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loudTopic: Lib Loser Stories
Rally organizer tied to Marxist party
One of the key organizers of the immigration protests and rallies nationwide, including yesterday's in Washington, is a group whose leaders are tied to the Workers World Party, a Marxist organization that has expressed support for dictators Kim Jong-il of North Korea and Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition, which also has proposed a nationwide boycott on May 1 to protest congressional efforts at immigration reform and border security, is an offshoot of the International Action Coalition, an anti-capitalism group founded by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
In a press release celebrating a March 25 rally in Los Angeles against immigration-law enforcement that drew an estimated 500,000 people, ANSWER said it helped organize "a major contingent in the march" and provided logistical support. The march was co-chaired by Juan Jose Gutierrez, director of Latino Movement USA, who also is a member of ANSWER's Los Angeles steering committee.
"We are people of dignity, and we demand respect," Mr. Gutierrez said at the rally. "This is the beginning of a movement that is going to call for a national work stoppage."
Another ANSWER member who spoke at the rally, Gloria La Riva said: "The racist politicians thought they could step on us with their racist legislation, but they have awakened the immigrant giant, and they will feel our strength when we stop work."
Founded three days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the organization describes itself as a "coalition of hundreds of organizations and prominent individuals and scores of organizing centers in cities and towns across the country" that have campaigned against "U.S. intervention in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia ... and for civil rights and for social and economic justice for working and poor people inside the United States."
ANSWER also organized the first national anti-war rally after the September 11 attacks, a demonstration that brought 25,000 people to Washington and 15,000 to San Francisco on Sept. 29, 2001.
The Workers World Party, a communist organization in the United States founded in 1959, describes itself as a party that has, since its founding, "supported the struggles of all oppressed peoples" and opposes "all forms of racism and religious bigotry." In addition to sponsoring or directing numerous popular-front groups, it was instrumental in founding ANSWER through the International Action Coalition.
Its March 25 rally in Los Angeles and its planned "Great American Boycott of 2006" on May 1 are part of a series of large-scale events that the coalition hopes will sway lawmakers to put millions of illegal aliens in the United States on track toward permanent residency and U.S. citizenship.
ANSWER has denounced attempts by Congress to secure the United States' borders and criminalize illegal aliens as "racist," saying all working people should back full amnesty for all of the estimated 10 million to 12 million illegal aliens now in the United States. It has accused the media, government and corporations of "erecting borders against humans and waging war on immigrant America."
Calling its proposed boycott a "day without an immigrant," the coalition has labeled members of Congress -- both Republicans and Democrats -- as "hatemongers," saying it will "settle for nothing less than full amnesty and dignity for the millions of undocumented workers presently in the United States."
The street rallies and the proposed boycott are seen as critical in keeping what ANSWER has described as "pressure" on Congress so it will not be allowed to "decide how much equality or how much inequality, or how much repression, should be meted out to the millions of hardworking immigrant families."
"Immigrant workers, including the undocumented workers, are the sisters and brothers and allies of all those struggling for justice," the organization said.
The boycott, according to the coalition, means no work, no school, no shopping, buying or business as usual.
Washington Times ~ Jerry Seper ** Rally organizer tied to Marxist party
Posted by yaahoo_2006iest
at 12:22 AM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, 12 April 2006 12:27 AM EDT
d'oh
Hillary Blames Failure to Create Jobs in NY State on Washington GOP, Talks Down Red Hot U.S. Economy
But I think given the fact that that wasn't the environment that I'd hoped for, we've seen some progress.' In fact, New York State has actually lost 112,000 jobs since sending Mrs. Clinton to Washington, according to the Public Policy Institute in Albany." Yesterday she was on 
He says, "You're going to give a major economics speech tomorrow night at the Economic Club of Chicago. The unemployment rate is 4.7%, robust growth, low inflation and interest rates, consumer confidence soaring. What's wrong with the economy?"
