January 31, 2005
IT’S THE FIRST STEP
Way to go IRAQ…nice job.
January 30, 2005
THINGS THAT ARE ON MY MIND
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE
CBO aims to provide the Congress with the objective, timely, nonpartisan analyses needed for economic and budget decisions and with the information and estimates required for the Congressional budget process. Compared with the missions of the Congress's other support agencies--the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office--CBO's mandate is relatively narrow. But its subject matter gives it a broad reach, reflecting the wide array of activities that the federal budget covers and the major role the budget plays in the U.S. economy.
Here are some Recent Social Security Analyses
Overview
Social Security Outlook
Policy Analyses
Individual Accounts and Investments in Private Assets
Click here for complete story.
PROTECTING OUR BOARDERS
Call a spade a spade...undocumented vs illegal aliens, what part of ILLEGAL don’t they understand.
OH REALLY MR NOVAK…
Paul Begala asked his co-host Robert Novak on CNN's Crossfire if he had seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.
Novak said "NO"
Paul then said you just judge it without seeing it.
To which Novak replied "Exactly".
OPEN HOUSES… JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR WHO CARES
Ferry coupon book changes
If ferry riders can't use up 10 round trips in a month, they're not bona fide commuters and shouldn't get a discount.
That's the feeling of state transportation officials, who are proposing to reduce the duration of coupon books from 90 days to 30. They also want to prevent more than one person from using coupons from the same book on the same trip. Open houses are scheduled in February.
Just like the Bremerton Tunnel they will not listen to the public, they don’t want to.
FREE TAX???
If you're planning to do your own taxes this year, there's an easy way to do it...fast and cheap. Just check out the Internal Revenue Service's Free File program, available through the IRS Web site; Click here to visit the IRS site.
With Free File, you can prepare and file your federal income-tax return electronically...online, over the Internet...at no charge.
Note, you must go thought the IRS site to be sure to get the free service.
TOP 10 REASONS FOR BEING SCOTTISH:
1. You ain't English!
2. You ain't English!
3. You ain't English!
4. You ain't English!
5. You ain't English!
6. You ain't English!
7. You ain't English!
8. You ain't English!
9. You ain't English!
10. You ain't English!
January 29, 2005
HAVING A SENIOR MOMENT
WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON IN THIS COUNTRY, ARE WE ALL GOING NUTS?
First it was SpongeBob SquarePants (see 1-21-5 and 1-24-5 entry), then it was Post Cards from Buster ( see below) and today an apology from The Sun for a small nude photo of a woman reading a book.
Come on folks we need to get a grip. As I understand it the JJ thing during the last Super Bowl cause something like 159 letters to the FCC which caused them to level a hefty fine on the network. Think about this…300,000,000 people in America DIDN’T find it necessary to write. Obviously they didn’t care, didn’t find it a big deal or weren’t watching.
The SpongeBob thing was a joke…right…Old man Dobson was just kidding. NO HE GOT IT WRONG AND WASN’T MAN ENOUGH TO SAY SO. Dobson is the conservative Christian leader and gay marriage opponent. Give me a break he’s no leader.
Then we have POSTCARDS FROM BUSTER a PBS TV show. This time it’s the Secretary of Education moaning and groaning about what PBS and these cartoon characters are doing to our kids. See the video here for the full story.
video View the Goodmorning America video about Postcards from Buster here.
And so today I read in my morning Sun this big apology about this picture they had in Fridays paper.
HERE IS THE APOLOGY FROM THE SUN:
From the Editor:
By Scott Ware, Editor
January 29, 2005
One person's art is another person's indecency.
That lesson was made clear by the reaction of some our readers to a book cover depicted in The Sun on Friday.
The cover of Susan Vreeland's new book Life Studies was a painting of a nude woman reading while sitting in a chair. It ran as a small illustration to a story on the front page previewing Vreeland's appearance today as part of the Kitsap Reads author series. In running the illustration, we made the judgment that, because it was an artistic depiction in a non-sexual context, readers would not find it offensive.
We know now that we misjudged how some of you would view it. What we heard from you is that nudity, regardless of context, is a private matter. You told us you do not want it delivered uninvited into the homes of you and your children, even if the depiction is only slightly larger than a postage stamp.
Others may quarrel with that reaction. But it is our responsibility as a daily newspaper to respect the values of all of our readers, and we apologize to those who found the artwork offensive or inappropriate.
