October Week 3, 2008
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October Week 3, 2008
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I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace.
Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
Laidback day, no school (I have no idea why) Christy and I filled out the paperwork to move my IRA... very scary. Not looking good for the bail out. Back
in 1990, the Government seized the Mustang Ranch, a brothel
in Nevada, for tax evasion and, as required by law
they tried to run it.
They failed and it closed. Now we are trusting the economy of our country to a pack of nit-wits who couldn't make money running a whore house and selling booze in Nevada. Tuesday, October 14, 2008 Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. Guy de Maupassant, short story writer and novelist (1850-1893 We mailed the paperwork to move my IRA from Smith Barney to Wachovia... even scarier. Wrote a long response to an anti-Obama email: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 Christy and I went to Colville with Monica, G'ma & G'pa, we all had appointments... it costs me about $30 in gas to go over the hill so it is great that the clinic lets us schedule serial appointments. Christy is having more back pain so she got an X-ray, G'pa got his hardcore meds. G'ma and Christy got their Protime(?) blood draw, G'ma was fine, Christy needed a medication adjustment and scheduled a follow-up. Rick looked at the lump on my back again and I told him that I wanted it removed. There is no pain and Christy and I watched The Debate, something suspicious about, Joe the plumber... comes off as a plant. I thought Obama cleaned McCain's clock, McCain looked defensive and looked sort of desperate Thursday, October 16, 2008 Christy went into Spokane for her appointment at 10:15 with her Oncologist. All is OK. She mentioned her back so he ordered some Scans. We got one scan scheduled for today... it took us until 1930 to get through but it saved on gas. We got all the shopping done and we had a nice lunch at 'Tomato Street'. The girl that seated us was 6'3"... I had to ask Al accident seizure
Friday, October 17, 2008 Campaigning today in North Carolina,
Sarah Palin said something quite extraordinary, she made a point of mentioning
that she loved to visit the "pro-America" areas of the country, of which North
Carolina is apparently one. What really pisses me off is that if Biden or Obama had said
something as stupid as that they would be crucified but since Born-Again-Barbie
said it she is given a free ride. Redneck Central (FOX) hasn't even mentioned
it. Saturday, October 18, 2008 If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you'll be going, 'you know, we're alright. We are dang near royalty. Jeff Foxworthy We have decided to get rid of the dogs... Sunday, October 19, 2008 The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)
"Government is the Entertainment Division of the
military-industrial complex.": Frank Zappa - (1940-1993),
Musician
= What Wives Should Know about Husbands Men acknowledge only 8 colors, like a box of Crayons. Peach is a fruit, not a color. If you won't dress and act like the Victoria's Secret girls, don't expect us to dress and act like soap opera guys. If something we said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one. If you think you're fat, you probably are. Don't ask us. We refuse to answer. Your hair, sorry, we may pretend we care but the truth is, we didn't marry you because we liked your hair. Sometimes, we're not thinking about you. Live with it. Don't ask us what we're thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as sex, weapons, cars, tools, and other things that don't need a woman's touch. Unless we are going to Le Sex Shoppe or Cabela's or Home Depot, shopping is not pleasure, and no, we're never going to think of it that way. When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear is fine. Really.
You have enough clothes. You have too many shoes. Most guys own three pairs of shoes. What makes you think we'd be any good at choosing which pair, out of thirty, would look good with your dress?
Crying is blackmail. Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That's what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for. Check your oil. It is neither in your best interest nor ours to take the quiz together... No, it doesn't matter which quiz. You can either tell us to do something or tell us how to do something, but not both. Because if you can tell us both, you can do it yourself. If we ask what's wrong and you say "nothing," we will act like nothing's wrong. We know you're lying, but it's just not worth the hassle.
