The Bush burns on.

Oh WHEN will people stop blaming Bush for all of the things he has done to us!

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CHART OF THE DAY: Reminder, The Deficit You're Freaking Out About Is Bush's Fault.

Gregory White and Kamelia Angelova | The Business Insider

President Obama's administration has been blamed for reckless spending that has put America into its debt hole. But in reality, much of that spending emanates from policies of President Bush, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

They argue that Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Bush tax cuts (along with the economic downturn) are what is driving the U.S. deficit, not stimulus spending.

The chart presents the ugly truth.

The Business Insider covers new media, venture capital, entrepreneurship and the digital landscape. You can find the original version of this story here.

From the Dept. of Things You Might Not Know.

Did you know that nearly half of the oil produced from the Gulf Coast states ... is shipped over seas? That's right.

In fact, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration databases (you can see more on this report here - http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/05/gulf_oil_exports.html), between 2003 and 2008 (while we were at war in Iraq to secure their oil for our consumption) U.S. oil exports nearly doubled.

Yep, all of that wailing and gnashing of teeth about the need to "drill baby drill" because we sooooo desperately need that oil here in the U.S. ...
... only apparently we don't need that oil as much as Mexico, Canada, and the Netherlands, or perhaps we're not willing to pay as much.

So "we the people" shoulder all the risk (and now the nightmarish cost) of drilling offshore while other countries get the oil and a handful of corporations pocket the cash.

Ain't it cool ?


... AND SOME MORE ... (added 5/11/10)
Here is a bit more to ponder over.
News stories yesterday touted the fact that BP had spent $350 million so far in it's oil spill damage control efforts.
Before anyone gets all teary-eyed about this though, they should know that last year BP's NET profit (that is how much "mad money" they had left over after they paid all their bills) was 20.09 BILLION dollars. That means that at the end of EVERY day of the year, when they went to empty their pockets, they had another 55 MILLION dollars to throw into their spare change jar.

So, it will only take BP 6 days to make back all the money they just spent on this mess. Of course, that is not taking into account the fact that BP (and every Corporation for that mater) was insured against damaged caused by such accidents.

Somewhere, BP had a group of engineers and accountants do a cost benifit study that showed it was much more profitable to opperate their rigs with the minimal safety standards they could get by with and then pay for clean-up in the statistically low chance they had an catastrophe.

When you look at the numbers it is clear that BP could aford to opperate at the maximum safety level and to maintain a quick response force to prevent what is now happening. They (and ever other oil company) could clearly do this and still make a NET profit. They just wouldn't be making as much of a profit.

THIS is where a corporation's priority is. NOT in the publics best interest or even in the National interest. It is first and foremost in the interest of their stockholders.

This holds true for the Corporations that run the Nuclear Power industry as well. They're only interested in as much safety as they can get by with and their plan for dealing with catastrophic failure is to count on it's statistical likely-hood of not happening.

Ask the business owners along the Gulf Coast what they think about statistically low probabilities.

Bogus e-mail inrages terrorist

So there you have it.

In my last post I postulated on how the simple act of forwarding bogus e-mails, urban legends and political scree - could further terror.

Well, now we have a real world example.
While clearly, this domestic terrorist was surrounded by an enviroment of hate, distrust and good old fashion "bat shit crazy" ... it is fake e-mails like the one mentioned below that can push that sort of the person over the edge. From simple fear filled, ignorance based, hatered ... to a person who takes up arms and plans to kill other citizens.

Don't tell me that no one is hurt by SPAM.
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TPMMuckraker

Hutaree Member Angered By Fake Hamas Resettlement Bill

Justin Elliott | March 31, 2010, 4:04PM

The Detroit Free Press notices that charged Hutaree militia member Tina Stone bemoaned the passage of H.R. 1388 on her Facebook page recently. That bill has been the subject of a false chain email that warns President Obama provided money to settle Hamas members in the United States.

(Stone made the statements on the same page that features the militia wedding photos we told you about yesterday.)

"H.B. 1388 Passed.... It's bad news for us all," she wrote.

She added: "I'm peeved,,, when people in this country is getting kicked out of there homes everyday and our government passes a bill to spend more then 20 billion dollars to bring Hamas here and supplies them with food and homes that just wrong."

