Kevin Colby: News, culture, political blog

Happy Halloween you freaks!

Just in time for Halloween, the Department of Defense (DOD) has issued new rules on human testing. The new proposal covers ethical treatment of “the use of human organs, tissue, and body fluids from individually identifiable living human subjects.” But “does not apply to the use of cadaver materials,” i.e. the dead.

Isn’t in our best interest to protect the dead, since they can become the undead on Halloween?

Information obtained from Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Here are some interesting articles to read:

Barack Obama is trying to blame McCain for the drop in GDP.  It’s the same old trick: try to link McCain to President Bush.  The trouble here is that there are enough stupid voters out there who will buy this stuff.

Obama’s “tax calculator” will show you how much of tax cut you will receive, but it won’t calculate how much of a tax increase you can expect (for all you evil rich people).

Obama’s plans for election night include a gathering of 65,000 … and he is going to do it without some sort of rap artist or Communist band.

Here’s a column out of Ohio: If we elect an admitted socialist president, we’ll deserve what we get.

Democrats are already making plans to decorate their offices … seriously!  And with your tax dollars.

The Republicans are considering actively pursuing Joe Lieberman to join their ranks.

Here’s a fun little stroll down memory lane … an article from 2006 predicting Obama as a presidential candidate.  The best part is if you read the comments about him not being ready or qualified.

Celebrities are threatening to leave the country if McCain is elected.  And the problem here is …?

A Pennsylvania resident mistook a government truck made by “McClain Galion” to be a government truck with a McCain bumper sticker … the woman promptly complained to her Senator about government trucks showing political bias.

Here’s some interesting news … Australia will join China in implementing mandatory censoring of the Internet.

The New Jersey police are confiscating illegal firearms and melting them down, so that “they’ll never hurt anyone again.”  Melt criminals, not guns.

A Canadian man just finished serving 6 months in jail for his 45 day sentence.  Read it again.

A tattoo artist was fined $600 for not being in proper control of his vehicle … because he was driving with a tiny Chihuahua in his lap.

Voters in this election say they want a president who will go to Washington to solve their problems!  Well a listener has sent us this poster …

A Colorado police dog, Izzy, has retired from the force after being injured while fighting with a suspect.  Now the handler is trying to pay for Izzy’s surgery.  We need to help.

All articles were obtained from boortz.com

AIG, the company that we taxpayers were forced to bailout–twice, has blown through almost the entire $123 billion that was handed to them by the feds.  Vanished in thin air, like a fart in the wind!  People, it’s time for this company to file bankruptcy and say buh bye!

The American International Group is rapidly running through $123 billion in emergency lending provided by the Federal Reserve, raising questions about how a company claiming to be solvent in September could have developed such a big hole by October. Some analysts say at least part of the shortfall must have been there all along, hidden by irregular accounting.

“You don’t just suddenly lose $120 billion overnight,” said Donn Vickrey of Gradient Analytics, an independent securities research firm in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Mr. Vickrey says he believes that AIG must have already accumulated tens of billions of dollars worth of losses by mid-September, when it came close to collapse and received an $85 billion emergency line of credit by the Fed. That loan was later supplemented by a $38 billion lending facility.

But losses on that scale do not show up in the company’s financial filings. Instead, AIG replenished its capital by issuing $20 billion in stock and debt in May and reassured investors that it had an ample cushion. It also said that it was making its accounting more precise.

Mr. Vickery and other analysts are examining the company’s disclosures for clues that the cushion was threadbare and that company officials knew they had major losses months before the bailout.

AIG has declined to provide a detailed account of how it has used the Fed’s money. The company said it could not provide more information ahead of its quarterly report, expected next week, the first under new management. The Fed releases a weekly figure, most recently showing that $90 billion of the $123 billion available has been drawn down.

AIG has outlined only broad categories: some is being used to shore up its securities-lending program, some to make good on its guaranteed investment contracts, some to pay for day-to-day operations and — of perhaps greatest interest to watchdogs — tens of billions of dollars to post collateral with other financial institutions, as required by AIG’s many derivatives contracts.

