I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to a limited cell of rumors and scares will support all sorts of wild stuff out of ignorance and fear, and fail to take this sort of thing apart and think it all through.

Nutballs in American political life were there from the beginning – look at the nastiness during the Adams and Jefferson administration, under Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and so on.  There’s been two big red scares (right after the first and second World Wars), and a lot of people fighting anything that smells like change.

They fought immigration from ‘those people’ – first non-English speaking Europeans, then non-Protestants, non-Europeans, and so on.  They fought changes in the laws to give anyone voting and citizenship rights…removing rules that kept Catholics, non-property owners and the like off the voting rolls.  Not to mention non-Christians.  And letting people who aren’t our kind into office?  Oh!

They fought taxation of any kind.  They fought any kind of consumer protection, including drug safety and food safety.  They fought public schools.  They fought paper money, banking, lending, interstate commerce, the internet and highways, and practically everything that they considered despicable progress.    They fought separation of church and state, because they desired their religion’s rules to trump everyone else’s.

They fought medicine and science and public health.  They fought innoculations, public water systems and sanitation laws. They fought educational reform; if the Bible and a switch were good enough for them, it was good enough for you.

They fought slavery in favor of indentured servitude (think serfs, and they were white and British) because they hated foreigners, and then fought against freedom for the black slaves that came over to America against their will, and they fought homesteaders.  And yes, there were fanatics like John Brown who fought against slavery but didn’t give much of a damn who died in the process, and bushwhackers like Quantrill and Jesse James who killed and laid waste in the opposite direction.

They fought freedom of expression and gun ownership by other people who didn’t fit their mind of real people.

They closed their eyes to intolerance, poverty, hate, misery, ignorance and want, out-scrooging every Scrooge.  They become stooges, in many cases, for much more moneyed and wanna-be-powerful interests.  And very often, those interests proceeded to screw the ignorant over just as much and thoroughly as anyone else, because the powerful who used them didn’t care who got worked over.  They fought reforms of banks and recoveries from panics and recessions and depressions because they felt that the government shouldn’t help anyone.

They become shills, endlessly repeating total nonsense.  They get sucked into buying tons of extra ammo and gold and survival equipment by scare merchants who advise them that the Boogie Man is right around the corner – or become dittohead drones to people who advise them to trust Nobody But Them aginst All Those Commies Out There.

Here’s a sampling of some; cut to avoid disturbing your stomach.  I remembered plenty of this from my own experience, and had to do a little research to give specifically connected links.

I have no problem with political debate.  I have every problem with organizing people to shut down political debate with threats and screaming.  And it deeply bothers me to see how many people don’t think before they act, vote or rant about whatever.

I know Marxists, and nobody in the Administration’s top is a Marxist, unless your definition has no connection to real life.   I see people rant at town halls about the evils of socialized medicine, and go home and thank God for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and never realize the problem with this.   I see people gripe about potholed roads and collapsing bridges and about how there should be no local taxes and never get the connection that no taxes = no public anything.

And I am tired of politicians who lie through their teeth for political power, regardless of the cost to all but their buds – whether it’s Richie Daley trying to tapdance about how the Olympics won’t cost Chicago anything, or the GOP leadership / politicians refusing to  care about anything but trying to destroy Obama  as a lesson to the rest of us and pandering to the most whacked out elements of their base.  That was the reason why I left the Republican party years ago; I believed in government’s role for the general good, and in things like honest government for the general good, and the GOP leadership stopped doing that.

When environmental protection comes down to ‘don’t worry, the rapture is coming’, I can’t support that.

More about Daley’s efforts to sell off city parking meters and other property, and how his idea of ‘quick money now so I can keep services going now and the heck with the future’ isn’t working so well.

Also, there’s the damage that the Olympic bid will do to the parks system, and Daley’s pledge to the Olympic committee to cover cost overages that totally counters what he told the citizens of Chicago.

From the Chicago Reader:  Part 1 and Part 2, along with the Easy Version,more concerns, and legal action from aldermen trying to kill the deal.

Over a year later, on December 2, 2008, Mayor Daley held a press conference to announce that after a rigorously monitored bidding process (as opposed to handing the deal to a company that employs his nephew) he was going to lease the meters to Morgan Stanley for–surprise!–about $1 billion.

It turns out to be a winning move for Mayor Daley. He gets the money–nearly 1.16 billion–up front. He’s pretty much free to spend it any way he wants. For all we know he may just want to put it in a big pile and burn it. Or spend it on the Olympics, which amounts to the same thing.

