Don’t ask me who Gus is. He (she?) is the author of one of those e-mails sent to a long list of people and forwarded to me. Whatever, Gus is a brilliant economist.
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As you may have heard the Bush Administration said each and every one of us will now get a nice rebate.
If we spend that money at Wal-Mart, most the money will go to China. If we spend it on gasoline it will all go to Canada, Venezuela, and the Arabs. How would that help the American economy? We need to keep that money in America.
The only way to keep that money here at home is to buy beer or spend it on prostitution, since those are the only businesses still in the US that are plowing their money back into the US.
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
Pigs like the smell of pigs. E Coli are determined to take over the digestive tract. And insiders think insiders should run everything.
Insider and one-time superdelegate Geraldine Ferraro (a Clinton campaigner) thinks that Democratic insiders should be able to pick the party’s nominee. That, in fact, is the subhead of her Op-Ed piece in Monday’s New York Times.
Superdelegates, she says, “were created to lead, not to follow. They were, and are, expected to determine what is best for our party and best for the country. I would hope that is why many superdelegates have already chosen a candidate to support.”
Well, that’s one reason, Geraldine. Another reason is money. The Center for Responsive Politics just issued a report on campaign contributions made to superdelegates (most of whom are sitting congressmen) by the Clinton and Obama campaigns. Their conclusion:
“Campaign contributions have been a generally reliable predictor of whose side a superdelegate will take.”
Is that your idea of leadership, Geraldine? To follow the money? Weren’t you once censured on campaign finances by the House Ethics Committee?
Geraldine also thinks the superdelegates should decide to seat the “delegates” from the non-elections in Florida and Michigan. Presumably, for the right price they very well might do that.
That would make Harold Ickes happy. He’s the Clinton campaign strategist who said last week in a conference call with reporters that superdelegates are more in touch with the issues important to voters than the voters are. Amazing. Then why hold primaries?
Just who are these supernatural beings who always know what’s best and who know the voters’ minds better than the voters themselves?
Could they possibly be the same Democratic congress people who have spent the last seven years kowtowing to George Bush, cowering in the corners and giving him every ugly, ignorant, arrogant, unconstitutional perversion of government power his tantrums demand?
Is it their all-knowing wisdom that has kept on playing patsy to Bush even after 70% of the voters in America had come to realize that this man and his administration are a comprehensive disaster?
These are our super-leaders, who can’t win a fight or defend a principle even when they have control of Congress and the president’s approval rating is 28%?
Go back where you came from, Geraldine.
You are part and parcel of the dirty laundry that Obama is promising to change and that Democratic voters are rejecting by overwhelming margins.
Notes from Mike Geraci on who the real freeloaders are in the illegal immigrant equation.
I’ve heard estimates of from 10 million to 30 million illegal immigrants in the country. To be conservative, let’s use 12 million. If one half of them work and earn the minimum wage (of $8.00/hr in Calif.), that’s 6 million earning an average of $320 per week each. (Some earn much more and some states have a lower minimum wage).
The current Social Security and Medicare cost is 7.65% times two (employee and employer) or 15.3%. With a wage of $320 X 15.3%, that comes to $48.96 per week per illegal going to the Feds. Multiply that times 6 million working and the total is $293,760,000 per week to the federal government.
Multiply that times 52 weeks and it comes to over $15 billion.
From the perspective of our duly elected representatives in Washington, since these are illegals, and therefore probably working under fake SS numbers, they don’t receive benefits. So this is free money for Congress to spend on special interest groups to buy votes. Since Congress has made so many irresponsible commitments, it’s impossible to pass up this newfound source of revenue.
Fence? What fence? Secure borders? Si. Bueno.
Were it not for his untimely death in 1650, Rene Descartes would be (and fully expected to be) 412 years old by now and more convinced than ever, “I still think; therefore I still am.”
We remember him as the French philosopher who held that mind and body are distinct substances – which makes me think of calf brains and veal.
Actually, Descartes spent most of his adult life not in France but in and around Amsterdam, working as a physician and researching new cures for mental and physical afflictions. These were the days when the Dutch East India Company had cornered a major share of the spice trade, and the herbs they were bringing back from Sri Lanka and the Moluccas were regarded not only as flavorings but, primarily, as medicines.