Read the full story.

The banks, brokerage houses, insurance companies and automakers all got theirs, so why shouldn’t homeowners?

Well listening to Clark Howard yesterday, he says that  the government is planning a federal bailout of some 3 million homeowners who are delinquent on their mortgages.  So here is the scoop:

Negotiators for the Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. are nearing agreement on a plan to have the government guarantee the mortgages of millions of distressed homeowners in what would be a significant departure for the federal rescue program, which has so far directed relief exclusively to banks and other financial institutions.

The plan, which sources said could cover as many as 3 million homeowners in danger of foreclosure and cost between $40 billion and $50 billion, would go well beyond previous government and private-sector initiatives. Critics say these have attracted too few lenders or offered too little aid to homeowners to stem the foreclosure crisis.

This is the first truly organized attempt to assist those facing foreclosure. The fairness issue aside, this is an effort to provide some level of base support for homes around the country. A foreclosure will reduce the values of neighboring homes by around 1%. That’s partly because banks do such an atrocious job of managing real-estate owned properties (REOs). The idea of providing a bailout to homeowners is to do a cram-down, with the loss split between taxpayers and the bank. We’ll see how it works out on the ground.

The reality is that we have too many houses. The best guesstimates put the figure at anywhere between 3 million to 10 million houses. So we have a ways to go before we burn through that excess. But housing markets that have been going down in value will start to stabilize. It took us several years to get into this mess and it will take us several more to get out.   Personally, I’m not for bailing any of the banks, corporations or homeowners out.  Just let it all burn to the ground! Then maybe  as a country we will learn our lesson.   Read the full story on the bailout.

Visit American Solutions.

A 21st Century Individual-Centered Intelligent Health System Now! The Center for Health Transformation is a high?impact collaboration of private and public sector leaders dedicated to creating a 21st Century Intelligent Health System that saves lives and saves money for all Americans. The Center is based on the following premise: Small changes or reactionary fixes to separate pieces of the current system have not and will not work. We need a system?wide transformation. Unlike other alliances, the Center unites stakeholders across the spectrum (providers, employers, vendors, trade associations, disease groups, think tanks and government leaders at both the state and federal level) to drive transformation according to a shared vision and key principles. Our nine key strategies are:

Accelerate the Adoption of Interoperable Electronic Health Records

Create secure, interoperable electronic health records with expert systems to maximize accuracy, minimize errors, reduce inefficiencies and improve care.

Create a System and Culture of Rapid Adoption of Solutions

Create a system and culture of rapid adoption of solutions that result in better outcomes at lower cost for Medicaid, Medicare, and the private sector.

Support Information?rich Health Savings Accounts

Accelerate the adoption of information?rich health savings accounts to both incentivize and empower the individual.

Develop a New System of Health Justice and Patient Safety

Create a new system of health justice and patient safety, focusing on a much fairer, less expensive and more timely system of health justice. The current system of civil health litigation is too expensive and fails to provide justice for patients and their families.

Create a Buyers’ Market for Pharmaceuticals

Create a buyers’ market for pharmaceuticals by building a transparent system for individuals, doctors, and pharmacists of price and efficacy information about prescription drugs and medically appropriate over?the?counter drugs. The system would have an open formulary with an “after?pay” rather than a co?pay (a “Travelocity” for drug purchasing).

Establish a System for Capturing the Cost and Benefits of Better Solutions

Establish an intellectually credible, accurate system for capturing the cost and benefits of better solutions, better technologies and better outcomes in order to create a technically correct model of return on investment for solutions resulting in better outcomes at lower cost.

Create a Real?time Continuous Research Database

Develop a real?time continuous research database that advances the discovery, development, and delivery of research (turning cancer into a chronic disease by 2015 and eliminating preventable complications from diabetes by 2015).

Create a Virtual Public Health Network

Knit together these electronic systems into a virtual public health network for health protection against natural outbreaks and a bioshield against deliberate biological attack.

