A place on the web to preserve our family history! Email stanmoffat@gmail.com for details or information, etc. This a work in progress...
Monday, March 23, 2009
The Big Takeover... by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
From Heather's blog....
Updated 03/18/2009 ET
But I can't ask him anymore because Ron died of a rare esophageal cancer last Sunday.
So now there is one less person in the world who never chooses his positions to feed a pompous ego or to stroke his self-image as a thinking person. There was no point to posturing for Ron: His social standing in Hollywood was revoked the moment he supported Bush and the Iraq War.
Perhaps Ron always spoke his mind, but I didn't know him when he was "brave"; I only knew Ron when he was actually brave.
I've noticed that words like "brave" and "courageous" are mostly used nowadays to mean "left-wing." We're constantly asked to admire the monumental courage of Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo and the Dixie Chicks -- sometimes even by other people.
But for my younger readers, what courage traditionally meant was risking the disapprobation of people you know. It was about losing friends, losing work and losing status where you live -- not alienating people you will never meet. Insulting people in Kansas when you live in Los Angeles is not speaking truth to power; it's speaking anything to serve power.
One thing you cannot say about Ron's magnificent speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention is that he did it to go with the flow in Hollywood, to take the path of least resistance, to win easy applause. Ron did lose work, lose friends and lose his entire social apparatus.
Ron didn't say what he said to get any kind of reaction, but because he believed it. He was an intellectual trapped in an actor's body.
Amid the antiques at his beautifully appointed Park Avenue pre-war, there were piles and piles of magazines and newspaper articles on topics ranging from Sunni Muslims to Darwinism. Nearly every room was lined with books, most of them dog-eared.
When I needed to stay with Ron for a few weeks once, he'd get up hours before I did, read all the major newspapers and leave the interesting articles circled at the foot of my bed.
This might be the nicest thing a man could ever do for me. Hey, skip the bagel and fresh coffee -- bring me that op-ed page and a pair of scissors! It was like a fabulous Park Avenue hotel with a clipping service.
During his long-shot chemo treatments at "the spa," as he called Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Ron turned his chemo rooms into Command Central. Most people doze off during chemo; Ron would be sitting upright, watching the news, checking his laptop and making cell phone calls, seemingly oblivious to the poison being injected into his arm.
He'd often come to church with me on Sundays -- while insisting he favored the "Original Testament," as if the New Testament were an act of judicial activism. He just liked to hear an intellectual lecture on the Bible -- and always perked up when the minister began discussing the "Original Testament."
On Sundays when we had communion, Ron would pop the host in his mouth as soon as the tray passed him, approvingly observing that matzo was served at church.
No ideas frightened him, which is part of the reason why we were always laughing, even when we were arguing.
Ron sometimes told me of the cruelty directed at him by his former friends, but never with bitterness or for publication -- although I'm tempted to get it off my chest even if he didn't want to get it off his chest. You know who you are.
As with his impending death, Ron mostly joked about his banishment from the plutocracy. When I off-handedly mentioned in December 2004 that I had to get a Christmas tree, he told me he'd like to help, but having recently spoken at the Republican National Convention, the last thing he needed was to be seen walking through the streets of New York carrying a Christmas tree.
After an aborted operation on his cancer in July 2007, as soon as I saw Ron in his hospital bed, I told him I had Christians across the country praying for him. He said, "That's good, because the Jews are praying for me to die."
Here he was joking only hours after being told his cancer was inoperable and he had mere months to live. Nearly two years later, he was gone. Luckily for him, he now faces a Maker who rewards bravery, but despises "bravery."
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Updated 03/18/2009 ET
It’s an outrage that the American people are being asked to pay for the bad behavior of people who should have known better, be they reckless traders on Wall Street or reckless borrowers on Main Street.
But the cure for our outrage is not merely, as President Obama is demanding, that AIG be prevented from paying its executives. The $165 million in planned bonuses -- as manifestly undeserved as it is -- is chicken feed compared to the $170 billion in taxpayer funds AIG has received so far.
Nor is it acceptable to ask Americans to keep throwing their tax dollars at failed companies and their leaders.
The answer is an old fashioned one: AIG should choose between receivership or bankruptcy. It should not be allowed to choose more bailouts from the taxpayer.
Restore the Rule of Law: Allow Failing Corporations to go Bankrupt
Under U.S. law, Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a company to reorganize. Chapter 7 allows a company to dissolve itself.
The choices for AIG, as both an insurance and non-insurance company, are more complicated, but ultimately boil down to the same options. And for other companies either receiving or looking to receive a bailout from the taxpayers, the option should instead be bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy would send a needed message to U.S. investors: Don’t assume the government will bail you out when you do something stupid.
And most importantly, bankruptcy would replace the rule of politicians over U.S. financial institutions with the rule of law.
Geithner Didn’t Inherit the Policy of Throwing Billions at Failing Companies -- He Helped Create It
Because when it comes to Washington’s handling of the financial crisis, so far we’ve had the rule of politicians, not the rule of law.
