We currently are in a recession SO bad that it teeters on the edge of being just as bad as the Great Depression. With big companies going out of business, other companies laying people off right and left and Mexicans hopping back across the border because it’s so bad here, why in the name of all that is holy, is the President and his wife spending $150-170 million dollars on Inauguration festivities??? Even ‘W’ only spent $43 mill on his Inauguration! All you need is security so you don’t get assassinated on your first day on the job and a boatload of Port-A-Potties. There you go! Do you really need a big ‘A’ ball as well as party after party after party? Really? Oh my gosh, are you serious? That’s like when AIG accepted their billion-dollar ‘bail out’ and celebrated by treating their employees to a retreat! It’s like when you get your driver’s license and immediately wreck your parents’ car.

I guess things could be worse…We could have seen the monstrosities that Sarah Palin would have found should she have been made the Vice President. $180 thousand dollar shopping spree anyone? Sorry Joe, I’m sure you’ve been laid off of your plumber job by now, but that’s ok, Sarah-Poo needed dresses.

I’m very close to seeing what the wonderful world of Canada has to offer.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let’s follow the money … right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Franklin Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now.

It’s not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe –and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

All mud slinging and political debating aside… Is anyone else extremely worried that the sequel to the ‘The Great Depression’ is rapidly approaching?

‘The Great Depression 2’ Starring Keanu Reeves, Drew Barrymore, and directed by Ed Wood. I figured with the worst Sequel you’d need the worst cast.

As most of you know, the great House of Representatives rejected the $700 billion idea resulting in an almost 780 point drop in the stock market. We have Wachovia being swallowed up by Citi group and Wamu being devoured by JP Morgan Chase… But wait, after another significant drop in the stock market, they went ahead and passed it resulting in yet another 900 something drop after that. I have to wonder if the $700 billion dollar idea is as good of an idea as FDR’s ‘The New Deal’.

Before I have hundreds of complaints as well as many bags of flaming poo on my non-existent door step, let me explain my statement. For any one who has ever taken an American History course of any kind, you will have no doubt heard of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘The New Deal’. The New Deal was supposed to get the American Economy out of the Great Depression by upping deficit spending by leaking money into the economy and providing jobs for Millions of unemployed Americans. Although it raised spirits a little and gave worth to the work force it wasn’t the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression, it was World War II. With out the money we received for WWII we would probably still be in economic ruin… So where does that leave our economy now?

We’re already at ‘War’ which is sinking our economy lower and lower every day. The stimulus payment that was supposed to generate deficit spending didn’t really work out the way it was intended… So again, where does that leave our economy now?

We are in the middle of one of the nastiest Presidential elections since Grover Cleveland/ James Blaine (1884 election). Donkey’s and Elephants fighting tooth and nail to get their respective leaders ie Obama and McCain elected to try and fix the situation. How the heck can they fix the situation when they’re to busy trying to blame failed ideas on the other… it’s like congress has turned into one big giant Zoo being over run with Monkeys flinging Poo at each other.

Meanwhile we pass a $700 billion dollar bail-out or our modern day ‘New Deal’ which in theory is a good idea but let us look at another view point. With the smaller banks failing and being bought up by larger banks, there is still a possibility of the larger banks failing as well or turning into monopolies which are, wait a minute… illegal! Not to mention that this doesn’t necessarily save the little mom and pop shops that keep most smaller towns afloat… you know the saying ‘it’s the little things’… if big things fail, it’s bad but if the little things fail, that is just as bad if not worse.

Speaking of worse, has anyone read up on the AIG debacle? If you haven’t let me inform you a little. While our economy stays in the slump, our beloved government gives AIG $85 billion dollars to keep afloat and what do they do? They hold a ‘staff retreat/getaway’ right after recieving the money. To make matters worse, they have the audacity to ask for another $35 billion more!?!? That’s like stealing something from the mall and flashing your ‘stolen merchandise’ infront of everyone. Good criminy! Can’t you just sit on the cash for a while and or possibly launder it like most ‘White-collered’ criminals?

I know what you’re thinking. What in the name of all that is holy? I know! I KNOW! Before we stop caring completely about our nation and our respective ‘government’, not mention before the apes start taking over, there has to be something we can do! Well, the way I see it, there are two options there’s option A.) Grab your tooks and move to Canada where they have free health care and moose… tempting, but it is pretty cold up there. Or B.) Make sure you are registered to vote. Search out the issues and what’s on the ballots. Know what you are voting for or against. It’s easy and takes about 3 seconds go to http://www.maps.google.com/vote

Help fix our government!

Welcome to internet fame, Joe!