Tuesday, October 28, 2008

EVEN MORE: Welfare Executives at the Trough Part II

It sure just blows me away really. These are the same people who 15 years ago were calling welfare recipients parasites, leeches, bloodsucking lazy slobs etc.

Well, when I opened my newsreader today here's what I saw:

http://money.aol.com/investing/adding-insult-to-injury?icid=100214839x1211881220x1200729240

As if the economic recession wasn't hard enough on Americans, seeing the government spend billions to bail out Wall Street has made it all even harder for the average person to take. Yes, we all want to avoid global financial collapse. But Bloggingstocks writers have noted many cases where the way the government bailout of Wall Street is playing out seems to be adding insult to injury.

Here are eight recent examples:

Next: Big Wall Street Bonuses

Wall Streeters Can Still Expect Big Bonuses

When the government agreed to bail out Wall Street, the goal was to provide funds to shore up banks' capital bases so they would start lending again. It wasn't to help them fund the bonus pool. But estimates run that as much as $70 billion will get paid out in bonuses to Wall Streeters this year. That amount equals 10% of the $700 billion bailout.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Ron Howard's Call for Obama along with Andy Griffith & Henry Winkler

Oh this should be fun. We know the right wingers will have field day with Opie and Fonzie, but Andy Griffith? How'r they going to paint Andy Griffith as a left-wing radical over pampered head in the cloud celebrity?

Ron Howard is the latest star to voice his support for Obama, and he did it alongside his old costars Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler in a video for Funny or Die. Watch him strip down, trim his nose hair and don an Opie wig for a black and white call to action before fast-forwarding to "Happy Days."

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

Video: Your request is being processed... Will Ferrell Back As Bush With Tina Fey's Palin On Thursday's "Saturday Night Live"

Thursday's "Saturday Night Live" election special welcomed Will Ferrell back playing President Bush in the opening sketch, with Ferrell's Bush offering an unwanted endorsement for the McCain- Palin ticket. The sketch was cowritten by Adam McKay and also starred Tina Fey as Sarah Palin meeting Bush for the first time.

As Ferrell's Bush puts it, the election is between "the hot lady and the Tiger Woods guy" and "I'm out of here in a few months, so screw it." He has also declared the White House a "bummer-free zone."

The last time America saw Will Ferrell as Bush was in April at an autism fundraiser. Ferrell is set to play Bush on Broadway next year.

PREVIOUS FEY SKETCHES:
Sarah Palin on SNL along with Tina Fey playing her, plus a bonus Alaska rap
Tina Fey as Sarah Palin With Hillary Clinton
Tina Fey as Sarah Palin With Katie Couric
Tina Fey as Sarah Palin in the VP debate
Tina Fey talks about Sarah Palin's voice to David Letterman

Your request is being processed...

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Greenspan admits to 'flaw' in his free market thinking

Jeremy Warner: Greenspan admits to 'flaw' in his free market thinking

Friday, 24 October 2008

Outlook Alan Greenspan, quoting Keynes, insists that when the facts change, he changes his mind. It wasn't exactly a mea culpa we had from the former Federal Reserve chairman in Congressional testimony yesterday, but it was about as close as we are likely to get to it.

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Mr Greenspan has spent much of the last two years trying to justify what, with the benefit of hindsight, were plainly a series of mistakes, both in the exercise of interest rate policy and in the regulation of banks, for which the Fed is partly responsible in the US. Central banks shouldn't attempt to deflate asset bubbles, he has argued, but only deal with their aftermath, while banks are best left alone to regulate themselves in their own self interest.

Yesterday, he admitted for the first time that at least some of this thinking was flawed. Rather in the manner of religious disillusionment, his realisation that the market isn't always right has come as a terrible shock to the former monetary wizard. Yet Mr Greenspan is not entirely repentant. As far back as 2005, he insists, he raised concerns that the protracted period of underpricing of risk, if history was any guide, would have dire consequences.

Unfortunately, it may already have been too late by that stage, and in any case, he failed to act on his own wake-up call, despite ample authority and opportunity to do so. He also admits to having failed to act on the concerns of Ed Gramlich, a former member of the Federal Reserve's board of governors, who had warned him in terms as far back as 2000 of the perils of predatory pricing in sub-prime mortgage lending.

