Alaska Representative Max Gruenberg’s bill to improve ballot access has a hearing at 8 am on March 20, Thursday. The bill eases the definition of “political party”, and is HB 402.
The current definition is extremely complicated and was last revised in 2004. The existing law is wildly irrational because the registration test moves up and down erratically. Under the existing law, the Libertarian Party is ballot-qualified, but the party will lose its status after the November 2008 election because the registration requirement will rocket up from 7,124 to approximately 10,500. Also under the existing law, the Green Party is not ballot-qualified. The Alaskan Independence Party is ballot-qualified.
HB 402 would simply the definition of “party” so that it is a group that has 2,500 registrants.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Alaska Ballot Access Reform Bill Has Hearing
A 737 traveling from Cincinnati to Salt Lake City was lost with all passengers and crew Monday when cash-strapped Delta Airlines, the aircraft's operator, canceled Flight 1060 en route.
which was forced to land in an Indiana cornfield after being canceled mid-flight.
According to a statement from Delta, the midair cancellation was made as part of the company's plan to cut continental service by 25 percent and emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy with an economically viable business strategy.
"Delta Airlines regrets any inconvenience to our valued customers," the statement read in part. "Unfortunately, in today's uncertain economy, service interruptions and cancellations are inevitable."
Air-traffic-control personnel reported that Flight 1060 was at cruising altitude when Delta cancelled the flight. According to the aircraft's black-box flight recorder, the crew announced the cancellation over the intercom, instructed passengers to gather their luggage from overhead bins for disembarking, then shut down all aircraft systems. At 9:46 a.m. Central time, Flight 1060's tracking designation vanished from air-traffic-control radar screens. Approximately 15 minutes later, the aircraft crashed in a cornfield outside Tipton, IN, killing all onboard.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/42594
Friday, March 14, 2008
Jon Stewart Mocks the Media Feeding Frenzy of the Spitzer Scandal
Gubernatorial Malfeasance! The Daily Show's Jon Stewart grabs his bib to join in on the media's feast of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal.
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Ron Paul's Expert Opinion on Fox Business
Ron Paul on Fox Business 3/13/2008 and his expert opinion on the financial markets and the Federal Reserve's recent $200 Billion fiat money printfest.
Tent cities spring up in LA
Tent cities spring up in LA BBC march12/2008Tent cities have sprung up outside Los Angeles in the US as people lose their homes in the mortgage crisis.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Wages of Peace
There is no longer any doubt that the Iraq War is a moral and strategic disaster for the United States. But what has not yet been fully recognized is that it has also been an economic disaster. To date, the government has spent more than $522 billion on the war, with another $70 billion already allocated for 2008.
With just the amount of the Iraq budget of 2007, $138 billion, the government could instead have provided Medicaid-level health insurance for all 45 million Americans who are uninsured. What's more, we could have added 30,000 elementary and secondary schoolteachers and built 400 schools in which they could teach. And we could have provided basic home weatherization for about 1.6 million existing homes, reducing energy consumption in these homes by 30 percent.
But the economic consequences of Iraq run even deeper than the squandered opportunities for vital public investments. Spending on Iraq is also a job killer. Every $1 billion spent on a combination of education, healthcare, energy conservation and infrastructure investments creates between 50 and 100 percent more jobs than the same money going to Iraq. Taking the 2007 Iraq budget of $138 billion, this means that upward of 1 million jobs were lost because the Bush Administration chose the Iraq sinkhole over public investment.
The War and the Working Class
The government treats its soldiers the way most corporations treat their workforce--as an invisible, disrespected, disposable means to an end that is contrary to workers' interests. Members of the armed forces come mainly and disproportionately from the working class and from small-town and rural America, where opportunities are hard to come by. The "economic draft" operates, in effect, to recruit young people from these communities as they sign up to gain job skills, experience and educational opportunities absent from their civilian lives.
