Archive for the ‘Fan & Fred’ Category

“Remember These Earnings the Next Time the Administration Feigns Outrage”

Friday, March 27th, 2009

So says Texas Rainmaker about Rahm Emmanuel’s profits from Freddie Mac.

Obama’s Chief of Staff Profited from Freddie Mac Scandal
March 26th, 2009 8:40 am

This should come as no surprise.

Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the current housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors by a top federal regulator.

One of those allegedly asleep-at-the-switch board members was Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel—now chief of staff to President Barack Obama—who made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort.

Remember these earnings the next time the administration feigns outrage over corporate pay.

He was named to the Freddie Mac board in February 2000 by Clinton, whom Emanuel had served as White House political director and vocal defender during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals.

The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most fellow directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board’s working committees, according to company proxy statements. Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other new directors qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.

On Emanuel’s watch, the board was told by executives of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass.

You know the right way to present this to a true-blue, died-in-the-wool liberal who you just know is going to be grasping-at-straws to find a way to excuse it?

It’s like Sarah Palin prancing around in $100,000 worth of clothes…and then getting her knickers in a twist over the fact that you’re wearing a suit that lists for $300. And then appealing to Congress for a retroactive tax that will cut you down to size and leave you naked.

Except Palin looks a helluva lot better wearing expensive clothes than Rahm Emmanuel does with a wallet full of cash!

Posted in Fan & Fred, Incumbent Scandals | No Comments »

IT Predictions for 2009

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

They’re gloomy. You were expecting something else?

Half of CIOs are looking to cut consulting-services costs, 35 percent want to reduce computer and server expenses, and 23 percent want savings on software, according to a Goldman Sachs survey.
:
The city of Seattle is using VMware to consolidate its existing servers, instead of buying 139 new ones from IBM. Next year, CIO Bill Schrier wants to use more of VMware’s so-called virtualization software, which lets computers run multiple operating systems, saving costs. VMware shares have dropped 71 percent this year before today.

Other parts of the software market, including SAP business applications and Microsoft Corp. operating systems and office program packages, may fare worse. Last week, Gartner cut its 2009 enterprise software growth forecast to 6.6 percent, or $244.3 billion, predicting slowdowns in those areas. That’s down from a September forecast of 9.5 percent.
:
While Microsoft will benefit from the popularity of its SharePoint software, which helps workers collaborate, slowing PC sales will crimp demand for its Windows and Office programs, according to Goldman Sachs. Microsoft spokesman Bill Cox declined to comment.

“I’m worried about every single vendor,” said Citigroup’s Thill. “It’s just a question of magnitude. The worst may very well be ahead.”

This is the kind of thing that made me wince throughout the year when people would talk about the technological Golden Age that would rise up to meet us once The Annointed One took His Holy Hand off the Bible on January 20th. Supposedly, the Obama Administration would peel back the veneer of dumbth and, with our battalion of bluetooth-earbud-wearing egotists packed into the White House, we’d stop banging rocks together in our little mud huts, and partake in the blessings of our twenty-first century Renaissance.

If this report be reliable, there’s no Renaissance ahead. There may not even be a chicken-in-every-pot. Can’t eat a unicorn fart.

My advice? First, take some solace in the list of worst predictions for 2008, because that’s what I’m gonna do. Predictions is predictions, they isn’t certainties — sometimes we need to remind ourselves of this.

1…A very powerful and durable rally is in the works. But it may need another couple of days to lift off…
:
3…Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are fundamentally sound…
:
6…Existing-Home Sales to Trend Up in 2008…

7…I think you’ll see (oil prices at) $150 a barrel by the end of the year…
:
10…There’s growing evidence that parts of the debt markets…are coming back to life.

Now those have to do with things being predicted good, and then goin’ bad. Except, I guess, for #7 if you’re a person who’s looking to buy oil products and not sell ’em. But predictions can go the other way — forecast gloom, and then become confounded as life hands you an unexpected bouquet of roses and chocolates. That does happen just as often.

