This'n'That; November 2nd[obama;Palin;Bail-out;Charity]

Palin Scammed Alaska Governor Sarah Palin spent six minutes speaking with someone she thought was French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The two discussed politics, the perils of hunting with Vice President Dick Cheney and Sarkozy's "beautiful wife." The call was made by a well-known Montreal comedy duo Parc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel. The two are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads-of-state. Bailout Stuff During the week ended Oct 31, the Treasury Department released $125 Billion to nine banks. ***Those nine banks [ticker symbol][how many $]: Bank of America.........................[BAC].....................................................$25Billion Citigroup....................................[C]..........................................................$25Billion JP Morgan Chase.......................[JPM].....................................................$25Billion Wells Fargo................................[WFC]....................................................$25Billion The Goldman Sachs Group........[GS]........................................................$10Billion Morgan Stanley.........................[MS]........................................................$10Billion Bank of New York.....................[BK]............................................................$2Billion State Street Bank......................[SST]...........................................................$2Billion This cash will buy taxpayers preferred shares in those banks and increase the banks' liquidity. The Bailout Promise: If the taxpayers provided the funds, the banks would resume lending, thawing a frozen credit market. The devil is in the details: The Treasury Department agreed to the loans with fairly weak strings attached. There was no actual requirement to lend the money provided by the feds and there are some weak restrictions on executive compensation. So far, the money is going to pay either bank dividends, satisfy old debt or to shore up the banks' bottom lines. NONE OF THESE will address the problem of frozen credit markets. Using nearly half of the funds to pay dividends to stockholders instead of fueling the credit markets, leaves the taxpayers on the "short end of the stick." Some [primarily] non-financial sector companies are lining up for Bailout funds. The automakers are claiming that they should be included due to their lending subsidiaries. They are arguing that because they have these financial subsidiaries, they are banks and thus should be included in the bailout. Bailing out ANYONE BUT bona fide banking institutions will create a dangerous precedent. The government will then be put in the position of picking-and-choosing what they consider winning versus losing industries/companies. As noted in the Weekly Wastebasket, an on-line publication of Taxpayers for Common Sense [ http://www.taxpayer.net/ ], Wall Street needs to get off it's collective "dead ass and on it's dying feet [I paraphrase]" and get back to work.... the business of the American economy. Is His Word Reliable; Will He Take Care Of Us? Well,IS o-bomb-a's word reliable? Take for instance, his pledge of tax reduction for those making "less than [insert number here...]. This pie-in-the-sky promise initially started at [those incomes less than] $300,000. It was then changed in the following digression: ***o-bomb-a [his-own-majestic-self] reduced it to $200,000. ***The Dolt [that foreign affairs genius] reduced it to $150,000. ***NM Governor Bill Richardson reduced it to $120,000. I'll bet in reality, the reductions don't stop until they reach the $40-50,000 range. o-bomb-a would replicate that "Slick Willie" moment: " I worked as hard as I could on this tax problem, as hard as I ever have........" Early in "Slick's" first term, he not only raised taxes after making campaign promises not to, he MADE THE INCREASE RETROACTIVE, back to January First!!!!! The first president in history to do so!!!! Well, WILL o-bomb-a take care of us? With all this "spread-the-wealth-around" talk, will he really take care of us? If that's really the case; if all these campaign promises are to be believed, then why hasn't he undertaken the same caring and compassion with his own family? ***o-bomb-a has a brother George, living in a hut in Kenya. George has an annual income of just $12; that's three-cents a day!!! If o-bomb-a, who's promised to take care of us, practically cradle-to-grave, tossed George a fifty-dollar bill, George's annual income would increase 400 percent!!!!! ***o-bomb-a's aunt was recently found living in a Boston slum. This aunt, Zeituni Onyango, is in the U.S. illegally-having been denied asylum from her home country of Kenya. In 2007, Money Magazine estimated the o-bomb-a net worth at $1.3 MILLION. The o-bomb-a 2007 Federal tax return indicated a $4.3 MILLION income. Seems like o-bomb-a could "get off soma that greed" and take care of his own family first. What would it take...... maybe twenty grand a year??? That would be about .00047% of the family's 2007 income [$4,238,826]!!! These folks, the o-bomb-as as a family, are a "really giving, charitable" couple. Check this crap out..... Year.....Income.....Donations...percentage 2000.... 240,505..... 2,350 .........00.9% 2001 ....275,123 .......1,470 .........00.5% 2002 ...260,824....... 1,050........ 00.4% 2003 ...238,327....... 3,400 .........01.4% 2004 ...207,642 .......2,500 .........01.2% 2005 ...1.6Million ...77,315 .........04.7% 2006....983,826......60,307........06.1% [Reference: www.msnbc.com/id/23796726/ ] So............ for those seven years they earned a whopping $3,806,247. As charitable donations, they claimed a Federal deduction for the paltry sum of $148,392 [equalling just 00.04% of income !!!] Don't his compassion jis makeya feel warm and fuzzy all over ?!?!?! Til Nex'time......