It is always easy to be wise after the event, and I'm not sure we should be too hard on Mr Greenspan for failing to recognise the significance of the boom in sub-prime lending. Hardly anyone else did either until it was too late. On the other hand, it is the job of a central banker to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets interesting, to quote another former chairman of the Fed, William McChesney Martin, and this Mr Greenspan notably failed to do.

Yet it was not for failings in monetary policy that Mr Greenspan was apologising, but rather for flaws in his whole world view. As he has said before, those who look to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity are in a state of "shocked disbelief". For him at least, 40 years of faith in the ability of the free market system to protect and heal itself has gone up in smoke.

Personally, I cannot see why an economist as ancient and accomplished as Mr Greenspan, brought up in the crucible of the Great Depression, should find this shocking at all. Down the ages, banks have repeatedly proved careless both with their shareholders' capital and their depositors' money. As the good times roll, they invariably drop their lending standards and eventually find themselves crucified by bad debt. In that respect, there is nothing unique about the present banking crisis at all.

As Mr Greenspan points out in yesterday's testimony, the crisis is at root about failure properly to price risky assets. Again, all banking crises share this characteristic. What made this one a bit different was the extent of global demand for dodgy, mispriced US assets.

Yet it is not so much the present state of market failure Mr Greenspan is in shocked disbelief over, as the fact that self-surveillance and correction by banks should have broken down on such a scale. Again, it is hard to see why he should find this remarkable. As the boom times roll, banks always end up allowing risk controls to become eroded and thereby lending too much. The longer the boom, the more extreme the process becomes.

What Mr Greenspan should really be kicking himself about is not his naive belief in the idea that markets are self regulating in their own interests, but his own failure to spot the extent of the mispricing, and then act on it. He's hardly alone in this failing, but then it was his job to keep the children under control. In any case, Mr Greenspan has now joined the greater regulation bandwagon. Yet it is endearing to see that he has not entirely lost his free market faith. Whatever regulatory changes are made, he says, will pale in comparison with the change already evident in markets. "Those markets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated regulatory regime". Quite so. When markets get it wrong, they really know how to punish themselves. Unfortunately, it is the little guy, and not the responsible bankers, who takes the brunt of it.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

John McCain is PROUD of G. Gordon Liddy

John McCain Is Proud Of G. Gordon Liddy

by BarbinMD

Sat Oct 18, 2008 at 02:00:05 PM PDT

Several weeks ago, seeing his last chance for the presidency slipping away, a desperate John McCain chose to focus of his entire campaign on William Ayers. In television ads, in stump speeches and through his surrogates, McCain, unable to run on the issues, decided that his only chance was to turn Barack Obama's time on a school reform board with Ayers into "palling around with terrorists," and during the last presidential debate, McCain said that "we need to know the full extent of that relationship." And McCain is right. We do need to know the full extent of a presidential candidate's relationship with an "unrepentant domestic terrorist." So let's talk about McCain's own relationship with G. Gordon Liddy.

During his recent appearance with David Letterman, McCain was asked about that relationship and said:

I’ve met him...I know Gordon Liddy. He paid his debt, he went to prison, he paid his debt.

Actually, Liddy "paid his debt" for his role in Watergate and breaking into the office of Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers fame. He never paid any price for:

...plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a "gangland figure" to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap "leftist guerillas" at the 1972 Republican National Convention -- a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis...he had named his shooting targets after Bill and Hillary Clinton.

And he never paid a price for saying:

Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests." Liddy's advice that day was explicit: "They've got a big target on there, ATF. Don't shoot at that, because they've got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots.... Kill the sons of bitches."

...a sentiment, by the way, that he expressed more than once on his radio show. And when asked in later interviews whether he regretted his role in Watergate or for giving instructions on how to kill federal agents, Liddy's answer was no. But really, who would expect remorse from a man who said:

When he listened to Hitler on the radio, it "made me feel a strength inside I had never known before," he explains. "Hitler's sheer animal confidence and power of will [entranced me]. He sent an electric current through my body."

