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Thursday, October 11, 2012

Vice Presidential Debate 2012 Will Go Down in History. Full Transcript and FULL Debate Videos in 6 parts

This Vice Presidential debate was history making!  Biden hit aggressively, with more facts and experience, and his hits landed with precision, and might.  

Ryan had no idea what he was talking about with the misguided facts and figures he was given in preparation for this debate.  He lied through his teeth, and there were moments when he bobbed his head and neck like a chicken scrabbling for feed; with high-browed indignance, trying to avoid the hits, while he took each hit square in the face.  

Biden was powerful, kept to the facts, and mopped the stage floor with Ryan.  Ryan's closing statement was as generic and vague, and self serving as Romney's.  Biden's closing statement had substance, facts, and compassion.  

Martha Raddatz was a wonderful mediator, and kept the focus going forward, despite the adrenalin flashing across the table.

This was a clear, definitive win for the Obama administration, under the skillful, and honest handling of the debate by V.P. Biden.  Watch this win get turned around by the corrupt, mainstream media.

Next will be the Mainstream media tearing the whole debate apart, taking things out of context, and I'm sure that the Romney group will charge Biden with lies, to cover up their own lies. Ugh! 
Be careful with your decisions, as the mainstream media puts bias into their reports, according to whomever pays them the most...

This ugly, mud slinging campaign will not end till election day, and after that, God help us!  I am getting prepared for the worst so I'm not caught off guard.

Full Transcript here

Full Debate below, in 6 parts:






Your right to resell your own stuff??!!! It could become illegal to resell your iPhone 4, your car, or family antiques

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — Tucked into the U.S. Supreme Court’s agenda this fall is a little-known case that could upend your ability to resell everything from your grandmother’s antique furniture to your iPhone 4. 

At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is the first-sale doctrine in copyright law, which allows you to buy and then sell things like electronics, books, artwork and furniture, as well as CDs and DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those products. 
 
Under the doctrine, which the Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your stuff without worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale. 

Put simply, though Apple Inc. has the copyright on the iPhone and Mark Owen has it on the book “No Easy Day,” you can still sell your copies to whomever you please whenever you want without retribution. 

That’s being challenged now for products that are made abroad, and if the Supreme Court upholds an appellate court ruling, it would mean that the copyright holders of anything you own that has been made in China, Japan or Europe, for example, would have to give you permission to sell it. 

“It means that it’s harder for consumers to buy used products and harder for them to sell them,” said Jonathan Band, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association for Research Libraries. “This has huge consumer impact on all consumer groups.” 

Another likely result is that it would hit you financially because the copyright holder would now want a piece of that sale. 

It could be your personal electronic devices or the family jewels that have been passed down from your great-grandparents who immigrated from Spain. It could be a book that was written by an American writer but printed and bound overseas, or an Italian painter’s artwork. 

There are implications for a variety of wide-ranging U.S. entities, including libraries, musicians, museums and even resale juggernauts eBay Inc. and Craigslist. U.S. libraries, for example, carry some 200 million books from foreign publishers. 

“It would be absurd to say anything manufactured abroad can’t be bought or sold here,” said Marvin Ammori, a First Amendment lawyer and Schwartz Fellow at the New American Foundation who specializes in technology issues. 

The case stems from Supap Kirtsaeng’s college experience. A native of Thailand, Kirtsaeng came to America in 1997 to study at Cornell University. When he discovered that his textbooks, produced by Wiley, were substantially cheaper to buy in Thailand than they were in Ithaca, N.Y., he rallied his Thai relatives to buy the books and ship them to him in the United States.
 
He then sold them on eBay, making upward of $1.2 million, according to court documents.
Wiley, which admitted that it charged less for books sold abroad than it did in the United States, sued him for copyright infringement. Kirtsaeng countered with the first-sale doctrine. 

In August 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower court’s ruling that anything that was manufactured overseas is not subject to the first-sale principle. Only American-made products or “copies manufactured domestically” were. 

“That’s a non-free-market capitalistic idea for something that’s pretty fundamental to our modern economy,” Ammori commented. 

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on the case on Oct. 29. 

Both Ammori and Band worry that a decision in favor of the lower court would lead to some strange, even absurd consequences. For example, it could become an incentive for manufacturers to have everything produced overseas because they would be able to control every resale. 

It could also become a weighty issue for auto trade-ins and resales, considering about 40% of most U.S.-made cars carry technology and parts that were made overseas. 

This is a particularly important decision for the likes of eBay and Craigslist, whose very business platform relies on the secondary marketplace. If sellers had to get permission to peddle their wares on the sites, they likely wouldn’t do it. 

Moreover, a major manufacturer would likely go to eBay to get it to pull a for-sale item off the site than to the individual seller, Ammori added. 

In its friend-of-the-court brief, eBay noted that the Second Circuit’s rule “affords copyright owners the ability to control the downstream sales of goods for which they have already been paid.” What’s more, it “allows for significant adverse consequences for trade, e-commerce, secondary markets, small businesses, consumers and jobs in the United States.” 

Ammori, for one, wonders what the impact would be to individual Supreme Court justices who may buy and sell things of their own. He himself once bought an antique desk from a Supreme Court justice. “Sometimes it’s impossible to tell where things have been manufactured,” he said. “Who doesn’t buy and sell things? Millions of Americans would be affected by this.” 

If the Supreme Court does rule with the appellate court, it’s likely that the matter would be brought to Congress to force a change in law. Until then, however, consumers would be stuck between a rock and a hard place when trying to resell their stuff.

