Let’s go back a bit in history, all the way back to when Clinton left office, there was a surplus in our budget which hadn’t happened under either of the previous republican presidents. It took a liberal “tax and spend” democrat from the lowly state of Arkansas to actually put this country on the right path. Sure things weren’t perfect but they were pretty good and getting better.

In 2000 Bush ran against Gore as a “compassionate conservative”. He didn’t turn out to be either of those things. The United States quickly dove into that surplus and then started spending massive amounts of money all while cutting taxes. It’s the opposite of a “tax and spend” liberal. It’s a “borrow and spend” conservative. In fact, the US debt has doubled since Bush took office. (source)

Due to the complete and utter greed of Bush’s friends in business and coworkers in the government, every possible avenue of making money was exploited. Gambles were made with reckless abandon and the people in position to make important decisions about financial matters, made all the wrong decisions. I’ve actually been concerned for quite some time and in fact made a post right here on this blog back at the beginning of 2007 concerning this very topic. I quoted an article talking about the need to solve the problem now, not when the economy goes south. Here’s what I quoted:

The good news is that because the problem only grows more intractable with every passing day, our dithering politicians will have fewer options to chose from when the crisis hits thereby making their jobs that much easier. The bad news is that the more time we spend in denial, the less time remains for us to get busy and do something about it. There is even the danger that if we wait too long, we will face a potentially unfixable problem on the scale of what the Soviet Union experienced – catastrophic economic failure.(source)

So, this situation was easy enough to see years ago by experts and those experts were able to relay that information to the public that cared, including me. So how can the government not have known? The answer is they did and they didn’t care.

I don’t trust this government at all and I do not want to give them any more money. This government has screwed up the lives of so many people already that I’m not willing to let them touch any more of the taxpayers money. If I had a say in the matter, most of the executive branch of government would be impeached and perhaps jailed and members of the do nothing congress we have, would be relieved of duty. This goes for both democrats and republicans. I’m particularly disappointed that Barack Obama supports a bill like the one the Senate passed yesterday and the House will be voting on tomorrow.

Secretary Paulson actually has stated that he will be leaving his post in 4 months. We don’t know who will replace him. This proposed bill gives the person who will replace him an incredible amount of power. If you listen to some people talking about this “crisis” they seem to suggest that if this money isn’t handed over to the Secretary of the Treasury immediately, then the entire global economy will collapse and the world as we know it will be over. That’s a pretty significant level of trust we are putting on somebody who already has one foot out the door and then on the unknown individual who will replace him.

I suggest both presidential campaigns name the person they would choose to appoint to the position and let them start taking questions as to how they would handle things. It just makes sense that we should have this knowledge when our congressmen are voting for this bill and we as voters need to know before cast our ballot for president.

But back to the point, obviously $700,000,000,000 is a lot of money. A lot.
To put it into perspective, the Iraq war has cost this country : ###
(source)

My immediate reaction to the idea of spending $700,000,000,000 is “woah… is buying up bad debt really the best way to spend that much money?” I don’t know the answer to that question but neither does Congress. The fact that the Bush Administration is trying to hammer this legislation through without giving people time to think about it, makes me super suspicious about their motives. Bush has gone on TV a few times now and given ominous sounding warnings about the urgency of this crisis:

(youtube video)

The problem is, we’ve heard this before from the Bush administration… Colin Powell trotting out to the UN with a powerpoint slideshow talking about the urgency and need to invade Iraq and the hastily passed Patriot Act. Two examples of this routine leading us down a path that in hindsight we should not have followed.

They claimed last week that if the bill didn’t pass by tuesday of this week, the world would end. Or at least the economy would be beyond saving. In reality we are still fine. And we will be fine for quite some time. I hope congress will do some small things that will help the economy now, then once a new administration is able to come in, they can work on some plans that will actually significantly help the situation in the right way, with proper deliberation and some actual thought about the future.

I think about what a $700,000,000,000 investment in alternative energy research and development would do for our nation in the long term. I think about ways that money could be spent on a national health care plan and a real investment in education. These are things that will actually help our economy by creating wealth, not just taking good money and sending it after bad money.

I have several more thoughts on the topic, but it is getting late, and I’ve already said plenty.

To end, here is a short video of Eisenhower warning against the dangers of the military/industrial complex, and it’s scary accurate!