HILLARY CLINTON: The indicators at the present time, as you say, are positive, but if you look just over the horizon and below the surface, there are some troubling issues. Yes, unemployment is 4%, but, you know, it was 4% in the Clinton administration and more people were in the workforce [sic]. So a lot of people have disappeared from the workforce. Replacement jobs for those that are lost are, you know, 20 to 40% less in income. The sort of pillars of the middle class, a stable job with certain benefits if you work hard are beginning to disintegrate
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RUSH: All right, does Mrs. Clinton know what she's talk about or as usual is she just meandering and wandering in vain search of a cogent thought? I have here, ladies and gentlemen, from today's 
"Well, of course the economy is good for the rich," they will say.
"The US economy isn't just producing jobs these days, it's also producing good jobs." By the way, there's always a template when news like this comes out from our friends in the drive-by media. The Democrats, like Mrs. Clinton just said here in a sense, "Well, of course jobs are way up, but what are they? They're hamburger-flipper jobs. They're not even worth the minimum wage," and yet the Democrats are trying to import that kind of labor into the country, the kind of jobs that they sit there and impugn and ridicule when they are created and say that they're worthless and it's nothing more than the rich enforcing involuntary servitude and poverty on everybody else. And yet here they're wanting to import just that kind of worker and make legal those who are here illegally. "Alongside the ads for jobs handling a cash register or a spatula are these new opportunities: In St. Louis, AFB International is enlisting both technicians, paid $30,000 to $40,000, and PhD scientists, offered $80,000 to $100,000, in its quest for the perfect pet food. In Delaware, Honeywell plans to hire people at $40,000 to $100,000 to work in a data-storage center. In southern California, some of the latest openings involve working on the railroad, for $35,000 to $70,000 a year. Union Pacific plans to add 2,000 employees altogether. These reports in the past month symbolize a welcome trend during an economic expansion that at first offered only tepid job gains, both in quantity and quality."
Now, every time a Democrat comes out and steps in it and says something bad about the economy, you can count on the fact the news is going to be good. It's just their stroke of luck. Do you remember, ladies and gentlemen, the two guys who wrote the book 
Thomas Stanley and William Danko live in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It's #1. The concentration of millionaire households is 20.4%. Number two is Naples, Marco Island, Florida, with a concentration of millionaire households at 17 1/2%. Number nine, Washington, DC, metro, concentration of millionaire households: 12.6%. Number ten is Honolulu. Concentration of millionaire households: 12.5%. So more than 80% of millionaires are ordinary people who have accumulated their wealth in one generation. The wealth continues to expand. The economy is producing great jobs, not hamburger-flipping jobs. It is a 4.7 unemployment rate which is actually above statistically full employment, and yet here's Mrs. Clinton and the Democrats doing everything they can to water down the good news, to get you not to believe it. I continue to just marvel at this. Just looking at them as human beings, forget that they're Democrats or liberals -- I know you can't do that because that's who they are -- but this preoccupation with doom and gloom and pessimism and destruction and the end of good times... Mrs. Clinton's whole comment was, "Yeah, yeah, but don't be so sure that it's really good news. It's going to get worse. The Republicans are messing up." Right in the middle of absolutely fabulous news.
I wanted to lead with that today because I love inspiring you people. I love motivating, and there are countless reasons -- because we are Americans, because we live in this country -- to be optimistic every day. Yeah, we have our obstacles to deal with, and it's not a panacea out there. But if there's ever been a people to demonstrate that we can overcome and we can do things and we can do the best, it's us. In the face of this constant, constant despair and gloom and doom and pessimism and the (almost) encouragement to go ahead and fail, "Fail, we'll take care of you. In fact, we Democrats love you as victims." Which is exactly what they're saying to these illegal immigrants that somehow have the money and the time to spend all of these days marching around the cities of America demanding that they be exempt from the laws of the country
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END TRANSCRIPT
Read the Background Material...
chatty
Prosecutor in CIA Leak Case Corrects Part of Court Filing
The federal prosecutor overseeing the indictment of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, yesterday corrected a claim in an earlier court filing that Libby had misrepresented the significance placed by the CIA on allegations that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger.
Last week, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald wrote that, in conversation with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Libby described the uranium story as a "key judgment" of the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a term of art indicating there was consensus within the intelligence community on that issue. In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments and was listed further back in the 96-page, classified document.