Most prominent among the politicians in question is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
As Americans’ level of outraged has risen, so has the level of finger pointing by Geithner and others for the mess we’re in.
But Treasury Secretary Geithner is disingenuous at best and untruthful at worst when he says that he “inherited the worst fiscal situation in American history.”
The truth is that Secretary Geithner didn’t inherit the policy of throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at failing companies -- he helped create it.
Even before he was Treasury Secretary -- when he was still head of the New York Federal Reserve -- Geithner was so deeply involved in the government’s bail out of Bear Stearns, its take over of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and its bailout of AIG that this was the Washington Post’s headline from September 19, 2008:
“In the Crucible of Crisis, Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner Forge a Committee of Three”
The first meeting of the first bailout -- of Bear Sterns -- was held in Geithner’s office. And the first meeting of what has become a $170 billion bailout of AIG was held -- where else? In Geithner’s New York Fed office.
Why Not Bankruptcy for AIG? Because Wall Street Wouldn’t Have Done As Well
From the outset, Geithner was central to the developing policy of having the taxpayers bail out ailing financial institutions like AIG rather then allow them to go bankrupt. And for months now, we’ve been told that these bailouts were necessary to avoid a wider, cataclysmic, financial meltdown.
But now it’s clear that other, less noble, considerations were at play.
As the Wall Street Journal editorialized yesterday, the real outrage over the AIG bailout isn’t executive bonuses, it’s that billions in taxpayer funds intended for AIG have been passed through to benefit foreign banks and Wall Street behemoths like Goldman Sachs.
And as former AIG CEO Hank Greenburg testified last October, these financial institutions wouldn’t have faired as well if AIG had filed for bankruptcy protection rather than do what it did, which was to negotiate a bailout with Timothy Geithner’s New York Federal Reserve.
Here’s how Greenburg put it:
“Although AIG stockholders could have fared better if the company had filed for bankruptcy protection, other stakeholders -- like AIG’s Wall Street counterparties in swaps and other transactions -- would have fared worse.”
For the Cost of Bailing Out AIG, Every American Household Could Have Free Electricity For a Year
So now everyone is outraged, and rightly so. But the lavish executive bonuses being paid with taxpayer funds are just the beginning of the story.
So far, the American taxpayers are on the hook for $170 billion to AIG -- that’s an astounding $1,224 per taxpayer.
What else could we have done with all this money?
$170 billion would pay for more than doubling the Navy’s fleet of aircraft carriers.
$170 billion would pay for a four-year education at a public university for more then two million Americans.
$170 billion would cover the electricity bill of every household in America for an entire year.
When You Reward Failure, All You Get is More Failure
What Washington should learn from all this outrage is to return to the common sense that should have guided it all along: When you reward failure, all you get it more failure.
A company that needs a $170 billion taxpayer bailout is a failed company. The executives that led that company are failed executives. But instead of having to face the consequences of their failure responsibly through bankruptcy or receivership, AIG and its Wall Street “counterparties” are being rewarded for their recklessness -- with our money.
Thanks to the Bush-Obama-Geithner policy of bailing out failing companies, we now have the worst of all possible scenarios: A taxpayer subsidized, government supervised private company; an unsustainable public/private hybrid that is too public to make its own decisions and too private to be responsible to the taxpayers that are keeping it alive.
Outrages like the fat cat bonuses currently dominating the headlines will only continue as long as the rule of politicians supplants the rule of law on Wall Street.
Congress should rethink this entire process. The dangers of a domino-like financial meltdown are real. But so, too, is the danger that the outrage of the American people will reach the point that we no longer trust the dire warnings -- or the righteous indignation -- coming from Washington.
Your friend,
guess i missed this memo.... sorry....
Madison's Dance Recital
Thrsday May 21 @ 7pm at the Stillwater Community Center
Senator Barack Obama received a $101,332 bonus from American International Group
No Boiled Carrots
WASHINGTON
Barack Obama even needs a teleprompter to get mad.
On St. Patrick’s Day, the president spoke a bit of Gaelic, dyed the White House fountains green and talked about his distant relatives in the tiny Irish town of Moneygall, aptly named since money and gall are the two topics now consuming him.
But Mr. Obama is still having trouble summoning a suitable flash of Irish temper at the gall of the corrupt money magicians who continue to make our greenbacks disappear into their bottomless well. He’s got to lop off some heads.
As he watches the fury of ordinary Americans bubble up at those who continue to plunder our economy, he should keep in mind one of my dad’s favorite Gaelic sayings: “Never bolt the door with a boiled carrot.”
His lofty team of economic rivals is looking more like a team of small forwards and shooting guards. At the White House on Monday, the president read reporters some tough talk from the teleprompter about the chuckleheads at A.I.G., accusing them of “recklessness and greed.”
