Say Anything Blog

Here’s the headline:
Job losses fuel foreclosure woes in Ind. county

MSNBC writes this whole sob story, and only casually mention that the reason that the husband in the first example can’t find work is because nobody should have hired him to begin with:

Because of his immigration status, Aguirre could not collect unemployment. He could find nothing that paid anywhere close to his previous wages

And since when did “Illegal” become “Undocumented”?!?!
*fumes*

The non-illegal example that they use is so non-typical that it’s laughable:

“...they were switched into a much higher interest rate than they had been told they could get, ... they found they had been misled about the condition of the building, which needed a new roof, foundation work and many other costly repairs… Their insurance company refused to cover the house and the lender added $400 a month in “forced-placed” insurance premiums to their mortgage payment, driving it from $800 to $1,200 a month

To me, this just confirms the notion that most people losing their homes should have seen it coming.  I also blame the banks that were dumb enough to lend money to an illegal immigrant and a guy who didn’t get a home inspection, lock in an interest rate, and get an insurance quote before closing.  Stop wasting my money on these fools!!!

I don’t normally follow polls, but
Wow:

Where does the government get its money anyway? While 65 percent understand the government’s money is their taxpayer dollars at work, some 24 percent think the federal government has “plenty of its own money without using taxpayer dollars.”

U.S. Guns Arming Mexican Drug Gangs; Second Amendment to Blame?
Officials: More Than 90 Percent of Weapons Used by Mexico’s Drug Gangs Come From the U.S.

Wow, we’re supposed to believe that Mexico has an effective control of their gun trade even though they have no control whatsoever over the drug trade?  Then the article shows photos of guns that are already mostly illegal in the US.

Furthermore:
The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=6960824&page=1

I guess that the donkeys forgot the lessons of the 1994 election.  It’s like deja vu all over again.

Obama warns of need for stimulus bill right away

He rejected the argument that more tax cuts are needed in the plan and that piecemeal measures would be sufficient, arguing that Americans made their intentions clear in the election.

This bill is a disaster

“I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change,” he wrote.

Funny, but I thought that Republicans lost in Nov. was because they did not follow through on their promise to control spending.  Now Obama is claiming the exact opposite.

As a follow up to the discussion on the Jimmy Carter a few days ago:

One of the next Virginia class submarines will be SSN-784 North Dakota.

(We already got ours - the USS Missouri, SSN-780, is sitting partially-finished in Groton in the same location where the North Dakota will eventually be built.

Virginia Class Ship List

(The JC is an extended Seawolf Class)

Battleship North Dakota

Employers cover workers, but parents can’t afford plans that insure children

So basically the myth that all of these uninsured kids exist due to lack of affordable coverage is untrue.  The parents choose not to purchase the additional coverage for their kids.  Why?  Because they don’t have the foresight to see the need and because they are used to walking out on ER bills and on having medicaid pick up the bill, so they don’t see any use.  These are the same people who don’t carry car insurance because they don’t see a need.

What does the author decide to do?:  Add a quote from some jackass who says we should pay for it instead by expanding SCHIP, then point out that eeeevil GWB vetoed expanded entitlement for these people who choose not to care for their children.

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I just hope that he’s running for something else...

I seriously hope that Jay Nixon is not our next governor.

This guy’s parents didn’t expect the state to punish their son - they took matters into their own hands and gave away his car:

In that episode, a state trooper stopped a sport-utility vehicle about 1:20 a.m. on Interstate 90 in Bellevue after he noticed the vehicle drifting across traffic lanes. When the trooper approached the couple inside, he found they both were naked and trying to stash an empty wine bottle.

King County District Court Judge Linda Jacke ordered 24 months of probation; a 90-day jail term, which was suspended; attendance at a DUI victims’ panel; and fines that totaled $1,718.

His family presented documentation showing that his SUV has been donated to a charity.

And, Jacke was told, the young man’s girlfriend has left him.

“The price he paid at home was far greater than what he paid in court,” said the judge.

“Fully Refundable” get a new meaning:

WASHINGTON (CNN)—President Bush on Friday proposed a temporary, broad-based tax relief package aimed at spurring the nation’s slowing economy.

Right now, President Bush is said to want an income tax rebate that would be generated by eliminating the 10 percent tax bracket, which applies to roughly the first $8,000 of income for single filers and the first $16,000 of income for married couples filing jointly.