Despite all that, McCain simply tells Letterman that he knows Liddy and that he's paid his debt to society. But there is more to their relationship than that. Liddy has donated thousands of dollars to McCain's campaigns, and McCain has appeared on Liddy's radio show, as recently as five months ago, and:

...McCain praised Liddy's "adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great," said he was "proud" of Liddy, and said that "it's always a pleasure for me to come on your program."

Let's review: Barack Obama served on a school reform board funded by an ally of Ronald Reagan, along with a number of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. John McCain accepts money and enjoys sitting down for interviews with a man who is a convicted felon, who plotted murders and bombings, who advocated killing federal agents, who named his shooting targets after a President and First Lady/Senator, and who tingled when he listened to Adolph Hitler speak. And John McCain praises his:

...adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.

Exactly which candidate "is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America"?

Comparing: Republicans Contract to Democrats New Agenda

You know, we hear a lot from the right wing propaganda machine about how much better Republicans are about things like keeping promises and how grand and glorious their Contract with America was, the slogan for years was "Promises Made, Promises Kept" Well here's a little chart for comparison. As we can see the 1995 Contract with America turned out to be yet another Republican lie. Even with an overwhelming majority in both houses they couldn't, or they wouldn't pass the base of their party's agenda whereas the Democrats New Direction Agenda has fulfilled the majority of it's goals, save the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act that was VETOED by Bush, with almost FULL Republican support!

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Now I ask you, who gets things done? Promises made, promises kept, INDEED! What gets my goat is that there are people out there still buying the Republican party's line about fiscal conservatism, yet they run up the debt and cut the government's pay from the people seriously crippling the country's debt to pay it's bills. They gripe about helping the poor in our own country with social programs like food stamps and AFDC, medicaid, etc. yet they run up a seven hundred billion dollar debt (that's $700,000,000,000 look at the zeros!) to give welfare to millionaire and billionaire executives that are ALREADY squandering several HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS of the money on English horesy set trips and salon treatments to get their toenails cut at a posh high dollar spa in California! Then that particular company asks for an additional 38 BILLION DOLLARS? You keep on supporting these bums, these Republican bums and welfare executives, you like this? You like paying high taxes while they get all the loopholes and breaks? If you work for a large corporation, probably one that sends more than half it's open jobs to be filled in communist c

ountries like China and Vietnam, you go right ahead voting for Republicans, and you'll get out of it just what you asked for. More meaningless negative deficit spending, and unfair balance of power between business and labor, more deregulation (McCain is lying about being in support of it), more bad business in general.

Don'tchya know....

(click the pic for a larger image)

Monday, October 20, 2008

Tricked Into Registering Republican

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/tricked-registering-republican

Dozens of newly minted Republican voters say they were duped into joining the party by a GOP contractor with a trail of fraud complaints stretching across the country.

Newly registered voters report that an organization identified as Young Political Majors, hired by the California Republican Party:

.... said they were tricked into switching parties while signing what they believed were petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. Some said they were told that they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Others had no idea their registration was being changed.

It is a bait-and-switch scheme familiar to election experts. The firm hired by the California Republican Party -- a small company called Young Political Majors, or YPM, which operates in several states -- has been accused of using the tactic across the country.

Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit. Prosecutors in Los Angeles and Ventura counties say they are investigating complaints about the company.

The firm, which a Republican Party spokesman said is paid $7 to $12 for each registration it secures, has denied any wrongdoing and says it has never been charged with a crime.

The 70,000 voters YPM has registered for the Republican Party this year will help combat the public perception that it is struggling amid Democratic gains nationally, give a boost to fundraising efforts and bolster member support for party leaders, political strategists from both parties say.

Those who were formerly Democrats may stop receiving phone calls and literature from that party, perhaps affecting its get-out-the-vote efforts. They also will be given only a Republican ballot in the next primary election if they do not switch their registration back before then.

Some also report having their registration status changed to absentee without their permission; if they show up at the polls without a ballot they may be unable to vote.

The article further states:

The Times randomly interviewed 46 of the hundreds of voters whose election records show they were recently re-registered as Republicans by YPM, and 37 of them -- more than 80% -- said that they were misled into making the change or that it was done without their knowledge.

Please click here to read the full article.

