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The fact that technically the $700 billion that the taxpayers are "loaning" to the government to "loan" to the various financial institutions in this country is not really a bailout doesn't matter to a lot of people (most of them morons). That's because they figure that if the government is giving away $700 billion (which they're not) that the government should give it away to them, the little people. But what the little, tiny, dumb, dumb people who think that way don't understand is that without helping out these greedy, bastardized companies (yes, I'm a tad bitter, why do you ask?) the economy would totally tank and there would be a line a mile long outside of the barrel store. And not Crate and Barrel. No, this would be more like the Apparel Barrel because that's what everyone would be wearing for years to come. You know, with a 50% unemployment rate and no money anywhere for anyone. Stuff happens, but we really want to avoid wearing large wooden containers as clothing. 
r about 74 million customers world wide. Just a few months ago, they had $15.2 billion dollars in excess capital. Today? Today they have none. Whoops! Losing $8 billion a quarter really seems to hurt business, apparently. Go figure. But the thing is, if they went under, it would be a nightmare for everyone. AIG had to be helped out otherwise there was a good chance that our fine, fine economic system would crumble like a fine dessert topping. Only the topping would be crap and the dessert would be more crap. No one wants crap for dessert. Or dinner, really. No one wants it. Ever. So to prevent having crap stew for the next decade, we the taxpayers loaned them $85 billion dollars. (Did you know you were generous? I had no idea I was! None! I was shocked to learn I was so giving! Wait until you learn how giving you REALLY are!)
e posh hotel/resort in California (where the rooms are $1,000 per night) and spend a week there, getting facials, pedicures, playing golf, and living it up. On our money. Um, I'm sorry, weren't you the folks that were flat ass broke about two weeks ago? Because I don't remember saying, "Sure, you were idiots with your business capital and lost it all and I'm going to give you all of this money and..hey! I have an idea! Since you did such a craptastic job running your company and running it right into the ground, what say you spend almost half a million on yourselves and go take a little vacation! Oh, and please, please make sure that the rooms that you stay in are at least a thousand bucks a night. I will hear nothing of anything less!" Yeah, I don't remember that part. 
ow, the partridges. The ones that the AIG guys went hunting for last week. Did I not mention? Sorry. Yeah, see after that stern look from the Senator, the AIG executive guys flew a group from the US to London on a private jet for a week so that they could hunt the bird otherwise known as the partridge (commonly thought of as being "in a pear tree"). And according to the folks over there at News Of The World, the execs were downright smug about the whole ordeal. They claim that AIG chief Alvaro Mengotti (if you can't remember 'Alvaro' just remember 'A-Hole' instead. You will remember he's an A-Hole by the time I get done here.) initially lied about being on the trip, saying he wasn't when he was. He was quoted as saying, "It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better." Then he sighed and went off to find a pear tree in which to bag said partridge (hopefully not Keith or Laurie). He's going to likely hear that phrase repeated to him one day as the mob of villagers pummels him with their ax handles. 
end well. And that's unfortunate because this is a pretty clear and easy to understand example of how a lack of supervision, oversight and accountability results in a ridiculous amount of fiscal waste for which no one except for people who had nothing to do with it will be made to be responsible for fixing the resulting disasters. I hate the thought of someone micromanaging my work and making sure that I'm doing stuff the way that it's supposed to be done. But I'm not running a multi-bazillion dollar company whose success and/or failure helps determine which way the economy blows. Those who are apparently need to be checked up on. Frequently. Now, you'd think that some of those financial oversight committees that they have over there in the House of Representatives would be able to do that. In fact, if you were crazy enough, you'd actually think that is what some of those committees were specifically for! Never mind. I just realized we'd need a committee to check up on the committee because they're not doing their job either. We're doomed. What's partridge taste like anyway?
