The Hate Crimes bill re-introduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee will add homosexuals as a protected group to existing hate crime legislation. The bill will make it a federal crime for pastors to use the Bible to speak out against homosexuality if in response to that teaching someone commits an act of violence against a homosexual. This will effectively stifle the ability of pastors to preach the Word of God without fear of prosecution. Vision America has a plan to stop this Bill.Inspiring someone to commit murder either is or isn't a crime already. The hate crimes bill has nothing to do with the spoken word - it has to deal with people dragging you behind their truck for a mile, or tying to you to a fence and pistol-whipping you in the head. I shouldn't be surprised, but still I am. Whining about your fear that you'll lose the right to incite murder. Only in America.
Last year was the eighth warmest year on record, according to the National Climatic Data Center.Read More......
The world's temperature in 2008 tied that of 2001, according to the center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Preliminary calculations show the world's average temperature for 2008 was 0.88 degree Fahrenheit above the 20th Century average of 57.0 degrees.
The ranking means that the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Record keeping began in 1880.
I just saw that my Citi Smith Barney visa card is now charging me 15.99% on standard purchases.More on this problem here. Read More......
Last month my rate was 8.99%.
I just got of the phone with a Citi representative. She said there was a notification that went out with last month's billing statement, but I didn't notice anything.
She told me that I could opt back to the 8.99% rate, but that I would not be able to renew my card, when it expires, that the account would close.
They take a big tax payer bailout then they screw their tax paying customers.
I'm fucking livid.
(excuse my language)
Derek Dye, the latest in the long, funny and sad line of abstinence-only sex education heroes. Dye uses his juggling clown schtick to draw the middle school kids’ attention, and then… Wham!Read More......“Having sex before you are married is just like juggling machetes!”Check out this must-see video of Dye at work in a middle school classroom:
“Sex before marriage will destroy all of your life’s dreams!”
...Thanks to George W. Bush and a complicit Congress, we currently spend $1.5 billion a year to fund abstinence-only until marriage sex education in our public schools. And yes, that money goes to people like Derek Dye, as he is employed by the Elizabeth New Life Center that received a $800,000 CBAE grant in 2007 to promote abstinence until marriage. His qualifications? A “Bachelor of Fun Arts” from Barnum Bailey Clown College, and an abstinence educator certification that can be purchased for $50....
Then again, as one colleague told me today, nothing wants to make her have sex less than a clown… so maybe they’re on to something.
We are here today not simply to pay tribute to our first patriots but to take up the work that they began. The trials we face are very different now, but severe in their own right. Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast. An economy that is faltering. Two wars, one that needs to be ended responsibly, one that needs to be waged wisely. A planet that is warming from our unsustainable dependence on oil.
And yet while our problems may be new, what is required to overcome them is not. What is required is the same perseverance and idealism that our founders displayed. What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives - from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry - an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.
That is the reason I launched my campaign for the presidency nearly two years ago. I did so in the belief that the most fundamental American ideal, that a better life is in store for all those willing to work for it, was slipping out of reach. That Washington was serving the interests of the few, not the many. And that our politics had grown too small for the scale of the challenges we faced.
But I also believed something else. I believed that our future is our choice, and that if we could just recognize ourselves in one another and bring everyone together - Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, north, south, east and west, black, white, Latino, Asian, and Native American, gay and straight, disabled and not - then not only would we restore hope and opportunity in places that yearned for both, but maybe, just maybe, we might perfect our union in the process.
Less than a week before it leaves office, the Bush administration has sparked anger across the Atlantic by tripling the import duty rate on roquefort cheese to 300%, a move which the US hopes will "shut down trade" in the sheep's milk product by making it prohibitively expensive.Read More......
The decision, part of Washington's attempts to force the EU into dropping its ban on hormone-treated beef, was greeted with disbelief by the French government and by farmers in the south-western Aveyron region who depend on the industry for their livelihoods.
"Maybe the Bush administration indulged itself by taking this decision just before it leaves," Robert Glandieres, president of the roquefort producers' group, told Reuters.
The tariff on roquefort, condemned as "incomprehensible and inadmissible" by the French government, will probably have a minimal effect, given exports to the US account for just 2% of annual sales. French farmers said it would mean "the end" for roquefort in the US and vowed to take "symbolic actions" in return.
A majority of America's largest publicly traded companies and the U.S. government's largest federal contractors -- including some receiving millions in federal bailout money -- use multiple subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to conduct business and avoid paying U.S. taxes, a new report finds.Read More......
The new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, released today by Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), lists Citigroup and Morgan Stanley as having set up hundreds of tax haven subsidiaries, along with American International Group and Bank of America. Also in the tax-haven list are well-known companies and such federal contractors as American Express, Pepsi and Caterpillar.
GAO, searching publicly available data filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, determined that 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded corporations and 63 of the 100 largest federal contractors maintain subsidiaries in countries generally considered havens for avoiding taxes. Dorgan and Levin said they requested the updated report from one several years ago because they are focused on combating offshore tax abuses, which they estimated cause $100 billion in lost U.S. tax revenue each year.
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