Wal-mart might be in violation of Connecticut sales tax law

Taxes you say!

Morris: Obama Taxes Equal ‘Mammoth Depression’
Political analyst Dick Morris tells Newsmax’s Ashley Martella that Barack Obama’s pledged tax increases would send this country into a “mammoth depression.”

Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.

In the cross hairs of the campaign carried out by DCI of Washington were Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. DCI’s chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain’s campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September

Larry,

Dick Morris also said there was no way that John Kerry could beat out Howard Dean for the Dem. nomination in 2004. He wrote a book predicting how Condoleeza Rice would successfully oppose Hilary Clinton for the 2008 presidency. And, he wrote this in The Hill after Hurricane Katrina:
“Every day for the next year, voters will see nonstop scenes of federal relief, rebuilding, renovation and reconstruction along with the empathy, sympathy and compassion these efforts imply in the heart of George W. Bush. He may have had a terrible first week, but he will rebound big time in the months to come.”

So take his predictions for what they’re worth…

And of course, all of this has a ton to do with CT sales tax :)

~~~~~~~~In Connecticut political circles, M. Jodi Rell is often referred to as the “accidental governor.” It is not necessarily a pejorative term, since Mrs. Rell, a Republican, steadied the state after Gov. John G. Rowland resigned in 2004. In 2006, campaigning for her first term in her own right, she largely ignored her challenger and stayed away from any flashy campaign promises — and won handily.  Mrs. Rell has avoided contentious partisan fights, dropping some of her priorities in the name of compromise.

Mrs. Rell was born June 16, 1946. A former homemaker who dropped out of college, she was first elected to the Connecticut General Assembly in 1984 and went on to hold leadership posts. There, she quietly cultivated relationships with legislators on both sides of the aisle.

Mr. Rowland asked her to run for lieutenant governor in 1994, but paid her little attention once they were in office. Mrs. Rell has repeatedly said that she had no knowledge of the wrongdoings of Mr. Rowland, who was later sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to federal corruption charges.

As governor, Mrs. Rell, a lifelong moderate, has backed legislation that many other Republicans would balk at, most notably approving measures allowing stem-cell research and same-sex civil unions. She has also made restoring ethics a centerpiece of her agenda, signing a bill that bans contributions from lobbyists to political candidates and establishes a public campaign financing system.

Mrs. Rell, who has two grown children, has also maintained her image as a motherly figure at the state capitol, typically speaking softly and still occasionally showing some discomfort in the spotlight. In December 2004, Mrs. Rell had a mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer, but has not reported any health problems since then.—Jennifer Medina, June 12, 2007

Rell Seeks Tax Increase to Raise $3 Billion for Connecticut’s Public Schools
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Gov. M. Jodi Rell proposed raising Connecticut’s income tax to 5.5 percent from 5 percent to pay for a $3.4 billion increase in education spending over the next five years.

February 8, 2007N.Y.~~~NYT~~~~~~~~

Al-Jazeera for Obama

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

By: Cliff Kincaid

Colin Powell’s predicted and expected endorsement of Barack Obama was transformed into big news by the pro-Obama media. But Arab propaganda channel Al-Jazeera’s intervention in the U.S. presidential contest is also extremely significant.

Al-Jazeera, a mouthpiece for enemies of the United States, aired a Moammar Gadhafi speech praising Obama and followed with a story depicting supporters of Sarah Palin as white, racist Christians. The channel is subsidized by the oil-rich Sunni Muslim plutocracy/dictatorship in Qatar.

The Al-Jazeera “reporter” who did the hit piece on Palin was Casey Kaufmann, who surfaces in Federal Election Commission (FEC) records as a $500 contributor to the Obama-for-president campaign and is based in Doha, Qatar.

The first plank in Al-Jazeera’s “code of ethics” includes a statement about “giving no priority to commercial or political considerations over professional ones,” which would seem to preclude political activities and contributions.

Kaufmann apparently didn’t get a copy of the ethics code when he was hired by the terrorist propaganda channel and made his $500 contribution to Obama. The contribution was recorded by the FEC back in February, before he made his way to Ohio to a Palin rally in search of ways to smear the GOP vice-presidential nominee.

