I worked for HTM in Colorado, it started out as a couple guys in a garage filling a simple niche, when a company needed to expand production for an electronic board. Instead of hiring more people and building more infrastructure for an electronic device that at the time only had an 18 month life before it was obsolete ... we would build it. Then SMTC (Bain) came along promising more business expertise to take the company to the next level by expanding our production into other countries like Mexico. Some of us even went down there to set up their lines and train them, then SMTC shut our still profitable plant down throwing 450 people out of work ... why pay workers $12/hr when you can make more profit with workers at $12/day?

The Dems didn't need the Repubs to pass or fail the 1965 Civil Rights act, they controlled the House 282-146 and the Senate 68-32 ... they could have passed or failed it on a straight party line vote!

Good point, in the Iraqi elections they tried to get out as many voters as possible which doesn't work quite as well if you demand a photo ID from everyone along with designating a committee to purge the names of voters. Why not do the same here, anyone of voting age would be allowed to vote only having to dip their finger in ink afterwards? The real problem in the US isn't voter fraud, it is voter turnout with only 63% turning out for presidential elections and 48% for off year elections. That is 30-60 million votes just sitting at home!

So explain something to me John, the central tenet of capitalism is to undercut your competition and dominate the market. In the ME to produce a barrel of oil it costs about $3/bbl while in the North Sea or Alaska the cost is about $25/bbl rising to nearly $70/bbl for the tar sands in Canada. Yet the ME resists the urge to undercut the market by flooding it with cheap oil and driving out the competition as they did in the 80's when they made the shale oil boom in Colorado go bust. Why isn't a gallon of gas still a $1 making the idea of drill baby drill, theoretically prohibitive, since it costs 10-25 times more to even get it out of the ground? Could there be other factors ... such as collusion?

So Derek, what ever happened to those guys in the south that had a D after their name and suppressed minority voting with lynchings and Jim Crow laws? Oh that's right, after the 1965 Civil Rights act passed, they changed the D to an R and found other ways to suppress minority voting rights like ... demanding voter ID cards or purging voter registration rolls! And now you wonder why so many blacks left the party of Lincoln?

Well its obvious that business acumen is important, neither Reagan or Kennedy had any previous business experience yet they are both in the top ten of Presidential popularity. While the business experience of George W. Bush, whose sweetheart deal with the Texas Rangers made him a multimillionaire, and Herbert Hoover, who came by his mining fortune honestly — were ranked among the worst presidents ever by the same historians. Bush left the country in a sea of debt and an economic crisis rivaled only by the one that engulfed Hoover?

annfan_777 Wrote: 7 hours ago (5:17 AM) How about that impressive election in 2010 - Democrats really showed us there, didn't they? LOL Well as normal you miss the point Ann, Wayne tells us what a great prognosticator he is and I go to his site and this is about the first thing I find. That he picked Angle, Buck and Miller to win but even that lent matter, it still comes down to electoral votes and those are harder to move. At the moment Obama has about 247 while Mitt has 202 ... so it really comes down to who can win the remaining 85 votes still in play to get to 270 first!

Impressive record there Wayne ... let's see what you predicted a few years ago. * My prediction is a GOP pickup of 8 to 10 Senate seats (10 being the number necessary for a GOP takeover). Tea Party Senate candidates will lead the way- Angle in Nevada, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Marco Rubio in Florida, Ken Buck in Colorado, Joe Miller in Alaska. Well 2 out of 5 ain't bad, but hardly impressive!

Dodd's values depend on which way the political wind is blowing ... as compared to the etch a sketch Romney???

So then what is your plan to keep the Banks and Wall St from again putting the US economy in the same straits that occurred in 1929 and 2008? Hope that they will be less greedy and much more smarter next time?