Every subversive organization and organization subject to foreign control shall register with the Secretary of State on forms prescribed by him within thirty days after coming into existence in this State.

“Subversive organization” is defined as:

means every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, of this State or of any political subdivision thereof by force or violence or other unlawful means

Under this new law people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington would have to pay $5 to register with the S.C. Secretary of State, if they lived in S.C., or face a fine of $25,000 or no more than 10 years in prison. I should point out that unions, fraternal or patriotic societies, organizations or associations or religious institutions would be exempt.

Could this be a reaction from fear of the so-called Tea Party Movement? Fear of militias? Or just silly politicians with nothing better to do. I’ll go with the latter.

New Partners specializes in grassroots outreach and is informally helping Romanoff get his campaign off the ground, said the former state House speaker, declining to give more detail.

Among the high-profile partners are Dave Hamrick, a former field strategist for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, and Paul Tewes, renowned for his primary work for Obama in Iowa.

On other fronts, Romanoff’s campaign has been less-than-traditional, most notably for lack of a designated campaign manager.

And while busy at house meetings and multiple local events, Romanoff’s relatively low profile has nonetheless led to speculation about the health of the 11-week-old campaign among the chattering class.

The introduction of New Partners should tamp down some of that, said Denver Democratic political consultant Steve Welchert. “That’s got a huge impact,” he said. “These are serious guys. Tewes ran Iowa for Obama; he’s an organizational magician.”

New Partners provides a range of services from recruiting a campaign team to motivating people to volunteer and vote. It also consults on fundraising and online outreach and provides research for polling, talking points and strategic planning, according to the firm’s website. Hamrick, the consultant working most closely with the campaign, declined to comment for this report.

This is somewhat odd because hasn’t Obama already backed Romanoff’s opponent, Sen. Michael Bennett, D-Colo.? Maybe in the Obama camp it doesn’t matter who wins the seat, so long as it’s a Democrat.

You’ve got Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary, who oversaw the New York Federal Reserve, whose job it was to prevent the sort of collapses that happened on Wall Street last year that played a major role in sparking our recession. Not to mention the fact the guy worked for the International Monetary Fund, a world bank responsible for giving debt-laden nations loans they will never be able to repay, and which could become even more powerful as more and more cash-strapped countries borrow from them.

There’s Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where he oversees derivative deals. He worked by Goldman Sacchs, by the way, Obama’s largest corporate contributor to his campaign and who engineered not only the deregulation of derivatives that contributed to the economic meltdown but basically told the Bush White House how much it would be giving the firm in bailout money. Oh yeah, only about 30 percent of his contributions came from the people. So you can imagine where this president of the people’s priorities are.

Perhaps one of the most significant people in this mess is Michael Froman, deputy assistant to Obama, Harvard law school buddy and top fundraiser who helped pick Obama’s economic team when he was still working for Citigroup, that “too big to fail” bank that also helped collapse the economy.

What do these people all have in common? They all worked with Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in the administration or on Wall Street when he was the head of Goldman Sachs, or with Citigroup where Rubin worked as senior counselor to “a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself.” In fact, Obama’s economic team is lined with people Rubin worked with, an incestuous stew of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup players who all had a hand in creating the banking mess of 2008.

What adds injury to insult is where he put all the hard-working people who worked tirelessly on his campaign: on the bottom rungs of the ladder. Karen Kornbluh, who served as Obama’s policy director on the campaign, was sent to Paris as ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of her. Austan Goolsbee, an economist who was one of Obama’s chief advisers on the campaign, was made staff director of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, “a kind of dumping ground for Wall Street critics who had assisted Obama during the campaign; one top Democrat calls the panel ‘Siberia.’”

This is all in a article by Matt Taibbi in the December 10 issue of Rolling Stone. To anyone who saw Michael Moore’s sensationalist, but well impassioned Captalism: A Love Story, this would not be news to some, but since most people seemed more fixated on health care, who Obama is or isn’t bowing to, who will or will not run in 2012 or some other cultural flashpoint, it’s probably fresh information. This is not a partisan concern. The economic policies these people have and will implement are sure to to leave Wall Street fat cats smiling and everyone else, right or left, shelling out more of their tax dollars to bail out their friends and pay for what will be disastrous inaction on regulating Wall Street. (Ironically, you never hear the Tea Party folks get in an uproar about this.)

But Obamamaniacs will say “yeah but at least they’re Democrats right?” Sure, but as David  Sirota, former Democratic strategist and current host of a morning show on Denver’s progressive 760 AM, they’re “limousine liberals.”

