Archive for July, 2010

THE FOX AND THE HENHOUSE

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

Once upon a time…well…never mind.  We all know the old adage about hiring the fox to guard the henhouse.  The old saying must have been created especially for this occasion though, because  we’ve never had a bigger fox guarding more hens than we’re about to have now.

Last week, the President signed to law the new Financial Reform bill that will, in theory, provide more strict government oversight of the financial zealots on Wall Street.  Let me be the first to admit that something needs to be done, for sure.  In the wake of the financial meltdown of Lehman Brothers, AIG, the auto industry, and Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, one not need be a rocket scientist to see that something is wrong.  Let me also admit here that I believe in free markets, trade and capitalism.  I don’t believe, however, that there are many people who need or could possibly earn some of the outrageous bonuses and compensation packages that have become the norm over the last several decades.

By and large, these are not people who have demonstrated some remarkable business savvy in the private sector.  It’s Hedge Funds and Annuities, trading on futures and speculation, and in essence nothing more than a gargantuan and complex shell game.  When thousands of Americans who had invested conservatively, saved money, planned a retirement…and then lost every dime to the likes of Bernie Madoff…something is dreadfully wrong.   It’s not unlike the health care system, also broken and complex beyond need.  It needs to be fixed.  What is remarkable is not so much that something is broken…but who we repeatedly send in to fix it.

The notion of the federal government nominating itself to be the regulator of the private sector financial world is exactly like the fox voting himself head of security in the chicken division.  The chickens would protest and be astonished.  But most Americans don’t even blink at the absurdity of what has just happened.

Yes…the same strict government that already had a Securities and Exchange Commission in place during the financial meltdown.  The same SEC that ignored repeated warnings from outside sources that Madoff was operating a huge Ponzi scheme.  Even with smart, legitimate people coming right to their desk with proof, they still did nothing to investigate or stop Madoff.  We heard Barney Frank tell us how Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae were solid, literally weeks before both institutions imploded taking an entire housing and mortgage industry with them.

Now, these same people have written another 2,000 pages of law, that will be enforced, I’m sure, with the same strident vigor as the last 2,000 pages were.  In other words, not at all.

Who is more corrupt with the public checkbook than our own politicians?  The same folks who spent 3 million bucks to study shrimp reproduction.  Just another day in the pork barrel.  And you know how this stuff works.  Some Senator somewhere has a nephew that “had a landscaping business, then he got into the blow and the next thing you know he’s bankrupt.  So…I bought him a boat, a snorkel and a clipboard and told him to go watch shrimps-gone-wild for a couple of years and take some notes…”.  Don’t laugh, this is exactly how pork works, or doesn’t work, more accurately.

This is the same government that, as part of the stimulus bill, spent 15 million dollars to build an underground tunnel for turtles to pass under a highway in Florida.  For 15 million bucks I’ll spend the next twenty years down there carrying the turtles across the highway on a velvet pillow.  How come I don’t have an uncle in Washington?

Never mind the fox, none of the above even addresses what the real intent of this law is.  I’m surprised there weren’t more “slippery slope” calls during all of this, because this is a Black Diamond Trail for sure.  It will be a much shorter leap now to the European model of income redistribution, a government cap on personal income, and a general one-size-fits-all approach to our economy.  One size, that is, for the working class.  The folks in Washington won’t be buying off the rack anytime soon.

Every American should wince at the prospect of the government controlling Wall Street.  Companies that allow huge bonuses to CEO’s who are mediocre at the expense of their stockholders and customers should be punished, but not by the government.  They should see their business dwindle and die as the customers stop buying their product, and turn to a competitor who operates a tighter ship.  But the notion of our government, that hasn’t seen a balanced checkbook in decades, is going to fix this problem is….well…like hiring the fox to guard the henhouse.

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ROMAN

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

Leave it to the Swiss to provide the headlining act to our opening act.  Switzerland, afterall, is much like Obamerica would look.  Just last week I wrote about the stunning decision by Eric Holder, aka Barack Obama, to dismiss all charges against members of the Black Panthers who had intimidated voters at a local polling place, brandishing night sticks and encouraging folks to “kill crackers”.  Another example of New World Justice which is doled out in many different forms, depending on your race and social standing.  Now, Switzerland, a gorgeous country which I have visited, skied in their Alps, ate their cheese, reveals their true political colors by releasing child rapist Roman Polanski.

Oh…what a long and winding road the Polanski story has been.  Protected by the Hollywood elite after committing the crime, decades ago, of raping a thirteen year-old girl after plying her with alcohol and Quaaludes during a “photo shoot”.  Naturally, because he is a talented guy, he needed, apparently, to be allowed some sort of artistic license.  C’mon…she’s thirteen, it’s not like she’s a kid!

