I saw this on my new favorite web-haunt, ProbablyBadNews.com, and I just had to share! It’s yet another epic fail courtesy of NBC News, because – as they say at PBN – journalism isn’t dying fast enough. At least, mainstream journalism anyway.

Meh, no worries, NBC, it’s not like our housing markets are important or anything! Psshaw, like, my inner valley girl is sooo bored with it already, fer shure!
In fact, I’ve been so impressed with NBC News lately, especially after seeing this report about those awful town hall attendees, that I decided to come up with my own slogan idea for NBC News!! I’m, like, so totally excited to share it with you!

How long do you think it’ll be before I get an excited phone call from the head of NBC News, telling me how much they totally love my new slogan?
Yeah, I’m not holding my breath…

I was just listening to a speech by Daniel Hannan, who happened to share a great little nugget of wisdom from history: a story of Winston Churchill & Clement Attlee, sharing a moment in the loo.

Let me tell you a little story that seems apt to our present discontents. The year is 1945. Clement Attlee is Prime Minister, and one day he is relieving himself in the Gents at the House of Commons. The door swings open and it’s the leader of the opposition, Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill spies the Prime Minister at the urinal and he strides purposefully to the farthest end.
    ”Feeling a bit standoffish today are we, Winston?” asks Attlee.
    ”No,” replies Churchill, majestically unbuttoning his fly. “But whenever you see anything big, Clement, you nationalize it.”

Perhaps those sentiments are the reason why Obama didn’t want to stare into the eyes of the Winston Churchill bust, which he so rudely returned to the British people not too long ago?
Still, it’s remarkable just how apt Winston’s wisdom, given our current global predicament. If only Winston were around today, to persuade yet another world leader with a little potty wisdom.

I was having lunch with a dear friend of mine not long ago and we were having a discussion about just how bad off I feel politics and the state of our country has become over the past several years, both under Obama AND Bush. When he asked me for something specific, I brought the travesty that is our federal and state taxation system. I mentioned in particular that I feared we could soon see more and more people paying close to 50% in taxes, outside of such taxes as sales tax and things like that which are harder to quantify. He seemed completely aghast at my concerns and basically passed it off as utterly ludicrous, that no one was anywhere close to paying 30 or 40 percent, let alone 50.
Well, I was listening to the news just now and they gave me a set of interesting figures out of New York. Certain higher tax brackets in New York City are paying the following tax ranges:
- 35-39% in Federal Income Tax
- 8-12% in New York State Income Tax
- 4 and a half percent in ‘City tax’
That’s getting awful close, don’t you think? (Hehe, yeah, ya think?!) Hell, the Federal income tax alone is already inching far too close to 50% for comfort, so I certainly don’t think it’s that outlandish of a concern to think that we could soon see half of our income being taken away in one form of taxation alone, let alone all the various taxes combined. And I’m not just talking about the wealthy, although frankly, I don’t feel they should have half of their income taken away any more than anyone else’s. After all, the wealthy are the ones who are investing in companies, creating their own, and getting all that capital out into the system that makes the world go round. But beyond that, everyone’s taxes are escalating, and the threshold for the so-called “wealthy” seems to dip ever lower with each passing year. Those who are currently wagging their fingers at the “evil wealthy” and proclaiming it necessary for them to be unfairly punished, they may soon find themselves in the same boat.
Granted, I don’t personally have any experience with taxation at the moment, given the fact that I’m no longer working due to disability and have no income to speak of. But do any of you out there have any personal experiences to share? How much of your income is being taken away to the government’s National Money Hole?

By the way, I want to apologize for the long delay between new entries lately. My health has declined a bit over the past several months as I’ve been battling both a long term upper respiratory infection as well as decompression sickness (don’t ask…) I’m trying to keep up, but alas, sometimes my body and brain just won’t let me. I’m doing my best, though, and will keep trying to bring you my perspectives on the latest political tidbits. Of course, if any of you would like to suggest a topic, or even if you want to write an entry and submit it, that’d be peachy with me!

Don’t you think the economy would have been far better served if every man, woman, and child had gotten that $30,000 Representative Grayson spoke about? If spending is supposedly going to kickstart our economy, that certainly would have worked. Or better yet, they could have – *gasp* – saved it! Instead, we have absolutely no clue what the hell happened with that money. Poof, gone! And the Inspector General of the Fed can’t even answer the question about who’s minding the store.
Incredible. Your government at work, ladies and gentlemen. And these are the people we want in control of our healthcare? Brilliant!
Huge kudos to Representative Alan Grayson for asking the tough questions that need to be asked. And by the way, he’s a Democrat. We need a few more like you, sir.

