Benz Speaks! How much is a billion?

This is too true to be funny.

The next time you hear a politician use the word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about whether you want the 'politicians' spending YOUR tax money

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend,but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of it's releases.

A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.

A billion dollars ago was only
8 hours and 20 minutes,
at the rate our government
is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain...
let's take a look at New Orleans ...
It's amazing what you can learn with some simple division.

Louisiana Senator,
Mary Landrieu (D)
is presently asking Congress for
250 BILLION DOLLARS
to rebuild New Orleans ..

Interesting number...
what does it mean?
Well... if you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans
(every man, woman, and child)
you each get $516,528

Or... if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787.
Or... if you are a family of four...
your family gets $2,066,012.

Politicians and Bureaucrats, wherever you are

Are all your calculators broken??

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL License Tax
Cigarette Tax Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax
Hunting License Tax Inheritance Tax Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax Luxury Tax Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Property Tax Real Estate Tax
Service charge taxes
Social Security Tax Road Usage Tax (Truckers) Sales Taxes Recreational Vehicle Tax
School Tax State Income Tax State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Tax
Vehicle License Registration Tax Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago...and our nation was the most prosperous in the world.

We had absolutely no national debt...

We had the largest middle class in the world...

and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

What happened?

Can you spell 'politicians!'

And I still have to press '1' for English.

I hope this goes around the USA at least 100 times

What the heck happened????

Will the Right Sit It Out?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

April 29, 2008

If John McCain wins the presidency, his comeback -- after the bankrupt debacle his campaign had become in the summer of 2007 with his backing of the amnesty bill -- will be the stuff of legend.

And as nominee, he is entitled to conduct his own campaign and be cut slack by a party whose brand name is now Enron.

That said, McCain seems to have decided to win by love-bombing the Big Media and putting miles between himself and the base.

Consider his "Forgotten Places" tour of last week.

It began in Selma, Ala., where McCain went to Edmund Pettis Bridge to hail John Lewis and the marchers night-sticked and hosed down by the Alabama State Troopers on the Montgomery march for voting rights.

Now that was a seminal movement in the fight for civil rights.

But this is not 1965. Today, John Lewis is a big dog in the "No-Whites-Need-Apply!" Black Caucus. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is sermonizing White America. The Rev. Al Sharpton is trying to shut down the Big Apple. And the fight for equal rights is being led by Ward Connerly.

With no help from McCain, Connerly is trying to put on five state ballots a Civil Rights Initiative that declares white men are also equal and not to be denied their civil rights because of the color of their skin.

And where does McCain stand?

From Selma, McCain went to the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective, where black ladies make the famous blankets. The stop could not but call to mind the hundreds of thousands of textile and apparel jobs in the Carolinas and Georgia lost after NAFTA and Most-Favored Nation for China, both of which McCain enthusiastically supported.

McCain's next stop was Inez, Ky., where LBJ declared war on poverty. But LBJ's war was a politically motivated scheme to shift wealth and power to government, which led to a pathological dependency among America's poor, his own abdication and Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign against Big Government that ushered in the Conservative Decade.

McCain then went to New Orleans to backhand Bush for failing to act swiftly to rescue the victims of Katrina.

But the real failure of New Orleans was of the corrupt and incompetent regime of Mayor Ray Nagin and the men of New Orleans, who left 30,000 women and children stranded in a sea of stagnant water.

No doubt Bush hit the snooze button, but why the piling on?

Then McCain headed up to Youngstown, Ohio, to tell the folks their jobs are never coming back and NAFTA was a sweet deal.

But why, when America's mini-mills and steel mills are among the most efficient on earth -- in terms of man hours needed to produce a ton of steel -- aren't those jobs coming back?

Answer: It is due to the free-trade policies of Bush and McCain, which permit trade rivals to impose value-added taxes of 15 percent to 20 percent on steel imports from the United States while rebating those taxes on steel exports to the United States. We are getting it in the neck coming and going.

An America First trade and tax policy could have U.S. steel mills rising again, while those in Japan, China, Russia and Brazil would be shutting down as uncompetitive in the U.S. market.

But we no longer put America first.

The U.S. government burns its incense at the altar of the Global Economy. The losers are those guys in Youngstown McCain was lecturing on the beauty of NAFTA. And the winners are the CEOs who pull down seven-, eight- and even nine-figure annual packages selling out their country for the corporation.

Does McCain think $6 trillion in trade deficits since NAFTA, a dollar rotting away and 3.5 million manufacturing jobs lost under Bush was all inevitable? Does he think we can do nothing to stop the deindustrialization of a country that used to produce 96 percent of all it consumed?

Why should those guys in Youngstown vote for McCain?

So the feds can teach them how to shovel snow?

Even Hillary, whose husband did NAFTA with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole's help, now gets it.

Then McCain took a time out to denounce the North Carolina GOP for ads tying the Rev. Wright to Obama, and the pair to two Democratic congressional candidates. To their credit, the North Carolinians told McCain where to get off and are running the ads.