It's pretty clear that Stone got these bogus ideas about H.R. 1388 from a chain email that has been thoroughly debunked by factcheck.org.

The email warns: "Obama funds $20M in tax payer dollars to immigrate Hamas Refugees to the USA. This is the news that didn't make the headlines..."

According to factcheck.org, the bill "actually expands AmeriCorps and other federal public service programs, more than tripling the total number of positions to 250,000."

"Careless Forwards Further Terror!"

I have a problem with relatives who like to urgently forward Urban Myths to me - usually warning me of some impending doom brought on by the current Presidential Administration, Nancy Pelosi, or Bill Clinton (which I find quite odd as he hasn't been in office for well over a decade!) but sometimes it is due to "The Media"® (which doesn't include Fox News for some reason) or some corporation that didn't donate to the "Tea Baggers" (which IS Fox News ... but I digress).


When ever I get these bits off bad fiction I quickly go to Snopes.com, find the link to the e-mail they have just forwarded to me (and EVERYone on their list) and send them proof of the HOAX they have just particpated in. I then gently (though not as gently now as the years of this drag on) suggest they go to Snopes and check this stuff out before forwarding it.

Of course, they still never bother to check these e-mails out. It's aways, "Grab your torch and pitchfork first - worry about those pesky 'facts' later."

As I was reading through this latest bit of sludge that fictitiously told of some guy who had predicted some attack (on Fox News of course) that later came true ... I started looking at these bits of fiction in a new light. Since I feel certain I am not the only one on the Internet who suffers from these "Spam who cried Wolf" friends ... I thought I would share my response.

Feel free to copy it and send it to your Uncle next time he sends you that bit about the Twin Towers being an inside job done by Bill Clinton.

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Good news! Snopes says your latest e-mail is a Hoax so you needn't fret about it.

It has gotten me thinking though.

Since the original creator of this piece of fiction meant to generate an atmosphere fear, distrust and growing terror among U.S. citizens, shouldn't that person be considered a terrorist?
If you and I in turn (even unwittingly), help to spread this sort of fear by passing along a terrorist created e-mail, are we ourselves aiding in an act of terrorism?

The more I think about it, terror e-mails like this could be considered the modern equivalent of the propaganda pamphlets that enemy armies used to drop from aircraft over cities and towns?
With e-mail though, just one initial attack might reach hundreds of thousands of civilians, striking directly into their homes and actually using the unwitting civilians themselves to launch the NEXT wave of terror and misinformation on their own friends and family ... simply by hitting the "Forward" button!

When you think about how little a "hoax" e-mail messages costs the enemy, this then is a very diabolical and cost effective tool in the terrorist's arsenal. We've been hearing for years that wars would someday be fought in "cyber space". Bogus e-mails like the one you were fooled into sending me could very well be the opening shots in that war!

Given all this, I pledge to check and double check any "Warning", "Cautionary tale", or "Anti U.S. Government/Personnel" e-mails that get forwarded to me - before I forward them myself.
I for one, refuse to voluntarily be used by terrorist/anti-American forces to help them spread their messages of fear and hate! I would like to encourage all of my friends and family to join me in this fight against the spread of terror and hope you would encourage your friends to do so as well.

Remember the phrase "Loose lips sink ships" ? Well, this is "Careless Forwards Further Terror!"

What a difference a year makes.

A little over a year ago, a close friend of mine was chosen by her company to attend a GOP fund-raiser. Her company paid a zillion dollars and in exchange, she and a handful of other VIP's from her Defense contractor, engineering firm were going to get to go through a line and shake hands with President Bush, then get to sit and listen to an hour of speeches.

For this to happen, her company had to write the big check and then submit the names of those who were going to attend so they could be vetted (I assume by the Secret Service).
Actually, getting to the event itself was a whole other story.

Although it was being held in a public convention center, the Secret Service had cordoned off a two block area around the facility, to include a public park. NO ONE gets in. In order to attend this event, my friend had to drive to a separate parking lot some miles away where she was to be screened again before being allowed to board a bus. The bus was then to take these vetted and thoroughly screened, paying guests to the event where they would be screened again before entering the venue.

