Posts from — January 2008

We are told that Bush hails tax-rebate deal as ‘robust’, when what we find is another corporate welfare bill that will do nothing for the economy of the nation. They promised Viagra^® and provided a saccharine tablet, not even real sugar.

Paul Krugman has two posts on the placebo that the House is pushing: Why worry about a poor stimulus plan? and Stimulus disappointment.

They cleared the calendar of the House to work on this nothing of a bill that increases the national debt and will be too little and too late to have any effect on the economy. Perhaps if we took the $169,300 annual salaries of the members of Congress and made them live on the $32,140 median income of the American worker, they might have more appreciation of the problems faced by the people in a recession.

As the median income, it means that half of all working Americans make less than that, while half make more. That is the middle of the middle class workers these days.

By the way, that $250 billion dollar deficit they are reporting for this year, that doesn’t include the other $250 billion that was “borrowed” from the Social Security trust fund.

Rudy Giuliani was on one of the talking head shows tonight on my Mother’s TV [she’s crocheting a baby afghan for a volunteer group, and turns the TV on when she knits or crochets] spouting the standard Repub mantra about the economic meltdown.

According to Rudy we have to lower taxes to be competitive with other nations. This ignores the reality that the US has had the lowest tax rates of any developed nation for decades – it’s not the taxes.

He also said we have to reduce the regulations on business. The prime reason the banks are in trouble over the sub-prime loans is because no one was enforcing the regulations when it could have been stopped, and Alan Greenspan encouraged people to buy these “creative” mortgages when they should have been locking in low fixed rates. If the Hedgemony had at least attempted to enforce the pitiful regulations that do exist, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

The lesson of the Great Depression was that you can’t trust the banks and businesses to act honestly, you have to regulate them for the survival of society. Reagan took the leash off and we have been paying the price ever since.

Now that there is independent research that confirms what reasonable people have known for years, that the Hedgemony lied us into a war, 925 935 certified lies in two years, what happens next?

More that 4 members of the US military and countless innocent Iraqis died for each of those lies. Will the media admit its culpability? Will the victims see any justice?

Have we sunk to the level of Joe Stalin – “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” ?

It’s always a good idea to check inside your luggage if you have cats in the house.

TSA will cop your pudding, but they miss a cat in checked luggage? I have to believe that at some point the cat released a nitrogen compound with a major odor component that should have been picked up by sensors that are supposed to be checking baggage.

As for the mix up at the destination, the only airport where I ever saw any attempt to monitor baggage pick-up is San Diego’s Lindbergh Field. Everywhere else you can grab anything you want and walk off with it.

CBS News is running a series on retirement: Can Families Trust A Volatile Market?

In this episode you have people who did what the financial planners told them to do for a comfortable early retirement that they keep having to postpone because they can’t afford it. Imagine what life would be like if Congress had gone along with the Shrubbery’s plan to privatize Social Security. Your retirement being managed by the people who created the sub-prime mortgage mess and the market in the toilet.

In other financial news, Fallenmonk wants to know: Is it Negative? If the Federal Reserve’s overnight rate is 3.5% and inflation is 4.5% isn’t that a negative 1%. In multiple places I have seen the opinion that the Fed is, indeed, paying banks a 1% premium to borrow money.

Bob Sullivan, MSNBC Technology correspondent, informs us that “water is wet” in his lengthy article, Most Americans are in cell phone jail, describing the practices of cellular companies in the United States.

We are years behind the rest of the world, have lousy connectivity, can’t buy the latest phones, don’t have the features, and pay outrageous prices while receiving crummy customer service.

People wonder why I still have a pre-paid cell phone. For one thing it was cheaper than the cheapest local cellular provider, and has gotten even cheaper while everyone else’s rates have gone up. I only pay for the calls I actually make or receive and there are no hidden charges. It isn’t a camera, a music player, an e-mail terminal – it just a telephone. That’s all I want.