Turn Health & Healthcare from a Problem into an Opportunity

By implementing the first eight strategies, turn health and healthcare from a problem into an opportunity, making it the leading creator of high?value jobs and foreign exchange earning in American society (including as a first step the creation of an undersecretary of commerce for health)

The presidential candidates and their respective political parties have formed a number of so-called joint fundraising committees in the 2008 election to collectively raise money. Donors write one large check, usually so they can attend an event headlined by the candidate, and the money then gets divided according to pre-determined portions and contribution limits. In a frequent scenario, the contributor makes a five-figure donation. The candidate takes a share–often the maximum allowed per individual donor, the national party takes a cut and the remainder is split among state parties. Donors to these joint fundraising committees, or JFCs, are among the biggest fish in political fundraising.

Since John McCain is receiving public financing for the general election, he can’t collect any of this money anymore for his campaign. But he can appear at the events where the parties continue to raise money used to support his campaign. Barack Obama is relying on private funds and can continue to take a portion of what’s collected by Democratic JFCs.  Information was obtained from The Center for Responsive Politics.

John McCain

Barack Obama

Some interesting articles to read:

A former staffer of ACORN’s Project Vote testified that they were provided a “donor list” from Obama’s campaign in 2007 for fundraising efforts.

John Stossel and I are on the same page … there are people out there who have a duty not to vote.

Obama is upset that John McCain is calling him a socialist.  Obama says this is a “phony attack.”

Here is the story of a Democrat speechwriter for Obama, Edwards, and Clinton who says that she is going to vote for McCain.

Columbia professor and Obama fan Jeffrey Sachs couldn’t tell Joe Scarborough one significant thing Barack Obama has ever done legislatively.

Joe Biden is less accessible to reporters than Sarah Palin, and he is being forced to use a teleprompter.

Someone has put together this video compilation of Obama apologizing for being late all the time to hearings.

Michelle Malkin has chronicled some Notorious Obamedia Moments of 2008.

Fraud and waste at the United Nations?  Can’t say that I am shocked about this report.

At the University of Florida, engineering students have actually created an Obamabot.  The real thing!  Maybe they should have taken some of that brain power to research Obama’s policies.

Two teenagers in Ohio thought it would be real cool to steal some McCain signs from someone’s lawn.  I wonder how cool they feel now after suffering from minor bullet wounds.

Joe the Plumber could be the next country super star.

A developer in Seattle can’t build a grocery store because of wetlands legislation.  So here’s what he is threatening to do … I’ll give you a hint, it involves strippers and a drive up window.

All articles were obtained from boortz.com

The Treasury Department has released its first bailout “transaction report,” which documents  where $125 billion of the $700 billion in the bailout bill is being spent.   I tried to copy and paste the report but it came out all funky, so you’ll just have to view it as a pdf file.  The list is somewhat behind the public announcement by the banks that are participating in the program. The initial report documents the first $125 billion investment in nine banks that the Department made earlier this month.

Click here to read the report

So it was Joe Biden who said just last week that evil CEOs would be the first to see their pensions go.  Are you ready for the full scale attack on privately held pensions and 401K plans once Obama and Biden are in the White House?

Something the mainstream media isn’t reporting is the fact that changes will be coming to your 401(k) … they have already been proposed in House hearings in Washington.  Earlier this month, the chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor Rep. George Miller (a Democrat) says that sweeping changes must come to the 401(k) system.  One of the main changes would be eliminating $80 billion in tax savings for higher-income people enrolled in 401(k) retirement savings plans.  Miller says, ” what we have to start to think about in Congress of whether or not we want to continue and invest that $80 billion for a policy that is not generating what we … say it should?”

What “we” say it should?  By “we” do you mean that the government should be able to determine how much I can put away for my retirement?

