Look Out Wal-Mart, Here Comes Aldi

We recently got an Aldi’s in our little village. They’re not very big, but boy do they have GREAT PRICES!! The store is neat and clean. It’s set up like a bulk store with products stacked neatly in boxes. The price is directly over the product.
It is my understanding that some local people wrote to the company asking them to come to our village--and it worked. I suspect they will have a very good year here.
And over in Tupper Lake is a Save A Lot. It is the same as Aldi’s but has more groceries. You can save a bundle there as well.
Personally, I am really glad someone is able to go head to head with Wal-Mart. It is about time they got a dose of their own medicine. Go Aldi’s!!

Best Blogpost EVER. Well done, Ms. West.

Wonder how much they pay their employees with prices lower than Wal-mart.

I don’t know how much they pay their employees, but there is a very good chance that they DON’T pay their CEO almost 30 million dollars a year.

“Wonder how much they pay their employees with prices lower than Wal-mart.

Joe in Florida in”

ALDI employees receive generous wages and benefits that are significantly higher than the national average. Employees averaging more than 20 hours a week receive full health insurance benefits. - From http://aldi.us/us/html/company/5565_ENU_HTML.htm

Another site says hourly employees get between $10 and $20 per hour.  The health benefits alone put Wal-Mart to shame.

Jane,

“Personally, I am really glad someone is able to go head to head with Wal-Mart. It is about time they got a dose of their own medicine. Go Aldi’s!!”

That’s what we have been saying all along, that businesses should ‘compete’ head to head with Wal-Mart, and if Aldis can do it, why can’t others?  I shop Aldis and get most of my groceries there!!  So, instead of getting ‘mad’ at Wal-Mart, promote businesses that are willing to go head to head with Wal-Mart and compete, instead of trying to make false claims against Wal-Mart!!

I also like Aldis.  I shop there when possible along with Walmart.  I you should realize, however, Aldi’s is a German company.  Much of your money is going overseas.

Like shopping at WalMart isn’t sending money to CHINA,South America,UK,etc.,etc.,....LOL! Not to mention that REIT set up by WalMart ,in Italy, to avoid paying Illinois state sales taxes.

States Crack Down

Wal-Mart’s Italian tax-planning maneuver is the latest disclosure of a strategy by the firm to cut state taxes. A page-one article in The Wall Street Journal in February focused on how the Bentonville, Ark., retailer cut taxes in some states by paying rent to a real-estate investment trust it owned, even though the money never left the firm.

That REIT strategy has been challenged by tax authorities in several states; some have enacted laws to close the REIT structure since the Journal article.

However, the REIT tax structure saved money only in some states—those that tax income solely from operations within their borders. This taxation system, known as “separate reporting,” can make it simpler for companies to shift income out of state to tax-friendly jurisdictions such as Delaware or Nevada.

But “combined reporting” states such as Illinois are much tougher. They add together all profits of a company’s domestic operations, regardless of what state they are in, and then allocate a portion of those profits to their state. Theoretically, combined reporting makes it harder for companies to shift income to more advantageous locales.

Because Illinois rules apply only to domestic profits—not world-wide income—companies can get around the rules by figuring out ways to effectively shift income overseas.

Wal-Mart’s 80/20 structure worked like this: The company first transferred its Illinois stores to its in-house REITs, paid rent to the REITs and then deducted those payments from its taxes. The REITs, in turn, paid that money to their 99% owner, a Wal-Mart unit based in Delaware.

Ordinarily, Illinois’s combined-reporting rules wouldn’t permit a company to cut its taxes by shifting income to a Delaware unit. But in late 2001, Wal-Mart formed a Delaware subsidiary called WMGS Services LLC, records show. WMGS, with offices in Florence, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Wal-Mart Property Co., which also was 99% owner of Wal-Mart’s main REIT.

In its filing, Wal-Mart contends that Property Co.’s ownership of the Italian unit converted Property Co. into an 80/20 company. In other words, at least 80% of its employees and its property were overseas, exempting its income from taxes.

