22 Days to E-Day

RAIN Minus 22

Item First – Let it RAIN: From now until the presidential Election Day we will begin each post with a review of the Remove All Incumbents Now (RAIN) campaign. A good rain washes clean all the road scum, dust and filth. We hope that a cleansing of Congress will result in the firing of the legislators who are part of the group that bailed out Wall Street with nearly a trillion dollars, at least 150 billion of which was blatant authorized pork by Democrats to appease Republicans who had previously rejected the bill then changed their vote allowing it to pass after being seduced by pork. We are not sure how much of the bailout, if any, was actually needed.

Up your stock market: Who can follow the logic of the market? The Wall Street pundits are in the same category of John Madden and other football commentators. They can always tell you what happened and why it happened after it happened. Last week when the market dropped nearly 20% - the largest one week drop in the history 100 plus years it has been operation, the pundits fell over one another trying to get face time on TV to tell the viewing public why it happened. Of course, none could predict that today more than half of that loss would be made up as the stock market had its biggest leap in history. But there they are again telling exactly how it happened. These are the same geniuses on whose watch the market fell last week and the week before and the week before and…

Boys will be boys: The waaaaaay-too-long election campaigns continue to drone on. Three long weeks of childish playground arguments between the principal parties – tongues wagging and other silliness. One candidate sticks his tongue out the other answers by making donkey ears. Today in Ohio one laid out a recovery plan that included tax credits and a stimulus package and the other promptly responded that the plan was irresponsible. My greatest fear is that the voters in America will become so fed up with the back-and-forth between the candidates and their childish surrogates that there will be a loss of interest and many will not bother to vote. The mudslinging from both sides has become such that the average American voter, who at best makes up their mind based on those 30 second sound bites, will decide that both sides are corrupt and stay home on Election Day. I’m sure some pundit somewhere has figured out that if that were to happen it would favor one candidate over the other. I urge every voter to not fall into that trap. Choose the candidate who you feel would do the least damage and vote for the presidency, but vote AGAINST all incumbents. Send a message to congress.

Continued hatred from the pulpit: Few things are so disheartening as when a so-called “Man of God” or one who calls himself a Christian speaks with such un-Christ like rhetoric. Today a clip was shown of a minister giving an invocation at a political rally who suggested that if the opponent won God would be mocked. In California at least two churches (Mormon and Catholic) are sending emails and letters to all their members and their priests and bishops are pounding the pulpit in an effort to support legislation that would not allow gay couples to marry because it is not of “God’s word.” I might be going way out on a limb here but why is it that every time a person who preaches to a congregation wishes to make a particular point they use God as their source of information. For some reason I have to think that if God wanted the world to know how he feels about the bedroom behavior between two consenting adults He would have let us know – and it would not be by whispering to all those folks who presumably have spoken to Him. Somehow I can’t imagine that God has an opinion of who commits their lives to whom, who the winner is in a given war, or which football team wins the Brigham Young University/Notre Dame game.

Other news – really there is some: Well, at least the news ticker lists it. I must have been absent during the years The Brady Bunch sitcom ran on TV as I did not watch it. I don’t know Marcia Brady, played by Maureen McCormick or her TV sibling played by Barry Williams. I’m sorry if those poor coddled kids who were making millions were getting stoned while I struggled to eke out a living. The million-heiress Miss had such a difficult life that at age 14 she was making more per episode than many a worker did in 40 years of struggle. So it is difficult to sympathize with her. Little Miss Perfect on TV apparently snorted cocaine on set, dated celebrities including Michael Jackson and Steve Martin, went to parties at the Playboy Mansion, and traded drugs for sex. Now she has written a tell all (or “Who cares?”) book and hopes you buy it so at age 52 she doesn’t have to live such a hard life any longer. Poor baby.

Recession, Correction, Depression obsession: Many of my relatives including my parents, uncles and aunts and their peers lived through the “Great Depression.” Based on stories I’ve heard and photos I’ve seen of that era of the 1930s – this ain’t it. Pundits have a tendency to understate the stock market – like when it takes a dive and they call it a “correction,” I call it a crash. Or when the economy is struggling as it has for the past months and they call it a Depression. Taking a page from the oral history of those how lived through the Great Depression, and reading logs, and accounts of that era including novels (that’s what we had before TV docudramas) such as John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” A snapshot by Donna LeBlanc of Louisiana of the depression appeared recently appeared on the CNN news blog. A firsthand account of Depression life follows: "She remembered vividly the barrels of flour, the bolts of cloth and the hunger in the faces of people as they begged for store credit," LeBlanc said. "The store must have been at least marginally successful, because my grandmother was able to purchase, a piece at a time, a complete six-person setting of Gorham Chantilly silverware for her trousseau, linens and even a Lane cedar chest to house her treasures."

The couple would catch wild hogs, feed them corn for a year and eat them once the wild taste was out of the scavenging animals. They also took advantage of available squirrel meat, a common food in the South at that time.

"It was a uniquely disgusting thing ... to see my grandfather take a stewed, skinned squirrel's head, smack the skull's dome with a heavy silver tablespoon, and dine on the brains."

A little blogging music Maestro... “Poor Unfortunate Souls” by the Jonas Brothers.

Dr. Forgot
http://drforgot.com

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