Obama – The God King

Posted in Government Failures, Socialism with tags , , , , , , on July 25, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

Obama, our God King, spoke again last week and decreed to his followers that we abide by his ruling through an executive order dated July 19, 2010.

Our God King wishes to expand the scope, size, reach and cost of his government, yet again, by using the offshore oil drilling accident as a means to justify government regulation, oversight and enforcement of…well…EVERYTHING.

Executive Order: Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes.

The God King, divining from his fluttering robes of gloriousness, spontaneously created yet another government agency…the National Ocean Council. To lead them, he has chosen from his flock, John Holdren. John is best known for his catastrophic prediction of global mass starvation and rampant overpopulation by the year 2000. His prediction never happened, but that does not deter the God King.

From HotAir.com…

If you drill, fish, live on the coast or enjoy boating, the National Ocean Council is going to regulate you because this new government agency will essentially rezone our coasts to achieve these goals:

“Coastal and marine spatial planning identifies areas most suitable for various types or classes of activities in order to reduce conflicts among uses, reduce environmental impacts, facilitate compatible uses, and preserve critical ecosystem services to meet economic, environmental, security, and social objectives.”

In fact, even if you don’t drill, fish, live on the coast or enjoy boating, the National Ocean Council will regulate you: “Concerns about water quality would be addressed by promoting and implementing sustainable practices on land.”

Who’s going to lead and guide us in implementing those sustainable practices? The National Ocean Council will be co-chaired by Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren. If his name sounds familiar, perhaps you remember it from the 1970s, when he co-wrote a book called Ecoscience which suggested compulsory abortion, mass sterilization, and a transnational “Planetary Regime” as solutions for the catastrophic overpopulation problem that absolutely, positively needed to be resolved by the year 2000, (that never happened.) He and his co-authors have walked that back somewhat, though Holdren has never unambiguously disavowed the book.

The purpose of this regulation will undoubtedly be to regulate offshore oil drilling into oblivion. This will skyrocket energy prices for us, driving up the cost of everything from gas to groceries. Obama is not interested in society bearing the brunt of this new financial burden because what you don’t understand is that he has a dream. A fundamental belief in the dream of green energy and the end of Big Oil and that government, BIG government is the solution to everything.

If that costs you $8 a gallon for gas and raises everything else you buy 20%, its just the sacrifice you will have to make to fulfill a God King’s dream.

Obama…our God King, has spoken.

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My Pictures & Video – Tax Day Tea Party – April 15, 2010 in Washington D.C.

Posted in Resist, Tea Party with tags , , , , , , , on July 25, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

The Flag Of The Tea Party

It’s been a long time coming, but here are the pictures and video clips I took while attending the April 15, 2010 Tax Day Tea Party rally in Washington D.C.

Something to keep in mind…

  1. I have never been to a rally before.
  2. I have never been active in politics before.
  3. I have been both a Democrat and a Republican.
  4. Finding both of those parties sorely lacking, I am now an Independent.
  5. I am in my 30′s, have a career and pay my taxes.
  6. I prefer Samuel Adams beer.
  7. I am an average American citizen.
  8. I am angry with my government.
  9. I am not a racist.

I don’t care what party is in charge, be it Republican or Democrat…both parties had a hand in creating the mess we are in.

I am angry with the bailouts, the moral hazards, the deficits, the wars, the endless social programs, the open borders, the national debt and the slow but relentless deconstruction of our freedoms.

I can report to you that both Tea Party rallies (Freedom Plaza & Washington Monument) were peaceful and racism free.

Protesters at our rally were peacefully left alone.

The Tea Party has three simple demands from all politicians, whether Republican, Democrat or Independent…three…simple…rules…

  1. Be fiscally conservative
  2. Uphold the Constitution
  3. Do not interfere with the free market

These three simple rules are the only ones the Tea Party Movement wants. That’s it.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Tea Party - Tax Day 2010

Tea Party - Tax Day 2010

This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

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You Are Not Entitled To A House – You Just Aren’t

Posted in Government Failures, Housing Market with tags , , , , , on July 24, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

These people are in Washington D.C. to take advantage of a program that may prevent them from losing their home.

