BottleOfBlog

Bush Encourages Americans To Invest In Worthless IOUs

Last night, in his "Blithering Idiot Tour" press conference, Preznit Monkeyhead said:

I know some Americans have reservations about investing in the stock market, so I propose that one investment option consist entirely of treasury bonds, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.

Options like this will make voluntary personal retirement accounts a safer investment that will allow an American to build a nest egg that he or she can pass on to whomever he or she chooses.

Which is, really, kind of shocking, don't you think?

I mean, here's Bush, last night, trying to stutter and stammer about how, if Americans are uneasy about investing their Social Security, they can invest it in United States treasury bonds which are absolutely, good as gold, guaranteed!

And, muthafucker, if he didn't just say this three fucking weeks ago!

PARKERSBURG, West Virginia. (AP) -- President Bush on Tuesday used a four-drawer filing cabinet stuffed with paper representing government IOUs the president said symbolized the Social Security trust fund's bleak outlook for meeting Americans' future retirement needs.

"A lot of people in America think there is a trust -- that we take your money in payroll taxes and then we hold it for you and then when you retire, we give it back to you," Bush said in a speech at the University of West Virginia at Parkersburg.

"But that's not the way it works," Bush said. "There is no trust `fund' -- just IOUs that I saw firsthand," Bush said…

Chapman opened the second drawer and pulled out a white notebook filled with pseudo Treasury securities -- pieces of paper that offer physical evidence of $1.7 trillion in treasury bonds that make up the trust fund.

Yeah, that's right.  Three weeks ago, he told the people of the United States that the Social Security Trust fund was a bunch of worthless paper--just a bunch of IOUs in the form of worthless treasury bonds that, presumably, the government was never going to pay.

And, last night, he looked the American people right in the eye, and he said, "Hey, we need to establish personal, private accounts because the treasury bonds our trust fund is made up with are worthless.  But if you're nervous about investing your private account in the stock market, you can always invest it in treasury bonds, which are guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the United States government."

What an unbelievable horseshitter!  How does anybody take this fucking joker seriously?  He'll say anything at anytime and he never means any of it!

Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

In case any of you were wondering why our elected representatives, acting on our behalf, felt the nation needed bankruptcy reform, despite the fact that about 0.0001% of Americans were crying out for it, here's what the ultra-conservative nuts at the Heritage Foundation have to say about the need for bankruptcy "reform":

The key fact in the U.S. debate is that bankruptcy filings have been doubling every decade for nearly three decades. The abundant supply of credit is not matched by an abundance of personal responsibility in current bankruptcy law…

The answer is that the law as revised in the late 1970s set up a flawed system. The result is more personal distress on the part of debtors, and an unfair shifting of the costs to others in the form of high credit card interest rates.

And since, as you know, our government is basically run by ultraconservative nuts, the above is the reason we got this unwanted, unneeded piece of crap legislation shoved down our throats.

The sorry fact is, people, that you have all been acting like irresponsible children.  You, the American people, have failed to take personal responsibility for your debts and so the various barons, and dukes, and earls in the People's House of Representatives had to vote to teach you a lesson:  there is no free lunch.

Unless, of course, you actually happen to be a member of the House of Representatives--or maybe the Republican House majority leader--then there's not only a free lunch, but free airfare, free golfing, tickets to the theatre, taxpayer financed healthcare and pensions, limos, and whatever else your little, hardened, greedy shrivelled up blackened heart desires.

But for the rest of us lowly deadbeats--or, as the Constitution likes to call us, We, The People--it's strictly pay as you go.  You get what you pay for.  And anything you get, you gotta pay for.

That's called "personal responsibility".

And it's not very personally responsible to try to get out of your credit card debts by going bankrupt.  That's abusing the bankruptcy laws.  Though, one wonders why getting out of all your other kinds of debt by going bankrupt is still okay, but getting relief from twenty percent credit card debt is abusive.

Like if you had an outstanding bill with your grocer, it's okay to get relief from that under our bankruptcy laws.  However, if you charged that grocery bill on your credit card, well, now you're really just being irresponsible and abusing the bankruptcy laws, and so we need "reform".

