The Plain Truth

'Gang of Six' Plan Mired in Higher Taxes

President Barack Obama told the nation on Saturday that solving the nation’s debt crisis would “take a balanced approach, shared sacrifice, and a willingness to make unpopular choices.”

Those are weasel words.

On Tuesday, the president applauded a proposal from the "Gang of Six" — six U.S. senators who unveiled a a scheme to reduce the nation’s debt. He called it “balanced” because it combines spending reductions ($500 billion immediately, most later and few specifics offered) with changes in the tax code that would bring in $1 trillion more money from taxpayers over the next decade than current law.

Read more on Newsmax.com: 'Gang of Six' Plan Mired in Higher Taxes
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!

Meat Glue Secret and your eating it!

Is It Too Late To Buy American?

Lois Rain, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Even America’s cloud has a silver lining. Just as reports tried to rally spirits with statistics about the decrease in unemployment, some major companies went down, leading to a whopping number of layoffs.

Meanwhile, ABC News, showed how a typical American family could in fact meet all of their needs with only American-made products. How many American-made companies are there? “Too many to count.”

Surprisingly, little tweaks in buying habits really can save the jobs of our fellow men and women. It is good news, because it shows that no matter how hopeless the job situation gets, some degree of recovery is possible with positive action. Just like the human body, some positive changes can lead to a recovery that is quicker than the time it took to develop ill health.

But is it to late?

Read more »

Tea partiers get restless with Republican leadership

Several tea-party leaders are getting frustrated with the Republicans in Congress and are making their voices heard.

Tea Party Nation Founder and President Judson Phillips has made the rounds of the talk shows to denounce the Republicans for giving in to Democratic pressure.

Phillips says the GOP has capitulated because it's not really a conservative party.

"You've got a wide range of viewpoints in the Republican Party," Phillips observed, "everything from good solid conservatives, good solid tea-party folks to RINOs [Republicans in name only] to folks who probably would be equally at home in the Democratic Party.

"The American people spoke loudly in this past election, which saw a shift of 60-some-odd seats in the House of Representatives. We've never had that big of a shift in the Congress before," Phillips continued. "People spoke very clearly about what they wanted."

Read more: Tea partiers get restless with Republican leadership http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=325345#ixzz1T1ko7sRT

How corporations avoid paying income taxes

With all the talk about how companies like General Electric and Cisco pay no or very low U.S. taxes, reader Hal Helfan of Oakland wants to know why can't there be an alternative minimum tax for corporations like there is for individuals, to make sure that companies can't use loopholes to wipe out their tax burden.

"If the AMT rate were set appropriately, it would probably be easier to lower the corporate tax rate and would definitely be a boon to small corporations that don't get much benefit from tax credits," he writes.

In fact there is a corporate AMT, and it works very much like the individual AMT.

Corporations figure their tax under the regular system, which taxes corporate profits at a top rate of 35 percent. Then they figure it under the AMT system, which tosses out some deductions allowed under the regular system, and taxes the resulting profit at 20 percent. The corporation then pays whichever tax is higher.

Many large corporations are subject to AMT, especially capital-intensive companies that lose depreciation and other deductions under AMT.

But there are two problems with the AMT. Although it's extremely complex to comply with, it's not all that tough.

"It's more than anything a nuisance revenue raiser," says Martin Sullivan, a contributing editor to Tax Analysts.

More important, it does not apply to the profits that U.S. companies earn or purport to earn abroad. U.S. multinationals have found myriad ways to shift profits to foreign tax havens.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/20/BUVT1J4F2U.DTL#ixzz1KDHRAjB5

Little-known firms tracking data used in credit scores

Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post

Atlanta entrepreneur Mike Mondelli has access to more than a billion records detailing consumers’ personal finances — and there is little they can do about it.

The information collected by his company, L2C, comes from thousands of everyday transactions that many people do not realize are being tracked: auto warranties, cellphone bills and magazine subscriptions. It includes purchases of prepaid cards and visits to payday lenders and rent-to-own furniture stores. It knows whether your checks have cleared and scours public records for mentions of your name.

Pulled together, the data follow the life of your wallet far beyond what exists in the country’s three main credit bureaus. Mondelli sells that information for a profit to lenders, landlords and even health-care providers trying to solve one of the most fundamental questions of personal finance: Who is worthy of credit?

Read more »

A Reminder from Ronald Reagan

Understanding UN Bias Against Israel

Prophets and Pretenders

Did You Know? Palestinian Law Says Selling Land to Jews ‘Punishable by Death’

By Palestinian Authority decree, Arabs face the death penalty if they’re caught selling their land to Jews.