A related article at Californiachronicle.com states:

The San Bernardino County Democrats set up a meeting with an assistant Registrar in the County office and together they agreed to check up on the new Republicans that were being turned in. The Registrar's office gave the list of new registrations to the Democrats who parceled out the voters which had changed from "Democrat" or "Decline to State" to "Republican." They designed a questionnaire, assigned lists of voters to be called by various volunteers, and made several hundred calls to the voters using the questionnaire to determine what was happening and how it was being done.

Their findings were surprising. Of all the voters who were contacted, more than 80% said they had intended to register Democrat and that their party had been switched without their knowledge or permission.

More than 75% of the phone numbers listed were no good, and these registrations were just two weeks old. Republicans usually require 75% phone numbers on the cards they pay for, so it is necessary to invent phone numbers in order to get paid.

More on our situation

More on Demand Side economics We've seen how this lousy economic situation happened. We've gone from people earning money and spending money, a demand based economy, to people's taxes being doubled under Reagan, the money being given to the wealthy where in most cases they are either saving it, sending it to China or maybe buying new ivory backscratchers. Either way the idea of it trickling down doesn't seem to be on their minds.

For people to maintain lifestyles they had from the late 40's throughout the 70's had to start borrowing and now we're all tapped out. So where do we go now? Dick Cheney said "One thing Ronald Reagan taught us is that deficits don't matter." From the Sunday paper insert "Parade" "For sale, U.S. roads, some of America's cash strapped states and cities are leasing public roads to the higest bidder who are often foreign investors. Chicago's Skyway is controlled by the Spanish-Austrailian Investment Group, an Italian firm operates the Dullus Greenway outside of Washington DC." You want to get to the nation's captital's airport you have to get on a greenway that is owned by a company that is out of Italy!

Abu Dhabi is poised to drop their connection to the dollar, why? Because the dollar is inflating like mad. They are experiencing 11% inflation in the UAE, because they don't fiddle with their inflation numbers. Kevin Phillips says our inflation numbers are total nonsense! A whole series of things happened, The Clinton Administration changed them, in 1994 the Bereau of Labor Statistics said if you work for less than half a year, you're now a "discouraged worker" and won't be counted as unemployed so right away 4 million people fell off the unemployment rolls. Looked good for the Clinton economy but really wasn't so good for us. They also thinned the economic sample by a sixth, it went from 60,000 families to 50,000 and guess who the 10,000 people they didn't samply anymore was, the inner city! So we no longer look at the areas where unemployment is highest in the United States, bottom line, we've got totally phony numbers. Now we can thank Clinton for that, but when we look at what was going on at the time with political pressure from the newly elected Republican majority in Congress coming into office we can probably attribute that to Clinton being weak knee'd in the face of what appeared to be a mandate from the people for Republicans on economic issues when in fact the Gringrich Revolution was mostly based on the culture war and the fear that things were going too far away from societal norms than fiscally.

According to Kevin Phillips, one of the top economists, and top conservatives in America says here's the real numbers, get this, today's unemployment rate is actually between 9 and 12%, our infaltion rate is actually between 7and 10%, our economic growth rate, once we take out the already rich and the super rich is not even there, we're creeping into recession, and that's Keven Phillips.

Meanwhile because our dollar has fallen so far, who won this battle between Bush and bin Laden, to the extent that it was a battle, not sure it ever was because Bush never went after him really. Nonetheless in 1998 Osama bin Laden said in an interview that one of the things that was really wrong with the world was the fact that we were "stealing oil from Saudi Arabia" his holy land. We were paying $11.00 per barrell in '98 as you may recall. How much did he say it should be? He said it should be about $144.00 per barrell. Guess what the price went to last summer, you guessed it folks, $144.00 per barrell. I would say that Osama bin Laden has effectivley won the economic war against the United States. He is bankrupting us. But really it's not so much bin Laden that's doing it, it's Bush and Republican policies, that's the bottom line, it comes down to that.

