The Worst.com

Posted by admin on February 26th, 2009 in Politics

To no intelligent person’s surprise, President Obama has chosen an extreme partisan who’s spent years on the Saudi payroll to chair his National Intelligence Council. According to today’s press release Charles W. Freeman:

“will be responsible for overseeing the production of National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) and other Intelligence Community analytical products, providing substantive counsel to the DNI and senior policymakers on issues of top national security importance, reaching out to nongovernmental experts in academia and the private sector to broaden the Intelligence Community’s perspective, and articulating substantive intelligence priorities and procedures to guide intelligence collection and analysis.”

So, what could it be about Freeman I dislike so much? Well, it could be his quote that:

    “Demonstrably, Israel excels at war; sadly, it has shown no talent for peace.”

Or maybe it is that, as president of the Saudi underwritten Middle East Policy Council, he published a working paper from professors at University of Chicago and Harvard titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” A paper no one else would publish which Freeman claimed was due to “the political penalties that the Lobby imposes on those who criticize it”.

Whatever happened to President Osama’s pledge to “close the revolving door for lobbyists and former officials”? I guess it is ok for those who were on the House of Saud’s payroll or, for that matter, the many other appointees Obama has relaxed this pledge for.

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Posted by admin on February 25th, 2009 in Politics

In my February 1st post I asked the following question:

    Is UNRWA being manipulated & used by terrorists or are they a willing participant?

It seems that UNRWA is a willing participant, moving between being HAMAS’s Public Relations arm and Post Office. According to the Jerusalem Post Israel is none too pleased by UNRWA head Karen AbuZayd handing over a letter and other materials written by a Hamas Foreign Ministry adviser to US Senator John Kerry.

To make matters worse, there are reports UNRWA has been lobbying around the world for governments to drop the international community’s three preconditions to talking with Hamas: Recognition of Israel, disavowing of terrorism and acceptance of previous Palestinian-Israeli agreements. Considering the sole goal of HAMASis to destroy Israel via terrorism, I guess I can understand why their PR arm would be working to get these preconditions dropped.

The amazing thing is how incredibly naive these idiots at UNRWA are. It is crystal clear to anyone with a brain that HAMAS doesn’t care at all about Palestinian civilians, rather, they actually look to increase the number of deaths amongst their people every chance they get!

None of this should come as a surprise as the United Nations is an absolute disgrace. So, the new question is: While UNRWA’s stated goal is to provide humanitarian aid and assistance to the Palestinian refugees, is their actual goal the destruction of the State of Israel via support of the world’s foremost terrorist organization?

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Posted by admin on February 16th, 2009 in Politics

I really don’t think President Barack Obama and his Democrat colleagues in congress could have made this any easier. It is only February 15th, not even a month into his presidency, and we already have the worst legislation in the history of our country. This isn’t because it happens to be the most expensive bill in history, rather, it is simply due to the way Pressident Obama and his cronies went about cramming this abomination of a bill through congress, writing most of it in secret, and forcing Congress to vote on it before a single member could even read it. Check out what Tom Price, chaiman of the Republican Study Committee, had to say the morning of the vote:

Oh yeah, didn’t the Democrats promise that the bill would be made available to the public for 48-hours before voting? Here is the leader of the House Republicans speaking on the floor:

Well, I guess the Democrats in Congress can’t be blamed too much for rushing this bill through congress. They must have just been listening to Obama’s shamelessly irresponsible fearmongering rhetoric when speaking about the economy (check out this story in the WSJ). I guess he doesn’t realize that, as President, his job is to stop campaigning and start leading. Oh, that’s right, he’s never led in his entire life. From his days as a community organizer to his constant ‘Present’ votes in the Illinois State Senate to his time as a US Senator when he didn’t introduce any bills and constantly voted along party lines. Maybe he should read Rudy Guliani’s book on leadership.

Here’s a video from a freshman congressman about the trip he took with the President to a manufacturing plant in his district.