And it’s a great deal for Morgan Stanley, which quadrupled parking rates and can look forward to hauling in buckets and buckets of cash for the next 75 years.

As for the suckers who call Chicago home: sorry chumps, you lose–again. That parking rate hike Sneed alluded to was supposed to bring in about $55 million to the “cash-strapped city.” Instead, we’re only getting at most $20 million a year in interest from the portion of the $1.15 billion Mayor Daley has socked away. So that means we’re facing a $35 million a year hole in the budget where parking meter revenue used to be, which our mayor can either make up by raising fees or taxes or by cutting services, like, oh, fixing potholes.

Meanwhile, the city has informed alderman Scott Waguespack that the meters are worth considerably more than $1 billion–probably closer to $5 billion.

So Mayor Daley sells the meters for less than they’re worth and will have to raise fees or taxes to compensate for the revenue that’s going to Morgan Stanley instead of into public coffers. You pay more in parking meter fees and you get less in service. Is this a great deal or what?

The tax refunds came back in, and back out again; Susan’s SUV needs immediate work on brakes and tierods (chaching), Mere and her cousin need to be signed up for some Summer stuff Right Now (chaching) and I’m getting the document scanner that I need, which is on sale at Egghead with free shipping (chaching).

Susan’s SUV also needs another grand worth of work, mine will need a new windshield ere long, and it all goes round and round.  And so far as I can tell, we *should* get the refinancing stuff final next week, probably while we are in Ohio.  I’ve been handing out my cell phone number to various people for purposes of keeping-connected on things that are in the works (such as some carpet stuff in Susan’s office and the basement)  - I usually avoid that, because I really don’t want people calling me on the thing, as I don’t have it on me at home all the time.   We were late adopters on cell phones, and I’ve never really gotten warm and fuzzy with mine.

Our plan for Ohio is to drive out on Monday by way of Indianapolis and Dayton, stay at the hotel in the eastern suburbs of Columbus Monday and Tuesday nights, and drive back on Wednesday day with a load of frozen pizzas from Marions Piazza.    Susan will then take off on Thursday morning with Meredith to go off with Susan’s Aunt on a weekend driving trip to Kansas City…coming back Sunday.   (Auntie is checking out hotel con/function space for the con she runs, and Susan and Mere are going along for the ride and to see people in KC Susan knows - our church / denomination is headquartered there.)

Needless to say, it’s busy around here.  I also updated two of the three Ubuntus in the house to 9.04, and I *really* need to fix the Ubuntu side of my own PC.   This will require me to mess with the nVidia setup that blew up on me, and I really don’t know what they heck I’m doing, so if someone decided to suddenly advise me, I’d appreciate it.

And man, the weather outside is lovely.

The big items of getting the taxes out and getting a pile of documents out for the refinance to the lender is over with; I don’t, at present, have a scanner that can handle legal-sized paper, and I killed a lot of time trying to figure a clever way around that. My clever ways all sucked, and Susan ended up taking it over to Office Depot for scanning this afternoon- and returning a 35 Megabyte file that I then had to chop in Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres three pieces to get through the mail system and off to the lenders.

One of the hot items on my buy-this pile is the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300, which I will probably buy in the very near future; pretty portable, pretty bulletproof, and good for document scanning.  I’ll still keep my Canon LIDE 30, the flatbed, but I do a ton of document scanning, and this will handle all sorts of document scanning very well.   The Canon also doesn’t take up much space, and works very well in general.

BTW, I have two pieces of software I really couldn’t function without - the Adobe CS3 Web suite (I haven’t upgraded to CS4 because  I honestly don’t see what the improvement is) and most especially Dreamweaver, Acrobat and Photoshop.   Love ‘em to death.

Meredith is busy this weekend; roller-skating practice tomorrow, a roller-skating event in Racine on Sunday, and a Salvation Army fashion show she attends every year (Susan’s aunt Marlyce and her pal Carol met in the SA and still connected) with Susan and Connie and Marlyce.  I will be at home on all of this, catching up on the piles of Stuff to Do.   But I feel good about making headway on the above big items, and want to bat more out of here ASAP.

Paid myself for another year.  I used to ask my Mom - since you're a federal employee, why do you have to pay taxes?  Isn't that paying yourself?

