Why is anyone surprised? Feinsteins husband makes a ton of money off defense contracting and guess what Feinstein tries to shove more business his way with spending bills. I don't even want to think about the earmakrs each one pushes.

Everyone in Congress is self-serving now. I really think there needs to be a term limits movement on all of them. Sitting around over time and gathering and giving favors isn't helping anything. Besides no one in Congress has any idea of what the average Joe faces on a daily basis.

Just wait till the "Manhattan Madam" featured on ABC's 20/20 last night publishes her list of client names! Spitzer wasn't the only politician or prominent business mogul sulking around the hotels with high priced hookers in NYC.
We need some large demonstrations in the streets to get the attention of the higher ups to change their ways.

We need some large demonstrations in the streets to get the attention of the higher ups to change their ways.

Honestly, I dont think demonstrations will do it. Its going to take a revolution. The elite wont lose their grip on control without a fight. They have had control for too long.

This is the trillion dollar question. We won't start answering it until the level of dialogue is raised from the simplistic scare talk we get now. It's communism! It's socialism! Bulls**t. If we had a hybrid healthcare system like France, it wouldn't change the rest of our capitalist system. And let's not forget, no two systems are alike... if we had the guts to do something, ANYTHING, it wouldn't necessarily resemble anything else in this world. We can be the beacon of democratic light in the world and still provide health care to all.

Unfortunately, insurance companies and other corporations are so entrenched that it would be hard to unwind this mess. Perhaps a majority of the stimulus plan could go toward buying out investors... hell, we're already doing it in the financial sector.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a LEADER who said, "re-election be damned. I am going to solve problems and I don't care who it pi**es off!"

From themail.com, Gary Imhoff's gadfly e-letter about DC politics. FYI.

Don

February 4, 2009

Homesteading

Dear Homesteaders:

We've just gone through an exciting week's debate over the failure of former Senator Tom Daschle, who was nominated to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to report all his income and to pay income taxes on it. Daschle's supporters claimed it was just an oversight, an understandable error; his critics insinuated that there was a simpler explanation. I was surprised that in this debate no one mentioned that this was not the first time Daschle had creatively reduced his tax burden, and that there was a local DC tax angle to the story. In 2004, opponents of Daschle in his last Senate race discovered that Daschle and his wife had sworn that their house in Washington was their primary residence in order to get DC's real property Homestead deduction. As a Senator from South Dakota, of course, Daschle's primary residence would have to be in that state, and it became an effective minor issue in the campaign not only that Daschle was evading paying his full property taxes, but also that he had become such a Washington insider that he was no longer a true South Dakotan. I brought this up at one of Mayor Williams' press conferences, and asked whether DC knew whether any other members of Congress were illegally claiming the Homestead deduction for their houses in DC. Williams bristled at and brushed off the question, and as far as I know nobody in the tax office ever decided to alienate Congress by exposing its property tax cheaters.