these IRS workers in Cincinnati should be rewarded for doing their job correctly. like me, maybe they were getting real tired of subsidizing a political cult of bigoted hatespeach with their own tax dollars. every tax dollar that some group of greedy, racist pigs like the Tea Party avoids paying, is one more dollar the rest of us have to make up.

get these IRS workers on Oprah and honor them for doing their job correctly and 100% in the public interest. A group of bigots who advocate for the elimination of government cannot continue to be included in modern society, they must be made to be outcasts and targeted for investigation, until they no longer exist.

graphic photos of Boston runners is ok. graphic photos of soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan is bad. The goal is continued billions for domestic surveillance police state and continued billions for the Pentagon. The corporate media is just doing their job, reporting only in a way that increases the perception that billions more are needed for domestic surveillance and incarcerations and foreign wars of misadventure.

instead of locking down the city of Boston, we should be locking down every gun and explosives merchant in America.

True, the Senate is a sick sideshow at the carnival of criminals aka the US Congress. But the real problem is the House. In the House we’ve got a Rethug majority at least until the next census in 2020. Read Nate Silver’s writings on the effects of gerrymandering. So to reform the filibuster now would be to take away the Dems future ability to halt the Ayn Rand corporate steamroller headed our way. Look at the big picture, money controls our former democracy now, and the corporations have all the money, they own the media, and they own the courts. Until the demographics of this country change, which they will, progressives are on defense, and the ability to filibuster might be about all we have left.

The major flaw of our government is that you really can’t mix representative democracy with free market capitalism, and expect a good outcome for the populace. It’s an experiment that has failed miserably and we’re seeing the manifestation of that failure in things like the gun debate. Read the second amendment, it clearly and unambiguously DOES NOT grant the unlimited right to bear arms, not rifles, not handguns, IT GUARANTEES A WELL REGULATED MILITIA ! The entire gun debate is based on the fraud of the NRA’s thirty year campaign to unilaterally re-write the second amendment, of course with their corporate money and corporate media enabling the myth that everyone has the right to a weapon, which is sadly what most americans believe.

Fat Tony should get his own radio show on Rush’s network. His shit only plays with idiots, this guy is an intellectual midget hiding in his misinterpreted reading of American history.

cspan had a debate a few years ago between Scalia and Breyer, it was at some middle of the road law school, not a liberal bastion by any means. By the middle of the debate the law students were openly mocking Fat Tony, as they had picked up on his dishonesty, after he changed his positions numerous times on questions in order to fit his political views. Breyer was laughing at him, along with the students. Fat Tony is a disgrace to all Americans, and especially Americans of Italian descent.

Brown is the textbook example of a senator who actually fights for the working families in his state, and the just rewards achieved. Having won a swing state by a wider margin than Obama, he is the rising star of the progressive side of the dem party. He’s a fighter and he’s fearless, one of the first to call for breaking up big banks, with an upcoming election in a swing state. He’s exactly the guy we want leading the spineless bunch of wimps known as “the democratic majority in the senate.”

He is a nightmare to Wall Street, I don’t think he can get shoved off the committee by Harry and the other corporate lackeys who think they are the real leaders of the senate majority.

oil prices / gasoline prices are not a good measurement of inflation/deflation, that is an artificial market driven by speculation.

deflation can be seen in under capacity in our industrial base, which is large. inflation requires full capacity in our industrial base, and rising worker’s incomes. Let me know when those two things start screaming higher and I’ll pay attention to inflation.

housing prices have always corresponded dirctly to personal incomes, except during the period of financial fraud known as the housing buble.

housing is now returning to it’s historical valuation models. Look at personal income increases and you can calculate housing appreciation, in one word: Minimal.

the demise of bonds has been predicted for so long by so many “experts” one has to wonder why they have not become worthless by now.

could it be that the entire investing profession receives a fraction of the commission on bond purchases that they receive on stock purchases ?

the Treasury dept. has a site called Treasury Direct that allows anyone to purchase bonds, commission free. That sets a pretty low cost threshold for all the scammers in the financial services industry to compete with.

look at Japan the last twenty years and tell me if you would have rather owned Japanese government bonds or japanese equities. We are Japan now, we’re in a balance sheet recession. Quality debt instruments hold and increase their value during times of deflation, which is where we are, witness the massive Fed stimulus required by the Fed to combat that deflation. Add in our austerity crazed Congress, and deflation becomes even more likely.

the U.S. has taken a more subtle approach to confiscating savers’ money. The big banks are getting FREE CAPITAL to gamble with, in the form of ZERO percent interest rates they are paying/not paying to their depositors.

Every widow, kid with a paper route, ordinary joe without a brokerage account, non profit, or any organization not allowed to make risky stock market investments, and the large percent of the population who has no inclination to enter the wall street casino with their life savings is providing the big banks with free capital.

Yes, zero interest rates were necessary to combat deflation after the big crash in 2008. But our government could easily make a special category of government bonds paying 5% available to all men, women and children, who are not wealthy, just savers, with a cap that allows the middle class and the working poor to recieve a return on their life savings.

The net result of the current scam is the next best thing to the result that Wall Street and Pete Peterson wanted with privatizing social security: Unlimited funds flowing to the financial criminals that the criminals could then churn, and churn and churn.

The current system allows the financial criminals to get FREE money, then turn around and buy US Treasury bonds with it. So, the people of America not only get zero income from their savings, they also owe future interest payments to the bankers who own the treasury bonds, those bonds that were purchased initially with money loaned to the bankers by the savers at zero percent interest !

And Durbin is attending the Wall Street Journal breakfast, and cheerleading for more cuts. He also slams his “liberal friends” in the quotations. I can’t remember when the last time the Dems had a majority in the Senate, and they selected people like Reid and Durbin. These guys need to be replaced in the Senate leadership, like yesterday.

Bring in Whitehouse, Brown, Murray, Warren, Merkley for god’s sake. Get rid of Durbin, Reid immediately, I can’t tell who those guys work for anymore.