CNN is running a report on Critical things to know about your cholesterol, which is actually reasonable, and is important to young women, now that medicine has finally recognized that women can have heart attacks.

It is important to note for Huckabee supporters that in addition to harboring the fleas that carry the plague, squirrels are high in cholesterol, even if they are not deep fried in a popcorn popper.

In Florida the race is on for fourth place – can Rudy Giuliani beat Ron Paul in the Florida Republican primary?

I’m going to join Hipparchia and Philip Barron of Waveflux in backing John Edwards as the Democratic nominee for President.

He may be having problems in the Democratic primaries, but I don’t have the slightest doubt that he can beat any of the Republicans still in the race, because he is ready to fight. If the media hadn’t decided not to cover his campaign, he would be in much better shape than he is, because he has a better message, and a better vision of what needs to be done to fix the country.

“It’s time for tourniquets, not aroma therapy”, is the title of Hipparchia’s post, and people who say things like that should back up their words, so I will vote for him in the primary, for whatever good that may do, and support him any way I can.

I’m not going to avoid criticizing or praising anyone, but he is the only one left with a reasonable if long chance to win who actually seems to understand the problems people are dealing with today. Some have suggested that if this thing goes to the convention undecided, we could end up with Al Gore, whether he wants it or not. [Wow, just like the VSP, a totally unsourced “some” followed by a provocative statement – I could be writing for the MSM or be on a cable show. 😈 ]

A lot of people have written about Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), on this 35^th anniversary, but don’t misjudge the opposition because that isn’t the real target. You have to understand your opponent to win against him.

Overturning Roe v. Wade is their stated goal, but the real goal is overturning Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), because that’s the case that affirmed a right of privacy and started the eviction of the state from people’s bedrooms. If they can engineer a reversal of Griswold v. Connecticut, the case on which Roe was decided, they can not only eliminate all abortions, but contraception as well.

In the last seven years these people have been rather open about their feeling that people don’t have a right to expect any kind of privacy, which is in line with their thinking that they should be able to legislate how everyone else should live their lives. Their goal is Calvinist Geneva.

In a promo for tomorrow Morning Edition, the speaker on NPR compared watching the stock market to sitting in a slasher movie waiting for the next victim to be attacked. You know it is going to be vicious and bloody, but you feel compelled to watch anyway.

Over at Pensacola Beach Blog there is another version, a kinder, gentler Market Wrap-up from a bygone era, with some footage from Hoovervilles. [I wonder if we’ll start referring to refrigerator boxes as Georgian mansions?]

Patricia Hollarn, the Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections, has done her best to summarize Amendment One on the sample ballot, but it’s still a solution in search of a problem. They are just shifting the tax burden, instead of fixing the system.

To make it worse, you will note that the school district taxes are exempt from the the supposed reductions. Those who remember the Reagan years already know what’s going to happen. Tallahassee will now reduce aid to education and the school districts will have to raise their taxes to make up the difference. What you thought you were going to save has just been shifted, not eliminated.

People need to vote no because their taxes are about to be reduced anyway, just as soon as their property gets assessed again. Most of the increase in tax bills was a result of increased assessments from the housing bubble, and now that the bubble has burst, the assessments will go down between 20 and 40%. The local governments already know this is coming, which is why they are against this amendment. They will have to cut services as a result of the new assessments, because you can’t raise taxes in an “economic slowdown”.

So I get a call from Common Sense Issues for a few questions. CSI is non-partisan [Republican] interest group that is not associated with any campaign [especially not the campaign of that good Christian, real Republican hero of the voter, Mike Huckabee].

They are doing it wrong. The first question should have been “are you a registered voter”, followed by “are you voting in the Republican primary” and the call terminated if the answer is “no” to either question.

It was a push poll dumping on McCain and Romney over their wealth and support for taxes, or something.

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Rook asks the burning question: Which came first, the chicken or the road?

It makes as much sense as the political talking heads.