This is a blog forum to discuss how governmental careerism is hurting the United States. We need to consider if our elected officials are still effective after they have become entrenched in Washington.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Once again
NOTE TO ELECTED OFFICIALS: This is NOT why we elected you.
I believe in Term Limits.
I believe in them enough to even say that Rick Perry, the fairly successful if tongue tied governor of my state needs to step aside and let someone else hold the reins of power. People who stay in one office too long often forget that they serve at OUR PLEASURE, not theirs. When I see the likes of Pelosi, Rangel, Reid all of whom have made themselves rich via pet project, pork spending and off the books donations in kind, it makes me sick. There is no problem so complex that our Congress can't make it worse. Earmarks, side deals and finagling seem to be the order of the day.
We have officials who measure their power by finicky and petty means such as office location, quality of furniture and number of assistants instead of how effective they are in doing their jobs. And in turn they promote a soulless bureaucracy that like a remora lives off the talents of the host without producing any real tangible benefits. This has to end. This endless massaging of the message via a partisan press has to end. The faceless "donations" and "contributions" which often come from shell companies and secret operations to candidates with few morals and less ethics must end.
And what it may take is some real political blood being shed. That may mean that we have to remove them all. All the incumbents. ALL OF THEM. It is time to send them home, vote them out, take away their power. Sure it's going to be confusing. And it's going to be messy. But it has to happen because what is going on now is going to destroy us individually and collectively.
Friday, September 4, 2009
I'm BAAAAACK
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Mark My Words
Friday, October 3, 2008
These People Are NOT Your Friends
But more than that attitude thing, I am truly wondering if the mainstream media has given up all pretenses of impartiality. The choosing of Ifill for the moderator was questionable considering her worshipful attitude towards all things Obama. But the way the media has chosen to ignore some very worrisome and possibly disastrous economic attitudes on the part of Joe Biden, is frightening.
To quote "Average Guy at the Home Depot" Joe, "
Excuse me? Banks are businesses. They run on the money they make from LENDING MONEY. That's known as INTEREST. The interest is set by the government not to exceed certain rates, but there is a great deal of leeway and consumers are more than welcome to shop around for better rates. Herein lies the problems. Congress literally forced lenders to make loans available to what is termed "underserved populations." The reason Congress did this was , according to them, to get rid of the vestiges of redlining and racism in the system. Instead, what really happened is that borrowers who could not prove income, had horrible credit history or who didn't have the financial stability to afford the lower interest rates of a conventional 30 year fixed loan, were leveraged into loans that had balloons that would rise after a certain amount of time or loans that were interest only. The stated reason for these types of loans to even exist was to help subprime borrowers improve their credit and possible refinance at better rates. Instead many of these borrowers went for the maximum amount they could acquire and when the balloons went up, they couldn't pay the mortgage. Now while this is sad, it's not like this was foisted on them by jackbooted thugs in dark alleys. These were free American adults signing contracts where all of the details are laid out in copious minutae. Every payment, every escalation, every interest rate is spelled out in writing. Why is it that only the people that PAY THEIR LOANS ARE GETTING SCREWED?
In the end, it's popular now to picture CEO's with golden parachutes getting the largest portion of the bailout. And maybe to a certain extent that's true. But what's really happening is that this is keeping the lights on at the bank on the corner and making payroll for the tellers and loan officers who don't have those cushy jobs. It's easy to blame some guy who gets away with a cushy retirement, but why is it that the media doesn't want to place the blame where it really belongs, on borrowers that didn't pay for their loans.
And this is why Joe Biden and Barak Obama should scare you silly. They have no intention of shoring up the banks for longevity. They simply want them shored up for now. They intend to allow judicial fiat to rip profits from banks. That means that people who actually put money into banks could see their interest and deposits dwindle as more people discover that paying out a loan is foolish when the government will bail you out. And what about retirees who have stock in bank corporations? They will also see their stocks value erode. This isn't the first time this has happened. My parents lost $200K when the savings and loans went belly up thirty years ago. There are still a few people around who should remember that. Unfortunately, none of them are running for president this year. Watch your pockets-these guys are NOT your friends.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Let Mom Do It
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
McCain, Not Obama, Right About Georgia
Courtesy of the Chicago Sun Times
Mention Georgia a few days ago, and most of us would have thought of the state evoked so sweetly in "Georgia on My Mind," the classic tune sung by Ray Charles. Very few of us had heard of the South Ossetia province of Georgia, the nation with the misfortune to have Russia as its neighbor, until war broke out last week.
