I haven’t had much time to write and I really have no time now, but we are all crazy. We’re all crazy to think that an $827 Billion dollar stimulous plan that is 20-30% tax cuts will do anything to slow this nosedive our economy is in.
Poverty, unemployment, and the percentage of uninsured Americans are all higher than they have ever been in my lifetime and the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped below 8000 last week. As a point of reference, the DJIA broke 8000 first in the late 90’s and hasn’t seen that low-water mark since 2003 (9/11 and two wars seemed to contribute to a 3 year slump).
Those in Washington seem to think throwing a barrel of money on it might put out this fire. In truth, If you throw enough money on this problem, you might be able to push and shove our way clear of depression. With proper oversight and smart spending we could build an American Utopia fit for the 21st century. But how much is enough? And what do we spend it on?
In the 90’s, Japan had a similar economic falling out and threw barrels and barrels of money on it and ended up breaking even, if you don’t count the massive, crippling debt that they will be paying off for generations to come. Why didn’t it work? They spent the money on crap: they rebuilt highways that were fine and played “urban reclamationist,” giving fishing towns palladiums and indoor skiing resort. This, in hindsight, was dumb.
The U.S., on the other hand, needs billions of dollars of public works projects performed. Our roads and bridges are literally falling apart. And, and this is a biggie, 40 million+ people are uninsured.
The uninsured do not spend money. They need money just in case they get sick. If we get people working again and get them insurance then they will have more disposable income. Lower income people are more apt to spend than save so, if you want to fix the economy, give some breathing room to those at the bottom.
It is common practice to cut the taxes of those at the top because what they invest their money in is believed to create jobs for those less fortunate. As most of us know, that’s a load of horse-shit. Give a billion dollars to Citibank, they buy a jet and a stadium; Give it to AIG, they go to Aruba to play golf. This may smack of “socialism” but, the U.S. should become major shareholders in every company they are bailing out so as to exert influence on how these dipshits spend our money.
YES, it is OUR money! They are taking taxpayer money and wiping their fat asses with it and it needs to stop.
Mr. President, I am part of the group who believed in you before you did. WE still believe that you will do the right thing: national healthcare, public works,rebates for all hybrid cars and alternative energy sources, and better education for our children. We are not begging on our knees, we are not asking you for hand-outs. We are not multinational members of the United Corporate Welfare States of America. We are proud, strong hardworking Americans who are being forgotton. Remember who we are, Mr. President: We are the future of America. Without us, America is lost. Without your help, this grand experiment may be over.
Stop this bill before it ruins us.

Um… Doesn’t a candidate for the Presidency of The United States of America have to prove their citizenship before they can be put on a ballot? Also, wouldn’t a man who has already been elected to the United States’ Congress already have had his papers checked? I don’t understand how the Supreme Court could have agreed to hear this appeal.

CHICAGO — The U.S. Supreme Court will consider today whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.
The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer’s supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation’s highest court.
The suit originally sought to stay the election and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells.
Legal experts said the appeal has little chance of succeeding, despite appearing on the court’s schedule. Legal records show it is only the tip of an iceberg of nationwide efforts seeking to derail Obama’s election over accusations that he either wasn’t born a U.S. citizen or that he later renounced his citizenship in Indonesia.
The Obama campaign has maintained that he was born in Hawaii, has an authentic birth certificate and is a “natural-born” U.S. citizen. Hawaiian officials agree.
Among those filing lawsuits is Alan Keyes, who lost to Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senate race. Keyes’ suit seeks to halt certification of votes in California. Another suit by a Kentucky man seeks to have a federal judge review Obama’s original birth certificate, which Hawaiian officials say is locked in a state vault.

If you’re a golf nut like me (no, not all golf nuts are Republicans, just most of them), then you were Googling “Mission Hills,” or “World Golf Championship,” this morning. If you were like me and Googled the former, you came back with a story about a California medical marijuana facility that was robbed this weekend:

“Police searched today for two men who robbed a medical marijuana facility in Mission Hills, getting away with cash and drugs.
Officers responded to reports of gunfire at 10 p.m. Friday at the dispensary in the 1500 block of Sepulveda Boulevard, Los Angeles Police Lt. Darryl Grayson said.”