Though Property Co. is the 99% owner of the REIT—which owns dozens of stores in Illinois—Wal-Mart says Property Co. owns no real estate itself. And although Wal-Mart has more than 48,000 employees in Illinois, the firm contends Property Co. has no employees in the state, either.

The only employees of Property Co. were in Italy, the company says. Property Co. was set up to own the majority of the shares of Wal-Mart’s main REIT and has no employees anywhere, Wal-Mart has said in court records elsewhere. (In its court filing in Illinois, Wal-Mart says that WMGS’s employees and property were in Turin, Italy; an official with the company in Florence and a Wal-Mart spokesman in the U.S. say the company doesn’t have an office in Turin.)

WMGS employs 22 people at its office in central Florence, according to a company official who answered the door there on a recent weekday morning. The office is responsible for procuring merchandise from around Europe, he said. Wal-Mart has no stores in Italy.

November 14, 2007---------Wall Street Journal

Like shopping at WalMart isn’t sending money to CHINA, blah, blah, blah...

Last time I checked, Wal-Mart was a U.S.-based company—as Joe said, Aldi is not.

...Aldi’s is a German company.

Ahh, yes, globalization. Maybe Wal-Mart should try their hand in Germany? Oh, wait! Been there, done that. Lost more that 3/4 of abillion dollars on that little fiasco as I recall.

GO ALDI!

“Last time I checked, Wal-Mart was a U.S.-based company—as Joe said, Aldi is not."~bbrd in

Walmart is like a wrapped present bbrd. The wrapping paper including the bow can have all the red white and blue you want on it. But the gift itself is straight from China. In the end the wrapping will all be in the garbage and the contents of the gift will be all that is left.
Personally I would be offended if Walmart displays any flag on it other than communist China. Anything other than that is like a flag of convenience like on an ocean liner. You need to realize that Walmarts true colours are not found on ‘ol glory’.

R E M E M B E R
J O N Q U I E R E
Q U E B E C
Home of Walmart Worker Abuse

R E M E M B E R
J A C K S O N V I L L E
T E X A S
Home of Walmart Worker Abuse

Treasury Dept. Report: Foreign Companies Stripping U.S. Assets
Posted by leveymg in General Discussion
Fri Nov 30th 2007,
* Bush IRS Helps Hedge Funds Strip U.S. Assets, Evade Taxes

* Wealthy Tax Exiles Hail IRS as It Generously Extends Deadline For Offshore Corporations to Report “Assets Stripping” Until After Bush-Cheney Leaves Office

Put this is the category of things only your tax attorney knows that might kill your job and cost middle-class Americans billions in additional taxes. In a little noticed IRS ruling on August 31st, the Bush Administration gave offshore companies doing business in the U.S. until December 14, 2008 to report assets moved overseas.

Read this another way: foreign-owned companies, and those that only pretend to be, now have a 13-month window of opportunity to move assets in the U.S. into offshore accounts and hedge funds, but they don’t have to tell anyone about it until after Bush-Cheney leaves Washington. That puts the burden of chasing down international tax cheats squarely on the incoming Democratic Administration and Congress, and shifts the tax burden away from global equity funds such as Carlyle Group and foreign-based companies, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.

Thanks, Dubya, for making capital flight cheap and easy, and all you’re doing for America.

*****

BIGGEST CORPORATE TAX DODGE OF ALL TIME: Bush Admin. Makes Tax Evasion Cheap and Easy for Offshore Corps.

Like most other disasters that have occurred since 2000, it’s not as if Bush Administration officials are unaware of the problem. See, http://www.reuters.com/article/governmentF…

Some foreign-owned firms “strip” US profit-Treasury
Wed Nov 28, 2007 2:44pm EST

WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Foreign-controlled U.S. companies that move their headquarters overseas are rampantly “stripping” earnings to avoid paying U.S. corporate income taxes, according to a new U.S. Treasury Department study released on Wednesday.
The practice of earnings stripping by foreign-controlled firms involves adding excessive debt or other costs to a U.S. subsidiary to reduce local profits and avoid tax liabilities.