Home today, loaded down with getting the fricking taxes out (this is my latest to do them in a while) and a big set of documents turned around for the lenders.  There were some ugly surprises in the lender’s last set of questions last night, including ‘have you fixed your chipped and peeling paint yet’ and ’so where’s the explanation about the energy-efficient stuff’.  The first was total news to me, and the second was covered ad nauseam with them about two-three weeks ago, and the person asking that was out of the loop for it…

As to the paint, I got a copy of the appraisal from the lenders this morning, and went over it with them on the phone.  On the one hand, it says something about the paint, and on the other, it says that there’s no problem like the paint on the house.  The lenders said - yeah, that makes no sense whatsoever, and it doesn’t say *where* the paint damage is supposed to be, we’re going to ring up the appraiser and ask WTF…

So around we go one more time. I will be *so* glad when this is over.

Mere has a roller-skating competition in Racine next weekend, and she’s doing better on some things, and is still having trouble on jumps.   She spent most of the day today on Easter-egg work with her old pal Alicia, who she has warmed back up to recently.  Mere was having such a good time with that the plans to hit the movies tonight died…well, the real point was to have her have a good time, and that she did.

As for me, I spent the day with Easter errands with Susan, including trips to get candy for The Basket.    Mere finally broke it to her mom and her grandma that She Knew about the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, and she added on - but could she still get those things anyway?  Of course, kiddo.

Also went to the eyeglasses place, where I ended up dealing with a serious need to use hard glasses cases all the time; I can’t work without good reading glasses, and both pairs fell apart on me.  One was repairable, but the other needed to be replaced - and unless you have ‘insurance’, which is about the cost of a new set of frames, you can’t get them fixed.    So I Learned an expensive lesson…

The rest of the time, I was digging through the house financial stuff - the new Quicken allows you a lot more ability to archive up supporting documents, starting out with statements.  Nice.

There’s just an awful lot of it all to hack through, and I’m thinking that a good deal of my frustration is that there’s just seemingly no end to it.   A real part of that is that while the pile of paper is still high, the digitized stuff isn’t as organized as it should be.    And while you’re working on project A, the other stuff gets away from you, and it’s hard to know which ones to work on in which order.  You can’t do them all at once, because there’s simply not enough hours in the day for that.

I am unbelievably happy to be *done* with work-work for the week; incredible drag and endless stuff to zig and zag and do.

Now, to shift over into HOME work.  Aaaaaagh.

Susan is off with Mere seeing HANNAH MONTANA, THE MOVIE.   Apparently, since Mere had today off from school, her idea of what to do did not include any sort of obligatory stuff like cleaning her room or house stuff, or reading for school.  It did involve being a PITA to her mom on all of the above, and probably only concentrating on the movie and generally screwing around.

Last night, we went out to Susan’s aunt’s place to Do Emergency Tech Fixes, and got their internet back up, and it killed the evening.   The underlying problem was that some sort of hardware/software thing had hit the ADSL modem, the backup external hard drive, and the Ethernet setup.  None of them worked right.    And the tech at AT&T tried to say that the modem their tech installed a couple of months ago wasn’t their equipment, and I blew a fuse on that, and got their supervisor on the line, and got things straightened out.   It basically required fixes and resets all over on the hardware, and reconnection pushes.  And then, for the endless software updates.

Agh.    Tomorrow, the tester is here, and roller skating in the morning, and I have to get the taxes out, and there’s just way too much to do.  And we’re supposed to spend the bulk of Sunday off at Susan’s aunt’s house, and I’ll groan and think of all the stuff I have to do here.   Auntie is kind, and I won’t turn down the invite, and boy, I could use some fresh air, but…

LJ: cedarseed is in Ethiopia; I’ve always been intrigued by the classical end of Ethiopian civilization (I need to pick up a Budge book on Ethiopian magic one of these days) and love looking at classic Ethiopian art.    Some good photos; check it out and her LJ in general.

Jay Lake and his family (especially his daughter, who, like mine, originated in China) are toodling around in China, with lots of pictures there and at his Flickr site.

Highly recommended by me and Meredith: The Tivoli Theater in downtown Downers Grove, about 30 miles west of the Chicago Loop.  And if you’re in the city, try the Gene Siskel Theater.

Fanzine: Henry Welch’s The Knarley Knews.