NATIONAL VIEW: Searching the world for economic answers"What don't you know, and how will you learn it?" When "Peggy from Amherst" submitted that question to Tom Brokaw, moderator of Tuesday night's presidential debate, she probably already knew she wasn't going to get a genuine answer from the candidates. And she didn't. Barack Obama made a quick joke ("My wife, Michelle, is there, and she could give you a (long) list"), observed that it's the unexpected challenges that often consume most of a president's time, then changed the subject to the American dream. John McCain explained that "what I don't know is what all of us don't know, and that's what's going to happen ... what I don't know is what the unexpected will be." Then he too changed the subject. So I'll answer Peggy's question. What McCain doesn't seem to know — yet — is that he's a dead man walking. He'll learn it definitively Nov. 4, when he's going to lose the election — and the polls increasingly suggest that he'll lose big. The Republican Party as a whole also will lose big. We're in the middle of an epochal shift in U.S. politics. A global economic crisis, two wars and an ongoing nuclear and terrorist threat have left most Americans disgusted by the recklessness of free marketeers and by unilateralist, militarist approaches to foreign policy. The era of GOP dominance of U.S. politics is over. McCain, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, wanted to be the Republican Party's "steady hand at the tiller." Now he's going down with the ship. Let's get to Obama, who's almost certain to be our president. What Obama doesn't know is how to keep the global economic crisis from sending all the rest of us to the bottom of the sea, right along with McCain and the GOP. Obama won't say that, of course — no sane politician would. On the contrary, Obama, like McCain, bent over backward during Tuesday's debate to reassure voters that all of our problems can be fixed. Neither he nor McCain made reference to the Dow's plunge of 508 points Tuesday, nor to the fact that the index has lost a full third of its value in a year. And when asked by Brokaw if the economy will get "much worse before it gets better," Obama's response was quick: "No. I'm confident about the American economy." Really? I'm not. I don't usually hope that politicians are being disingenuous. But if Obama truly thinks things won't get worse, then what he doesn't know is scary. The U.S. economy is now in roughly the situation the Titanic was in when its lookouts spotted that fatal iceberg looming ahead, and most Americans have started to figure this out. And although finger-pointing is always fun, most of us are turning to more urgent questions — such as whether there will be enough lifeboats to go around and whether there's any real prospect of rescue and recovery. Obama must know this. But presumably his debate prep team told him that with election day so close, it would be stupid to acknowledge a vast, spreading problem if he can't offer voters an equally comprehensive and compelling solution. And I'm pretty sure Obama doesn't yet know how to do that. Don't blame him for not yet knowing how to do that, though. Right now, no one really knows how to do that. Not Obama, not McCain, not Ben Bernanke or Paul Krugman or Larry Summers or Hank Paulson. We're all out of our depth. That's what makes our situation so frightening. A problem that began in the U.S. housing market rippled around the globe. Ripples became waves, waves became tsunamis and now global shores are strewn with wrecked financial institutions. Entire national economies are starting to sink. And in today's globalized economy, we all sink or swim together. During World War II — even as the fighting raged in devastated Europe — the Allied powers met at Bretton Woods to establish international institutions designed to stabilize the international financial system. On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund — a cornerstone of the Bretton Woods system — warned that the world economy faces "the most dangerous financial shock in mature markets since the 1930s." But even as the IMF called for "strong and coordinated actions," much of the post-World War II financial system appeared to be unraveling. Can we save it? Or is it time for some radically new approaches, both domestically and internationally? Obama doesn't know yet. But whatever Obama says publicly, I hope he's got his most creative economists working to figure this out. He — and the rest of us — better hope we can learn fast. Brooks is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Dear Mr. William P. (Bill) Lear,
Jr.
First, I am
an Obama supporter… if you want someone’s respect don’t presume to call them
disingenuous, you have no right to call anyone you don’t know ‘disingenuous’!
I may only
be 65 year old, and a Non-com Vietnam Vet, I never flew a fighter jet but I
heard fighter jets, but they are hard to see at 30000’ but I have worked for a
living all my life earned a paycheck and saved as much as I could, I am watching
it swirl down the toilet with the rest of the economy. I don’t have the ego or
arrogance to presume that I am smarter or more perceptive than any of you. But…
what I do know is that my opinion is sincere and has just as much value as
yours, my passion for truth is genuine.
