Cliffs Riffs - Stuph n Nonsense

So - a nice lady from India (gee, how do I know she is from India - even though her name is "Nancy"?) called the store to "update your free business listing." After all the address/phone # stuff she asked, "May I know your position there?" Me: Chief Bottle Washer. Her: Hmmm. (pause) We do not show that as a listing, but we have bottle washer as one listing and supervisor as another. Should we go with .... supervisor? Me: Sure. Her: May I speak to the owner, please? Me: What? Listen, I am the owner. Her: You are the owner, sir? Me: Yes, I was just kidding with the bottle washer thing. Her: Will you please hold while I swith you to a supervisor to verify ..... I hung up at that point.

Die hard members of the donkey and elephant parties need to quit making like ostriches and pull their heads out of the sand and take a look around. Does the millions (billions?) Fannie and Freddie blew make you sick? Well the elephant candidate hired one of their well paid lackies to run his campaign and the donkey candidate was the number two recipient of Senatorial money from them. Both candidates blow the trumpet of alarm for the cameras but the reality is that they both have their hands out albeit in different ways. Does the thought of AIG execs spending over half a million on a spa week-end and a hunting trip to England boil your blood? Have you noticed that no donkey or elephant has done a dang thing about it? Do the math - they all get their goodies from the same trough. This election, I will be pulling as many Libertarian levers as I can because both of the major parties have us bamboozled with rhetoric while they milk the system for all the cream they can get. They hand out ou...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18568.htm START: The 545 People Responsible For All Of U.S. WoesBY Charley Reese(Date of publication unknown)-- -- - Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes? You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don't write the tax code. Congress does. You and I don't set fiscal policy. Congress does. You and I don't control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does.One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices - 545 human beings out of the 235 million - are directl...

The Belleview View newspaper used to run my column back in 2001-2002. If I recall I was a guest columnist once a month. My columns generated a lot of feedback from their readers and so Sarah, the editor, blessed me with my first (and only) Award for Journalism. Sniff-sniff....seeing this never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

"Congress opens hearings on financial meltdown By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, Associated Press Writer 6 HOURS AGO WASHINGTON - Days from becoming the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, Lehman Brothers steered millions to departing executives even while pleading for a federal rescue, Congress was told Monday." The story goes on from there. Once again we are smacked in the face by the fact that our president and his advisors are idiots or lackies of Big Business or both. The members of Congress refused to listen to the outcry from the people they supposedly represent and went ahead with this flim-flam bailout bullshit. How is it that everyone I talked with about this was against the bailout? It didn't matter if they were donkeys, elephants, or independents - they all knew this was about throwing a lifeline to companies that had been milked to the max. All of us regular folks knew this was a sham and Congress, in its infinite wisdom, didn't recognize a pig in a poke? At the...

I do not believe that the fault for any aspect of our current financial situation(s) can be laid solely at the feet of donkeys or elephants. Elephants are traditionally proponents of less regulation and donkeys pretend to want to look out for the little guy, but when both parties are "blessed" by the largess of Freddie and Fannie lobbyists how do you properly assign blame? When checks from Fat Cats go in equal amounts to both sides, why would any of them rock the boat? Personally, I think the two parties get their devoted followers so stirred up about what "the other guys" did or did not do, that we all manage to miss the fact that they are all strolling together to the bank with big ole smiles on their mugs. If you watch a split screen of Fox and MSNBC you can see some pretty condemning statements and actions coming from both sides of the aisle. FOX, in spite of the pretense of unbiased reporting, is awful dang good at zeroing in on donkeys. MSNBC makes no pr...