You know, when people asked her back in august, she didn’t know. And right now she has the wrong answer. Who’s been coaching her?

And could somebody please hand her Section 3 of Article I of the Constitution?

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The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.

Or, as the Senate website says it:

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… and presides over the Senate only on ceremonial occasions or when a tie-breaking vote may be needed.

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One would think that Iraqi farmers, now prospering under “freedom” and “democracy,” would be able to plant the seeds of their choosing, but that choice, under little-known Order 81, would be illegal.

But first, it is important to set the context. Most people have never heard of the infamous “100 Orders,” but they help explain why the majority of Iraqis remain opposed to foreign occupation. The 100 Orders allow multinational corporations to basically privatize an entire nation, and this degree of foreign and private control has not been witnessed since the days of the British East India Company and its extraterritoriality treaties.

A few examples of the 100 Orders are illuminating:

* Order 39 allows for the tax-free remittance of all corporate profits.
* Order 17 grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, immunity from Iraq’s laws.
* Orders 57 and 77 ensure the implementation of the orders by placing U.S.-appointed auditors and inspector general in every government ministry, with five-year terms and with sweeping authority over contracts, programs, employees and regulations. (1)

Back to one of the most blatant orders of all: Order 81. Under this mandate, Iraq’s commercial farmers must now buy “registered seeds.” These are normally imported by Monsanto, Cargill and the World Wide Wheat Company. Unfortunately, these registered seeds are “terminator” seeds, meaning “sterile.” Imagine if all human men were infertile, and in order to reproduce women needed to buy sperm cells at a sperm bank. In agricultural terms, terminator seeds represent the same kind of sterility.

Terminator seeds have no agricultural value other than creating corporate monopolies. The Sierra Club, more of a mainstream “conservation” organization than a radical “environmentalist” one, makes the exact same case:

“This technology would protect the intellectual property interests of the seed company by making the seeds from a genetically engineered crop plant sterile, unable to germinate. Terminator would make it impossible for farmers to save seed from a crop for planting the next year, and would force them to buy seed from the supplier. In the third world, this inability to save seed could be a major, perhaps fatal, burden on poor farmers.”

What makes this Order 81 even more outrageous is that Iraqi farmers have been saving wheat and barley seeds since at least 4000 BC, when irrigated agriculture first emerged, and probably even to about 8000 BC, when wheat was first domesticated. Mesopotamia’s farmers have now been trumped by white-smocked, corporate bio-engineers from Florida who strive to replace hundreds of natural varieties with a handful of genetically scrambled hybrids.

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A Microsoft patent filed in the US on October 14 looks set to curb the torrent of swearing every Xbox Live online player has to put up with (mainly from homophobic eight year old Americans).

Patent 7437290: “An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in real-time, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible.”

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Did you enjoy your shitaki mushroom, Mr. Fukawa? Excellent. Are you still planing on going to the bird sanctuary today? I hear they have a new display of boobies and great tits, as well as some chickens. I just love those cocks and hens. Also, I hear that they have set up a petting zoo outside with an ass, a bitch, and a couple of pussy cats. If you have any problems finding the place, just give us a call and ask for the manager, his name is Dick Kunt.

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“I’ve signed up for online, ‘All-Electronic’ billing,” Dave H writes, “and no matter what I do, they continue to send me monthly notifications in the mail telling me that my bill is now available online. ”

I wonder if she thinks the person with the strongest faith in her God in an airplane should be made the pilot?

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- People lined up to be among the first to vote at several early voting sites around Jacksonville Monday morning had an extra long wait and some left frustrated when machines at several locations refused to record the ballots.

“It was very shocking to have the very first ballot at 10 o’clock this morning not go into the machine,” said state Rep. Audrey Gibson, who hoped to be first to vote at the Gateway location.

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This election has not been working out as planned for John Laughlin of Westerville, Ohio. “I voted for Paul in the primaries. When that didn’t stick, we started a write-in campaign for Ron. My yard sign has been proudly displayed for thirty two weeks now and I haven’t had one theft yet. It’s a bit discouraging”

The sign is displayed prominently in Laughlin’s yard on a busy side street. He guided me through some of his defenses. “I spent $150 on motion detectors and $75 on extra cable for my webcam.” His plan to capture possible thieves in the act has gone unexecuted. “I’ve got the sign pulled up so that getting it out of the ground would not take much effort.”

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Looks like Apple spent a bit too much time on its brick manufacturing process and not enough on key sorting. It’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen Apple make such an Airror.

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Early voters in North Carolina, most of whom were black,  were heckled and mocked by McCain supporters as they their cast their ballots Sunday.  According to Washington Times reporter Christina Bellatoni primarily white McCain supporters shouted “terrorist” and complained that “Sundays are for  church not voting”

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The gap between rich and poor is getting bigger in the world’s richest countries — and particularly the United States — as children and low-skilled workers slide deeper into poverty, according to a 30-nation report released Tuesday.

In a 20-year study of its 30 member countries, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said children and young adults are 25 percent more likely to be poor than the population average — with an even larger gap for single-parent families.

The OECD’s members are mostly developed nations, especially in Europe.

The United States has the highest inequality and poverty in the OECD after Mexico and Turkey, and the gap has increased rapidly since 2000, the report said. Meanwhile France has seen inequalities fall in the past 20 years as poorer workers are better paid.

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Despite the way the blogs and the Democratic Party are spinning it, I never called all liberals anti-American, I never questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism, and I never asked for some House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunt into my colleagues in Congress.

Okay… let’s look at the video again:

Ehm… Michele? You did.

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Thailand’s Supreme Court said on Tuesday in a majority ruling that former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had violated a conflict of interest law while in office and sentenced him to two years in prison.

Dear Alaskan Ethics committee, this is how you deal with it.

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A 74-year-old woman and a 46-year-old man with Obama signs in their front yards near the 600 block of South Villa Avenue received similar letters that had a Villa Park Village Hall return address. “Get the Obama signs off your property—now,” the letter reads. “Failure to obey this order will result in the immediate death of all family members.” Both residents said they will not remove their signs, though the man, who had voted Republican for 25 years before switching parties this year, said his wife is worried about letting their 7-year-old son play alone outside.

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There’s a graph that Obama supporters are sending around, showing the differences between the Republican and Democrat tax cut proposals. It shows that Obama is not in fact planning to raise taxes – he’s planning to cut them for all but the very, very rich. I couldn’t help but notice though – the graph is still massively weighted towards the interests of the super-rich. For example, the bottom two-thirds of the population are given only a third of the space on the graph, while the top 0.1% of the population – one in a thousand people – gets almost 10%. What’s more, an “average tax cut” is then given, which seems to have been derived from taking a total of the nine income brackets shown and dividing it by nine. Journalists should really volunteer to take remedial arithmetic, you know. Once again, this ignores that one of the brackets represents one thousandth of the population.

So let’s make this a bit more accurate – let’s keep all the brackets, but draw it to scale.

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Security forces in Natanz have arrested two suspected “spy pigeons” near Iran’s controversial uranium enrichment facility, the reformist Etemad Melli newspaper reported on Monday.

One of the pigeons was caught near a rose water production plant in the city of Kashan in Isfahan province, the report cited an unnamed informed source as saying, adding that some metal rings and invisible strings were attached to the bird.

“Early this month, a black pigeon was caught bearing a blue-coated metal ring, with invisible strings,” the source was quoted as saying of the second pigeon.

Plotting a coo?

Useful: http://www.friendda.org

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