What does a McCain victory mean for conservatives?

Probably a veto on tax hikes and perhaps a fifth justice like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito or John Roberts, to turn two pair into a full house. Fifty years after Warren, it could be game, set, match for the right.

But McCain may also mean more Middle East wars, more bellicosity, more manufacturing jobs lost, malingering in the culture wars, and more illegal aliens and amnesty.

In Pennsylvania, thousands of Republicans re-registered to vote Democratic, and 27 percent of the GOP votes went to Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. McCain may just stretch this rubber band so far it snaps back in his face.

Why McCain Would be Worse Than Bush

by Patrick J Buchanan
January 25, 2008

In 2004, the voters of Arizona, by 56 percent to 44 percent, enacted Proposition 200, requiring proof of citizenship before an individual may vote or receive state benefits. Forty-six percent of Hispanics voted for Prop. 200, giving the lie to those who say Hispanics support the illegal invasion of their country.

Over 190,000 Arizonans petitioned to put Prop. 200 on the ballot. As it simply required proof of citizenship before receiving the benefits and privileges of citizenship, who could oppose it? Answer: the entire GOP congressional delegation, led by Sen. John McCain.

This is the same John McCain who battled the border fence and colluded with Teddy Kennedy on the amnesty bill rejected by Congress last year after a national uproar.

Bottom line: If the presidential race is between Hillary and Amnesty John, the border security battle is over and lost. As Laura Ingraham asks, “If Congress passes McCain-Kennedy in 2009, would President McCain sign it?”

For conservatives, the stakes could not be higher.

For on the great controversies, McCain has sided as often with the Democrats and the Big Media that pay him court as with conservatives.

Where President Bush has been bravest, on taxes and judges, McCain has been his nemesis. Not only did McCain vote against the Bush tax cuts twice, he colluded to sell out the most conservative of the Bush nominees to the courts.

In 1993, McCain voted to confirm ACLU liberal and pro-abortion Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But when Bush set out to restore constitutionalism, McCain colluded with Democrats who wanted to retain power to kill Bush’s most conservative nominees.

McCain helped form the Gang of 14, including seven Democrats, who agreed to block a GOP Senate from using the “nuclear option” – allowing a simple GOP majority to break a Democrat filibuster of judicial nominees – unless the seven Democrats approved. McCain thus conspired with liberals to put at risk the most courageous conservatives nominees of President Bush.

With his record of voting for liberal justices Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and of colluding with Democrats in their campaign to kill the most conservative Bush nominees, what guarantee is there a President McCain will nominate and fight for the fifth jurist who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?

In the battle over campaign finance reform, McCain colluded again. The McCain-Feingold law denies to gun folks and right-to-lifers their basic First Amendment right to name friends and foes in ads run before elections.

As for the policies that have transparently failed Bush and the nation, McCain remains an obdurate advocate.

After America has run five straight record trade deficits that have denuded the nation of thousands of factories and 3 million manufacturing jobs, McCain is still babbling on about Smoot-Hawley.

“When you study history, every time we’ve adopted protectionism, we’ve paid a very heavy price,” McCain told a Detroit paper after informing Michiganders their auto jobs are never coming back.

But what history is John McCain talking about?

Was the Tariff of 1816, which saved infant U.S. industries from the malicious dumping by British merchants after the War of 1812, a failure? Were Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Calhoun and Henry Clay fools to support President Madison’s tariff?

From Abraham Lincoln through Calvin Coolidge, the Republican Party – the Party of Protection – put 12 presidents in the White House to two for the Democrats, and the United States became the mightiest industrial power in history, producing 42 percent of the world’s manufactured goods.
This is failure – while Bush free trade is a success? Tell it to Ohio.

Even Hillary Clinton, whose husband enacted NAFTA with McCain’s support, has begun to question the NAFTA paradigm. Not McCain.

Where Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon came to office determined to extricate the nation with honor from a war whose costs had begun to outweigh any benefit, McCain is talking about spending 50 or 100 years in Iraq.

Where Bush, by moving NATO onto Russia’s doorstep, planting bases in Central Asia and intervening in the affairs of Russia’s neighbors, has undone the work of Reagan in making Russia a friend, he sounds like George McGovern alongside the braying McCain, who can’t wait to get into Vladimir Putin’s face.

Where Bush finally cleansed his administration of neocons, if not of their legacy, a McCain candidacy is the last, best hope of a neocon restoration and new military adventures in the Middle East.

If Rudy Giuliani founders in Florida, neocons will be chanting, “Mac is back!”

The three issues that ruined the Bush presidency are this misbegotten war in Iraq, the failure to secure America’s borders from invasion and a mindless trade policy that has destroyed the dollar and left foreigners with $5 trillion to buy up America at fire-sale prices.

McCain remains an unthinking advocate of all three.

But where Bush was at his best, on taxes and judges, McCain was collaborating with Hillary. The question conservatives may face if McCain is nominated is not whom should I vote for, but should I vote.