Like Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait and other unfamiliar places before, Ossetia reminds us that a small, remote corner of the globe can explode into an international crisis. One who was up to speed on Georgia and the menace it faced from Russia was veteran Sen. John McCain. He had visited the Caucasian nation three times in a dozen years. When fighting erupted, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate got on the phone to gather details and issued a statement Friday summarizing the situation, tagging Russia as the aggressor and demanding it withdraw its forces from the sovereign territory of Georgia.
It took first-term Sen. Barack Obama three tries to get it right. Headed for a vacation in Hawaii, the presumed Democratic candidate for commander in chief issued an even-handed statement, urging restraint by both sides. Later Friday, he again called for mutual restraint but blamed Russia for the fighting. The next day his language finally caught up with toughness of McCain's.
Making matters worse, Obama's staff focused on a McCain aide who had served as a lobbyist for Georgia, charging it showed McCain was "ensconced in a lobbyist culture." Obama's campaign came off as injecting petty partisan politics into an international crisis. This was not a serious response on behalf a man who aspires to be the leader of the Free World. After all, what's so bad about representing a small former Soviet republic struggling to remake itself as a Western-style democracy?
The comparison between the two candidates served to emphasize the strength McCain's experience would bring to the White House in a dangerous world.
Obama's favored approach to international issues, diplomatic talks, failed to stop Russia's invasion. Vladimir Putin, a KGB bull in the former Soviet Union, wants to restore Russia as the supreme power of Eurasia and, to that end, bully former vassal states like Georgia out of their democratic ways. The fear is that Ukraine will come in his cross hairs next.
However the world's newest war ends, America's leadership must recognize and respond to the underlying dynamic of Russia's resurgent aggressive instincts -- the power bestowed on Moscow by its oil and gas riches.
While we don't get fossil fuels from Russia, Western Europe does, and the Kremlin's energy might is fueled by the worldwide demand for oil. Developing U.S. domestic energy sources and alternatives to oil will only enhance our national security and, by reducing the world's petroleum demand, undermine the economic, political and military advantage vast oil and gas reserves give to unfriendly powers like Russia, Iran and Venezuela.
Obama calls for transforming America's economy in a decade. He's got the right idea -- long term. But short term, this nation must push for energy security on all fronts -- now. That includes new offshore drilling for oil, which Obama loathes, and new nuclear plants, which he views with aversion. We can't just wait for breakthrough technologies for wind, solar and biomass energy.
McCain has got it right in advocating new offshore drilling and a federal push to add 45 nuclear generators over the next two decades. Given the evidence of Russia's energy-fueled aggression, he should abandon his opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and to extending subsidies he favors for nuclear energy to include renewables.
As Georgia burns, we need to light a fire under all the talk about energy security and start doing what it takes to make it happen.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Of DDT, Green and Global Warming
"...DDT does things no other weapon, at any price, can do. Sprayed in tiny amounts just once or twice a year on the inside walls of homes, it keeps 90 percent of mosquitoes from even entering – and keeps those that do come in from biting. That’s why it has slashed malaria rates by 75 percent in South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and other countries where it has been used. Since DDT is no longer used in agriculture, mosquitoes are unlikely to become resistant to it. Studies show that even those that are immune to its killing properties are kept away by its repellant effects. The alleged dangers of DDT are ridiculously small or irrelevant compared to the dangers of diseases inflicted on Africa by tiny buzzing insects. Malaria alone infects over 400 million Africans annually, and kills the equivalent of ten jumbo jets full of passengers crashing every day. It enslaves the continent, kills babies and pregnant women, prevents people from working, perpetuates poverty, keeps tourists and investors from coming to Africa, and reduces the continent’s economic productivity by billions of dollars a year. In Kenya alone it costs 170 million lost working days annually..."
Full story here
Be a Concerned Scientist for $35 Full Story here
It’s astonishing that elected officials would use their taxpayer-funded offices to bully a company’s president into changing his corporation’s philanthropic giving practices. And it’s deplorable that in trying to discredit critics of catastrophic global warming, Rockefeller and Snowe would stoop to using smear rhetoric that alludes to “Holocaust denial”—and is inaccurate to boot. No one seriously denies that the Earth is warming. The debate is over the extent and consequences of such warming. Remarkable, too, is the senators’ cryptic reference to a “scientific group” that would soon issue its “findings,” words that bestow authority on what, as we expected, would turn out to be no more than a political attack.