(hat tip to my friend Joey for the link and to the DailyBail.com for publicizing this video.)

“The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner.”
- Jeffrey Immelt, February 6, 2009

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt recently announced that his company will be spending $6 billion dollars over the next 6 years on a project called ‘Healthymagination’ in Washington, DC. Together with Intel, GE will be developing software to monitor health data and health records. Their goal? To sell this software to the government, for use in Obama’s plan to develop an entire Federal body whose entire mission is to monitor every citizen’s health records, every order a doctor writes for those citizens, for the purpose of determining whether those doctor’s orders are “fiscally responsible”. Meaning, a government bureaucrat will have the authority to rescind your doctor’s order, if that bureaucrat decides that either you can’t afford – or you flat out just don’t deserve – whatever procedure it is your doctor deems necessary.
That isn’t just socialized medicine, it’s a medical dictatorship, where the government decides what you can and cannot spend your own money on when it comes to you, your body, and your health. And GE’s right there with the White House, developing software to make this plan a reality.

Oh, and Tom Daschle, the man who couldn’t become the head of the HHS, he’s on the ‘Healthymagination’ advisory board.

Beyond the implications this plan and ‘Healthymagination’ could have on your daily life, there’s another side to this story which is deeply concerning. Part of the plan for this project includes a massive propaganda campaign. According to a statement given to the Dallas Morning News by GE, all aspects of NBC Universal – including NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, all of it – will create 5,000 separate news pieces on this ‘Healthymagination’ project. Every news program on every NBC network will be trumpeting this project amidst their supposedly ‘unbiased’ news coverage, acting as if they’re objective journalists here to tell you all the positive, wonderful things ‘Healthymagination’ and socialized medicine will do for this country. They’ll be bringing this propaganda straight into your home, presenting it as news, all for the sake of further tying GE and our federal government together into an unholy union.

According to most Democrats I know, they define ‘fascism’ as a combination of government and big business. Although that’s not historically accurate, it leads me to wonder: if that’s truly what they believe fascism to be, where are all the good Democrats? Why aren’t they standing up against this? They rightly stood up against Bush when he was presiding over the same thing. In fact, under the Bush administration, GE Capital received $139 billion directly from the FDIC, despite the fact that GE is not a bank. The FDIC supposedly doesn’t have the authority to hand out such huge wads of cash to entities outside of their regulatory authority of the banking industry. Yet they got away with it, and no one’s bothered to ask how or why.
This corruption has been going on for a very, very long time and under Obama it hasn’t changed. It’s only gotten much, much worse. Now Jeffrey Immelt is serving on Obama’s financial advisory committee. He’s been party to the majority of meetings regarding the implementation of the government’s radical healthcare plan, despite the obvious conflict of interest, since his company stands to gain great wealth by selling the government all their healthcare products. In fact, some claim that GE’s already been promised contracts should this healthcare plan come into effect.

So where are all the good Democrats? They were angry about the no-bid Haliburton contracts, so why aren’t they just as angry about all the sweet no-bid deals GE is getting with regard to energy policy, healthcare policy, and so on? They’re making a helluva lot more money in a helluva lot more industries than Haliburton ever did, so why aren’t the Democrats making a fuss? Why aren’t they standing up now?
Or is the same behavior alright when their guy is the one doing it? Sorry, it’s still the same country, it’s still the same problem, it’ll still have the same horrible, destructive consequences, no matter which party is responsible for it. It’s still wrong. So why aren’t you standing up now?

Everything GE has been doing to wiggle their dirty little fingers into our federal government is wrong and it must be stopped. I, for one, recommend that we immediately boycott as many aspects of GE as we possibly can, starting with changing the channel on our television sets away from NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, and all of their other myriad networks. If they’re going to be pushing their propaganda into my home under the guise of journalism, I’m not going to tune in. I certainly hope you won’t either.
If you’re a GE shareholder, I would strongly urge you to speak up. Do everything you can to voice your opinion and make sure the powers that be become intimately acquainted with your disgust at their behavior. If they won’t listen, then speak with your money and dump those stocks. Don’t let yourself become party to the destruction of our free market, our republic, and our freedom.