My
resentment at having my intelligence and integrity called disingenuous is
somewhat muted by the fact that I don’t know exactly what you were trying to
infer If you meant to imply that Obama Supporters were hypocritical liars, that
would upset me, if you mean that we are just cynical and a bit naive then I
would deem that as demeaning, any more than you would. I don’t like being sold
short either.
To start
this off, Obama’s Father was 100% Kenyan (He was from Kenya… that’s in Africa),
his mother was 100% White American, that makes him half black, he is literally,
Bi-racial… The racist crap you quoted: (“To qualify for this distinction you
must be at least one-sixth black. Obama is only one-eighth.”) was
terminology used by slavers to rate the blackness of the people they were
selling in America, your inaccurate description ’one-sixth black’, in
that context, would imply he was an Octoroon. (FYI: I wouldn’t use
that word outside a KKK meeting, most civilized people from this century find it
offensive.)
Is what you
are trying to say, he’s not black enough to call himself black and therefore he
is cheating and taking unfair advantage of the poor old multimillionaire white
guy by playing the race card … do you have any idea how silly that sounds? He
is a young black man, raised by a single mom running for president of the
United States and somehow “Playing the Race Card” is an advantage… gimme a
break… you obviously don’t know any rednecks. You say
McCain is not playing the race card and Obama is… Incidentally, what does that mean exactly? As near as I can determine, there are three definitions of the phrase; ‘Using the race card”:
1.
It
alleges that someone has deliberately and falsely accused another person of
being a racist in order to gain some sort of advantage. (Neither one of them
have done that)
2.
It
refers to someone exploiting prejudice against another race for political or
some other advantage. The use of the
southern strategy by a political candidate is said by some to be a
version of "playing the race card", such as when former Senator
Jesse
Helms, during his 1990 North Carolina Senate campaign ran an ad
showing a black man taking a white man's job, intended as a criticism of the
idea of
racial
quotas. The ad was interpreted by many people as trying to play to
racist fears among white voters. (Obama certainly hasn’t done that, I have seen
some questionable crap from McCain supporters but nothing directly from McCain)
3.
Others suggest that the term itself is a
rhetorical device used in an effort to devalue and minimize claims of
racism. (Supporters on both sides have done that but I have not seen either of
the candidates using the phrase)
… that’s
news to me and every other American. If you are right then McCain has no control
over the people working for him and you are not reading the e-mail I am getting
or looking at the commercials I am watching. The McCain Election Committee or
their surrogates have been using the ‘race card’ on every level… incidentally,
Obama is BLACK he doesn’t have to play the “race card” he
is a
race card.
I have
listened to people on the radio and in my own town who have called him
everything but a human being, I have heard old men threaten to kill him if he
walked through the door simply because they, like you believe him to be
presumptuous (Which is another word for ‘uppity’ if you are black) enough to
believe he can be President of the United States.
In my mind,
among his many other attributes, he is one of the bravest men I have ever heard
about in my life, he takes is life in his hands every time he opens a door.
Obama has
never been a Muslim, the only Muslim “baggage” he has is the baggage piled on
him maliciously by the Conservative media and by the unsophisticated, uninformed
people who fall for their lies and innuendo. Every minute of Barack Obama’s life
is documented, his life is an open book.
Contrary to
Palin’s misinterpretation of an NY Times article, Obama has never associated
with terrorists… (Ask McCain about his pal G. Gordon Liddy, he was a real
terrorist and convicted criminal. Here’s a quote from his radio show;
(“Now
if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are
bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be
wearing bulletproof vests." ... "They've got a big target on there, ATF. Don't
shoot at that, because they've got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head
shots.... Kill the sons of bitches.”)
