Here is a little something to ponder on. Barack Obama recently said that he didn’t like nationalizing everything, but he sure seems to keep doing it. For example, here is an article about the recent bank “stress tests”.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jo-ppncRlwU24Ns-TI2AgEY1QQngD97VKBDG1

If the test showed that dismal economy would push a bank below a minimum level of capital, regulators asked the bank to find a way to boost its finances. One way to do that would be to convert preferred shares held by the government or other lenders into common stock. That would help the Treasury avoid returning to Congress for more bailout money, but it would dilute the value of common shares and put taxpayer dollars at greater risk.

What we have here is very important, though most people might not realize why. This new “Stress Test” is nothing more than a trick for the government to nationalize banks without having to say that they are nationalizing banks.  

Basically the government has come up with a made up test, that you are designed to fail.

The tests estimate losses the banks would face in a “what-if” scenario that includes 10.3 percent unemployment and a 22 percent drop in home prices during the next two years.

They might as well have a “What happens if all your assets are eaten by flying piranhas clause”.

When you fail, the government will splash it all over the news, thereby guaranteeing that nobody will ever invest in you again, or you give the government control. Which sounds suspiciously like the kind of tactics the mafia uses, but I digress. The key to nationalization is in the first quoted paragraph.

The government has purchased non-voting (Preferred) stock as part of the Bailout/Spending Orgy ‘09. That stock would normally have value, but not on this new stress test. So now the bank is undervalued and is about to get raped in the news BUT they can change that non-voting stock into voting (Common) stock, and now their test will be just peachy!

Which means that the government now gets to vote on how your bank is run. Yippee.  

So let me see if I’ve got this right. The same people who decide if you are viable or not, get to take you over if you are not viable…

I’m sure this will do absolute wonders for the economy. The government can run the banking, auto, and insurance industries!  Next up will be health care, and then they’ll just cap & trade the ever living hell out anything that is left.  I’m going to need to speed up my plans for my End Of The World Bunkerplex.

I saw another news article today about Barack’s new plan to cut down on tax evasion by doing away with “loopholes.” A common misconception is that loopholes are tricks in the tax code for evil people to use to avoid paying their fair share.  Well, for the non-accountants in the audience, that’s basically a bunch of crap. A loophole is something that was put into the tax code by congress at some point to encourage some sort of behavior. The word loophole is used as profanity by politicians whenever it encourages behavior that the other side liked.

A lot of Americans get up in arms about loopholes when the news is telling them about some rich-fat-cat using them, but they don’t realize that their mortgage or charity deduction is also considered a loophole by somebody else. There was some talk about doing away with the deduction for charitable contributions, which would absolutely destroy charitable giving in America, but whatever, Barack wants you to pay your fair share. Besides, charity is government’s job. They know who best to give that money to, not us idiot taxpayers, with our silly morals or beliefs.

I wish I could find it, but there was a gem of a quote from Timmy Geitner about how awesome it is to make sure everybody pays their fair share of taxes. That’s ironic, since if it had been me or you to make a five figure “mistake” on Turbo-Tax, the IRS would have taken our houses, and our families would be living in cardboard boxes while we served 5 years in prison.

My first thought when I saw today’s headlines about how Barack wants to make sure everybody is paying their fair share of taxes was that it was because he was having one hell of a hard time filling cabinet positions…

In more business news, Chrysler is toast. Despite the fact we just gave them a giant pile of money like two months ago. Well, that was tax dollars well spent. We should print some more and try again! GM is now run by the government and the union, so I’m expecting to see some really overpriced garbage coming out of Detroit.

I’ve not kept up on the specifics, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Ford has taken any bailout money. If that is the case, then I think they should be running ads all over the place proclaiming that fact. FORD. Buy our cars, because we’re not a bunch of sell-out quisling parasites!  They should have it narrated by Mike Rowe, and it should start by having a giant 10 cylinder 4×4 truck run a stupid Chevy HHR off the road where it can blow up in a giant fireball. (I still despise the Chevy HHR… so very much…)

Obama has been on a real roll here nationalizing everything he can get his hands on. Since the Democrats have pretty much changed to Fabian Society style Socialism, and the political parties that are exactly like them in Europe are called Social Democrats, they might as well change their name to the Social Democrats. (Socialists for short) And since Barack is so good at nationalizing everything, his branch of the party could be the National Socialists. (now why does that sound so familiar?)