The Treasury study noted the existence of “strong evidence” of earnings stripping by foreign-controlled corporations that have undergone so-called “inversion” transactions—those in which a U.S.-based parent company is replaced with a foreign parent in a low-tax or no-tax country.

That raises the question, what are the current crop of Congressional leaders and Presidential Candidates going to do about it?

WAL-MART’S FAVORITE INT’L TAX DODGE

Inversion, also called “assets stripping”, has allowed huge multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart and McDonald’s to move money offshore while they evade paying U.S. taxes. What a deal.

Here’s how that particular offshore scam has worked.

Let’s say you’re a big retailer, Wal-Mart for instance, that’s publicly listed on a U.S. stock exchange, has three-quarters of a million American employees working at thousands of locations across the 50 states, with corporate headquarters in Arkansas, and is incorporated in Delaware. Pretty safe to say, that company has to pay U.S. federal and state taxes on earnings, right?

Guess what.

Wal-Mart, with subsidiaries abroad has been claiming deductions for rent it pays an off-shore subsidiary, a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), which it claims owns its real estate in the U.S., and then deducts that money from its U.S. taxes. See, See, http://www.taxjustice-usa.org/index.php?op…

Obama’s Hawaii Trips Cost More Than Palin’s Clothes
Sunday, October 26, 2008
By: Ronald Kessler

Barack Obama’s trips to Hawaii on a chartered Boeing 757 each cost more than twice the price of Sarah Palin’s new clothes.

Brad Blakeman, who was in charge of scheduling for President Bush, says a Boeing 757 costs about $20,000 an hour for fuel, crew, and maintenance. Since a trip to Hawaii entails 10 hours of flying time from Chicago, the total cost for each round-trip comes to about $400,000.

Obama used the Boeing 757 for trips to Hawaii over the summer for a vacation and again last week to see his failing grandmother. Admirable though that visit was, “By Obama using a private jet to go on a purely personal visit to see his grandma, he’s wasting not only energy, but he’s using the money that his supporters have given him for campaign purposes,” Blakeman says. “It’s a purely personal visit paid for with campaign funds.”

On the other hand, the media are highlighting the Republican National Committee’s purchase of $150,000 in clothes for Palin, even though the dresses will be donated to charities. The New York Times played the story on page one.

“They’re picking on Palin, who was provided a wardrobe by the RNC strictly for political purposes, and it was always intended that these garments would be then given to charity,” Blakeman says. “So there’s a benefit that’s going to charity, not a benefit that Palin will have after the election. There was a need for it because she’s a modest person who didn’t have an extensive wardrobe to do 24/7 campaigning.”

To pick on Palin without going after Obama’s plane trips is “an absolute journalistic abuse,” Blakeman says. “This is the same plane that he took to Hawaii when he went on vacation. In the summertime, when gas was soaring and Americans were having to pinch their pennies, this guy gets on his campaign plane and goes to Hawaii on vacation. He did a couple campaign stops in a state that is not a swing state and is a guaranteed win for Obama. That was clearly to cover the tracks of this vacation.”

Blakeman notes that at the height of the gasoline price surge, Obama suggested that Americans check their vehicle’s tire pressure as a way of conserving fuel.

“I wonder if he checked the tires on his jumbo jet before taking off for a purely personal visit?” Blakeman says. “The way he spends campaign money is a direct reflection of how he will spend ours. He could have easily flown commercial or taken a much smaller corporate aircraft that would cost a fraction of a 757.”

Ironically, it was Palin as governor who saved money for Alaskans by selling the state’s jet and instead flying commercial.

Kellyanne Conway, one of the most respected Republican pollsters, says the media’s attack on Palin’s clothes is an example of elitist snobbery or “classism.” Noting the media’s treatment of her, “I can’t believe her own family still approves of her, after the unprecedented, personal and relentless attacks that this woman has undergone,” Conway says.

Besides attacks on Palin over her clothes, Conway cites snide remarks about “the way she speaks, her husband’s lack of a college degree, the barefoot and pregnant 17-year-old daughter, you know who hunts moose anyway? The classism is so raw and unapologetic, so unconsidered and so undisguised

Larry,

It is sad that you are indifferent to George W. Bush being pulled over for another economic DUI, but it helps nothing for you to be drunk on John McCain.