Obama is my
man, he is the best hope America has to survive the train wreck Bush and his
gang of self serving, greedy idiots have created. 8 years of Bush/Chaney plus 6
years of a Republican rubberstamp Congress and two years of Bush veto’s have
brought this country to its knees.
This has
nothing to do with your e-mail, I just got it from CNBC’s site; National
Debt When Jimmy Carter arrived at the White House:
$660 billion.
Added during
Carter's four years: $337 billion.
Added during
Ronald Reagan's eight years: $1.6 trillion.
Added during
George H. W. Bush's four years: $1.6 trillion.
Added during
Bill Clinton's eight years: $1.5 trillion.
Added during
George W. Bush's seven years, nine months: $4.5 trillion.
Portion of
the $9.5 trillion added to the national debt during the past 31 years and
seven months that came during Republican presidencies: $7.7
trillion.
Percentage
of that $7.7 trillion added during George W. Bush's two terms:
58%. Could
somebody explain again what "fiscal conservative" means?
McMaverick
has had his nose up Bush’s butt since the git-go. He has voted the party line
over 88% of the time and voted with Bush on every major bill. McCain has the
integrity of an Olongapo bar maid. He has changed positions on Abortion,
Stem-cell Research, Financial Regulation, he’s a damn ‘wind sock. To compound
his arrogance he flips off the country by nominating a clueless Born Again
Barbie Doll as his VP as a ploy to get the evangelical women’s vote.
Incidentally, have you noticed that every time she opens her mouth to preach to
the choir she costs J. S. McCain another percentage point.
I'm a little
confused. Let me see if I have this straight...
If you are a
playboy, who graduated from Annapolis 494th out of a class of 499, A man who
‘modestly’ parlayed his war experiences into a political career you are an
exemplary and trustworthy man. A man with the political influence and money he
got when he divorced his handicapped wife (who “Wasn’t young and pretty enough
anymore”, to marry his girlfriend, the jet set multi-millionaire daughter of a
politically influential multi-million dollar beer distributer you’re just one of
the boys.
If you attend 5
different small colleges in 6 years before graduating with a degree in
Journalism, you're well grounded.
If your total
resume is: local weather/sportscaster girl, 4 years on the city council and 6
years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the
governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become
the country's second highest ranking executive (and according to the actuarial
tables, have a > 30% chance of succeeding the president during your first term).
If you spend 3
years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of
the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000
new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a
State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman
of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the
United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring
or actively supporting 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment
and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real
leadership experience. (Hardly a “flash-in-the-pan opportunist”)
If you have
been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters,
all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
----------------------------------------
I too am a
registered Independent, a military veteran. Calling myself a “patriot” seems
self-serving and presumptuous. If you mean by that word that you are willing to
take up arms to defend your country as I would my home, then I am a patriot too,
if by ‘Patriot’ you mean I will blindly support my country as an aggressor, our
right to torture anyone, it’s greedy businessmen and it’s lying politicians
then, sorry, put me down as as the enemy.
I also beseech
you to put aside party considerations and vote for the best man. I am
obviously NOT a McCain supporter I believe he is a flake. It's not
a party issue. It's all about electing the best man.
Please pay no
attention to anyone trying to influence your vote with crap he heard on the Rush
Limbaugh Show or read in some discredited book or undocumented e-mail. Get the
facts, don’t let the Republicans define Obama and don’t let the Democrats define
McCain. The truth is out there if you care enough to look for it.
I have looked
closely at both candidates and I believe in my soul that Barack Obama is the
best man for the job.
Thanks for
reading my gut reaction to the e-mail below. I care about all of you too, we are
all Americans.
I too care our
country, we can’t afford four more years of the status quo.
Pete Daggett ps-God smiles when intelligent men disagree amicably
This old, but younger than me, former fighter pilot has been around, like me.
I share his concerns and his views. Recommend your read and heed his plea.
jrdc
Blue Skies & Tailwinds...
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