January 20, 2011

• Lieberman Won’t Run In 2012
• U. S. Tax Code Grew 1.4 million Words Since 2001
• Afghans Want To Tax U. S. Contractors
• Brutal ‘Baby Doc’ Back In Haiti: Chaarges Filed
• Iran Admits To Refining Weapons Usable Uranium.
• Startling Evidence About Pot Use
• JFK Inaugurated 50 years ago Today.

Actress Betty White  celebrated her 89^th birthday on Monday, January 17, 2011. Her latest SITCOM “Hot In Cleveland” begins its second season this week on TV Land.

Sixty-eight year-old  Sen. Joe Lieberman (I) Conn,, who left the Democrat Party and became an independent six years after being the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president, is shaking up the political scene in Connecticut by announcing he will not reun for reelection.

Lieberman was Al Gore’s Vice Presidential running mate in 2000 when they won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote to George W, Bush.

Democrats are favored 3 to 1 to retake Lieberman’s seat. Lieberman caucuses with Democrats.

Camden, New Jersey statistically the 2^nd most dangerous city in America is laying off 160 politce officers, about half the force, due to budget problems.

The typical small business in the United States might need to spend 187 hours a year to comply with the nation’s tax code. In the Indian Ocean nation of Maldives, compliance could take less than an hour - and in Brazil, 2,600 hours.

The World Bank and the PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting firm devised an analysis of the world’s tax codes based on a hypothetical company: a flowerpot maker that owns one building, two plots of land, and one truck, has 60 employees, and pays half of its profits to its owners. The United States ranks 66th among the 183 nations in hours spent complying with tax regulations. At the top of the list, after Maldives, are United Arab Emirates (12 hours), Bahrain (36), Qatar (36), The Bahamas (58), and Luxembourg (59).

Maldives has no income, sales, property, or capital-gains taxes.

In Brazil, the flowerpot company would have to devote 2,600 hours to compliance. That’s about 108 days of nonstop work, or 325 eight-hour shifts, Slate.com points out.

Other nations with arduous taxation systems include Bolivia (1,800 hours), Vietnam (941), Nigeria (938), and Venezuela (864).

In the United States, the tax code rose from 1.4 million words to 3.8 million between 2001 and February 2010, the Internal Revenue disclosed, and from 400 pages to about 70,000 since 1913.

The FDA will require the makers of Vicodin and Percocet to reduce the most potent ingredient in the drugs. The announcement was made by the FDA’s medical chief, Dr. Buzzkill. - Conan

The Afghan government is ramping up efforts to tax U.S. contractors operating there - an effort that could raise millions for the cash-strapped government but could also provoke fresh confrontation with the United States, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

Taxation of U.S. government assistance is barred by U.S. law, as well as by a number of bilateral accords between Afghanistan and the United States. But the wording in the documents is vague, and the two governments disagree on what “tax-exempt” means.

Non-Afghan contractors who have recently received tax bills for work done under U.S. government programs say they have appealed to the Defense and State departments to clarify the matter with the Afghans. But they have been told simply to ignore the bills and “stand up for our rights,” said one official of an American company that has multiple U.S defense contracts in Afghanistan.

The Afghan government says no clarification is needed. It has started to send out what it says are overdue tax bills and has threatened some U.S. companies with arrests, loss of licenses and confiscation of aid goods.

Soon we could see soldiers feeding parking meters to park their tanks.

An Australia couple with three sons has ignited religious and ethical debate by voluntarily aborting healthy twin male fetuses because they want a girl baby more.

Exiled former Haitian despot Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc” Duvalier returned unexpectedly to his Caribbean homeland on Sunday for the first time since he was driven from power by a popular uprising in 1986. Shortly before 4 a.m. on Feb. 7, 1986, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, his gorgeous and glitzy wife Michele Bennet, their two young children, at least one mistress and about 20 close friends and servants got aboard a huge U.S. Air Force jet and headed for France :”never to return.”. He has lived in extravagant luxury there since as Haitians have suffered. Now he’s back.

It was not immediately clear why he returned. But Duvalier is back in Haiti as the impoverished country grapples with a disputed presidential election and a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 3,750 people.