Give it up Larry. You are fighting a losing battle.

Give it up, Why?
When I can get a kick out of giving you Liberal Democrats a dose of your own medicine and watch you come slithering out from under your rocks to shovel sh*t into your liberal warped blenders and spin it before you fling it on each other !

Here’s the quote of the Day!

The Moral Decay of Our Society can be directly linked to the Liberal Democrat and their Self Centered Indulgence!

IS THERE AN AUTO ACCIDENT FATALITY COVERUP REGARDING JOHN MCCAIN?~~~~~For the past two months, a major American magazine and an allied news service have been engaged in a legal battle with the United States Navy over records that they believe show that John McCain once was involved in an automobile accident that injured or, perhaps, killed another individual.

Vanity Fair magazine and the National Security News Service claim to have knowledge “developed from first-hand sources” of a car crash that involved then-Lt. McCain at the main gate of a Virginia naval base in 1964, according to legal filings. The incident has been largely, if not entirely, kept from the public. And in documents suing the Navy to release pertinent information, lawyers for the NS News Service allege that a cover-up may be at play.

“Plaintiffs have also obtained documents showing that law enforcement officers were ordered back to the accident scene to retrieve personal physical effects. The Navy has never publicly acknowledged this information,” one document reads. “This request involves federal government activity, as it addresses what may be an attempt by the Navy to protect by concealment the involvement of a former Navy officer, sitting Senator and Presidential candidate in a serious incident involving the injury or death of another human being.”

The first request for information concerning duty assignment logs to Portsmouth Naval Hospital—where McCain was allegedly brought after the accident—came in the form of a Freedom of Information Act request on August 28, 2008. The Navy acknowledged receipt of the request and advised that it had located the relevant information a few weeks later, only to deny the FOIA on grounds that it didn’t prove an “imminent threat to the life or physical safety of an individual” or satisfy the criteria of “a breaking news story of general public interest.”

“The patient admission record logs that you seek are exempt from release,” wrote G.E. Lattin, Deputy Assistant Judge Advocate General, “as information in personnel and medical files, as well as similar personal information in other files, that if disclosed to a requestor, other than the actual person in which the information is pertaining to or next of kin, would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

NS News Service and Vanity Fair appealed the decision and asked for expedited treatment of the case, as the end of the presidential election loomed. But the Navy denied that request as well.

“It appears to be a deliberate refusal to provide clearly releasable information concerning assignments to Portsmouth Naval Hospital,” wrote legal representatives for the two news organizations. “Allowing the Navy to extend its time to respond beyond a date when the documentary facts of this matter would be available for public consideration prior to the national election on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 would violate the spirit, as well as the provisions of the FOIA.”

Staff for National Security News Service and the company’s lawyer both refused to discuss the proceedings. And there are only parcels of information concerning the story that can be gleaned from the court documents.[cont.]

At a minimum it seems clear that Vanity Fair and NS News Service have launched an investigation “disclosing first-hand witnesses’ recollection of an automobile accident in which then Lt. John S. McCain III was involved. Those witnesses specifically recall McCain’s assignment to that [hospital] facility with the other person involved in the accident.” This episode in McCain’s life has, it seems, not been made public, and the plaintiffs suggest that the Navy may be attempting to actively restrict information about the incident.

“The subject matter of the documents is a matter of current exigency to the American public,” reads a document filed by legal representatives for the news service, “because the requester is preparing a current news report addressing whether the Navy continues to conceal the involvement of a Navy officer in a serious automobile accident in July 1964."~~~~~~~~~~~Sam Stein, Huff Po, Oct.28,08

ddrb,

“The incident has been largely, if not entirely, kept from the public.”

Maybe those documents are housed in AREA 51, right next to the UFO files and Obama’s birth certificate!!

I won’t bring up irrelevant birth certificate non issues of loserville distraction tactics...I will let my fellow desperate and insane supporters do it for me.