And as Americans, we have a long and stalwart legacy of galvanizing ourselves into action as a direct consequence of need. When the need softens, we hibernate like big fat bears. We excel at adapting to the requirement of the moment. Once the zombies are all slaughtered and the mortgage payment is off in the mail and levee has been fixed and the foot fungus has been cured — we, The American People, can sit back the farthest, relax more muscles, flip on that idjit box that fastest, stick out that big ol’ belly the farthest, pop open that beer, and make sure it’s the biggest, coldest one there is…better than any nation, civilized or no, this rock in space has ever seen. That is what we do. We fix things that are busted, and once they’re fixed, we relax to such a masterful extent we practically melt.

That really is what’s been happening here. When did we really get disenchanted with technology in general? When it pulled this Chicken Little bullshit about the sky falling, and the world coming to an end because there weren’t enough digits to store the year. Everyone would have to hoard bar soap and banana chips into their backyard bunkers, and put a .50 cal turret on top, remember that?

When did we start wallowing in this modern, non-technical malaise? Survivor? Jar Jar Binks? The View? Britney Spears? Right about that same time. It’s been so handy to blame it all on that punk smirking cowboy George W. Bush — but he didn’t come along until about a year and a half later.

We weren’t being conservative. We were being fat and lazy. We were pissed off about that money we lost in the dot-com bubble, and besides, we didn’t want anything else invented because we figured it had all been invented already. Well, we’re still in that mode.

Maybe a good stiff economic crisis will be all it takes to pull us out again. Necessity is the mother of invention.

It’s worked before. In our country, anyway. Pretty consistently.

Think with high hopes. Act with low ones. Let every single new day you meet, as the Good Lord sees fit to let you roll outta that bed, know who’s boss — take it by the horns. And this will all work out. Really, it will.

And when it does, you better believe His Holiness At 1600 Pennsylvania will take all the credit for it. That’s okay. In government as well as in business, the Dilbert-pointy-haired-boss is a part of life. He’ll always be there. Ignore him, and do your best.

Posted in Fan & Fred, Obamamania, Poisoning Capitalism, Technical | 4 Comments »

Illegal Aliens with Illegal Mortgages

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Newsbusters…

A single report by KFYI radio of Phoenix, Arizona highlights a shocking claim made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD says that five million illegal aliens hold illegal mortgages. This is just one more example of the lax lending laws put into place by Democrats like Barney Frank that have contributed to this economic crisis. One would think this would be big news. But, so far we have only this one report to cover it.

There have been earlier stories of home flipping schemes that made liberal use of illegal aliens as straw buyers and the FBI has followed numerous cases to prosecution and conviction. But the Old Media have not done much with this story.

KFYI reports that these fraudulent straw purchases of mortgages by illegal aliens has affected every state in the union.

One illegal alien was arrested this year in Tucson after allegedly using a stolen social security number to buy two homes and rack up over $780,000 in bad debt.

Some five million fraudulent home mortgages are in the hands of illegal aliens, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It’s not known how many of those have contributed to the subprime housing mortgage meltdown, but it has affected every state, including Arizona.

The problem began years ago when banks were forced to give mortgages without confirming social security numbers or borrower identification. As a result, illegal immigrants were able to obtain home mortgages which they could not afford.

Lax immigration laws have also helped make this crime easy to perpetrate.

In 1965 a Democrat Controlled Congress under President Lyndon Johnson passed the concept of “chain” immigration into law. A later commission named the Hesburgh Commission convened during Ronald Reagan’s first term, found that this concept statistically allowed each single immigrant to bring into this country 84 of his family members. Of course, all these people have to live somewhere making such fraudulent mortgages quite attractive.

But go on. Vote for the fellow with the most charismatic personality for your hopey changey goodness, and blame any hitches in the giddy-up on “eight years of Bush Cheney.”