The reporter captures some poignant observations from these individuals to elicit a feeling of empathy and sadness from the viewer.

I only feel contempt at their entitlement mentality.

A home is not a fundamental right. Here are some of the quotes and my thoughts on them…

  • “We’ve been having struggles paying our bills, we had to take our son out of private school.”

Oh no. You had to take your son out of private school? OMG. Well, now you can teach your son fiscal responsibility and accountability and go rent.

Nobody is putting a gun to your head and saying you must stay in your house, so go take your son out of private school to pay for it.

  • “My mortgage is basically out of reach, so I am choosing whether to eat or pay my mortgage.”

No, you can eat all you want…in your new apartment. All you have to do is choose to rent instead of paying a mortgage.

It’s very simple..GO RENT.

Meanwhile, I too must choose between renting and paying a mortgage. Oh wait, that’s right…even though I am in the top 10% of earners in the United States, I can’t afford to buy a house due to over-inflated prices, greedy sellers out-of-touch with the market, the government propping up prices, banks restricting inventory levels to keep prices artificially high and millions of people like the ones on this video begging for assistance to avoid doing what I am doing…RENTING.

I do not have a choice. I can not line up in Washington D.C. and ask that I be given assistance to GET a house.

I could sit around and blame these people for keeping me out of a house, I suppose. After all, it was the millions of them that took out adjustable rate mortgages so they could squeeeeze into a house they should never have qualified for that brought housing inventories crashing down overnight and skyrocketed prices through the roof, thus preventing me from buying a home years ago. I won’t blame them for making a mistake, but I’ll be damned if they are now going to force me to help them keep their home, despite that mistake, while I still can not afford a house because of them and their mistake.

You made a mistake.

People make mistakes, it’s not the end of the world. Now that you know you made a mistake, and bought something you can’t afford, correct your mistake and go rent. Don’t ask the government for help, which is the same as asking me for help.

I can’t help you anyway, I’m busy saving all my money for the ridiculous down-payment I have to have these days just to afford to buy your obnoxiously overpriced home.

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Bell City Manager Resigns in Disgrace From $800,000 Government Job – Will Now Receive $650,000 Pension Every Year For Life

Posted in Gov't Workers & Unions with tags , , , , on July 24, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

That’s for life.

He’s only 56…quick math means his disgraceful departure will earn him about $13,000,000. Nice job, if you can lose it.

As reported by ABC News…

Three municipal officials whose outsize salaries sparked a firestorm of outrage in the working-class Los Angeles suburb of Bell, Calif., resigned after midnight Friday following an emergency meeting of the city council.

The 56-year-old will draw an immense pension, between $650,000 and $880,000, making him the highest-paid pensioner in California.

“Rizzo resigns and still makes more than $600,000,” said Ali Saleh, founder of the Bell Association to Stop the Abuse, a grassroots community group. “That’s why I call him a predator. He’s taking advantage of the community whether he keeps his job or resigns.”

Four of the five council members, who approved the employees’ salaries, earn over $100,000 for part-time work, sparking a preliminary investigation by the Los Angeles County District Attorney.

City council members in comparable cities holding similar posts typically earn around $4,500.

“We’re reviewing the facts to see if we need to launch a formal investigation,” said Jane Robison, spokeswoman for the L.A. County district attorney.

“Part of what took place is legal,” she said. “If the council voted to give [Rizzo] the pay, that’s legal. How much the council members are making and how those elected officials got that pay might require investigating.”

“When Rizzo came in, in 1993, he was one of the lowest-paid city managers in the state,” said Hussein Saleh [a city resident], who owns a fashion company and last year lost an election for city council. “Now he’s the highest. It’s not hard to understand what happened. He raised utility taxes, raised property taxes to the highest in the area, and pushed through a $70 million bond issue to fix the parks, but we haven’t seen any of it.”

