Gridlock News

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Carol Mosely Braun was mugged over the weekend. She was very fortunate in that a university student came to her rescue as a knife wielding many was beating her on the ground and throwing punches. The incident happened right outside ex-Senator Braun's home as she walking home from the theatre. She has not yet publicly spoken about the incident as she is relaxing at home today. She is expected to make a statement next week.

Affluenza is a regular and re-occurring topic on many of my blogs. it is the concept that society is inflicted with a virus like influenza and it targets the affluent. Symptoms of this disease include a propensity to spend money on things you don't really need for occasions when you don't really need them and then to repeat that process over and over and over again until we all live on top of a big landfill.

Sometimes we can blame corporate America for this epidemic but most of the time we have to blame ourselves because I was curious type seemed like a shiny things and we keep buying them and stash them away like pack rats and when we're done with the maybe we throw them away and maybe we don't but we'll was by more. Now were watching the real estate market start to pop and I don't mean pop in a good way I mean pop in a bubble bursting bad way And it's partly due to our perceived need to buy bigger and bigger homes to put all of our affluent junk.

It's time that we rained this and and stop buying stuff for every occasion. We can to start with the little occasions we need to start at the top and knock off Christmas. No more Christmas gifts for anybody. Then we need to move down the list and stop buying gifts for Martin Luther King Day and Valentines Day and stop buying gifts for Mother's Day and Father's Day and even the Fourth of July. We made a neat consider stop graduations and birthdays and first communion gifts.

It is all gone far too far and it's time that we put our country into rehab. You don't put a person in a rehab and give them a smaller amount of heroin, you have to take them off the drugs and let them sweat it out. That's exactly what we need to do as a country, we need to sweat it out for a couple of years and get this sickness out of our system.

Several months ago my grandfather passed away. He had lived a long life and was extremely productive but ultimately old age and he recently diagnosed cancer took his life. In many ways he and my grandmother were prepared for his passing. Despite their financial preparations they were somewhat surprised by several of the additional bills that they received from the funeral.

It seems that literally everybody and their brother decided to chip in and add a few line items to the various bills that added up to cover the funeral expenses. Some of those came on invoices and some of them came on things that appeared to be napkins. Some were hand-delivered and some were mailed. The whole thing was a little less than professional and made our family question whether or not we were being nickel and dimed.

We don't know now, however I suspect if we'd utilized Funeral Insurance instead of pre-pain for many of the items in insurance company might have been able to root out some of these items and make sure everything was on the up and not. We oftentimes complain about health insurance and how it's an extreme hassle, but it does do a fairly good job of negotiating rates up front with providers and ensuring that the contract rates aren't terribly inflated. The due diligence and red tape also protects the insurance company and by extension the insurance companies customers from fraud and additional expenses.

That said this is one of those things that's unlikely to be terribly popular because most people want the personal tide should and don't want to have to deal with an insurance company when someone they love passes away.

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Apparently Republicans weren't able to clean house as well as they'd intended to when the Clintons left office several years ago. There comes a time when cleaning the house just is not enough. sometimes you have to replace the furniture, maybe the carpet, you probably will need to repaint and you may even need to gut several of the rooms and start fresh.

If all the scandals coming out of the Bush ministration are any indication, that's probably what's needed this point in time. Fortunately, our sponsor Powell furniture might be older help providing excellent furniture at excellent prices. Maybe some fresh decor will help liven things up and put people in the right frame of mind to get to work and quit fooling around on Capitol Hill.

Well it looks like the scandal du jour in Washington finally came home to roost as one of the Bush administration members resigned this week resulting from the fallout of the Washington, DC Madame that has been sharing information with authorities about her escort service clientele.

Randall Tobias resigned from the State Department. He was the US foreign aid official and a former head of Eli Lilly. He was also subordinate of Condoleezza Rice, one of her deputies in fact.

It probably doesn't sit well that this Bush administration member was cavorting with an escort service even though he claimed that he was using this high-priced call girl service as a messenger service.  Apparently he hadn't heard of FedEx or the US Mail. Few people realize that prostitutes make some of the best messengers. 

Apparently, this is especially true for State Department officials trying to do the work of the nation at the pleasure of the Secretary of State.