It didn’t take us long to figure out what this “scientific group” might be and who is behind it: For almost four decades, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has manipulated the high reputation of “science” to serve the low ends of politics. It has done a good job of cherry-picking scientific facts to stir up public fears to advance its agenda. This time it is promoting alarmist claims about global warming by leveraging the prestige of the “concerned scientist.”
The credulous media usually fall all over themselves to defer to UCS every time the group takes a political position. For instance, when it issued a report in 2004 criticizing President George W. Bush’s handling of science policy, the union was described as “a scientific advocacy group” (New York Times), “a group of scientists” (Reuters), “an independent Cambridge-based organization” (Boston Globe), and a “nonprofit ... advocacy group in Cambridge, Mass.” (Newsday). After all, who but concerned scientists would pass judgment on President Bush and conclude that he was a scientific ignoramus manipulating science in order to advance a partisan agenda?
That UCS is a highly partisan operation—well funded by left-leaning foundations and
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Guess Who Supports Drilling Now?
Story here
(Pickens plan is right in a migratory flyway. So how do you reconcile putting windmill generators there? Especially when the Kennedys managed to get just such a program scrapped near their own family home? I guess Texans and the welfare of their wildlife just isn't as important as a view of the ocean.....)
Monday, August 4, 2008
GOOOH
GOOOH
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Run Away, Run Away
"Drill, Drill, Drill", they cry as the price of gas reaches uncomfortable levels. But Congress, with it's prevalent mode of governing being of the extremely liberal persuasion, instead decides to take a break rather than resolve the gas crisis in a fashion that would lower fuel prices because it flies in the face of the radical Green monsters of their party. You remember them, the same folks who are demanding environmental impact statements on everything from paper cups to napkins.
Currently Democrats are on the record as opposing:
Domestic oil drilling
Use of coal and maintenance of coal fired plants.
Hydroelectric plants
Nuclear plants
That leaves us floundering around with technology that is simply not sustainable or ready for use. Look at Pickens wind generators. Sure, it can be part of a solution, but wind is variable and we don't currently have transmission or storage capability. Plus it's a sure thing that being a major immigration flyway in the Texas panhandle, PETA will stop construction. What are we to do? We could drill and refine oil for the immediate future with the idea of using that until other methods are ready, but the Democrat Congress under the dubious leadership of Reid and Pelosi would rather run away than make any substantive decisions. They had better hope that this isn't a cold autumn up north, because if Republicans are smart, they will throw this issue right into the Democrats' laps.
Read this article here
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Your Democrat Leadership @ Work
Last time elections rolled around, there was the overall feeling by the voters that they needed to cast off the Republican party. They didn't do it because things were bad, but instead because the media and the DNC told the American public they were bad. In the two years since the Democrats have taken the reins of Congress, precious little has been done in the way of creating progress. Pelosi is bottling up legislation that could make domestic drilling possible which in turn would eventually lower some of the cost of living. Instead, they are promoting only alternative sources for power. Never mind that the social elite, like the Kennedys, don't want their scenic horizons marred by wind generators. Instead they want them invisible, which of course means, out west. I am not sure how they are going to reconcile PETA's designation of wind turbines as detrimental to bird life. Likewise, we cannot use nuclear because of a move twenty years ago. We can't use hydroelectric power generation because of environmental PAC's that don't like it. Instead we are supposed to use the fluctuation nuances of wind power-which dies in the afternoon during peak usage, and solar, which isn't potent enough to generate power for more than an incremental amount of what we use. As for those electric cars, still limited by battery capacity and the hybrids still use gasoline. Here's what the Democrats have done for you. They have forced corn based ethanol, using bad science from Brazil's sugarcane based ethanol. They have bought votes from key farm states via subsidies. The results are that animal feed is higher, meaning all animal products from meat to dairy are also higher. Don't kid yourself, this isn't accidental. Part of the world wide green intiative is to cut meat consumption. I have even heard lectures on the news about how we are supposed to consider how much water it takes to produce food before we buy it.