In a letter to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, Fitzgerald wrote yesterday that he wanted to "correct" the sentence that dealt with the issue in a filing he submitted last Wednesday. That sentence said Libby "was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."
Instead, the sentence should have conveyed that Libby was to tell Miller some of the key judgments of the NIE "and that the NIE stated that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."
Libby is not charged with misportraying or leaking classified information. He was indicted last year for allegedly lying to the FBI and a grand jury about what he said to reporters. The indictment came as part of Fitzgerald's investigation into who leaked to the media the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose husband became a public critic of the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war.
silly
Barbara Streisand Psychoanalyzes Bush
Noted political psychologist Barbra Streisand says she has plumbed the depths of President Bush's psyche, and has come up with his deep-seated reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein.
In her latest "Truth Alert," Dr. Streisand explores what she describes as the "psycho-social reasons relating to Bush’s decision to invade Iraq."
Turns out, according to the oracle of Malibu, Bush has "a long-standing father and son competition based on feelings of jealousy and inadequacy."
Posits Streisand: "Bush saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow and no longer be seen as the perpetual underachiever who consistently failed under the watchful eye of his accomplished father."
By invading Iraq, she insists, Bush 43 "had the chance to finish what he feels his father was unable to finish. And he could finally have the opportunity to achieve something his father was unsuccessful in achieving ... a two-term presidency.
"
Thus, says the Freudian "Funny Girl": "the warmongering Bush administration was given the perfect rationale for waging a war: combating terrorism."
(Excerpt)
By making increasing demands that the U.S. not enforce its immigration laws and, indeed, that it liberalize them, Mexico is throwing stones within its own glass house. This paper, the first of a short series on Mexican immigration double-standards, examines the Mexican constitution's protections against immigrants, and concludes with some questions about U.S. policy.
Summary
♣ Immigrants are denied equal employment rights.
♣ Immigrants and naturalized citizens will never be treated as real Mexican citizens.
♣ Immigrants and naturalized citizens are not to be trusted in public service.
♣ Immigrants and naturalized citizens may never become members of the clergy.
♣ Private citizens may make citizens arrests of lawbreakers (i.e., illegal immigrants) and hand them to the authorities.
♣ Immigrants may be expelled from Mexico for any reason and without due process.
GOP Gains Ground on Immigration Debate
(Excerpt)
In a political season when most of the news has been bad for Republicans, the Congressional debate over immigration has produced a bit of movement in favor of the GOP.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national opinion survey found that 37% of Americans now trust Republicans more than Democrats on the issue of immigration. Just 31% trust the Democrats more.
Siplin (right) scaled a chain-link fence behind his senate office in Pine Hills and jumped into a waiting car. Just an hour and a half before, State Attorney Lawson Lamar announced a third-degree felony charge of grand theft had been filed against Siplin, as well as a misdemeanor of using services of officers or employees. He apparently was trying to avoid being seen by Channel 9 cameras waiting at his office (
"This case centers on a person in a position of trust utilizing approximately three months of labor, funded with taxpayer dollars, for his personal political campaign -- not for the job a state employee was being paid to do," Orange-Osceola State Attorney Lawson Lamar said. "That amounts to grand larceny from the people of Florida."
Lamar said Siplin requested two months leave for an employee to work on his campaign and kept her working there on public payrolls after that period ended. He is also accused of using the services of two other public employees over shorter amounts of time.
Channel 9 could not reach any staffers Monday. None of the three named in charging paperwork still work at Siplin's senate office. All three were subpoenaed and gave statements to prosecutors.
From those, Lamar said, it was clear to investigators Siplin did not simply make a mistake.
"It was not as though he didn't know exactly what he was doing," Lamar said.
Gov. Jeb Bush will review all information surrounding the case and then decide what action to take, said Alia Faraj, Bush's spokeswoman.
"We're going to study the matter further and review all the information that will be provided to our office," Faraj said.
Senate Minority Leader Les Miller said Siplin hadn't been notified of the charges when he talked with the senator just before noon Monday.
