Annette's blog

Hmm....you know, I think this is a *very* good question. Because, quite frankly, NO ONE cares what I think or want, therefore, I am probably a minority. At least, politically.

So, here goes.

(MY) PERFECT POLITICAL PARTY. What would it's platform be?

Re: Religion - Stay the heck outta government. Otherwise, in 15 years, we'll all be learning the Koran (not that anything's wrong with the Koran, but, yanno, just sayin')

Re: Education - develop models that mimic European styles of teaching. Throw out the ag-based summer vacation, and throw out the 150 standardized tests they are trained to answer. This educational system sucks. I've noticed that the government is less and less interested in education. School days are getting shorter and there's talk of 4 day school weeks - teachers suck, our children are graduating as stupidheads. College is non-attainable at today's prices. All of this - the quality and the quantity - has to change, or all of the difficult American jobs are going to go to foreigners. We will be a nation of janitors.

Re: Trade - Fuck everyone else. We need to buy and sell our own stuff to ourselves at prices we can afford. Once we get our own dollar under control, then we can worry about other people.

Re: Foreign relations - Fuck everyone else. I say, turn the other cheek. Live and let live. Osama, who cares. This is ridiculous. Let them smoke their poppies until they choke.

Re: NA Free Trade Agmt. What's so free about it? End it. Our lives have been hell since its inception.

Re: The Bill of Rights. Make sure it's upheld. Have a Congressional Czar override the Supreme Court every time they forget what it says.

Re: Taxes. 20% Feds, 3% state and local, across the board, be they corporations or individuals. No more tax code bullshit. Once it exceeds 30 pages, the book loses interest. Oh, and no more withholding. We'll pay you on April 15th and not a day before.

Re: Politics. Anyone who wants on the ballot needs to gather 500,000 names on a petition. The ballot can be as long as we want it to be, and there can be as many participants as can find supporters. Whoever gets the most votes wins, whoever gets the lesser amount is vice president. End of story. No more electoral college bullshit. No more chess.

Oh, and throw TIF out the window while we're at it. And eminent domain. Everybody knows that's not right.

Oh, and one more thing. Whoever is in my party and wants my vote will make a law that we must have so many trees per square foot, nationwide. We're going bare..

Hmm, I think that's about it.

I just had a frightening experience.

You see, I have this mortgage, and it totally bugged me a few years ago when the escrow account knocked it above $1,000 a month. Because, well, I'm cheap.

I'll admit it, I'm cheap. Fine. Okay.

So anyway, things were fine, I'd settled in and become comfortable with my $1000 a month mortgage, and then, I get a notice. Escrow shortage. They're knocking it up *again*, this time to $1100. So I called them (Citimortgage).

I got an Indian.

Anyway, so I am talking to this Indian, about 50% of what he says I did not understand, but I answered my own questions when I pulled up my county tax and noted that they'd knocked my taxes up by $300 for last year. Can't wait to see this year's...so I excused him from answering the escrow shortage question.

Instead, I inquired about a refinance. He gulped and asked if I was experiencing financial hardship.

I said "No...I just hate bigger and bigger payments, I know the rate has gone down to 4%, and I was just curious."

I mean, my God. They used to send me refinance offers every day in my email. One time they even Fedexed me an unsolicited refinance package that I threw away.

So he says, "Well, due to high call volume, we don't have *time* to speak with you regarding the possibility of a refinance. Why don't I refer you to some other lenders?" And he proceeds to decline to even discuss refinancing.

Oh.My.God....how freaky is that?

I'm compiling a list of ways to say that someone is nuts.
Loco in la cabeza.
Loony tunes.
Hasta la vista, baby.
Out of their freakin' mind.

Anyway, here it is (I took a poll on another site), and I invite...no, I implore you...please, join in the fun! As a friend of mine would say, when life gives you a hard time, sometimes ya just gotta laugh. So, here we go!
=============

S/he doesn't have both oars in the water.

"Nice girl, but about as sharp as a sack of wet mice." --Foghorn Leghorn

lost the plot

space or crack monkey

"they've gone scooters."

5150: Mentally/Emotionally disturbed person (police code)

a llama pajama.

space cadet!

spinner

not playing with a full deck
flew over the cuckoo's nest

Cray Cray!

A few french fries short of a Happy Meal

Spinning crop circles
not playing with a full deck
Whacked right out of his head. He ain't never coming back
having crossed wires
Loco en la Cabeza
He should be wearing an I love myself jacket
He's not right
They must be off their meds

s/he's got a brain like a bee-bee in a boxcar

Hawaiian word: lolo

Nutters

Someone turned the lights out in the penthouse.

Five beers short of a six-pack.

A couple sandwiches short of a picnic.

Fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.

She kinda reminds me of Paul Revere's ride.....a little light in the belfrey. - Foghorn Leghorn

I call them DING A LING!!!

one plus one doesn't always equal two

"she's a real wack job"

wing nut

Nuttier than squirrel shit.

One stamp short of postal?

his/her bread ain't baked!!

Coo coo

off his/her tits

:-) Thanks for reading!

Rage Against the Machine: Freedom!

"Anger is a gift."

Tis better to give than to receive. :-)

The change we need - www.theguardian.uk

After eight long, tiresome years, President Al Gore won't be missed.

Even if he did save the planet

TA Frank The Guardian, Wednesday 14 January 2009

No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds - all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we've gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla.

I think I started to dislike Gore when he stirred up a media storm after the Feds broke up the terrorist ring conspiring to fly airplanes into buildings back in 2001. He could have let it pass quietly, as Bill Clinton did with the millennium plot arrests in 2000. Instead, Gore held a press conference to milk it for political gain and scare us into a 15 cent per gallon gas tax. But who can afford to pay over a dollar and a half per gallon? No wonder we're resorting to electric cars these days.