These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they’re willing to give a little more to the poor. That’s the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else.

The whole situation is probably best summed up by Taibbi in the article:

There’s no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America’s racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Vocker, concerned about a “moral hazard” creeping over the administration.

If Obama keeps on this course, a Republican victory in 2012 will become more and more promising.

I live in Colorado, a state that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, has had the lowest rate of obesity in the nation since 1990. Being about 60 pounds overweight myself, it can be hard not to look at all the thin people in Denver or Boulder or Fort Collins, or anywhere in the state really, and not feel out of place. Sometimes I get looks, not nasty looks because of my race but because I’m not a “normal” size. They can be hurtful, but I find most people treat me with egalitarian respect. The disdain sometimes comes from the perception that if you’re overweight you’re putting an unnecessary burden on the flailing health care system.

Ah, but I can tell my fellow Coloradoans that I have had a near clean bill of health the last few visits I’ve had to the doctor. A few visits back I had a slightly high cholesterol count, but by my next visit I got that down to a normal level and all my other blood tests came back normal, including LDL and HDL cholesterol. The last time I had to stay in the hospital was to get a tonsillitis as my tonsils had grown too large and was causing me sleep apnea. I have never had to go to the hospital or ER as a result of me being overweight. Besides my depression, a hereditary condition, which is being treated, and the continued need for a CPAP machine for sleep apnea, I’m pretty healthy.

I bring this up because The New York Times ran a story this morning about how some anti-fat-discrimination groups have been rallying Congress not to punish the overweight in its sweeping health care reform bills, one of which, the House bill, passed last night 220-215 to much hand wringing by the Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Marilyn Wann, a weight diversity speaker in Northern California and member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, petitioned legislators on Capitol Hill to not exclude the overweight in a public option, and for coverage that did not include being overweight as a pre-existing condition.

A federally-financed study by Linda Bacon, a nutrition professor at City College of San Francisco and author of “Health at Every Size,” “found that there were many people who could be healthy in fat bodies.”

Ms. Wann used some of Ms. Bacon’s findings as her talking points when she visited legislators with other lobbyists for “fat acceptance” in May.

She said she felt encouraged that the health care bill the House Democratic leaders unveiled on Thursday does not allow changes in insurance pricing based on obesity. But there is still a long way to go before any bill becomes law.

I’m not a traditional tax-and-spend liberal, but I do support a tax on fatty and junk foods to pay for the real health costs of our most obese patients and to maybe discourage people of all sizes to quit eating so much of that unhealthy food that’s really not all that satisfying for long. That may seem contradictory to what I’ve written above, but I support initiatives that encourage health and help treat those that struggle most with obesity and obesity-related health problems, so people can get to a size they’re comfortable with, and be healthy.

The point is that fat does not always mean unhealthy, or lazy, or slothful, or messy or unkempt. And, guess what? Some of us, including myself, are actively working on losing weight! So drop your prejudices and come talk to us fluffy fellows and gals. You might meet someone you like, despite their size.

That said, both the Republicans and Democrats have entertained me with their reactions to this news.

RedState’s Erick Erickson stated, “I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota.”

Rush Limbaugh said in an e-mail to Politico: “They [the Nobel Committee] love a weakened, neutered U.S, and this is their way of promoting that concept.”

He went on to say: “I think that everybody is laughing. Our president is a worldwide joke. Folks, do you realize something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn’t deserve the award. Now that’s hilarious, that I’m on the same side of something with the Taliban, and that we all are on the same side as the Taliban.”

As expected, the Democrats retorted with a statement by DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse: “the Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists — the Taliban and Hamas this morning — in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.”
This is why I’m an independent.

After nearly a decade at war in Afghanistan, the United States still has not defined the terms of the conflict. Seven months after President Barack Obama’s administration released its wide-ranging strategic review of the war, basic questions remain. Who is the enemy? What are the objectives? Is counterinsurgency meant to achieve the goal of counterterrorism (beating al Qaeda), state-building (bringing stability and democracy to Afghanistan), or both? What would “victory” in Afghanistan even look like? And how will the war stay won, after the United States leaves?

Without knowing the answers to such questions, the United States has no way of determining whether it is succeeding. And as long as it continues to conflate military and state-building objectives, the United States will always appear to be losing. But by focusing on stamping out al Qaeda with a light military footprint and accepting an Islamist government in Afghanistan, the United States has an opportunity for unqualified success.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/malou-innocent/defining-victory-to-win-a_b_312195.html