Except…she is a kid. Or was.  It is fair to question what sort of parental malfunction occurred that results in a girl that age being at Jack Nicholson’s house with Roman Polanski for a photo shoot.  At the end of the day, however, she is very much a minor and despite what Whoopie Goldberg may say, rape is rape.  Were it you or I with a camera, pills and alcohol, we would probably just be finishing up our sentences.  Or maybe not.

Look, it’s no surprise that Switzerland let Polanski go free.  That was any easy guess when they brought him in months ago.  Let the story get off the front page, wait a day or two more for another mind altering story to emanate from the United States, and then let him go in the middle of that dust cloud.  Remember, too, that Switzerland is the poster boy for European culture, particularly when it comes to sexuality.  Travelling there when I was a young boy, I took an unhealthy fascination with their news stands, as I remember.  Let’s just say that the Saturday Evening Post took on a whole new meaning at the Swiss magazine racks.

The reason though, that I wonder if you and I would just be hanging up our prison jumpsuits today, is that there is more to this story than Polanski and Switzerland.  It is the omnipresent blind eye that we continue to cast, as a culture, on sex crimes against children.  Had Polanski beaten the girl with a baseball bat, but not sexually assaulted her, there would be more outcry.
Even violent rapes against adult women, horrendous as they are in their own right, generally garner more press coverage and social outrage then the same crime against a child.  This baffles me.

Despite the strengthening of laws that deal with child predators, in nearly every state across the country (thanks in large part to Bill O’Reilly), the sexual exploitation of our children continues to grown like a cancer in this country.  Child pornography on the internet is an established business and that fact doesn’t seem to bother too many people.  Try distributing a video of someone clubbing a baby seal or a Dachshund, though, and see how quickly your phone starts ringing.  When was the last time you heard a politician mention this horrific scourge on our national character?

So maybe Switzerland knew that the Polanski thing would only show up beneath the fold, if at all.  America is busy, afterall, suing themselves and looking for a ShamWow large enough to cover the Gulf of Mexico.  They just let two Black Panthers off the hook, and in Massachusetts a four year old girl was violently raped by an illegal immigrant.  America is not even watching it’s borders, much less worrying about an aging and irrelevant Hollywood icon living off of past achievements and notoriety.

Switzerland was right.  Polanski is free and barely anyone blinked.  And like their cheese, we may soon find ourselves so full of holes that we…America…become unrecognizable.
www.beantowncomedy.com for details.”

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WILD KINGDOM

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

If you’re my age you probably remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a television series about wildlife.  Too bad the host, Marlin Perkins, wasn’t around, because we’ve got a whole new “Wild Kingdom” to talk about and you don’t need to go to the Serengeti to see it.

I’ve written before how astonishing our current administration is, without a week going by that some new mind-boggling decision, non-decision, or legislative initiative is hoisted into the dust cloud of failure that is engulfing them.  The lawsuit against Arizona, despite nearly 70% of the population supporting the new Arizona law is one of the latest examples.  Folks were quick to jump on McCain as having political motives when he hardened his view on the Arizona border, but our President stops just short of administering a personal back rub to every illegal immigrant, and suffers barely a whisper from the “Press”.  Not coddling that Hispanic vote are you?  The motivation could not be more flagrant.  And, Obama seems oddly removed from any concern about public perception of his performance or motives.

He continues to seemingly ignore the Gulf Oil Spill, and by the way, we can stop calling that a “spill” anytime now.  A “spill” is a glass of milk, not an oil slick the size of Kansas.  The country should expect weekly briefings from him with regards to the world’s largest environmental disaster.  Of course, there would be nothing to report, because there has been no leadership from the White House on this.  No commands coming from the command post.  They have dispatched lawyers, instead of drilling and clean-up experts and have hampered, stalled or denied every effort by the State of Louisiana to mitigate the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico.   Send more lawyers.

Lawyers, too, were involved in the latest example of blind leadership.  The charges against a couple of Black Panther members who disrupted a voting center during the 2008 Presidential election were ordered dropped by Attorney General Eric Holder.  You’ve all seen the footage.  A “Panther” outside a local voting center waving a night stick and threatening folks on their way in to cast their vote.  More footage of the same man urging people to kill “crackers” and their babies.  Hard to imagine, isn’t it?  The conviction was in place, just sentencing was due, and the entire case got dropped.   Imagine a couple of White guys doing the same thing in a mostly Black neighborhood?  Imagine, if you can, the field day the Press would have with that.  Imagine the charges being dropped.  There would be rioting in the streets.

