Florida's Crist puts essential need over politics and conservatism

Florida Governor Charlie Crist | 2009 State of the State Address

There is no doubt, that for our economy to recover, we must get people back to work. In the past several weeks I have visited with Floridians at seven unemployment offices across our state. I have looked into their eyes and I saw worry. I saw good, honest people who desperately want the opportunity to help themselves. Some argue the politics of the federal stimulus plan. My friends, while our people worry, we cannot put politics over their needs – the needs of our students and teachers, the sick and the infirm, or those out of work. We should not ask what it means to be Republican nor should we ask what it means to be Democrat; but rather what a good human being is supposed to do. In each and every one of us is the hope of the millions who sent us here. We must honor that sacred trust, to put them first.

Above is a part of Crist's State of the State address from March 3, 2009 (as written, perhaps not as it was delivered). Crist, a Republican, is not one of the governors who tried to refuse stimulus money. He has thus become a target by conservatives. That is understandable, but only so far as as is his acceptance of the money, as he outlines above. Call me anti-capitalist, but I agree with Gov. Crist, in the comment above, at least. As fate would have it, so do all our governors, as of very recently (SC's guv caved this week). Stimulus stinks, indeed, and so does how steeply off track had gone our regulations, laws and practices. Shame.

If this stimulus results in future increased taxation burdens for states, to pay for unemployment -- and welfare of a more permanent nature -- into the future, I will be thoroughly miffed. If that's the deal, then that law needs to be trounced and "un-billed" (so to speak; that is, passing a bill to remove a prior bill). Right now, today, Florida is a state that needs this money for a real crisis. Millions would have lost their unemployment -- professionals who are not being hired by the occasional retail or other company that has an opening -- without this. Is this is good thing? Define "good thing". Do I love getting unemployment, ever? No. Would most anyone getting unemployment be happy they are getting it? I seriously doubt it! I would be much happier being EMPLOYED, and I am pretty sure most people who just got on welfare rolls feels the same way.

Do I like using tax dollars for unemployment, education and to help the needy? Yes, far more than I think tax money should be used to bail out companies such as GM, AIG and to cover bad mortgages -- all inspired by cowardly attitudes, stupid laws and bad regulation. I don't want government to be any bigger, any more taxing (literally) than it is, and I vehemently want it to be less so. Screwing people out of unemployment is not the answer, however. Getting rid of the disgustingly pandering attitudes of people such as Nancy Pelosi, where Americans feel pain for basics while she calls illegals patriotic Americans, and whines about getting her own jet for trips, THAT is where the real battle lines are, not where we help -- and minimally so -- underemployed or unemployed American families.

Do I like any of this stimulus money, knowing just what it and this absurd federal budget seem to be promising? No. But reality, to me, dictates caring about the jobless and the needy Americans, not throwing the baby out with the bath water. As for the budget, well, one can only pray that plenty of people get their common sense -- and butts -- in gear and working boots on, and move Barack Obama into a nice speaking tour in November 2012. However, that seems a very far-fetched concept to me right now, seeing the adorable little mess that 2007-08 brought in and how well it was played by the Democrats (even though it was their upside-down finance markets ideals that helped everything along, too).

Meanwhile, 2010 is not very far away, and there's some Congress and gubernatorial work to do, to get rid of wacky liberals and get in some moderates and conservatives.


- jR aka AirFarceOne (Twitter)

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Did Israel strike at Sudan to hit Gaza gun-runners?

BBC NEWS | Africa | Mystery over Sudan 'air strike'

Mystery over Sudan 'air strike'


map of Egypt, Sudan and Sinai

A Sudanese government minister has confirmed reports of an air raid in eastern Sudan earlier this year.

The minister, Mabrook Mubarak Saleem, told an Arabic news channel that many people had been killed in the strike, said to have taken place last month.

Earlier reports suggested that those attacked were on their way to deliver weapons to Hamas fighters in Gaza.

Israeli officials have not commented publicly on reports that their planes may have been involved.

The CBS television network said it had been told by American officials that a strike by Israeli planes in January had succeeded in preventing weapons from Sudan reaching Gaza.

