On the Financial Meltdown: The Hills Darken and the Land Quakes... Grab Your Laundry Off The Line, Grab Your Babies and Go Inside!

Disclaimer: In this post I say “we” a few times, but I want the readers to bear in mind that when I say “we” I’m speaking of the communal “we.” The “we” that makes up America, not specifically “I” or “you” because I do recognize, quite frankly, many of “us” are not involved in the same way as everyone else.

In light of the financial situation in this country, I posted this video to remind us all that this should not have been a surprise at all. The market meltdown was noted, and expected and of course, ignored. It’s not all that different I guess than when there are predictions of devastating hurricanes or storms and we do nothing in regards to preparation.

The days of living our lives of sunshine and singing birds with happy oblivion with regards to everything else outside of our blissful microcosm, are now over. And when we look out into the horizon we see darkness shadowing the hills and we hear the roar of thundering footsteps in the distance. It is time to become quick studies and find out what the heck is really going on.

I’m so sorry if I’ve awaken you…but we really need your help.

Long long ago, in a Land Far Away, Before This Concession to Debate...

Once upon a time there was a goof-ball who wanted to join the military…not because he was so dedicated to defending his country, but because it was a family tradition, and his behavior illustrated this fact. So this young man floated through military school on the reputation on his father before him and graduated near the bottom of his class.

His experiences in the military made him grow up – a little. But this young man was not strong enough mentally to be a hero, for when pressured and tortured by the enemy after his capture, he broke and offered information to his enemies. This shamed his father.

His enemies, being the opportunists that they were, stopped torturing him and the other POW’s in the camp that came before and after him and instead, used the soldiers as collateral for negotiation. The soldiers were much more valuable alive than they were dead. Among themselves, the POW’s made a pact that there would be a hierarchy of release, so that those who were there the longest should be released first. When the young man’s captors offered him an early release, the man realized that his comrades would forever consider him a traitor if he didn’t honor the pact. He then declined an early release, just as they all deemed he should.

Eventually the broken soldier was released, and almost right away, after reuniting with his children and wheelchair bound wife, he began having affairs with other women. The lying, cheating, former POW finally settled on a rich, beautiful heiress, decades younger than himself.

He planted the seeds of a long conservative political career, until one day when he was old and had survived cancer four times, he decided he wanted to run for president of his country.

Though he was short-tempered, narcissistic and a bit spastic, many people loved him because buried deep in a mystic mountain of deception, a tiny shiny gem of truth revealed that his followers felt safe with him because he was white, and they were afraid of change.

Towards the end of his presidential campaign, the bottom fell out of his country’s financial market and the man, being the opportunist, tried to portray himself to be more involved politically than he actually was and then tried to sabotage both the presidential and vice presidential debates to protect his small town, aggressively unintelligent, self-centered running mate he secretly regretted choosing.

Finally, after strong advisory, the old man conceded to continuing the scheduled debates, despite his fear of looking like an ill prepared, unpredictable spas.

On with the show, this is it!

Troy Davis Update

I don't normally double post, but as you may be aware, this is a special circumstance. This update is provided by Market Watch. It is not the complete article, just a segment of it due to a more detailed report being posted on The Wrighter today.

Amnesty International Praises Stay of Execution for Troy Davis

ATLANTA, Sept 23, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) today welcomed the order from the Supreme Court of the United States to stay the execution of Troy Anthony Davis hours before his scheduled execution. The state of Georgia scheduled Davis' execution for today, in effect circumventing the U.S. Supreme Court before it had time to decide whether its justices would consider Davis' case.

"For reasons that are unfathomable, Chatham County officials seemed doggedly determined to ram this execution through before justice could fully run its course," said Larry Cox, executive director for AIUSA. "We are grateful that the U.S. Supreme Court has shown the foresight to stay the execution. We hope that it takes up the case and looks at it with fresh eyes, marking the first time that evidence pointing to Davis' innocence will have been heard in a court of law."

I have just been informed of this and due to time sensitivity, I'm using Guardian.co.uk to provide the information because the article on CNN's website seems to be a little, I don't know, biased? The article is written by Mark Tran.

US state of Georgia urged to halt Troy Davis execution

Amnesty International today urged the US state of Georgia to stop the execution of Troy Davis, who faces death by lethal injection tonight despite doubts over his conviction.

Last July, the state's board of pardons and paroles stopped the execution less than 24 hours before it was to be carried out.

However, yesterday it rejected pleas to reconsider its recent decision to deny clemency on the grounds that so much uncertainly exists over whether Davis shot and killed a Savannah police officer.

Georgia's supreme court also denied Davis's request for a stay of execution, and his last hope of avoiding execution at 7pm local time (midnight BST) now appears to rest with the US supreme court, where his lawyers have asked for a stay of execution.

