December 31, 2013
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.
Click here to see the complete report.
January 6, 2013
If I were to ask any sensible person what the number one issue facing America is, I’d bet the answer would be spending and debt.
We know what’s wrong. We know what needs to be done. However, half of Americans who bothered voting rewarded America with another 4 years of this idiot we call President.
In his first 4 years, Obama ran the biggest deficits in US history, driving the biggest debt growth in US history. His spending and deficits as a percentage of GDP were staggering, truly Greece-like. He presided over the worst employment record since the Great Depression, and poverty surged to record levels under him.
In spite of all this, the dolts of America decided we need more of it. So then the question pulled from this is “Why?” Simple; voters have discovered that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.
Game over.
January 28, 2012
What to do about our growing mountain of debt
We are running a 1 trillion per year deficit and our debt is 15.2 trillion and climbing. If we cut expenses by 1 trillion a year, our debt just continues growing. If we cut 2 trillion per year, and allocate the 1 trillion saved to paying off the debt then it will take is 15 or more years to pay it off. This also means our budget is frozen at current levels but it needs to reversed.
pics on Sodahead
We need to get the spending trajectory onto a descending glide slope and hold it there for the next 5 years until we reach 3% of GDP. Will it hurt? You bet, but not as much as what we’re getting ready to experience if we don’t reverse this spending insanity. In addition, I don’t care what social program gets hurt or obliterated in the process. It’s going to happen either way. Today, we have a position where we can choose. If we do nothing, that position will be lost along with our future.
Once on this glide slope, we must reverse the evisceration of our military budget. I don’t believe in compromising our defensive posture just because we’ve overspent on social programs and giving money to our enemies under the name of Foreign Assistance programs The free world is getting ready to dance with Iran and reducing our defense capability is asinine.
If we don’t start correcting this soon, I believe that what is in store for the American people – our society in general – won’t be a positive and uplifting experience. I believe we will see hardship bordering on post depression experiences, or worse.
We have allowed Socialist values to subvert America’s
Because I have lost faith in the wisdom of our gov’t, I am not preparing for a bright and wonderful future and I have already begun feeling sorry for my son knowing the experience he will have to endure with little likelihood he will experience a life better than the one I have enjoyed.
I blame this on swing voters and those who have no capacity to fear the consequences of liberal i.e. “progressive” ideologies which grant voters access to the treasury, promised to them by those seeking office who stay longer than they should once they get in there. I also blame the RNC, infiltrated by liberals and moderates, who have guided the party away from its conservative principles, ignoring conservatives in this country who outnumber liberals by a 2-1 margin.
Reexamining my distaste for a 3-party system
I have been told by a French-American, France has well over a dozen political parties. It is guaranteed that anyone who gets elected will automatically be an unpopular president. In spite of that, France, often viewed to be liberal and bent toward socialism and communism, has elected Sarkozy of a right wing party positioned in “conservatism, liberal-conservatism, also libertarianism and nationalism”.
It serves to make me wonder about a 3-party system in America composed of
So, the question I’ve been kicking around is “If France can vote in a conservative in a mega-multi-party system, and in light of the fact that conservatives in America outnumber liberals by 2 to 1, could conservatives be galvanized under a 3-party system to reverse America’s socialist trend?”
The Left, Center and a New Right
Lately I have arrived at a new point in my never ending analysis of America’s political evolution. I have been driven there by a an unpleasant understanding that there are people in our country who have a deep rooted need to be coddled and driven by the need to feel protected. They are the ones who look to gov’t to fulfill this need. They are the ones who believe more in gov’t than they do themselves. These are the ranks of the fucking confused.
There are others who think along the idea gov’t serves at the convenience of its people and that no one is better at figuring out what they need than themselves. They don’t want gov’t in their faces and crotch all day long from cradle to grave. They want to be left alone and not feel like their freedoms are being stolen from them while feeling powerless to do anything about it. They want a better future for their kids, not the future the loony left wants.
Problem is, special interests have gotten involved and pissed in the cereal. Our elected officials don’t listen to the “little people” anymore. They have whored themselves to special interests, the PACs, big business.
All of a sudden, I’m now singing songs of the “Occupiers”
January 2, 2012
On December 31 of 2011, President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). The law gives authority to the president to order the military to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without official charge or trial on the mere suspicion of being a terrorist or linked to a terrorist organization.
Since then, many have described the law as –
There are two elements to this worth mentioning.
First, the liberties and rights described by the COTUS creates the dichotomy between our moral obligation to protect life and the desire to protect those liberties and rights. These two values are at odds with one another. Without the former there is no latter. To borrow the phrase, it’s a question of whether we “piss on the Constitution”, or piss on life.
Second, the hyperbole should be self-evident. As yet, there is no evidence to suggest that we are about to begin a campaign to summarily round up citizens in the dark of night and throw them into some form of political labor camp. Yes, there is a threat, but I don’t see this country doing that to itself and to do so would mean we’ve actually learned nothing from the lessons given by Hitler, the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor and our civil rights movement. It will be a test for this nation and will shed some light on the kind of people we are. It will also divide. On the one hand there will be those who believe we will be able to balance these opposing beliefs. On the other, there will be those who don’t.
This on-going argument has a simple resolution which I suspect will soon present itself. This question of whether we have the right to protect the lives of innocents by detaining terrorists intent of robbing us of our perceived liberties and freedoms will be put before the SCOTUS. If the court upholds this law in its current form, the test for this country begins.
Regardless of the outcome the forces in our gov’t (We the People) will and should continue to influence the likelihood of its existence. In other words, the current state of the law represents a point along the line of its existence and there are sufficient reasons to believe its existence will not be a permanent one.