Republicans were supposed to bring a new sense of propriety to Washington, DC after cleaning the White House upon the Clinton's departure in 2000. Maybe they received the memo about not cavorting with interns, but they missed the spirit of the intentions of a new propriety altogether as this latest scandal finally starts to errupt.

I'm sure the Republicans weren't the only ones involved in this particular scandal and there'll be several Democrats that shakeout as well, this just happens to be the first.

The real estate market is now reportedly the worst real estate market we've had an 18 years, which means it's about as bad as it ever was in the early 90s just before the recession. That doesn't mean that it's as bad as it was during the early 80s before trickle-down economics really started to do anything. Trickle-down economics had a significant impact on kick starting the economy over long term. However it wreaked havoc on the savings and loan industry which in turn wreaked havoc on the real estate industry which created such a lousy real estate market at the end of the 80s and the early 90s. That of course led to the famous quote "It's the economy stupid". On today's real estate market you might be able to do a little bit of bargain hunting as the prices start to come down. In the South prices are not coming down and correcting like they are in the Northeast and on the West Coast. For example, beufort nc real estate like many areas of the South have only seen marginal decreases in sales and corrections and prices off of their highs of last year. Another is a country those corrections have been much larger, especially in Florida where houses are barely selling at all.

Google was finally able to get our blog moved over to the new version of Blogger! That means we now have new tools that will help us keep up with comments on this blog much more effectivley. Under the old blog the comment notifications were rarely delivered and there were no flags to indicate if a comment actually came in to our site. We hope you accept our apologies for past transgressions, we promise to be much more responsive in the future

I was recently commenting that politicians should potentially be given an appetite suppressant before they went to Washington maybe something like, Phentermine or something. I was not truly referring to giving them something to stop their eating habits or reduce their number of lobbyists luncheons or political fundraisers paid by the plate. The veto that can be coming from President Bush is probably one of the stranger vetoes that we've seen in politics in recent years. The bill has a lot of porkbarrel spending and it, but the president is not going to veto it because of porkbarrel spending and the odd thing is that he's publicly stating that. In recent years presidents don't always stand up for the positions they believe in and they usually cite differences in the excessive spending to be found in the bill even when that spending is something they may actually prefer. So it is a strange irony that for this bill the President is likely to veto something for the actual reason he intends to veto it and that he is stating that reason publicly!

CNN is reporting that 21 people were shot at Virginia Tech today by a lone gunman, who is also dead making 22.  Separate reports are indicating that the local hospitals are being flooded with other casualties with possibly as many as 17 more people wounded at just one of the regions hospitals.

High winds are preventing helicopters from either airlifting casualties from one hospital to the next and preventing more resources from flying into the region.

The shootings happened in two separate but likely related incidents.  One to two people were shot in the first incident after 7 am at the largest residence hall on campus.  Many more were later shot at a different location on campus known as Norse Hall, an engineering hall.  CNN is providing video footage taken by one student that shows police advancing towards Norse Hall while 5-7 shots can be heard fired in the background.

No names have yet been provided of any of the victims.  Police state that the university is now secure.

Many of the candidates running for

in the presidential primaries lack curb appeal.  You can tell just looking at them from the street below that most of the candidates aren't terribly appealing.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain have both been viewed as the likely contenders over the last couple of years, however as the American people that closer to the house they were considering buying it just wasn't that something special about them.

So we've been taking our realtor around and looking for better candidates and are not coming up with a great set of choices.  We've got a recycled John Edwards, who looks and sounds attractive until you get more than 10 minutes into his big picture views.

We've got Barack Obama the talks are very good game and seems to be the best fundraiser out there, but he has no experience.  We've got met Romney would definitely appeal to the Christian right, if he were a member of the elite club.  Then there's Rudy Giuliani (and John McCain for that matter) both running in a family values party, and the two of them have a combined total of five marriages under their belt.

I think what is going to happen is very similar to what happens with houses that have been on the market too long.  Their going to get a quick make over, possibly some new landscaping, brighter light bulbs a new shiny brass house marker, and then they are going to be repositioned as the new and improved candidate.

It will probably end up being John McCain and Hillary Clinton that will benefit the most from this curb appeal move, and Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will be the losers.  The American public will become disenchanted by the bait and switharoo all over again, and come 2008 it will be one very nasty election, but at least the candidates will look superficially appealling . . .

