just me

So Sen. McCain has said that he won’t debate Sen. Obama until Congress has reached a deal on “saving the economy.” Now Dems are whinging that it’s a ploy because they sey that McCain doesn’t want to or is afraid to debate Obama. I agree with Republican sympathizers that this is not the case, that John McCain is more than capable of debating Barack Obama. Here’s my 2¢:

It’s a ploy to either give Palin more time to prepare for her debate against Biden or to continually postpone the VP debates until it’s too late. Palin may be a decent governor, but at best she’ll look like a fool on national TV, and the McCain camp knows it. Anyone remember the televised VP debates from 1992 with Ross Perot’s VP, Vice Adm. Stockdale?

If Barack Obama were white, he’d be leading in the polls by at least 20 points.

If Obama loses in November, it’s because American voters are still too racist to vote for a black man. It could also be because the 18-25 demographic was too damned lazy to get to the polls before they close at 6:00pm.

If Sarah Palin weighed 200lbs. and was plain looking, nobody would know who the hell she is.

I can understand why some people choose to be vegetarians. I’ve even considered becoming a vegetarian from time to time, but I just like hamburgers too much. And I’ve always felt a connection to nature and to animals. And while I’m quick to agree that Homo Sapien Sapien are intellectually superior to animals, animals aren’t stupid creatures. They can communicate with one another. They can communicate with humans if the human is really willing to pay attention. And they have feelings. They care for their young. They care for their elders. There are endless stories of one species caring for the young of another.

So when I hear stories of animal cruelty, whether by an adult or a child, it makes my blood boil. This story, though, is truly heinous. I genuinely felt physically ill when I first read this article. If it was my call these perps would suffer the same punishment that they doled out to these pigs. It’s mind boggling that a species that is capable of incredibly selfless acts is also capable of such disgusting and appalling crimes. Now where did I put that veggie burger…

PETA video shows pigs abused at Iowa farm

Palin stays firm on Bridge to Nowhere claim

Do my fellow Americans not care that she’s lying through her teeth, or do they not believe the evidence? With the rise in “creationists” I’m inclined to believe the latter (no pun intended).

You have got to be fucking kidding me. Sixty-two percent of men? Really? Other than being attractive, Palin has zero redeeming qualities. I wouldn’t vote for her for City Council, let alone the second most powerful person in the world. She lies, she’s so far from being qualified for the job it’s not even funny, she’s a nutjob born-again Christian, and she’s just damned annoying to listen to. If the GOP wins the Whitehouse again I’m seriously thinking of moving elsewhere.

Here’s the CNN article.

I just don’t get why so many people think that Obama is too much of a risk to be our next President. For fuck’s sake, most of these people voted George W. Bush to TWO terms. The first time Dubya was elected, I was bitterly disappointed, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Here was a guy that spent two terms as governor of Texas, was a failed oilman, owned a stake in the Texas Rangers, a previous coke-head, dodged Vietnam, earned himself a DUI, and never left the USA until after he was elected President. He’s slightly less incompetent than his younger brother Neil, who was “a player” in the Savings and Loan fiasco that We the People bailed out from 1986-1996 at a cost of $160.1 BILLION (funny note — John McCain, part of the “Keating Five”, had a hand in the S&L mess as well). Google “Silverado Savings and Loan” and “Neil Bush” and see what you find. While you’re at it, try “Keating Five”, “Lincoln Savings and Loan” and “John McCain”. But I digress.

In my mind, Barack Obama is no less of a risk than anyone else who has run in the last quarter century. Sure, you never know until they’re in office, just like any other job in the world. Nixon had plenty of experience and look how he turned out. And now the GOP has the gall to pick Gov. Palin of Alaska for their VP? Two term mayor of a town of 9,000 and 20 months in office as governor, and they think she’s more qualified than someone who worked as a community organizer/activist, civil rights attorney, law professor, member of the Illinois Senate for 8 years, and 4 years as the Junior Senator from Illinois.

In my honest opinion, the real reason many people consider Obama a risk is because he’s not white. That’s right, I said it. A lot of this country is still bigoted and racist, especially older generations.

I imagine because of my continual rants of people emailing crap without verifying if it’s true or not, my mom has gotten into the habit of asking me if it’s true/hoax/cause for concern. I honestly am happy that she does this. So a few weeks ago she forwarded one on to me from my aunt and uncle (her brother and sister-in-law) about how “the liberals care more for flowers than they do for America.” Basically, it was about why we should drill in ANWR and why it really won’t harm the environment. Below is my response to them. I haven’t heard back from them since.

