Inauguration Excess while world suffers

I found a pic that reminds me of the fattest of our four cats:

[Broken External Image]:http://www.gotlaughs.com/funpages/crazylazy_cat.jpg


.....except for the color, that's him and his lifestyle.

 

Back then, we had a budget surplus and a body bag deficit.

But that was then.

 

Yep - because back then we still had World Trade Center. Remember?

 

Mr. Taylor, you are living in a fantasy world. While everyone can have their opinions of Bush, of the war, of who or what is responsible for the health care crisis, it is a simple fact that in this wealthiest of all countries more people than ever before in our recent history lack health insurance, and those who do not have health insurance lack for basic health care: the regular check-ups that prevent disease or catch it early. Very, very, very few of the homeless get a free check. In fact, most of the homeless work full time, but minimum wage is less than the cost of housing, and by the time they buy food there is nothing left for rent.

I spent five years working with homeless men (our shelter was small and had no room for families) and I can tell you that while a very few were homeless by choice, most were homeless because of alcoholism, mental illness, or physical injury. And roughly 1/3 to 1/4 of them were Vietnam Veterans whose mental illness and/or alcoholism was directly related to the war. Your proud and free president, extolling the bravery of the soldiers, has turned his back on the veterans of previous wars (as has every president since that war).

And on cold winter nights, and mosquito-infested summer nights, when sleeping out of doors is the hardest, every shelter in town is full and turns people away. This in Fargo. And I assure you it's a lot worse in every major city in the country.

Any time anybody praises the soldiers in Iraq, I ask them what are they doing for the broken veterans of Vietnam? And if anybody is thinking of enlisting, I suggest you first visit your local homeless shelter and take a look at the veterans of past wars who have been tossed onto the garbage heap by the very people they served.

And as far as Clinton, Gore, and Kerry, they are no better than Bush.

 

Scary pic, change the color of the fur and that is my cat exactly. I didn't have to train him how to eat and poop, he picked that up all by himself.

 

You won't get any argument from me about that. When the disaster was first reported, nobody knew the full scale of it. So countries like the U.S. made the initial offer of aid based on what, 15,000 reported dead?

Here in Canada, PM Martin, or "Mr. Shipping Tycoon Who Doesn't Pay His Taxes But As Finance Minister Expected Everybody Else To," made the rather lavish and bold financial offers of aid and the shipments of food and essentials.

The only problem, Canada doesn't have heavy airlift capability. There is a ragtag fleet of C-130 Hercules that are the highest-time Hercules fleet on the planet. They'd never make it. For fascinating reading, check out this URL:

http://www.theurc.com

So Canada will do what it always does: publicly knock down the United States, then ring up the U.S. Air Force and bum a C-5 or a C-17. Oops, sorry, they're all busy. Try back later. To avoid major egg on face, Martin finally managed to rent some suitable heavy cargo planes:

Antonov heavy lift aircraft. From the Russians.

THE RUSSIANS!

How pathetic is that??

As far as the issue of how a country treats its veterans, look at other countries. American Vets have it good in comparison. Here in Canada, you're only a "veteran" if you served up to the Korean War. All those "peacekeepers" wounded overseas do not count.

So a lot of countries blabber on and on about how "generous" and "caring" they are, even Castro's Cuba and the Communist Chinese. America really can't be all that bad if folks are willing to risk a leaky innertube and hungry sharks to land on her shores.

I'm not sure how long it will last though. Thanks to the scandalous incompetence at the UN, the wealthier countries are being sucked dry. Look at all the debt. If the Global Economy should ever sputter to a stop, it's over.

Speaking of Cuba or China, if you live there and p*** and moan about something, they toss you in prison or they off you. Or fire up a tank and flatten you like a waffle.

We now have PM Martin in China dreaming up a new trade deal (We send them boatloads of money, they send us cheap crap and throw Canadians out of work) and he pointedly looks the other way about the issue of "human rights."

