March 2009
27 posts
Send in the troops! Then tell me if it was a good...
OBAMA: “Well, I would say that— the decision to send more troops— into Afghanistan. You know, I think it’s the right thing to do. But it’s— a weighty decision because we actually had to make the decision prior to the completion of— strategic review-- that— we were conducting. … It’s very important to make sure that we’ve got...
Ford Foundation - fun fact
Timothy Geithner’s father, Peter F. Geithner, is the director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation in New York. During the early 1980s, Peter Geithner oversaw the Ford Foundation’s microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by Ann Dunham-Soetoro, mother of President Barack Obama. Small world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Dunham...
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We won the global war on terror!
News flash-because it’s been renamed to “Overseas Contingency Operation”
National Intelligence Council - Ironic & Sad
Obama’s pick to head the National Intelligence Council has resigned from consideration after being accused of basically being too anti-Isreal. It’s ironic and sad on a few levels that Obama’s done sooo poorly vetting this picks for national posts and that it was for the INTELLIGENCE council.
Though the fact that Charles Freeman wasn’t 100% pro Isreal might be slightly...
Sam: So how's life been treating you, Tom?
Tom: Like it caught me sleeping with its wife
update on portugal's drug decriminalization →
turns out it works!
recovery.gov (in transition)
Government is so nimble it’s impressive, Earl Devaney, the Economic Stimulus Accountability & Transparency Board Chairman, said it’ll take 30-45 more days to “take control of the website” from OMB (the office of Management & Budget).
And it might take a year to make the site searchable!
Maybe all of those laid off Yahoo! employees should give Earl a call....
Average amount of government fraud is 7%
Historically, for government contracts there is about a 7% fraud or waste - for the 787Billion dollar recovery bill, not factoring the Omnibus bill, that’s a casual 53 Billion dollars in waste. Those AIG bonuses don’t look so bad right now.
How Tall is a Buck
If counted out in $1,000 bills, a million dollars would stack 4 inches high. A billion dollars would be 358 feet high. To reach a trillion dollars the stack would stand 67.9 MILES high.
-Washington Post
Global warming estimates
If all the estimates are coming in (suddenly this year) twice as bad as previously predicted, than why am I to believe that the new estimates are correct.
So far it’s tracking incorrectly something tells me “they” won’t nail the new estimate either.
You go get pissed at AIG bonuses
Pleeease. It’s around 400 or 500 employee’s getting $165 million that nets out to around 375,000 a person. That’s absolutely nothing compared to just about anything else that’s made a headline in the past 6 months.
Such a distraction from the rest of your money heading elsewhere.
Sure outrage, sure no one needs to retain those crappy employees. People just might want to...
USDEUR=X
The dollar has dipped on the Euro in the past week, it was a buck twenty a euro, now it 1.26. That’s a lot of money given the total amount of dollars - though finding out that number of total dollars seems a bit tricky - perhaps why the dollar just fell 6 cents in 7 days.
“Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure”
– Thomas Edison
Buy foreign organic food? - HR 875
Monsanto is working overtime
For your own reading:
http://www.brownfieldnetwork.com/gestalt/go.cfm?objectid=165E8705-5056-B82A-D06DA251E3778548
+
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto
equals =
http://blog.friendseat.com/rosa-delauro-hates-small-farms1/
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Monsanto-s-dream-bill-HR-by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-090309-337.html
Rep. Steve King from Iowa is trying to get a “fair tax” passed and remove the federal income tax. It was actually well said and wants Americans to be remineded on every tranaction show much the government it taking from us - Nathan Deal & Jeff Miller are echoing his statements - so far I’m in! Too bad it’ll never happen
Obama's job plan
Obama can’t fill his own cabinet… how is he supposed to save or create 3.5 million?
Seriously though, what’s stinks in his adminstration? He started looking into these positions before he was even elected yet they arne’t filled!
Turns out the only people that want to work for him owe back taxes. If I get behind on taxes I’ll look for a job in the government too.
New York city is unemployed
More than 12 million Americans don’t have jobs, more than the population of NYC. There’s also a casual 8 million or so that have part time jobs instead of a full time job - total 20 million earning nothing or little and it’s not over…
Naci Pelosi failed to make Summit on Global...
Turns out it might now be that bug of a problem after all…for further reading: http://tinyurl.com/c9vhtx
FDIC - not just AIG is running out of money
The FDIC has overseen 17 bank failures in 2009 so far.
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair warned that the fund insuring Americans’ deposits could be wiped out this year without the new fees on U.S. banks and thrifts.
But don’t worry the FDIC is “backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government,” Gray said. “We can and always will be able to meet our...
AIG is the real titanic
Don’t worry about the automakers or citi - AIG is the really large sinking ship and the government is blowing into balloons to keep it up.
Turns out that insurance is as much of the underlying problem “that would cripple lending.” If AIG were to fail, lending would be dead on the table.
Be ready to cover more losses all year long - in the grand scheme, might as well piss away...
“The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does weather...”
Too big to fail!?
If a bank is too big to fail, then it should fail. “But it will cause a horrible ripple effect in the lending markets.” Hate to tell ya but we’re there, been there for the past 3 months.
If monopolies get too big we break them up, or at least that’s what used to happen. If banks get to big to fail, why don’t we break them up so this doesn’t happen again.
...
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are...”
– Mark Twain
American values = a little bit of torture
At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters he hadn’t spoken to the president about the report, but called the news about the videotapes “sad,” and said Obama was committed to ending torture while also protecting American values.
Didn’t know you couldn’t do one w/o affecting the other.
For further reading:...