Here are some facts about Duvalier:

• Duvalier, 59, is popularly known as “Baby Doc” and is the son of Haiti’s former authoritarian leader Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. He took power after his father’s death in 1971, becoming one of the world’s youngest heads-of-state at age 19.
• “Baby Doc” Duvalier ruled Haiti with an iron fist for 15 years, calling himself “president-for-life” before fleeing the country after an outbreak of popular protests. He lived in exile in France before his surprise return to Haiti.
• Together, the Duvaliers ruled Haiti for 28 years, using a sinister secret police force known as the Tonton Macoutes whose members wore dark sunglasses and carried pistols to suppress opposition. Critics accused the Duvaliers of living lavishly and doing little to alleviate poverty in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
• More than 100,000 Haitians fled the country under the younger Duvalier, many of them escaping on barely seaworthy rafts to seek asylum in the United States.
• Facing demonstrations that saw hundreds of thousands of Haitians take to the streets, Duvalier abandoned the presidency under pressure from the United States, handing over power to a six-man military and civilian commission in Haiti.

Reportedly charges may be brought against him by Haitian authorities.

California has the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the nation.10 of the 12 most illiterate metropolitan areas in the country are in California It has the 2nd highest taxes in the nation. Now you can add that Caliofnira has earned an “A+” in being a perfect State to live-in for abortion. 

Iran says it has produced 20 kilograms (about 44 pounds) of 20% enriched Uranium often termed “weapons usable” grade Weapons grade or highly enriched uranium (HEU)  is generally described as 80% pure U-235 which must be separated from naturally occurring U-238 where it exists at less than 1% by weight. The first uranium bomb, named Little Boy that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945, used 64 kilograms (144 pounds) of 80% enriched uranium.

Critical mass wherein an uncontrolled chain reaction occurs requires about 50 kilograms (110 lb), which at normal density would be a sphere  about 17 centimeters (6.7 in) in diameter.

So-called fuel rods for power generating reactors are generally in the range of 3.5% purity or L.EU, while many naval reactors use 20% enriched fuel.

The recent STUXNET cyber attack severely damaged some of Iran enrichment centrifuged by reportedly allowing them to  run out of control at destructive speeds.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.- James Bovard

All of the available evidence indicates that Jared Loughner is psychotic and that his documented use of marijuana and other mind-altering drugs may have triggered it.

Liberals including Obama, a former marijuana user, may not want to acknowledge this fact because his administration is soft on drugs and even buys into the “medical marijuana” scam. In 2004, Obama favored decriminalization of marijuana. As president, his Attorney General, Eric Holder, has withdrawn some federal resources from the war on drugs.

Marijuana has been linked not only to the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords but also to a death threat against Rep. Jim McDermott, (D-Washington).

Charles Turner Habermann, a 32-year-old man from Palm Springs, California, was arrested Wednesday for leaving threatening voice messages on McDermott’s telephone. CNN reports that Habermann “said he used medical marijuana for depression, and he apologized for the voice messages…” Another report put it somewhat differently, saying he was “high on medical marijuana.”

Not surprisingly, the FBI complaint against Habermann notes that he has exhibited symptoms of paranoia.

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, linked marijuana and schizophrenia last year in an interview in which he said: “It’s clear that if you’re pre-disposed to schizophrenia, smoking marijuana will tip you over. But marijuana won’t tip over someone into schizophrenia that is probably not predisposed to it. So, you know, most people smoke it and do not end up in mental hospitals. But some do.”

In addition to the scholarly work, Marijuana and Madness, the British Journal of Psychiatry published a study, “High-potency cannabis and the risk of psychosis,” which concluded that “people with a first episode of psychosis had smoked higher-potency cannabis, for longer and with greater frequency, than a healthy control group…” It said this finding was consistent with the hypothesis that 9-THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, increases the risk of psychosis.

The authors said: “This has important public health implications, given the increased availability and use of high-potency cannabis.”