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(pepa\";p=\"65429)</div>

Iraq and Saddam Hussein, as despicable as he is, did not present a credible threat to out security. That is why this administration's rationale for going to war keeps changing on almost a weekly basis.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(pepa\";p=\"65429)</div>

You can live in your fantasy world. It will not change the fact that under the Shrub, the haves are doing better and the have nots are faring worse.

Good jobs with insurance and other benefits are disappearing and are replaced by non skilled (hamburger flipper) jobs that pay less and have few, if any, benefits.

Unemployment numbers are higher than they were during the second Clinton term and the underemployment rates are not measured by the government.

Lastly, those who exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits, despite the fact that they still are unemployed, are not counted for purposes of calculating the unemployment rates.

 

Uh-huh. When it's your kids, or yourself at age 56 flipping burgers, then gummint-paid insurance and welfare suddenly looks like a real good idea.

History will note that 9-11 didn't bankrupt the US. Neocon opportunists did.

 

When it's your own adult kids flipping burgers, or yourself at what should have been retirement age, then gummint-paid health insurance suddenly looks like a real good idea. The only question is whether Republicans will adopt that as policy in time to avoid getting voted back into the minority.

History will note that 9-11 didn't bankrupt the US; tax-cutting borrow-and-spend neocons did.

 

I have to side with Robert Taylor on this one.

I've lived in the U.S. (Utah) and now in Canada. First of all, there is NO SUCH THING as "free" health care. There is a HUGE health care crisis in Canada. The system is bankrupt and waiting lines are endless.

Here in Canada, people are dying as they simply cannot get the care they need. We have folks stacked up in the corridors, and that's in the "Emergency" room. There are caps on doctor salaries, so guess what? A lot of Canadian doctors are heading to greener pastures: the United States.

I find it very amusing that a recent Simpsons episode had Homer driving to Winnipeg to get "cheaper" Canadian meds. Guess what? Most of the newer meds are not even available in Canada.

As an example, my Mom has acid reflux. Prilosec OTC works very well for her, so we routinely drive down to Minnesota or ND to buy the 48-day box of Prilosec at Wally World. Here in Canada, the only similar med is Losec, which is prescription-only and NOT covered by the gummit health insurance.

It costs MORE, WAY more, to buy Losec in Canada than Prilosec OTC in the United States. I've never seen Michael Moore or any other Democratic apologist mention this. Wonder why??

Since the Canuck taxpayer is, in effect, subsidizing meds here in Canada, the Liberal government is seeking to ban all cross-border sales of meds to Americans. Since many meds are in short supply, this is one of the few things, perhaps the ONLY thing, the Liberal gov has done that actually makes sense.

If I recall, our current job outsourcing binge (High tech, manufacturing, etc) was set in motion when PM Chretien, here in Canada, and Slick Willie, signed all these good trade deals with the Chinese. That is, they're good for the Chinese: we send them boatloads of money, they send us cheap crap and throw folks here in North America out of work. I believe China is now a "most favored nation" whatever the h*** that means.

Never mind that the Chinese have no qualms about using tank tracks to make a waffle out of a human being, that they use prison labor and indentured servitude, and that they laugh at us while exploiting our greed and selfishness. Oh, they also appear to be exempt from any of the emissions requirements that Greenpeace and The Sierra Club are always whining about.

What did Slick Willie, or for that matter Gore the Bore (He DID invent the Internet though. Give him "credit" where it's due), to uphold basic human rights in China? Or to protect the American worker?

I find it very ironic that Dubya was labeled an a** hole when he attempted to put duties on cheap imported steel. This was to protect the American steel industry. What did Slick Willie ever do to protect American jobs? I seem to recall he dramatically increased H1 visa limits, to allow more foreign workers.

I think it's natural to have cross-border trade between the U.S. and Canada, as the two nations are a lot more similar than they care to admit. When trade is used to line the pockets of a few large multinationals at the expense of many jobs, it's no longer fair.

There was a brief glory period during the nineties when the American economy boomed. A lot of that, especially the Dot Com thing that Slick took credit for, was a temporary bubble that left a lot of workers displaced. It was a nice dream but it ran out of steam as Slick's second term ran down.

