This must be a closed club. My replies to the ignorance being spouted by stewartm are being blocked.

I will each and every day trade you your ounce of gold for my ounce of copper.

Gold has throughout the history of man been considered a store of value and accepted world wide as such. Many currencies have come and gone, gold/silver… still here.

Your reality is your reality. You wish to revere a piece of paper with a promise printed on it, that is ok with me. You should understand though, when gold was $35.00 an ounce, it was an ounce of gold. Today gold is $1690′ish an ounce and it is still only an ounce of gold. Get the picture?

Let me help. Its not that gold that has become more valuable, its the dollar that has lost value. It is still only an ounce of gold.

You work for the fed?

Buy silver, it is 30′ish an ounce and the return will be much greater.

Hi mj,

I read the replies to your accurate assessment of the results of minting a trillion dollar coin.

Please do, Mr. President. Mint that trillion dollar coin so this madness we call an economy will meet reality.

Many people do not even know the federal reserve is a private bank that creates money out of nothing and loans it to U.S. at interest.

You mint that coin and make it clear to the world what the dollar really is. If it were made of gold, it would have to weigh 36,764,706 lbs at todays rate. I can’t even imagine how big it would have to be.
Mint it out of nickel or some other material readily available and the dollar *will* become the laughingstock of the world.

I am really looking forward to the minting of this coin.

Apologies.

Richard Blum

Does anyone know who her husband is?

From your friends at DKOS…

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/20/1163458/-CNET-Corporate-Lobbyists-Mislead-on-Leahy-Privacy-Bill

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans’ e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

It all sounds scary, but they have this all wrong.

Leahy’s re-written bill, which you can read here, prohibits law enforcement agencies from accessing GPS information without a warrant, and generally requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant to compel service providers to disclose information unless the information is relevant to an ongoing telemarketer fraud investigation (a relatively narrow loophole). this is great because currently, these agencies obtain this information based on an adminstrative subpoena that is not subject to judicial review.

The controversial portion of the rewritten bill is the portion which grants all Federal agencies (defined here) the power to issue an administrative subpoena for electronic information, GPS information and even remote computing service.

CNET quotes an array of folks raising privacy red flags, as well as a corporate lobbyist who seems terrified:

Markham Erickson, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. who has followed the topic closely and said he was speaking for himself and not his corporate clients, expressed concerns about the alphabet soup of federal agencies that would be granted more power:

❝ There is no good legal reason why federal regulatory agencies such as the NLRB, OSHA, SEC or FTC need to access customer information service providers with a mere subpoena. If those agencies feel they do not have the tools to do their jobs adequately, they should work with the appropriate authorizing committees to explore solutions. The Senate Judiciary committee is really not in a position to adequately make those determinations. ❞

What we have here, is a situation where legitimate concerns over individual privacy are being conflated with the legitimate needs of regulatory agencies to be able to investigate regulated entities. The CNET article seems to adopt the frame of the corporate lobbyist and confused privacy groups to suggest that this bill somehow threatens the privacy rights of everyone, when in effect, the main losers of this bill would be regulated corporations.

Hey DD…

“Why it’s desirable to sustain an industry based almost wholly on fraud escapes me.”

Have you read “The Creature from Jekyll Island” ?

“Man, I wish had taken the blue pill…”

Some good could come out of this….

McClatchy has been querying congress to release their tax returns for the last three months. Here is the response.

Seeing our representatives tax returns for the periods they’ve been in office could be illuminating.

(Coincidence McClatchy started this investigation 3 months ago?)

Once your unemployment runs out, they don’t count you anymore. So each week the labor pool grows smaller, reducing the unemployment rate. For instance say there were only 100 people and 10 are unemployed, 10% unemployment rate. When those 10 people’s (the 10% unemployed in my example) unemployment insurance runs out…the new unemployment rate would be 0%.

They twist the numbers in other ways also, but this is the most egregious manipulation. Real unemployment is closer to 20% than the 8.3% they claim.

One month’s entire drop in unemployment was almost equal to the number of people who fell off the rolls. I think January…

This is nothing compared to the diddling they do with the debt to gdp numbers.

Do a search at zerohedge, they are really good with numbers over there.

p.s. DD your articles are my main reason for visiting here, but this article is more akin to something I would expect from MSNBC than factual. It is an election year and everybody “rah rahing” obama’s economy and policies is sickening. I hope FDL isn’t leaning towards what Ms. Hamsher refers to as the veal pen?

Oh the humanity! Can you imagine what her life would be like today if after she had been deported in 2002 she would have had her husband fill out the proper paperwork? She probably would be a citizen by now. Instead she chose to flaunt the process, return here “illegally”, make another anchor baby and take her chances.

Guess what? She lose.

I’ve been in construction since 1981. Your sympathy is misplaced.

You saying so, does not make it so. I say speculators, (i.e. all that idle money) are driving food prices up in the commodities market.

re: Obama…I said it before and I’ll say it again. Reward him with a republican senate and house. They will impeach him for war crimes immediately after the statute of limitations expires on the BFEE.

Me…500 cans of tuna and counting. hehehe

Hi Mary,

Here is a link to what is really going on in Pakistan despite the many stories being peddled:

Link

excerpt:

On January 25th 2011, just two days before Davis shot and killed the two young Pakistanis, the US Embassy submitted a list of its diplomatic and non-diplomatic staff in Pakistan to the Pakistani Foreign Office (FO), as all foreign nations are required to do annually. The list included 48 names. Raymond Davis was not on the list. The day after Davis shot and killed the two Pakistanis, the US Embassy suddenly submitted a “revised” list to the Foreign Office which added Davis’ name!

When Pakistani police took Davis into custody on January 27th, he had on his person an ordinary American passport with a valid ordinary Pakistan visa, issued by the Pakistan Embassy in Washington. On January 28th, a member of the US Consulate wanted the Pakistani police to exchange that passport in Davis’ possession with another one. The fresh passport being offered was a diplomatic passport with a valid diplomatic visa dated sometime in 2009. This visa was stamped in Islamabad by the FO!