Living green

Instead of making a big old footprint the way Algore and the Hollywood left do, Greenpa has an upfront list on the right hand side of his blog on how to live green.

1) Off the grid. 31 years. Solar electricity
2) Limited power- house electricity has 4 golf cart batteries.
3) Composting toilet. Outside. (eew, you do that indoors!?)
4) No road to house. You gotta walk.
5) No running water in house. Water pumped by wind.
6) Showers solar heated; outdoors.
7) Heat with wood. One stove in house-..
8) Cook with wood 8 months, propane in summer
9) Most of our fuelwood now is from trees we planted
10) No refrigerator. 31 years. You don't need one either.
11) Big garden.
12) Eat locally when possible, not obsessive about it.
13) No pesticide use ever, gardens or crops; not even organic (ok, except a little in the outhouse and the greenhouse...)
14) Earth sheltered solar greenhouse (aren't they all solar??)
15) Shut up about it. Nobody likes preaching.
16. These are our choices- yours are yours.

I respect a guy who walks his talk.

I don't respect the regulators and legislators who think we all should be living like Greenpa (rest assured they won't be). For instance, S.B. 221 and H.B. 562 in Ohio.

The Senate bill creates an Advanced Energy Standard (AES)--a minimum of 25 percent of electricity sold by Ohio's investor owned utilities must come from renewable (wind, solar, biomass, fuel cell, hydro), clean coal and advanced nuclear sources by 2025. Right off the bat you know the feds under the greenies and global warming alarmists will shut down the coal and nuclear industries, so that leaves it to your imagination on how we're going to light, heat, cool or cook in Ohio. Folks, in a good year we might get 37% sunshine, and we can't even put up a clothes line in Upper Arlington. Our sunshine is underground in coal where the good Lord stored it for later use.

The amended substitute House Bill 562 signed into law on June 24 provides for definitions and classifications of wind farms. I haven't seen any in Ohio, but they are ugly as sin on the prairies of Illinois. Ohio doesn't have prairies, it has Appalachia. We are part of the Pittsburgh Coal Bed with 34 billion short tons of coal. Both presidential candidates are mouthing platitudes about clean coal, but the alarmists will shut that down as soon as either one gets to the White House.

How do you site a wind farm? First you commission someone or something to do it through an initiative (that's a difficult word to spell and understand). Legislators do that too through, you guessed it, using our tax money. They have public meetings using the help of public institutions like universities which are also paid by us. Interestingly enough, the public always agrees with them and the project moves ahead. Right now they are looking at the western basin of Lake Erie as a "demonstration site." This will be sold to Ohioans as "economic development" even though we are a very rich coal state and much of our economy depends on coal.



There goes the neighborhood, and tourism, and shipping and fishing.

Cleaning the bathroom

This story is for Bev, who patiently reads through my political stuff hoping for a good story. She loves me, my cat and my foibles.

I've never claimed to be an organized housewife. Drives my husband crazy. He knows exactly where his Boy Scout folding cup from fifth grade is. So today I started on the guest room by moving a few things to my closet off the master bedroom. However, that bathroom is my husband's, so after I rearranged my shoes which our house guests will never see, I started on his bathroom. I'll be using this while our California relatives are here, so for my sake, I decided to attack it. I don't care if a guy is a bachelor or married or a CEO with a private office suite and maid service, men's bathrooms are always YUK!

While cleaning the shower (on my knees) I got a good look at the bottom of the shower door. Double yuk. The seal on the bottom of the flap was so mold covered, I think that's all that was holding the trim piece on. I saw there were 4 screws, and needed a Phillips screw driver. I know how to do that, so I went to the basement and found a small Phillips. Three screws came out after much effort and a blistered palm. The fourth wouldn't budge. I think this is a type of Murphy's Law--4 screws, 3 come out. So instead of yelling until I was hoarse from the second floor to the basement the way the other person in this marriage does, I walked down.

"There are four screws on the trim piece of the shower door, and I could only get three of them out. I'm trying to clean off the mold. Can you do the fourth one?"

"Phillips?"

"Yes, I got it out of the store room."

"I'll get my bigger one out of my tool bin in the garage."

"What's wrong with my Phillips?"

"Not enough torque."