Mark Wiens, the CFO for Menu Foods Income Fund, sold 45% of his stock for over $100,000 on February 26 and February 27.  He sold approximately 14,000 units that today would be worth just over $60,000.

He still owns 17,000 units and he owns options to purchase an additional 100,000 units at this time.

He told The Globe that it was a "horrible coincidence."

He claims he did not hear about the issues with the pet food recall until early March when over 60 million containers of pet food were recalled on March 16.  He stated that they've received consumer complaints at Menu Foods all the time, and they don't necessarily send those complaints to the top so he didn't know about the broiling problem. 

The Canadian company and their CFO have not yet been contacted by the Ontario securities commission or any other regulators regarding stock transactions leading up to the recall.  It does look likely however that they will pay a visit before too long due to the suspect timing of the transactions even if it is a "horrible coincidence."

Wind and if the securities investigators show up and do something, this may be one of the first times that a CFO has their dog supplies receipts audited as part of a securities investigation.  If he sold his stock short, did he take steps to protect his own pets??

 A week before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Judiciary Committee did not want to be outdone and so they issued a subpoena for records relating to the firing and performance valuations of US attorneys.

They seem to want to get the paperwork before the testimony before the Senate takes place.  Specifically they want unredacted papers on the matter especially as it relates to any documents associated with the firing of the eight US attorneys, and an unredacted rating and performance evaluation of the entire 93 US attorneys that were originally targeted for firing.

The Senate is also expanding its probe into the matter surrounding this issue as it relates to some of the prosecutions that were taking place via some of these US attorneys.

Senate Democrats took another step today to expand the scope of an ongoing probe beyond the dismissals themselves. Wisconsin's two Democratic senators, Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl, joined others in demanding records and other information about a disputed federal public corruption prosecution in that state, according to a letter to Gonzales.

A federal appeals court in Chicago last week ordered a former Wisconsin state employee released after overturning her conviction in the case, which one judge criticized as based on thin evidence. The case was cited prominently by Republicans during an unsuccessful challenge of Wisconsin's Democratic governor last year.

Link to House Panel Subpoenas Gonzales for Documents - washingtonpost.com

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eric Clapton are taking two different approaches to helping drug rehabilitation centers.  Governor Schwarzenegger is looking to cut funds of prop 36, which opponents of the cuts claim would severely cripple the program and not allow people to receive the treatment they need.  Prop 36 is designed to allow drug users or drug offenders to seek drug rehab instead of going to jail.  Schwarzenegger wants tougher penalties for offenders that go to drug rehab but did not finish.  As governor and chief executive of California Schwarzenegger's only option is to either work with the Legislature or propose cuts or veto legislation as it comes in.  So at this stage it looks like he's proposing with a backhanded threat at a cut.

Meanwhile Eric Clapton, a legendary musician partially but not only famous for a song titled cocaine, is preparing to launch a concert to raise funds for his charitable organization called crossroads which he set up in 1998 to help people fight their addictions to drugs.  His organization created a drug rehab center almost 10 years ago and he's hoping to bring together legendary musicians from around the world to help in the effort.

Oddly enough Willie Nelson is reported to be included in the lineup.  Willie Nelson's tour bus was recently pulled over a few months back a day after a different entertainer announced on the Colbert Report that will he always had a large amount of pot on his tour bus.  Please pulled us over and upon opening the door to the tour bus were greeted with billowing clouds of suspect smoke.

Maybe Willie thinks that other people have problems with drugs aside from himself, or maybe he considers marijuana to be in a different class from the drugs that people are seeking treatment for an air Clapton's Center.

Larry Birkhead!

I would not normally write about paternity suits here, however the paternity suits surrounding Anna Nicole Smith has created so much gridlock that has blocked the way for normal news I feel compelled to let everyone know that it's almost over.

I was just watching CNN, the channel that used to display the news all the time, and they showed 25 minutes of footage covering the front door to the courthouse where the results of the DNA tests for Anna Nicole Smith's baby were revealed this afternoon.  Shortly after the footage of the front door, Larry Birkhead and his attorney came out of the courthouse to announce that the test did reveal that Larry Birkhead is the biological father.

Anna Nicole Smith's attorney and partner Howard Stern is not the father.  Neither is O.J. Simpson Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband nor apparently anyone else including Sydney Portier, who was accused on the same news segment of walking around half naked in the Bahamas.