“I won’t bring up irrelevant birth certificate”

Since becoming the President of the United States requires being a ‘Natural Born Citizen”, a ‘birth certificate’ proving WHERE you were ‘born’, is VERY relevant!!

Thanks RDS, I think there are 7 or 8 people left in the United States who still care about this fake issue of semi-scare tactic extremism and foreign born xenophobia. When the thirteen colonies were formed into the United States of American who would have ever thought my being born in Panama could be so neatly overlooked. But thanks anyway, it was worth a try to get the nursing home vote.

Obama Refuses to Answer Birth Certificate Lawsuit

Friday, October 24, 2008

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman

A Pennsylvania lawsuit alleging that Barack Obama is not a “natural-born citizen” of the United States took an unusual twist this week, after a federally mandated deadline requiring Obama’s lawyers to produce a “vault” copy of his birth certificate expired with no response from Obama or his lawyers.

The lawsuit, filed by former Pennsylvania Deputy Attorney General Philip J. Berg — a self-avowed supporter of Hillary Clinton — alleges that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is thus “ineligible” to run for president of the United States. It demands that Obama’s lawyers produce a copy of his original birth certificate to prove that he is a natural-born U.S. citizen.

Berg’s suit and allegations have set off a wave of Internet buzz and rumors, though Obama could easily have put the matter to rest by providing the federal court with the basic documentation proving he is eligible to take the oath of a president. But Obama has apparently decided to deny the court and the public that documentation.

The Constitution provides that any U.S. citizen is eligible to become president if the person is 35 years of age or older and is a natural-born citizen; that is, born in the territorial United States.

By failing to respond to the Request for Admissions and Request for the Production of Documents within 30 days, Obama has “admitted” that he was born in Kenya, Berg stated this week in new court filings.

Berg released a long list of “admissions” he submitted to Obama’s lawyers on Sept. 15, and asked that they produce documents relating to Obama’s place of birth and citizenship.

Instead of responding, lawyers for Obama and the DNC asked the court to dismiss the case. But Judge R. Barclay Surrick of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has issued no ruling in the case that would have given Obama’s lawyers more time.

“There are lots of legal ways to stonewall,” a well-placed Republican attorney told Newsmax, who was not authorized to comment officially on the case. “But failing to respond is not one of them.”

“The first thing they teach you in law school,” he added, “is don’t put a complaint like this in a drawer. That’s how a nuisance case can become a problem.”

The 30-day deadline for defendants to comply with a discovery request is set forth in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures.

“It all comes down to the fact that there’s nothing from the other side,” Berg said after he filed a motion on Thursday for summary judgment.

“The admissions are there. By not filing the answers or objections, the defense has admitted everything. [Obama] admits he was born in Kenya. He admits he was adopted in Indonesia. He admits that the documentation posted online is a phony. And he admits that he is constitutionally ineligible to serve as president of the United States.”

In a contentious case, lawyers on both sides will haggle over the production of documents, and will frequently go beyond the deadlines, several lawyers told Newsmax.

“The rules are more often complied with in the breech rather than the observance,” a senior trial attorney who has close ties to the Democrat Party, but is not involved in the current case, told Newsmax.

McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out

By CARL HULSE
Published: February 28, 2008
WASHINGTON — The question has nagged at the parents of Americans born outside the continental United States for generations: Dare their children aspire to grow up and become president? In the case of Senator John McCain of Arizona, the issue is becoming more than a matter of parental daydreaming.

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

Almost since those words were written in 1787 with scant explanation, their precise meaning has been the stuff of confusion, law school review articles, whisper campaigns and civics class debates over whether only those delivered on American soil can be truly natural born. To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states.

“There are powerful arguments that Senator McCain or anyone else in this position is constitutionally qualified, but there is certainly no precedent,” said Sarah H. Duggin, an associate professor of law at Catholic University who has studied the issue extensively. “It is not a slam-dunk situation.”

Mr. McCain was born on a military installation in the Canal Zone, where his mother and father, a Navy officer, were stationed. His campaign advisers say they are comfortable that Mr. McCain meets the requirement and note that the question was researched for his first presidential bid in 1999 and reviewed again this time around.