I’ve been on a huge kick studying the first three decades of this century. It is a byproduct of the story that I’m currently writing (set in 1932) and I’m a sucker for research. I get into these ever expanding research circles that just keep growing and growing. My last trip to the library had me bring home about 50 pounds of books on the Great Depression. The parallels are amazing.

Investments were overinflated. Everything was bought on credit. People used credit to invest in overinflated assets.  The bills came due. Unable to sustain the false profits that they were making before, some overvalued companies went out of business. Stupidity and avarice can only carry you so far. Eventually there was a reckoning. Sounds familiar, right?

The media keeps beating us over the head with how much Obama is the 2^nd coming of FDR. The scary thing is that I believe they are right, only that at some point in the time they decided that FDR was good for the country.  FDR took a crisis (in the spirit of Rahm Emmanual’s No Crisis Left Behind) and used it to remake the country into something different. Something alien.

For such a bunch of people who believe in Darwinism in life, they sure don’t believe in it in business. Distorted, mangled, manipulated, FDR managed to drag out the Great Depression to three times longer than it should have been. Then because Democrats suck at diplomacy and lack the courage to take a moral stand, we got into the biggest war ever.

The parallels haven’t gotten us that far yet, but that’s only because I don’t think America is stupid enough to elect Barack for three more terms. (That and I don’t think Joe Biden has half the moral fiber or courage of Cactus Jack Garner to step down in protest). But then again, Barack has gotten FDR’s agenda further in 100 days than FDR managed in his first term.  We might not have that long until the great and glorious vision is realized.

I might have to hurry up and fund my Bunkerplex on credit…

http://www.atomicnerds.com/?p=2182 This is the best summary I’ve seen so far. Atomic Nerds breaks down why we probably shouldn’t start a massive freak out just yet.

That said, it is still one more excuse for me to hurry up and move to the country where I can build my End of the World Bunkerplex.

Okay, there is this professor in Russia who has a theory about how America is going to collapse into a civil war and then break into several different groups.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html

Okay, that’s not the part I’ve got an issue with, because I’ve already told my Texan friends to scout me out some good real estate as soon as they succeed.

The funny part of this is his map.

 

Yes, because Alaska is going to go back to Russia… Yep. That’s going to go over well. Sarah Palin and Vladamir Putin could go hunting together. The Russians couldn’t defeat Afghanistan, I don’t really know how well they would do against a bunch of people who shoot moose off their porch with .338 Win mags for fun. Alaskans are tough. Anybody who lives somewhere where the local animals will eat you and the weather can kill you in minutes tend to have their priorities in order.

I love how Mexico is going to take over Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi… Good luck with that! I think that it would actually be the other way around.  I think there was a period in time where that blue part of the map was known as the Confederacy. They’ll probably get along just fine.  In fact, President Chuck Norris of Texabamaianaippi (Damn, what is it with you southerners and all those vowels? Are you Polynesian or something?) will just wait until Swine Flu wipes out Mexico and then they’ll go down and build condos there and drill for oil.  I’m willing to be the Texabamans would have no problem securing their border.  

The Eastern states will join the EU. Okay, that part I could actually believe, except somehow he’s got Tennesee and Kentucky in there. Okay, if you’ve been there, you’ve got to admit that the idea of Nashville in the EU is kind of hilarious. I nominate my buddy Echo Tango to be the ambassador to the World Court. I’m trying to picture a very angry southerner choking out Belgian diplomats.