"He sounded like he was a little bit in a shock mode because he hadn't been notified. All of a sudden it was on TV, on the Internet and no one had called him," said Miller, D-Tampa. "He was pretty much in shock. I told him to go do what you have to do and I'll get back with you.
"
Senate President Tom Lee said in a statement that Florida law doesn't call for the automatic expulsion of senators facing criminal charges.
"This is a very unusual circumstance. These are serious charges, and we will treat the State Attorneys action accordingly. We did not receive any formal notification of this action, nor have we received the specifics on the charges," the Valrico Republican said.
If convicted of the third-degree felony, Siplin faces up to five years in prison.
Lamar's office is also investigating rent payments Siplin made with public money for offices in a building his wife owned and another where his law office is located.
RAW VIDEO: 
don't ask
Iran Hits Milestone in Nuclear Technology
TEHRAN, Iran - Iran has successfully enriched uranium for the first time, a landmark in its quest to develop nuclear fuel, hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday. He insisted, however, that his country does not aim to develop nuclear weapons.
In a nationally televised speech, Ahmadinejad called on the West "not to cause an everlasting hatred in the hearts of Iranians" by trying to force Iran to abandon uranium enrichment.
"At this historic moment, with the blessings of God almighty and the efforts made by our scientists, I declare here that the laboratory- scale nuclear fuel cycle has been completed and young scientists produced enriched uranium needed to the degree for nuclear power plants Sunday," Ahmadinejad said.
"I formally declare that Iran has joined the club of nuclear countries," he told an audience that included top military commanders and clerics in the northwestern holy city of Mashhad. The crowd broke into cheers of "Allahu akbar!" or "God is great!" Some stood and thrust their fists in the air.
The U.N. Security Council has demanded that Iran stop all uranium enrichment activity by April 28. Iran has rejected the demand, saying it has a right to develop the process. The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, is due in Iran this week for talks to try to resolve the standoff.
The White House denounced the latest comments from Iranian officials, with spokesman Scott McClellan saying they "continue to show that Iran is moving in the wrong direction."
Ahmadinejad said Iran "relies on the sublime beliefs that lie within the Iranian and Islamic culture. Our nation does not get its strength from nuclear arsenals."
He said Iran wanted to operate its nuclear program under supervision by the International Atomic Energy Agency and within its rights and regulations under the regulations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
party time!
US economy's latest output: better jobs
Newest job numbers show that businesses are expanding opportunities in high-wage fields.
♠ In St. Louis, AFB International is enlisting both technicians, paid $30,000 to $40,000, and PhD scientists, offered $80,000 to $100,000, in its quest for the perfect pet food.
♠ In Delaware, Honeywell plans to hire people at $40,000 to $100,000 to work in a data-storage center.
♠ In southern California, some of the latest openings involve working on the railroad, for $35,000 to $70,000 a year. Union Pacific plans to add 2,000 employees altogether.
These reports in the past month symbolize a welcome trend during an economic expansion that at first offered only tepid job gains, both in quantity and quality.
This good news about the breadth of job creation comes against a backdrop of labor-market anxiety that has persisted despite the economy's solid overall footing. Competition from imported goods, the threat of outsourcing services abroad, and a controversial influx of illegal laborers are just some of the forces that make many workers worried about their future.
Creating good jobs - the kinds that can keep American living standards rising - appears likely to remain a challenge. But the current employment picture at least indicates movement in a positive direction.
"We're creating lots of all kinds of jobs, across many industries, occupations, and pay scales," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. But he adds: "If your skill sets are rusty, or at the low end of the skill range, you're going to have a tougher time."
The economy added 211,000 jobs in March, according to a Labor Department report Friday - a solid showing about on par with expectations. The unemployment rate fell a notch, to 4.7 percent.
The new jobs still include plenty at the low end: An analysis by Merrill Lynch finds that some 40 percent of the net gain in March came in two areas known for low pay: retail services and leisure/hospitality, which includes restaurants.
But this is just part of a broader tapestry. Management and professional occupations are employing 1.2 million more people this month than a year ago - or about 1 in 3 new jobs in America. This is the highest-paying of five broad categories tracked by the Labor Department. Not all of them are CEOs or engineers, but the median paycheck for full-time workers in this category is $937 a week, far above the US median of $651.