Mr Mabrook Mubarak Saleem said the air raid happened in February and that those killed or injured had been civilians from a number of African countries.

Another Middle East-linked mystery. Sudan, which has deep ties to China that might or might not be the pin that keeps everything from collapsing, is not exactly a place to be counted out of being a spot for gun runners who are working with not only Gazan terrorist or other aggressive groups, but Al-Qaeda and anyone else with cash.

This is after all the nation that has been killing, maiming, raping and keeping in misery countless thousands in the Darfur region. All primarily due to religious, ethnic and cultural intolerance. Their government there is trouble, or the ICC would not have issued an arrest warrant for the state's president, Hassan al-Bashir, in early March 2009.


- jR, aka AirFarceOne (Twitter)

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If I had a dime for every time a socialist said this over the years...

If you think this is bad, wait till next year, says Russian scholar.

Russian scholar says US will collapse --next year (AP via Breitbart)

It wasn't clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise.

Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur."

But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center who did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.

"I can't imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart," Malashenko told the AP.

It's pretty sad when, by contrast to the topic at hand, a contrary view after a Russian speech on the collapse of the U.S. gives me more confidence than my president!


- jR

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WHY ARE WE BANKRUPT :: one problem's impact, lots of links

Some links that someone else compiled follows. I found them on an activist Web site. I hope the links work. If not, just look the facts up. It beats trusting your government -- it is called being informed. The government prefers that you are not that, clearly. That is WHY BIG GOVERNMENT IS, AND ALWAYS WILL BE, A BAD THING.

The bigger government is, the less they actually wind up doing for the good of the common man, because power corrupts -- even if that simply means that that power makes people lazy and glib and smug. It is still corrupt. Not caring about your duties is simply akin to corruption.

However, the country, Bush or Obama aside, is failing, thoroughly, to be a caretaker of tax dollars and to regulate such efforts. See the following examples, which regard ONLY illegal alien costs. This is ANNUALLY. This is just one little problem in the U.S. today. Add to this the errors of bad regulative efforts against banking, financial markets, etc. Add to this the cost of the RAISED SALARIES that our U.S. Congress accepted for themselves, in December 2008. Add to that the cost of the stimulus. Where is all the money coming from? You, and me. Anyone who pays taxes.

What are you getting out of it, if you are a "victim" of the current economic crisis? If you are unemployed, and living in Florida, you get a grand total of $275 a week. Some states offer better. If you are in a union, perhaps you get better in most cases. However, if you are in an auto union, you will likely be working in a non-union, Japanese-owned factory come 2010. If you're lucky.

Anyways, just some thoughts on one "little" segment of where your tax dollars were going, and will still be, even while billions of dollars are going out to banks and job creation that the government is sanctioning.

WHY ARE WE BANKRUPT

Boy, was I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the War on Terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that readers get sick of them. I also have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.

Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, AKA anchor babies for these illegals who are still illegals even though they have US kids, note.

Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate CRIMINAL illegal aliens. This is NOT a tiny segment of the prison population. (See next.)

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.

Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html

9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US .

Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.

Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.'

Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.

Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One million sex crimes are Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States."
Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articles.html

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION PER YEAR.

Are we THAT stupid?

Hmm. I think we have been. Will we stop being that stupid?


- jR

2010 elections: Time for change we can believe in is still to come

In reflecting on the pathetic, awkwardly funny disappearance of the age Florida hedge fund manager Arthur Nadel, I realize that the change is not yet complete. After all, Congress has the same horrific, at times supremely arrogant, leaders that it had for the past two very decisively bad years for our economy. What did they all do, almost to a person? They blamed Bush and his Administration for all of this. Excuses, excuses.

It started with Clinton's era, and the Dem, then GOP, Congresses of the time. It continued into Bush's terms, and for some mad reason even the supposed fiscally conservative GOP let the crazy mortgages survive when they could have stopped them -- obviously, since their friends in finance were getting rich off the crooked concept of CRA loans. Then, even when it was OBVIOUS that the economy was broadly slowing down, this robbery thrived while Barney Frank insultingly balked -- like a mean grammar school teacher -- at those who told him, in public meetings, that we needed a tightening on CRA mortgages and other financial matters.

