So, what did they achieve at the end?

Making $50,000 a year? Mitt Romney thinks you ought pay higher tax rate than him

60 Min: Is “fair to a guy who makes $50k” to pay “a higher rate than you?” Romney: “yeah.. It’s the right way to encourage economic growth”

So, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney continues to double down on comments showing a direct disregard for people making less than him.

On CBS’s 60 Minutes, Romney defended his low tax rate – and further denounced half of American people.

“Now you made, on your investments, personally, about $20 million last year,” Pelley said. “And you paid 14 percent in federal taxes. That’s the capital gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 and paid a higher rate than you did?”

“It is a low rate,” Romney said. “And one of the reasons why the capital gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.”

When pressed on whether or not he believes that rate is fair, Romney said he thought it was the “right way to encourage economic growth — to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.”

Mitt Romney believes – as does the newly reformed and hard-edged Republican party – catering to the rich while asking for the middle class and poor to make even more sacrifices, including losing what you’ve paid for while working – Medicare and Social Security.

Romney also works tirelessly to convince those hard-working $50,000 a year wage earners to forgo their pocketbooks and wallets and  protect the rich in the hopes of a “trickle-down” solution. Oh, those pesky social issues are mixed in for flavor.

And the GOP push the message of redistribution never having a place in America. But leave it to those annoying fact checkers to prove Romney – and the GOP – wrong.

Romney said that “redistribution” has “never been a characteristic of America.”

Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of it, but redistribution has been a basic principle of the U.S. tax system and many federal programs, including some such as veterans benefits that have long attracted support from Republicans. Pants on Fire!

Again, there is a war being waged. It is not surprising people remain blind to the facts, those being 1)used for their voting power and 2) using social issues to keep them from thinking about how poor and mistreated they really are.

Sure there is more than that, folks. But know this: A person who lives in a doublewide in the south making less than $50,000 will defend Mitt Romney and his twisted immoral philosophy.

And that’s a damn shame.

Because those exact people need the help the GOP are wanting to throw in the dumpster.

Toyota Hybrid Horror was a HOAX

Gee, what a surprise. Media people need to get a clue.  Link to the full story is here : http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/12/toyota-autos-hoax-media-opinions-contributors-michael-fumento.html?boxes=financechannelforbes.  The dude didn't shift into neutral, he's 700k in debt, in bankruptcy proceedings, and never actually took his car in for recall.  What a douche.

Rachel Maddows Factually Shows GOP hypocrisy - Vote against stimulus and policy they support

Too awesome.  It's amazing people don't get called out like this more often....  Palin, are you watching this?

Holy Names

Now some Islamists want to prohibit non-Muslims from referring to God as Allah.