That’s the same Caterpillar that announced 22,000 layoffs last month. But wait, President Messiah announced on February 12th at a CAT manufacturing plant “that if Congress passes our plan, this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off.” Not so says Jim Owens, the CEO of Caterpillar. When asked about this he stated “I think realistically no. The truth is we’re going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again” and “It is going to take some time before that stimulus bill means re-hiring,” he said.

Most amazingly, after all this rhetoric and Congress rushing the bill through at his request, Obama decided to go on vacation with his wife instead of signing it into law. It doesn’t seem believable but Congress voted on this abomination without reading it (something even Democrats admit) and Obama is taking his sweet old time to sign it. I mean, why couldn’t Congress have spent the long weekend reviewing the bill, learning what they were voting on, and then vote on it on Tuesday? What a joke!

Want another example of the extreme weaselness displayed by the Democrat leaders of Congress? They’ve decided to post the stimulus online; however, they’ve posted it in a format that is UNSEARCHABLE and contains hand-written notes and markups. To make matters worse, the bill has been broken up into four files and totals well over 100mbs. Oh yeah, and every Site they post it on, whether it be the Speaker’s Site or otherwise crashes constantly.

I’ll get into the actual legislation in my next post, but I want to avoid this post being as unwieldy long as the bill.

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Posted by admin on February 13th, 2009 in Finance

Let me start this by making clear that I don’t think we are heading for a Great Depression redux, that is, equity markets down 90% off their highs and unemployment at 25%.

Most people believe the reason we won’t have another Great Depression is that we’ve implemented controls against it such as the FDIC (insuring depositors against bank failures) and SIPIC (insuring investors against fraud). Late last year, the government even increased FDIC insurance for depositors by 150% in an effort to stem bank runs.

While I do think these programs are great, I fear these protections are a bit out of date. Today, most people have their savings as equity in their homes and their retirement funds in 401K & pension plans that have become increasingly tied to the equity markets. To the best of my knowledge, these aren’t insured against the extreme downturn we’ve seen in those markets-just ask anyone who’s opened recent 401K statements or tried selling their homes in the past year.

We also currently have the highest percentage of our citizens at or past retirement age with another huge percent moving close to it. Even if inflation has stopped, the cost of living for these groups has become absurdly high due to sky-high health care costs (not to mention the suckers who agreed to pay their children’s unconscionably high college & graduate school tuitions). Many of these people have also had their cost of living increased tremendously by skyrocketing property taxes.

Due to these issues most people nearing retirement are staying at their jobs, only exacerbating the employment situation. Think about all the new grauates, saddled with debt, who can’t get a job and therefore can’t purchase homes (often from the aforementioned who are counting on selling their home for retirement funds).

The truth is, the only way we’re getting out of this crisis is by returning the balance between prices and income. Just to be clear, I’m not just talking about housing prices, we’ve got to look at all goods and services such as cars, education, fuel, food, etc.

Personally, I believe we can return this balance by doing away with our arcane income tax system and moving to a sliding sales tax which increases based on how luxurious an item is based on where it lies between that type of product’s opening price point and ‘top of the line’ price. For example, an automobile under $15,000 should have a certain incredibly low percent tax while a vehicle between $15,001 and $25,000 should have a slightly higher percent, with the scale increasing every $10,000 or for every 10 percentiles. This way, those who choose to spend more on luxury items will pay appropriately higher taxes.

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Posted by admin on February 13th, 2009 in Finance, Politics

There are a lot of ideas floating around about how we’re going to fix the housing problem and by proxy the financial system. Many of the ideas include more of what got us into this mess: allowing people to overleverage themselves with cheap credit. Here are some other ideas…

When it comes to housing, Democrats in both houses of Congress are moving forward on legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to modify home mortgages by reducing both the interest rate and the loan’s principal. I understand the compassionate side of allowing people to stay in their homes (though technically the homes belong to the banks who now own more than 100% of the homes worth). Unfortunately, this idea is really shortsighted and presents many problems, many of which are pointed out in this great article by Todd Zywicki in the Wall Street Journal. Here are a few:

• Considering there are currently 5 million people behind on their mortgages, what affect would this have on a bankruptcy system that handled only 800,000 cases last year. Oh yeah, and there are another 15 million people underwater on their homes.
• What happens when, in an effort to keep their home, those millions file for bankruptcy and no longer need to pay their car loans, credit cards, medical bills, etc. Can you say trickle down?
• Knowing that judges can rewrite mortgages, who will be giving to offer them and at what cost? Rates will certainly go up tremendously to mitigate lender’s risks.