So, thanks to all of our leaders who could have gotten some control over the financial meltdown up to two years ago, or could have ended the illogical CRA mortgage "plan" ages ago. You've failed us. So stop pretending you're going to fix it now. You're too comfortable or too foolish to truly manage to fix it, I fear.

Time for the "Obamatized" change is not yet active. There's the 2010 election in our sights. Some will never change: too bad Connecticut and Massachusetts, to name a few, can't help but elect the same blowhards over and over again. Too bad the Dems couldn't pick a real leader for either half of Congress (they couldn't even if they did it behind closed doors in a secret ballot, I suspect) -- they appear too happy with average people who are elitist dullards, like Pelosi and Reid, as leaders. After all, Pelosi was selected leader once again, just recently, though her Congress is the least popular of all time. Its popularity plummetted concurrent with her reign. No coincidence, in my estimation. She's simply too beauty queen populist to believe that any of it is her fault -- it must be merely a sign of the times, after all, since Bush is the terror in all of this. Hypocrisy is alive and well in Washington, folks.

It is they who created and let thrive the pathetic old monsters such as Madoff and Nadel, and the CRA mortgage companies, and all the Wall Street greedmongers who robbed while the robbing was easy (and quite legal, by accident, seeing the lack of actual regulatory effort by our government). It is you who are now letting them all simply step away from the card table quite wealthy, cards still stuffed in their sleeves, for fear of the house of cards falling. It is the government wave of irresponsibility that has let them leave Wall Street for their cozy winter homes, except for the rare imprisonment or the recent, and the future, suicides and "disappearances" (I wonder if these last ones are at all out of guilt, or simply out of mad selfishness?).

We have yet to address the full weight of our anger. There is still 2010 to finish the job, and to motivate any good leaders to find a way -- through the dull flow of political maneuvering or by going around it -- to put out for the night the ferile cats who screwed us all. There is still an election in 2010 in which to remove more garbage from the Capitol steps.

- jR

All hail the Mexican billionaire: news media to plummet farther, NY Times goes first

The Times to get their own bailout. From Mexico. Is this a Peter Sellers film I've not yet seen, or what? 

New York Times may find benefactor in Slim | Reuters

The New York Times Co has heard more than its share of opinions on what it must do to survive. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim appears ready to let his cash do the talking.

The 68-year-old telecom tycoon, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world's second-richest man with $60 billion, may pump hundreds of millions of those dollars into the Times Co.

I SUPPOSE this is because his money, and plenty more of it, is not needed in Mexico, where everyone is wealthy and enjoys a good economy, reasonably safe neighborhood. Who knew? Well, I guess those stories of Mexico plummeting into a nether-world of battles of police versus drug gangs, especially near the U.S. border, were just propaganda. 

Slim is the second richest man on earth - ON EARTH! Indeed.  Glad to see his own country doesn't need the awesome usefulness of his huge bags of money. I had no idea how well the infrastructure improved in Mexico in the last week, and how economically stable Mexico was! On the other hand, I guess he's already applied his wealth where it is needed: keeping the impoverished where they belong, like a good crooked capitalist in a grandly crooked political system that poses -- far more laughably than most -- as a "democratic system."

Here's a fundamental question: how exactly would someone become the SECOND WEALTHIEST MAN in the WORLD in Mexico? Seriously, how? Mule sales? Earthquake insurance? Drugs? There's a lot of world out there, and this guy pulled off second place on the richer scale (grin) from creepy, dangerous, unkempt, corrupt little Mexico.

Go ahead, look the other way, NY Times. You're good at seeing one side of a story! Take that cash in one hand and proclaim appreciation for "progressive" policies on your pages. You get Slim's money to hang on like a bloated U.S. auto company, and the U.S. at-large gets Mexico's troubled citizens, for any reason, like a painfully trickling Mariel boatlift. 