Jeffrey Immelt and GE must be stopped. It’s about damn time we raise a ruckus about this dangerous marriage of government and big business. It’s about time they got a divorce, but that simply won’t happen if we roll over and refuse to get in the way. As they always say during a wedding ceremony, if anyone has any objections to this union, let them speak now or forever hold their peace. We’ll be forever forced to hold our peace if we don’t speak up now and prevent them from stealing out freedom. So stand up and speak out, before it’s too late.

Important to understand in preparation for Obama’s press conference. Keep these numbers in mind while you listen to TOTUS, won’t you?

Wow, wow, wow! I didn’t even know they made ‘em like this in Britain anymore…

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love this man. Keep up the great work, Mr. Hannan, America’s loving it, and here’s to hoping Britain is too!

What happens when you make brash generalizations? You make yourself look like a fool. What happens when you make generalized assumptions about an entire group of people? You betray your own prejudices.

That’s what I believe has happened – among other things – with the vilification of generalized, anonymous, faceless A.I.G. “Executives”. Certain members of Congress, along with the Attorneys General of various states, would have us believe that every executive who ever worked at A.I.G. is directly responsible for all the credit default swaps that landed them and the American economy in such turmoil. Furthermore, not only is it every executive’s fault – regardless of whether they were even in the same departments that handled those credit default swaps or not – all of those executives are also totally heartless, greedy, disgusting bastards who deserve to die for so blatantly disrespecting and victimizing the tax-payers by doing something so wrong, so dastardly, so disgusting as… receiving payment for their hard work, as dictated by contracts signed by those in charge, both at A.I.G. and in the Federal government. If we believe what we’re being told by the likes of Barney Frank, *every* executive is a criminal who deserves to be “named and shamed”, who deserves no sympathy for the death threats they and their families are being subjected to, and who ultimately deserves the first ever retroactive, personally targeted, over-the-top, 90% taxation that was just enacted by Congress, despite the fact such taxation legislation so blatantly violates the Constitution (another contract that no one seems to hold must esteem for these days.)

This is another rash generalization. Not only does it make those who make such generalizations look like fools, and not only does it betray their prejudices, but good people who have done absolutely nothing wrong are being hurt in the process.
Oh, and we, the American people, are also being hopelessly distracted from much more important and pressing issues.

This point is beautifully illustrated by none other than one of those awful executives from A.I.G, Mr. Jake DeSantis. He’s taking an awful risk revealing his name, but I believe that what he has to say is important. After all, didn’t our parents teach us to walk a mile in another man’s shoes before we criticize them? And no, not just so that when we do criticize them we’re a mile away and we have their shoes. No, no, the point is, we need to look at both sides before grabbing our pitchforks and running people out of town who may be completely and utterly innocent. Mob rule isn’t the answer here; reason is.
So for the sake of reason, I beg you to take a look at the letter of resignation which Mr. Jake DeSantis sent to Edward M. Liddy, the Chief Executive of A.I.G. It explains a few things from the point of view of the executives that we’re all being riled up to hate.

Click here to check it out.

Before any of us say another word about these executives, I wish we’d all calm down for a minute and think about a few things. First, contracts should be sacred and the government has no right to interfere with them, especially with regard to contracts that they themselves agreed to.

Secondly, before we let mob rule trump our reason, perhaps we should ask ourselves, who is it that’s trying to get us to behave like a bunch of vicious, thoughtless, violent rioters in the first place? Perhaps then we might have a better idea about what really went on here, and who’s really to blame. Not some faceless, nameless, villain of an executive, but some politicians who didn’t even bother to read the biggest, most expensive bill in the history of our country before they voted for it. They’re the ones who signed a contract before reading the fine print (hell, they didn’t even let us read it!) If that happened to us, the little people, we’d be the ones to blame. We’d be the ones with our credit ruined and our possessions being taken away. Yet Congress is trying to shift the blame and attention onto others, hoping they’ll get away with something tremendously stupid – which, by the way, we’re currently paying the price for. Congress entered into this contract, a contract which simply stated that executives – like any other employee of a company – should be compensated for their work. Whether the Congressmen and Senators now feel that compensation was too high, it’s too bad, so sad. It’s their fault for not reading the fine print. So hold them responsible, not the people who simply got paid for doing their job. If that contract can’t stand, if the government can interfere in that contract, then who’s to say they can’t interfere in one of yours? Who’s to say you won’t be the next villain to distract the people of America from yet another of Congress’ sins? Walk a mile in the shoes of those executives before being so quick to judgment, then maybe you’ll understand why this entire situation is so entirely wrong.

