I used to think that people come to this country to escape terrible circumstances, such as persecution.  I no longer believe that.  I rest my case on the fact that the pro terrorist, anti-Semitic, pro Hamas demonstrators who convened in NYC on the weekend brought young children with them.  Some of these kids carried signs with "Clean Zionists off the Earth" which I take as a call for genocide.  I am afraid that this generation of Moslem-Americans is lost thanks to their parents, their mosques and their lefty friends who encourage this garbage.  I hope that ACS and the police photograph these loons and report them for child abuse.  I recall the photo of a German Moslem child with a fake bomb belt on at a pro terrorist rally in Germany.  Shameful, dangerous and disgusting.  And coming to a neighborhood near you!

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From the Bush Administration's current economic performance, it's clear the GOP has no idea how to revive the economy.  Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, an alumnus of Goldman, has been tossing billions of taxpayer dollars to his buddies on Wall Street.  Please explain to me how a bailout of blundering banks saves the economy.  All it does is reward bad behavior, the last thing the GOP needs to revive its "reputation".

If a bank is "too big to fail", it should be broken up.  Banks that engaged in reckless lending practices should be permitted to fail.  Their managers should be fired.  Their shareholders and creditors should take a bath.

The lesson of the current debacle should be that reckless behavior is punished.  The voters certainly are punishing the GOP.  That's because too many GOP politicians were tied to the scandals currently playing out.  Even more Democrats are involved, but the Bush Administration utterly failed to get that message out.  Does ANYONE know about the Bush Administration's, former GOP Congressman Chris Shays's, and John McCain's valiant efforts to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, shut down by a sarcastic Democratic Congressman Barney Frank and Democratic U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, who was bought and paid for by Countrywide?  I doubt it.  It received no publicity.  Fighting the War on Terror, the Bush Administratiuon didn't think it important.

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A bio blurb on Deepak Chopra reads as follows:

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It appears that the Administrators and Editors of the "new" Urban Elephants have been greatly disappointed over the failure of so many of the original bloggers from the classic Urban Elephants website to participate in this reincarnation.    

Well, they shouldn't be!                

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I enjoyed Slumdog Millionnaire and suspect that it will win several awards.  I don't want to give away too much of the plot, which involves a poor boy whose mother is killed during Hindu on Moslem violence in India; a popular Indian tv game show which Jamal enters;  the evil underbelly of India which includes criminals who send children off to beg and even blind them because "blind children earn double"; and of course, a romance.  One of the issues which troubled me about this movie is the Hindu on Moslem violence at the begnning of the movie, particularly in light of the terrible attack that India recently endured in which hundreds of Hindus, Christians, Jews, Moslems, etc., were killed and also the fact that India's railway systems have been under attack for years by Moslem terrorists who have killed thousands of people.  I wonder if I am the only one who was uncomfortable with the fact that the hero of the movie is a Moslem boy.  I did hear several people whisper during the begnning of the movie, "Oh, they are Moslem" as if the director, Danny Boyle, were trying to make a "moral equivalency factor".  The criminal enterprise that Jamal's brother joins is run by a man named "Khan" who is obviously a Moslem.  I would like to hear other reactions to this.  But then again, it is only a movie.

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Cross-posted from an earlier comment:

The economy of this country is built on cheap food and cheap energy. Somewhere along the way, the politicians in the Congress who voted to subsidize ethanol with tax dollars (including Barack Obama) forgot that.

The consequence has been skyrocketing food and fuel prices. Ethanol is made from corn and other food crops. Turning food into ethanol creates food shortages, and is a recipe for skyrocketing food prices. It's also a recipe for unrest in the third world. In Mexico, for example, poor people no longer can afford corn meal, their food staple.

And ethanol is far more expensive to manufacture than gasoline is to produce. Ethanol manufacture also ruins the environment in farm states. So our tax dollars are subsidizing environmental ruin as well as ethanol.

I heard Boone Pickens lecture in NYC a month ago. He knows energy policy, and says we have no energy policy right now. He advocates for increases in energy production in a variety of ways, including more nuclear energy, more solar energy, more wind energy, and most important, more natural gas production. There remains an abundance of natural gas in this country in many places, including New York.  We need to exploit all available sources of energy to wean us from dependence on hostile foreign powers.  The only other alternative is to go to war with them.

Krauthammer's a brilliant commentator, but he's clearly out of his league discussing energy policy. He's obsessed with trivia as the big issues goes un-discussed. It's sad to see such talent go to waste.

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As the national economic collapse causes Wall Street tax receipts to fall off precipitously from city coffers, New York City council members  plead poverty and demand more revenue.  They have already added roughly $20-$30 per night per guest to the cost of an average Manhattan hotel room.  So, holding a small or medium-sized convention or seminar in New York City of, say, one thousand attendees for three days would cost at least an additional $60,000 - that's $20,000 per day -- in taxes. 

Like all politicians, New York's city council members are resorting to the old "Welcome, Stranger!" rule of tax policy whereby politicians pass taxes on the people who can't vote against them in the next election.  When revenues fall short, you can pretty much expect that out of state residents and businesses will be the "first burned" by tax policy. 

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A few days ago, as the Israeli counter-strike on the Palestinians in Gaza began, I was wondering how soon it would be before the oh-so morally superior U.N. and the oh-so morally superior world community starts bashing Israel for its “disproportionate response” against those poor innocent oppressed Palestinians. These are the same Palestinians who had been launching rockets unanswered into Israel from Gaza—land Israel gave up for the sake of peace, remember???—without a single peep from such bastions of morally superiority.

Well, the wait is over. And, luckily, Vice PM Tzipi Livni has a bigger backbone than many of her predecessors, saying before the Knesset:

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Today the Commissioners of the NYC Board of Elections met and voted to affirm the previos decisions of the bi-partisan team of BOE employees to rule certain ballots in the 11th Senate race invalid. The 7-3 vote clears the way for the State Supreme Court to render a decision in this matter and likely uphold the decision of the Commissioners.

While it has not been determined that there would have been enough votes for Gennaro to swing the race in his favor, this should settle the matter with Padavan still ahead, although by a tight margin.

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