I sure would like to know the number of “LETTERS TO THE EDITOR” they got on this NASTY picture. Still more craziness going on.
IS IT THE GOAL TO SERVE THE FEWEST RATHER THAN THE MAJORITY…IS THAT WHAT’S GOING ON? Hmmmm I wonder.
TOP 10 REASONS FOR BEING ENGLISH :
1. Two World Wars and One World Cup.
2. Warm beer.
3. You get to confuse everyone with the rules of cricket.
4. You get to accept defeat graciously in major sporting events.
5. Union jack underpants.
6. Water shortages guaranteed every single summer.
7. You can live in the past and imagine you are still a world power.
8. Bathing once a week - whether you need to or not.
9. Ditto changing underwear.
10. Beats being Welsh.
January 28, 2005
FRIDAY? I thought it was Tuesday
IS THE BUSH TAX CUT FAIR
Look at the chart above and you tell me.
SO THAT’S THE REST OF THE STORY PART 3 OF 3
You might have heard that the Social Security system currently takes in more money than it pays out in order to try to handle the baby boomer problem. What happens with the excess money the system collects? The Social Security system buys U.S. Treasury bonds with the surplus. Essentially, the government (in the form of the Social Security Administration) loans the surplus to itself.
In future decades, when it comes time to start drawing on the collected surplus, the government will pay itself back through tax revenue (or additional borrowing). The Social Security system will start cashing in the bonds, and the government will have to make good on them with tax revenue. That sounds weird because it is weird -- Whether or not it will work is a source of significant debate right now. The effect it will have is that it will shift the payment of Social Security benefits over to the government as a whole. The government as a whole, rather than the Social Security system, will have to repay the treasury bonds that the Social Security system will be cashing in. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens!
PRETTY GOOD JOKES
A guy goes into the psychiatrist's office. The psychiatrist tells him, "You're crazy." The guy says, "I want a second opinion."
So the psychiatrist says, "OK, you're ugly, too."
January 27, 2005
SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS
WORTH LOOKING INTO?
I saw Christine Todd Whitman on the TODAY Show. Moderates must aggressively reclaim their lost heritage, she argues, or the party will continue to lose more of the broad-based center that is the core of American politics. For evidence, she cites former Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush as representing the "various ribs of the Republican Party, and none of them would have tolerated purging the party of those who didn't share their own particular brand of Republicanism."
Whitman makes a convincing argument that the Republican Party has a rich political-historical tradition that needs to be defended. She details how the party should return to its roots of racial and minority inclusion that date back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.
Click here to visit her web site for more information.
SOCIAL SECURITY SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM PART 2 of 3
In 1935, there were many more people paying into the system than those receiving benefits. The ratio of workers to retirees meant that workers did not have to pay much into the system in 1935 to support the retirees up through 1950, only 2% of income (1% employee, 1% employer) was withheld for Social Security, compared to 15.30% (7.65% employee, 7.65% employer) today.
In the future, the retirement of millions of baby boomers will hurt the ratio -- there will be so many retired people that the working people will not be able to support them. If the population had grown steadily this would not have been a problem, but there is no good way for the design of the Social Security System to handle a population spike like the baby boomers.
Many people have become so used to the idea of a 401(k) plan (where your money belongs to you and grows to a large sum over time through investment compounding), that the idea behind the Social Security system becomes hard to swallow. Currently a worker pays 7.65% of his or her gross income into the Social Security system (with a cap at a gross income of around $70,000), and the employer pays another 7.65% for the worker as well. If you could take that 15.30% of gross income and invest it in a 401(k) plan for the same period of time, it would generate an immense sum of money based on historical returns -- far more than a person with average income (or greater) would get from Social Security. A retiree's Social Security benefit is calculated using a complex formula rather than an account balance, because there is no "account" in the traditional sense.
TOP 10 REASONS FOR BEING GERMAN :
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Give them a second chance:
1. Oktoberfest.
2. Oktoberfest-beer.
3. BMW.
4. VW.
5. Audi.
6. Mercedes.
7. On a highway you can travel at a speed that would bring you to jail in any other country of the world.
8. You do not have to learn German as a foreign language.
9. You think Sauerkraut is delicious.
10. Contrary to common belief laughing is not forbidden by law (yet).
January 26, 2005
HUMP DAY
NOTHING ON THE RADIO
Yesterday I had a Dr. Appointment. As I drove to the doctors I was searching the radio for something to listen to and came across my good friend Rush Limbaugh. It was a commercial break and he was doing an ad for “COLD DRUGS”. My question is this “IS HE THE RIGHT PERSON TO BE PROMOTING DRUGS?” just wondering.