(youtube video)

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My thoughts on the “Bailout”

As a photographer, I often get questioned about why I’m taking pictures and often get told to stop taking pictures. Usually it’s not by police, because I know the rules of where and when I can shoot, as do they, so we have no problems, but security guards are a different story. But I know my rights so I don’t get pushed around and honestly sometimes the security guards are in the right so I do abide by their request to stop shooting.

So far, in all of my experience with cops, I have found them to be professional and courteous and have nothing against them doing their jobs. In fact, I would consider being a cop myself if it wasn’t so boring. I feel that my confidence in knowing my rights and the fact that I rarely have anything to hide has led to my good experience with police. However, I do know that not everyone experiences the same situations in dealing with the police, so I encourage people to know their rights. The video below is a good place to start.

click here

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Know your rights during interactions with cops!

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Bill Clinton’s Speech at the 08 DNC

Just think about what would have happened if he won the nomination…

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John Edwards is a douchebag… (sound familiar?)

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This article makes me sad and scared

Of course it will help Obama in the general election, but every democrat will support the nominee anyway, so this really doesn’t make a difference in any major way.

I never really liked Edwards. He just never seemed genuine to me. Then after his wife was diagnosed with cancer he decided to keep running for president anyway. That showed me what type of guy he is and it’s not the the guy I would want rrepresenting our country. Anyway, John Edwards sucks and I think he should just go back to being a lawyer.

UPDATE: Newsweek agrees with me pretty much exactly.

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John Edwards is a douchebag

Mike Huckabee, our formerly fat governor, has announced a running mate already in his bid for presidency. Click here for the article.

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Huckabee chooses running mate!

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Long article discussing Al Gore as a candidate

His response: “You can go cower in the corner and hide or you can go out there and stand up for what you believe in. We have no intentions of cowering in the corner.” [Source]

So lets go with an optimistic hypothetical: John gets elected to 2 terms and leaves office in 2016 and let’s say she dies in 10 years, 2017. Luckily she didn’t die while in the White House. But meanwhile John spent the last 10 years of her life being President not spending it with her.

If it were me, and I really loved my wife, I would try to make the last years of her life the best I possibly could. That doesn’t involve being first lady. Being First Lady is a big job and comes with a great amount of stress. I don’t think it’s fair to put somebody through that. It certainly doesn’t involve me traveling all over the world cleaning up the mess Bush left and leaving her at home alone, likely with a greater degree of sickness each year.

You can argue that she wants him to still run for President. Probably she does. However, in this situation, it is the duty of a husband to take care of his wife.

You can argue whatever you want about survival rates and treatments and life expectancy, but none of those arguments will change my opinion. I might be odd, but I don’t want a President who is more concerned about being President than being by his dying wife’s side. I also don’t want a President who is more concerned with his dying wife than being President. See the dilemma?

I just don’t see how this plays out well in any way, shape, or form.

also, there’s {this}!

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John Edwards should drop out!

How does watching that video make you feel? At face value this behavior looks like a very good indicator of why America might be losing (already lost?) the war in Iraq. The Iraqi people probably see this everyday and view the American presence as an occupying force. They certainly have an argument.

However, the justification of this behavior is that if the humvee stops for more than a few seconds chances are reasonable that they get blown up by a bomb or RPG. They simply can’t stop.

So on one hand you have a whole lot of pissed off iraqis and the other you have a bunch of American Soldiers facing the proposition of a fiery death if they don’t keep the humvee moving. Those ingredients don’t make a good cocktail.

I’m not picking sides on this because honestly the situation is a lot more complicated and delicate than I, or the average person, can really understand. There are so many factors at play. I was never on the supportive side of going into Iraq in the first place. But now that we are there we should be responsible for fixing it.

The question though, is how much fixing can we actually do? I tend to think that perhaps we’ve done everything we can do. As soon as weapons became easy to obtain, War changed. No longer do you have one side versus another. You have one side versus 1000 or 10,000 or whatever. The ‘enemy’ can operate as individuals and constantly attack US forces from any and all sides. There is no way to win in that situation. We will probably never again see a white flag of surrender or a treaty being signed to signal the end of a war. Those days ended after World War II and before Vietnam.

So now that we have captured, tried, and executed the evil dictator and helped establish an Iraqi government to replace the old one, what is left? It seems Bush isn’t ready to leave until there is not a single drop of blood being shed anywhere in the country. This is just a pipe dream that will never happen. The only way to end the violence is to make the people happy. I think they would be at least a little bit happier without America over there. If they then can’t work out their political/religious differences in a nonviolent way, perhaps they deserve the chaos.