Illegals are like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get. Once the plans are complete, the "progressive" plans, the U.S. will appreciate how crooked Mexico is, since for the lower and middle classes it will be in the same condition as Mexico by the end of Obama's first administration, if the far left has anything to do with it (such as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi). You go, NY Times! Let's hear it for the master of so-called "progressive" journalism.

This is the NY Times -- please turn off the irony -- which ran front page stories about a non-affair by John McCain back in 2008 which was based on totally unfounded rumors. Meanwhile, it buried news of completely strange and questionable issues about Obama as much as they could manage it. Regularly. Repetitively. Often!

This paper, once held at the top of journalistic high regard, not just a place for highly intelligent, nonobjective writers, and for politically wrongly categorized commentators such as David Brooks, is going to be bailed out by a proclaimed telecom tycoon? 

Wow. That just ... that really ... that simply underlines how sad news media is today. Sad. Very, very sad. We've gone from conscientious and overt, to TV reporting and the selective nonobjectiveness of Ed Murrow, to the knee-jerk, one-sided reporting that is pervasive in much media, to being bailed out by Mexican business cretins. What's next? Reporters simply shooting the people who disagree with their editorializing? 

What a waste of paper. 


- jR

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Finance, credit cards and capitalism: Free trade or a free-for-all?

Is this what we call free trade, or is it just a free-for-all?

That credit cards, and the whole gamut of lenders, can do the things they have been doing, to everyone's ruin, is wrong. It is not merely unfortunate, nor unfair, but immoral, amoral, and capitalism in its crudest, egregious form. How such behavior can possibly be considered a free market is euphemistic at best.

A free market could be mistakenly defined, in finer print, as one that takes advantage of the poorest and [those who are] the hardest working for the lowest wages: that is capitalism at its worst. If that is free trade, then give me something BETTER than that. A free market would be one that considers all the rational and positive facets of the word "free": free to trade, free to live, free from illicit deception, etc. Free market ought not be defined as one party is free to do any damned thing they please no matter the result on others (including, as in the recent financial disaster, the results that impact all others).

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When the going gets tough, attack WTC... figuratively

New Orleans Mayor Takes Swipe At NYC, Nagin Cites Failure To Rebuild Ground Zero While Defending Katrina Clean-Up - CBS News

Ahh it was only two years ago that Ray Nagin confirned what many suspected in 2005: he's a jerk. It is hard to believe that one mayor could make such an spectable of his callousness, especially in a national TV interview, but then, Ray Nagin is no ordinary mayor. He's mayor of Chocolate City, as he put it.

In late August 2006, the first anniversary of the destruction of Katrina, Nagin found a reason to deflect questions of logistics and leadership away from himself and onto the Big Apple. Apparently the nearly instant death of almost 4,000 people is not even sacred to this man of the people. The chocolate people. Does that mean he thinks everone is an Oompa Loompa in Nola? For that matter, isn't Hershey, Pennsylvania, the Chocolate City? New Orleans is more like the Bare Breasts for Fake Pearls City, or the Bourbon City. How about the Southern Comfort City? That's where Southern Comfort was created, after all! (OK. I'll stop.)

(CBS) Confronted by accusations that he’s taking too long to clean up his city after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin defended himself by remarking on New York City’s failure to rebuild Ground Zero.

Nagin made the remarks in an interview conducted by CBS News National Correspondent Byron Pitts. (Click here)

Remember, New Orleans reelected him. He has had a chance to do it better, as everyone has, with Gustav, which luckily didn't create the misery that reached Katrina-sizes levels. So far, so good. Fortunately, not just the leaders learned a lesson from Katrina: folks respect nature a bit more after that one.

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Was it the lack of a devil's advocate that cost the nation the Katrina tragedy?

How Bush Blew It
After-Action Report: Bureaucratic Timidity. Bad Phone Lines. And A Failure Of Imagination. Why The Government Was So Slow To Respond To Catastrophe.

Newsweek, from Sept. 19, 2005:

It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the President of the United States

When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

Tragic situation, even more tragic, it would seem, due to the management approach of GW Bush.

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