I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I AM PRETTY SICK OF RICH, SELF-CENTERED IDEOLOGUES
TRYING TO RUN MY LIFE!!!!!
"...The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.
Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008....:
Monday, July 7, 2008
Obama: Follow the Money
"...Obama said he now eschews public financing because the devil (McCain and the GOP) made him do it; Obama supposedly is at a disadvantage because they are "fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special-interest PACs." To which FactCheck.org replied: "We find that to be a large exaggeration and a lame excuse. In fact, donations from PACs and lobbyists make up less than 1.7 percent of McCain's total receipts, and they account for only about 1.1 percent of the [Republican National Committee's] receipts." Here's a final word from FactCheck: "[T]he Democratic National Committee has historically been far more reliant on PAC and lobbyist money than the RNC. In 2004, PACs provided about 10 percent of the DNC's total fundraising and only about 1 percent of the RNC's total. Obama, after he sewed up enough delegates to win the party's nomination, sent word to the DNC to stop accepting PAC and lobbyist donations...."
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Sharing the Blame: Both Sides of Congress Creating the Fuel Crisis
For a long time it's been the norm to blame Big Oil for rising gas prices. But Congress has created much of the problem with their incessant pandering to special interest groups. The Democrats have the Environmental Lobby, that blocks nuclear use, coal use and off shoring or ANWR drilling for domestic crude. The Republicans aren't willing to set meaningful limits on fuel consumption or to subsidize individual access to alternative power. So here's why I think they all need to go!
Excerpt:
"...The Democrats have an obvious motive for their denial of Econ 101 reality: They are so beholden to the environmental lobby that they can't advocate increased domestic oil and natural gas production.
To save the planet from global warming, the greens want to end mankind's use of fossil fuels, so they oppose drilling for natural gas offshore, for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and exploiting America's vast coal reserves. And Democrats obey, as do some Republicans, recently including Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).
The greens for years have also blocked new nuclear plants, although some have changed their tune because nuclear is carbon-free. Most Democrats remain opposed, while Obama is wishy-washy on the subject. McCain, to his credit, favors nuclear and always has...."
Monday, June 30, 2008
Shutting Down the Opposition
Anti-Obama Blogsites Shut Down
Sunday, June 22, 2008
The Argument FOR Drilling
When I posed this to an advisor, he asked, "So how long do you think it will take you to complete the degree"
I answered, "Five, maybe six years."
"And how old will you be then?" He asked. I stated my age in five years.
"And how old will you be in five years if you don't get the degree?" he replied.
I post this for a reason. I watched for several years as the Thunderhorse drilling platform was being constructed at Port Aransas. It's not a quick, nor an easy process. You are basically construction a building to float at sea. Daunting to say the least. So here we have two sides.
On one side, they say, "oh if we start now, we won't see results for five, ten, maybe fifteen years." So my question is-when will we see results if we DON'T START NOW?
The other side is demurring on the side of avoiding drilling oil where it exists. Any oil man will tell you that for every strike, there are ten to twenty dry holes. Oil is not a migratory beast you can hunt, it forms and exists where it is. Which means that you can have leases from here to Kingdom Come and that doesn't insure there is oil on ANY OF IT.
We need to drill. The polling of the American public concurs with that opinion. The only people that do not are the politicians and that is strictly due to their income sources for campaigns. If you believe that the sooner we start drilling, the better, then let you representatives know.
This is not to say we shouldn't develop alternative fuel sources. Nuclear power plants are safer and more efficient than the old Three Mile Island model. Gassification of coal, natural gas and biofuels are all something we need to develop. This isn't a one answer solution, our energy needs are multi-faceted. But for those tunnel visioned true believers that think wind farms and solar arrays are going to supply all of our energy needs, think again. Right now, the pure electric cars have a storage capacity of about 40 miles. That may work for commuting to school or going to work, but it's not going to haul goods or provide the services needed in our community. For now, and for the foreseeable future, we will still need oil. And the sooner we start the process, the further down that road to energy independence we will be.
Dancing Around The Issue
Story here
Spreading It Around
The whole list is here.
I also highly recommend that you visit OpenSecrets.com. It's a very eye-opening website.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Mean What You Say Part Deux
Story here.
Green Party
Friday, June 20, 2008
Scandal Brewing OR Who's Under the Bus This Week?
Story One
Story Two
Story Three
Story Four