"What's torque?"

he explained.

What's for dinner?

One good reason to blog about your menus or dinners, you can look back when company's coming and see what worked. My husband's brother and sister-in-law are coming next week, so last night my husband said, "What's for dinner Tuesday night (the day they arrive)?" I was still thinking about the dust in the guest room and cleaning out some closet space, so I drew a blank. Then I was looking through my January blog entries, and I FOUND IT.

My husband is the only one in his family who's only been married once. In the above photo (Bruce sibs with their father), there are 12 marriages represented and another three "significant others" that we've known over the years who've disappeared from view and the Christmas card list. Family holidays and get-togethers are always so interesting. They are all terrific people and we have a lot of fun.

How Democrats brought down the economy through ignorance, sloth and bribes

When Republicans tried to rein in the GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) our Democrat economic brain trust said: Maxine Waters, "Wasn't broke." Gregory Meeks, "I'm pissed off [that you're investigating this]." Barney Frank, "I don't see anything that's an issue." Lacy Clay, "Political lynching."



And now they want us to elect another Democrat to fix it. I've always thought of Obama as a marxist, Hillary as a socialist and McCain as a Democrat, so maybe they've got this one right. Vote McCain-Palin. It couldn't get worse than what these financial wizes whized. And if I may continue in that vein about Democrats, "they haven't got a pot to pee in" when it comes to the poverty of their ideas.

McCain got it; Obama didn't

Remember that Chicken Little thought the sky was falling and that Foxy Woxy could save her and the other animals she had frightened. Well, meet Foxy Woxy, the one Democrats want us to elect to guard the hen house.

Where were they then--before the bailout?

All the people who went to the elite schools, who had the law degrees, MBAs, PhDs, who peopled the econ and finance faculties at left and liberal institutions like Harvard and Yale, Columbia and Darmouth, and who had years on the banking and finance committees in Congress, who knew several languages, had passports and travelled, wore the right clothes and drank the expensive wines, who knew all the beltway gossip and sent their children to private schools. Where are they? Where were they? When all this stuff was coming down over a year ago. And they didn't notice? Or told their staff to check on it because they were too busy running for a bigger job. You know--the folks who make fun of the lack of sophistication and experience of say, a Sarah Palin.

December 16, 2007, Financial Times: "A plethora of opaque institutions and vehicles have sprung up in American and European markets this decade, and they have come to play an important role in providing credit across the financial system. Until the summer, structured investment vehicles (SIVs) and collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) attracted little attention outside specialist financial circles. Though often affiliated to major banks, they were not always fully recognised on balance sheets. These institutions, moreover, have never been part of the “official” banking system: they are unable, for example, to participate in Monday’s Fed auction.

But as the credit crisis enters its fifth month, it has become clear that one of the key causes of the turmoil is that parts of this hidden world are imploding. This in turn is creating huge instability for “real” banks – not least because regulators and bankers alike have been badly wrong-footed by the degree to which the two are entwined."

Or, as a blogger I've never heard of before wrote today: "The very dipsticks who gave you this crisis now promise to solve it for you. I told you: this is not an economic crisis anymore, it’s a full-blown political emergency, and they’re all trying to hang on to "power". They can’t, so prepare for the sound of goose-stepping boots in your streets." Automatic Earth

The summer of 1929

The Great Depression is generally dated as beginning with the crash of the stock market in the fall of 1929, but as I've mentioned before, for farmers it had already begun. In a desperate attempt (in my view as a non-farmer) to salvage their heavily mortgaged farms, my grandparents who owned several farms in Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska (and possibly Kansas) decided to fatten cattle on the plains of Nebraska, then ship them back to Illinois. Today we think of land as wealth, but when it is mortgaged for more than it is worth, being taxed, and you can't sell it, it's much like today's housing market when the bubble burst.

When I was a little girl I heard many stories about this summer of 1929, because Mom was in high school and for her the summer in Nebraska was sort of an adventure, although she was a rather studious, sober child and I think she knew they were in serious financial trouble. Today I received a letter she wrote in August 1929 from Caldwell, Kansas. Without sharing the personal "girl talk" with her friend here's her account--very much the way I remember her telling me over 50 years ago as we would do up the dishes after dinner. I haven't changed anything--spelling or sentence structure.