It‘s a law that’s been in place since before Israel declared statehood in 1948, and while the decree is apparently well known in the region, it is relatively unknown in the West.

The Christian Broadcasting Network reports on a man whose death, his brother believes, was caused because people believe he sold his house to Jewish settlers:

“Who killed him nobody knows, but it was because of the house,” said resident Abraham.

Abraham told CBN his brother was innocent, and said the Jewish residents even said they bought it through someone else. Nevertheless, the situation is all too common, with some real estate transactions even including extra money for the Arab sellers to leave the region and settle somewhere safer.

According to CBN:

Israeli correspondent Pinchas Inbari said it’s widely known that under the Palestinian Authority, an Arab caught selling land to Jews faces the death penalty.

“People have already been executed on these charges or to be killed by the militias, by Fatah, or the Islamic jihad. or whatever you have,” Inbari said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought up the law when speaking to members of the foreign press earlier this year:

“Ten minutes from here in the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, there is a law, a decree that if you sell land to Jews, it’s punishable by death,” Netanyahu said. “Now you think that’s something worthy of reporting?”

Watch CBN’s full report Click Here>>>>>>>>

Paul Harvey on social security (BROADCAST in 1985!!!)

Revealing God's Treasure - Mt. Sinai

Bomb Explosion Rocks Norwegian Gov’t Headquarters

OSLO, Norway (AP) — A powerful bomb tore open several Oslo buildings, including the prime minister’s office, on Friday, killing at least one person, a Norwegian news agency said. Several people also were injured, as the blast shattered windows and coated the street with documents. More Plus Video (Graphic)>>>>

150 human animal hybrids grown in UK labs: Embryos have been produced secretively for the past three years

Scientists have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories.

The hybrids have been produced secretively over the past three years by researchers looking into possible cures for a wide range of diseases.

The revelation comes just a day after a committee of scientists warned of a nightmare ‘Planet of the Apes’ scenario in which work on human-animal creations goes too far.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017818/Embryos-involving-genes-animals-mixed-humans-produced-secretively-past-years.html#ixzz1SsgkTiA8

The USDA “Invasive Species” Sham

Debbie Coffey
The PPJ Gazette

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the center of one of government’s biggest shams.

As a member of the National Invasive Species Council, the USDA has a mandate to   “not authorize, fund, or carry out actions that it believes are likely to cause or promote the introduction or spread of invasive species in the United States or elsewhere.”

Your taxpayer dollars are paying for the eradication of invasive species like stink bugs and salt cedar.
Meanwhile, more of your tax dollars are funding the vast promotion of the ultimate invasive species: genetically engineered plants and cloned animals.  This includes USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) which was formerly CSREES, Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), Economic Research Service (ERS), Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS).
Invasive species are any species not native to an ecosystem, and with an intentional or unintentional release, are likely to cause, or does cause, economic or environmental harm, or harm to human health.

Consider this when you see what the USDA has allowed to be field tested in the U.S.:

• Human genes in barley, corn, tobacco, rice, and sugarcane
• Mouse genes in corn, along with human genes
• Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) and Hepatitis B genes in corn
• Rat genes in soybeans
• Fruit fly genes in potatoes
• Pig genes in corn
• Cow genes in tobacco
• Jellyfish genes in corn and rice

What else?

Read more »

How to Start a 1-Acre, Self-Sufficient Homestead

Expert advice on how to establish self-sufficient food production, including guidance on crop rotations, raising livestock and grazing management.

John Seymour
Mother Earth News

Everyone will have a different approach to keeping a self-sufficient homestead, and it’s unlikely that any two 1-acre farms will follow the same plan or methods or agree completely on how to homestead. Some people like cows; other people are afraid of them. Some people like goats; other people cannot keep them out of the garden. Some people will not slaughter animals and have to sell their surplus stock off to people who will kill them; others will not sell surplus stock off at all because they know that the animals will be killed; and still others will slaughter their own animals to provide their family with healthy meat.

For myself, on a 1-acre farm of good, well-drained land, I would keep a cow and a goat, a few pigs and maybe a dozen hens. The goat would provide me with milk when the cow was dry. I might keep two or more goats, in fact. I would have the dairy cow (a Jersey) to provide the pigs and me with milk. More importantly, I would keep her to provide heaps and heaps of lovely cow manure to increase my soil fertility, for in order to derive any sort of living from that 1 acre without the application of a lot of artificial fertilizer, it would have to be heavily manured.