I assume, as well, that this should open the door for some pretty colorful expressions of Free Speech outside voting booths this November.  I’ll be yelling from the gun turret of a surplus tank over here in Milford.  Should be no problem as far as I can tell.  Folks should expect intimidation and threats of violence when they go to their local Middle School or Town Hall to vote, right?  I mean…look at Iraq.  Why should we be any different?

As though the economy wasn’t enough, and the social unrest that will accompany any further decline in it, Obama seems to breed chaos.  It’s as though they want it.  He has fueled the fire in Arizona instead of quelling it.  The Black Panther situation is yet another signal from Washington that deep cultural change is the intent and if the shrinking number of Americans that still remember what this country is all about, and are not ashamed of it, don’t come out in force this November to stop this madness…well…we will all need a night stick, or worse, to go vote in 2012.

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STARK REALITY

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

The only thing more gooey than the Gulf Coast right now is the personality of California Representative Pete Stark.  Indeed, nothing would bring me more joy than to see him drenched in crude and hopefully near an open flame.  On this Independence Day, when we honor our country and freedom, and the unspeakable costs of attaining and maintaining it, pause is called for on all fronts.  We are at war and not doing well.  The economy is on the verge of complete collapse, indeed it has collapsed we just don’t know it yet because we are delicately poised atop Chinese props.

For anyone who hasn’t heard it yet…Google it.  This elected Representative engages in one of the most arcane arguments I have ever heard, with a citizen at a Town Hall style meeting.  The man in the audience, polite beyond reason, is questioning Rep. Stark about the border problem and illegal immigration, and why the government is not doing more to address the problem.  Stark responds to every single question from this guy with the most pompous, arrogant style I have ever witnessed.
He tells the man “we want to send the Minutemen more arms”, tongue-in-cheek, and when reminded that Americans are being killed, most recently in Arizona, Stark simply replies “yes”, but with a tone that suggests satisfaction with that fact.

I’m considering archiving the entire conversation and using it as a ring tone so that I never, ever, forget, how pitifully vapid some of these people are.  Elected to a position that was intended to be voluntary by our forefathers but has since become some kind of life-long appointment to royalty, Stark displays a swagger that rivals Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men”.  Except Stark is all hat, and no cattle.  The swagger is built on sand.  He has revealed himself as  just another diminutive jackass who couldn’t make it in the real world, so entered politics and climbed to heights that can only be climbed to by people like that in the political world.  In the real world, they never make it past janitor.

We should all take note of Peter Stark.  The entire country.  And we should think about it.  We should think about that horrific mouse of a woman, Nancy Pelosi, who admonishes the rest of us to “tighten our belts”, while she continues to spend over a grand a week on booze and nuts for her flights on government aircraft.  Someone explain how she got here…to a place where my tax dollars are paying for her travel and in-flight snacks.  Stark is her new counterpart in the political shop of horrors.

The gentleman in the audience should be applauded for maintaining his dignity.  It’s more than I could have done. It could have been a Saturday Night Live presentation.  It was so over-the-top it didn’t even seem real.  I could never have contained myself, being mocked and spoken to like that.  Stark even told the man, “if you knew anything about our borders, you would know that they are quite secure, thank you…”.  Really?  Quite secure?  Just don’t trip on any dead ranchers, and ignore those signs just erected by our own federal government that certain areas are unsafe for travel.  What more of a wake up call do we need?  Sections of Arizona have been lost to the illegals.  It’s an invasion, as I have said all along, and they have secured territory.

How I miss men like Moe Udall who served Arizona for 30 years as a Representative.  But he truly represented his people.  He was a cowboy, a rancher.  He drove his beat up F-150 to work for years and was modest and attentive.   He wanted to give back to the country, not take from it.  He also coined one of my favorite phrases, that “the difference between a caucus and a cactus is that a cactus has all its pricks on the outside.”  Beautiful.

Hard to believe that just a little over 200 years ago we won our freedom here.  Stranger still that we seem more and more likely to be approaching a point where we may need to fight to get it back.  Through all the battles, the bloodshed, the sacrifice, we are now supposed to accept that those battles were fought to provide a free country for anyone who wants to wander in.  And when a citizen, a taxpayer, questions an elected official about it, he is derided and satirized.

I can be pretty swift with the written blade myself and there is nothing that would please me more than to cross paths with that arrogant blowhard Peter Stark.  I’d like to go completely John Cleese on the guy and finish it with a solid boot out the door.  That door, by the way, opens in November.  Maybe you’ve never voted.  Maybe you’ve never paid a lot of attention to this stuff.  But if there was ever a time to do it, it will be this Fall.

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