On top of that we've just seen the biggest job loss number come in for 2008, the biggest seen for FIVE AND A HALF YEARS actually at 159,000 jobs LOST!! That's NINE MONTHS IN A ROW OF JOB LOSS, and HUGE job losses at that every month!! Nobody's mentioning the fact that even if there were no jobs lost, there would still arguably be jobs lost due to the fact that on average we've got over 100,000 people coming into the job market every month as young people graduate from high school and college coming into the job market at higher numbers than people are retiring or dying. So we have to have 115,000 jobs a month just to keep even. At least during the 8 years of the Clinton administration for all of it's faults, over thirty million jobs were created, during the almost 8 years of the Bush administration, three million jobs have been created. Now granted under Bush economics and the second half of Clinton economic policies if you got lost your good paying full time union job and you took a part time job working at Wal Mart and another part time job working at a gas station, you are now considered to be 2 employed people.So according to statistics, things went up! That's how bad the book keeping is.Now it's cracking down into the 401k's, all the while the neocons have been saying we need to privatize Social Security and put it into a 401k type of system, forget pensions, that's so outdated, people want a fixed amount of money, not a pension that pays every month for the rest of their lives no matter how long like Social Security does, which is a pension, instead they want a defined benefit plan where if you put in 100,000 dollars, you get out 100,000 dollars plus intrest. The problem is, most 401k plans are based in the stock market and what's happening to the stock market now? It's going south! You hear anyone promoting privatization of Social Security now? Even John McCain flipped his flop from for it, to against earlier this month. I'm telling you folks, the Republicans have destroyed our economy for everyone.

Look, as long as we refuse to admit that Reagan didn't actually save us from the economic woes of the late 70's and early 80's and as long as we don't admit that it was all a fantastic illusion based on borrowed money that was never totally paid back (both with Republicans Reagan, Bush I and Bush II as well as the Democratic President Clinton) and the real problem of jobs and wages were never solved, only worsened during this time over the past 30 years, we'll only see our intrests fall to below the poverty line and our aspects of doing better seriously hobbled.

Remember, if Gen X is the first American generation to not do better than their parents did then the boomers will be the fist American generation to leave the country worse off than their parents left it to them, after all the country was coming back from the Depression by the end of Roosevelt's 2nd term though it would be until around 1953, '54 before the stock market had totally recovered some quarter century after the crash of '29, at least they spent that quarter century fixing the real problem. Now that we're more than a quarter century away from the end of the Vietnam war, and the resulting effect that the money borrowed for it had come due by the late 70's (considering it ended totally in '75) we never fixed the problem, only deluded ourselves about how well we had done and how far we had come.

Don't you think it's time to change, don't you think it's time for honesty in assesing the situation and actually fixing a thing or three that's wrong?

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Video: Mick Benedict - Chevy Van

I was just foolin' around with the video software and thought I'd throw this one out there. If you didn't know I've always had a thing for custom vans. I had a Jim Dandy of one when I was about 17.

I had a 1977 Dodge B-200 short wheel base deal with no windows except for the small slits in the upper rear corners. On the inside it had a parkay hardwood floor, quilted velor on the walls, the couch/bed, sink and ice box, moon roof, overhead console complete with CB radio and killer stereo.

On the outside the van had desert murals on both sides with letter about a foot high that stretched across from front wheel to back reading "GOOD TIMES MACHINE" in reflective lettering, and on the back had a metal plate that said "Keep On Truckin'". I miss that old heap.

Well, hope you enjoy. After finishing the video up I noticed that I had used a previous demo track so sorry about the parts that sound a bit wrong.

Thanks--Mick

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Reality of Reaganomics

As Gen X will remember, back around 1991, 1992 we were told that we would be the first American generation to NOT do better or even as well as our parents।

For years we wondered just why this was. We asked ourselves, can this be true? How can this have happened? Especially after the messiah Ronald Reagan came in and saved us all. Or did he?

The main reason behind the holding back of achieving the reality of the American dream and offered a watered down, debt ridden version of it is because of Conservative/Republican economic policies, because we have replaced old fashioned "demand side" economics that was the way this country was run for over 200 years and arguably goes back thousands of years.

Demand side economics basically is the idea that there are people out there that want to buy things, gee, I think I'll start a business to sell to them. With "supply side" economics, an invention that came to life during the Reagan adminsitration basically says, let's take the public's money and give it to wealthy people and hopefully they'll build more factories, and they'll get even more wealthy, and in the process of them buying yachts, they'll build factories that will create new jobs buidling yachts, and when they buy more Gulf Stream airplanes, Gulf Stream will create new jobs building Gulf Stream airplanes and hopefully they'll build more factories making more things that we'll want to buy.

