When you’re busy counting 100 bills, you’re going to spent less time lobbing rockets. What happens when the money dries up?

All Betrayus needs to show congress is a briefcase full of 100 dollar bills. THats pretty much 90 percent of the plan. The sunnis are being paid off not to attack us. If we gave the head of every major american crime family a billion dollars each (the equivalent buying power of the amounts we’re spending on many Sunni chieftan) each not to engage in criminal conspiracies, I think you’d probably get a substantial reduction in organized crime. Bribery is pretty much Chalabi and Betrayus modus operandi, thats why thier BFF’s now..

How’s that political progress that the surge was supposed to buy time for coming exley?

If you consider paying “terrorists” not to attack us as “success”, sure.

A question I’ve often asked you is , how much american money do we spend to pay people not to attack us? If you think many many of the sunni chieftans we’ve been giving “aid packages” to (and who are having thier pictures taken with armfuls of american cash) dont have american blood on thier hands, you’re incredibly naive. I thought we dont negotiate with terrorists exlexlia?

And once you turn the 4th corner…you are back where you started.

And once you have turn the first and second corner for the second time expecting a different result you are insane.

Comment by MapleStreet — November 13, 2007 @ 11:49 am

Sounds like collusion to me! When do we get our refunds? Oh no refunds for us? Just huge profits to the drug companies and payments to the generic drug companies?

“What is price fixing?
The general rule provides that a vendor may not in combination with another vendor agree to set a certain price thereby creating a fixed price within a certain market.”

http://business-law.freeadvice.com/trade_regulation/price_fixing.htm

If the generic drug companies agree to delay production then that keeps the price of the drug set at whatever ridiculous amount has been set – hence price fixing.

I’m still making up my mind who to support. But Clinton has an ad running where she describes the current economy as a trap door. The middle class is just one random swing away from the door opening for illness, etc. Quite an apt description.

Now with gasoline prices rising, those with borderline incomes now have to find more money to travel to work. A local small shop keeper told me this weekend that he is thinking of getting out as the prices are rising him out of business – the cost of hot dog buns rose 25% on him just in the last 2 weeks. Sodas have risen 25%. Gas rises mean higher costs for anything that uses fertilizer to grow and anything that has to be transported. Diversion of corn to ethanol rises the price of foods (both human and in feed grain). Look at all the foods that have corn in them – both as a grain and as high fructose corn syrup.

One more piece of the floor is falling out from under us.

I followed the link and it said that drug companies pay generic drug companies money to delay producing the generic drugs – aka reverse payments.

Could anyone tell me how this is not illegal under monopoly / price fixing ?

Make that Mission Fubar, Exley.

The areas have been ethnically cleansed, and US soldiers are refusing to patrol some areas, opting to just “phone in” imaginary military operations. We cannot locate hundreds of thousands of weapons or pieces of body armor, which the sects are stockpiling until we leave and they can finish their internecine war.

Yup, Mission Accomplished.

Makes one wonder why the death rate for 2007 is the worst one in the “War on Terra” when the actual number of attacks are decreasing?

Maybe the insurgents are killing more soldiers in each attack then they did in all the previous years?

The “surge” seems to only have increased the targets, not reduced the violence.

Comment by Exley — November 13, 2007 @ 10:35 am

Are you impressed by the fact that violence has fallen because everybody is dead or a refugee? Are you impressed by the fact that the USA soldier deathtoll is highest in 2007? Are you impressed with your blindness and ignorance, or are you impressed by your willingness to be lied to and stolen from by your own government? You are easily impressed, as most of the wingnut, lockset fools are, so it’s easy to see how you could be impressed by TP’s reporting of a single temporary trend.

Of course, that’s kinda like saying that the moratorium on whale hunting is working, because they’ve only found like 5 whales in the whole ocean, and therefore the numbers of whales hunted these year have decreased dramatically.

I remain unimpressed. Bring back the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees, and then we’ll talk about progress.

Do my eyes deceive me???? ThinkProgress actually acknowledging the progress being made in Iraq and thus success of the surge????

Well, I guess evidence of the dramatically falling levels of violence in Iraq is now so overwhelming that even the most hardcore war opponents cannot ignore it….

Well done, TP. I am impressed.

OTOH, if we put all the ‘white’ drug crime doers in jail, we’d have to build a thousand more prisons.

Prescription drug abuse, (Druggie Limpballs), is by far more prevalent than street drugs. I hear numbers like 1 in 3 people having issues with abusing prescription drugs. 1 in 3…that’s about 100 million people!

Yes, Heroin & other poppy residues are climbing, but I don’t think many people know the numbers behind Oxycontin & the other synthetic opiates.

Alarming? Yes.

Profitable for big Pharma? Yeah, sure, you betcha!

Comment by bilbobaggins — November 13, 2007 @ 10:08 am

Meanwhile, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has been stacked with conservatives and is not pursuing discrimination complaints: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/08/1449259

Your comments on the widening disparity of fairness toward black communities are appreciated.

There is a little bit of hope in the right direction if the U.S. Sentencing Commission follows through on its consideration of reducing sentences for crack cocaine.

It has always been an outrage that crack users have been punished far more severely than powder cocaine users, LSD users, OxyContin abusers, and even heroin addicts. Yes, it’s thought that crack is thought to be more addictive than powder cocaine, but the reason for the sentencing disparity becomes pretty obvious that when one sees that crack is used mostly by poor black people and powder is used mostly by rich white people.

Furthermore, I don’t see drug addicts as criminals (unless, of course, they are committing other crimes). They are drug addicts, and should be treated as such. Now, those who sell the drugs — that’s a different story. They perpetuate the problem, and should continue to receive stiff sentences. But let’s equalize things. Let’s punish “white” drug crimes and “black” drug crimes equally.

Same speaker, though.