Democrats could get on board with an income tax rebate if it’s fully refundable, meaning that everyone with earned income would get the full rebate, even if they didn’t make enough money to owe income tax, said Furman.

This is just like the Earned Income Credit wealth redistrubution which already exists. If it’s not tax relief, why call it as such?

This irritates the heck out of me. Any family with as little as 250 acres risks losing their land after 2010 due to the inheritance tax relief disappearing coupled rising land values (which is worse than the AMT ever dreamed of being) and the Democrats want to expand welfare instead of providing honest tax relief.

Update:
Please ignore the first comment (unrelated to the post) and feel free to contribute if you have something relevant to say. Otherwise make your own posting for your rants.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/livenewsevents

Sky news is reporting that Benazir Bhutto died after being targeted by a gun & suicide bomber attack.

Via Drudge:

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

It’s been easy to understand why Poland, Romania, and other Eastern European countries have been such great allies of the US for the last 15 years - they value their freedom because they still remember what it’s like not to have any.

It’s nice to finally see somebody make this comparison:
1. GW alarmists cry about renewable fuels and other ways to combat GW since, reasoning that, among other things, the poor will starve if Earth’s temperatures rise:

Mounting political panic over carbon emissions has encouraged politicians in European and America to raise targets for the biofuel content in a litre of petrol.

2. World increases ethanol production in response.

“There is a new demand component,” Shayle Shagam, a livestock analyst at USDA, said. “Livestock producers have to bid against the ethanol industry to get supplies of corn.”

3. Food prices rise.

The USDA predicts that food prices will rise by up to 3.5 per cent this year as farmers rein in output in response to feedstock costs.

heh.
Dash for green fuel pushes up price of meat in US

I guess I’ll have to eat more deer this year…

It’s time to consider changes to the 14th amendment:
Pleading to keep families intact

As the government’s crackdown on illegal immigrant workers has intensified in recent months, so have the consequences for a large group of U.S. citizens: American-born children of illegal immigrants.

At least the author was realistic:

“Kids often pay for the bad decisions of their parents. If you do something wrong that sends you to jail, well, your kids suffer for that. If you are careless with your mortgage and lose your house, your kids suffer along with you,” he said. The parents “knew what they were doing when they had kids here, knowing that they were still illegal immigrants.”

I think that the media and lawmakers need to keep in mind who these people are:  criminals and scofflaws.

I’m in favor of encouraging legal immigration and I think that we need to improve the process and increase the numbers of immigrants taken into the US each year, but I also think that we need to treat those who ignore our laws as the criminals they are.

A rare media story appears to support the Bush Administration in two of the US attorney firings:

Area U.S. attorney lauded in gun cases

The [Western MO] office could have been a prosecution model for two who were fired, Justice Department report shows.

At least two of the former U.S. attorneys fired last winter were criticized for their inattention to gun prosecutions, according to documents released recently as part of Congress’ investigation.

A performance review of former U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden of Nevada noted that his staff lawyers “failed to consistently follow (Department of Justice) policies with regard to firearms prosecutions.”

For Carol Lam, former U.S. attorney in Southern California, the criticism was more pointed.

“The president has made clear he expects gun crime to be a significant effort, but (the Southern District of California) has only brought a fraction of the cases of other extra-large districts,” the evaluation read. “Despite its size and population it ranks 91 out of 93 districts in terms of average numbers of firearms cases since (fiscal year) 2000, doing only an average of 18 cases.”

Lam also was criticized for the “modest” quantity of crimes-against-children cases filed in Southern California.

According to U.S. attorney caseload statistics released recently, her district filed four child pornography and abuse cases in 2005, while prosecutors in western Missouri filed 47, the sixth-most out of 93 districts.

It appears to me that these two had ample time to realize that their performance was not sufficient prior to their dismissals.

Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says

GAAKH!  Now humans are polluting the neighborhood.  This never would have happened if Algore had been elected.

“The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars,” he said.

Abdussamatov’s work, however, has not been well received by other climate scientists…

...who compete with him for funding.

“His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion,” said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England’s Oxford University.

no kidding

“And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report.” (Related: “Global Warming ‘Very Likely’ Caused by Humans, World Climate Experts Say” [February 2, 2007].)

why do these lunatics continue to unquestioningly refer to the same politically motivated studies?

Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that “the idea just isn’t supported by the theory or by the observations.”

Theories are just that, theory.  Observations:  gee it’s getting warmer here, so that must be due to human activity.

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