Real life just isn’t that simple, m’friends.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in Fan & Fred, Illegal Immigration, Poisoning Capitalism | No Comments »

Best Sentence XLIII

Friday, October 10th, 2008

John Stossel snags the forty-third award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL):

Everybody talked about the “freeze” in the credit markets, but why, I wonder, were the cable news programs that repeated the credit-freeze mantra pausing for commercials from companies trying to lend me money?

He goes on…

Ditech and LendingTree still hawk mortgages at under 6 percent. Some credit freeze.

Economist Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute looked at the credit numbers kept by the Federal Reserve. He writes: “Although certain financial institutions are undeniably in deep trouble — difficulties of their own making … — credit markets in general have not ceased to operate. Moreover, lenders are extending credit in historically great amounts“.

Maybe this is why CNN business reporter Ali Velshi broke ranks when reporting on “dried up” credit and said, “When I say ‘dried up,’ I don’t mean there’s no money. But you’d better have good collateral and good credit.”

What’s wrong with that?

You really should go read the whole thing. It’ll change your perspective…especially if you think the 1929 crash was some harbinger of doom regarding what’s about to happen to us next.

It’s the technology. Not what it used to be. Seventy-nine years is a long, long time.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in Fan & Fred, Poisoning Capitalism | 1 Comment »

Obama: Bad Loans Are a Good Idea

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

H/T: IUSB Vision, via Rottweiler.

Posted in Fan & Fred | 1 Comment »

Forbidden Fruit

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Via fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm, we learn of the Saturday Night Live skit that Saturday Night Live doesn’t want anybody to see. It goes up on the YouTubes, it comes down again, someone else puts it up, it gets taken down again.

The subject is the “bailout.” I guess it’s got a little too much truthiness. These “copyright” issues keep on crawling outta the woodwork…ya right.

Well, Malkin has a complete transcript, with pics. And as you read it over, you get a pretty clear idea of who’d be getting torqued when people are able to watch it. Hmmm…

Posted in Fan & Fred | No Comments »

Bookworm on Deregulation

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

Fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm reiterates a point she made previously.

If nobody, from sea to shining sea and all across the fruited plane, learns one single other damn thing over the next month — let this be the one thing they do learn.

As you may recall from Thursday’s debate, Biden kept saying that our current financial woes arose because of deregulation and that even John McCain now wants more regulation. In other words, bad Republicans let Wall Street go wild, and now they’re cowed and are following the Democratic line.

Palin, who generally did fantastically well, failed a bit when dealing with Biden’s direct and indirect accusations, because [she] didn’t correct the terminology. Let me state, therefore, what should be obvious, and what should be an embarrassment for the Democrats and a source of pride for the Republicans. That the opposite is true is only because the Democrats are controlling the message and the Republicans are hiding:

The problem did not start because of deregulation. It started because of hyper-regulation: Because Democrats did not think it was “fair” that only people who have saved a lot of money and have reliable income sources should get loans, the Democrats forced through policies mandating that banks must give loans to those who normally would be poor risks (those famous subprime loans). What kept banks from squawking about being forced by the government to engage in practices that no sound business would ever engage in was the fact that Fannie and Freddie (staffed at the upper level by Democrats) promised to buy those loans, insure them, and sell them. Well, with an offer like that, the Banks couldn’t refuse, and they went hog wild. It was a no loss for them, and a huge incentive (because of these government regulations, not deregulations) to give out as many bad loans as possible.

Over at the American Thinker Blog, she continues this line of thought and makes another point that perhaps she thinks is expendable, whereas I think it’s vital, in this day and age in which we huff and puff so much talking about the character and integrity of our presidential candidates:

I know that Biden and Obama understand what’s going on, but are hiding the distinction, and I know that McCain and Palin…well, I assume that McCain and Palin see the distinction so clearly that they don’t recognize that the public is confused.

Whatever. I don’t think I give ’em that much credit. My intuition tells me that politicians, especially senators, weigh everything in terms of cost-benefit more than truth-versus-untruth. This is a McCain decision; this is why so many of us have blog banners and bumper stickers and tee shirts that say McCain/PALIN!, or Palin/McCain, and hope-against-hope that the ticket wins and then McCain resigns before Groundhog Day.