Is there a motivation here?  Well, try this.  Let’s look at health insurance.  For decades the government has favored government-provided or employer-provided health insurance over privately-acquired plans.  If your employer bought you the policy - deductible.  If you bought it yourself - not deductible.  The goal here was to make it easier for you to depend on someone else for health insurance than on yourself, and in fact to punish you if you tried to employ a bit of individual responsibility.

Are we moving to the same scheme for retirement savings?  Get your retirement from the government and you’ll be favored.   Try to set up your retirement plan on your own and you’ll be punished.  Self-sufficiency, punished.  Dependence, rewarded.

So where do we go from here?  Government guaranteed retirement accounts.  Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor, proposed this plan.  Here’s Teresa’s explanation: “The way the government now encourages 401(k) plans is to spend $80 billion in tax breaks, which goes to the highest-income earners.  That simply results in transferring money from taxed savings accounts to untaxed accounts.  If we implement automatic [individual retirement accounts] or if we expand the 401(k) system, all we’re doing is adding to this inefficiency.”

Do you smell a plan to make you dependent on government for your retirement?  Talk about having you by the short hairs …..

In the meantime, let’s get back to Joe Biden’s “their pensions will be the first to go” comment.  The more savvy among you know that a large part of the current economic crunch can be blamed on Washington action or inaction.  Are their pensions in jeopardy because of their malfeasance?  Hardly.   Just yesterday, Yahoo Finance reported that lawmakers in Congress may turn out to have the “sweetest” pension plan.  This is because lawmakers are offered a defined-benefit pension plan that is backed by the US Treasury and insulated from Wall Street fluctuations.  But keep in mind, when it says that they are backed by the US Treasury, it means your tax dollars.  The article says that lawmakers like George Miller are in an “increasingly privileged category” because they are guaranteed retirement benefits thanks to you, the tax payers.

What exactly do they get?  Well their benefits start earlier and accrue faster than the average private company worker.  Lawmakers also get cost-of-living increases, which is extremely rare in the private sector.  George Miller, for example, if he were to retire tomorrow would take away an annual pension of about $122,000.  In other words, “lawmakers’ retirement benefits are out of step with most ordinary Americans.”  And at a time when Joe Biden wants to take away the pensions of CEOs, Congress has made no effort to revisit its own retirement plan.

Robyn Credico, the national director of an employee benefit consulting firm, says, “The government plans are certainly very rich even if you compare them to the pension plans in corporate America … I certainly believe it affects policy … If you’re not impacted yourself it’s very easy to make different rules.”

One other item to take away from this is the fact that private employers do have the option to offer these defined benefit pension plans.  But what happens to a private company if it offers this type of plan, and the value of that plan drops … it has to make up for the extra cost in other ways … like layoffs, cutting other benefits or freezing the pensions.  When government defined pension plans lose value – the taxpayers make up the difference.

So what can we take away from this?  Federal lawmakers in Washington have secured pension plans that are affected little by this financial crisis … and they have your tax dollars to thank for it.  Meanwhile, they want to target evil CEO pension plans first.  Then they want to target private pension plans and eliminate any tax breaks you may currently enjoy.  Where does it stop?

Visit Boortz.com

Here is a great idea:

With the economy on the ropes, hundreds of thousands of Americans losing their jobs, and a national debt over $10 trillion, it is time for lawmakers to take a hit where it financially hurts. With the election of the 111th Congress just more than a week away, this new Congress should save us some money and provide an important symbolic gesture by freezing its own pay.

Since 2000, real wages for most American’s are flat or have even gone down; yet during that time Congress has, according to the Congressional Research Service, increased its own pay nearly 20-percent (from $141,300 to $169,300).  In 1855, when Congress started earning a per annum salary, members earned $3,000; adjusted for inflation, that is about $67,000 in 2008 dollars.

Freezing its own pay while the nation is suffering through a financial crisis the likes of which most of us have never seen won’t be the answer to all of our fiscal woes, but it will serve as a symbolic reminder that Congress feels our pain and is willing to take a small hit along with everybody else while times are tough.

Visit Taxpayers for Common Sense.