Let me start off by saying I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Both parties care nothing for fixing anything, unless it helps them retain power…

I can’t vouch for the validity of the photographs, but the maps and the size of ANWR are accurate. Spills will happen (in 2006 there was a spill of between 134,000 and 268,000 gallons of oil near Prudhoe Bay) and roads will need to be built, as there are zero roads within or leading into ANWR. But even though there are no roads, there are thousands (at least 5,000) native Inupiat peoples that live in ANWR and depend on the flora and fauna of the area.

Sure, jobs will be created and there will be oil pumped out, but it’s a tiny amount of oil and a relatively small number of jobs. According to the Department of Energy’s EIA (Energy Information Administration:

“The opening of the ANWR 1002 Area to oil and natural gas development is projected to increase domestic crude oil production starting in 2018. In the mean ANWR oil resource case, additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR reaches 780,000 barrels per day in 2027 and then declines to 710,000 barrels per day in 2030. In the low and high ANWR oil resource cases, additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR peaks in 2028 at 510,000 and 1.45 million barrels per day, respectively. Between 2018 and 2030, cumulative additional oil production is 2.6 billion barrels for the mean oil resource case, while the low and high resource cases project a cumulative additional oil production of 1.9 and 4.3 billion barrels, respectively.”

“Additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR would be only a small portion of total world oil production, and would likely be offset in part by somewhat lower production outside the United States. The opening of ANWR is projected to have its largest oil price reduction impacts as follows: a reduction in low-sulfur, light crude oil prices of $0.41 per barrel (2006 dollars) in 2026 for the low oil resource case, $0.75 per barrel in 2025 for the mean oil resource case, and $1.44 per barrel in 2027 for the high oil resource case, relative to the reference case.”

For the average case, drilling in ANWR would reduce crude oil by 75 cents, in 2025. The total production from ANWR would be between 0.4 and 1.2 percent of total world oil consumption in 2030. So, we won’t see any oil for at least 10 years, and at best the price per barrel of oil (not per gallon of gasoline) will drop by $1.44 in 19 years. To me, that sounds like a huge waste of time and money. Instead, we should be investing our time and money on weaning our country off of oil, not just “foreign oil.” The more we invest in alternative energy sources for the production of electricity the less oil and natural gas we’ll need to import, which will bring the price of oil, and therefore gasoline, down.

Furthermore, the U.S. consumes 20,687,000 barrels of oil per day (as of 2006). At best, and only at it’s peak, we would be able to extract 1,450,000 barrels of oil per day. Since the entire world consumes a total of 83,607,000 barrels of oil per day (as of 2005), we Americans use nearly 25% of the worlds oil but account for less than 0.5% of the total population of the planet (300 million out of over 6 billion). The real kicker is that the total world production of oil is 82,532,000 barrels of oil per day (as of 2005). So, not only are we using much more than our fair share of oil, but we’re using it faster than we’re finding it. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. If I spend more money than I make it’ll eventually catch up to me, and then I’ll really have problems.

There is no magic bullet to save us from this energy crisis. People want simple solutions, but there are never simple solutions to complex problems. And this is a problem that has been decades in the making. I don’t profess to speak for God (or Jehovah or Allah or…), but I’d imagine he’s extremely disappointed at how humanity has run (ruined?) this beautiful planet. Aren’t we supposed to be stewards of the Earth?

Mike
—
“A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers
intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all,
rich or poor, or else this system of government we call
democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the
machine and make him like it.”
- Frank Lloyd Wright

I’m definitely behind a timetable for pulling our troops out of Iraq (I won’t even get into discussing why we should’ve never been there in the first place). But I can’t help but think that Bush’s impending reversal is a clever GOP (i.e., Karl Rove) strategy to take away a key point from the Obama campaign. Not that the only thing Obama has is being against the war in Iraq, but it was a major talking point, and now he’ll have to put more emphasis on other areas and ideas. And Rove is probably betting that it’ll take some wind out of his sails. And McCain can say, “See, we know what we’re doing in Iraq.” Rotten bastards.

Or maybe I’m just a little too jaded and cranky.

I still believe that the USA is the greatest country in the history of mankind. The most just, the most equitable, the land of opportunity. But it’s also just as corrupt as any other country out there. Take for example the recent Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac fiasco. Here’s an excellent piece about it from via my good friend Squid.

