stealthisbook's blog

We're screwed. The deciding factor for a distressingly large number of voters in 2000 and 2004 was that they felt that George Bush was somebody that they would like to have a beer with. Bush had by then been quite vocal about the fact that he was a tea-totaler and recovering alcoholic. I can only assume that if there was going to be a hypothetical kegger and the rich guy was going to buy the booze and not be drinking any of it, then the average voter said what I would-- hell yeah!

Now we're up against a guy whose wife controls a massive beer distributorship. Follow the liquor when they're counting the election results.

I'm not entirely sure when the term "fixed income" became associated almost entirely with retirees. Sure, you can't work overtime to get a bigger social security or pension check at the end of the month, but at least social security has periodic cost of living increases. Nationally, average wage growth has been static for the past eight years and if you add inflation, wage earners are looking at taking home less now in earnings than they did when Bush was elected.

I missed this when it passed a couple of years ago, but our darling Marilyn inserted an amendment into the Higher Education Reconciliation Act of 2005 that exempted owners of small, family-owned businesses from reporting their assets when they applied for federal financial aid. Her reasoning was that it was unfair for small business owners to face the prospect of selling off parts of their livelihoods in order to send their kids to college. Fair enough... except that the qualification hinges entirely on the number of employees, not the value of the assets.

A June 9th article in US News and World Report (http://www.usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2008/6/9/why-the-economy-is...)
actually cited the fact that union membership is down as a good thing. The author pointed out that with union membership down, cost of living adjustments mandated in collective bargaining agreements won't be an issue in raising inflation.

Yeah... so it's good that employers aren't pressured in some fashion to compensate their emplyees in a reasonable way. Buying gas and groceries isn't a priority in the world of economics.

We're constantly reminded that the Bush administration views the war in Iraq as the central front in the war on terror. Often we're told that if we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here. That's assuming that fighting terrorists (and a variety of new religious and nationalist identified groups) there precludes an attack here. Most folks would say that it increases the chances of one group or another taking a stab at us since this massive, baseless, and brutal war has alienated huge swaths of the planet's population.