Geez.

Let’s take a look at a few parts of the activities of the past 30 days. Signing of the largest spending bill in the history of the world. Holy cow. How can that not throw up all kinds of red flags? And where is this money going? How will it “stimulate” the economy? Truth of the matter is it won’t. Any “stimulus” it might provide will be in the form of jobs on the government payroll. And when was the last time you ever knew the government to reduce it’s payroll? That’s right, never. So not only are we spending a ton of money now, we’re increasing the size of government more than we ever have, which will mean more government spending tomorrow.

Has anyone noticed that every time the president opens his mouth to preach more doom and gloom, and blame the previous administration for all the ills in the world, that the market takes another few steps downward? All stocks are suffering, but banks are hardest hit right now. So the next step is the government “invests” in these banks to shore them up, at a greatly reduced per-share cost. Nice. The government gets a deal, and we end up with the entire banking system having the fed as the largest single shareholder. If the government controls the banking industry and the printing of currency, how can that be good? Tell me, if (and that’s a big if) the banks recover after this, and their shares go back up, does the government have to pay capital gains taxes on their increases? Something tells me “no”. They’ll just keep the stock and continue to control the banks.

What about the mortgage “crisis”? Well, since you asked, we have some legislation and spending for that, too. Let’s do this: if people can’t pay their mortgages, the government will step in and force the banks to rewrite the loans while paying for the shortfalls of the consumer. Hmmm, what does that encourage? In the areas where people “suddenly” find themselves upside down in their mortgage, because the value of their home has dropped so much they now owe more that it’s worth, what are they going to do? Stop paying the mortgage, of course, especially if they’re only eligible for government assistance if they’re delinquent. This will only cause matters to get worse, much worse. On top of that, it’s starting to become clear that the vast majority of foreclosures are occurring in 5 states (California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida, and Michigan). By a whopping margin. The home values there were significantly inflated compared to the rest of the country. Banks wrote notes to people who couldn’t have afforded them in the first place, they default, and the banks foreclose. This causes the values to drop, which causes a correction. The market takes care of itself. But since the fed is going to step in and encourage default, this will only accelerate the decline. Honest people who would otherwise find a way to make it by in lean times will say “forget it” and go into default so they can participate in the handouts. So now the government owns the mortgages too.

Healthcare is next, and gun control is after that. Just wait. And the president announces last week that he wants to cut the deficit in half while all this spending is going on. How in the world does that compute? We’re just being softened up for the tax increases that come along. And history shows that every time taxes are raised, the economy reacts negatively.

It concerns me that the big O is spreading the fear and doubt in an effort to depress everything so that he can rush as much government increase legislation through as possible. Pretty soon the majority of the country (in one way or another) will be working for the government, and then suddenly everyone is going to wake up and realize that we’ve been Socialized. That will be a scary day indeed. The road to recovery from that will be painful indeed.

Take off the party hat and think for a second.

Things either spiral down or they spiral up. And it’s all comes down to confidence and attitude. If you are confident and have a positive attitude, things tend to go your way. If you have a negative attitude and are scared to death of the next shoe to drop, you start hoarding what little you have, holing up in your home, spending as little as possible, and things go the other way. Some call that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, in that line of logic, think about it this way. If the President of the United States preaches nothing but doom and gloom, and says we’re going to use the power of the government to spend our way out of this (by increasing the size of government), and we’re going to help everyone out by giving them what amounts to $13 a week, what are you going to do with your $13? Probably put it under a mattress. It won’t go back into the economy. People will see that they’ll get a handout if they shirk personal responsibility. We’ll all go downward together.

But if the President said something like, “you know, our economy is still the largest in the world. We lead, we don’t follow. In fact, when we grow our economy, everyone benefits. More jobs are created. The tax base grows. Everyone wins. So, instead of spending us into oblivion, we’re going to do something radical. We’re going to do away with income tax for 2009. Take that money and get yourself back on track. Whatever that means to you.” Think about the impact that that would have on our economy right now. Sure, some people would use that shot in the arm to get themselves in a better financial position, perhaps getting out of debt. Many would go out and spend more. For about the same price as all of this spending the economy would receive a much more direct “stimulus”. And the stimulus would be at the hands of the people, not the government. Then the market could take care of itself.

If they really wanted to get radical, during the tax hiatus they could overhaul the tax system itself. Eliminate the stupid concept of taxing a persons earnings and move to a consumption based tax system. Forget this flat tax nonsense (although that would be better than what we have now). Tax me on what I consume and spend, not what I earn. That would have a much more positive natural effect on peoples spending and saving habits. Why should I aspire to earn more if that means the government is just going to take more?

