Credit

Everyone check your credit accounts. Capital One just cut my credit line by 60% & Bank of America did everything short of canceling my account. It's my honest opinion that even if this bailout bill passes, nothing will really improve quickly...

Cubs clinch the division!

This video brings tears to my eyes;)
GO CUBBIES!

War on Poverty

I am skeptical of the success that can be had of these dubious wars: War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, etc. And I was thinking about poverty the other day and got curious about the amounts Uncle Sam (or, as it turned out, Nanny Sam) spends. This is what turned up.

We spend $1142 billion on welfare programs. Okay, next step. How many Americans are in serious poverty? Now I'm not talking about someone who doesn't have a TV, I'm talking about people who are having trouble feeding their kids. Since the national poverty rate is somewhere around 12 percent, I'm guessing bad poverty (I'm being generous here) is around eight percent. That's about twenty four million people. Divide 1.142 trillion by twenty four million and you get approximately $47, 583 per person per year.

Okay, so what's happening to all that cash? It seems to me that if you give a struggling family in the Bronx almost 50k/year, they'll leave the Bronx pretty fast. It also seems to me that they won't need that kind of welfare for long, and it could be used to get the remaining four to six percent out of poverty. Shortly thereafter, poverty would be eliminated and the tax could be discarded. This is never going to happen and we're going to have more of a wasteful welfare state, not less. (I have the cynicism of youth)

Given that there is a minimum of 20k per year per person in poverty (if you remove Social Security from the equation) and that I hold 20k is enough to get you out of poverty in a few years (assuming these families already make maybe 15 thousand a year), where is all that money going?

Barack Obama's economic plan

Feminism at its best.

A recent grad from Sacramento State University has come up with an interesting way of earning money to pay for her Master's Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. Her undergrad was in Women's Studies which makes a lot of sense given her attitude towards her...unusual choice of income.

Great quote from the movie: "As long as she's doing it for herself and to pay for school, I think it's a noble thing". Ya know what we call people like that? Prostitutes, that's what.

It figures that feminists would think that prostituting yourself to the highest bidder is "empowerment". It seems that whatever is degrading and dishonoring about women is now "empowerment" and "liberating". N.O.W. makes porno flicks to "celebrate women", prostitutes are now "noble", and people who still have their heads on straight wonder just what the hell feminism is anymore. How can porn and prostitution be possibly benefit women? Do feminists think that making women objects of desire is going to create justice and equality? True justice will never be effected with such base methods.

Tolstoy had it right when he said that the basis for women's subjection was "that men do, and think it good to regard her as objects of enjoyment. If we continue to regard her as such and teach her the same, no amount of women in the courts or offices will ever change her from an inferior being".

Before I end my little rant, it's interesting to note that Ms. "Dylan" wishes to pursue a Marriage and Family therapy career. I don't know about you, but I'm sure as hell not going to see a prostitute to help me out with marriage. Forget that, and forget feminism.

Woo Hoo! She's Twenty-Two!

Happy Birthday, Elena! We are so glad you were born. I hope this auspicious day is full of fun, if not party hats. Put your birthday dress over your birthday suit and paint the town red. (so to speak.)

Here's to one more trip around the sun.

What about Georgia?

So here is another political quesiton: what are we doing in Georgia? (country, not state.)

Nate wants to be added

I don't know who the administrator is, but Nate would like to be added to the blog. His email is nenade.davis@gmail.com.

I Like This Lady

This is the kind of person we need in Washington: someone who is not afraid to tackle the status quo of politics and dispense with perks (like selling the governor's jet on eBay. ..) I think we need actual change, not just talk about it, and we need someone who has a record of making changes.

Since We're All Thinking About Politics (except me)

I thought I would share with y'all an article that I read recently that caused me great enjoyment. It is by Charles Krauthammer eight weeks ago and concerned Senator Obama; it portrays him in a less favorable light than the messianic swoon engaged in by the regular media.

"Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation. When President Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George H.W. Bush -- who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap -- called "a Europe whole and free"?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It's as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself. There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?
Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.

After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: " I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his lectern, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down.

He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, "you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish" -- a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how "embarrassing" it is that Europeans are multilingual but "we go over to Europe, and all we can say is 'merci beaucoup.' " Obama speaks no French.

His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism . . . that you come out of your isolation. . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?

We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when "our planet began to heal." As I recall -- I'm no expert on this -- Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas."

I thought this was hilarious.

So "Focus on the Family" initiated a video advertisement asking people to "pray for rain" 2 minutes before Obama's acceptance speech at Mile High.

(Focus on the Family has taken legal action to remove the video off of you tube)

What's even funnier, is that rain DID NOT happen during Obama's speech! And what really makes me chuckle is that today's events in the Republican Convention are suspended because of "torrential rain". Haha.