Don’t go away thinking this is just an isolated problem. This pillaging of you, the tax payer, is happening at the federal, state, county and town level. Every town and its taxpayers are suffering from overpaid, under-worked government employees with nice fat pension plans, early retirement, bounteous health care coverage and more than generous salaries.

Every town…even your town. Bell is just a “lightening rod” example of the abuse happening to us all of us from every level of the government.

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Housing Market Double-Dip – Right On Schedule and My Future Predictions

Posted in Housing Market with tags , , , , on July 21, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

As dozens of bloggers have been predicting for over a year now, yours truly included, the housing market is entering its double-dip phase of dropping prices, as reported in today’s WSJ.

Despite the lowest interest rates since 1971, home inventories are increasing and demand is evaporating. And isn’t this the summer selling season? What’s the winter going to look like?

When loans are so cheap, how can that be? It’s so simple, yet seems to escape everyone in the mainstream media and the housing bulls…

We STILL HAVE a price problem.

It doesn’t matter if interest rates go to zero, when home prices are unaffordably high, nobody can afford them. Period.

For example, in Orange County, CA the median listing price is now $460,000, down quite a bit from $650,000 in 2006. The median household income as of 2007 is $72,000. Don’t kid yourself, incomes haven’t gone up much since then in this recession, if at all.

Using the time-tested and proven rule of not buying a house more than three times your gross income, the most a family in Orange County can afford is $216,000. If they had a 20% down payment, maybe they could afford $260,000.

$260,000 is nowhere near $460,000.

So homes in OC are almost 60% higher than what the average income in OC can afford. Again, very simple…PRICE PROBLEM.

MY FUTURE PREDICTIONS

Interest rates must eventually rise and this will put tremendous downward pressure on prices. For each tick up in interest rates, home sellers will have to drop their price.

Home inventories will continue to rise as foreclosures rise driven by high unemployment as continued job losses will cause future home owners to go into foreclosure.

As prices drop, more and more homeowners will go underwater on their loans and strategically default, adding even more homes to the current inventory through foreclosure. This vicious cycle will continue on and on and on…

Potential home buyers will stay out of the market due to  fear of becoming one of the unemployed and fear about the economy overall and a feeling that home prices are too high and not wanting to buy a house “on the way down” in price.

Other potential buyers who would like to “trade-up” to a larger house will be trapped in their current house by owing more than it’s worth and unable to sell it.

The banks are not lending to anyone anymore because they will not loan money to someone who can not afford the home price. That alone should be ringing alarm bells, but instead, our government stepped in and will make loans to anyone with a pulse. Our government went from making less than 3% of home loans pre-bubble, to over 90%!

As the government continues to lend to unqualified borrowers through the FHA, Fannie and Freddie, and has become the new subprime lender, these home owners will continue to default in large numbers on a continuous roll-forward basis as the government can never go bankrupt and taxpayers will always be available to pay for the losses.

This will add more foreclosures to the market and continue the downward pressure on prices.

AND OUR GOVERNMENT

….ah, the ones who brought us this mess. They will continue to suspend the accounting mark-to-market rule for banks so they don’t actually have to value homes on their financial statements at these new lower prices, thus avoiding bankruptcy and avoiding selling foreclosed homes for what they are actually worth. FYI – that is akin to what Enron did, but it’s okie dokie this time because the government told them it is. It’s not illegal if the government does it. Didn’t you get the memo?

They might even try another “tax credit” for home buyers which would be a tragedy and a waste of your money, just like the last one.

They are already starting the worst thing they could do, which is use your tax dollars to help homeowners pay down the principal on the houses they bought at the top of the market. Oh yeah, the government’s decided your money gets to help someone else stay in their house by helping them pay it off. Lucky you! I did a post on it, here.

If you do want to read more? Choose HOUSING MARKET from the CATEGORIES selector on the right side of my blog.

