IRAN's Ahmadinejad Almost Gets It Right....

It's about campaign finance, Redneck. Eliminate the cause of the problem as to why our government is unresponsive, and unable to be effective, and you solve the problems. Simple....

Here's a new one for you, though....

JOHN BOEHNER ON THE TAKE!

Pat Williams served nine terms as a U.S. Representative from Montana. After his retirement, he returned to Montana and is teaching at The University of Montana where he also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West. Here is what he says about John Boehner, the man orchestrating the GOP alternative economic plan...

"In 1995 Boehner began meetings with corporate lobbyists each Tuesday in a room just off the House floor. At those meetings the nation’s most moneyed and powerful lobbyists met with the new Republican House leadership.

The ideas for legislation, amendments, appointments, regulations, and often the actual writing of legislation was dispensed to these corporate money changers. Imagine it, a weekly meeting under the Capitol Dome during which the very essence of our Republic, the writing of law, was bartered away to lobbyists representing companies whose businesses ranged from pharmaceuticals, energy and banking to mining and tobacco.

Boehner was in charge and the quid pro quo was quietly understood by all.

In exchange for this unprecedented access to the inner workings and the power of Congress, lobbyists would provide financial help, by the hundreds of millions of dollars, to elect and re-elect their conservative Republican co-conspirators.

The evidence is stunning, including the summer day in 1995 when Boehner was caught handing out campaign checks from the tobacco industry to members of Congress right on the floor of the House!The illicit web would grow and strengthen as favors and money from the corporate consultant world of Washington, D.C., spread its labyrinth over Capitol Hill capturing Republicans.

Many members of Congress, both current and former, who know John recognize the simple but harsh truth in the words of Boehner’s home state newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer and the national newspaper, USA Today. The Plain Dealer: “Boehner loves to golf with corporate contributors at some of the country’s best courses from California to Virginia. He enjoys dining at Washington’s fine restaurants, often in the company of lobbyists.” USA Today: “In the past five years, special interests have paid for 31 out of 36 of Boehner’s domestic and international trips. The average cost of those trips was $4,000.”

The corrupting cycle of corporate payoff continues in the highest levels of American government.

The difference is, the Dems were charged with ethics violations, and will be investigated. Guys like Boehner have written the rules so that their activities are possibly within the law, yet immoral.

The problem with the health care bill is that we truly need it, but the GOP and some Dems, I'm sure, let the insurance company write it, edit it, and take the meat out of it. So, now we have something that most people don't understand, let alone the politicians.

When we let special interests run the country, we will have problems. Voting is usually choosing between the least of two bad alternatives. At least some of the Democrats have pushed campaign spending reform and wanted to reduce the influence of special interests. No GOP member has come out for that and stood by it with his votes. I'll take my chances with the Democrats, even though my personal life is not adversely affected one way or the other based upon who is in power. Obama presented ideas of hope and change for the disenfranchised after the worst President in the history of the US. I think he deserves a chance to try his agenda, without the watered down GOP version of everything being the final result.

For those who don't believe that our government had knowlege of the 9/11 attacks that Bush COULD have acted on, had he been a competent President not looking to reward his donors, there is this...

From February 26 to May 29, 2001, Moussaoui attended flight training courses at Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma. Despite 57 hours of flying lessons, he failed and left without ever having flown solo. This school was visited by Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who piloted planes into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center respectively.

During his time in Norman, Moussaoui had a roommate named Hussein al-Attas. On August 11, 2001, Hussein al-Attas drove Moussaoui to Minnesota from Oklahoma.^[16] Hussein al-Attas said that he and Moussaoui planned to take a trip to New York City in late August/early September 2001. In 2002, al-Attas admitted that he lied to the FBI to conceal Moussaoui's name, lied to the FBI to conceal Moussaoui's jihadi and anti-American beliefs, lied to conceal his own jihadi tendencies, lied to conceal that Moussaoui had been trying to convince him to become more active in the jihad, and lied to conceal the names of other Middle Easterners who were taking flight lessons in Oklahoma.^[10]

Moussaoui allegedly received $14,000 in wire transfers from Binalshibh, originating from Düsseldorf and Hamburg, Germany, in early August. This money could have helped him pay for flight training about two weeks later at Pan-Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. On August 13, Moussaoui paid $6,800 with $100 bills to receive training in a 747-400 simulator. The simulator that Pan-Am uses is operated by Northwest Aerospace Training Corporation (NATCO), a training facility affiliated with Northwest Airlines. Moussaoui was reportedly considered as a replacement for Ziad Jarrah, who at one point threatened to withdraw from the scheme because of tensions amongst the plotters.^[17]

Clarence Prevost, the flight instructor assigned to Moussaoui, began to have suspicions about his student. His behavior largely resembled that of other seemingly wealthy men who had come to the center in the past to receive jumbo jet training despite the fact that they'd probably never use it, but some characteristics were unusual. Prevost said later that in pre-simulator instruction, Moussaoui would ask questions that had the right jargon but were otherwise nonsensical. Moussaoui read through the 747 training manuals, but had a lack of understanding of the plane's systems. Prevost was confused as to why Moussaoui would seek simulator time if he lacked basic plane knowledge. After some convincing, his supervisors contacted the FBI, who came to meet with him. (Despite later reports, Moussaoui did not skip the training for takeoff and landing).^[18]

On August 16, 2001, Moussaoui was arrested by Harry Samit of the FBI and INS agents in Minnesota and charged with an immigration violation^[19]. Materials itemized when he was arrested included a laptop computer, two knives, flight manuals pertaining to Boeing's 747 aircraft, a flight simulator computer program, fighting gloves and shin guards.^[19]

Some agents worried that his flight training had violent intentions, so the Minnesota bureau tried to get permission (sending over 70 emails in a week) to search his laptop, but they were turned down.^[20] FBI agent Coleen Rowley made an explicit request for permission to search Moussaoui's personal rooms. This request was first denied by her superior, Deputy General Counsel Marion "Spike" Bowman. Several further search attempts similarly failed.

FBI watchdog Sen. Chuck Grassley, Republican-Iowa, later wrote to FBI Director Robert Mueller:

If the application for the warrant had gone forward, agents would have found information in Moussaoui's belongings that linked him both to a major financier of the hijacking plot working out of Germany, and to a Malaysian al-Qaida boss who had met with at least two other hijackers while under surveillance by intelligence officials.

BUSH issued no warnings to the airline industry when warned prior to 9/11, in a Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) titled "Usama bin Laden Wants to Attack Within the US" and specifically mentioned using airliners as weapons. Maybe Bush didn't know, maybe it was just gross incompetence, maybe he wasn't smart enough to warn anyone, or maybe he was trying to save the US airline industry some money. In either case, after the terrorist attacks, US airliners were grounded for three days, and passenger trips declined dramatically in the following months.

Look at the candidates being put forward today.... Witches, Whackos, beauty queens...can we afford any more incompetent, or just downright greedy leaders, like Bush and Cheney and their ilk?