This “Maverick” stuff. You don’t often hear the point from people like me, who lack the skill and talent necessary to “go with the flow” during those times when it might be well-advised. But what goes so often unmentioned is — being a maverick is only beneficial if the group happens to be, or will later on turn out to be, wrong. Or at least inferior.

We’re looking at exactly where McCain’s political methodology is a consistent disappointment. When the time comes to challenge the liberal orthodoxy…McCain bowls somewhere around a 37. Too much of the time, he makes the decision that the facts may very well be on his side, but it just isn’t worth the hassle. And so he pops up with that “Maverick” stuff and speaks Truth To Power against those punch-drunk Republicans…in situations in which they’re the real mavericks. Maverick McCain, then, goes and stands with the real corrupt entrenched power-base. Again and again.

This is the kind of “maverick” Judas Iscariot would’ve been. If, that is, he started following Caiaphus around hoping for an invitation to the next party — and calling himself a maverick. And riding around in a bus called the “Straight Talk Express.” It’s sickening.

A Palin/McCain ticket, I think, would not be making this error. Maybe they’d persuade few, but they’d at least get the point out there, to their credit. And I’d put money on that.

I hope they pull their heads outta their butts on this one. Soon.

Update: The NRCC is onboard — they have their heads outta their butts. Halfway, anyhow…the ad discusses the problems, how the Republicans were sounding the alarm, and the democrats were demanding everybody lie low and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It’d be nice to see the point made that regulators didn’t neglect the problem, they made the problem.

But it’s a very nice start. Pretty late in the game, as The Anchoress points out. Hope it works.

Posted in Elections, Fan & Fred, VPILF | No Comments »

Right Wing News Poll on the Bailout

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Nobody reads this blog — of course! — but we were nevertheless invited to participate in an informal poll of right-wing blogs by Right Wing News. As we responded, we were politely requested to keep a wrap on things until the deadline passed…with the results now posted, the coast is clear to unveil our responses, complete with notes, snarky remarks, etc., exactly as we shipped ’em off.

1) Is the PRIMARY cause of this crisis…
A) Deregulation, market forces, and Wall Street?
B) Government interference in the market?

B), and anyone who chooses A) is simply demonstrating they haven’t been paying attention. To this issue, or any other issue related.

93% of respondents agreed.

2) Do you support the bailout?
A) Yes
B) No

B). Although I understand the situation may very well be bad enough, that compromise will be necessary lest a calamity have a devastating effect on everyone. Government interference, after all, is all about lashing everyone together. That is the intent, and it is impossible for that not to be the ultimate effect; so I have to acknowledge we’re probably all in the same boat, by design. I believe the very least that’s going to have to happen is some kind of low-interest loan, hopefully one secured with collateral. Good collateral. Not the moose-feces mortgage-paper that started this sinkhole in the first place.

71% of respondents agreed.

3) Politically, is it smarter for Republicans in Congress to support or oppose the bailout?
A) Support
B) Oppose

I believe if my answer to 2) was codified as an official policy, the ultimate effect would be a complete or near-complete salvaging of this mess PLUS unprecedented popular support. Why nobody has thought of it, probably has to do with powerful interests who’d be hostile to it — plus — a beltway mentality that hinders even invigorated, educated minds from seeing the obvious.

In the interest of answering your question unambiguously so you can tabulate my responses easily, I choose B).

69% of respondents agreed.

4) If John McCain signs on to the bailout, does it help or hurt his chances of getting elected?
A) Help
B) Hurt

At this point McCain and Obama are in a fight over undecideds. I refused to support him until late August, because I know in politics the undecideds are the people who — ironically — decide things. (grin) Now that he’s picked Sarah Palin, and as a direct consequence I have declared my support for him, I’ve used up whatever trivial influence I have as a registered voter as well as as a blogger. (Yeah, tremble in fear before the righteous fury of The Blog That Nobody Reads.)