But it was his own boiled carrots who acted shocked at bonuses that they should have known were coming, and should have dismantled before handing A.I.G. another $30 billion two weeks ago. It is bad enough that the billions are being laundered through A.I.G. to the likes of bailout double-dippers Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America, not to mention foreign banks.
Mr. Obama belatedly tried to stop the tumbrels that began rolling toward the Potomac after Larry Summers went on Sunday talk shows to assert that there was nothing the administration could do about the blood-sucking insurance monstrosity’s venal payout.
Summers, who inspires lusty dreams of A.I.G. tormentor Eliot Spitzer, asserted that the government “cannot just abrogate” contracts with financial vampires. It seems as though it would be pretty easy to upend a bonus contract that must read something like: “If you ruin the world economy, we’ll pay you an extra million.”
As Andrew Cuomo pointed out on Tuesday, 11 of the A.I.G. executives who received retention bonuses of $1 million or more — including one who received $4.6 million — were not even retained. They’re no longer working at A.I.G. Bonuses were paid to 52 people who have left the company.
At first, on the nutty bonuses, Team Obama thought it could get away with the same absurd argument used to justify the nearly $8 billion in unnecessary earmarks it allowed Congress to jam into this year’s overdue spending bill: It was written last year; we’re just signing off on it; we’ll do better in the future.
What President Obama should have said to the blood-sucking bums at A.I.G., many of them foreigners who were working at the louche London unit, was quite simple: “We stopped the checks. They’re immoral. If you want Americans’ hard-earned cash as a reward for burning up their jobs, homes and savings, sue me.”
He also should have saved a dollar a year and fired Ed Liddy. There must have been ways to avoid rewarding the perpetrators of our financial crisis and Liddy seems to have seriously explored none of them.
Barney Frank told reporters: “I think the time has come to exercise our ownership rights ... and then say as owner, ‘No, I’m not paying you the bonus. You didn’t perform. You didn’t live up to this contract.’ ”
Cuomo, who seems far more intent on transparency than Mr. Obama, and Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary who reluctantly signed off on the bonuses, issued subpoenas for the names of the bonus babies. Cuomo started an investigation of whether the payments were fraudulent because the company knew it did not have the funds to cover them.
The president needs to brush back the arrogant, greedy creeps who kneecapped capitalism, rather than cosseting Wall Street for fear of looking like an avatar of socialism.
Geithner, who comes from the cozy Wall Street club, and Liddy believe it’s best to stabilize the company and keep on board the same people who invented the risky financial tactics so they can unwind their own rotten spool.
Isn’t that like giving bonuses to the arsonists who started a fire because they alone know what kind of accelerants they used to start it?
“Their mythology starts with the false premise that these are irreplaceable geniuses,” says Cuomo.
Boiling mad that A.I.G. made more than 73 millionaires in the unit that felled the firm, Cuomo called the company’s counsel on Monday to demand that she stop payment on the checks. Cuomo was informed that the money had already been direct-deposited in the accounts of the derivative scoundrels with the push of a button.
Monday, March 16, 2009
You know you have made it when you have your own menu item at Joseppis!
Wow... The Stan.... on the menu... wow...my head is swelling..... NO.... don't tell me what Clark's first name is...
i know this is here because of me... and my name on many quality tools.... Stanley brand... great tools right...
so...... hehee... thanks Craig, for keeping me informed on who might be infringing on my patents... haha yeah right...
I had Mr. Johnson fix and tune up the old piano we can not even give away....
Tender, Juicy Obama Fingers Hit the Shelves
GERMAN FRIED CHICKEN
Tender, Juicy Obama Fingers Hit the Shelves
By Charles Hawley
A German frozen food company hopes to raise sales with a new product: Obama fingers. The tender, fried chicken bits come with a tasty curry sauce. The company says it was unaware of the possible racist overtones of the product.
Selling products has, of course, become a bit more difficult than usual these days. No wonder then that companies everywhere are turning to optimistic marketing messages in an effort to counteract the steady drum beat of negativity coming from front page headlines around the globe.
Andrew's Baseball Games - Schedule for Spring
March 24: 6:00 & 7:15
April 7: 6:00 & 7:15
April 21: 6:00 & 7:15
May 5: 6:00 & 7:15
May 19: 6:00 & 7:15
May 26: 6:00 & 7:15
June 9: 6:00 & 7:15
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Does our VP just make you so excited...??? What a comedy of errors the obama team is... sigh...
Oh, That Joe! (No. 48 in a Series) -- Gimme a Break
March 13, 2009 5:40 PM
At an event at Union Station today where Vice President Joe Biden was heralding the $1.3 billion in investments in rebuilding train stations and passenger rails, a microphone picked up one of the former senator's myriad Senate colleagues addressing him, formally, as "Mr. Vice President."
That met with Vice President Biden's standard reply.
"Gimme a f*&$#ing break," he said, apparently unaware that the microphone was on.
-- jpt