See?  There's a difference.  Although, what the fuck it is I have no idea.

And your elected representatives don't either.  Because when they charge something on their credit card, it's not their credit card.  It's Jack Abramoff's credit card.  And they don't have to pay that back.

So, they, your representatives, can't understand what your beef is about credit card debt.  As far as they know, Jack Abramoff pays it off each month.  What do you need bankruptcy relief for?  You bunch of irresponsible whiners.  Just let Jack pay it and shut the fuck up.

I'm also at a loss to understand how it's consumers who are irresponsible when they lack the means to pay off billions of dollars in unsecured loans from credit card companies.  I mean, really, isn't it the credit card companies who are irresponsible for making so many bad loans?  Shouldn't the credit card companies have to take personal, corporate responsiblity for making unsecured loans to people who can't pay them back?

Nobody's making the credit card companies loan money.  And, the credit card companies are well aware of the bankruptcy laws--it ain't a fucking surprise to them when some high risk debtor goes belly up and gets bankruptcy protection!  The bankruptcy code isn't a goddam secret!  They knew what they were getting into.  Or they should have.

But for some reason, to your Republican government, that's responsible bidness--making high risk, unsecured loans.   But it's irresponsible for people receiving those loans to use the lawfull and long standing, well known protections of the bankruptcy statutes for relief.

I also don't get how our elected representatives feel the desperate need to give an added layer of protection to credit card companies, which made 30 billion dollars in profit last year, when credit card companies already have protection against defaulting debtors.

What protection is that?  It's the fact that credit card companies, when interest rates are the lowest they've ever been in my lifetime, can loan money to debtors at 24% APR.  Get it?  When the prime rate is down in the low single digits, these companies are loaning money at 24%.  And the reason why they're allowed to do that is because a lot of people are going to default on these incredibly high interest loans.  And, in that way, the credit card companies have either already made a profit on a bankrupt debtor, or they'll make up their loss on the rest of the debtors out there.

If the credit card companies don't have to worry about defaulting creditors under the bankruptcy code anymore, why do they still get to loan out the money at outrageous usury rates????

Since they've gotten their bankruptcy "reform", shouldn't their rates be limited to a couple of points off prime?  I don't know.

You figure it out.

And, if you can't, you can always write or call your Congressional district duke, or baron, or earl, and maybe one of their squires will explain it to you.  Or clap you in irons.

But the thing I really don't understand is the hilarious justification that bankruptcy relief costs us, The People, all more in the form of higher credit card interest rates.

Well, it's not so much that I don't understand it, it's more that I'd like to punch the majority of the House and Senate, and every sumbitch at the Heritage Foundation in the nose for foisting such a grotesque lie on me and my fellow country men and women.

Here's a little known secret I'm going to tell you:  whenever any business says they need some sort of legislation passed because, without it, consumers will have to pay more--that business is lying to you.

How do I know that?  Why should you know that?

Because, in your entire lives, have you ever, in the wake of some legislation that was presumably passed to stop The People from bearing the burden of higher costs, experienced lower costs?

Fuck no!  You'll get medical malpractice litigation "reform", and the cost of health care won't go down.  You'll get class action, products liability litigation reform and the costs of products won't go down.  You'll get energy deregulation "reform" and the cost of heating your home won't go down.  You'll get tort reform and your car insurance and home insurance and whatever else won't go down.

Companies don't spend billions of dollars lobbying this kind of legislation to lower your costs.  They do it to increase profit margins.

And with bankruptcy "reform", you are not going to ever, ever get cheaper credit.  No matter what the shameless horseshitters at MBNA or the Heritage Foundation keep telling you.

For instance, in the wake of this unwanted, unneeded, insulting and, frankly, cruel bankruptcy "reform", I get this letter today from one of my credit card companies, which is just leaping at the opportunity to give me credit at lower interest rates and save me money(!) in light of new legislative developments:

"If your account had a 12.99% APR and a Default Rate of 24.99%, and we did not receive the minimum payment in July by its payment due date, we could increase your APRs to as high as 24.99% without giving you additional notice...We are changing your grace period for purchases.  With this change, you will need to pay your balance in full by the Payment Due Date each month in order to have a grace period and avoid finance charges on purchases.  Prior to this change, you needed to pay your balance in full by the end of each billing cycle."