"I have been riding around in the car and sleeping and working all summer. The reading that I have done could be put in a thimble along with your finger. I have missed the piano lots but I haven't had any time for music at all. [This did surprise me a little because I rarely saw her play the piano--only the cello.]

Muriel and I go riding every day on our horses. I sure will miss my dear Blackie this winter. I have grown so very fond of her. [As a child I was horse crazy and would just be distraught at the thought that she had to leave her horse behind.]

On Sundays we generally go about the country. One time we visited the Indian mission on the Rosebud reservation just north of us in Dakota. It was a most interesting excursion. Another Sunday we set out for the forest and game preserve, but got lost in the hilly country around the Niobrara River (a most beautiful place).

Pa had to come to Caldwell so we all packed up and came along. We left Ted [the dog] at the tenants and the canary at Brills our nearest neighbor. The tenants have so many small children that we thought the canary would be safer where there weren't so many children and love of pets.

We have been here in Caldwell since Sunday evening. We started Friday morning about eight o'clock and spent the night in a tourist cabin at Humphrey. On Saturday we stopped at Lindsborg to see Mr. ------- [this must have been a former resident of their home community]. We found both Mr. and Mrs. at home and very glad to see us. It is very difficult to tell which of Mr's eyes is glass. It is his left one. He looks and talks just like he used to. They have a very nice home there and intend to settle permanently, I believe, as Mr. is very well liked.

We had some very bad roads after we got farther south and had to fight mud till we got within 40 miles of Wichita [paved roads would not be common for another decade]. Cars were sliding all over the roads and as we were all in the same fix everybody was friendly and lent less fortunate travellers a helping hand. One fellow had taken off his shoes and stockings and had rolled up his pant legs and was helping push their family car up a steep grade. He looked so awfully comical because he was fat and his clothes were very good, but he took it good humoredly one car pushed another one up the hill on his bumper. [It's possible that my Uncle Clare was with them to help with the driving, but I think he was with Grandpa to drive the cattle to Illinois. Grandma was thoroughly modern, and in those days loved to drive--although I never saw her drive a car.]

We stopped Saturday night at McPherson. They have wonderful cabins there, so nice and clean, toilets and hot and cold shower baths. Sunday we drove the remaining distance of 125 miles and stopped for a while at Wichita at the air fields. We watched a cabin plane go up many times with passengers. The fare was $2.50. [No mention is made of them taking a ride as I suspect the price was too high. It's another reason I think Clare was not with them--he was crazy about airplanes and died in one in 1944 in WWII.]

We have been house keeping in two upstairs rooms of the dairy house so as not to be a bother to the tenants, as they already are taking care of a woman and three of her children. [There was no plumbing or electricity in this building, which wasn't a house.]

We cook on our little Camp Kook [I think this is a cast iron dutch oven on legs to use over a fire]. It has been so handy. We bought a little cook stove for the ranch house at Crookston which we use for baking, washing and heat the rooms when it is chilly and it is chilly quite often.

I love the hills at Crookston, but it has become almost a relief to see level plains again, although I think the Nebraska climate up in the hills can not be beat, at least by Illinois.

We will go back to Crookston tomorrow and then start for Home (Franklin Grove, IL) the middle of next week and probably get home a week from this Sunday. But it depends on how long it will take Pa to get to Crookston with a carload of cattle, as we won't leave till he gets there too. We are anxious to get home a week before school starts so as to get straightened around."

Mother in 1929

Cells from human testes superior to embryonic stem cells

was the headline in the paper October 8. Well, good. They can start using men as cell farms and poking and proding them instead of pregnant women. If GWB never did one more good thing in his life time other than these three, 1) appoint two outstanding judges to the Supreme Court, 2) stay focused in Iraq and not turn tail and run out on the people he liberated, and 3) hold the line on growing embryos so the guys in lab coats could experiment, then he should go down in history as our finest President. Ever.