Like I said, I’m kind of uninformed about things but I really don’t think Bush can handle this quagmire he drove us into. There is no easy solution and he seems to think it’s a very cut and dry situation where brute force is the answer.

I am not a hater of the soldiers who are risking their lives and I am not posting that video for that reason. I’m using the video to illustrate my point about it being a complex mess that must be viewed at more than face value. My brother will be in Iraq soon and I have other friends over there and I have nothing but the utmost respect for their sacrifices. It’s the Commander in Chief that I have problems with.

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My thoughts on the Iraq situation

But without getting too political here, I just wanted to comment on the abundance of sports analogies that get used when referring to politics. I rarely ever hear a political analogy used in sports though!

“He just dropped the ball”
“They crossed the goal line”
“it’s 4th and goal”
“the rout is on”
“like a hail mary pass”
“down for the count”
“it was a slam dunk”
“he took a shot and missed”
“the republicans are on the ropes”

There are tons more. But check out this picture:

“We’re gonna fake the screen and then throw it deep.” — Fox Commentator, desperately trying to draw up a big play that could turn things around for them.

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Election night 2006 and sports analogies

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2187rank.html

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A list of all the countries bank account balance!

I think it is a new republican tactic to just confuse the hell out of all the fundementalists that are dumb enough to still support Bush. If it was on Fox News it must be true!

Here are some videos on youtube demonstrating the scam.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_vtC98IFoA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmITwibzgH4

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New Republican Tactics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwWP-N1HqT0

The Diebold AccuVote-TS and its newer relative the AccuVote-TSx are together the most widely deployed electronic voting platform in the United States. In the November 2006 general election, these machines are scheduled to be used in 357 counties representing nearly 10% of registered voters. Approximately half these counties — including all of Maryland and Georgia — will employ the AccuVote-TS model. More than 33,000 of the TS machines are in service nationwide.

The main findings of our study are:

1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.

2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.

3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.

4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold’s software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines’ hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

From itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting

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This could be the cause of some “Voter Irregularities”

Click Here

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A Contrary Opinion

The primaries are where each state decides which nominee to support. You may know that Iowa and New Hampshire are always the first two states to have primaries and often those two states decide who the democratic nominee will be. That’s how John Kerry came from nowhere to take the lead, by winning third in Iowa and then winning big in New Hampshire. Many nominees can’t afford to keep campaigning if they haven’t placed in the top 3 in those two states.

What’s the problem with this system you may ask? Well for starters, it’s not fair. Iowa’s white population is 95 percent, New Hampshire’s is 96.2 percent, according to the latest Census numbers (source). Blacks and Hispanics are core constituencies for the Democrats. Yet, when it comes to states that have a sizable portion of non-whites, the primary voting is just a formality, for NH and Iowa have already selected the nominee that will run for president.

Take these stats for example: (source 1)

• with the exception of 1976; Iowa and New Hampshire have a long tradition of picking losers. The last Democrat to occupy the White House was Bill Clinton, and he lost the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. What does that tell you?

• Iowa and New Hampshire have 7 and 4 electoral votes respectively, and unless the general election is extremely close, losing Iowa and New Hampshire’s combined 11 electoral votes is not going to cause one to lose the White House.

By adding a southern and midwestern state into the early mix it gives the primary voting a little more variety and hopefully the presidential nominee will be a little more reflective of what the country actually wants. I would love to see Arkansas get an early primary.

Update: 7-22-06

It looks like they chose Nevada to go between Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina to go right after New Hampshire. (Story here)

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Changing the Primaries schedule

This website has a funny name. http://www.abunchofgreedyrightwingliarswhoworkforwalmart.com/

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A bunch of greedy right wing liars who work for walmart.com

“Artist Brian Springer spent a year scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption. The result of his research is SPIN, one of the most insightful films ever made about the mechanics of how television is used as a tool of social control to distort and limit the American public’s perception of reality.

Take the time to watch it from beginning to end and you’ll never look at TV reporting the same again. Tell your friends about it. This extraordinary film released in the early 1990s is almost completely unknown. Hopefully, the Internet will change that. ”

This is a really interesting thing to watch, but I don’t think it taught us anything we didn’t already know.

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Footage you were never supposed to see!