As for the Omega World Golf Championship in Mission Hills Golf Facility in China (Shenzhen, maybe?), the Swedes pulled this one out in style. As for the Honolulu Advisor: I am available for proofreading. Unless, of course, a “Bride” is some spectacular scoring opportunity I haven’t heard of yet:

“The Swedes made five brides on the front nine to catch the Spaniards at 23 under.”

Really, everyone knows, the Windows spellchecker thingy sucks ash.

Or was that a flat-screen I was after. I’m really busy with school and work, but something happened on Long Island that is just ridiculous. A WalMart employee has been trampled to death. Really.
I used to work retail at KMart and so I understand the hell that is “Black Friday,” but no one I ever worked with was afraid for their lives. Also, in California, two men shot eachother to death and some woman miscarried in a store rush. Happy Holidays, savages.
CNN:
“Three violent deaths in two stores marred the opening of the Christmas shopping season Friday.
In the first, a temporary Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death in a rush of thousands of early morning shoppers as he and other employees attempted to unlock the doors of a Long Island, New York, store at 5 a.m., police said.
In the second, unrelated incident, two men were shot dead in a Toys “R” Us in Palm Desert, California, after they argued in the store, police said.
The toy company and authorities said the California shootings had nothing to do with shopping on Black Friday, which is historically one of the year’s busiest shopping days.
The Wal-Mart worker, whom authorities did not identify, was 34 and lived in Queens, said Nassau County police Detective Lt. Michael Fleming.
“This was utter chaos as these men tried to open the door this morning,” Fleming said.
Video showed as many as a dozen people knocked to the floor in the stampede of people trying to get into the Wal-Mart store, Fleming said.
The employee was “stepped on by hundreds of people” as other workers attempted to fight their way through the crowd, Fleming said.
“Several minutes” passed before others were able to clear space around the man and attempt to render aid. Police arrived, and “as they were giving first aid, those police officers were also jostled and pushed,” he said.”

In case you don’t know: the WalMart thing could only happen on Long Island. We suck, so bad.

Bush trying out a vocabulary word. NYTimes.com:

This year, the president said military airspace would be made available not just on the East Coast but also in the Midwest and Southwest and on the West Coast. Commercial planes will also be able to fly in the corridors, particularly during bad weather, during the Christmas holidays.
“In other words, we innovated last year to ease the travel; it worked, and now we’re expanding that innovation this year,” the president said, speaking at the Department of Transportation’s headquarters in Washington.

Spell “innovation.”

Can you use it in a sentence?

“In other words, we innovated last year to ease the travel; it worked, and now we’re expanding that innovation this year,”

No insult intended, to the retarded that is. Honestly, someone glue this child’s lips together. E online:

“Lindsay Lohan referred to President-elect Barack Obama as the country’s “first colored president” in an interview on “Access Hollywood.”
Describing her experience on Election Day, Lohan said, “It was really exciting. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s our first colored president.”
A spokeswoman for Lohan didn’t immediately return messages left Wednesday.
Interviewer Maria Menounos didn’t question the 22-year-old actress on her use of the term. “Access Hollywood” also didn’t cite her remark in its online story, but did post an “extended interview” video on its Web site that included the remark.”

That last post was, of course, a mistake. I was about to write a whole big thing about Russian President Medvedev but, as I am with names, I forgot his first name. So, instead of clicking the back button and going to Google, I, of course, pressed enter. Forget it, the Russians hate Bush and view the incoming Barack Obama with guarded optimism. From some online paper thingy on the internets (CNN):

