"What we're talking about is a one-half percent income tax surcharge on incomes above $1 million," said Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., a leader of the Blue Dog group. "So someone who earns $2 million a year would pay $5,000. ... They're not going to miss it."

According to Business & Media Institute advisor Don Luskin, Soros’ “Theory of Reflexivity” could be better explained as an effort manipulate economic and political events. He referred to Soros short-selling the British pound in 1992 after England was pressured to devalue its currency. Soros made $1 billion in one day, which caused the pound to suffer even more.

“Simply, ‘reflexivity’ says that financial markets can have impacts on the real world,” Luskin wrote. “So if you want to move the world, just move the markets.”

“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.” Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.

When French students are not getting this kind of wildly biased commentary on the destruction wreaked by capitalism, they are learning that economic progress is also the root cause of social ills. For example, a one-year high school course on the inner workings of an economy developed by the French Education Ministry called Sciences Economiques et Sociales, spends two thirds of its time discussing the sociopolitical fallout of economic activity. Chapter and section headings include “Social Cleavages and Inequality,” “Social Mobilization and Conflict,” “Poverty and Exclusion,” and “Globalization and Regulation.” The ministry mandates that students learn “worldwide regulation as a response” to globalization. Only one third of the course is about companies and markets, and even those bits include extensive sections on unions, government economic policy, the limits of markets, and the dangers of growth. The overall message is that economic activity has countless undesirable effects from which citizens must be protected.

?"It is what it is. We’re not complaining,” he stated. “We have to deal with the hand we’re dealt with.”

Update... My DC-insider friend "Mick Danger" agrees:

You are corect, sir!

A conservative wins in Mississippi; he just happens to be a Democrat. (Hillary's win in West Virginia is meaningless to everyone, except maybe to her and her campaign-paid hairdresser.)

McCain is running as a third party candidate, trying to use the global warming issue he believes in (why, 'cause he's marinated his brains in the media bowl) to shake his tail feathers at independents and Democrats.

The trouble is that this is a fatally flawed political strategy because McCain is driving some likely voters away in an attempt to attract others who his campaign imagines exist. McCain is a regular guy, despite his dalliances with the international set.

Folks in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Arkansas -- the states he needs to carry to get to 270 electoral college votes -- work with their hands; carbon is what they do. They sure don't buy no eco clothes, unless they come printed with their favorite NASCAR number or “Git ‘er done!”.

Think the following announcement would be popular: "Ladies and Gentlemen, Turn off your engines. We are still waiting for our federal emissions carbon offset approval notice."

Here are my observations:

1. This is still a slightly-right of center country

2. "Conservative" is better than "Republican"

3. The biggest threat to blue collar jobs is political, mostly "Global Warming" legislation

4. The Republicans are now the third party, behind Democrats and Independents

5. Brace yourself; the inept Republicans and the kidding-themselves Blue Dog Democrats are about to hand the keys to the government to Nancy, Harry and Barack.

Union leaders are pushing a big money-maker (for them). It goes by the very Orwellian name, the “Employee Free Choice Act.” In fact, if this idea of theirs becomes law, it will eliminate free choice. Instead of a safe secret ballot, employees will be under enormous pressure to sign a “card check” indicating that they will accept a union and the obligation to pay union dues. Senator Obama supports it. John McCain opposes it.

Turns out this idea, once explained, is highly unpopular with the public. One of the best pollsters in either party is a fellow named John McLaughlin, president of McLaughlin & Associates. (Not that old whale on TV.)

Here’s the good John McLaughlin, making it as simple as 1-2-3, backed up by real research:

[1] Labor will spend exorbitant amounts of money to elect a Democratic president and to secure a filibuster-proof Senate, so the threat of EFCA being enacted is real. The irony is that Democratic support for this unpopular legislation could be the reason the party falls short of the magical 60 votes in the Senate.

[2] Voters intrinsically support the concept of private ballot elections. They are worried about the potential of workers being coerced and intimidated under the card-check scheme. And they see little need to change the existing balance in current labor laws to make it easier for unions to organize nonunion workplaces.

[3] More important, they resent and oppose efforts to take away an individual’s right to a private and secret ballot. These inconvenient facts for Big Labor can be exploited to the detriment of the candidates it supports. Smart candidates will not want to be on the wrong side of this issue come Election Day.

During a weekend in early September last year, two trucks and their respective containers were stolen from a haulage business in Pine Road, Yennora. More than 170 wall ovens, worth a total $257,000, were inside the containers...

As a result of inquiries by Property Crime Squad detectives attached to Strike Force Luskin, a storage unit in Anzac Street, Greenacre, was raided on Friday 8 February.

During a search of the unit detectives will allege they located and seized 124 of the 171 reported stolen wall ovens.

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