A number of parallel experiences link the lives of soldiers with those of working-class civilians, going well beyond their common discipline of following orders. Consider "stop-loss" as an example. The military reserves the right to extend the deployment time and active-duty status of every soldier beyond the service dates prescribed in their enlistment contracts and mobilization papers. Most soldiers were unaware of this as the Iraq War intensified, but by the start of 2006 the military had enforced its stop-loss provision on 50,000 of them. Outraged soldiers and their families challenged these extensions in court, but they were upheld.
Meanwhile, in the civilian economy, one out of every five full-time hourly employees worked mandatory overtime--the requirement by management that the worker stay on the job beyond the normal quitting time. Many workers want overtime for the money, but they generally resent being forced into it, especially when it disrupts family plans or taxes their physical or mental strength. While the consequences of stop-loss are more far-reaching, the principle is the same. Both disregard the needs of the workforce and abrogate the expectations working people have of a life outside the control of their employers. .
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[Source: The Nation: Top Stories -
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Washington State Ballot Access Reform Bill Dies
Washington state’s HB 1534, which improves ballot access for minor parties and independents, failed to move through the Washington Senate Rules Committee by the deadline, so it cannot pass.
It is tough to pass a bill like this, while the entire state is still waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court decision on its primary process. The case, Washington State v Washington State Republican Party et al, was argued on October 1, 2007, in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court still hasn’t issued the opinion
CNN Mississippi Primary Results
CNN election returns page for the Mississippi primaries. CNN has projected a win for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary, and a win for John McCain in the Republican primary.
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Will My Crack Tax Be Paying for These Hookers?
NY Governor Eliot Spitzer, who has made news after proposing a "crack tax," a method of collecting tax revenue on illegal drugs by requiring drug dealers to purchase stamps to place on their products, now has bigger problems than being laughed at by his constituents. Turns out Spitzer likes to pay for it, sex that is. He's been linked to an online prostitution ring that was busted last week and allegedly admitted this fact to his senior advisers this morning. I knew there was a reason he was so desperate for new revenue. Those girls don't come cheap, you know.
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Monday, March 10, 2008
Nader Begins Petitioning In New Mexico
The Nader campaign has launched its first petition drive. It is in New Mexico, and will attempt to qualify the Independent Party for the ballot. The petition needs 2,794 valid signatures by April 1.
That New Mexico deadline for new parties is supremely irrational. New parties in New Mexico do not nominate by primary. Therefore, there is no reason why the deadline should be so early. That new party deadline had been in July, until 1995, when the New Mexico legislature moved it to April. The motivation was that the Democratic majority was unhappy that the Green Party gubernatorial candidate in 1994 had polled over 10% of the vote, and was perceived to be responsible for the election of Republican gubernatorial nominee Gary Johnson.
North Carolina Ballot Access Lawsuit Trial Likely in or Before June
The ballot access case that has been pending in North Carolina state court since 2005 is expected to have a trial, in or before June 2008. The plaintiffs are the North Carolina Libertarian and Green Parties. This is an ACLU-sponsored lawsuit. If the case wins, every minor party will benefit, regardless as to whether any particular party is a plaintiff in this particular lawsuit.
Judge Attacks Homeschooling
A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.
The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming.
"At first, there was a sense of, 'No way,' " said homeschool parent Loren Mavromati, a resident of Redondo Beach (Los Angeles County) who is active with a homeschool association. "Then there was a little bit of fear. I think it has moved now into indignation."
The ruling arose from a child welfare dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Philip and Mary Long of Lynwood, who have been homeschooling their eight children. Mary Long is their teacher, but holds no teaching credential.
The parents said they also enrolled their children in Sunland Christian School, a private religious academy in Sylmar (Los Angeles County), which considers the Long children part of its independent study program and visits the home about four times a year.
The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time public or private schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home.
Some homeschoolers are affiliated with private or charter schools, like the Longs, but others fly under the radar completely. Many homeschooling families avoid truancy laws by registering with the state as a private school and then enroll only their own children.