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$800,000 Salary for City Manager of Bell – A Tiny Town in Los Angeles County

Posted in Gov't Workers & Unions with tags , , , , on July 20, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

Bell, a tiny town in the County of Los Angeles of about 39,000 people, mostly Latino, who average between $9,000 and $12,000 a year in annual income are paying $787,637 a year in salary for their Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo, $457,000 a year for their Police Chief and over $100,000 a year for each of their City Council members.

City Council members of a city this size typically receive $400 a month, so about $95,200 less per year than these guys in Bell are making.

How much of an increase did you get last year from your employer? As reported in the LA Times, “Rizzo’s salary has grown steadily over the years, once going up 49% in a single year. His current contract calls for 12% pay hikes every July.”

And what did Rizzo say when he was confronted about his ridiculous salary, “If that’s a number people choke on, maybe I’m in the wrong business.”

Are you ticked off yet?

For some perspective, President Obama makes $400,000 a year to run the entire country and the Police Chief of Los Angeles, a real city, makes half of what the Police Chief of Bell is making.

None of these guys care. They made a fortune while they were in office, and if they retire now under pressure from citizens they’ll simply enjoy their lucrative retirement benefits and not work another day in their life living off Bell taxpayers until they die. If they don’t retire, the city would have to buy out their contracts,which would cost hundreds of thousands of additional dollars.

Is there really anyone left on the planet that doesn’t think government workers aren’t overpaid and underworked? It’s government worker salaries, early retirements, guaranteed retirement benefits and health care coverage that are bankrupting this country and causing all of the states to run massive deficits and raise taxes and lower services.

This is our NUMBER ONE problem. BIG GOVERNMENT. It has to STOP.

If you haven’t read PLUNDER! by Steven Greenhut, I highly recommend it, especially if you don’t mind being infuriated with learning how much government employees are making from school teachers, firefighters, police and other city and state officials.

An excellent website on the “pension-fleecing-of-every-American” is pensiontsunami.com. Check it out.

This is YOUR money.


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Hezbollah Terrorists Attempt to Establish Themselves on Mexico-U.S. Border

Posted in Government Failures, Immigration, Terrorism with tags , , , on July 17, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

This post serves as a recent confirmation to my previous post found here, on attempts by terrorist organizations to use our non-existent enforcement of border security along the U.S.-Mexico border as a means to infiltrate the United States.

This is real. This is happening right now. While Obama and politicians like Pete Stark keep telling us lies about how secure the border is and how Arizona needs to back down on border enforcement, our enemies in terrorist countries around the world are attempting to establish beachheads to mount terrorist attacks on the United States from Mexico.

Please consider the following:

  1. Hezbollah agents are believed to be learning Spanish in Venezuela where it is widely accepted they have a foothold.
  2. Mexican gang members in prison in the Southwest are turning up with tattoos in Farsi indicating some Iranian influence in their organization.
  3. A Mexican army general believes independently of American suspicions that Hezbollah is training drug cartels in the art of making bombs for every occasion.
  4. Homeland Security has been aware of Hezbollah members caught at the border trying to enter since 2006.
  5. Mahmoud Youssef Kourani, the brother of a Hezbollah chief, was smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border and settled in Dearborn, MI. In 2005 he pleaded guilty to providing material support to Hezbollah.

Articles here and here or Google it and find dozens more.

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United States Demographics – Key Graphics & Comments

Posted in Economy, Personal Economics with tags , , , , on July 17, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

The following images are from Wikipedia. I thought it would be interesting for some readers to see what the demographics of the United States look like and to point out a couple key facts.

The first image is the breakout of household and individual incomes. You should note (yellow highlight) that less than 1.5 % of the population make the $250,000 and up that Obama said would pay for all this spending we are doing. It is impossible for 1.5% of the population to help support the other 98.5% and all this government spending. Brace yourself for additional taxes, regardless of how much you make.