It’s no wonder that former ABC newsman Dave Marash, once considered the “American face” of the English-language version of the channel, quit in disgust in March. He cited anti-American bias and other factors.

We’re probably asking too much if we request that Al-Jazeera take its ethics code down from its official Web site since it’s painfully clear that the rules don’t apply to Kaufmann or anybody else at the channel. It’s to Marash’s credit that he had the honesty and integrity to quit.

Al-Jazeera is the mouthpiece for al-Qaida and other terrorist groups and inspires foreign Muslim fighters to go to places like Iraq and Afghanistan to kill Americans. Accuracy in Media produced a documentary about the channel, warning U.S. cable and satellite providers to beware of its incendiary programming.

Our video showed clips of terrorists saying they went to Iraq to kill Americans because of what they saw on Al-Jazeera.

Among other things, we noted that Al-Jazeera’s first managing director was an agent of the Saddam Hussein regime and that one of its Afghanistan reporters, Tayseer Alouni, went to prison in Spain on terrorism charges. Al-Jazeera paid Alouni’s salary, legal fees, and “related expenses” during his trial and continues to defend him.

Judea Pearl, father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, has called Al-Jazeera “today’s greatest recruiter for terrorism.” Daniel Pearl was murdered by al-Qaida.

In July of this year, Pearl notes, Al-Jazeera threw a birthday party for Samir Kuntar, a released terrorist who had smashed the head of a 4-year-old girl with his rifle butt in 1979 after killing her father before her eyes. Kuntar had been released by Israel in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, who were kidnapped by Hezbollah in 2006.

Kuntar’s birthday party was “initiated and choreographed by Al-Jazeera’s bureau in Beirut and aired on Al-Jazeera TV July 19,” Pearl noted.

“Brother Samir,” the interviewer says, “we would like to celebrate your birthday with you. You deserve even more than this. I think that 11,000 prisoners if they can see this program now are celebrating your birthday with you. Happy birthday, brother Samir.”

One of the regular personalities on Al-Jazeera is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has inflamed Sunni-Shia tensions in the Muslim world, in addition to encouraging suicide bombings against Americans. He has been banned from entering the U.S.

cont.

Now the terrorist channel has turned its sights on the American presidential election, intervening in an effort to make those in the U.S. opposed to Obama appear to the outside world as white Christian racists. The YouTube video of Kaufmann’s report has been viewed by more than 1 million people.

In another interesting video that has surfaced on Al-Jazeera, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi is shown giving a speech in which he describes Obama as someone with an “African and Islamic identity” running for president of the U.S. with Arab and Muslim backing. WorldNetDaily was the first national website to highlight these comments, which were monitored by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

“All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man [Obama] . . . [and] may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns” to his campaign, said Gadhafi. The Libyan dictator described Obama as “a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia.”

The Gadhafi address aired on Al-Jazeera TV on June 11, 2008.

While Gadhafi is pumping up the crowds on behalf of Obama abroad, Casey Kaufmann’s assignment was to find some controversial Palin supporters making controversial comments, in order to depict Obama’s opposition in the U.S. as racist rabble. It was “mission accomplished” for Kaufmann’s Arab backers and financial sponsors.

Predictably, far-left Web sites such as the Huffington Post were quick to exploit the Kaufmann report in order to make anti-Republican points.

“Hate and fear are still powerful forces in American society,” stated Kaufmann, in a report that was headlined as revealing popular “misconceptions” about the Democratic presidential nominee.

What were those misconceptions? According to Kaufmann’s report, some of the people in Ohio thought Obama had links to terrorists. Is it possible they came to this conclusion because of Obama’s actual and documented association with terrorists?

Others in Kaufmann’s piece thought that Obama and his wife may harbor anti-white views. Could this conclusion be based on Obama’s association over a 20-year period with a racist like Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

The facts, of course, didn’t matter to Kaufmann.

