A1A South

How much will your chances of getting colorectal cancer be reduced if you gnaw on lots of fruits and veggies? None at all; in fact, you may actually have a greater chance of getting colorectal cancer at the higher rates of fruit/veggie consumption if you are a male.

Read the rest at Junkfood Science.

Being serious about the financial “crisis” would mean that the rules forcing banks to make loans to people that can’t pay them back would be repealed. Hasn’t happened. It would mean that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been dissolved. Hasn’t happened. Until such time as the root cause of the “crisis” is addressed, I don’t care to see my tax dollars being wasted.

Not to mention the energy crisis being brought on by the ranking Congressional tree hugger, specifically the ol’ bat that is the Speaker of the House. She needs to go. That is a job for an adult, and the ol’ bat isn’t qualified.

From American Thinker:

America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.

Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama’s connections to his radical mentors — Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama’s radical connections since the beginning.

Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama’s life comprise a who’s who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.

But even this doesn’t fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis

In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.

I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent – the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

Read the rest. It’s something that I believe. It is difficult to watch Nancy Pelosi blame the REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT solely for something that was created and perpetuated by Democrats. I have to believe that it is a deliberate strategy for electing a man who does not have America’s best interests at heart.

Per News4Jax:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jaguars offensive lineman Richard Collier, who needed three surgeries to save his life after he was shot 14 times by a gunman Sept. 2, is finally off life support, but will never play football again, his doctor and his sports agent said on Monday.

“When he came into this hospital … there was probably very little hope that he would live,” NFL agent Jeff Jankovich said.

Jankovich praised Shands-Jacksonville Medical Center with saving Collier’s life, threatened not only by the shooting, but subsequent infections, including pneumonia. One bullet fractured his spine, leaving him paralyzed him from the waist down. Part of his left leg had to be amputated.

This wannabe thug violence has got to be stopped. This unfortunate man, in the wrong place at the wrong time, has had his livelihood and his ability to walk taken away from him. I am ashamed that this happened to this young man in my city.

From The American Thinker blog:

If the great American middle class ever figures out the trillion dollar phony mortgage scam from Freddie and Fannie, they will finally rise up in wrath and throw the liberal bums out. Let it start hitting their pocket books, their ATM cards and credit cards, let their home prices fall like a rock — and Barack Obama will be out of politics, along with the Democrat majority in Congress.

For conservatives this is the opportunity of the century.

That is why the Democrats are screaming with fear about the abyss that has suddenly opened at their feet. Since the Carter Administration first threatened the banks with punishment if they didn’t allow themselves to be robbed by sub-prime borrowers, since the Clinton Administration made it all even worse in 1995, even the Democrats have known full well that the bills had to come due at some time.

There is a sane reason why bankers and trustees have to exercise “due diligence” over other people’s money. All the politicians are lawyers, and they know about money and theft. But “due diligence” was criminalized for bankers through Federal law. They were compelled, on penalty of law, to lend money at high-risk through Fannie and Freddie. It is the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 all over again, where everybody bought stocks on margin until they could see the abyss opening up at their feet. Well, this time it was the Feds who created an insane lending scheme themselves. The US Government threatened to punish bankers for “redlining” — which in real life means giving money only to people who can pay it back.

Nothing like leftists in government that are happy to squander YOUR money on their ideas. Not to mention getting a nice bribe out of it.

Another good read at Investor’s Business Daily:

One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?

The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.

Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac, (FRE) even into the early 1990s, weren’t the juggernauts they’d later be.

While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie’s and Freddie’s rules.

Democratic fingerprints are all OVER this mess, and we have to pay for it. Somebody needs to be fired.

Read the details in the Wall Street Journal.

I haven’t read anything indicating that that piece of crap legislation that forced banks to make bad loans has been rescinded.

NOT ALL COUNTRIES guarantee their citizens the right to virtually unbridled freedom of speech. The United States does. Would someone please tell the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama? And the dozing guardians of liberty at the University of Mary Washington?

Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president, is scheduled to speak at a rally at the university today. The public is invited to this forum, on property it, the public, owns. However, signs and banners will not be allowed, according to the organizers and compliant campus officials. Suddenly, UMW is a First Amendment-Free, or at least a First Amendment-Crippled, Zone, subject to the self-serving preferences of politicos. Why does an Obama rally–or a McCain rally or a Nader rally–justify taking a little off the top of Americans’ most fundamental rights?

A UMW spokeswoman says that the Obama campaign required the sign-and-banner ban. That campaign tells us that the ban is for “security” reasons. But a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting presidential candidates, says that the service has no objection to signs at rallies, provided that no “part of the sign could be used as a weapon”–e.g., a heavy metal pole or a sharpened stick. Finally, the McCain campaign tells us, “We encourage people to make signs at our events.”

