WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS YOU MAY
HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR ONE
YEAR TWO
YEAR THREE
YEAR FOUR
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OBOF YEAR FOUR INDEX
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-01
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Jan. 02, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-02
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Jan. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-03
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Jan. 15, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-04
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Jan. 24, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-05
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JAN 30, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06
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Feb. 06, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-06 EXTRA
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Feb. 09, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-07
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Feb. 13, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-08
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Feb. 21, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-09
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Feb. 27, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-10
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Mar. 08, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-11
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Mar. 13, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-11 EXTRA
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Mar. 15, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-12
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Mar. 21, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-13
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Mar. 29, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-14
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Apr. 03, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-15
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Apr. 12, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-16
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Apr. 19, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-17
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Apr. 26, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-18
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May 03,
2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-19
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May 10,
2014
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OBOF TYMHM PART 14-20
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May 20,
2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 21
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May 28, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - Ho 22
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June 10, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 23
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June 20, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 24
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July 04, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 25
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Aug. 04, 2014
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OBOF TYMHM Vol 14 - No 26
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Aug. 25, 2014
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Agenda
1.
Hello from Floyd.
2.
Jack Them Up - Get Jacked Around.
3.
Will Social Security be there?
4.
Justice Ginsburg "America
Real
Racial Problem."
5.
Billionaire Koch Brothers
Pony
Up for GOP
HELLO,
HELLO: I hope some of you are still out
there.
It seems as though
very time I get started on my posting for you, something happens that set me
back again. There is so much that I want
to get to you. I guess I am not going to
set a particular day of the week, or even what week, as it has been
recently. I will try to make it something
that is worth your time when it does come.
The price is certainly cheap enough.
I do get a lot out of getting these postings to you. It's just like I am having a conversation
with you.
The problem this time
was another fall. This time I messed up my
left hand quite a bit, makes typing a little difficult. However, I am going to give it try now.
JACK'EM
UP
&
GET JACKED
AROUND
(CORRUPTION
- - FIRST CLASS)
By Floyd Bowman
publisher
"Opinions Based
on Facts"
August 21, 2014
Picking up from my
last posting, Jim gave a lot of thought as to what the soldiers had told him
about the danger changing a tire in a combat zone. He knew that the one he has developed was too
small for military use. Also, it would
need to perform in different circumstance and environments. There was a National Guard base not far from
Jim. He went to see what he would have
to do to meet military needs.
Note: I don't know if I am going to be able to tell
you about this or not. I have missed so
much and I have gotten way ahead of where I should be.
Going back to the
beginning, Jim had to make a number of these units in his little shop at
home. Each time he refined it and was
able to test it to see if it would do what he said it would do.
At this point he had
to find a manufacture who could make these, a few at a time. For some years he knew a man that had such a
shop. He talked with him and he agreed
to make a few at a time so Jim would be able to start - one show at a time. Now, this man would make the unit, but it was
not ready to sell. Jim had to digress,
paint, put decals on the units, put boxes together, and label the out side of
the box. Here I am again, jumping
ahead. He had to get a custom box made
and get labels made. As he went about
getting these things made he, not only had find a place to get these things
done, he had to contend with price. He
was sure he had a good product, but it still had to be at a price that would
sell.
Now here I am again,
ahead of where I should be. To simply
say "he got his patent" before he did all the above. He had to decide on a name for the unit, and
what did he want to patent that would really protect him? All of this was determined with the help and
advice of the attorney. Every time he
turned around it was something else that cost money. Money that he didn't have. He and his wife are very resourceful, but it
was not easy to get the financing they needed.
More than once they thought they were going bankrupted.
I think we will leave
it at this point until the next posting.
~~~
Commentary:
Will Social Security be there when you need it?
This article, by Dr.
Allen Smith
was published in the
One of the top 100
papers in the country.
Posted: 12:00 a.m. Sunday,
July 27, 2014
How could
the optimists and pessimists reach such radically different conclusions from
the same data?
They
couldn't, if they were being honest with the public. As an economist, who has been researching and
writing about Social Security financing for the past 14 years, I am appalled at
the distorted misinformation the American people are being fed.
If the
government had not taken, and spent, the $2.7 trillion in surplus Social
Security revenue generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike, Social Security would
be able to pay full benefits for another 20 years.
But the
government did take, and spend, for non-Social Security purposes, every penny
of that $2.7 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue over a 30-year period.
If the
government were to make provisions for repaying that $2.7 trillion debt to
Social Security, the financial problems of Social Security would suddenly be
dwarfed.
Every
member of Congress knows that the real Social Security problem is the direct result
of the misappropriation of Social Security money. But few American citizens
have even a clue that all of the surplus Social Security revenue was used for
general government spending.
The
citizens of America Parkersburg ,
W.Va.
The
government may or may not choose to repay the misappropriated money. But, because of a 1960 Supreme Court ruling
(Flemming v. Nestor), the government is not legally required to repay the
money.
The
surplus revenue was neither saved nor invested in anything. It was supposed to
be saved and used to purchase marketable U.S. U.S.