“The world may have woken up to the election of a new president in the United States, but global political tensions haven’t gone away. One of the many foreign policy issues President-elect Barack Obama will soon have to face is the increasingly frosty relationship with Russia. And if Wednesday marked the dawn of a new era in Washington, the tone coming from Moscow was decidedly reminiscent of the Cold War.
On Wednesday morning, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev gave his first annual address to the nation and he chose to attack the United States’ “selfish” foreign policy and “economic blunders,” that he says led to the global financial crisis. And just a few hours after Obama was declared the victor in the US presidential elections, Medvedev upped the ante in Moscow’s dispute with Washington over the US missile defense installations in Eastern Europe.
The Russian president said that Moscow planned to place Iskander short-range missile systems in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave that borders NATO members Lithuania and Poland. He said that the country planned to electronically jam the US system, parts of which are to be deployed in Poland and the Czech Republic, and he announced that Moscow was scrapping plans to stand down three Cold War-era missile regiments.
The 43-year-old Medvedev was speaking in the Kremlin’s ornate white-marbled St. George’s Hall to around 1,000 parliamentarians, top government officials, religious leaders and journalists. The 85-minute speech was broadcast live on TV and radio. His predecessor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sat in the front row nodding approvingly as Medvedev made his nationalistic speech in which he railed at Washington’s “selfish” foreign policy during Russia’s war with Georgia this summer.
“The conflict in the Caucasus was used as a pretext for sending NATO warships to the Black Sea and then for the forceful foisting on Europe of America’s anti-missile systems, which in its turn will entail retaliatory measures by Russia,” Medvedev said. The president told his audience that the brief war with Georgia over the rebel region of South Ossetia had been “among other things, the result of the arrogant course of the US administration which hates criticism and prefers unilateral decisions.”
The Bush administration has maintained that the radar base in the Czech Republic and the interceptor missiles in Poland are to counter a missile threat from “rogue states” such as Iran. However, Russia-already fuming that so many former Soviet states are now NATO members-has perceived the missile defense system as a threat to its security. High-level negotiations between the US and Russia have not led to a compromise solution and Medvedev’s speech indicates that Russia has given up on the talks producing results.
The Russian president also repeated his accusations that the global financial crisis originated in the US. “Inflating the cash bubble to stimulate their own growth, they not only made no effort to coordinate their actions with the other participants in global markets but also neglected the elementary sense of proportion and did not listen to repeated warnings from their partners.”
Medvedev said he hoped the incoming Obama administration would take steps to improve relations with Russia. “I stress that we have no problem with the American people, no inborn anti-Americanism. And we hope that our partners, the US administration, will make a choice in favor of full-fledged relations with Russia,” Medvedev said.
Medvedev is due to travel to Washington next week for the Nov. 15 summit on the global financial crisis. It not yet known if he will use the trip to get to know his future US counterpart, Barack Obama.”

Never really understood that one. No bother. Things have “gotten real,” real quick, as it were, for the incoming Obama administration

Just as the “In The Defense Of Marriage Act” was promoted on compltetely false premises, California’s proposition 8 was promoted on the grounds that same-sex marriage “hurts our children.” The California Supreme Court found that the wording of the “ammendment” was inconsistant with the truth in regards to the prior ruling stating that denying same-sex marriage rights is unconstitutional:

“While turning down the challenge to the title and summary, the California Superior Court also found that the Yes on 8 campaign had overstated its ballot argument on the measure’s impact on public schools and ordered a minor change in wording. The original arguments included a claim that the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage requires teachers to tell their students, as young as kindergarten age, that same-sex marriage is the same as opposite-sex marriage. The court said the Yes on 8 argument was false because instruction on marriage is not required and parents can withdraw their children. The court said the ballot argument could be preserved by rewording it to state that teachers “may” or “could” be required to tell children there is no difference between same-sex and opposite-sex marriage.[36]“

As soon as the Court decided that the initiative should’ve been pulled from the ballot, as months of spreading falsehoods gave Californians an unfair picture of what they were voting for. I’d say that most Californians don’t care what happens in another person’s house, they just don’t want their kids to be involved. This ballot initiative may as well have said the Supreme Court ruling granted the right of openly gay men to have sex in front of your children. I’m not sure I’d be okay with openly gay women having sex infront of my children. I’ll think about it. A lot.

I am not going to talk about Gov. Palin not knowing that Africa is a continent or what countries were involved in NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). That has to be bullcrap. That she didn’t know what the Vice President’s job was or anything about the Supreme Court just makes her patently American (uniquely American, if you’r George Bush). Instead today, I reprint a bit of a King/Maher interview from CNN:

“King: Is Karl Rovism dead?
Maher: Never. Negative campaigning, mudslinging, tearing people down — that will always be in vogue. McCain did make a classy speech last night. But, you know, they all make a classy speech when they lose. What else can you do?
And it does ring a little less true when only a day before you’re calling the guy a socialist, a communist, a terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American.
Oh, we lost? He’s a great guy. Forget what I said yesterday. Let’s all get behind the guy I just said was a communist. Please.”

He’s kind of a prick, but Maher’s got a way of saying things the rest of us can only think.