The construction industry continues to hammer out more than its share of new jobs. It accounts for about 6.4 percent of US jobs, but has provided 14.4 percent of the past year's job growth. The quality of construction jobs is mixed - often offering higher hourly pay than the US median but with lower benefits.
Even the manufacturing sector, which has long offered blue-collar workers a measure of middle-class prosperity, appears to be stabilizing after a period of heavy job losses. Despite downsizing in the automotive industry, 175,000 more people are employed in production occupations today than a year ago.
"As this recovery gets under way, professional services have begun adding jobs fairly broadly," says Jared Bernstein, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington.
EPI tracks the weighting of higher- versus lower-paying jobs that are being added to the economy. For much of the current expansion, which began at the end of 2001, that indicator has been negative.
In the past year, however, it has turned positive, meaning that the new jobs in the economy are the kind that tend to pull average wages up, not down.
Beyond professional services, one example may be construction. The housing market is cooling, but commercial building is heating up.
"More of the work will be in nonresidential construction," predicts Michael Carliner, an economist at the National Association of Home Builders. That could mean demand for higher skills, such as equipment operation, that boost pay.
The question, however, is how much of today's strengthening labor market represents cyclical trends, rather than long-term gains.
At this point, perhaps midway into an expansion phase, it's not unusual to see the job mix improve and pay to rise in new and existing jobs alike. "I would expect wages and compensation to increase faster," says Rae Hederman of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.
How long that pattern lasts will depend in some measure on the Federal Reserve, which is now trying to decide whether to raise interest rates further. Setting rates too high, some experts warn, could slow the economy and dampen job growth.
The labor market's gains are beginning to take on the shape of a barbell, with growth weighted heavily at the two ends of the pay scale. During the current expansion, the bulk of new jobs have come in either the highest-paid of five broad occupational categories - management and professional - or the lowest-paid, services. Together the two sectors now account for more than half of all jobs. (The other three major categories are sales and office work, construction and natural resources, and production/transportation.)
The economy's overall share of jobs with strong pay and benefits has failed to grow during the past quarter century, even though workers today have higher skills and more technology to make them productive, says John Schmitt, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research institute in Washington. That's a break with the past, he says, when "wages typically tracked closely with productivity."
celebratory
Passive smoking doesn't cause cancer - official
The world's leading health organisation has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect.
The astounding results are set to throw wide open the debate on passive smoking health risks. The World Health Organisation, which commissioned the 12-centre, seven-country European study has failed to make the findings public, and has instead produced only a summary of the results in an internal report.
Despite repeated approaches, nobody at the WHO headquarters in Geneva would comment on the findings last week. At its International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, which coordinated the study, a spokesman would say only that the full report had been submitted to a science journal and no publication date had been set.
The findings are certain to be an embarrassment to the WHO, which has spent years and vast sums on anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns. The study is one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking - or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) - and lung cancer, and had been eagerly awaited by medical experts and campaigning groups.
Yet the scientists have found that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer. The research compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people. It looked at people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers.
The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: "There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood."
A spokesman for Action on Smoking and Health said the findings "seem rather surprising given the evidence from other major reviews on the subject which have shown a clear association between passive smoking and a number of diseases." Roy Castle, the jazz musician and television presenter who died from lung cancer in 1994, claimed that he contracted the disease from years of inhaling smoke while performing in pubs and clubs.
A report published in the British Medical Journal last October was hailed by the anti-tobacco lobby as definitive proof when it claimed that non-smokers living with smokers had a 25 per cent risk of developing lung cancer. But yesterday, Dr Chris Proctor, head of science for BAT Industries, the tobacco group, said the findings had to be taken seriously. "If this study cannot find any statistically valid risk you have to ask if there can be any risk at all.
"It confirms what we and many other scientists have long believed, that while smoking in public may be annoying to some non-smokers, the science does not show that being around a smoker is a lung-cancer risk." The WHO study results come at a time when the British Government has made clear its 
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