28 Good Questions That The Mainstream Media Should Be Asking

Economic Collapse...Why is there so little trust in the mainstream media these days?  CNN ratings have been hovering close to record lows over the past few months.  A recent Gallup survey found that 60 percent of all Americans "have little or no trust" in the mainstream media.  That was a record high according to Gallup.  So why is this happening?  Sadly, the truth is that the mainstream media quit telling the truth a long time ago.  The mainstream media has an agenda, and more Americans than ever are beginning to recognize this.  Once upon a time, control of the news in the United States was at least somewhat decentralized.  But now there are just six giant media corporations that control almost everything that we see, hear and watch.  The version of "the news" that they give us is designed to serve the interests of those corporate giants and the other corporate giants that spend billions of dollars to advertise their products through those outlets.  Watching the news on television can be an extremely frustrating experience these days.  Yes, there are little bits and pieces of the truth in there, but you have to wade through an awful lot of "infotainment" to get to those bits and pieces.  That is one of the reasons why the "alternative media" has absolutely exploded in recent years.  The American people are hungry for the truth, and they are increasingly turning to alternative sources of news on the Internet in an attempt to find it.
We live at a time when the world is changing more rapidly than ever before.  Just about everything that can be shaken is being shaken, and anyone with half a brain realizes that we are heading for challenges that previous generations never even could have imagined.
There certainly is no shortage of news, but instead of focusing on the terribly important issues that we are facing, the mainstream media feeds us an endless stream of fluff, scandals and celebrities.
Just check out some of the headlines that I found on the front pages of major mainstream news websites today....
"Man Dies After Roach-Eating Contest"
"Ex-NFL Cheerleader Admits To Sex With Minor"
"Facebook Rolls Out Pinterest-Like Tool For Buying Stuff"
"Grumpy Cat Becomes Internet Sensation"
So what should the mainstream media really be talking about today?
The following are 28 good questions that the mainstream media should be asking....
1. Why is the IMF warning that there is an "alarmingly high" risk of a deeper global economic slowdown?
2. Why is Switzerland preparing for "major civil unrest" throughout Europe?
3. If the Spanish financial system completely collapses, what is that going to mean for the rest of Europe and the rest of the globe?
4. Is Turkey about to drag the rest of NATO (including the United States) into a war with Syria?
5. Why aren't people screaming in outrage about the fact that the U.S. national debt increased by more than a trillion dollars for the fourth straight year in 2012?
6. Should we be concerned that the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt on the first day of fiscal year 2013 than it did from 1776 to 1941 combined?
7. If temporary refinery problems can cause some gas stations to shut down and cause gas prices in California to skyrocket to all-time highs, what would a real crisis do?
8. Why are some analysts predicting that a "rapid collapse" is coming for the U.S. dollar?
9. Will the U.S. dollar soon lose its status as the primary reserve currency of the world?
10. Why is Marc Faber warning that the wealthy "may lose up to 50 percent of their total wealth"?
11. By keeping interest rates near zero, is the Federal Reserve crushing the retirement dreams of millions of elderly Americans?
12. Why do Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and most members of Congress continue to stand behind the TSA when nearly 400 TSA employees have been fired for stealing from travelers since 2003?
13. Why are nearly half a million employees of the federal government making over $100,000 a year?
14. How in the world can you have a debate about the economy that lasts for an hour and a half and never even mention Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve or quantitative easing?
15. Why are Romney campaign signs being smeared with excrement?
16. British taxpayers spent 57.8 million dollars on the royal family in 2011.  U.S. taxpayers spent 1.4 billion dollars on the Obamas that same year.  How in the world can this be justified?
17. Why does the U.S. government treat our military veterans like garbage?  Many of them have given everything for their country.  Shouldn't we treat them with more respect?
18. Why is the mainstream media ignoring a warning that an international gang of cybercriminals plans "to steal money from the online accounts of thousands of consumers at 30 or more major U.S. banks"?
19. The New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts is warning that rapidly rising global food prices could soon lead to massive food riots all over the planet.  Is this something that we should be concerned about?
20. Why is the United Nations pushing to have the authority to impose "global taxes" on all of us?
21. How did we get to the point where sex trafficking is now at epidemic levels all over the United States?
22. Why are so many young people being arrested?  Should we be concerned that 41 percent of all Americans have been arrested by the time they reach the age of 23?
23. Why are most Americans either overweight or obese or severely obese?
24. How was one Baltimore woman able to accumulate 30 free cell phones all paid for by the federal government?
25. Why are nearly 30 percent of all young adults in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket living at home with their parents?
26. Why has the birth rate in the United States fallen to an all-time low?
27. With the race for president incredibly tight right now, will the side that loses end up accusing the other side of using voter fraud to steal the election?
28. Is the U.S. Supreme Court about to make it illegal to resell our own stuff at yard sales, in thrift stores and on eBay?

Curiosity Finds…SOMETHING…on Martian Surface

 While scooping its first samples of Martian soil, NASA’s Curiosity rover captured the image above, [enlarged further below...] which shows what seems to be a small, seemingly metallic sliver or chip of… something… resting on the ground. Is it a piece of the rover? Or some other discarded fleck of the MSL descent mechanisms? Or perhaps an exotic Martian pebble of some sort? Nobody knows for sure yet, but needless to say the soil samples have taken a back seat to this new finding for the time being.