But given mounting interest, the campaign recently asked Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general now advising Mr. McCain, to prepare a detailed legal analysis. “I don’t have much doubt about it,” said Mr. Olson, who added, though, that he still needed to finish his research.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and one of Mr. McCain’s closest allies, said it would be incomprehensible to him if the son of a military member born in a military station could not run for president.

“He was posted there on orders from the United States government,” Mr. Graham said of Mr. McCain’s father. “If that becomes a problem, we need to tell every military family that your kid can’t be president if they take an overseas assignment.”

The phrase “natural born” was in early drafts of the Constitution. Scholars say notes of the Constitutional Convention give away little of the intent of the framers. Its origin may be traced to a letter from John Jay to George Washington, with Jay suggesting that to prevent foreigners from becoming commander in chief, the Constitution needed to “declare expressly” that only a natural-born citizen could be president.

Ms. Duggin and others who have explored the arcane subject in depth say legal argument and basic fairness may indeed be on the side of Mr. McCain, a longtime member of Congress from Arizona. But multiple experts and scholarly reviews say the issue has never been definitively resolved by either Congress or the Supreme Court.

Ms. Duggin favors a constitutional amendment to settle the matter. Others have called on Congress to guarantee that Americans born outside the national boundaries can legitimately see themselves as potential contenders for the Oval Office.

“They ought to have the same rights,” said Don Nickles, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma who in 2004 introduced legislation that would have established that children born abroad to American citizens could harbor presidential ambitions without a legal cloud over their hopes. “There is some ambiguity because there has never been a court case on what ‘natural-born citizen’ means.”

Mr. McCain is not the first person to find himself in these circumstances. The last Arizona Republican to be a presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, faced the issue. He was born in the Arizona territory in 1909, three years before it became a state. But Goldwater did not win, and the view at the time was that since he was born in a continental territory that later became a state, he probably met the standard.

Quickly recognizing confusion over the evolving nature of citizenship, the First Congress in 1790 passed a measure that did define children of citizens “born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States to be natural born.” But that law is still seen as potentially unconstitutional and was overtaken by subsequent legislation that omitted the “natural-born” phrase.

Mr. McCain’s citizenship was established by statutes covering the offspring of Americans abroad and laws specific to the Canal Zone as Congress realized that Americans would be living and working in the area for extended periods. But whether he qualifies as natural-born has been a topic of Internet buzz for months, with some declaring him ineligible while others assert that he meets all the basic constitutional qualifications — a natural-born citizen at least 35 years of age with 14 years of residence.

Lawyers who have examined the topic say there is not just confusion about the provision itself, but uncertainty about who would have the legal standing to challenge a candidate on such grounds, what form a challenge could take and whether it would have to wait until after the election or could be made at any time.

In a paper written 20 years ago for the Yale Law Journal on the natural-born enigma, Jill Pryor, now a lawyer in Atlanta, said that any legal challenge to a presidential candidate born outside national boundaries would be “unpredictable and unsatisfactory.”~~~~~~~~~~~~~NYT

So what you are saying is that it is an absolute fact that John McCain was born outside the then 48 states of the United States of America?

From all my research, that should disqualify him to be President.

And God bless white America.

“McCain Was Strong Supporter Of Group Accused Of Terrorist Activities"- October 31, 2008, Sam Stein, Huffington Post

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

During the closing weeks of the election, Sen. John McCain has gone to great lengths to present his opponent, Barack Obama, as someone too willing to coddle to groups that have ties to terrorists or terrorist activity.

It is important to understand which individuals and organizations Obama has been associated with, the refrain usually goes, as it is reflective of his foreign policy as a whole.

But if that is indeed the standard by which voters are to judge the candidates, than McCain has some questions of his OWN.

During the late 1990s, the Senator supported and reportedly helped arm an organization that was accused of terrorist activities and allegedly had ties to al Qaeda.