To put it more concisely, the folks like me who signed on because of Sarah Palin, are in. Or else, if we’re not, nobody cares. McCain continues to have problems with his “base,” but these problems pale in consideration to the more urgent business of winning converts from the middle, and from behind enemy lines. Anyone who’s undecided at this point — they are highly unlikely to be unimpressed with McCain’s opposition to the bailout. They’re more likely to be impressed with that “rising up above bipartisanship to move the country forward” snake oil. Therefore, I would have to choose A).

I hate like the dickens to admit it, but McCain would have to be a fool to try to win converts away from Bob Barr, at the expense of winning converts away from the guy who has a far better shot at walking away with this whole thing. It would be the right thing to do to oppose the bailout, but it would be stupid politics. I hope he just comes up with an unorthodox and ingenious answer of some kind, that’s good for the country, just like he did on August 29.

55% of respondents agreed with me in choosing A).

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Elections, Fan & Fred, VPILF | No Comments »

Things Are Going Well

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Wow and wow…he gets to blame it on not hearing the question…unbelievable.

Aided by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich., who stood in for Palin during practice runs today, Biden spent seven hours on the second floor of the Sheraton Suites hotel in Wilmington before taking a break for dinner at 6:30pm.
:
Meantime, the Dow saw its largest single-day point drop of today – 777 points – as Congress failed to muster up the votes needed to pass the financial bailout bill.

Obama’s campaign released a joint statement on behalf of Obama and Biden, saying “This is a moment of national crisis, and today’s inaction in Congress as well as the angry and hyper-partisan statement released by the McCain campaign are exactly why the American people are disgusted with Washington. Now is the time for Democrats and Republicans to join together and act in a way that prevents an economic catastrophe.”

As he exited the hotel for his dinner break, Biden was asked “Senator, can we get your reaction to the House bill not passing?”

Biden interrupted the question with a “Hey folks,” to reporters and then said “Oh, things are going well.”

Biden’s press secretary, David Wade, sent an e-mail minutes later, saying “the senator thought you asked how prep was going” for this week’s debate with Gov. Sarah Palin.

Prior to Biden’s departure, the press was moved further away from the hotel’s exit, perhaps far enough away that it prevented Biden from clearly hearing the question.

Had the same thing happened to, for example, Ronald Reagan — I daresay for the next week and a half the entire civilized world would’ve forgotten there was such a thing as a stock market.

H/T: Instapundit.

Posted in Elections, Fan & Fred | No Comments »

Party Like It’s 1999

Monday, September 29th, 2008

Boortz has a newspaper clipping…nothing really special about it, it might as well be one of many others. But it’s some good research material to have and to study right about now.

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: September 30, 1999

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets — including the New York metropolitan region — will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

Yay! While we’re at it, let’s start using pure hydrogen in our derigibles.

The story really couldn’t be simpler. The free market says “don’t make this loan” — the government, with government-sponsored entites, steps in and says “Hey we’re the government we know more about this than you do” — and, a few years down the road, it turns out the free market knew what it was talking about. The folks who want government to run more things, start blaming the free market. Smart folks don’t listen to ’em; dumb ones do.

If the cause-and-effect is still a mystery to you…well then, you just might be a liberal democrat.

Posted in Ayn Rand Spins, Fan & Fred | 2 Comments »

On the $700 Billion

Monday, September 29th, 2008

…Ace…

Did Paulson Pull The $700 Billion Number Out Of His Ass?

Um, maybe.

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

In that case…Mission Accomplished!

And Obama says the answer is more regulation. Yeah, let’s do it! Subject the businesses that have to justify every little number on every little ledger to “oversight” by pencil-neck government bureaucrats who so easily pull big numbers outta their butts. Put the inmates in charge of the asylum.

Anyone who agrees with that, I say, has his head crammed so far up his ass that I estimate he can stick his tongue out and lick his own tonsils.

Not that that’s based on any particular data point or anything.

