Cain Is Gone? Newt’s At The Top?

   I am happy to see that Herman has left the game, at least for now. of course, the GOP still has nothing but human ( ? ) jokes as candidates for the White House with Newt Gingrich being the man at the top of the list for the time being. That, my friends, is a sad state of affairs not only for the Republican Party, but for America also.

Robyn E. Blumner of the St. Petersburg Times notes the statements that the Newtser made at a gathering of GOP assholes at the debate in Iowa, concerning the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Gingrich's statement on the Occupy movement, offered with self-satisfied gusto during the "Thanksgiving Family Forum" Republican presidential candidate debate in Des Moines, Iowa, says all you need to know about the man who wants the reins of the economy. Gingrich's prescription for reversing the nation's record-breaking long-term joblessness and the shrinking of the middle class is a little shoe-leather and deodorant soap.

"All of the Occupy movements start with the premise that we all owe them everything," Gingrich said. "They take over a public park they didn't pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn't pay for, to beg for food from places they don't want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously explain that they are the paragons of virtue for which we owe everything.

"Now that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them: 'Go get a job right after you take a bath.' "

      Newt has no clue about the ills that many Americans face in this current economic disaster, or either he does not give a shit. As a candle-holder for the 1% who have screwed this country, I’d bet that he does not care.

   Fox News and the rest of the media will now push the Newt as the savior of both the Republican Party and America. When you start hearing how great Newt is, just remember his Contract On With America.

This is the Republican presidential hopeful who is rising in the polls. A man whose bloated ego is only matched by his antipathy for the plight of others. Every Republican who is unemployed, underemployed or knows and respects someone who is, should commit the phrase "Go get a job right after you take a bath" to memory. Then vote.

   America most certainly does not need a Newt sitting in the White House if only because the Newt is the prince of immorality.

Technorati Tags: Newt Gingrich,Republicans,GOP,Contrat With America,Politics,Current Events,An American Gothic,2012 Elections

Friday Funnies: Mixed Bag

  Todays list comes from many site from all over the Internet and are not necessarily political, for a change of pace

Council flat (social housing apartments) tenants complaints
These are genuine clips from British Council flat (apartment) tenants
Complaining to the Council about problems with their apartments/ flats.

1. My bush is really overgrown round the front and my back passage has
fungus growing in it.

2. He's got this huge tool that vibrates the whole house and I just
can't take it anymore.

3. It's the dog's mess that I find hard to swallow.

4. I want to complain about the farmer across the road; every morning at
6am his cock wakes me up and it's now getting too much for me.

5. I am a single woman living in a downstairs flat and would you please
do something about the noise made by the man on top of me every night.

6. And their 18-year-old son is continually banging his balls against my
fence.

7. Please send a man with the right tool to finish the job and satisfy
my wife.

8. My lavatory seat is cracked, where do I stand?

9. I am writing on behalf of my sink, which is coming away from the
wall.

10. Will you please send someone to mend the garden path? My wife
tripped and fell on it yesterday and now she is pregnant.

11. I request permission to remove my drawers in the kitchen

12. 50% of the walls are damp, 50% have crumbling plaster and 50% are
plain filthy

13. I am still having problems with smoke in my new drawers.

14. The toilet is blocked and we cannot bath the children until it is
cleared.

15. Will you please send a man to look at my water, it is a funny colour
& not fit to drink.

16. I want some repairs done to my cooker as it has backfired and burnt
my knob off.

17. The man next door has a large erection in the back garden, which is
unsightly and dangerous.

18. Our kitchen floor is damp. We have two children and would like a
third so please send someone round to do something about it.

19. I wish to complain that my father hurt his ankle very badly when he
put his foot in the hole in his back passage.

20. I wish to report that tiles are missing from the outside toilet
roof. I think it was bad wind the other night that blew them off.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I recently turned 65 and had to choose a new primary care physician for my Medicare program.
After two visits and exhaustive lab tests, he said I was doing "fairly well" for my age.

A little concerned about that comment, I couldn't resist asking him, "Do you think I will live to be 80?"

He asked: Do you smoke tobacco or drink alcoholic beverages?"

"Oh no," I replied. "I don't do drugs, either."

"Do you have many friends and entertain frequently?"

"I said, "No, I usually stay home and keep to myself".

"Do you eat rib-eye steaks and barbecued ribs?"

I said, "No, my other doctor said that all red meat is unhealthy!"

"Do you spend a lot of time in the sun, like playing golf, sailing, hiking, or bicycling?"

"No, I don't," I said.

"Do you gamble, drive fast cars, or have a lot of sex?"

"No," I said. "I don't do any of those things."

He looked at me and said, "Then why do you care?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Dead Cow Lecture!
This is the best example for paying  attention that I have ever heard.

First-year students at the Ohio State Vet   School were attending their first anatomy class with a real dead  cow. They all gathered around the surgery table with the body  covered with a white sheet.
The professor started the class by  telling them, "In Veterinary medicine it is necessary to have two  important qualities as a doctor. The first is
that you not be  disgusted by anything involving the animal's body." For an example,  the professor pulled back the sheet, stuck his finger in the
butt of  the cow, withdrew it, and stuck his finger in his
mouth.

"Go ahead and do the same thing," he  told his students.
The students freaked out, hesitated  for several minutes, but eventually took turns sticking a finger in  the butt of the dead cow and sucking on it.