It was nutmeg for diarrhea, headaches, and colds; ginger for dyspepsia; cloves for toothache; pepper for fever and flatulence. Descartes studied these along with animal organs from the butcher shop. He had also experimented with mathematical methods for curing disease, which fortunately have been lost. He believed that his scientific discoveries might extend his own lifespan to perhaps 500 years.
Cogito ergo sum, sum, sum.
As attending physician to the exiled Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, he treated her chronic headaches, depression, and rashes. His advice, as reported by Steven Shapin: “Take some ‘refreshing broths which contain nothing but kitchen herbs’ and, above all, look on the bright side of life.”
Descartes was not only a philosopher, physician, and psychotherapist but also a formidable mathematician who co-founded analytical geometry and a physicist who advanced the science of optics.
But anyone can have a bad day. In a careless moment, having misplaced his tin of nutmeg as well as the decimal point in his projected lifespan, he died of a chill at 54.
A timely message from John DePaul:
Mark Helprin In today’s Wall Street Journal (”McCain and the Talk-Show Hosts”) takes on the flapmouth fraternity and their holier-than-thou stance against McCain’s candidacy based on their perceptions of his disrespect for “conservative principles.” The concluding paragraph:
“So, rather than playing recklessly with electoral politics by sabotaging their own party ostensibly for its impurity but equally for the sake of their self-indulgent pique, each of these compulsive talkers might be a tad less self-righteous, look to the long run, discipline himself, suck it up, and be a man. And that would apply equally as well for the gorgeous Laura Ingraham and the relentlessly crocodilian Ann Coulter.”
As a conservative, albeit of the moderate variety, I agree with Helprin’s view. I remember, too, that Ronald Reagan once said, “When you go over the cliff with flags flying, you’ve still gone over the cliff.”
What a bunch of supercilious assholes. There is still hope, I hope, for Glenn Beck and Laura. The rest will cut their own throats through blind allegiance to what they think their listenership “bases” want to hear.
Richard Evans recently wrote in the New York Review about Adam Tooze’s book, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Tooze had tracked German manufacturing through the war years and found that, despite Allied bombing, production of armaments continued to increase in 1943 and 1944, owing largely to forced labor.
The workers were brutally exploited in slave labor camps in Germany and Poland, underfed and living in appalling conditions, relentlessly driven to turn out munitions including the V-2 rockets falling on London.
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Even if you didn’t like the articles, NYR would be worth reading for its letters.
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The next issue brought a letter from scientist John Diebold, who liked the review, had decided to get the book, and also had something to add.
In 1978, he along with colleagues in Norway needed to trigger a series of explosions in order to make seismic measurements. They used World War II surplus Nazi explosives that had been stored in man-made caverns along Norwegian fjords.
“It was my personal observation,” he writes, “that while the munitions dated 1939-1940 were reliable, those with dates from 1943 and later were typically weak or noneffective.”
Either the Nazis were running short of critical materials, or the concentration camp inmates were sabotaging the armaments – or both.
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Reviewer Evans was grateful for the new information, and he responded with a confirming story of his own.
In 1943, a German bomb fell through the roof of his wife’s grandmother’s house in the East End of London and lodged, unexploded, in her bedroom wardrobe.
When the bomb disposal unit opened it up, they found a note inside:
“Don’t worry, English. We’re with you. Polish workers.”
Frontline report from Dr. Steve in Oklahoma.
I awaken at 3:30 am and turn on the Firefox news that Mercury has been photographed and may be 4 billion years old, and I live in a state where most people think nothing is older that 6 thousand years. Where most people support the insupportable (W}.
The best high school basketball player here, when interviewed on TV, said he had narrowed his choices for college to three — Oral Roberts, Arkansas, and Oklahoma State — and god (Jesus) would make the decision for him.
Jesus chose Arkansas, and that really worries me.
Watch next year to see if a kid, last name Clark or Clarke, starts for the Razorbacks. I think a huge mistake was made here because Jesus was a Jew and Arkansas’s name is the Razorbacks, and a razorback is a pig, and I know for a fact that Jesus kept kosher and would not have selected Arkansas for anyone.
This, as you are thinking, is an issue for someone who awakens at an ungodly hour. Is this type of thinking of any practical or even nonpractical use?
Huckabee.
That must be it. He also changed his name, as you surely know. It used to be Humpabee and, after tomorrow, who knows?