I’ve about had all I can take of this class warfare rhetoric. “Tax the rich, they can afford it!” What a load of crap. It’s been said, but I’m going to say it again. I never got a job from a poor person. Ever. Here’s the deal: there will always been someone with more than you, and there will always be someone with less than you. You have to encourage people to move up in life. If I have money to spend, chances are I’ll spend it. Either by starting a company (creating jobs), or investing (creating jobs). Chances are not great that I’ll just stuff it in my mattress.

The government was put in place for only two reasons: to protect the people from foreign enemies (military) and to enforce the common laws of the land (judicial). It was not put in place to guarantee healthcare or build roads or help the poor or invest in the stock market or any one of the thousands of other things we’ve allowed it to do. The government has no place to tell me how I spend my money. It has no right to take my hard earned dollars and give them to someone who has a different set of socioeconomic circumstances. If you try to level the field by taking from me to give to someone else, you will only bring us both down. But if you get out of the way and let me decide who and what to invest in or give to, we all rise. That’s the fundamental difference between a market driven republic and a socialist/communist society.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for helping out your fellow man. If you vote left because you think your party is more compassionate towards those less fortunate, that’s great. But think about this: if you want to give to the poor and help out at the soup kitchen and volunteer at the hospital, that’s awesome. But do you want the government to mandate what you do in that regard? Should it be up to the political elite to decide where your earnings go? Or should you decide that?

With the current and proposed increases in government spending and scope, that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s all connected. How in the world can you have the “live and let live, what you do is your business and doesn’t affect me” attitude on the one hand, but then have the “I’ll tell you who gets your money” attitude on the other? You can’t have it both ways. It just doesn’t work. There are fundamental truths to the world.

I’m not happy with where the Republicans allowed us to go in the past few years, but is this the kind of “change” we were looking for? Socialism? It concerns me to no end that we now have a generation of voters and citizens who don’t even know the meaning. All they hear is headlines and rhetoric. And they can’t look past next week’s paycheck to see where we’re headed. We have a real opportunity to right the ship. But at this rate, we’re going to abandon it. So, if you lean left you can gloat all you want about your newly elected candidate. But I urge you to ask the question “is this really what I signed up for?”

In software, systems often reach a point where it’s easier to trash it all and rebuild than it is trying to support the current code stream going forward. You move forward with the learning and knowledge of the prior system, but start anew. A bunch of people from Europe did that about 250 years ago. Are we there again?

Remember, once a government increases its power, it very seldom gives it back. And we’re rushing towards the point of no return. Every example of Socialism and Communism has ended in revolution.

Think about it.

That pretty much means I’ll be avoiding all media on Tuesday. And Wednesday.

Except Lost. I’ll be watching that (but fast forwarding thru the commercials, thank you Tivo!)

If you have the stomach for it, head over to howobamagotelected.com. If you have the time, watch the 10 minute video up top. If not, head down to the bottom to the stats.

It’s absolutely crazy how the media contributed to this election. And it was very interesting to watch on election night when it was obvious that Obama would carry the day… the news anchors started commenting “wow, we really don’t know much about this guy, do we?”

The truth of the matter is they didn’t report much (most, really) of what they did know. And what they didn’t research and uncover may be even worse.

Again, it’s not that people are inherently stupid. It’s that we live in a headline driven society, and people don’t think. They go with the headlines. And that means the media ran this election.

And if you have a hard time swallowing that, step back from your preconceived notions for a moment and be objective. Seriously.

Just think for a second. 100 years ago, people got their news from papers. Longer stories, more details. Today, we get our information from a 8 minute segment on the 10:00 news. There’s, at most, about 3 sentences about each story. Headlines only. That’s all anyone hears.

And the lines between satire, comedy and real news are so blurred, people can’t remember who’s who or what’s what.

How in the world, HOW could a country that the media classifies as right-center elect the most blatantly liberal man to ever hold the office?

Ah well. I guess things had to get a lot worse before they could get better.

When a Democrat goes into the booth to vote, they see two choices: “Obama”, or “Not Bush“.

At any rate, whatever side of the aisle you’re on, if you haven’t already, go vote.

After you listen, read this.

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

When Pelosi tried to lay the blame a Bush’s feet, did they call her on it? Of course not. When Barack tries to blame it on the Republicans, do they call him on it? Of course not. They have no credibility. They’re dangerously close to being a joke. It’s sad, really.

Read the entire piece here.

Unfortunately, although humorous, it almost makes you cry that the democrats don’t get the fundamentals.

O wait, maybe they really do.

They’re just socialist.

Even the report of news to the contrary, they can’t let go:

The bruised economy limped through the first quarter, growing at just a 0.6 percent pace as housing and credit problems forced people and businesses alike to hunker down.