I’m just now watching Obama’s appearance on last night’s Tonight Show – thank you, Tivo! – and I just had to pause it. I couldn’t go any further without commenting on a few things, so this won’t be a full analysis, this is just me having to sound off now before I forget my initial reaction.

First off, here’s a direct quote I just transcribed from Obama. I’ll try to get an exact video clip of this line later on.

“”No, no, no, but, no, th-th-th-th… This is the point that I made, I think two days ago, when somebody asked, ‘Well, do you have confidence in Tim Geithner?’ I said, ‘Look, I’m the President. So ih-eh-uh, ultimately, all of this stuff is my responsibility. If I’m not, uh, giving him the tools that he needs, uh, to make sure that we’re moving this forward, then people need to look at me.”
- Barack Obama, Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 03-19-09, roughly 35-40 minutes into the broadcast.

Um, Mr. President, if it’s your responsibility to get Tim Geithner all the tools he needs to solve what you and your administration repeatedly refer to as the greatest financial and economic disaster to strike this country since the Great Depression, then why is it that you have time to go on a late night chat show, and yet you haven’t had enough time to fill the remaining 17 out of 18 presidential appointments within the Treasury Department? Tim Geithner is the only one you’ve appointed out of those 18 appointments, meaning Tim Geithner is operating without a full compliment of appointees on his staff, to assist him with this massive crisis.
Wouldn’t you say that’s a pretty big error on your part? Wouldn’t you say that’s an instance of you not giving Tim Geithner the “tools that he needs to make sure we’re moving forward”? Don’t you think filling those 17 appointments should be a higher priority than chatting it up with Jay Leno?
Hey, Mr. Obama, you asked us to look at you, you said this was your responsibility. We’re looking at you now.

Secondly, I will say that I was impressed with one question in particular that Jay Leno addressed to Obama. When he asked specifically about his concerns over Congress targeting specific individuals with 90% taxation legislation, did you notice that Obama didn’t even answer the question? He completely deflected and didn’t even come close to addressing Leno’s very legitimate concerns!
But then again, I guess you wouldn’t want to answer that question either, if you were presiding over a Congress that just passed legislation which violated the Constitution not just once, but twice.
Yet again, Mr. Obama, I’m looking at you. This is your responsibility, and you can’t even answer a drastically important question such as the one Jay Leno presented to you?
I sincerely hope I wasn’t the only one who picked up on that deflection, because that’s a very, very, very important question that we should all be demanding a satisfactory answer to.

Lastly, didn’t you just love how in every single answer, the only solution Obama presented to both the economic crisis AND the big AIG mess, was more regulation and oversight? That’s pretty funny, coming from the golden boy of the same Democratic party who repeatedly rejected Republican attempts at providing more regulation and oversight before this crisis even erupted, in an effort to put on the brakes before we hit an absolute catastrophe. Wasn’t it the Democrats who said that Fannie and Freddie were just fine, and that Republicans were doing nothing more than being evil “fear-mongers” for suggesting that a major global financial crisis was on the horizon and that we’d better act now through regulation and oversight?
Kinda funny that Obama thinks we should trust those very same Democrats to effectively implement that regulation and oversight now that the very same crisis the Republicans predicted has hit us at full force, that crisis the Democrats said didn’t exist and was nothing more than a Republican fantasy. But not only did the Democrats fail in that regard, but they also failed to put in any regulation and oversight into the massive stimulus bills they passed which led to this big AIG mess that Obama was commenting on.
Hmm, that’s at least two strikes, if not more. How many strikes will we allow the Democrats before we realize, hey, they have absolutely no track record of success and they flat out suck at implementing any kind of effective regulation and oversight, like the kind Obama was touting on Jay Leno?

Alright, now to hit play and finish the rest of it. I swear, I feel like pulling my hair out, this is so frustrating to listen to. So before my brain just fizzles out, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the whole debacle, so please, comment away and let me know what you think!

Oh, and by the way, just to add my voice to the chorus – let’s impeach Chris Dodd, shall we?

For those of you out there who still may not understand the process by which the markets became involved in all these sub-prime mortgages, which became the catalyst for at least one aspect of the global financial crisis – or if you have friends who might still need a little help understanding it – I’ve found this remarkable video that does a pretty good job of just explaining the market side of the issue. (It certainly taught me a thing or two about the details.) It’s not so much about the political policies that led to this behavior, but simply how the market reacted to changes in policies. And hey, the video’s also just plain pretty to look at, so enjoy!

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.