Look at them!  Just immediately passing on the savings to me!

Ummm.  Feel that consumers?  That's your elected Representatives working for you!  That's you, The People, reaping the benefits of bankruptcy "reform", designed and passed to save you money.  Do you get it now?

Oh, and also, baby, do you finally understand that I only hit you because I love you?

A Fond Farewell...

"I only hope I can do for the World Bank what I've done for all of you..."

Unreconstructed Alien

(CNN) -- Former Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia was taken to a hospital late Thursday, a nurse at the facility outside Atlanta said.

Miller, 73, arrived via ambulance at Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville about 8:45 p.m., nurse Dan Hurst told CNN in a phone interview. He said he could not give details about what caused the hospitalization.

They're going to open him up and discover Newt Gingrich in his chest.

Oh, My God

What a jibbery, blinky, stammering know nothing bumbling stutter monkey resides in the White House.

If only he had given a weekly press conference throughout his entire first term, we wouldn't be looking at this blotchy and sweating dope right now...

Chaos Monkey

WASHINGTON, April 28 - The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency said today that American intelligence agencies believe North Korea has mastered the technology for mounting a nuclear warhead on its missiles, an assessment that, if correct, means the country could build weapons to threaten Japan and perhaps the western United States...

But [Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby] appeared to be putting a final conclusion on a study the intelligence community has had under way for at least two years. In 2003, the United States warned South Korea and Japan that satellite imagery had identified an advanced nuclear testing site in a remote corner of North Korea where equipment had been set up to test conventional explosives that, when detonated, could compress a plutonium core and set off a compact nuclear explosion.

Since then, American investigators have been pressing Pakistan for details of what kind of technology North Korean engineers might have been given in visits they made to Pakistani nuclear sites. North Korea supplied Pakistan with many of the missiles Pakistan uses for its own nuclear arsenal.

And how exactly did we get to this point?  How did we get from the two Koreas opening up their borders, allowing families to freely cross from North to South, from the restoration of train service between North and South Korea to North Korea building multiple nuclear weapons and then building missiles that can carry those weapons and might be able to actually strike the west coast of the United States?  How did things go downhill so fast?

Oh, that's right!  Election fraud in Florida in 2000:

North Korea's nuclear initiative has exposed a crisis in the Bush Administration's Korea policy dating back to February of 2001, shortly after President Bush had taken office. Then-South Korean president Kim Dae Jung came to Washington six weeks after the Bush inauguration to urge the new administration to quickly resume the dialogue with North Korea launched by the Clinton Administration. Secretary of State Powell had said the new Administration would continue the Clinton policy, but when President Bush met President Kim, he put the kibosh on South Korea's hopes, warning that North Korea could not be trusted to keep its agreements. Bush's remarks were viewed as a slap-down of the South Korean president's "Sunshine" policy of engagement with the North, which infuriated Seoul and saw Pyongyang respond by chilling relations with the South...

The Bush Administration said its North Korea policy was under review. And the Administration's most public declaration of intent on North Korea came a year later, when Pyongyang was named as the third point on the President's "axis of evil" — a rhetorical signal of the Administration's desire for "regime-change" in Pyongyang, which set off alarm bells among U.S. allies throughout East Asia. Ten months later, North Korea dramatically upped the ante, first by defiantly pleading guilty to U.S. charges that it had been developing a secret uranium enrichment program, and then, when the U.S. responded by choking off energy supplies, it kicked out UN monitors and reopened a plutonium-extraction plant mothballed under the 1994 agreement.

A butterfly ballot flaps its wings in Dade County, and you get intercontinental nuclear ballistic missiles in North Korea.  It's the whacky iterations like:

In July 2003, as delicate six-party talks including North Korean were about to start, Mr. Bolton called Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, a "tyrannical dictator" of a country where "life is a hellish nightmare."