Posted in Fan & Fred, Nanny State Crap, Obamamania, Poisoning Capitalism | 1 Comment »

No Crisis at Fan or Fred

Monday, September 29th, 2008

No flashy-blinky-stuff, no laughey-talky-jokey-smokey stuff…just substance.

Watch it. Just…watch it. And share, with whatever methods and resources you have available.

H/T: Good Lieutenant at Jawa Report.

Posted in Fan & Fred, Lying Liars, Nanny State Crap | No Comments »

The Conscience of Fannie Mae

Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Posted in Fan & Fred | No Comments »

Covering Your Fannie

Friday, September 26th, 2008

H/T: Fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm.

That actually didn’t make my eyes pop too much. My head was already spinning from reading an article put out by Prof. Thomas J. DiLorenzo of the Mises Institute this spring. The subject is one of my favorites: Capitalist free-enterprise markets, mixed in with wonderfully progressive anti-capitalist ideas in unsanitary laboratory conditions, with disastrous results, which are then blamed on…capitalism. And, as one might anticipate, the topic specifically under discussion was this bursting housing bubble.

“Liberal” economists are overjoyed by the bursting of the housing bubble, for it provides them with what they believe is another “market failure” story. “Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure,” Robert Gordon gleefully declared in the April 7 online edition of The American Prospect magazine, edited by Robert Kuttner.

Gordon does not define what an “analyst” is, and does not cite any survey to support his claim. One suspects that his opinion is based on an informal survey of his like-minded, left-wing friends.

The liberalism we know and love. It spends half its time making messes, the other half of its time instructing us to believe liberalism is blameless for the creation of them.

Anyway, what made my head spin was this paragraph…

The government also “streamlined” the regulatory requirements for CRA loans in 1995, allowing — and indeed pressuring — banks to make such loans without the benefit of many traditional credit-worthiness criteria, such as the size of the mortgage payment relative to income, savings history, and even income verification! Instead, the Fed told banks that participation in a credit-counseling program, many of which are federally funded, could be used as “proof” of a low-income applicant’s ability to make his mortgage payments. [emphasis (bold) mine]

It’s not that it was news to me that the strong-arming was going on. It’s that I didn’t understand it was this bad, and I think most people don’t understand this.

We hear so much, now that the time has come to pay the piper, about this stuff called “oversight.” The oversight was there from day one. If there’s one thing governments in general don’t have a problem doing, it’s overseeing things.

The issue really is — any time you oversee something, you have to have a goal in mind. Goals, I notice, are very seldom discussed when people talk about oversight. And what a good thing it is to avoid any discussion of them with regard to the government overseeing the private sector; wouldn’t it be a silly thing to say, that the private sector needs oversight from the government so it can receive all the wisdom, pointers, tips & tricks on how to turn a profit and stay liquid?

I’ve lived long enough to see a lot of “oversight” put in place, especially at the federal level. I’ve not yet seen anyone discussing oversight from a government agency for the purpose of helping a private-sector company in any industry to achieve solvency.

Nor, come to think of it, have I ever heard of anyone making an income by attending a credit counseling session.

Posted in Fan & Fred | No Comments »

SNUL

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

We do not SNUL here. SNUL is an acronym for “Sorry, No Updates Lately” and it refers to the process of chewing up enormous chunks of the interwebs to help contribute to a singular message…”sorry there haven’t been any updates lately.” After porn, MySpace pages, and grandstanding screeds about President Bush being an idiot, SNUL pages account for the greatest portion of what’s out there.

Besides of which, we are The Blog That Nobody Reads…which means we have a charming lack of enthusiasm on the question of who’s reading, why they’re here, etc. We just spout our stuff. If we get hit by a bus, or kidnapped by aliens, there will be no “goodbye.” We’ll just stop posting.

So lately we’ve been getting off-line messages asking why we’re not updating. Vagaries of life. We actually have very few time slots throughout the day in which we can get our postings done — it tends to be at the extreme ends, after we roll out of bed, and just before we roll back in — and personal events have consumed those. What few cycles we can eek out there, we’ve been spending on the fascinating conversation about individualism and collectivism, over here.