We aren’t going anywhere for the Easter holiday, alas.  Meredith is part of a twin study with Sissy, and is supposed to be given her IQ tests and whatnot this weekend here at the house by a professional tester; one of my many tasks is to finish up an evaluation of her to hand in for the study.  Sunday, we’re invited up to Susan’s aunt’s house for a while to eat an Easter dinner of sorts off of their new grill.   And as usual, I have a blue million things to do.

• I wonder how many of the people who are going on about “teabag” protests understand the common slang usage of the term?
• Retail vacancies at malls and shopping areas are soaring.
• Men aren’t buying new underwear, which was one of Alan Greenspan’s classic uh-oh-the-sky-is-falling barometers of how well business is doing.
• My question on Coleman-as-sore-loser-and-endlessly-litigating-this is  - if Pawlenty decides to not certify the election until all appeals and whatnot have ended, how much in-state political doom will he create for himself in Minnesota?
• Normally, the rate of how-long-cars-stay-on-the-road fluctuates between 10 and 15 years, but at the current sales rates, people must be expecting them to stick around for over 26 years.
• Warren Buffett’s company just lost their AAA rating.  No, we won’t talk about how the rating agencies tried to shnooker us into believing all of the mortgage-related paper was made of gold, too, and busily bankrupted all sorts of small towns who went in for goofy paper arrangements.
• Our constitutional right to whup our children.  Well, real soon now…

The tax program choked and died on me on install; had to clean everything out and reinstall.  Had to also dig up our old tax files for the program, so that it could pull forward old information for multi-year stuff affecting our taxes, and those had gotten stuck away somewhere and were more of a bear to find than I figured.

I’m reviewing a friend’s book draft; AH stuff, and pretty good.  I decided to convert it from a DOC Word file to a Mobipocket Kindle file, and it’s doing me a lot of good to have it there vis-a-vis Getting The Thing Read.

Susan and Connie got a lot of cleaning upstairs done, considering their energy levels, which still suck.  On Friday night, Connie and I went off to eat at a local Chinese restaurant, and she had a terrible reaction from the shrimp she ate; we’ve seen stuff like this is a lesser degree from Mere when the shrimp was turning, and I noticed other uh-oh trends to make me think that the restaurant is hurting for quality.   Susan was worried that she’d have to take her mom off to the ER for anaphylactic shock, considering the severity of the reaction, and it really knocked the stuffing out of poor Connie.

Mere spent the bulk of the day over on a playdate; she shot down going off with me to see CORALINE in order to play longer.   At night, we got back to reading THE HOBBIT together; she likes Tolkien’s verse, and lets me do the actual reading of everything else.  Part is that I’m good with drama and voices, and I also can help translate British slang (Knock me up in the morning and give me a fag) to something she can understand.   Right now, the dwarves and Bilbo are trying to recover from the spiders in Mirkwood, and Thorin has been captured by the Elvenking - and she is seriously grooving on the book.

If the Seattle Press-Intelligencier survives the next month, it will be as a online paper only.   Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver is about to cease publishing.

The new US government budget (PDF link) under Obama is going to cap federal employee raises (the automatic kind) to 2% next year; the base this last year for us was 3.9%.   On the other hand, he’s bringing back the Superfund tax and funding the EPA at very good levels.    Considering the cuts to funding during the Bush years, I’m delighted.   Read the whole Bloomberg article for details, such as this one:

The agency would get $19 million to start building a greenhouse-gas emission inventory, an early step necessary for creating a carbon cap-and-trade system.

Absolutely. The agency needs much better IT/ data systems to take on these new reponsibilities.

Forgot to mention that the foot doc is pleased with my progress on healing up the streesed spot on my foot, and that the orthotic seems to be working very well and comfortably!

That last part surprised me a good deal; I expected it to be a major PITA, and it really isn’t.   He says the thing is only good for about a year, however.  I’ll deal with that over dealing with daily discomfort.

Our refinance stuff is going round and round; I’m busy trying to deal with a lot of small issues that have popped upm, and getting the package of stuff for the Energy Efficient Mortgage add-on is / has become a huge pain.  Chasing people all over the place for the right documentation and estimates for the work needed, and so on - and the people from the lender have been hitting me with weird snags.  Apparently there’s a new rule that says we needed a second appraisal on the house; I could imagine that rule was due to fraud in the recent past from borrowers, so they have to make really sure that this is all legit.