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I'll tell you what, if a particular job ever has an available slot to be filled (and provided that this particular job I'll be referring to actually exists, which I don't think it really does and that's a shame because oh, oh, oh, what a great job it would be) I want to know how to get on the short list of candidates for that job. From what I envision (again, if such a post actually exists) the job is totally cush, totally easy and you can just recycle the material that you come up with time and time again for various clients and it will always be applicable and "effective". The job I want? Public statement writer and press conference coordinator for politicians that get busted having affairs. 
e women politicians don't have affairs, I'm just saying that it's usually the men who we hear about and, quite honestly, I can't think of any women who have had to publicly come clean after their affair was found out. I don't know that it means that they're smarter or sneaker, but I do know it doesn't mean that they're more moral than the men. Heck, no. Married women can be just as trampy as married men can be, don't think that they can't be. Sluts. Most of 'em. Well, the politician ones. My, but I digress. Where was I?). And then they get busted somehow. Whether their prostitution vendor of choice gets busted and their name is found to be all over the client scheduling list, or whether their mistress scorned goes to the press with their tawdry affair (Lesson Number One of Having An Affair: Never scorn a mistress.), somehow they eventually get busted. And when they do you see the following scene: 
Standing behind the politician is the somber and cheated on wife. I don't know why the wife is always there. I'm assuming it's because the politician can't trot out his dog to do that, but I don't see why not. That's kind of the representation, that of the loyal pet, that the wife is portraying by just standing there, eyes looking down, her sullen expression frozen on her face. This is a phenomenon that, from what I can tell, only occurs in politics. Personally, I do not know too many married individuals who, if they found out their spouse was cheating on them, would stand there, in PUBLIC, by their side, not saying A WORD and let them give their emotionless, unapologetic apology to the media. No WAY. Not ONE person that I know or that I have heard of would just be completely silent upon learning that their spouse was banging someone else. And someone else. For months. (I'm longing for the day when one of those women just jumps in front of the cheating loser and starts screaming at him in front of the media. It will happen. It has to. I pray that it does!) 
t I be the speechwriter for these guys? I'll write one speech (well, OK, I'll just write down the one that they already use, but I'll use a different font and everything so that it looks original) and I'll make a bunch of copies and have them laminated and hand them out to everyone when they take office. It can be part of their welcome package. I'll also hand them on in smaller, wallet sized versions, so that they can study them in their free time. To sweeten the deal, I'll even throw in a diagram of where their wife is supposed to stand in relation to themselves at the press conference that they will inevitably be holding one day while reading the speech that I changed fonts on and passed off as my own.
to those who he was cheating on his wife with (I say "those" because there was apparently more than one. See? First client material right there!). He can give a monotone speech while pretending to apologize. And, overall, he's a jackass. It's perfect! I can hand him the little laminated card and give him a pep talk that would go something like, "Here you go. Remember, no intonation in your voice. Do not, I repeat, do not sound like you are sorry. Make sure you throw in all of the fake apology references to your family. Don't admit directly to anything. Oh! And don't forget the part about how it's now a "private matter" and you and your family want to be left alone. Make sure you throw in at least one "incredibly difficult time". Got it? All rightee. Now go out there and lie your ass off!" Then I shove him toward the podium and collect my check while he's fake apologizing. 
hat job sooooo bad! And this Mahoney guy is the perfect jackass to write unremorseful drivel for! It doesn't get any better than this! Tim Mahoney, (Democrat, Flori-DUH) is the guy who ran for Mark Foley's seat. Mark Foley, as you may or may not choose to remember, was the guy who was sending sexually explicit text messages to at least one 16-year old male former page. So when it became clear that Foley's seat was going to be up for grabs, Mahoney ran for it. A story that ran in the Tampa Bay Times reported that "Family values is a concern for Mahoney, a Methodist who has been married for 21 years and has a 20-year-old daughter." During his campaign he did a commercial with Senator Bob Graham. In the commercial, Graham says that Mahorny "is a man of 'faith, family and personal responsibility'." He goes on to say that "Tim Mahoney will help end the fraud, waste and corruption in Washington." And he apparently did that by moving it to Flori-DUH. And the topper for that is that there's a picture of Mahorny standing next to a church. (No mention of whose playing his organ at his church.) So this guy is not afraid to go all out and be a complete and total hypocrite in every aspect of his life! Excellent! Look, if someone wants to cheat on their wife, it sucks, but that's their deal. But w
hen they're in the public eye and when they're supposed to be a trusted public servant the water starts to get a little bit murky as to whether or not the choices that they make in their personal life should be a factor in whether or not they are competent to do their very public job. Hard to say. Although, in Mahorny's case, there is an ethics investigation going on to find out if he paid off one (yes, one. As in, he had more than one woman that he was affair-ing with) of his extra curricular activities with $121,000 of campaign funds. They really frown upon stuff like that. That right there makes him not a good person to be holding a public office.
