Do you know what the word carpet bagger means?
What do you think it means??
Do you think of Sunquist and Bredesen as carpet baggers??
I do.
I work in the Agriculture business. Your Tobacco settlement numbers are an exaggeration.
What do you do in the agriculture business?
The numbers I used; "hundreds of millions" paid to some of the lawyers who represented certain litigants is right on the money and is certainly an unmitigated fact.
Example A, just one of fifty states.
Up in smoke: State diverts tobacco payouts - Houston Business Journal
The fund was conceived to channel an anticipated $350 million in tobacco settlement payments to boost the states competitiveness as a biotech hub and improve health care. The payments are a bonus connected to Washington states lead role in the litigation that produced a 1998 settlement between states and the tobacco industry.
The payments come in annual increments over 10 years. The first two payments in fiscal years 2008 and 2009 were $32 million and $33 million, respectively.
Then, grappling with a budget deficit this year, the Legislature voted to divert $13 million from the bonus payments in both 2010 and 2011 to the states general fund, leaving the Discovery Fund with a total of $15.8 million this year and an estimated $15 million to $16 million next year.
With another deficit looming, lawmakers may be eyeing the funds revenue stream again when they convene in January. (The Office of Financial Management estimates the tobacco bonus payments into the state will be in the $28 million-to-$30 million range in fiscal 2012 and 2013).
Most states have also diverted those funds into their general funds also.
BTW, the very first and most vehement advocate for the total ban of tobacco use anywhere was Adolph Hitler.
Most of what we hear about the dangers of tobacco use is completely false propaganda with no real science to back it up although 90% of the people believe it completely.
Your arguments jump all over the place, and you draw conclusions from things that don't make any sense. Just because I'm opposed to most farm subsidies doesn't mean I support building mosques in a foreign country. Where the heck does that come from?? Is your name Basil Marceaux? :crazy:
I don't mean to argue anything, I have stated my position, you have said nothing at all to move me from that position.
You realize that if it doesn't make sense to you that you can't say that it makes sense to no one else??
I oppose the abuse of farm subsidies. (which I might add that probably every federal subsidy program has also been abused at one time or another but subsidies to financial institutions have dwarfed all the rest except perhaps for entitlement programs who aren't really entitled to anything except to get a job and go to work.)
I am not acquainted with Basil, is he related to Marcel?? :w00t:
You do know the main reason for farm subsidies to begin with??
Stalin's USSR, while starving to death millions of it's own citizens and covered for by the pulitzer winning NY Slimes, was dumping grain on the world market to try to deland the American farmer.
That is what they did to the small middle class farmer in the USSR, the kulaks were either starved or murdered outright because they were considered to be part of the bourgeoisie.
Just because GHW Bush declared the end of communism doesn't mean that is so, on the contrary that is a laughafable statement.
Consider Russia's current support of Iran and Venezuela and subversive groups in the USA.
Consider communist inspired and funded enviro groups in America that have succeeded in many actions agaisnt the small or even large farming operations in America.
How about the current denial of irrigation water to the hugely productive agricultural central valley of California and the really sorry denial of irrigation water to the Klamath Valley whose inhabitants were war veterans that were guaranteed irrigation rights 'forever' for them and their descendents.
Cheney was maligned as some sort of ogre by the enviros for intervening on behalf of the Klamath farmers but as far as I'm concerned those enviros derserve a bullet between their eyes.
Dwght Eisenhower;
"Farming is easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field. "
John Fitzgerald Kennedy;
"The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways."
Other than Ronald Reagan we haven't any president worth his salt since JFK.
"The culmination of men's dreams for 6,000 years were formalized with the Constitution, probably the most unique document ever drawn in the long history of mans relation to man. I know there have been other constitutions, new ones are being drawn today by newly emerging nations. Most of them, even the one of the Soviet Union, contain many of the same guarantees as our own Constitution, and still there is a difference. The difference is so subtle that we often overlook it, but it is so great that it tells the whole story. Those other constitutions say, Government grants you these rights, and ours says, You are born with these rights, they are yours by the grace of God, and no government on earth can take them from you."
Ronald Reagan
"This irreconcilable conflict is between those who believe in the sanctity of individual freedom and those who believe in the supremacy of the state."
Ronald Reagan
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