THIS HAS BEEN A DISASTER!! IT DOESN'T WORK!!

The traditional concept of economics is people buy things because they have the money to buy them. What drives an economy is demand and the demand comes in part because people have the means to fulfill that demand. In other words they're making enough money to buy things.

There were really two pieces to Reaganomics, the first part basically said, we're going to forget about whether or not people can afford to buy things, we're going to tax working people, literally doubled the tax on the middle class and put in huge tax breaks (it went from 70% to 28% on people making over 3.2 million dollars per year) on the very wealthy and on corporations. Before Reagan came into office major corporations were paying 35% of all infastructure like police and fire that yes, even corporations use. Because of that we are now down to around 7 or 8% of our taxes in the United States are paid by corporations, the rest are paid by individual taxpayers, you know, you and me. There's the reason YOUR taxes are so high.

The Reagan Administration came to the conclusion, as a result of this supply side silliness that it doesn't matter if people actually have the money or not because we're all about raising corporate profits. So they cut corporate taxes, gave them money to the corporations by way of subsidies, bonuses, more free Federal land for the oil industry, mining industry, etc. We're going to change our rules on international trade so their manufacturing floors can move overseas, they can make the cars in Mexico, make the toys in China, etc, etc. so labor becomes cheaper, as a consequence of that corporate profits go up as well we didn't see necessarily where prices went down, but profits did go up. So the bottom line was, destroy the ability of the wage earner to earn money and shift all this money up to the top. There's a slight problem here, who's going to buy anything if they don't have income anymore?

We've seen the income of the average American worker erode after it had climbed for years and years. From 1949 to '59 the median income of American familes grew by 37%. From 1959 to '70 it grew by 41%, that's SUBSTANTIAL INCREASE in the income of working people. People were making more money every year. People knew that they could do better than there Dad had. Every year was a better year as far as income was concerned. By the end of the Carter Administration, mainly because we were ringing out all the money borrowed for the Vietnam War it dropped down to 6.8% during the late 70's and 97% of that went to the top 20% of families. Since Reagan came along real income for wage earning Americans, people who earn a paycheck and don't live off of dividends. Real income has DECREASED steadily.

So the Republicans looked at this and said this is working out well for our fat cat campaign contributors, the top 2%, the millionaires and the billionaires, the top tenth of 1%, but we've got this problem, we've got consumers that aren't buying stuff. So Greenspan came along and said, loosen credit, let them borrow. During the 40's and 50's when we were seeing wage growth every year, the middle class became strong, people bought their homes, they bought their cars, land, ASSETS! Let's strip them of their assets. Make it easy for them to refinance their house as times get tougher, make it easier to buy on credit, don't even buy a car, just lease it. Let them run up credit card debt high intrest rates and make it easy for the credit card companies to screw them.

Basically what has happened over the last 30 years Americans have, by government policy, been thrown massively in debt as a way to keep buying stuff, as a way to keep the economy moving and here we are now, it's coming to an end. It's coming to an end in two ways, Number One; We're reaching the limits of credit. Americans are tapped out. We're so broke we can't afford to borrow money anymore. Number 2; The government has been doing the same thing. 70% of the TOTAL DEBT of America was run up by THREE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS!!! Two Bushes and a Reagan.

The consequence of this is that our dollar is falling through the floor, now places like Abu Dhabi and other countries around the world that have a dollar peg are strongly considering de-pegging our currency and theirs.

It's time to get past ideology and admit to ourselves for all of their talk, all of their shoving it down our throat, it's time to admit that Republican policy has failed the United States of America, and as a result, we, the good ol' U.S. of A. as the leaders of the free world, with all of our promise to spread good will and uplift and promote democracy and freedom of thought everywhere have failed in our stewardship of our own Constitution, and our own freedoms.

We are citizens, it's time to act like it. Don't be distracted by a go nowhere culture war, be sensible and do what's right, stay away from what's wrong (even if it's legal) and don't be anybody's fool!!