wont matter. The border can and should be sealed. Law is useless without enforcement and I have ZERO expectation that any felony provision would be enforced. We can and should make the law but ... it's kinda like buying gas when you know there's a hole in your tank.

I am very seriously considering becoming a one issue voter.

If we don't speak with our votes we will be overrun by the vocal minority.