Former
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner refers to the slush fund in his new book,
"Stress Test." Geithner wrote:
"In treating Social Security like a slush fund, the federal government has
borrowed, spent and vowed to pay back the $2.5 trillion or so 'surplus' in
payroll tax revenue it has siphoned out of Social Security. The money has been spent but the federal
government has promised to pay it back."
As
secretary of the Treasury, Geithner was also managing trustee of the Social
Security fund. If Geithner says Social
Security served as a slush fund, and all the surplus Social Security revenue
was "siphoned out of Social Security," it must be true.
Maybe I
have a distorted view of what things should be like in the United States
``
Allen W.
Smith of Winter Haven is a professor of economics, emeritus, at Eastern Illinois University
~~~
Justice Ginsburg:
America
‘Real Racial Problem’
Ian Millhiser
Think Progress / News Investigation
Published: Saturday 23 August 2014
The Supreme Court was “once a leader in the world” in
combating racial discrimination, according to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “What’s amazing,” she added, “is how things
have changed.”
Ginsburg, who
was one of America’s top civil rights attorneys before
President Carter appointed her to the federal bench in 1980, spoke at length
with the National Law Journal‘s
Marcia Coyle in an interview that was published Friday. In that interview, she
lays out just how much the Court’s outlook on race has changed since she was
arguing women’s equality cases before it in the 1970s.
In 1971, for example,
President Nixon had begun to reshape the Supreme Court. As a presidential candidate and, later, as
president, Nixon complained that the Supreme Court’s school
desegregation decisions had intruded too far on local control of public
schools. Yet, as Justice Ginsburg points
out, Nixon’s hand-picked Chief Justice, Warren Burger, authored a unanimous Supreme Court decision recognizing
what are known as “disparate impact” suits, which root out discrimination in
employers with policies that disproportionately impact minorities.
Burger’s resolution of this case “was a very influential
decision and it was picked up in England
The Court’s present majority, by contrast, seems much
more interested in using its power to thwart racial justice. In 2013, for example, the Supreme Court
struck down a key prong of the Voting Rights Act, effectively ending a regime
that required states with a history of racial voter discrimination to
“preclear” new voting laws with officials in Washington
Writing for the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts
justified this decision because he claimed that racism is no longer a big
enough problem in the states covered by the Act, and thus the Voting Rights
Act’s longstanding framework was outdated. Permitting the federal government to
apply such a check against racially discriminatory voting laws was an
“extraordinary departure from the traditional course of relations between the
States and the Federal Government,” and it could no longer be allowed,
according to Roberts, because “things have changed dramatically” in states with
a long history of racism.
Two hours after
Roberts claimed that racism was too minor a problem to justify leaving
America’s most important voting rights law intact, Texas Attorney General Greg
Abbott announced that Roberts’ decision would allow a gerrymandered map and a recently enacted voter ID
to go into effect. Federal courts had previously blocked both the
map and the voting restriction because of their negative impact on minority
voters. Alabama
Justice Ginsburg,
for her part, warned that tossing out a key prong of the Voting Rights Act
“when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is
like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are
not getting wet.”
In what may become the most controversial part of her
interview with Coyle, Ginsburg also suggests that public acceptance of gay
Americans is eclipsing our ability to relate to each other across racial lines.
“Once [gay] people began to say who they
were,” Ginsburg noted, “you found that it was your next-door neighbor or it
could be your child, and we found people we admired.” By contrast, according to
Ginsburg, “[t]hat understanding still doesn’t exist with race; you still have
separation of neighborhoods, where the races are not mixed. It’s the
familiarity with people who are gay that still doesn’t exist for race and will
remain that way for a long time as long as where we live remains divided.”
Regardless of
whether Americans as a whole are falling behind on race even as we become more
accepting of our gay neighbors, the phenomenon Ginsburg describes is certainly
alive and well on her Court. One day after
the Court tore down much of the Voting Rights Act,
it struck down the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is solidly conservative on most issues that come before the
Court, typically votes with the more liberal justices on gay rights
issues. He was in that majority in both
the Voting Rights Act case and the marriage equality case.
So one possible
explanation for this disparity between the Court’s gay rights cases and its
racial justice cases is that Justice Kennedy controls the balance of power on
both issues, and he is a conservative on race and a relative liberal on gay
rights. At a recent conference, however,
a member of the legal team that successfully argued that the Court should
strike down DOMA offered a different theory for this disparity — a theory that
closely resembles Justice Ginsburg’s analysis. According to Pam Karlan, a Stanford law
professor who now serves as the Justice Department’s top voting rights
attorney, “very few upper middle class people wake up to discover that their
children are poor. Very few citizens
wake up to discover that their children are undocumented. Very few white people wake up to discover that their child
is black,” but even the most staunchly anti-gay parent can wake up
to a phone call from their child telling them that he or she is gay.
~~~
Billionaire Koch
Heads Pony Up for the GOP
Jim Hightower
Otherwords / Op-Ed
Tuesday 5
August 2014
Born into riches, the Kochs convene in a
secret summit deciding to pledge millions of dollars to political efforts. This
years goal? Put up $500 million to turn
the U.S.