During the late stages of the Balkan War, the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA]was known for committing incredible atrocities in its efforts to facilitate Kosovo’s independence from Yugoslavia. The guerrilla group often was responding to acts of violence committed against its own people. But its tactics were, nevertheless, viewed as condemnable: abductions and murders, systematic burning and looting of homes, and harassment and intimidation of Yugoslav officials.

President Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, described the KLA in 1998 as, “without any questions, a terrorist group.”

And yet, John McCain, the current Republican standard-bearer, was one of the KLA’s most outspoken supporters. Back in May 1999, when it seemed as if NATO air raids would prove ineffective in stopping the violence, and calls were being made to send in ground troops, McCain suggested that the U.S. simply fund the KLA instead.

“It wouldn’t bother me if you arm the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] forces,” he said.

Moreover, this past February, former Rep. Joe DioGuardi, a prominent Albanian lobbyist, was quoted as saying that McCain even help get arms for KLA forces.

“Even in 1998 when we had problems with Milosevic, McCain did everything that we asked of him to the benefit of the Albanian people, including arming the KLA,” he said.
DioGuardi, a bundler for McCain, did not immediately return requests for comment.

The Senator’s support for the KLA, however, puts him near one of the far ends of his party’s mainstream during that conflict. It also represents another blemish on a foreign policy record that McCain has held up as “virtuous.” Earlier it was reported that the Arizona Republican had a served on the board of a far-right conservative organization that had supplied arms to paramilitary organizations in Latin America-McCain’s involvement in the U.S. Council for World Freedom became problematic for his candidacy because of that group’s past ties to anti-Semitic figures and its efforts to circumvent U.S. law and fund militant anti-communists.

But McCain’s support for the KLA was far less clandestine than his service on the U.S. Council for World Freedom board. But it is similarly telling of his world policy views.

Part of it had to do with alleged ties to al Qaeda—the Washington Times reported in May 1999 that several members of the KLA were trained in terrorist camps run by Osama bin Laden himself, charges that Abrahams says have never been proven. But much of the criticism had to do with the KLA’s brutal tactics. According to a 2001 report by Human Rights Watch:

The KLA was responsible for serious abuses… including abductions and murders of Serbs and ethnic Albanians considered collaborators with the state. Elements of the KLA are also responsible for post-conflict attacks on Serbs, Roma, and other non-Albanians, as well as ethnic Albanian political rivals… widespread and systematic burning and looting of homes belonging to Serbs, Roma, and other minorities and the destruction of Orthodox churches and monasteries~~~~~~~~~~Sam Stein ,Huff Po

And God Bless ALL Americans-irrespective of color. God bless us all!

I’m Cranking Up My “Liberal Blender” to Puree Just For You Larry in USN!

Come election day, I hope my “blender” spews all over people like you and RDS!

Screwedby,

“Come election day, I hope my “blender” spews all over people like you and RDS!”

Sorry, but it won’t make much difference to ME who gets elected, I’m retired and have NO debt, it will be the younger people who will be affected most, by ‘who becomes president’!!

...it won’t make much difference to ME...

Earth shattering news, boys & girls! RDS is all about ME. He reminds me of the seagulls in Finding Nemo.

Mine! Mine! Mine!

Live Better In Cheap Underwear

Ken V,

You seem to have glossed over the part where I said, “it will be the younger people who will be affected most, by ‘who becomes president’!!”!!  My point was that while the election won’t affect me much directly, it could hurt many others if the wrong guy gets elected!!  According to Obama, I would be ‘better off’ with him, if it were all about ME, why then am I not supporting him!!

RDS: Don’t YOU have grandchildren?[You said you do.] Aren’t YOU concerned about the world they will inherit?

ddrb,

“RDS: Don’t YOU have grandchildren?[You said you do.] Aren’t YOU concerned about the world they will inherit?”

Isn’t that what I said?  I would like them to inherit a world, where ‘hard work’ is rewarded and you don’t have to pay for those who ‘don’t work’, where people could feel ‘safe’ again in their homes and walking down the street, where people accept ‘personal responsibility’ for their actions and not claim “the devil made me do it’ or some other excuse, and where people work together, not to tear things down, but rather to build things up!!