Yet the appeals court said state law has been clear since at least 1953, when another appellate court rejected a challenge by homeschooling parents to California's compulsory education statutes. Those statutes require children ages 6 to 18 to attend a full-time day school, either public or private, or to be instructed by a tutor who holds a state credential for the child's grade level.
"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. "Parents have a legal duty to see to their children's schooling under the provisions of these laws."
Parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply, Croskey said.
"A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare," the judge wrote, quoting from a 1961 case on a similar issue.
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Sunday, March 9, 2008
Zeitgeist Day is March 15th
The internet sensation Zeitgeist has been remastered for viewings worldwide on March 15th. What does Christianity, 9/11 and The Federal Reserve all have in common?
UPDATE _Its out, Watch Below.
Zeitgeist Addendum
Came out today! Oct 3rd
Full Movie @ WAR ON YOU or Full Movie @ VidzKing to watch the full movie for free or download.
ABC News Runs Defense For Puppy Killer
As you can see, the media is doing what they do best-which is spin the story to get the public to parrot what they say to their friends and family. Don't be surprised now if you confront anyone about this issue and they start telling you about how stressed out the soldiers are.
Let's see here......the african american football player that participates in dog fighting and drowns dogs is castrated and repeatedly attacked by the media on our televisions, but a white soldiers which is video taped throwing a puppy off a cliff is ok, because he is stressed out from the war? So the guy who came back and killed his wife and family is justified?Don't let the media abuse you by manipulating the issue and fight back for the truth to be told and heard globally.
I'm calling all my dogs to stand up for justice by asking questions and demanding answers.Do not let others Nationalistic Faith blind you to this true horrific act that has taken place and continues to take place every day. Just cause a criminal is in the army, does not give him/her immunity to the laws that are held here in the states.
Dog Murder Double Standards
As should be expected, not only the blogosphere is abuzz over the sadistic murder of a whimpering puppy, allegedly by Marine David Motari, but so is the corporate media. As for the latter, we get lame excuses, for instance from shrinks employed by ABC News.David Spiegel, professor and associate chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and thus supposedly an expert on these sort of things, tells us Motari was confronting "the fear of being wounded or killed and one of the ways to confront that may be by showing you're the one that renders other creatures helpless," in other words, by sadistically murdering puppies and, we can only imagine, possibly other innocents unable to offer defense.
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Rand Paul: Is the Revolution Over or Just Beginning?
by Rand Paul MD | March 8, 2008
Reports that Ron Paul has quit the Presidential Race remind me of Mark Twain's famous quote, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." The Ron Paul Presidential campaign continues, albeit at a different pace.
What does that mean?
Ron Paul will continue to contest the remaining primaries. Ron Paul's name will be on all the remaining state ballots. Ron Paul volunteers are encouraged to become precinct captains, delegates to state and national conventions, and to try pass Constitutional proposals to each state's Republican platform.
For example, volunteers in each state should try to attach amendments such as the following: Republicans believe that war should only be fought after a proper Declaration of War by Congress. Another possible platform idea is that: Republican Congressmen are expected to vote against any federal budget, Republican or Democrat, that is not balanced.
Want to have some fun? Just imagine the fun when the debate begins on these ideas.
Is Ron Paul still campaigning for president? Yes. Ron Paul has tentative plans to campaign in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Ron Paul will also likely appear in other states that have remaining primaries.
The press is reporting that Ron Paul has quit the race. This is not true. Ron Paul's video simply acknowledges that the campaign will continue but will also transform into additional activities such as education and supporting other candidates. In Kentucky we just held precinct conventions and Ron Paul Republicans won hundreds of precinct captains. In Kyle Texas, Craig Young upset the establishment choice for Republican County Chairman.
The Ron Paul Revolution lives on! Victory comes in many forms. Help shape what the Ron Paul revolution becomes.