(There is a bit of irony in the fact that McCain, a former POW who suffered at the hands of his captors is a proponent of this law. There is little doubt there is anyone more wary than he and I doubt he is throwing caution into the wind.)
At the end of the day, this is really only a distraction, drawing our attention away from the reason the bill was signed into law to brave the criticisms created by its affront to our Constitution. It should cause you to think about how we are going to defeat those reasons before it really gets ugly.
October 9, 2011
Protests against corporate greed and economic inequality spread across America.
Spreading unrest: Protesters gather on the front steps of the Idaho Capitol in Boise, Idaho.
They included Tampa, Florida; Trenton and Jersey City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Norfolk, Virginia in the East; to Chicago and St. Louis in the Midwest; Houston, San Antonio and Austin in Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Los Angeles in the West.
To understand how we got to this, we need to take a short look at history.
This televised report aired in September 2004 and can be viewed here. In the space of four minutes, it attempts to time line the events leading to the greatest economic failure since the Great Depression.
A significant portion of the events leading up to the Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac debacle begins in – believe it or not – 1977
The Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA, Pub.L. 95-128, title VIII, 91 Stat. 1147, 12 U.S.C. § 2901 et seq.) is a United States federal law designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Congress passed the Act in 1977 to reduce discriminatory credit practices against low-income neighborhoods, a practice known as redlining. The Act requires the appropriate federal financial supervisory agencies to encourage regulated financial institutions to meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered, consistent with safe and sound operation. To enforce the statute, federal regulatory agencies examine banking institutions for CRA compliance, and take this information into consideration when approving applications for new bank branches or for mergers or acquisitions.
And who signed this beautiful piece of legislation into law? The original Act was passed by the 95th United States Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. It is the subject of heated political and scholarly debate whether any of these moves are to blame for our troubles, but they certainly played a role in creating a permissive lending environment. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation.
Clinton admitted that his Administration could have done more to “set in motion some more formal regulation of the derivatives market,” but he vehemently denied that the repeal of Glass-Steagall or his Administration’s housing policies helped spur the financial crisis.
September In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
November: Clinton signs banking overhaul measure. Congress passed the bipartisan measure November 5, opening the way for a blossoming of financial “supermarkets” selling loans, investments and insurance. Proponents had pushed the legislation in Congress for two decades, and Wall Street and the banking and insurance industries had poured millions of dollars into lobbying for it in the past few years. “It was sweaty, it was tense, but it had momentum,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) said of the final bargaining session. He and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut) whose states are home to Wall Street and the banking industry (New York) and the insurance industry (Connecticut), helped broker the agreement.
Corrupted political leaders contributed to the debacle we now wake up to every morning. In a Wall Street Journal analysis, the failure of the GSE’s began shortly after their 2003 and 2004 accounting scandals. Senior executives at Fannie Mae manipulated accounting to collect millions of dollars in undeserved bonuses and to deceive investors. The government-sponsored mortgage company was fined $400 million.
Franklin Delano Raines once a prominent Democrat and CEO of Fannie Mae, and Leland Brendsel, the CEO of Freddie Mac were removed from their assigned office in the wake of the multibillion-dollar accounting scandal. Source:The Fall of Fannie Mae
Spanning a period of 6 years, President Bush and his Administration have not only warned of the systemic consequences of failure to reform GSEs but also put forward thoughtful plans to reduce the risk that either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac would encounter such difficulties.
Beginning as early as 2001, the President made repeated attempts to reform the supervision of these entities but was thwarted by the legislative maneuvering of those who emphatically denied there were problems with the GSEs.
The mounting and overwhelming evidence points to the fact many Democrats chose to drive while their eyes were closed, ignoring call after call to fix the problem and in some cases, belligerently and arrogantly denying any problem existed with their policies.
Now, three years after the meltdown of 2008, we watch in amazement as the disillusioned take to the streets to protest against Wall Street and the banks.
It’s a bit ironic once you realize that the failed policies designed to give them what they want – easier access to housing being among them – turns out to be the catalyst to send them out into the streets in protest. Too self-centered to see it, or too stupid to understand, they are actually protesting against their own principles and philosophies, the outcome of which they apparently don’t like.
Cry Baby, cry.
September 18, 2011
Last week, businessman Bob Turner (R) defeated state Assemblyman David Weprin (D) in the special election for the House seat held by former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner (D).
To get his win into some kind of perspective, Weiner won this seat with an 11 point lead while Turner won it with a 7 point lead. That’s an 18 point swing from one end of the political spectrum to the other. This, in a district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1. Huge.
The win is often described this way:
“New Yorkers put Washington Democrats on notice that voters are losing confidence in a President whose policies assault job-creators and affront Israel,” said National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) in a statement after Turner’s win.
While the win is partly being attributed to Obama’s anti-Isreal stance not in agreement with the district’s Jewish segment, the National Jewish Democratic Council disputed the idea that Israel was a major factor.
That leaves the current state of the economy as the culprit behind the Democratic loss. If this is the case, can the defeat then be attributed to the fact that the policies of the DNC have come back around to bite the hands that feed it?
It appears that Democrats believe in and support their principles right up to the point where they start to personally feel their effects. THEN they don’t like them.
July 4, 2011
When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.
This is further confirmation of what we already knew from information released in September of 2009, six months after the act’s passage.
You can read the rest of this new revelation here.
The small print says: "This Hope and Change Thing Is Just Fricking Awesome !"
The small print says: "This Hope and Change Thing Is Just Fricking Awesome !"
our obama nation 