HOW DOES SOCIAL SECURITY WORK
In almost every financial situation that we deal with on a regular basis, there is the idea of an "account". For example, when you put money into a bank, it is understood to be "your money" and it goes into an account with your name on it. The same thing happens when you contribute to your 401(k) plan at work -- you have an account with your money in it, and if you change employers the money in the account is yours. You also have accounts for your credit card, mortgage, car loan, and so on. In any of these accounts, you add money to the account and take money out of it, and whomever holds the account keeps track of how much you have or you owe.
The Social Security system is nothing like that. In the Social Security system, the money you pay into the system gets immediately paid back out to the people who are currently getting Social Security checks. This arrangement came into being because of the way the system started. In 1935, when Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, there were a lot of people who needed benefits (because of the Great Depression), but there was no money to pay those benefits with. The idea at the time was that people currently working would pay into the system, and their money would immediately go back out in the form of benefit checks. Each generation of retiring workers would get paid by the people currently working, and therefore the system would fund itself forever despite the fact that the system had no money to start with.
This clever idea worked great in 1935 (and for many years after that), but it is going to have a problem in the future for two reasons: We’ll cover that tomorrow.
The Bush plan to privatize Social Security
U.S. Social Security privatization is top of the neo-conservative agenda, following the re-election of George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential election. Three strands of the debate are moves to protray the existing system as being 'in crisis', conservative attacks on AARP, which opposes privatization of the system and a campaign supporting it by the Alliance for Retirement Prosperity (ARP), a group was launched by Republican stalwarts such as Jack Kemp and Dick Armey.
As the Bush administration pushes to privatize the current Social Security system in the United States, we've compiled a number of articles about people and groups supporting the campaign.
Click here for more information.
TOP 10 REASONS FOR BEING BELGIAN:
1. You get to speak three languages, but none of them intelligibly.
2. If other countries want to fight a war, they will do it in your country.
3. You can brew drinks out of fruit, and still call it beer.
4. You are either
a.like the Dutch, just less efficient
b.like the French, just less romantic
c.like the Germans.
5. Decent fries. Real mayonnaise. Great chocolate. The best beer.
6. No one knows anything about you, except for the Dutch and French and they make fun of you.
7. More scandals in a week than any other country in a decade.
8. You can drive like a maniac on the road and nobody cares.
9. All your famous countrymen are either imaginary, or sex-offenders.
10. Face it. It's not really a country, is it?
January 25, 2005
IT'S ABOUT TIME
Regulators plan to turn down indecency complaints about ABC's airing of the movie. The FCC got 159 complaints against the airing of Saving Private Ryan last November.
Let’s see now there are about 300 million Americans and the FCC got 159 complaints and they were supposed to lay big fines on ABC for running this movie… I don’t think so.
USE THE REMOTE PEOPLE.
How DUMB can they be that they watch something so that they can write a letter of complaint.
WE HAVE QUESTIONS
Why do MOST sports guys voices sound so strange on TV and radio?
HEY ISN’T IT ALWAYS THE CONSERVATIVES THAT ARE CRYING THAT THEY “DON”T GET NO RESPECT” FROM THE AWFUL LIBERAL MEDIA.
Cable news nets ignored progressives in covering inaugural
It wasn't just protesters who had difficulty making their views known during inaugural coverage, and it wasn't just CNN keeping viewers in the dark. A Media Matters for America review of daytime coverage January 20 on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News found that "Republican and conservative guests and commentators outnumbered Democrats and progressives" 42 to 10 on the three networks:
Between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET, Republican and conservative guests and commentators outnumbered Democrats and progressives 19 to 7 on FOX, 10 to 1 on CNN (not including a Republican-skewed panel featuring Ohio voters), and 13 to 2 on MSNBC. Moreover, the rare Democrat or progressive guest usually appeared opposite conservatives, whereas most Republican and conservative guests and commentators appeared solo or alongside fellow conservatives.
FROM ANIMAL BLESSINGS
By June Cotner
Making a house a home
For me a house or an apartment becomes a home when you add one set of four legs, a happy tail, and that indescribable measure of love we call a dog… Roger Caras
January 24, 2005
I JUST CAN'T HELP IT
HERE'S JOHNNY!
