Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Tax Protest in Eureka Today!




Hundreds of revolting tax payers came out in force today.

I find it hard to believe that all of these people attended the Tea Party at the Humboldt County Court House. Do any of them think that their federal taxes will be going up next year?
If they make less than 250-thousand dollars after deductions, they will be getting a tax break.
None the less, most of them seemed very patriotic but didn't fully understand what the Boston Tea Party was all about.
Here's some info from Thom Hartmann writing over at CommonDreams.org.


Published on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
The Real Boston Tea Party was an Anti-Corporate Revolt
by Thom Hartmann
CNBC Correspondent Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" on Feb 19th in protesting President Obama's plan to help homeowners in trouble. Santelli's call was answered by the right-wing group FreedomWorks, which funds campaigns promoting big business interests, and is the opposite of what the real Boston Tea Party was. FreedomWorks was funded in 2004 by Dick Armey (former Republican House Majority leader & lobbyist); consolidated Citizens for a Sound Economy, funded by the Koch family; and Empower America, a lobbying firm, that had fought against healthcare and minimum-wage efforts while hailing deregulation.
Anti-tax "tea party" organizers are delivering one million tea bags to a Washington, D.C., park Wednesday morning - to promote protests across the country by people they say are fed up with high taxes and excess spending.
The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.
They covered their faces, massed in the streets, and destroyed the property of a giant global corporation. Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

9/11 Commission Counsel: Government Agreed to Lie About 9/11



New book from man tasked by government to help investigate attacks unveils how “official story is almost entirely untrue”

Paul Joseph WatsonPrison Planet.comTuesday, April 14, 2009
The senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission - John Farmer - says that the government agreed not to tell the truth about 9/11, echoing the assertions of fellow 9/11 Commission members who concluded that the Pentagon were engaged in deliberate deception about their response to the attack.
Farmer served as Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States), and is also a former New Jersey Attorney General.
Farmer’s book about his experiences working for the Commission is entitled The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America’s Defense on 9/11, and is set to be released in September.
The book unveils how “the public had been seriously misled about what occurred during the morning of the attacks,” and Farmer himself states that “at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.”

Only the very naive would dispute that an agreement not to tell the truth is an agreement to lie. Farmer’s contention is that the government agreed to create a phony official version of events to cover-up the real story behind 9/11.

More CEOs received pay hikes than cuts in 2008.

This is from Thinkprogress.org
According to a new AFL-CIO survey of 946 companies, last year, 480 executives received pay raises, while 463 received pay cuts. Furthermore, the “median CEO salary rose 7 percent in 2008. CEO perks at the companies surveyed also went up, nearly 13 percent to an average value of $336,246, according to the survey. Of CEOs whose compensation increased, the average was $5.4 million, including salary, bonuses and stock options.” Today, the AFL-CIO also launched a new Executive PayWatch site.
Wow the Clinton Administration sure did a lot for CEO pay according to this chart.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Dobson concedes that the far right has ‘lost’ the culture war.


Posted on Easter Sunday
In a farewell address to the staff of Focus on the Family, James Dobson conceded that evangelical conservatives had lost most of the recent so-called “culture war” battles. Attributing the right’s recent failures to the “internet” and the election of Bill Clinton, Dobson said, “Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost.” He added that the nation is now “absolutely awash in evil“:

Trinidad Easter Bunny?


What appeared to be the Easter Bunny was spotted just off the road on Trinidad Head.
Actually, there were two of them but only one was willing to pose for me.
Happy Easter everybody!

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Google Helping Local Transit?

Referring to to Humboldt County:
They have one of the best fare box return ratios of any rural transit system in California.
See Trillium Solutions blog

Public Input on Off Shore Drilling on the West Coast


The following is an excerpt from the Humboldt Herald is guest blogged by Jim Ferguson.


On Thursday, April 16, 2009, the U.S. Department of Interior will be holding a public hearing on the opening of the outer continental shelf (OSC) to oil and natural gas exploration and production. This hearing, the only one scheduled for the west coast, will be at the University of California-San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, California beginning at 9:00 a.m.

If you can't attend, see Humboldt Herald for other ways to have input.

Photo courtesy of : weblogs.sun-sentinel.com