Besides of which, in spite all of what’s going on, none of it is really hitting my hot button. We have the Fannie and Freddy thing, but to me that’s just a rehash of all the other trouble that’s been caused by crossing our capitalistic system with experimental portions of Marxism…and if the resulting hybrid turns out to be a Frankenstein monster, blame all the ugliness and defects on capitalism instead of on the Marxism we just got done injecting in.

We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again.

Capitalism is supposedly to blame for the high cost of housing that comes from rent controls…which are anti-capitalistic. And the high cost of health care that results from excessive regulation, torts and price controls…which are anti-capitalistic. And for the oil and gas market, which is inherently anti-capitalistic. And for the problems with our education system — which is anti-capitalistic. Now we’re blaming it for the housing bubble. Which we made by forsaking capitalism, AGAIN, in favor of some monstrosity hybrid.

As far as how we’re screwing ourselves over this time around, I really can’t do the subject justice compared to Dr. Melissa Clouthier’s turn at it.

So. SNUL. Don’t worry, we’ll be back.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Fan & Fred | 1 Comment »

Boortz on McCain’s Suspension

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Yup, I’m pretty much gonna have to go ahead and agree with every word.

This is what bugs me about McCain. As a person, I’m sure he’s an honest, truthful fellow. But in politics, he seems to suffer from the kind of tone-deafness that only burdens those who have neglected to think out their positions according to true principles. I see it in quite a few things he does…the global warming thing…the offshore drilling flip-flop…he simply doesn’t live in a world of cause and effect, except inside the beltway. His if-then thinking isn’t quite so much “IF we increase taxes over here, THEN people will stop spending money over there” — but rather — “IF my position changes over here, THEN that guy over there will support me.”

What that all boils down to is he’s pure-bred Yang; atrophied to true if/then thinking, compensating for it by honing his skills at figuring out where the crowd’s headed, and beating ’em there. Not like just any politician. But using it as a substitute for true, critical thinking.

Well, even dedicated, energetic, intelligent Yang screw up pretty often in that department. It’s really something to watch, not unlike seeing a cat walk along the rim of a full bathtub and accidentally fall in. I think we just saw it happen. McCain’s plan is based on the notion that we’re all supposed to think a certain thing about him when we see him do this. It fails to take into account that it’s up to each man to make up his own mind in the confined space between his own ears. And, embarrassingly, it seems to fail to take into account that left-wingers will screech their talking points at us the entire time.

He really should know better.

Boortz’ comments follow…

“MCCAIN WANTS A TIME OUT”

At least that is what liberal websites like the Huffington Post are calling it. As of this morning, John McCain has suspended his presidential campaign in order to focus on the economy. Here’s a taste of the press release …

“I will suspend my campaign and return to Washington after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative. I have spoken to Senator Obama and informed him of my decision and have asked him to join me.

I am calling on the President to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.

We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved. I am directing my campaign to work with the Obama campaign and the commission on presidential debates to delay Friday night’s debate until we have taken action to address this crisis.”

Obama’s reaction? “The debate is on.”

The first response from the liberal media … McCain is doing this because he doesn’t like the way his campaign is going. The Politico says, “in terms of the timing of this move: The only thing that’s changed in the last 48 hours is the public polling.”

And just in case you give a flying Frisbee what I’m thinking … I think this is a campaign ploy that went wrong. McCain wanted to look presidential. He wanted to show the voters that he would put aside the frivolity of campaigning when there was honest-to-goodness work to be done in Washington. Trouble is, the Obama campaign and the media are all to eager to remind the voters that it was McCain who said that he wasn’t all that up-to-speed on matters economic. I can hear the leftist chattocracy now: “McCain knew that this debate would move into economic matters, and he didn’t feel prepared to address them.”

Sorry … but not a good move.

Posted in Elections, Fan & Fred, Yin and Yang | 2 Comments »