Custody will be decided at a later date.  And the fight over the money will continue.  The movie should be released within two or three months.

Hopefully the world can move on now!

Over the weekend several reporters and pundits raised the potential ugly specter that John McCain is spending more to raise funds than he is actually bringing funds into his campaign.

John McCain has never been a big public advocate of campaign fund-raising, in fact he became partially famous as a senator for his work to limit campaign fund-raising.  Now he's in a race for president in 2008 and he's trailing Mitt Romney.  He's publicly stated that he is not met his own fund-raising goals for the first quarter, and in fact he has barely placed in the top six of all presidential candidates for fund-raising.

If he actually spent more than he brought in, then his war chest could be in a sorry state.  It is still early in the race and he did a good job of raising funds compared to past political seasons.  However this political season is not going to be anything like past political seasons.

If John McCain wants to make it to the oval office he needs to pull out all the stops.  I'm not saying that he personally has two study up on 101 ways to save a buck or two himself, but his grassroots supporters and his potential donors may want to take a glance that article and figure out a way to push more campaign contributions to John McCain if he's going to stay in the race successfully.

It's possible that he might turn out to be the comeback kid of 2008.  Several years ago he was considered one of the front runners for the Republican nomination, and now that appears to potentially be in trouble.  However Americans do like an underdog and it's possible that he's pacing himself for that role.  The only thing is the Democrats seem to be pacing themselves for an all-out sprint all the way to the elections in 2008.

 For good or for bad parliamentary systems do have one advantage.  When the gridlock gets too ugly, they just dissolve parliament and call for new elections.  That's exactly what the of Ukraine did today. President Viktor Yushschenko disbanded the current government on national TV and called for new elections.

This is very similar to the fight sin that are taking place the United States between the Democrats and Republicans as past elections in the Ukraine have been extremely close and in some cases violently protested.  This dissolution is seen as one more step in the direction of that fight.

Link to AHN | Ukrainian President Dissolves Parliament; New Elections Called | April 2, 2007

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 The Bush administration cannot be happy with a vote from the Supreme Court.

The nation's highest court by a 5-4 vote said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency "has offered no reasoned explanation" for its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide and other emissions from new cars and trucks that contribute to climate change.

Source: UPDATE 1-US court rules against Bush in global warming case | Bonds News | Reuters.com

the Bush administration has repeatedly shied away from utilizing the Environmental Protection Agency to maintain or clean up the environment.  The court decision basically tells Bush that he has not been doing his job, and that it is now time for the executive branch to enforce the law that as the Constitution requires.

In sending the case back for further proceedings, Stevens said the high court did not decide which policy the EPA must follow. "We hold only that EPA must ground its reasons for action or inaction in the statute," he wrote.

The Bush administration has consistently rejected capping greenhouse gas emissions as bad for business and U.S. workers.

Bush has recently been seen traveling the country with auto leaders that are suffering from severe setbacks in the auto industry.  Additional EPA restrictions on auto emissions will not help that industry, however that industry has not been helping itself nor the environment for many decades.

Many reports of this week indicate that Hillary Clinton raised more money than Barack Obama in the first quarter of 2007.  However there is a difference in the type of funds that they have raised.  Clinton has been taking funds for both the primary and the general election receiving end the maximum amount of money allowed by law from each of her contributors attended her events.  That amount set by law is $4600 and it includes half its allowed to go towards the primary and the other half that's allowed to go towards the general election.

Obama the other hand only took in $2300 per contributor.  That means that his funds are destined for the primary and not for the general election.  He raised $20 million and Clinton raised $26 million.  Now Clinton did receive an additional funds from lobbyists and special interest groups and Obama did not.  So if we look at just the contributions, it appears that Obama may have raised more money than Hillary by at least $7 million.  That number would be even higher if we excluded contributions from lobbyists and other special interest groups that gave the Clinton.

People involved in Democratic fundraising noted that many of Clinton's events required a contribution of $4,600 for access to the senator and other VIPs. That is the maximum amount allowed for an individual to donate by law, with half going for the primary and half for the general.
Obama, on the other hand, mostly sought donations of up to $2,300, which means the bulk of his take this quarter will be available for the primary campaign. Obama also made his fundraising task more difficult by refusing to accept money from lobbyists and political action committees, unlike Clinton.

Source: Dems raise historic sums | Chicago Tribune