(actually, wait a second, maybe it would be in Texabama’s best interests to become part of Mexico, because then they could sneak across the unsecured border into the New EU to get free emergency room healthcare, free education, and all those other perks. They could say that they’re just doing the job that Vermonters won’t do… I’ll have to consult with Chuck Norris on this next time we’re playing golf with Rush Limbaugh and Ted Nugent at the NeoCon convention) 

Montana and Wyoming will be conquored by CANADA.  Oh, man, that’s good.  I love how Montana and Wyoming will naturally fall in line with Illinois. Because they have so very much in common. When I think of obvious sister cities I think of Chicago and Bozeman. Then they will all be dominated by CANADA.  Okay, everytime I type that out it makes me laugh out loud.

A community organizer in Wyoming is the guy on horseback stopping traffic on mainstreet while they run a herd of cows through town.   

And last but not least, Idaho and Utah will fall in with California (logically), and we’ll all be taken over by China…

I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here, and guess that the good crack smoking professor has never actually been to America other than with Google Earth. 

If America were to ever fragment it certainly would not be along those lines. If it were to happen in my lifetime it would probably look like a great big red slash right through the middle of the country, leaving a narrow bunch of west coast and the eastern seaboard and the urban midwest. 

Blue state folks laugh about that and say, “So! We’ve got all the precious seaports!” (besides Houston, and I’m pretty sure we’d take San Diego too, heck, we’ll trade you Denver for it) Then we’d just have a good chuckle as we shut down the freeways into their utopia and say good luck farming all that asphalt.

Oh no! We would no longer have New York or Hollywood. How could we ever live without all that precious culture? Where would I go to have a bunch of elitist pricks tell me everyday how much of an ignorant, racist, inbred, hillbilly, bumpkin I am out here in fly-over country clinging to my guns and religion?

Where will I be without NBC (a subsidiary of GE) to hit my kids over the head with global warming and ice floe drifting polar bears every thirty seconds? (see that big styrafoam bonfire over there, yep, that one’s for you, Al Gore)

We would lose all of the best liberal-arts and law schools (aw shucks). Where would we be without Columbia or Harvard? (even though when I was at po’ ol’ hillbilly Utah State, our business majors absolutely smoked Stanford’s business school in all areas of testing even though our yearly tuition would maybe pay for their valet parking for a week). Where would we be without a bunch of PhDs who’ve never done anything useful in their entire lives besides pontificate to a bunch of other academic weenies about how superior they are to us red-staters?

Oh, whatever would we do?  

Man, maybe this Russian guy is onto something.  Now if only he could learn to read a frigging map.

Well, Arlen Specter finally made it official and changed from an R to a D. Since he’s been voting Democrat for years, it is about friggin’ time.

The news is portraying this as some massive blow to the Republicans. Well, anybody who’s paid any attention to Arlen knows that he could absolutely never be counted on to hold the line on anything.

My understanding is that he was about to get trounced in the primary, and as you know, the most important thing in the world for a politician is to keep their job no matter what. 

I would much rather be in a smaller minority with people that I can actually trust, so I can rebuild, than in a larger minority, destined to stay that way forever because your own number will stab you in the back whenever it is convenient. What’s the point of being in a party that doesn’t stand for anything?

Now if he would just take John McCain and those two idiots from Maine with him, we could start over.

Recently there has been a big splash in the news about the possibility of legal prosecution against the Bush administration attorneys that wrote the memos concerning what is and is not legally torture. Like most of the recent bread and circuses coming out of Washington, this is just more useless garbage to keep us distracted, but I find particular circus act especially offensive.

 

Now I’m on record for my general disapproval of George Bush, but to give the man his props, he took one part of his job seriously, and that was protecting America from our enemies. As Dennis Miller once said, Bush’s first thought every morning when he got out of bed was ‘how can I kill some mother f’ing terrorists today?’

 

However one of the policies of the current administration is to slander the previous one whenever possible, and to appease the far left whackadoos whenever possible, so that means that we’re back to the torture debate.