Nasser Rey, a friend of Loughner’s from elementary and middle school, is quoted in The Washington Post as saying that, after high school, Loughner talked a lot about smoking marijuana and taking mushrooms. Rey said, “I just never thought he’d be the type who would be getting high. I thought he was like a goody-good. He was pretty smart in school. I was more of a partyer.”

This adds to the abundant evidence that Loughner’s curious behavior was related to the heavy use of marijuana and other dangerous drugs.

Writing at the American Thinker, Jan LaRue, senior legal analyst with the American Civil Rights Union, noted: “Mental health experts have opined that Loughner’s threatening and bizarre behavior, his videos, and nonsensical writings are consistent with a history of heavy marijuana use. The facts indicate that Loughner preferred a pot party to a tea party. So it’s not surprising that the advocates of legalizing marijuana are silent. They never talk about the negative side of the ledger - the costs and consequences of drug use on society.”

Some in the liberal media may be coming around to reality. Time magazine’s Joe Klein acknowledges the possibility that Loughner “was a paranoid schizophrenic whose illness was exacerbated by frequent marijuana use.”

He doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the complete truth because he has been a supporter of marijuana legalization. He goes on: “I’m not saying that marijuana was the cause of this - again, no one knows why Loughner went berserk - but as Massimo Calabresi writes below, frequent drug use can have a deleterious effect on those with schizophrenic tendency.”

The Calabresi piece, “Environmental Influence on Violent Psychotics,” asks whether drugs or other factors fueled Loughner’s rampage.

The link is apparent not only in the Loughner case but was evident when it was revealed that John Patrick Bedell, who was killed after opening fire and wounding two police officers at the Pentagon, had a history of marijuana use and had in fact been receiving “medical marijuana” in California.

At that time, Charles Lane of The Washington Post had noted that “the legalization of physician-recommended pot in California is a prescription for disaster because it authorizes the ‘treatment’ of a wide range of real maladies with a spurious ‘medicine’ - marijuana - that might be ineffective or actually harmful. And Bedell’s case illustrates my point.”

Ominously, on Nov. 2, Arizona legalized “medical marijuana,” to be dispensed by the state, by passing Proposition 203.

A fact sheet from the Drug Enforcement Administration, one part of the federal government still run by a holdover from the Bush Administration, identified George Soros as one of the major funders of the initiative and noted that taxpayer dollars would be used to cover the costs of “the free marijuana program.”

The DEA called it a “drug legalization scheme disguised as a ‘medical marijuana’ initiative.”

The foregoing  is based on an article by Cliff Kincaid for Accuracy in Media

An avid golfer and Catholic gets  once in a lifetime audience with the Pope. Flying to Rome he asks the Pope if there are golf courses in heaven. The Pope says he doesn’t know but will ask God and tell him the answer. The very next days the man is summoned.

I have good and bds news says the Pontiff. “Yes,” says the Pope there are beautiful golf courses and all are eternally precisely maintained.

“What could be the bad news?” asks the man.

“You’re teeing off tomorrow morning,” replies the Pope.

Fifty years ago today, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President of the United States becoming the first Catholic to serve as president.

Kennedy’s inaugural speech remains one of the most memorable and quotable of the 20th century. Read the fulltext below it is worth you time to read and reflect. The famous “ask not” ;ine are in bold near the end.

Vice President Johnson, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chief Justice, President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, President Truman, reverend clergy, fellow citizens, we observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom-symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning-signifying renewal, as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.	1
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe-the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.	2
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans-born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage-and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.	3
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.	4
This much we pledge-and more.	5
To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do-for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.	6
To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom-and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.	7
To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required-not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.	8
To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge-to convert our good words into good deeds-in a new alliance for progress-to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.	9
To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support-to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective-to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak-and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.	10
Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction.	11
We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.	12
But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course-both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.	13
So let us begin anew-remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.	14
Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.	15
Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms-and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.	16
Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.	17
Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah-to “undo the heavy burdens … and to let the oppressed go free.”	18
And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.	19
All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.	20
In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.	21
Now the trumpet summons us again-not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”-a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.	22
Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?	23
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility-I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it-and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.	24
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you-ask what you can do for your country.	25
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.	26
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.

“Freedom is the distance between church and state”– Bumper sticker