Read more »

Vietnam's Legacy Haunts Each President

If journalism is the first draft of history, the current phase of journalism with blogs, tweets, and miscellaneous bells and whistles is once-over-lightly history that bears little relation to reality.

Mercifully, there are exceptions. Some journalists still spend five or more years researching a subject they already know well and that has already generated scores of books — but the brass ring on history's carousel is infuriatingly elusive.

This time nonpareil journalist/scholar Marvin Kalb and daughter Deborah Kalb have documented how Vietnam's "Haunting Legacy" has spooked every U.S. president from Ford to Obama. And the richly deserved brass ring is in the family vault.

Read more on Newsmax.com: Vietnam's Legacy Haunts Each President
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!

Yosemite Nature Notes - Episode 15 - Moonbows

We're All Greeks Now

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Departing for New Hampshire in November 2010, Sen. Judd Gregg, the fiscal conservative President Obama wanted in his Cabinet, blurted an inconvenient truth: “This nation is on a course where if we don’t do something about it, get … fiscal policy (under control), we’re Greece.”

The remark was regarded as hyperbole. But Gregg had a point. For though Greece, measured by the size of her economy, is only 2 to 3 percent of the EU or the U.S. economy, she is a microcosm of the West.

Read more...

2012: The End of the World As We Know It

By Peter Ferrara on 7.20.11 @ 6:08AM

Like a replicating amoeba, America is pulling apart into two separate cultures. One is strongly committed to the birth of an even more robust, pro-growth, entrepreneurial capitalism. The other thinks Che Guevara and Karl Marx had important social insights relevant to America today, and wants to follow the path of Juan Peron 's Argentina, if not Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. This is the stark choice facing the American people in 2012.

This is also why the vast majority of the American heartland feels more cultural affinity with the people of New Zealand and Australia than with the people of San Francisco and Seattle, at least as reflected by the majority of those two benighted cities. But the replicating amoeba analogy is not apt, because amoebas split into two equal new entities. What the American people are about to demonstrate in 2012 is that the heartland's vision of a booming economy restoring America's traditional world-leading prosperity and superpower might is shared by far more citizens than you might think, and that the long outdated socialist vision of the "progressive" American Left, for whom that traditional American prosperity and superpower status is a moral embarrassment, is fading into oblivion.

A House Divided......... MORE>>>>>>>

Court: Appeal to assassinate Obama is protected speech

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that calling for someone to kill the President of the United States cannot be classified as a threat because standing law does not prohibit "predictions or exhortations" to violence.   Read More>>>>>>>>

Great white thumps on to boat

Staff Writer

A three-metre great white shark breached into a vessel carrying marine researchers yesterday.

While none were injured, they said it gave them “the fright of our lives”.

Six researchers from Oceans Research, a Mossel Bay-based marine research organisation, were on the boat Cheetah collecting data on sharks near Seal Island, in Mossel Bay, led by field specialist Dorien Schroder.

It was 8.30am.

“Activity around the boat ceased for about five minutes and all was pretty quiet at the stern,” Schroder said.

“Next thing, I hear a splash and see a great white breach out of the water from one side of the boat hovering, literally, over a crew member chumming on the port side.”

The 500kg shark landed on the boat’s fuel and bait storage containers – with half of its body onto the boat, she said.   Read More>>>>>

Bill Clinton: Obama Should Ignore Congress on Debt, Invoke 14th Amendment

Former Democratic President Bill Clinton has come out swinging at Congress, telling The National Memo’s Joe Conason that he would take decisive action if no debt deal is reached by the August 2 deadline. Clinton says that if he were in Obama’s situation, he’d invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to raise America’s debt ceiling “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me.”

Clinton, who came out strongly against Republicans in an exclusive interview with The National Memo on Monday, said:  Read More>>>>>

Complete History Of U.S. Debt Defaults

Source: Market Oracle

John S. Chamberlain writes: On July 13th, the president of the United States angrily walked out of ongoing negotiations over the raising of the debt ceiling from its legislated maximum of $14.294 trillion dollars. This prompted a new round of speculation over whether the United States might default on its financial obligations. In these circumstances, it is useful to recall the previous instances in which this has occurred and the effects of those defaults. By studying the defaults of the past, we can gain insights into what future defaults might portend.

Why Americans can't afford to eat healthy

The real reason Big Macs are cheaper than more nutritious alternatives? Government subsidies

Wiki Image

David Sirota
Salon

The easiest way to explain Gallup's discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being "Whole Paycheck." Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times.

It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point's carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile -- if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blowhard -- that's because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.

As with most issues in this new Gilded Age, the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism -- the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.

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