And why did he pressure the universally admired Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to step down early in 2002? Replacing him with that old warhorse Paul Volcker was a nasty surprise, especially when Volcker choked off a promising housing boom in 2002 and imposed old, outdated regulations on lenders. Some properties lost as much as 8% of their value that year. Now housing prices are rising really slowly, and GDP barely grew by 3% this year.

To be sure, Gore did accomplish some good things in foreign policy. The Middle East is definitely better off now that Israel and Palestine are separate states. It was clever to transfer the most diehard West Bank settlers to the Gore Biosphere in North Dakota. But in Iraq, even after the demise of Saddam from virulent salmonella, Qusay has proved to be no more agreeable than his father, and Uday is simply out of control. (Grinding up the players of the national football team and roasting the remains on a stadium-sized spit was the nadir of his coaching.) When a group of foreign-policy luminaries - from Bill Kristol to Paul Wolfowitz and Kenneth Pollack - urged Gore to invade Iraq and remake the entire Middle East, the president didn't even listen. That's rude.

Then, of course, there were the countless scandals and ethics problems. Recall that in 2003 a department of justice official failed to report receiving a bottle of Bordeaux wine from the French government, even though experts agree that its value would be in excess of the amount permitted as a gift. Then there was the case of politicising federal agencies, when Gore officials were accused of changing the wording in a report on global warming to say that it was a "severe" rather than a "serious" threat. The Republicans held hearings on that for weeks.

Of course, the biggest disappointment was Gore's failure to handle Hurricane Katrina properly. Not only did the massive evacuation of New Orleans prove a costly and time-consuming overreaction, since the levees - fortified in 2003 - held up fine. The emergency management agency also took over 24 hours to set up trailers for evacuees along the Gulf Coast, leaving them without government housing assistance for a full day. And Gore's decision to single-handedly venture into a flattened house in Mississippi and free a trapped two-year-old showed him to be an irresponsible showboat. Sure, President Gore knows CPR, hears like a German shepherd, and has the strength of 10 men - but we didn't need to see it.

All in all, the Gore combination of psychodrama and condescension won't be missed. It's also time for the Democrat stranglehold on power to end. What we need now is a bit of adult behaviour: a Dick Cheney presidency won't be eventful, but at least it will be calm.

• TA Frank is an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation

Time consuming to read, but many interesting facts that WILL one day land in a trivia game.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/01/0082319

A must read.

My favorite was the fact that Donald Rumsfeld's vacation home is a house where the first African American to run for vice-president of the United States was repeatedly beaten, as a slave.

How many ways can we count how glad we will be to see these people go? Every last one of them.

Someone apparently went to a mental ward and somehow, snapped pics with no one noticing. I find this hard to believe but hey, who knows?

http://kineticnorth.com/loonybin/

Sometimes I'm glad to be out of the loop...but shit like this is so obvious, and yet nobody sees it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/25/the-intriguing-death-of-t_n_153...

This is a travesty. Why isn't this article on every news page?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/3901941/Afgha...

Channel 4 footage shows eight-year-old Qassem saying goodbye to his family.

'Kiss your father and mother goodbye now - it is time,' he was told as his purchaser handed over $1,500
The plight of many Afghans is now so desperate that selling a child is increasingly routine
The trade in children is spurred by the battered country's economy and the failure of foreign aid to reach beyond the coffers of central government in the capital Kabul.

While girls are rarely traded, boys can fetch substantial sums - at least in the eyes of the poor couples who give up a child simply to allow the rest of the family to survive.

A cameraman working for Channel 4 News, Mehran Bozorgnia, witnessed the sale of an eight-year-old boy, Qassem, to Sadiqa, a wealthy woman from Kabul, outside the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

As the meeting began, the boy's father, Nek Mohammed, knew he only had a final few moments with his son. Sadiqa was business-like. "Kiss your father and mother goodbye now - it is time," she said, before handing over $1,500 (£1,000). Mr Mohammed began to weep.

The translator accompanying the cameraman said: "Sadiqa, this is wrong!"

"Yes you're right. It's cruel, " she replied, before claiming: "But I have two aims here. First, to give this boy a bright future and a good education. And second, to save their other children. The winter's coming and I've given them money so the children don't die of hunger."

Mr Mohammed said: "I sold a piece of my heart to stop my four other children dying of hunger. I don't have an elder son. I'm also sick.

"My kidney is failing. My body is in pain."

For Mr Mohammed, selling a child was the only way to keep his other children alive.

The plight of many Afghans is now so desperate that selling a child is increasingly routine. But there is another threat to the welfare of the young – and their parents.

Afghanistan's boom business is kidnapping. At least 180 documented abductions in the past seven months in Kabul alone. The going rate is around $50,000 (£34,000) to release the sons of the wealthy.

One kidnapper in Kabul who would speak openly about his trade said that he had no problem targeting the rich.

"We're not dealing with poor people," said the man, who claimed his name was Mateen Khan. "We are only going to kidnap people who have foreign money from all around the world and who have taken it for themselves.

"We are going to take their children. You see their six year olds sitting in the back seat of a Lexus - the latest models. People abroad couldn't afford these cars. So we kidnap these type of children to get the money off their families - the money they've stolen."

In a stable he showed off a teenage boy, who was blindfolded and bound and plainly terrified.

"We'll sell him or take his eyes out and bring him to the eye hospital and call his relatives. Or we'll sell him to the Taliban," said Mateen Khan.

Although he said his gang has no formal ties to the Taliban, his admission that he does business with them appeared to confirm speculation surrounding the Islamist group's involvement in the trade in children.

His threats were all made within earshot of the teenager, whose fate is unknown.