Politics

I was pursuing the local (zips starting 447) list of contributions to the Presidential campaigns (follow that link and you can find out for your area, or candidate or donor), and there seem to be a fair number of illegally large contributions.
Each individual is allowed $2300 per candidate per election, with the primary and general election counting as two elections, and you can contribute all $4600 during the primary election, so that if the candidate doesn't win the primary, they turn the $2300 remaining of your contribution to the general election fund for whomever does win. Perhaps those who made the overly large contributions thought it was $4600 per donation, who knows... I would guess after next quarter results are posted, we'll see some corrections to that as there are lots of reattribution requests.
Oddly almost all the illegally large local contributions were made to John Edwards. I also see some contributions to John Edwards that I would think would be legal as they total $4600, but it says reattribution requested... unless reattribution requests means it comes from the person and they want to reattribute the donation to somebody else... and then I am not sure if that means they want to say the money came from somebody else or want the money to go to somebody else....
So no question on John Edwards winning the local contributions, at least as of last quarter, we'll see how things are after the reattributions go through and the results come in from this current quarter.
Meanwhile let's see how the Republican's are doing locally as of last quarter (this current quarter ends in a few days, and I have no idea how long until they update the information):
Romney: $0
Giuliani: $250
McCain: $1250
Brownback: $400
Paul: $750
Tancredo: $50
Huckabee: $0
Hunter: $0
Thompson: $0 (to be fair, I don't think he could have had any last quarter)
Cox: $0
Gilmore: $0
No mention of Keys on that list.
I won't list all the Democrats, however, John Edwards currently has a huge lead locally. Kucinich, our dear CFR free Democrat and the only candidate beyond Paul who will end the war quickly has $0 locally. Anyhow, it would appear from the Republican stand point it was McCain then Paul, both with only two contributions.

"Mattel apologizes to China for product recalls" is the headline of a story about Mattel's recall of about 21 Million toys. What is Colgate going to apologize to Chinia next, "sorry we didn't watch the shelves for fake Colgate," after all was it China's fault that they made fake Colgate with poison? Are the pet food companies going to apologize to China for trusting them and not checking the food before packing it up and killing a bunch of pets? To be fair, Mattel claims that most of the recalls were design problems not Chinese manufacturing problems, but who cares why apologize to China since some were manufacturing problems at Chinese plants. Stop doing business with them, they kill people for protesting the government, heck we only arrest people for practicing their first amendment rights, and then really only if they are protesting against Bush, so that is largely Bush's fault... then again they tazered that kid for speaking out at the Kerry rally, long after he was handcuffed... and again there is a giant standoff at the Brown's house since they are holding off their IRS payment until somebody shows them the law that requires you to pay an income tax (did you know it is a secret law and they refuse to show it to anyone, even congress people who have requested to see it), admittedly holding off payment until they show you the law is perhaps not the best way to do it, but since the courts refuse to help and show the law I guess they took the only action they could (details). Anyhow, we don't need to do business with them, they would revert back to a third world country if everybody refused to do business with them.

There is a very important bill before Congress that I urge you to tell your Representative to get behind right now. The Parental Consent Act of 2007, would explicitly "prohibit the use of Federal funds for any universal or mandatory mental health screening program."
The bill is in response to TeenScreen, which until recently was screening kids for mental health issues with a short (generally 10 minute) test, to see if a kid is suicidal. If the test decided they were at risk, they would be referred to further evaluation where if the parent refused or refused to allow them to be drugged, they would be threatened with child abuse violations. The program is overseen by advisers to the drug companies and is an obvious ploy to medicate more kids and sell more drugs. Recall that the drug companies, on a per dollar basis, makes more than twice what even the oil companies make, only banks make more. Until recently the program would test kids with passive consent, that is they tested every child, unless specifically told by the parent or guardian they were not allowed, of course what the parent doesn't know... Recently it was changed so that specific consent was required, at least in most public schools. However we need a law to prevent them from rolling it back or other such laws coming forward. The false positive rate of TeenScreen is 84%, meaning there are 84 false positives for every 16 real hits, this is worse then the drug screen rate (which is far higher then the industry will publicly admit, but what do they care if millions of lives are ruined by false positives meaning those people can't get jobs, it means even more money for them, and the government doesn't care as it means those people can't work putting them on government rolls and dependent on the government). Can we take serious any test that has an 84% false positive rate? So we put these kids on antidepressants who are not depressed and suicidal, the side effect of such drugs is suicidal thoughts according to the FDA... Where is the logic of this? Kids who took their own lives are 15 times more likely to have been on antidepressants, which even after you filter out those who were already likely to commit suicide is a very high number. I have to actually ask what is the point of an antidepressant if it increases suicidal thoughts according to the FDA? How does such a drug pass FDA standards?
How would you answer a question about if you ever feel nervous doing things in front of a large group of people? If you say yes, sorry you are neurotic, and need mental health help and drugged. According to TeenScreen anyhow. TeenScreen's response is that the test is voluntary, which kind of side-steps the issue.
Oh, and we know how nice kids are to other kids. We know a kid falsely, or even positively labeled as mentally ill won't get made fun of...
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