We don’t know how many Palin people were interviewed in order to find the select few who surfaced in the report and made disparaging remarks about Obama and Obama’s supporters. But Colbert King of the Washington Post was sufficiently impressed by this propaganda piece that he wrote about Al-Jazeera’s visit to a “white working class community” in Ohio in an October 18 column under the inflammatory headline, “A Rage No One Should Be Stoking.” King, who is black, is offended that some white people don’t like Obama or what he stands for. King is himself angry because Palin and McCain have belatedly begun focusing attention on Obama’s ties to terrorists who killed Americans.

But realizing that he would look like a complete fool if he offered up anti-American propaganda from Al-Jazeera without any critical comment, King posed the big question: “Was this fodder served up by Al-Jazeera to feed anti-American sentiment overseas?” He answered himself: “To be sure. But the camera didn’t lie. Did Al-Jazeera, however, record the whole truth?”

cont.

King’s conclusion was that the only way the Al-Jazeera report would turn out to be untrue is if Obama is elected president. In other words, white people have to prove they’re not racists by voting for Obama. On the other hand, if record numbers of blacks vote for Obama, in the 90-95 percent range, that is not by definition racism. This is the double-standard that is being used to browbeat whites into voting for Obama. King knows that if Obama doesn’t get a significant percentage of the white vote, he will lose.

Kaufmann’s cameras did lie, of course, in failing to explain why Americans believe Obama has links to terrorists and racists. One point of Kaufmann’s piece was that Americans are racist if they take note of the racism that shaped Obama. So Palin’s supporters couldn’t come out looking good no matter what. This is what made Kaufmann’s story an amateurish piece of foreign propaganda. It was almost laughable.

Al-Jazeera has the right to produce such trash and distribute it around the world. But the Kaufmann “report” will serve as another reason why major U.S. cable and satellite providers should have second thoughts about putting this propaganda on the air on a regular basis. It’s too bad that columnists for the Post don’t have higher standards.

Cliff Kincaid is the editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

I know how you try to be unbiased and fair, Larry, so this item must have slipped your mind:

Al-Qaeda group backs McCain for president

A message posted on the site al-Hesbah said that if al-Qaeda wanted to exhaust the US militarily and economically ‘it requires an impetuous American leader such as McCain’.

(The message was translated by US-based Site Intelligence Group which monitors extremist websites.)

McCain Advisers Freaked Out by Al Qaeda Preference for McCain
By Spencer Ackerman 10/22/08
I just got off a conference call held by the McCain campaign to deny that Al Qaeda, contrary to reports in the AP and the Washington Post, is rooting for their man. To describe the call as panicked would be an understatement.

Jim Woolsey, the former CIA director who publicly connected Iraq to the 9/11 attacks without ANY evidence in 2001, and senior foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann spent more time WHINING about the Washington Post’s standards of fairness than on the logic of why Al Qaeda might prefer Sen. John McCain. “An amazing piece of journalism, and I use journalism in quotation marks,” Woolsey, for his part, peered into the mind of what he called “one individual Islamist blogger from one terrorist Islamist blog” and determined that he was “clearly trying to damage John McCain” and “not speaking from his heart.”

What was absent from the call, oddly enough, was any discussion about why Al Qaeda might WANT McCain to win. And there the case is simple enough. Al Qaeda prefers an indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq and a bellicose U.S. all across the Muslim world to radicalize Muslims to its terrorist cause and drain the U.S. of its financial wealth — what Osama bin Laden calls his “bleed to bankruptcy” strategy. Hence, the reason WHY, as the CIA eventually concluded, Bin Laden tried to help George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 by releasing a late-October tape. McCain pledges basic continuity with Bush on the Iraq war. As Scheunemann put it, “John McCain will spend what it takes to win.”

Yet the idea of Al Qaeda preferring a U.S. strategy that strengthens it confounded the McCain camp. “It is ridiculous to believe that in its heart of hearts, Al Qaeda wants John McCain to be the president,” Woolsey said. “It’s ludicrous.” But the ONLY thing that’s ludicrous is Woolsey’s expectation that the American public will keep falling for this sort of misdirection by the same blinkered analysts who blundered the U.S. into Iraq in the first place~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~