Yet even now, compare the unemployment rate in the U.S. to Canada, or the EU countries. This was briefly discussed by The Underground Royal Commission at:

http://www.theurc.com

About the only bubble left is in India and China, and they're running desperately short on energy, especially oil. I'm wondering if China will begin to start collecting all those debt IOU's with the U.S. and Canada. For example, they could be eyeing the Athabasca Tar Sands in northern Alberta, which has proven oil reserves 5-10 times that of the entire mid east.

As far as the war in Iraq, that was a long time coming . I find it amusing that Iraq pointedly ignored 17 UN "resolutions" while doing their thing. The Russians, Germans, and French were, of course, opposed to Gulf War 2.

They also made plenty of money off Iraq and especially the Oil For Food program too, so I can see their reluctance to have the global spotlight suddenly show up in Iraq.

Once all the baby boomers retire, the entire house of cards will collapse anyway. So perhaps we should be worrying about more important things than how much the inauguration cost. Look at how much Sundance costs, or the Academy Awards.

Perhaps we should have a few acres set aside in BFE, and build a house that can run without grid electricity.

 

Speaking of environmentalists, how about that favorite icon here in Canada: David Suzuki.

For a long time on CBC (Funded by the Canadian taxpayer), he had a show called The Nature Of Things. Liked to blame Canada and, of course, the U.S. for all the environmental woes in the world. Especially pollution in the Far Arctic.

I was dumbfounded when he just recently had a show in which he claimed most of the arctic pollution came from - drum roll please - Siberia.

All that sulfur and heavy metals from metal refining, all the radionuclides from secret nuclear accidents that made Chernobyl look like a Chinese firecracker, all the nuclear waste residue from a "creative" waste disposal system (Dump the reactors at sea), all of it from Mother Russia.

Of course, some folks still have a great deal of respect for this "environmentalist."

 

Well Robert, I get very frustrated that otherwise well-meaning folks appear to support all those "apologists" who carefully distort The Truth to satisfy a dark purpose. Sadly, it's nothing new.

Case in point: Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer, while he was at The New York Times writing glowing articles about how wonderful Stalinist Russia was. That is, this Duranty convinced the world (At least some readers in the United States) that there were no Gulag's, no torture, and the starvation of +12 million Ukrainians didn't happen.

Only after the well-deserved collapse of the USSR have we gotten a glimpse of the true horror behind The Iron Curtain. How workers in their Glorious Socialist Workers Paradise dropped dead while building a road, and the road was paved right over top of them. How Ukrainian farmers opposed to the Collectivization of farms - another sinister crackpot scheme - and their families were starved by that madman.

Yet this Duranty is still recorded in the history books as a nice fellow with his "well deserved" Pulitzer Prize, not an evil person who gave good PR to a sinister regime. At the very least, we need to update all those history books pronto, and his Pulitzer should be rescinded.

There were also apologists for Hitler's Nazi party. I doubt anybody seriously entertains the notion that The Holocaust didn't happen, or that the numbers were "much less" than quoted.

Here in Winnipeg, the recently deceased media tycoon "Izzy" Israel Asper's estate has started work on a Holocaust Memorial, which I have already donated to. Once we forget - by accident or purposely - the horrible things committed against the human race, we are no longer deserving of the rights and freedoms that came at such a high price.

I find it mind boggling and incredibly disturbing that people can wear such selective filters on their glasses. In this case, the filters are so selective the glasses are opaque.

Does the United States have problems? You bet it does. So does every other member of the G8. But last time I checked, nobody has been turned into a human waffle by tank tracks in the streets of America. These problems can be fixed through hard work and, most importantly, the willpower to do so.

Once you lose the willpower to seek out The Truth, all bets are off. To actually embrace Socialism/Communism? Scary.

So that's why I got so ticked off hearing all this nonsense about the inauguration costs. The fact that Kofi Annan's son was heavily involved in the UN Oil For Food scandal hardly ranked mention at all. Yeesh.

That was, quite literally, blood money.

 

8) Robert Taylor and jayman,

I know this might be a little off topic but I believe you both will like it.



http://worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/br...0680555557.html


Ben