 

So now Top Secret memos have been revealed, detailing that we waterboarded three different terrorists. And since it isn’t enough to let our enemies know exactly how far we’re allowed to push them, we’re also now going to prosecute the people who actively fought our enemies. And we’re not going to prosecute them for breaking the law. We’re going to prosecute them for doing their job in a manner that makes liberals squeamish.

 

To put this in perspective, we waterboarded Khalid Shake Mohammed, known mastermind behind the attack on the WTC, and we got information out of him that nabbed us 17 other scumbags that were planning on killing thousands in Los Angeles, apparently this is a grave travesty of injustice. It would have been a lot better to have 9/11 part 2 than to waterboard a terrorist.

 

I’m actually impressed by the lengths the Bush people went to keep these interrogations legal, down to the questioning the legalities of slapping and threatening somebody with a box of caterpillars. Listen, morons. If I was in charge, and I had known terrorist Khalid Shake Friggin’ Mohammed in custody, and I thought that there might be a .0001% chance that torturing him might save the life of a single American, I would have him skinned.

 

We live in topsy-turvey world. We live in land where the so called leadership of the Department of Homeland Security won’t talk about terrorism anymore, and the Justice Department has decided that the greatest terrorist threat is from returning US veterans. Pakistan is inches from being overthrown by the Taliban, while our President talks about meeting with the “moderate” Taliban. Moderate Taliban? Is that like being Sort Of Pregnant?  Is a moderate Taliban somebody that only saws off people’s heads on weekends? Maybe they only stone every other rape victim to death? Moderate Taliban my ass…

 

So while we are in a war for survival, that only apparently half of us can actually see, we’re more worried about the returning veterans who’ve been protecting us than the evil men who mean to murder us. I think our leadership’s priorities are a bit out of touch.

 

I heard some author talking about how, sure, these interrogations may have saved lives, but on the other hand, the absolute awfulness of waterboarding only caused more people to be recruited in the fight against us. That is such utter and complete horseshit that I’m having a hard time understanding how anybody with two brain cells capable of creating friction could actually believe that.

 

You mean to tell me that if you’re living in a 3^rd world hole, and you’ve been taught every single day of your life that the reason your country sucks by your Mullahs is because of Israel and the Great Satan, and you live in a culture of complete and utter violence, where history has been so rewritten by the powers that be that you actually believe the Holocaust is Israeli propaganda, and you swallow hook line and sinker all of the nonsense about the Great Satan that you’re willing to sacrifice your life in fiery suicidal jihad to get your 72 virgins, but you’ve just been holding back strapping on that bomb vest… until you discovered that some other crazy Muslim you’ve never heard of was threatened with a box of caterpillars. Because that is just the final straw!  BOOM!

 

Most of the left wing has no clue about the violence in the middle-east. You think waterboarding is scary to these people? Check out this video. And it is from one of the mildest and least screwed up countries in the region.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2W5rbF8hLU&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fmypetjawa%2Emu%2Enu%2Farchives%2F197398%2Ephp&feature=player_embedded

 

And that was a member of the royal family! How many dead hookers do you think he has buried in the back yard?

 

Just because waterboarding makes your average Greenwich Village liberal blogger uncomfortable, they assume that it terrifies people who come from a land where you can get your hands chopped off with a dull scimitar for stealing a cookie. If one of the Hussein boys wanted to interrogate you, they’d just politely ask you questions while they fed your kids, feet first, into the wood chippers. Welcome to Big Boy Town, squeamish liberals.

 

Now let’s come at this from a different direction. Apparently saving LA from being burned (by foreigners this time, instead of its own residents) was not worth waterboarding three terrorists. Let’s imagine that Janet Napolitano is right, and that the biggest threat to America is angry veterans who’re all hung up on crazy stuff like freedom and the Constitution, and now America is under attack by us crazed right-wingers. Right wing terrorists have been captured. They have a plan to kill thousands.

 

Do you honestly think for a split second that Obama wouldn’t have people like that waterboarded if it meant that he could stop a terrorist attack on Colombia University, Hollywood, or Berkeley?

 

Because that’s different. Because people like me are dangerous. Militant Islamists are just misunderstood.