By Christopher Hitchens
In Malaysia last month, there was vicious rioting after high court judge Lau Bee Lan issued a ruling on the proper naming of God. A complaint had been lodged by Muslim groups that local Christians were using the word Allah in their services and publications. (In the Malay language, that happens to be the word for God, a term Christians find it hard to do without.) The high court finding was very narrowly drawn; it said that the Catholic Herald could say Allah in its Malay-language edition, provided that the paper was sold "only on church grounds and bearing the label FOR NON-MUSLIMS ONLY." Even this restriction was too lenient for the Islamists. Several churches and convents have been firebombed and defaced, and the Malaysian government has publicly regretted the court's decision. According to an Associated Press report, the authorities believe that "making Allah synonymous with god may confuse Muslims and ultimately mislead them into converting to Christianity." The danger of this seems small—most of Malaysia's 2.5 million Christians are ethnically Chinese or Indian, and indeed there is a slight but unmistakable racist tinge to the Malayan Muslim demand for an ethno-linguistic monopoly on the word for the deity.
This is interesting and alarming for several reasons. First, it is happening in one of the world's most celebratedly "moderate" Muslim states. It seems very probable that the same sectarian intolerance will now spread to neighboring Indonesia, which has a language very similar to Malaysia's in which the "G-word" is also Allah no matter which confession is employing it. This would add to the existing pressure being brought by Islamists in Indonesia to reduce the size and influence of the country's Christian minority, as well as to make Islam an enforceable religion by means of sharia.
When speaking silkily to ignorant Western audiences, Muslim propagandists sometimes like to say reassuringly that we all—Christians, Jews, Muslims—worship the same God. We are all children of Abraham, blah blah blah. We are all "peoples of the book," blah blah again. It is true that the Quran contains much material borrowed from the Pentateuch and the New Testament, but it is also true that it is widely considered to be authentic only when written or declaimed in Arabic. The Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia lingua franca contains many borrowings from Arabic, including the G-word, but this doesn't stop its Christian speakers from being told that they can't follow their own faith in their own tongue. This quite clearly negates the notion that Islam is universal, that it preaches brotherhood, that it is a "religion of peace," blah blah blah. Instead, it shows a very calculated sectarianism, not entirely free of racial and national exclusivity at that, which proves that deep down the Islamists are not monotheists at all but believe that there are several gods, of whom theirs is naturally the best.
It won't surprise you, I hope, to learn that I have been an expert on this for decades and took it in literally with my mother's milk. My earliest years were spent in the island nation of Malta, that wonderful spot of earth between Libya and Sicily, with its capital, Valetta, perhaps the greatest Baroque and Renaissance city in Europe. Malta has a language of its own, which I used to speak in a boyish way. The Maltese tongue was once considered by some philologists to be descended from the speech of the Carthaginians, but by far its closest kinship is with the Arabic spoken in the Maghreb of Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco. It is the only Semitic language rendered in a Latin script, and, along with English, it is an official language of the country. Since Malta's accession as the smallest member state, it is also an official language of the European Union. And in Maltese, the printed word for God is Alla, which means that when spoken by a priest, it sounds exactly the same.
This is made additionally interesting by the fact that Malta is probably the most Christian country in Europe, more observantly Catholic than Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or even Poland. It is studded with beautiful and ornate churches and was the site of one of the longest sieges ever mounted by the Ottoman Empire—a siege that eventually led to a Crusader victory. (They don't call themselves the Knights of Malta for nothing.) When services are held in the vernacular, God is addressed as Alla.
It could well be that all this unsettling information has not yet reached the ears of the jihadists. But it now joins the long list of actual and potential confrontations, derived from the infinitely elastic list of matters about which Muslims award themselves the right to be aggrieved—and also the right to resort to violence. Who could have guessed that they wouldn't notice until last year that there were non-Muslims speaking the same language as them? Who could have foreseen that within weeks of this startling discovery we would witness the usual dreary display of yelling crowds, snarling preachers, and smoldering buildings?
Arabic is a great language of literature and poetry, and derivations from it (such as algebra) are found in our own dictionaries as well as across the geography of Spain (Alhambra, Alcázar, etc.). You might think that Muslims would be flattered that Christians in Mediterranean Europe and Asia employ the Arabic word for the divine. (As presumably do the local atheists, maintaining stoutly that Allah is not great or does not exist.) But it seems that grim sectarianism now carries all before it. Perhaps our newsroom copy editors should begin to make the relevant adjustments so that mobs howling "Allahuh Akbar" are now translated as howling only that "Allah is great," and people intoning "Insh'allah" are quoted as saying only "If Allah wills it," rather than "If God wills it." But if this change were ever adopted, you could make a sure bet that there would be rioting and burning and killing about that as well.

How Differential Gear works (BEST Tutorial) - Simple & Amazing

An excellent tutorial from the 1930's on the principles and development of the Differential Gear. Fast Forward to 1:50  

The Republicans' Reagan Amnesia

The resurgent GOP wants a Gipper purity test. Does the party faithful know he raised taxes, grew the federal government, and granted amnesty to illegal immigrants?

Republicans love hallowing Ronald Reagan’s name. Too bad they know so little about the guy.

