Friday Morning Open Mic for February 18, 2011

I thank all who offered me “get well” wishes over the last few days. I have to tell you, on Wednesday I felt like a bus had run over me and backed up to do it again. I was a little better Thursday. Now thursday night, I am still stuffy and congested in the head and chest, but I feel like the worst is behind me. At least I sure hope so. While I am better, I am still not well. My head is still a little fuzzy and I will be trying to get to bed earlier again tonight in the hopes that I can work in my office tomorrow instead of another day of working from the house. But I do want to throw out an article or two for open mic. The first is an economics article. A friend sent it to me with the note saying, “as it turns out, hyperinflation isn’t just around the corner.” So I share the article to get the opinion on it from some of our more economic minded folks. I will try to add another article or two throughout the morning on Friday.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for November 9, 2010

I am going to do open mic a little differently this evening. I have been working around the house this week as I prepare for the new job. Yesterday I painted the bedroom (a warm orange) and didn’t get to bed until 8:00 am! Tonight I was cleaning the bathroom and apparently managed to find the sharp end of some tweezers that gashed my finger. As a result typing is a very slow process. Couple that with my only sleeping from 8:00 til around 10:00 this morning and you find an exhausted blogger who cannot type well. So tonight I will find the articles I want to put up for open mic and post them without my commentary. They I will begin answering comments from yesterday and adding my thoughts on the topics I post until I can no longer keep my eyes open. For tonight’s topics we have a Tea Party Candidate (and Palin lackey) being petty, Wealthy Americans cutting back on charity, Quatitative easing by the Fed, and the new START treaty. I will also pull forward a thing or two from yesterday’s discussion. Particularly, I want to pull forward a JAC topic and a comment or two directed at me.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for June 1, 2010

I hope that everyone is sufficiently rested after a long holiday weekend for Memorial Day. Allow me to here say again thank you to all who have chosen to serve their country, and to pay a small tribute to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for what they believed in. For this week’s open mic we have some interesting topics. Our first topic involves yet another anti-christian ruling in Connecticut. We are also delving into the flawed tactics of the census and how it is being used as a tool of manipulation rather than to accomplish its actual purposes. Add to that yet another jackass California local government entity deciding that they will ignore reality and boycott Arizona, while the leader of the country says nothing. Finally, we will hopefully get some input from the economically literate folks at SUFA as to why the Federal Reserve wants to stop regulations protecting small businesses but not consumers.

Tuesday Night Open Mic for March 30, 2010

Alas, I already find myself at the Tuesday Night Open Mic. It has been a quick start to the week. The conversations thus far have been interesting. The individual liberty discussions were especially good, but we didn’t get to the core of the issues quite yet. We danced around some of them. I will be bringing that article forward in a couple days instead of posting another article so that the discussions can go further. Open mic brings a host of different topics, from global warming taking a larger international hit to the President attempting to mischaracterize the tea party movement. Sprinkled in there we have Arriana Huffington completely missing on her reasoning for the decline of innovation in America and the courts issuing a stupid verdict in the case of the hatemongers from Westbor Baptist (it is not a) Church. We also have a little bit of government claiming that fearing the government is a good thing and a good old politician playing a politician’s game, and sucking at it. As an added bonus I brought over a Black Flag offering from late Tuesday that many may have missed.

Government Meddling or Necessary Regulation?

News came down last week that the President, in his haste to shift the focus away from a quickly diminishing chance at health care reform, will now re-focus on regulating the big banks in an effort to prevent them from becoming “too big to fail” again. I have already written on the fact that, despite the fact that the banks were too big to fail before TARP, they have comntinued to get even bigger. You can read about that HERE . I also shared a banker’s perspective on what regulations need to happen that I had found on the Huffington Post. You can read that HERE . So this isn’t a new subject. But the President was pretty strident in stating that he was going after these regulations, even going so far as to say if they (the big banks) are looking for a fight, he is ready and willing to give them one. Now, I know that you are all aware of where I stand on the idea of government regulation of private businesses. But I am willing to report what I am reading and keep an open mind to the fact that I could be wrong in some way.

Much Criticism… But Is There a Solution?

I was reading yet another article this evening on the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and his ranting about increasing regulations in order to limit the ability of speculators to create a bubble that can throw the economy into crisis. As many of you can guess, I am almost never in favor of increasing regulations on anything. I think the government uses the words regulation to mean control, and not in a good way. And hearing the FED Chairman talk about it, as if the FED had nothing to do with the housing troubles we saw, was nothing more than another level of the blame game in my opinion. As I have often stated here, I am a smart guy, but I am not an economist. I understand economics, and my common sense fills in for those big words. But there are those who understand it better than I do on this site, so I hope they will offer their thoughts as well. The big question that I have at this point is whether there is a good solution to the problems we see in the economy?

Geithner… Just Another Crook Doing What Crooks Do

A night where I almost didn’t write. I have had a full day of travel, returning from travel this afternoon to a dog that had chewed the corner of the wall in the kitchen during the six hours he was alone, drywall and all. After cleaning the mess up, and setting up his new cage for sleeping in at night, I quickly showered and headed to work. And tonight I spent a good hour lying on my back in the cold watching the Leonid meteor shower. I can never pass up the opportunity to watch a meteor shower, I just love all forms of nature. But I decided that I hadn’t written while traveling last night (I literally didn’t get to a hotel room until 4:30 am) so I was kind of obligated to do so tonight. So I left the meteor shower and came in to write about something. I was determined to not write about the Fort Hood stuff tonight or the idiotic move to bring the 9/11 conspirators to NY for a civilian trial. So the night was as much me avoiding certain subjects as finding one… then I stumbled on to this article at the top of the Huffington Post home page.

Guest Commentary – Goldman Sachs

We have come yet again to Friday night. I had a couple of different things in my inbox that I didn’t have time to read all of yet, so I am unsure if what was there was suitable guest commentary material or not. But I saw a familiar name in there who had done guest commentary before. Life of Illusion had offered some more information to me. Knowing this was a name I could trust, I opened his email and found that the information, while not “technically” a guest commentary, was very pertinent to the discussions we have been having all week. LOI offered several different portions of articles that discussed the series of events involving Goldman Sachs. I have followed this saga for some time as, in my opinion, it offers a fairly important glimpse into how high the corruption in our federal government goes.

Too Big to Fail, or Too Easy to Control?

I was reading an interesting article this evening on the Washington Post website. I had actually diverted there from another site, I don’t remember which, that was discussing the article and the facts around it. We all are fairly fed up with the bailouts that we have seen. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was the only one that I even remotely understood as possibly being needed. That isn’t to say I approved, because I am not sure that it was needed (I would be interested in what some of our more economically inclined folks think about whether it was needed or even good). But, the government unfortunately does not seem to be too interested in my opinion about what they should or should not be doing these days (or the opinion of any other regular citizen for that matter). The bottom line is that they passed the TARP bill and President Bush signed it on into law. They blamed Bush for deregulating and allowing the madness to happen, despite the fact that both parties (and especially you Barney Frank) were fully responsible for what happened.

More of the Traveling Magic Show

I have listened to the news for the last couple of days swirl on about the bonuses being paid to executives from troubled insurance giant AIG. I understand that many of you are upset with AIG. I do get that we are seeing a company get bailed out with Billions of dollars of US Taxpayer money. And I do get that the contracts of these executives awarded them large bonuses that you don’t think are fair. I don’t think they are fair either. Let’s get that out of the way. But, my friends it is time to put a little perspective into play here. And once we have some perspective we can ask ourselves what is the real game afoot?