td11 wrote:amazing

at least ted cruz will sleep well tonight

td11 wrote:**this post brought to you by Philly the Kid** u liz

At her first Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing, Warren questioned top regulators from the alphabet soup that is the nation's financial regulatory structure: the FDIC, SEC, OCC, CFPB, CFTC, Fed and Treasury.

The Democratic senator from Massachusetts had a straightforward question for them: When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? It was a harder question than it seemed.

"We do not have to bring people to trial," Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, assured Warren, declaring that his agency had secured a large number of "consent orders," or settlements.

"I appreciate that you say you don't have to bring them to trial. My question is, when did you bring them to trial?" she responded.

"We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals," Curry offered.

Warren turned to Elisse Walter, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who said that the agency weighs how much it can extract from a bank without taking it to court against the cost of going to trial.

"I appreciate that. That's what everybody does," said Warren, a former Harvard law professor. "Can you identify the last time when you took the Wall Street banks to trial?"

"I will have to get back to you with specific information," Walter said as the audience tittered.

"There are district attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it. I'm really concerned that 'too big to fail' has become 'too big for trial,'" Warren said.

Bankers and other financial interests have opposed Warren as she rose from being a Harvard University law school professor to a Massachusetts senator. They opposed her permanent nomination to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she created. After Senate Republicans said that they would filibuster her nomination, she ran for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Wall Street donated heavily to her opponent, former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), but she won the seat. Warren became a member of the Senate Banking Committee, despite further heavy opposition from banking lobbyists.

This includes cutting unnecessary red tape in order to speed up the availability of life saving drugs and treatments and reprioritizing existing federal research spending. Funds currently spent by the government on social science – including on politics of all things – would be better spent helping find cures to diseases.

Facebook’s income tax refunds stem from the company’s use of a single tax break, the tax deductibility of executive stock options. That tax break reduced Facebook’s federal and state income taxes by $1,033 million in 2012, including refunds of earlier years’ taxes of $451 million.[1]

But that’s not all of the stock-option tax breaks that Facebook generated from its initial public offering of stock (IPO). Facebook is also carrying forward another $2.17 billion in additional tax-option tax breaks for use in future years.[2]

So in total Facebook’s current and future tax reductions from the stock options exercised in connection with its IPO will total $3.2 billion. That’s almost exactly what CTJ predicted last year, when Facebook first announced its IPO.[3]

Some observers, including CTJ, have argued that the most sensible way to resolve this incongruity would be to deny companies any tax or “book” deduction for an alleged “cost” that doesn’t require a dime of cash outlay.[4] But instead, rules in place since 2006 now require companies to lower their “book” profits to take some account of options. But the book write-offs are still usually considerably less than what the companies take as tax deductions. That’s because the oddly-designed rules require the value of the stock options for book purposes to be calculated — or guessed at — when the options are issued, while the tax deductions reflect the actual value when the options are exercised. Because companies typically low-ball the estimated values, they usually end up with bigger tax deductions than they deduct from the profits they report to shareholders.

A November 2011 CTJ report assessing the taxes paid by the Fortune 500 corporations that were consistently profitable from 2008 through 2010 identified this stock option tax break as a major factor explaining the low effective tax rates paid by many of the biggest Fortune 500 companies.

The guy that killed bin laden wrote:When we first started the war in Iraq, we were using Metallica music to soften people up before we interrogated them. Metallica got wind of this and they said, ‘Hey, please don’t use our music because we don’t want to promote violence.’ I thought, Dude, you have an album called ‘Kill ‘Em All.’

"I'm at the body in the homeless in August to pay thugs"
"what's the Hamas you've got the April not"
"I'll get the paneling and soaps"
"On the bottom of my adios to felony insists. The outer space."
"I'm gonna hit"
"not growing illegal yet"
"we have an oral nothing with those"
"C Vivian in the canal"
"indictment house"
"opened at a regular relay get complete gas killed"
"Organist illiteracy"
"the classic mania Upton"
"I'll have to significant on puppet"
"But as a puppet the only with an acoustical ceiling"
"She's anything I can bought back want"

CalvinBall wrote:Thinking about running for my dads council seat this fall. He hit his term limit. They need someone. I don't know though. Might be hard to sell lives at home with parents.

LEE DOREN, QUESTION: A lot of people are very concerned that your administration now believes it's legal to have drone strikes on American citizens, and whether or not that's specifically allowed with citizens within the United States. And if that's not true, what will you do to create a legal framework to make American citizens within the United States know that drone strikes cannot be used against American citizens?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well first of all -- I think, there has never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil. And, you know, we respect and have a whole bunch of safeguards in terms of how we conduct counterterrorism operations outside of the United States.

The rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside the United States, in part because our capacity, for example, to capture a terrorist in the United States are very different than in the foothills or mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan.

But, what I think is absolutely true is that it is not sufficient for citizens to just take my word for it that we're doing the right thing. I am the head of the executive branch. And what we've done so far is to try to work with Congress on oversight issues. But part of what I'm going to have to work with Congress on is to make sure that whatever it is that we're providing Congress, that we have mechanisms to also make sure that the public understands what's going on, what the constraints are, what the legal parameters are, and that's something that I take very seriously.

I am not somebody who believes that the President has the authority to do whatever he wants, or whatever she wants, whenever they want just under the guise of counterterrorism. There have to be legal checks and balances on it.

Bucky wrote:man, the stupid, misguided, mud-slinging criticism of Obama on facebook in unbearable. I wasn't on there during the bush years, but I'm assuming it was just as dumb in the other direction then. People r dumb.