Abstract: "Human primordial germ cells and mouse neonatal and adult germline stem cells are pluripotent and show similar properties to embryonic stem cells. Here we report the successful establishment of human adult germline stem cells derived from spermatogonial cells of adult human testis. Cellular and molecular characterization of these cells revealed many similarities to human embryonic stem cells, and the germline stem cells produced teratomas after transplantation into immunodeficient mice. The human adult germline stem cells differentiated into various types of somatic cells of all three germ layers when grown under conditions used to induce the differentiation of human embryonic stem cells. We conclude that the generation of human adult germline stem cells from testicular biopsies may provide simple and non-controversial access to individual cell-based therapy without the ethical and immunological problems associated with human embryonic stem cells." Nature, online Oct. 8, 2008

"On Aug. 9, 2001, Bush announced his decision on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in an address to the nation. He said only research on stem cell lines already in existence by the time of his speech would be eligible for federal funding.

He said research on these stem cell lines was permissible because an embryo had already been destroyed. But federal funding would not be allowed for research on any stem cell line created after Aug. 9, 2001, as to discourage future embryo destruction. However, privately funded human embryonic stem cell research has remained permissible on either the “existing” human lines or on lines derived after August 9, 2001.

At the time of the address, the National Institutes of Health determined that there were 64 stem cell lines in existence. However, researchers have expressed doubts about how many lines are actually available for use, whether the cells provided enough genetic diversity and whether the lines are contaminated with animal cells. On Sept. 5, 2001, Thompson acknowledged that only 24 or 25 of the cell lines were established embryonic stem cell lines.

On Nov. 7, 2001, the NIH Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry was launched. It lists all the cell lines that are eligible for federally funded research, as well as contact information for researchers who wish to use them." Stem Cell Research 101

And I should give Bill Clinton and Congress of the late 1990s some credit too, who held the line all through the 90s with just a little slip up in 2000, which opened up those original lines for research. The U.S. never fell behind on stem cell research, in fact it led the world. It was only the federal money that was restricted--and my goodness, look what you can accomplish! You wouldn't know that if you only let NYT or WaPo form your opinions about the value of human life.

The Hank and Ben Show

Seen at jomama

Is it too early for a repeat? So much has happened in 2 weeks. Our investment advisor says we're the lucky ones--our portfolio has dropped "only" 8%--the market 20%. By next week it won't make much difference, but we'll be using cash to draw down our IRAs which we are required to do next year.

I’ve got the low down, trillion dollar, Ben and Henry Blues
by Norma Bruce

Woke up this morning ‘bout five fifteen,
Read my big ol Bible and a new magazine,
Jumped in the van, turning on the key
Let me tell you mama, there’s no stopping me.

Driving on to Main Street, stopping at the light
Heading for the coffee shop the other side of night,
Singing with the radio, changing stations now
Got the dog and pony show, candidates take a bow.

Mitigating factors, oozing out the wazoo,
Sell ‘em or hold ‘em, it’s all a rescue.
I’ve got the low down, trillion dollar
Ben and Henry blues.

Warm bakery bread and yeasty brown rolls
Congress still propping up the C-E-Os
Espresso coffee chai and tea
The government ya know--that’s just you and me.

NINJA loans for aliens, flipping for the rich,
From coastal homes, to buildings in the sticks,
McBama to Fannie to Goldman Sachs
They’re pointing fingers and covering tracks.

Mitigating factors, oozing out the wazoo,
Sell ‘em or hold ‘em, it’s all a rescue.
I’ve got the low down, trillion dollar
Ben and Henry blues.

Doesn't scare a Chicagoan

No, this isn't about who's the next president. Three people were murdered in Columbus' Hilltop area, execution style, in a home that had apparently become a drug deli. One local said, "It looked like a drive through." One of the deceased had the usual high recommendation from a relative, "He had a good heart, . . he was smart. He cared about his family. I don't think he deserved to be killed like that."

Do residents feel unsafe? One young woman, 28, according to the Columbus Dispatch said the block is generally good and that she wasn't frightened to live there.

"I'm from Chicago," she said. "It don't scare me."

Keep that in mind as you go to the polls.

Corporate executives and directors of Fannie Mae

Look how much they earned to screw up your retirement accounts. Click on each name. Some are on more than one board. You can check on their donations--Linda K. Knight, one I just chose at random--has made two $500 donations to Obama and one $500 donation to Chris Dodd.