But th
ere's something about the hypocrisy of the circumstances surrounding how he was able to have a chance to even get elected at all. That being the whole Mark Foley is chasing pages around the Capital building issue and Mahorny touting himself as this faithful, God loving, family man when, in reality, he was an unfaithful, loving God-knows-who, liar. Oh, and vilifying Mark Foley while he was doing all of that. (Did Foley deserve to be vilified? Probably? Did he deserve to be vilified by Tim Mahoney? Probably not.) Something about the blatant hypocrisy just makes it harder to .... I was going to say "swallow", but I'm going to say "take" instead. It makes it harder to take.
So I'm officially announcing that I am ready, willing and able for that Affair Admitting Speechwriter and Press Conference Organizer position as soon as it is available. See earlier blog posts for relevant qualifications. (Also, note the sarcastic tone and witty banter present throughout. It's sure to elevate me far above any other applicants that manage to express interest before I was able to kick them in the shins to stop them from stealing my thunder.)
Side note: In my quest for this non-existent dream job of mine, I think I shall somehow incorporate pink into the whole ordeal. Not sure if it's because it's Breast Cancer Awareness Month or just because I've developed a fondness for it lately. It's probably the latter, but the former is a good reason as well.
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Time flies like an arrow (and fruit flies like a banana). That's why you might not remember what all of the news was about exactly one week ago. That's also why I'm here to explain the unexplainable. (Here's a hint on how it's going to go: It might start with "WTF" and it might end with "they're all idiots". But I'm not giving anything else up. That's all you're getting for right now.)
middle of Armageddon. Fortunately for me, I happen to know someone who is extremely bright and quick (and really hot) who did a quick calculation/estimate for me and came up with approximately 12 members of the House would be Jewish based on averages. Twelve. I see. And they took the freaking day off? Are they unaware of what the concept of "working on a holiday" is about? They might want to sit down when they learn this: Some people actually DO work on holidays! Yes! Can you believe it! AND those people that DO sometimes work on holidays? They do so when they are NOT in the middle of, as one House member put it, "a financial 9/11." But they took off for Rosh Hashanah. That is when I lost what little, if any, confidence I had in this whole ordeal and immediately went out shopping for a much bigger mattress which to store my life savings beneath.
House was off Rosh Hashanah-ing, the Senate held a little powwow and took a vote on their revised version of the "Troubled Asset Relief Program" aka TARP. (They should have called it COAT - "Cover Our Asses Today.") Their revised version is not 2 pages long either. It's also not 137 pages long. No, this thing is now four hundred and fifty one pages long. 451!!! 22,500% more pages than the original 2. 451 pages. By the time I finish reading the damn thing, the economy will have collapsed AND fixed itself by then! Are you kidding me?!? What the hell is in those 451 pages?!? Actually, forget about that for a minute. How was Rosh Hashanah?
wo. But let me just say this: Those 451 pages? They're not ALL about the giving financial assistance to the companies that loaned out money for mortgages to people who couldn't afford to pay them back. No, that's what it was supposed to be about. But since not enough of our fine, fine Representatives could come together and agree on passing the bill, they needed to come up with ways that might sway some to change their vote to yes. So they did that by throwing a bunch of other things into this bill as well that have absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with this bill nor with the outcome of the economy. They just figured that if they pandered to some people's desires, projects, and wants that they might be persuaded to vote yes the next time around. Hmmmmm......see, for those of us NOT currently serving in the House, there's a name for that. It's called bribery. You selfish, self serving, rat bastard, weaselly snakes. 
as right. This has to be two posts. I need to go yak somewhere. But I am hereby formally advocating to just clean House (literally) and start over. All of the members of the House are up for re-election in November. (Just one of many reasons that some had for voting "no" the first time around for this TARP thing. ) I am formally advocating the voting for every challenger to every incumbent seat in the House. I don't care who they are. All of those who are currently in office over there need to go. Yesterday. Throw them all out and start over. I don't care who the challenger is either. Communist? I'll vote for 'em. Homeless dude? Sure. Your dog? Yes. All of them. I will be voting for every single challenger to House seats out there. If ANY of these bozos are re-elected, you have to wonder WHO the people are who voted for them AGAIN. It's like when I hear that Congress has an 11% approval rating. I don't immediately think, "Wow, they suck." But that's because I already know that. I immediately think, "Who in the hell are you 11% that think that they are doing a good job?! Who are YOU?!?!"
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