In a case that has attracted international attention, Pope Benedict XVI and the former US president Jimmy Carter have asked for the sentence to be commuted to life in prison without parole.

Davis, a 39-year-old African-American, is on death row for the murder of officer Mark MacPhail in 1989, but seven key prosecution witnesses have recanted their testimonies since his 1991 trial and post-trial testimony implicating another man as the gunman has emerged.

A "jailhouse informant" retracted his incriminating account of Davis' supposed confession, while several other supposed eyewitnesses later took back their trial evidence while insisting they had been under "a lot of pressure" from police to provide signed statements.

One witness, Antoine Williams, a Burger King employee who identified Davis as the gunman at the trial, later said: "Even today, I know that I could not honestly identify with any certainty who shot the officer that night. I couldn't then either.

"After the officers talked to me, they gave me a statement and told me to sign it. I signed it. I did not read it because I cannot read."

Chatham County prosecutors, however, are sure that Davis killed MacPhail, who rushed to a Savannah Burger King car park late at night after hearing the screams of a man who was being pistol-whipped.

Prosecutors say that MacPhail, a 27-year-old father of two, was shot down by Davis before he could draw his weapon. They say Davis then stood over the fallen officer and fired again and again.

Davis has admitted being at the scene, but has always denied shooting MacPhail. No physical evidence against him has ever been produced, the murder weapon has never been found and the case against him at trial consisted entirely of witness testimony.

Georgia's board of pardons says it has extensively studied and considered the case, including hearing from every witness presented by Davis's lawyers, retesting the state's evidence and interviewing Davis himself.

"After an exhaustive review of all available information regarding the Troy Davis case, and after considering all possible reasons for granting clemency, the board has determined that clemency is not warranted," a board spokeswoman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.

Since its resumption of executions in 1977, the US has executed 1,118 prisoners, 42 of them in Georgia.

Meanwhile, more than 100 people have been released from death rows around the country, many in cases in which witness testimony has been exposed as unreliable.

Is He For Real?

I won’t spend much time on this because I’m not sure if there is any validity to it. But someone shared a YouTube video with me, where a young African American male claims to be the father of Bristol Palin’s unborn baby. If you’ve been in a comma for the last couple of weeks, Bristol Palin is the teenage daughter McCain’s VP running mate, Sarah Palin.

The young man in the video makes a plea to Bristol Palin and the Palin family to acknowledge him as the father so that he can take responsibility and be apart of the baby’s life. This dude either has way too much time on his hands (which could very well be the case) or he is sincere and does not know how to go about taking action to secure his position as the father.

Here is the problem I have with this video: The young man makes it clear that Bristol Palin stepped out of her relationship with her fiancé, Levi, in order to be with him…and since this is the case and the baby is unborn, how is it that this young man knows that the baby is his? He doesn’t explain this in the video, so unless Levi had been absent for a stretch of time, there is no real way for this young man to know for certain, without paternal testing, that Bristol’s baby is his.

Maybe this is the very reason news organizations are not paying any attention to him. My gut feeling was that it was a hoax and then I thought that it could very well be possible… and then I shook my head again…it must be a hoax.

Stop Babying Palin!

For those who are uncertain, this presidential election is not men vs. women. Oh sure it would be nice to have a woman president or vice president, but the RIGHT one is what we’re aiming for…just like we’re looking for the RIGHT man. It’s the RIGHT person who should get the job. Can we all agree on this?

I have noticed that now that Sarah Palin is on the Republican ticket that many people have popped their heads up and cried foul against media bias and sexism against her. Perhaps a few of those who are incensed by media prying, depictions, and questions posed, have a new and improved way of finding out who the right person for the job is. Should we just leave her alone and pretend the doubts and questions in our minds don’t exist?

What if Sarah Palin had 10 kids. Should we still believe that her being a mother of so many children would not affect her role as commander and chief of this country if something happened to the oldest president in the country’s history, should John McCain become president? As a matter of fact, John McCain has 7…that’s pretty close to ten. Maybe the short-sightedness of the media is not that they are questioning Palin’s abilities, but that they are not questioning McCain’s as a father of 7. There, any semblance of sexism has vanished.

If we don’t put our presidential candidates under glass and shine light on issues that can potentially affect their abilities to work as we need them to once they are in office, then we are essentially giving up our freedom and spitting in the faces of those who have died to preserve it. And I’m not just talking about men and women in the military either, because they seem to be the only ones to get credit for the fight of freedom. As I recall, there have been plenty of my ancestors to fight for freedom without ever even holding a gun.

Presidential candidates, are no longer private citizens and no longer have the luxury of privacy and anonymity about the business and personal affairs they conduct. No one should ever back off of Sarah Palin as long as her hat is in this race, because as a late comer in the game, there are a lot of hard questions we need to ask, and she needs to stand up and give us all honest answers.

LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE! The Republican GOP Convention Speakers Should Be Ashamed of Themselves!

Not sure about you, but I found it absolutely appalling how little substance there was in the speeches of the GOP convention last night. Oh sure, Sarah Palin got her chance to paint herself as a human being, so we can actually feel something for her and her five babies… Track, Trig, Willow, Bristol and Piper. She got in some laughs comparing hockey moms to pit bulls, and drew pretty pictures of small town life and small town people in the beautiful Alaskan city of Wasilla.

I am neither Democratic nor Republican, however, I found that the speeches were so full of cynicism, fluff and lies that it made me angry… so much so that I actually cursed! ME – of all people! I know these speeches were written to inspire the ignorant, and the followers. The unquestioning, unchallenging patriots, and those who don’t or won’t read the facts for themselves. But there is no excuse for misleading the public. And can we stop questioning patriotism like we’re back in the McCarthy era?

Every speaker last night clung to McCain’s POW experience, like a 90 lb man to a pole in a wind storm. I found myself agreeing with one of the political analysts: just because McCain served in the military 40 years ago, doesn’t mean that he’s ready to run the county by default. And actually, according to my sources, McCain held out for a while under torture, but later broke under pressure and gave information to his captors. There were other POWs who were there, who didn’t break under pressure, and died for their country. Not McCain.

I digress.

In her speech, Palin claimed that Obama supports plans to raise income taxes; payroll taxes; investment taxes; the death tax; business taxes; and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars. The truth is, Obama’s plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by 5 percent, while McCain’s plan would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, according to The Tax Policy Center.

Obama’s plan would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for the poor and elderly and tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families. The reason some don’t like his plan is because his plan also includes raising taxes for the wealthy, including raising payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000 as well as raising corporate taxes.

I don’t even have the time to go into all of the different types of poison that ran through the veins of those speeches last night, but I did run across an Associated press article this morning that lays out some of the truth stretching and manipulation and blatant lying that went on last night.

This info was reported by Jim Kuhnhenn of Associated Press, and these are just a FEW examples:

PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."

THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

PALIN: "There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate."

THE FACTS: Obama has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.

MCCAIN: "She's been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America's energy supply ... She's responsible for 20 percent of the nation's energy supply. I'm entertained by the comparison and I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America," he said in an interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson.

THE FACTS: McCain's phrasing exaggerates both claims. Palin is governor of a state that ranks second nationally in crude oil production, but she's no more "responsible" for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, another oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to tax oil, which she did in concert with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest state in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state — by population.

MCCAIN: "She's the commander of the Alaska National Guard. ... She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities," he said on ABC.

THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under "federal status," which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska's national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.

FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States."

THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.

FORMER MASSACHUSETTS GOV. MITT ROMNEY: "We need change, all right — change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington — throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin."

THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president for nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only since January 2007 have Democrats have been in charge of the House and Senate.

Microchips Injected into Humans! Do Something!

It is no longer a science fiction fantasy, but a real life issue and a threat to our freedom as we know it. I don’t mean to come across as doom and gloom, but there has been an issue on my mind, and it kept me from falling back to sleep this morning.

Late last night I was doing a little research on the Verichip. It is a microchip that is as small as a grain of rice, and is inserted into human beings to track whereabouts, identity, medical information and financial information, and high ranking officials in Mexico already have them implanted in their arms. Why in the world would one person or entity need to have that much information on you other than you (and maybe your spouse).

The people from Verichip know that this chip raises flags about privacy issues, but they are patient and they realize that it’s just a matter of time before it is accepted by people. After all, if they’re pushing it hard enough on society as a whole, the shock value dies and it becomes, “not such a big deal.” However, this is how invasive and controlling mechanisms are introduced into society, because once the idea of injecting microchips into human beings becomes acceptable, it paves the way for this type of tracking and deterioration of privacy to being mandatory.

Just imagine it. One day, it could very well be illegal not to have a microchip injection. Maybe one day your kids aren’t allowed to go to school without one. Perhaps one day they change the location from your arm to your brain? And just think, as technology advances so will the chip, allowing brain control and other devices manipulated by your government.

And stop calling the government “Big Brother.” I don’t have one, but I’m pretty sure if I did have a big brother he would treat me much better than my own “closed door” government does.

Back to the microchip.

It is approved by the FDA, the same governmental agency that approves the harmful drugs that are actually lethal and cloned meat that has only briefly been tested. It is the same agency that is slow to approve natural and cost efficient cures for diseases.

This is your government – and seeing how it is yours… you are going to be the one responsible for keeping it in check! Demand that mandatory injections be illegal. Demand voluntary ones to be illegal! Do something before your “Big Brother” slowly turns you, your parents, and your children into robots. Spread the word…and then do something!