North Korea responded furiously, saying that "such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks" and that Pyongyang no longer considered Mr. Bolton to represent the administration. The State Department removed him from its delegation.

Or:

Bush raised eyebrows again when he said of Kim Jong Il, "I loathe him," and called the North Korean leader a "pygmy."

It's tiny little "imperfections" like that, which make foreign policy as impossible to predict as the weather!  I mean, you call a guy a "pygmy", say you loathe him, and have your ambassador use the words "hellish nightmare" to describe his country--all of which is probably pretty true!--but who, in their wildest dreams, could ever have imagined that that kind of diplomacy wouldn't have yielded some results!

That's chaos theory, folks!  Or, more recently, "Bush Theory":  Government Is Hard, Hard Work!  Shit happens!

I mean, how could anyone possibly imagine after insulting a nutty dictator(who, as we all know, is famously thick skinned and almost entirely without ego), virtually cutting all diplomatic ties with his country, and then tying down your entire military--your only credible threat against the pygmy--in a country with no WMDs that shit might get out of control on the Korean penninsula?

Who knew?  Who could have guessed!

Certainly Bolton couldn't.  That's why we've rewarded his brilliant work in North Korea by nominating him to go to the U.N. so that he can spread his certain kind of diplomatic magic all over the world, rather than just confining it to one small, extremely dangerous country in Asia.

And certainly Bush couldn't!  Because he's been allowing this disasterous nightmare to snowball for over two fucking years!

But foreign policy is as impossible to predict as the weather.  It's as tough as economics!  I mean, who could have predicted that by slashing government revenue while increasing government spending we'd be looking as massive, record setting deficits!

Goverment is hard, hard work, people!

And if the west coast of the United States has to take one for the team?  Well, fuck 'em.  They never vote Republican, anyway.

On the upside, you can't say these Bush guys are totally stupid.  After all, after about five years of fucking around, they're now pressuring our good friends the Pakistanis, who the Bush administration is giving a billion dollars worth of military aid to, for information on what the hell is going on in North Korea.

And, if anyone would know about North Korea, it would our good friends, the Pakistanis. 

You know, since they've been trading arms with the North Koreans for years.

Let The Clinton Jokes Begin

LITTLE ROCK, Ark., April 28 - The ivory-billed woodpecker, a magnificent bird that ornithologists had long given up for extinct, has been sighted in the watery tupelo swampland of a wildlife refuge in Arkansas, scientists announced today.

Christ, Almighty.  It had to be some kind of pecker people were seeing.  In Arkansas.

It couldn't have been a monkey in Texas...

Whistling In the Wind

Like a lot of people, whenever someone posts a comment on my page, I get an email notification telling me a comment's been posted and the email contains the comment, as well as who posted it, and when, and what their ISP is, and some other stuff.

So, today, some kook posted a comment on my page.  Like at eleven o'clock in the morning, or something. And I get the email notification and I open it up, and it starts with:  "You are retarded."  And so I just stop reading, and I scroll down, every now and then taking in a line or two, and it's like this three page long nutty, angry, confused, emotional diatribe, which was triggered by one of my posts.

I mean, it must have taken this nut like an hour to write this dumbass comment.

And I didn't really feel like reading the whole thing because, you know, it was stupid.  I mean, just the couple of phrases that jumped out at me were the same kind of goofy, pathetic jibberish that you hear from callers on talk radio in the middle of the afternoon.

So, I just deleted the email.  Then, I deleted the comment. And then that made me just start to laugh.  Because I was thinking:  here's this idiot, who thinks I give a flying fuck about how he "thinks" gravity works in the secret world that he's invented in his mind, and this joker takes like an hour out of his life, in the middle of the morning, to furiously pound his keyboard and pour out his "thoughts" and emotions to write this long, crazy comment, and, after all that, not only is no one ever going to read it, but even I didn't read it.

It's just gone.  In like three seconds. 

He might as well have been writing his brilliant manifesto on a tuba in his mother's basement, for all the difference that hour of his life made.

I don't know.  For some reason, that just really made me laugh.