A Tangled Web of Housing Grants

Since 1978 "NeighborWorks has been helping create opportunities for homeownership through NeighborWorks® America, local NeighborWorks organizations and Neighborhood Housing Services of America." Considering the amount of money they've been pulling down, I'm surprised anyone is left to recruit for the program! Just teasing. The money goes to fund their offices and salaries just as in most government programs.

Why, just last year NeighborWorks received a big chunk ($180 million) of the $360 million funds appropriated by Congress for 2008 to increase the availability of foreclosure counseling services across the country, and they're getting another $180 million from the newest bailout. Grants are being made to fund foreclosure counseling and legal assistance to homeowners at risk of foreclosure to housing counseling intermediaries approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Of course, if you sign up to take one of their classes so you can counsel people in foreclosure who were probably counseled by one of NeighborWorks home ownership counselors, you'll have to pay over $1,000 to take the class. It's only $610 to learn how to prequalify potential buyers. Who knows where the $360 million goes--the courses certainly aren't free--maybe to pay your salary after you become a counselor?

And look who helps NeighborWorks--research and input from ACORN, and La Raza, the militant organization that wants to return our southwestern states to Mexico is on their Advisory Board. Not that advocacy groups like NeighborWorks much. Seems to be a parting of the ways when slicing and dicing the poorer communities.

And you should see the career opportunities in this organization. Big time. I don't know how many poor get into homes, but there are bunches of high level administrative jobs for bureaucrats like DIRECTOR OF FINANCE & ADMINISTRATION, Senior Corporate Partnership Development Manager, and PRESIDENT/CEO! And you can work in the nice trendy suburbs of DC (except for that one with the Navajos--you need to go to NM and have a brokers license).

How buyers were lured into home ownership they couldn't afford

In June 2005, Black Enterprise was encouraging potential minority home buyers with the following article, which contained a chart (scroll to the bottom of the article) of private and government programs to assist with low or no down payment home ownership:

With interest rates still near historic lows and the growing popularity of low down payments and "no money down" mortgage programs, more families and individuals are taking the plunge into first-time homeownership. . . many people are still delaying building wealth through homeownership because they think they must already have the money in the bank to do it. "People assume they'll need 15% to 20% down to get their first home, which is simply not the case these days." [said Pierre Dunagan, president of The Dunagan Group].

Fannie Mae, while not a lending institution itself, is a government-sponsored enterprise that buys loans from lenders to make mortgage financing available to more borrowers. A number of financing programs that don't require the standard 20% down payment -- or any down payment at all -- are available through approved Fannie Mae lenders and mortgage companies. One of them is the Flexible 100 program, which is especially popular with first-time home buyers. Borrowers need only contribute $500 toward the down payment and/or closing costs. The Flexible 97 program, which allows borrowers to put up just 3% of the cost of the home, is also available through Fannie Mae. Banks have created similar programs to help new home buyers. . .

SPECIAL PROGRAMS MAKE IT EASIER
Many of the new loan products for first-time home buyers have been created specifically to make homeownership easier, says Fannie Mae spokesperson Sandy Cutts. "In addition to our Flex programs, we have the Expanded Approval/Timely Payment Rewards program for people with less than perfect credit. With this program, the homeowner makes on-time payments for two years, then after that time, their interest rate automatically lowers," she explains.

Cutts also says Fannie Mae has rolled out a new pilot product called the Payment Power program, which allows borrowers to defer two monthly payments a year -- but no more than 10 over the life of the loan -- in exchange for slightly higher interest rates. The loan reamortizes, meaning that the skipped payments are recalculated into the remaining payments. This program may be especially beneficial for people who hold seasonal jobs, such as teachers and construction workers who may not have an income during certain times of the year.

Dunagan says there are also 100% financing programs available for first-time home buyers but, in some cases, they have higher interest rates and higher private mortgage insurance costs. He says deciding whether having a higher interest rate is better than long-term renting is an important decision prospective home buyers will have to make.