Today, Barak Obama’s plan to modify mortgages before they become delinquent was partially announced. The key here is partially as it seems all Obama administration plans are only partially announced (like tax evading Tim Geithner’s bank plan). Like that plan to purchase toxic / illiquid assets from banks (the same one the Bush administration also considered before realizing it was impossibly expensive), I suspect this plan will also prove to be far more expensive than anyone can imagine and therefore impractical. Also, we still have the problem of who from the private sector will get into purchasing mortgage backed securities if they can be modified.

Personally, I think the only true solution is to allow home prices to regress back to where they should be naturally, that is, REASONABLY IN SYNC WITH MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME.

I can’t believe that no one is focusing on this absurdly simple principle. How can we expect people to be able to afford homes if home prices are completely out of whack with their income? The only way, of course, is one of the biggest factors in this economic crises: exotic mortgages and the extension of unwarranted credit. Not to mention the fact that municipalities have gone berserk when it comes to property taxes (especially here in New Jersey).

While I’m on property taxes, I need to mention a simple fact home sellers and realtors seem simply incapable of comprehending: If a home’s property taxes go up by a total of $6,000 a year over a 5 year span (not at all uncommon in these parts for a $500,000-$600,000 home), the carrying costs of that home goes up by $500 a month which is almost $100,000 in a mortgage. So, even if the market stayed flat, the home is in effect worth $100,000 less.

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Posted by admin on February 3rd, 2009 in Politics

How shortsighted can The Rat Pope be? On January 24th 2009, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Alois Ratzinger), lifted the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson, a Holocaust denying Briton, in an attempt to heal a 20-year-old schism in the Church.

In an interview broadcast on January 21st Williamson told Swedish television: “I believe there were no gas chambers… I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers.” He continued: “There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!”

To make matters worse, which you can imagine is quite difficult, Williamson issued the following apology to the Pope on his blog:

    “I beg of you to accept, only as is properly respectful, my sincere regrets for having caused to yourself and to the Holy Father so much unnecessary distress and problems.”

It is really amazing that some have portrayed this as an apology for his Holocaust denial as opposed to a reaffirmation of his views.

Here are some other comments from this moron:

    In a 1999 newsletter he asserted that Western leaders have “long been controlled by Judeo-masonry.”

    In a 1991 letter he states “Women’s trousers are an assault upon woman’s womanhood” and “represent a deep-lying revolt against the order willed by God.”

    In 2001 he states “Women going to university is part of the whole massive onslaught on God’s Nature which characterizes our times.”

I don’t understand how a Pope who grew up in Nazi Germany and was compelled to enroll in the Hitler Youth could make such an absurdly stupid and divisive decision.

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Posted by admin on February 1st, 2009 in Politics

Quickly following up on Barcelona’s decision to cancel the city’s lone Holocaust Remembrance day service, a Spanish judge decided to launch legal proceedings against what was Israel’s entire military leadership at the time they justifiably assassinated HAMAS arch-terrorist Salah Shehade.

The Spaniards don’t seem to care that Shehade was the founder and leader of HAMAS’s Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades – their ‘military wing’. It clearly matters not that this man brought death to hundreds of Israeli’s and Palestinians.

What really is amazing is Spain’s claim that they are doing this “in the name of universal justice,” recognizing “all matters pertaining to crimes against humanity and genocide.” Meanwhile they haven’t brought a single suit against any of the true genocidal regimes or the potpourri of Islamic countries that engage in various crimes against humanity on a daily basis.

Spain, at the behest of their spineless populace, has again shown the world it true strips. Look out EU, while you go vacilate about allowing Islamic Turkey into your ever non-exclusive club, Spain is quickly reverting to their Caliphate days.

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