Click on image to enlarge

This image breaks out the social classes in the United States. Again, in two of the models only 1% are the “wealthy” that we talk so much about taxing to pay for everything. 1% paying for the 99%…I don’t think so. I noted in green highlight in the third model which has a group of 5% called “The Rich,” that most of that wealth is in home equity, which is “rich” on paper only. His study was done in 2004, about five years into the housing bubble and considering that the median home value in Orange County, California reached $650,000…that’s for the average house, I imagine that 5% figure has been significantly reduced since then. Combine that with all of the foreclosures and I am sure it is much less.

Click on image to enlarge

This last image is the racial breakout for the United States. Considering how often white people are called “racists” I am happy to report that despite the fact that 75% of the population is white, thereby “racist,” we somehow still managed to elect a black president. Some will argue that this occurred only because all the other non-white races turned out at the polls while the majority of white people did not.

However, if this were true then I can assure you that if whites in America were as racist as these people claim, then they surely would have turned out in vast numbers at the polls to prevent a black man from becoming president by voting for the other guy. Yet, this did not happen. So much for white people being a big group of racists. Clearly, not true.

Click on image to enlarge

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Fabianism – The Gradual Transformation to Socialism

Posted in Government Failures, Socialism with tags , , , , , , on July 17, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

I was reading a book on economics the other day when I came across the word fabian. I had no idea what it meant, so I used my Kindle’s dictionary feature to look it up. One more reason I love my Kindle. You just drop the cursor next to the word and a definition appears at the bottom of the screen. Very handy.

The short definition according to Wikipedia is, “favoring gradual change rather than revolutionary change.” It was named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus nicknamed, “The Delayer.” He avoided head-on battles with the enemy, preferring guerrilla warfare tactics instead such as harassment and attrition. He was quite successful.

This reminded me of the boiling frog story, again from Wikipedia, “The boiling frog story is a widespread anecdote describing a frog slowly being boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually.”

What struck me is that Fabianism is really just the political application of the boiling frog story. This may surprise you, but as many people as there are that believe in Democracy, there are many others who believe in Socialism.

Socialists did not just die off like some plague…they are still here, still walking around among us, and they believe in Socialism as much as you believe in Democracy. They simply believe that Socialism is a better idea.

So if you’re a socialist, and you want to socialize a Republic, you have two choices; revolutionary change or gradual change. Revolutionary change, like dropping the frog into boiling water, will not work in the U.S., but slow gradual change will.

So, if I were a socialist and I wanted to transform this country, knowing that socialism is not popular in the U.S., how would I do it?

  • First, I would never admit I was a socialist.
  • Second, I would simply become a politician of any party and impose socialist policies slowly, making small gradual changes over time…even if it took decades to bring the water to a boil.

So the way I see it, we are slowly being cooked to death by many of our own politicians.

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Larry King & Teabaggers

Posted in Tea Party with tags , , , on July 17, 2010 by angrywoodchuck

While I was traveling for work last week I just happened to have Larry King on in my hotel room. While I was working I heard someone use the term “teabagger” in referring to participants in the Tea Party Movement (TPM).

The term “teabagger” refers to a sexual act, and anyone who doesn’t understand or doesn’t like the TPM continues to use this term to make fun of them.

Remember when you were a kid and how the bullies on the playground could use words in such an abusive way that without even a single violent act they could tear down another kid to sobbing tears in mere minutes?

I don’t think there is anyone out there who has not had a bully pick on them, make fun of how they look, what they were wearing, their name or where they come from. I know I’ve had my share of bullies.

Calling people names is the bully’s way of forcing submission, and fear, in another person.

The definition of bully includes, “a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.”

So every time I hear someone call someone in the TPM a teabagger, all I can think about are the playground bullies who have no other tool available to them but to dominate, intimidate and control someone else through fear.

Why do adults teach children not to call people names and then immediately resort to that tactic as adults?

Larry King video here, Stephanie Miller’s comments start at 0:29.

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