One of the programs listed in this article is AmeriDream, which as near as I can determine was a shell game founded in 1999 under the Clinton Administration whereby builders “donated” the down payment to a charity (AmeriDream), took a charitable deduction, and then that was gifted to the buyer. The buyer was actually charged that amount more for the house, plus paid a fee to AmeriDream, but it looked like they had the down payment to qualify for a loan. By law the seller gifting the buyer is illegal, and of course it hurt many buyers in the long run, who would have been better off saving first, buying later. The AmeriDream program was eliminated on July 30, 2008, after which Representatives Gary Miller, Maxine Waters, and Christopher Shays introduced legislation to reauthorize and reform the charitable down payment assistance funded in part by sellers. The program was eliminated by legislation signed by President Bush on July 30, 2008. It still has a website, and is appealing for funds--and its life.

The Black Enterprise article has links to some other programs--Austin, Sacramento, Washington, DC, etc. but I haven't looked at all of them. Some sites I googled no longer exist--I suspect the companies have gone under with their clients.

Cheers for GWB for eliminating AmeriDream, but I suspect it will resurrect itself after Maxine can show her face in public again. Miller and Shays serve on the House finance and banking committee, and Shays is up for reelection.

Creating the meltdown
--a rousing cheer for the Democrats

Fannie, Freddie, Sallie,
Barry, Nancy, Harry,
Barney, Chris and good ol' Joe
Watch our pensions as they go

Yeah team Democrats!
Boomers, Yuppies and the old
On team Democrats!
Watch our pennies not our gold.

A house of very shaky cards
with old junkers in the yards,
On the backs of working poor
Now you're checking us for more.

Yeah team Democrats!
Boomers, Buppies and the cool
On team Democrats!
More control for which you drool.

Their dream, our nightmare

Ordinary people get it. Why doesn't Congress?

In one month, we've lost more value in our retirement funds than the value of the mortgages of many of the home buyers the government is trying to bail out. Why are we being punished for the misdeeds of Congress, who actually alotted $20,000,000 a year to protect buyers from "predatory lenders" while forcing banks to make risky loans.

We played by the rules--bought our first house in 1961--didn't exceed credit limits or go into consumer debt, lived in a crummy neighborhood, got fixed rate mortgages, fixed up our homes and never missed a payment. We weren't the ones who thought low income workers had to have "the American dream." We actually understood from 47 years of home ownership that a home isn't an investment, it's a place to live that you care about more than the place you rent. Period.

But Congress thought it was a good idea to provide NINJA loans (no income, no job, no assets) and push low income people into the suburbs to fill up cheaply built houses where they had no network of friends, services or church and a long drive to work. Not the best place to be when gasoline prices started to soar due to more diddling by Congress with e-regulations.

All this was encouraged by the other dream--"wealth redistribution" and "justice" (just-us) pushed by the left, by church groups and "organizers" with their hand out, like ACORN, and the clever entrepreneur real estate home flippers, and wealthy CEOs atop the Fortune 400 who never miss a chance to make a buck with government loop-holes.

Now you want to hand out below market rates to rescue these mortgages, and that's what got my retirement account where it is? Are you guys crazy? Why do you want to rescue people who couldn't make it the first time, but not me who did?

Let's stop grilling CEOs

For now. I don't care if they make $90 million a minute, if it's legal and their stockholders don't object. Franklin Raines (formerly of Fannie Mae) made far more than Hillary Clinton and Barney Frank who both make way more than I do, and after the first million or so, I lose track of who is being greedy.

First, let's serve up some toasted Congress for public heckling, disgrace, fines and prison.

So just how did a little ACORN bring down the mighty oak of our economy? By manipulating some very vague regulations about how banks should treat low income applicants for mortgages in a social engineering law of the 1970s. Doesn't this sound innocent enough? But it's a recipe for blackmail once ACORN started realizing they could rake in big money from the government by spinning off smaller groups to get government grants (millions and millions from HUD) and big pay-offs from the banks (more millions in hush money).

The OCC encourages community and civic organizations, government, and other members of the public to express their views about a bank’s CRA performance to the bank and the OCC at the earliest possible time. This allows the bank to address any concerns and the OCC to take the public’s views into account in evaluating the bank’s CRA record and reaching conclusions about its performance ratings. If those comments are sent to the OCC, the OCC will also consider them when reviewing applications covered by the CRA. OCC Link

Some of you "get" the voter fraud stories we see about ACORN every election cycle--just 6,000 votes have determined a president in Ohio [Carter], the swing state, and this year they probably bussed in that many homeless in our one week marathon of register and vote the same day. Fox is all over this story today. Why not go directly to START? Voters and investors should be more outraged about how they've set in place the machinations to destory your retirement income (46% of Americans are invested in the stock market which has just recently lost trillions).