Rubacracy

Via Eschaton:

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes, according to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a cigar is an economic prop to a brutal totalitarian regime. Arguing against loosening sanctions against Cuba last year, DeLay warned that Fidel Castro "will take the money. Every dime that finds its way into Cuba first finds its way into Fidel Castro's blood-thirsty hands.... American consumers will get their fine cigars and their cheap sugar, but at the cost of our national honor."

DeLay has long been one of Congress' most vocal critics of what he calls Castro's "thugocracy," which is why some sharp-eyed TIME readers were surprised last week to see a photo of the Majority Leader smoking one of Cuba's best—a Hoyo de Monterrey double corona, which generally costs about $25 when purchased overseas and is not available in this country. The cigar's label clearly states that it was made in "Habana."

It's too fucking funny.  While the rubes are all ginned up, and all for economic sanctions and embargoes to snuff out the last vestiges of Communist evil in this world, and ready to follow their resolute, principled leaders into war with Cuba, Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh are smoking big, fat, expensive Cuban cigars.

While the idiotic rubes are swearing off or renaming their goddam french fries, their heroes, the voices, the very hearts of modern conservatism, are smoking Cuban cigars, drinking French wines, and vacationing in Paris...

Good Lord, "values" voters!  Isn't one of your fucking "values" honesty???

I mean, sure, Bill Clinton lied about having an affair--but he wasn't trying to pass legislation making adultery illegal while he was doing it!  He wasn't running for office on his lousy marriage!

These people are taking a dump on you and laughing about it.  You are the simple, ignorant peasants to these obscenely rich, idle aristocrats.  Doesn't that bother you at all???

I Was Thinking Of A Padded Cell

Well, I'm just kidding around, you know.  Like I said, I'm about the only person I know who doesn't have one by now.

I have friends, who are chatty, who I think would actually die without their cell phones.

I'm not much of a phone person to start with--I mean, I'm not even that crazy about having a phone in my house.  So, the idea of having one with me everywhere I go gives me the willies.

But it's not the phones that bother me, or the fact that some people really enjoy being able to call someone from anywhere--I mean, that's sort of one of the miracles of our time--it's what having a phone with you at all times does to some people's sense of common courtesy.

People who are generally very courteous and thoughtful become absolutely retarded when their cell phones ring.

If you were entertaining in your own home and the phone rang, unless you were expecting an important call, most people would probably let the answering machine pick up, rather than leave their guest to have a ten minute chit chat.  Or they might answer the phone and say, "Look, I've got company.  I can't talk right now.  Can I call you back later?"

If you were sitting in a restaurant, having lunch with someone, you wouldn't suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, whip out a newspaper and start reading it, telling the person you were with, "Hold on a second, I've got read this article."

If you were walking down the street with a friend, again, having a conversation, you wouldn't suddenly put on headphones and start listening to your IPod, saying "Just a minute, I've got to listen to this song."

And, yet, in our cell phone culture, in these same situations, people feel absolutely comfortable flipping open their cell phones and saying, "Hold that thought."  And then proceeding to have a ten minute conversation about nothing very important while the people that they're actually with have to wait patiently, twiddling their thumbs or looking up at the ceiling,while being forced to listen to half a conversation.

I mean, it's rude.  It really is.  It's like being put on hold while you're actually with someone.

I just can't tell you how many times I've been at meetings, or lunches, or whatever--just a social occasion--that I've been invited to--it was for the other person's benefit, and it was my time I was giving up for them, and they've had the nerve to take a phone call right in the middle of it!

Ten years ago, if you were having lunch with someone and the waiter told you there was an important call for you, you would probably apologize profusely for having to take the call, and promise to be right back to the table.

Now?  It's an upraised palm, a "hold that thought", ten minutes of oblivious chit chat, and then an "Okay, now, where we're we?  What were you saying?"

It doesn't have anything to do with the phones.  It's just something that they strangely seem to do to us when they ring.  They seem to make ordinarily decent people incredibly thoughtless and rude.  And the last thing Americans need is something else to make us more rude, or inconsiderate, or oblivious to people around us.