Regarding today’s event, one would expect better from a campaign bearing the name of a former professor of constitutional law. (See Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a lawyer: “one skilled in circumventing the law.”) And one would expect much better from a university that, in pursuit of a day of celebrity, a boost in prestige, and profits from its book store’s planned commemorative Obama T-shirts (now scotched), shaves away an American liberty purchased by men who turned white snow red and dry dirt wet with their sacrificial blood. This is a lot to swap for a mess of pottage. Remarks the Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead, who has turpentined the Bush administration’s civil-rights record, “The Secret Service has a better free-speech viewpoint than the college.”

The First Amendment guarantees the freedoms of religion, speech, the press, peaceable assembly, petition of the government. Will one who aspires to the title Defender of the Constitution begin inhibiting these First Freedoms even before he is in office–at a public university? Source: The Free Lance-Star

Hat tip Robert D.

Are Obama supporters a bunch of thugs that can’t be trusted not to whack each other with signs?

About 3 years ago, Don Bruce (formerly Don Juan) was involved in some violent altercations over ownership of one of the barns. Don Bruce is an older-type altered male, and he was getting the worst of the deal. I convinced him that spending the night on the screened porch wasn’t a bad deal at all. He was so convinced that he stayed up there willingly, abandoning ownership of the barn to be closer to me. Or so I deluded myself.

I was not Don Bruce’s human at all. Don Bruce had long since laid claim to my son, who he followed home one day when son was about 13 years old. Son now has his own place but, indeed, still has some things out in that barn that Don Bruce guarded for such a long time.

A couple of nights ago, I heard cat curses being hurled on my back porch. I flicked on the light and stepped out. Nobody there but Don Bruce and Princess Di, aka momma kitty, named because of her imperious manner. How odd. Perhaps I was hearing things.

Before dawn the next morning, I was carrying feed out to the stable and heard some scrabbling outside the barn. I shone the flashlight toward the noise and caught the interloper in the act of hurriedly climbing back into the second story of the barn. He’s apparently been squatting out there unnoticed by us for the past 3 years.

From Forbes:

Detroit – If you want to know what impact the banking crisis is having on the overall American economy, look no further than automakers, who say they are facing “horrific” sales this month because customers can’t get credit–or are afraid to buy amid the uncertainty.

“It can be nothing but a disaster for consumer confidence when you’re talking about bank failures,” frets Earl Hesterberg, chief executive of Houston-based Group One Automotive, a large, publicly traded dealer group. “People are worried about where their bank deposits and CDs are. We’ve seen traffic suffer accordingly.”

Carmakers were already facing a tough year, amid a difficult housing market, higher gas prices and escalating commodity costs. But Wall Street’s high-profile collapse, and the related tightening of credit for all businesses, has made a difficult situation even worse–and stirred concern about whether carmakers have enough cash to weather the downturn.

Retail car sales were down 34% through the first three weeks of September, compared with the same period a year ago, and analysts are now lowering their forecasts based on the added factor of credit gridlock. On Wednesday, J.D. Power & Associates lowered its September sales forecast to an annualized rate of 12.6 million units, down 400,000 vehicles from what it had been predicting only a couple of weeks ago. Read the rest of the sad story here.

A lot of industries are going to be ruined through no fault of their own. Even the deepest pockets aren’t going to be able to hold out for very long.

The auto makers support auto workers, dealers, salesmen, mechanics, paint companies, parts makers, steel manufacturers, tire manufacturers….and that’s just a small part of whom the House and Senate are trying to/have screwed over with their failure to fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac years ago.

Many of them are unionized. And most of them are going to vote for the very people that proclaim to be for the worker who are trying to make fuel for automobiles so expensive that people cannot afford to drive anything but smallish imports. The same party that claims to support the American worker but blocks deporting illegals that will work for a third of their wages.

Oh, well, don’t forget the coal miners. Obama and company want to eliminate their jobs entirely. Perhaps they can learn to erect windmills.

See The Daily Standard.

Wow. I wish that we had some cash reserves buried out underneath the pecan tree in a mason jar but, sadly, we do not.

Update: I was just up at the feed store discussing Fortis with one of the employees. She told me that she and her husband had been wondering whether they might not be better off taking their money out of the bank and paying by cash and money order. When main street America starts discussing this, you know people have lost faith in the ability (or integrity) of the House and Senate to fix the problem and in the solvency of banks.

I hope she doesn’t bank at Wachovia.