Add on that I finally can go and do our taxes; the present holder of our mortgage is a BIG outfit, often in the news  - for being about ready to go under.  Communicating with them is beyond a PITA, and they didn’t send out the 1098 forms; you had to log in online and get them.  In late February!

We’re looking at refinancing the house; there were some consumer debt stuff that built up while money was sorted over to the pay-the-medical-bills area, and it’s gotten stiff enough that we really want to get rid of it.   Some of the credit cards belonged to outfits that have suddenly decided that No Matter How Good You Were, We’re Still Going To Jack The Rates To 30% and Make Up Our Dumb Losses That Way.

That, and rates for mortgages have dropped a good deal.  (Our old rate was 6.25%, these rates are at least 1.25% lower)

What we have found, however, is that mortgages are now *very* influenced by the credit scores of the person taking out the loan.   The ‘conventional’ mortgages only have decent rates IF you have a pretty spotless credit score.

Otherwise, they’re either (a) jacked up on a sliding scale that quickly goes astronomical the lower your score goes, or (b) available only as FHA loans, which require a monthly mortgage-insurance payment  - and even then, there’s a sliding scale of how much the rates will go up depending on that all-important credit score.  If you have a lot of bills, the credit score goes down…and the rates go sky-high.

We have two loan options in front of us; one has a higher rate but reasonable closing costs; the other has a lower rate but has a gazillion odd pay-at-closing fees to the loan people - along with hefty loan origination and points costs.  (The difference is about $11k for us.)   The actual cost of the two loans on a monthly payment basis isn’t much different;  you end up borrowing more to cover the costs of the mortgage for the cheaper rate. The escrow amounts (for house insurance and taxes) are the same.

In mortgages, the lender is going to make their money somehow; in the case of the less-fees one, it’s a higher rate, and they sell the thing off shortly after they set it up to Someone Else and get bucks off of them for the loan paper.  In the case of the other outfit, it’s the up-front fees.   Both use a local set of go-to outfits to get the appraisal and whatnot done for them.

So I have to sit down with a family friend and go over the stuff and figure which one to go for, and talk it over with Susan.    I have a slight preference to one of the lenders, and she to the other.    We should make up our minds early this week, and hope to get the closing around the beginning of next month.

• With huge numbers of people unemployed, and more rolling into the offices, the states are running out of money to pay benefits.  Like 30 out of 50 states.
• Drill-baby-drill just went *choke*, as oil companies are suddenly unwilling to finance new exploration.   Existing wells are being shut down as uneconomical to operate, and forecasts are looking like oil will reach $30 a barrel, as the Chinese economy goes into full slump.  These things seem to be interconnected, don’t they?

So here’s my ideas, half-baked:

• Make the deal comprehensive, and mostly a take it or leave it scenario.  This sucker has been a political football for decades, and this ends here right now.
• All three companies essentially go into a central, nationalized receivership corporation.
• The equity in these businesses is pretty much gone, in any event.  Say goodbye to what’s left.
• The receivership corporation essentially will rehire management staff at their discretion.  Golden parachutes and stock options and excessive compensation just vanished.  Cap salaries at $250k.  We’ll talk about bonuses when you make things people want to buy.
• Immediately make interest from car loans deductible on taxes, and lean heavily on the nations banks to start making car loans again.  Offer a sizable tax rebate ($4000-5000) scaled towards more fuel-efficient cars made by the ‘corporation’ and its spinoffs.  You want a Hummer or a Corvette?  You’re on your own.
• Eliminate car financing by the manufacturers.
• The UAW and the auto makers were in the process of setting up trusts to handle retiree health costs - in 2010.  Have the government take over the gap of that trust and set it up to be self-maintaining.   This would eliminate the vast legacy costs for health care from the auto makers’ books now.
• Eliminate and standardize.  You don’t need all of the crap brands and submakes out there.  Bust out the better parts and make them their own company.    And eliminate the old dealer/line deals that mandate that you have to keep the obsolete car lines.
• Focus all R&D towards two things - serious materials / fuel efficient cars, and away from oil-based fueling systems towards electric cars / serious hybrids.

The hardest angle on this is about the union workers and where to set up the jobs that will remain, and that’s tough.  Here’s a union perspective on some of this.

The real thing is that if you are living a digitized life, you need to be able to make sure of two things:  enough space for all of those things you’re storing, and a way to find it later.

And, of course, the same is true of any library or other paper system.  People looking at my library are astonished that it’s so huge, and say - how can you find stuff?  Organization, of course.   The larger it gets, the more you have to organize things.