When everyone finished, the Professor  looked a them and said, "The second most important quality is  observation. I stuck in my middle finger and sucked on my index  finger. Now learn to pay attention. Life's tough but it's even  tougher if you're stupid."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Honeymoon Train!!
After returning from his honeymoon
in Florida with his new bride, Virginia, Luigi stopped by his old barbershop in Jersey to say hello to this friends.
Giovanni said, "Hey Luigi, how wasa da treep?"
Luigi said, "Everyting wasa perfecto except for da train ride down."
"Whatayou mean, Luigi?" asked Giovanni.
"Well, we boarda da train at Grana Central Station. My beautiful Virginia , she pack a biga basketa food. She bringa da vino, some nice cigars for me, and we were lookina forward to da trip, and open upa da luncha basket .
The conductore come aby, waga his finger at us anda say, 'no eat in disa car. Musta use a dining car..'
So, me and my beautiful Virginia, we go to da dining car, eat a biga lunch and starta at open da bottle of a nice a vino!
Conductore walka by again, waga his finger and say, 'No drinka in disa car! Musta use a cluba car.' So, we go to cluba car.
While a drinkina da vino, I starta to lighta my biga cigar. The conductore, he waga is finger again and say, 'No a smokina in disa car. Musta go to a smokina car ..'
"We go to a smokina car and I smoke a my biga cigar. Then my beautiful Virginia and I, we go to a sleeper car anda go to bed. We just about to go badaboom badaboom and the conductore, he walka through da hallway shouting at a top of his a voice..
'Nofolka Virginia !
Nofolka Virginia !'
"Nexta time, I'ma just gonna taka da bus."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorry teacher
Attendance call on the first day at school in Birmingham
The teacher began calling out the names of the pupils:
"Mustafa El Ekh Zeri?"
"Here."
"Achmed El Kabul?"
"Here."
"Fatima Al Chadoury? "
"Here."
"Abdul Alu Ohlmi?"
"Here."
"Mohammed Ibn Achrha?"
"Here."
"Mi Cha El Mey Er" Silence in the classroom.
"Mi Cha El Mey Er"
Continued silence as everyone looked around the room. She repeated,
"Is there any child here called Mi Cha El Mey Er ?"
A boy arose and said, "Sorry teacher. I think that's me.
It's pronounced Michael Meyer."

Technorati Tags: Friday Funnies,Poltics,Humor,Jokes,Current Events,An American Gothic

Florida Facts

  I bring to you a couple of statistics concerning life in the 3rd-world state of Florida.

   While consumer confidence rose sharply in most of the United States this month, it was not so great in Florida, remaining at the same level as last month.

    The Conference Board’s Index rose up 56 from a previous reading of 409 in October. This was the biggest monthly gain since April of 2003.

   Florida uses a different confidence index ( naturally ) which stayed stuck at 65 in November, barely above the record low  according to a phone survey done monthly  by the University of Florida. The record low ( 59 ) was set back in June of 2008.

    On an even sadder note:

    47% of Tampa Bay homes are underwater with their mortgages as of the end of September. Your mortgage is labeled as being underwater when you owe more on it than the home is worth.

   That 47% comes out to some 311,511 homes being not worth the prices paid for them.          Source

   The really sad part is that many of these homeowners would not be in this predicament if they had used some common sense ( lacking in Florida ) and had not gotten greedy in the first place. Many of the owners bought their homes for the express purpose of selling later on after the value had doubled or even tripled in a few cases. Borrowing against the home as the value rose put many people on the chopping block when the bubble burst, and they now cry about having to make payments on a product that has become somewhat worthless.

    Greed will screw you over at every chance that it gets to do so. Have you homeowners learned anything?

Technorati Tags: Tampa Bay,Florida,Housing,Current Events,An American Gothic,Unemployment,Jobs,The Economy

   

$700 Billion TARP Bailout? Not Even Close….

   … as Hunter at Daily Kos points out. Let’s try trillions instead.

Fed commitments to financial sector topped $7 trillion      Mon Nov 28, 2011

Bloomberg News sorts through how the Fed handled the banking crisis. It isn't pretty:

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”

One of the underlying themes of the article is that almost nobody contacted for the story, whether in government or in the large banks, was willing to comment on it. And during the debates over both TARP and bank regulation, the scale of secret government assistance to the largest banks was unknown even to Congress:

Lawmakers knew none of this.

They had no clue that one bank, New York-based Morgan Stanley (MS), took $107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008, enough to pay off one-tenth of the country’s delinquent mortgages. The firm’s peak borrowing occurred the same day Congress rejected the proposed TARP bill, triggering the biggest point drop ever in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (INDU) The bill later passed, and Morgan Stanley got $10 billion of TARP funds, though Paulson said only “healthy institutions” were eligible. [...]

Byron L. Dorgan, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota, says the knowledge might have helped pass legislation to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which for most of the last century separated customer deposits from the riskier practices of investment banking.

“Had people known about the hundreds of billions in loans to the biggest financial institutions, they would have demanded Congress take much more courageous actions to stop the practices that caused this near financial collapse,” says Dorgan, who retired in January.

Now that the information is coming out, will that make a difference in future discussions over regulating too-big-to-fail banks? Color me skeptical. Lawmakers might grumble a long while about the Fed committing the United States to seven freaking trillion dollars in loans and guarantees to the financial industry, but government is still quite thoroughly captured by the top banks:

At the meeting with [Sen. Ted] Kaufman, [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner argued that the issue of limiting bank size was too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions, Kaufman says. According to Kaufman, Geithner said he preferred that bank supervisors from around the world, meeting in Basel, Switzerland, make rules increasing the amount of money banks need to hold in reserve. Passing laws in the U.S. would undercut his efforts in Basel, Geithner said, according to Kaufman.

Technorati Tags: Federal Reserve,The Economy,Bank Bailouts,TARP,Timothy Geithner,Congress,Morgan Stanley