Last week in Hawaii, the Republican National Committee almost passed a resolution named after the Gipper. “Whereas President Ronald Reagan believed that the Republican Party should support and espouse conservative principles and public policies,” it declared, only candidates who complied with eight of 10 “Reaganite” principles would be eligible for party funds.

The GOP isn’t as close to a political rebirth as its boosters believe.

And what were those principles, exactly? No. 1—according to the resolution—was “smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes.” Let’s take those from the top. Smaller government: Federal employment grew by 61,000 during Reagan’s presidency—in part because Reagan created a whole new cabinet department, the department of veterans affairs. (Under Bill Clinton, by contrast, federal employment dropped by 373,000). Smaller deficits and debt: Both nearly tripled on Reagan’s watch. Lower taxes: Although Reagan muscled through a major tax cut in 1981, he followed up by raising taxes in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1986. In 1983, in fact, he not only raised payroll taxes; he raised them to pay for Social Security and Medicare. Let’s put this in language today’s tea-baggers can understand: Reagan raised taxes to pay for government-run health care.

Then there’s plank number five: Reaganite candidates must “oppos[e] amnesty for illegal immigrants.” Really? Because if you look up the word “amnesty” in Black’s Law Dictionary, you’ll find a reference to the 1986 bill that Reagan signed, which ended up granting amnesty to 2.7 million illegal immigrants.

Then there’s foreign policy. Plank number six demands that candidates back the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what did Reagan do in his biggest confrontation with jihadist terror? When Hezbollah murdered 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut in 1983, the Gipper didn’t surge; he withdrew the remaining American troops, and fast. Plank number 7 calls for “effective [read military] action to eliminate” Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs. But Reagan condemned Israel’s 1981 preventive strike against an Iraqi nuclear reactor. And plank number nine requires steadfast opposition to abortion. Yet two of Reagan’s three Supreme Court nominees voted to uphold Roe v. Wade. Turns out this Reagan guy wasn’t really that Reaganite after all.

Why does this Republican amnesia about Reagan matter? Because it shows that the GOP isn’t as close to a political rebirth as its boosters believe. Reagan succeeded because he married a reputation for principle with an instinct for pragmatism. When Republicans lost big in the 1982 midterm elections because Democrats accused them of wanting to privatize Social Security, Reagan abandoned the idea and instead made a deal with Democrats that raised taxes and saved the program. In 1984, when his advisers told him that Americans considered him too warlike, he responded with a series of breathtakingly dovish speeches about his desire to eliminate nuclear weapons that helped ensure his landslide re-election. In 1981, he nominated the socially moderate Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court, even though Jerry Falwell and other evangelical leaders cried betrayal.

That was the real Reagan, the one Republicans need to embrace if they’re to genuinely threaten Barack Obama’s chances of re-election. Instead, they’ve reinvented the Gipper as a Sarah Palin-style zealot. Party activists always want to believe they can win elections without compromising their ideological purity, and the GOP’s recent string of off-year victories has convinced the conservative base that most Americans are tea-baggers at heart. But the tea-bag movement is dominated by graying white Anglos, at a time when the American electorate is growing less white, less Anglo and less gray. Demographically, American politics is being transformed by the dramatic growth of Hispanics, and by the emergence of a vast (and heavily non-white) “millennial” generation, larger in number than the baby boomers. Both groups went heavily for the Democrats in 2004 and 2008. And in their economic and cultural views, both are light years away from the tea-bag GOP.

These realities will be easy to overlook this year, because minorities and the young turn out in lower numbers in midterm elections, and because when unemployment is at 10 percent, the party in power suffers no matter what. But ultimately, the GOP’s fortunes will rest on its capacity to make inroads in these two groups. The angry white geezer vote alone won’t do it.

That’s why many of the smartest conservative intellectuals—from David Brooks to David Frum to Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam—believe the GOP must become less ideologically doctrinaire. In this effort, the real Ronald Reagan could be a useful model. Of course, were he around today, he’d have a tough time getting funding from the RNC.

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published by HarperCollins in June.

For more of The Daily Beast, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.