Fast forward to a little over a year later. Now we have a new President at his first State function. An event in the White House itself. A facility where the most state of the art surveillance and screening equipment have been in place for some time now.
Yet, a couple merely playing the part of guests, two people who apparently didn't even have to produce any credentials what so ever, are allowed by the Secret Service to merely walk in the front door and shake hands with the leader of the free world.

This is simply unfathomable to me.

In a time in which public already has very little trust in our governments ability to do it's job, it would seem our secret service couldn't even manage to perform the most very basic function of their job, checking credentials at the door, in order to protect a Democrat President. Our first Black President. A President who had received a record number of death threats before he even swore the oath of office.

I just can't even begin to understand this incident. Because the simplest answers are simply unconscionable.

Unemployment - can you handle the truth ?

With all this talk about a "jobless recovery" and claims that we can't actually have a recovery unless the job situation gets back to normal, I've begun to question what normal really is (was?).

Looking at an "unemployment rate" graph from google, I see that since 1990 during any given 4 year Presidential term, the most the rate has changed (up or down) is about 3%.

I picked the "4 year term" time period because (right or wrong) "we the people" seem to correlate unemployment directly to actions taken (or not taken) by a Presidential administration. I only went back to 1990 because that was the only graphed data I could find at the moment.

So ... after the cataclysmic economic events in the Fall of 08, in which the unemployment rate spiked nearly 6% to a high of now 10.2% , the most we should seem to rationally expect out of an administration would be to lower that back down to around 7%
To get unemployment back down to the 4 - 5 % range would take the sort of extraordinary economic prowess not shown by either party in nearly 2 decades.

However, even that wouldn't really be "back to normal".

From the beginning of the Bush Presidency until the extraordinary events in the Fall of 2008, the unemployment rate only decreased 0.1%
Yes, they did have about a 3% change between their high and their low but in the end, almost 8 years later, all their efforts just managed to hold unemployment steady.

But the job scene was changing rapidly.
Corporate America was in full scale "right-sizing" mode and was trying to trim as much "fat" as they could get away with. The outsourcing of work to foreign countries and even the relocating of corporate headquarters was in high gear. Jobs were disappearing at a voracious rate.

The main thing that prevented the unemployment rates from drastically climbing during the last administration was long unemployed workers being dropped from the unemployment rolls and a massive amount of Government hiring.
The birth of the Office of Homeland Security was the creation of one of the largest, open-ended Government programs since Social Security! This massive expansion of the Federal Government helped to offset the number of "private" jobs that were being lost.

Where we now stand.

Pun-dents keep talking about the Obama stimulus effort not "creating jobs" yet "normal" would be to just stop the bleeding and hold steady where we are. As for actually lowering the unemployment rate, that may be a dream of decades long gone. With productivity on the rise (doing more with less) and overhead now as lean as it has been in decades, does it really make sense for corporations to return to the "bloated days" and hire all these U.S. workers back?

What about massive government spending to create jobs? The public didn't so much as bat an eyelash at the previous administration for doing this. Now though, with a LOT of cheer-leading from FAUX News and Hate Radio, it seems that the public has no stomach for the current administration's suggestions for doing the same.

So now what?

I really couldn't say but I do know that it is past time to embrace the changing reality of the U.S. employment situation and start making plans based on what we face and NOT on nostalgia for an era gone by.

Good news about the "TARP"

With everyone taking their shots at the administration's plans to save our necks, I thought I might share this example of where "Troubled Asset Relief Program" IS working.
Seems it can work when you can find bankers who want to make it work.

How the TARP Should Work: A Prime Example

One other note;
The Republicans are on a massive PR tour to try to talk up the amount of "pork" that was in the budget that got passed yesterday. They keep throwing out figures that are specifically tweaked to try and enrage the masses.
What they are NOT telling you is that the amount of earmarked projects that are in this Omnibus budget have been reduced to just 2% of the total. One of the lowest amounts of such spending in a long, long time.

BTW: I saw an interview with one of the chief Republican congressmen who is attacking the amount of earmarks in this budget. When the reporter pointed out the millions that had been put in for earmarked projects in HIS state, he said he would put those items back IN the budget if they were to get removed. Apparently it is only "pork" when the money goes to someone else.
Hypocrite.