This actually was buried in the middle of a lengthy football column I read (Tuesday Morning Quarterback, or TMQ as they call it in the last paragraph) & got me pretty riled up:

Increasingly Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are looking like little more than devices to transfer money from the pockets of taxpayers to the pockets of Fannie and Freddie senior executives. Former Fannie Mae boss Franklin Raines paid himself about $50 million for years in which, we now know, the company lied about its earnings in order to inflate executive bonuses, while management was playing fast and loose with other people’s money. Beginning in 2007, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went off the cliff, their stocks plummeting to less than 20 percent of their previous values, and taxpayers were put on the hook as guarantors of the firms’ bad management decisions. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Mae-Mac debacle will cost taxpayers $100 billion or more. Yet Freddie Mac CEO Richard Syron was paid $14.5 million for 2007, including a $2.2 million “performance bonus.” Syron has taken home $38 million total from Freddie in the past five years. Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd got $14.2 million for 2007, plus a substantial prepaid life insurance policy and other perks including “financial counseling, an executive health program and dining services,” the Washington Post reported. Hey, $49,000-a-year median U.S. households, you are being taxed for millionaire Mudd’s “dining services.” Bon appetite.

Executives receiving very high pay justify their deals on two grounds: that they are risk-takers in high-pressure situations, and that they have valuable expertise. Now we know that no one at the top of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took any personal risks — everything was federally guaranteed, and all mistakes billed to the taxpayer. Here,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/business/05freddie.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1217953639-Yd9SmkzN5YSr/88nehqU9w
the New York Times reports that Syron was repeatedly warned in 2004 that the organization was taking on bad loans, and did nothing. Syron justified his inaction by complaining to the Times that he was under pressure from various Fannie constituents. That’s why he was paid so much, to take the heat! Yet he took no heat, rather, devoted himself to avoiding responsibility. If things go well, executives are lavished with money and praised as risk-takers. If things go poorly, executives are lavished with money and blame others.

And just what incredible expertise do Syron and Mudd possess? They made billion-dollar blunder after billion-dollar blunder; they failed to realize things as basic as buyers borrowing without documentation of income may not be able to repay loans. People chosen at random from the phone book could hardly have performed worse. Yet the federal bail-out legislation just signed by George W. Bush does not require them to give back any of their ill-gotten gains.

This is the core lesson of CEO overpay scandals: The corrupt or incompetent executive always keeps the money. He may be caught and embarrassed by bad press, but he keeps the money while someone else — shareholders, taxpayers, workers — is punished. Raines recently settled a federal legal complaint by agreeing to return about $3 million of his $50 million, but kept the rest; his employment contract was worded such that even if he was malfeasant, whatever he took from company coffers was his. Hilariously, federal prosecutors claimed victory because Raines “surrendered” to the government a large block of stock options — options now worthless, owing to the Fannie Mae decline Raines helped set in motion by lying about Fannie numbers. Until Congress enacts a law that allows money taken by corrupt or incompetent executives to be recovered, the lying will continue. Lying by CEOs is what society rewards!

Why does Congress tolerate the swindle aspect of Fannie and Freddie? For the standard reason: Congress is on the take. Here,
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11781.html
Lisa Lerer of Politico reports that in the past decade, Fannie and Freddie spent almost $200 million on campaign donations to Congress and on lobbying members of Congress, some of the lobbying money going to former members. This year, for instance, Fannie gave the legal max of $10,000 to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and to Republican House Whip Roy Blunt, neither of whom face meaningful re-election challenge. As for costly lobbying, the implied deal is: Don’t rock the boat while in office and someday you too will be a former member getting easy money to lobby former colleagues. During Senate debate on the Mae-Mac bailout, Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to permit a vote on an amendment that would have barred Fannie and Freddie from giving money to members of Congress. Reid did not merely oppose the measure, he refused to allow the Senate to vote on it — so that members of Congress could remain on the take, without having to go on record about the matter.

Now that taxpayers are covering Fannie and Freddie’s cooked books, the $200 million diverted to Congress in effect came from average Americans, forcibly removed from their pockets — and thanks to Senator Reid, more will be forcibly taken from your pocket and placed into the accounts of senators and representatives. This is what TMQ calls a Sliver Strategy. The Sliver Strategy is a means to disguise embezzlement. Congress looked the other way while Fannie and Freddie approved vast amounts of bad debt, in order to shave off a sliver for itself — in this case, the $200 million in lobbying and donations. Had Congress simply awarded itself $200 million, editorialists would have been outraged. Because the money was slipped in to a larger fiasco of much greater sums wasted, Congress got away with it.