“Critics of the notion that CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) had a major impact on the subprime crisis ask how a law passed in 1977 could have caused a crisis in 2008? The answer has a lot to do with ACORN — and the critical years of 1990-1995.”

Read the whole story. Planting Seeds of Disaster; ACORN, Barack Obama, and the Democratic party. By Stanley Kurtz

The new racist vocabulary

The left just keeps embarrassing itself looking for new ways to cry "RACIST!" First it was "dressing a Moose," according to that Floridian Hastings, whose only regret is he wasn't clearer in how he called her a racist. Then "palling around" with a terrorist (Bill Ayers, a person of pallor) was a racist comment according to a hypersensitive AP writer. And now they've gone berserk over "that one." Obama can be "the one," but not "that one." And to think Hip Hopsters make millions with the "N" word. And yet, look at what his running mate called him and the left tolerated and even rewarded that.

Biden has a long history of making statements that get him in trouble. He was forced to apologize to Obama almost the moment he entered the race for president after he was quoted as describing Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," a remark that drew criticism for being racially insensitive. [Press Democrat]

The left is truly losing it.

Bill Ayers, proud terrorist, stands on the American flag, but Palin is called a racist for pointing out his long standing friendship with the Obamas.

Sarah Palin and the rape kits

Here's another favorite lie of the left about Palin.

The Boston Globe editors opine about Sarah Palin and the rape kit allegations. The only problem is they ignore any facts that are inconvenient to their stated position, which is, apparently, that Palin is akin to the Anti-Christ, but more evil. Link.

It begins with the headline, "Wasilla Made Rape Victims Pay." Except that there's no evidence that any rape victim was ever charged by the town. In fact, the town has financial records indicating they did pay for rape kits during Palin's time as mayor.

The Globe writes, "The policy so outraged the Alaska Legislature that in 2000 it passed unanimously a bill forbidding such fees." As discussed earlier, in six separate hearings on the legislation, Wasilla was never mentioned. Other, much larger jurisdictions like Juneau were mentioned as places where victims were being charged. During those hearings, the deputy commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Public Safety testified that he had never found a police agency that had billed a victim.

They are so afraid, so very afraid, of a woman. It really is in a class with the Bush Derangement Syndrome.

The Effort Diet

Seth says that effort is more important than luck, and suggests you try his diet

. . . here's a bootstrapper's/marketer's/entrepreneur's/fast-rising executive's effort diet. Go through the list and decide whether or not it's worth it. Or make up your own diet. Effort is a choice, at least make it on purpose:

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of 'spare time' from your life. This can include TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks and meetings. Up to you.

2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:
1. Exercise for thirty minutes.
   
2. Read relevant non-fiction (trade magazines, journals, business books, blogs, etc.)
   
3. Send three thank you notes.
   
4. Learn new digital techniques (spreadsheet macros, Firefox shortcuts, productivity tools, graphic design, html coding)
   
5. Volunteer.
   
6. Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
   
7. Give a speech once a month about something you don't currently know a lot about.

3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

If you somehow pulled this off, then six months from now, you would be the fittest, best rested, most intelligent, best funded and motivated person in your office or your field. You would know how to do things other people don't, you'd have a wider network and you'd be more focused.

It's entirely possible that this won't be sufficient, and you will continue to need better luck. But it's a lot more likely you'll get lucky, I bet.

Where have you been all my (blogging) life?

Today I found Dennis. He's a library director and theologian. Can't imagine I've not had him on my links, unless he fell off during one of my remodelings or has used a pseudonym.

"Dennis Ingolfsland: I usually write these commentaries in the evenings or weekends from my recliner (hence the name, Recliner Commentaries). I am a library director with masters' degrees in library science and theological studies. I also have a doctor of philosophy in religion and society. I've published about 30 articles, 50 book reviews, numerous scholarly conference papers and I have an insatiable interest in almost everything."

Wow. He's written more on the current campaign and Obama than I have! Wow. What a guy.