SPONGEBUSH SQUAREPANTS!
Maureen Dowd did a very funny piece in the New York Times yesterday called A Bunch of Krabby Patties. Click here for the full text. She was ranting about Dr. James Dobson, the conservative Christian leader and gay marriage opponent, who claims the president's re-election was more a mandate for his ideas than George Bush's, to point out the insidious underside of the popular cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. It takes a sponge to brainwash a child.
She went on to say. Holy Abe! Dr. Dobson outed SpongeBob at a black-tie inaugural fete last week for members of Congress and political allies. He said that a "pro-homosexual video" - starring SpongeBob, Barney, Jimmy Neutron, Winnie the Pooh, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy - was set to go to elementary schools to promote a "tolerance pledge," including tolerance for differences of "sexual identity."
Dan Martinsen, a spokesman for Nickelodeon, where SpongeBob beats the pants off the competition, was flummoxed: "It's a sponge, for crying out loud. He has no sexuality."
She has now renamed Bush to “SpongeBush SquarePants!”
A NEW MOTTO FOR SOCIAL SECURITY
The new Bush Social Security policy and motto: SCREWING OVER ONE RETIREE AT A TIME!
FROM ANIMAL BLESSINGS
By June Cotner
Scratch a Dog
Scratch a dog and you’ll find a permanent job… Franklin P. Jones
January 23, 2005
IT'S A GOOD THING TO LIVE HERE
NOW THAT’S GOOD PLANNING
Well the republicans can sure plan an inauguration but a war not so much….
48 hours ago on Thursday President Bush was sworn in…today it is snowing back there like crazy.
Wonder why they couldn’t have done that with Iraq.
LETS TALK CRISIS
The presidents push to reform Social Security has me worried. Not because it will effect me …it won’t. I have only minimum SS that I managed to earn years ago. But I still think it’s a good program that while it might need to be tweaked it is not in crisis. To me the $7 trillion National Debt is a CRISIS that does need to be addressed now.
To me it’s like me adding a new room to the back of my house while the front room is burning down. I want to add that room but the CRISIS is in the front room. Why would I want to continue to build that new room and ignore the fire in the front of the house.
It doesn’t make sense. The NATIONAL DEBT IS THE FIRE AND THE CRISIS.
FROM ANIMAL BLESSINGS
By June Cotner
Devotion
I have found that when you are deeply troubled there are things you get from the silent devoted companionship of a dog that you can get from no other source… Doris Day
January 22, 2005
It'S JUST POLICY
GO FIGURE…
It strikes me as funny that President Bush is taking on a problem (Social Security) that might be a problem 20, 30, 40 or 50 years down the road yet doesn’t address a problem that we have RIGHT NOW.
THE GROWING NATIONAL DEBT.
Concerned? Then tell Congress and the White House!
TOP 10 REASONS FOR BEING DUTCH:
1. You can get arrested for growing plants, but not for smoking them.
2. You can make jokes about the Belgians and still drink their beer.
3. a. You can legally kill yourself b. You can legally be killed.
4. You're exactly like the Germans, except that nobody hates you.
5. You think you are a world power, but everyone else thinks Copenhagen is
your capital...
6. You get to insult people and defend yourself by saying it's a national
tradition.
7. You can put your finger in a dyke and it will save your country.
8. You live in the most densely populated country in Europe, and still
you've never seen your neighbors.
9. If the economy is bad, blame the Germans. If a war is started, blame
the Germans. If you lose your keys, blame the Germans.
10. Bikes are public property. Locks are a challenge.
January 21, 2005
DOES ANYTHING EVER CHANGE
I REMEMBER BACK IN THE FIFTIES…
Back when I was a kid and Rock and Roll was getting started some of the religious nuts saw it as the end of the world. When Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show they only showed him above the waist. Over the years there have been these outburst of book burning and tape or CD’s being destroyed for pretty much the same reason.
Now 50 years later here we go again. The difference this time it’s coming from a respected conservative religious leader and in many ways it’s much more hurtful and I think vicious.
Me thinks that some of these so called “religious nuts” have much to much time on their hands and need to spend more time paying attention to their ministry. They need to check the divorce rate, they need to find out if the very poor have FOOD, CLOTHING and SHELTER. Remember those VALUES???
Click here for complete story.
FROM ANIMAL BLESSINGS
By June Cotner
Folks Will Know
Folks will know how large your soul is by the way you treat a dog… Charles F. Duran