(emphasis mine)

A “recession” is successive quarters of negative GDP. So we’re not in a recession. No where near one.

And we won’t be in one before the next election. Sorry, dems.

The Story of Two Houses
Look over the descriptions of the following two houses and see if you can tell which belongs to an environmentalist:

HOUSE # 1:
A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and Natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern “snow belt,” either. It’s in the South.

HOUSE # 2:
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every “green” feature current
home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

HOUSE # 1 (20 room energy guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.

HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as “the Texas White House,” it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

via e-mail, checked.

The National Security Agency’s Internet site has been placing files on visitors’ computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most of them.

That’s the first sentence of a AP article that’s getting front-page play on all major news sites over the past 24 hours:

• ABC: NSA Web Site Places ‘Cookies’ on Computers
• MSNBC: NSA used banned data-tracking on Web site
• CNET: NSA catches heat over cookies
• CBS: NSA Web Site Uses Banned ‘Cookies’
• Fox News: NSA Caught Placing Cookies on Web Visitors’ Computers
• Breitbart (via Drudge): NSA Web Site Puts ‘Cookies’ on Computers
• Yahoo! News: NSA Web Site Places ‘Cookies’ on Computers

The media, in typical fashion, is so desperate to run a “Look how scary our government is” story that they don’t even bother to fact-check it.

Sorry, but “cookies” just don’t work the way this story implies that they do. This is very similar to the “cookies are bad because they can infect your machine with viruses” junk that went around in the mid-90′s.

It’s painful that the general population knows so little about the technology they’ve come to rely upon. Including the reporters in these stories that speak as though they thoroughly understand what they’re talking about. But, as usual, the problem is we live in a headline-driven society. And now popular blogs are picking up the story and reporting it as well, driven only by the desire to have something to criticize the current administration about:

• HD For Indies: Way OT – your government in action (UPDATE: Mike removed this story after I commented that his site placed 3 cookies on my browser, one with an expiration date of 2033)
• Slashdot: NSA Caught With The Cookies

This story is only interesting to left-leaning organizations/blogs, those that are desperate to pile-on the current wire-tapping stories that are going around (which is a whole ‘nother pile-o-smelly that I just won’t go into now).

Let’s make this simple:

1. Cookies are simply snippits of text that a website can ask your browser to send back the next time you visit. They’re not executable code. They don’t carry viruses. They don’t propagate.
2. Cookies are controlled by the BROWSER, not the web server. A browser (i.e. the user) can decide not to accept cookies. Or can toss their cookies at any time (pardon the pun).
3. Cookies will only be sent back the web server that sent them in the first place. A server cannot “poll” a browser for all it’s cookies. The browser sends the cookies that a server sent to it when a page on that server is requested.

Getting a little more technical: cookies are persistent state devices that allow the web to have a session oriented experience. Without them, most of the web wouldn’t work.

If your desperately looking for someone to be afraid of, look to the media agencies themselves: the ad agencies, google, etc. Because of the ubiquitous presence of these ads, they can truly track where an individual browser is going, because references to their servers are embedded in the pages you visit. I don’t know of many sites that embed image references directly to the NSA in their pages.

Think before you panic, and read past the headline before you jump to conclusions.

The last word on Bushâ??s bulge

Call off the conspiracy freaks. Now it can be told: That mysterious bulge on President Bushâ??s back during the first presidential debate was not an electronic device feeding him answers, but a strap holding his bulletproof vest in place.

Speculation about the bulge on the Internet only increased since Georges de Paris, the Washington tailor who makes Bushâ??s suits, told The Hill last month that it was nothing more than a pucker on the back of Bushâ??s coat caused when he crossed his arms.

But sources in the Secret Service told The Hill that Bush was wearing a bulletproof vest, as he does most of the time when appearing in public. The presidentâ??s handlers did not want to admit as much during the campaign, for fear of disclosing information related to his personal security while he was on the campaign trail.

(the quote is about half way down the page)

I said to the wife as soon as the story of the bulge broke that it was probably a vest, but of course the left couldn’t use common sense and had to jump to the “natural” conclusion that Bush needed a little help from Rove during the debate with Kerry.

The comic I saw about the bulge actually being the pull string (ala Woody from Toy Story), was especially funny ridiculous. Unfortunately, I can’t find a copy of it on the net to link to.

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Disgruntled Democrats seeking a safe Canadian haven after President Bush won Tuesday’s election should not pack their bags just yet.

Canadian officials made clear on Wednesday that any U.S. citizens so fed up with Bush that they want to make a fresh start up north would have to stand in line like any other would-be immigrants — a wait that can take up to a year.

Hehe.