In the case of digital stuff, what the real problem becomes is that there’s a whale of a lot of files, and searching them for things becomes a serious pain in the butt unless you have some sort of a system.  While it’s very obvious to plunk Things You Can Pick Up into a system (all the Astronomy books go over here, and group the Spherical Astronomy books together) it’s not so obvious when you have a crap load of files.

From work, I also learned that cryptic file names are hopelessly stupid.  Set up a easy-to-understand system for naming things, and group ‘em together.   For instance, here’s my financial stuff:

• airlines (receipts for air travel of a personal sort, mostly Mere and Susan flying to Alabama)
• automobiles (stuff on our SUV and our van, each in their own folder, with a separate area for motor club stuff that covers both.  This includes receipts for work done, car registrations, testing results)
• banks (each bank we deal with currently has its own primary category - statements, letters from the bank for whatever reason)
• credit cards (one big one, with each card having its own sub-directory - by the way, all of the statements and correspondence is dated (bp_card_070307.pdf) and if I make a payment on-line, I save that as a separate document (bp_card_payment_072307.pdf))  In some cases, if the credit card has some kind of weird phone system for calling up on things, I save a diagram of the system.
• salary (statements from work on my pay and hours)
  financial-archive (old taxes, stuff from my mom’s estate, how to work the financial software we use)
• insurance (car, house, warranties, dental, life)
• mortgage (house docs, including mortgage payments (I add all of the payments together in one big file for the year), a refinancing we did when the rates were cheaper)
• receipts (for big ticket items, and their specific waranties)
• taxes_2008 (for tax-related stuff for the next tax time, such as reciepts for charitable donations, etc.)
• utilities (separated by type, like water, etc)

Long pile, but you get the idea.

You want examples of what happens when government looks the other way and deregulates business?

Remember that whole business last year about pet food being loaded with plastics byproducts that could fake protein in feed tests by the Chinese government?  It’s happened again, in China, over fake baby formula, loaded with the same stuff, which fudged the same tests. The stuff was sold over half of China, and is out of the country - both in Taiwan and here, in Chinese grocery stores.  (As as an adoptive parent who got only three things that weren’t paperwork from the Chinese government - the kid, the clothes on her back and a bag of provincial-government-baby-food-factory formula, you bet this make me pissed.)  Wonder when the overloaded and undersupported FDA will pass this on to the human food chain here?  They already did, but told us not to worry yet.  And this sort of baby formula crap has happened before in China, too, in 2004, but the wild-west of anything goes business there doesn’t stop them.

You remember that MBA president and all of the big Wall Street financial people, along with people like former Senator Phil Gramm, told us we didn’t need all those silly regulations, and that we were all a bunch of whiners about the economy, and that everything was just fine?  Watch now, as the biggest financial houses collapse because these guys decided to play double or nothing craps with the economy on fake credit and endless foreign borrowing with no real collateral.  Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac - with Washington Mutual and General Motors sitting in the spillway, ready to take the slide.

A lot of people made a fast buck or zillion - and your money becomes worthless, your company can’t get credit, your house faces foreclosure while your job teeters on the brink.

At any time in the last five years or so, did the management at any of the major investment banks say, “these mortgage-backed securities are extremely risky, and we’re not going to get too involved with them?”  Naw.  There was too much money to be made, and if we didn’t, well, someone else would look good in their quarterly report.  Primarily, the people making the decisions were looking at Possible Fantasic Profits and made sure they had a wonderful, cushy golden paracchute so they could get out with millions personally, damn the company and the country.

Keep an eye here in the near future on this.  And - frankly, who has illegitimate babies, flag pins and so on is nothing compared to this sort of Crapola - the title of this entry above was Sarah Palin’s idea of how she and McCain would fix the economy, along with more tax cuts.  Jesus Wept, lady!  That’s what got us into the mess in the first place!

In Alaskan politics, you have to remember that the main support of the state revenue system is the tax-on-oil-stuff coming out of the north slope…and that all Alaskans get a cut back from the state of around $1700 a year in ‘reverse taxes’.  So EVERYONE supports drilling in ANWR in Alaskan politics.  Otherwise, they’d have to pay for the state government.

Local towns get their money from some sales or property taxes.  If you want to see stuff on ‘cranky’, Google up “property tax” or “sales tax” in the Alaskan newspapers.   And yes, there are bonds.