Surviving on hope, prayer, and bribes

Detroit city council president pro tempore and "child of God" Monica Conyers faces a possible sentence of up to five years after her guilty plea last Friday on one federal count of conspiracy to commit bribery.




Ms. Conyers, 44, long dogged by a bad temper, was so quiet in court the judge had to ask her to speak up. Maybe that's because she hadn't strapped on her political "gun" husband, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, 80, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. He was back in D.C. saving us all from global warming. His people released this statement following her plea:

"This has been a trying time for the Conyers family and with hope and prayer they will make it through as a family. Public officials must expect to be held to the highest ethical and legal standard. With this in mind, Mr. Conyers wants to work toward helping his family and city recover from this serious matter."

If you're weary of reading about Jacko's autopsy results and legacy, the Detroit Free Press has done an admirable job of covering the FBI's four-year probe of Detroit's pay-to-pay corruption.

Monica and John Conyers, center, with Rev. Charles Adams, l, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Ms. Conyers, who couldn't get on just her $81,000 annual salary plus perks such as a taxpayer-supplied Ford Crown Victoria, should spare the people of Detroit more entertainment and resign before she's forced out of the city council.

Call me Lucifer, a skeptic or whatever, but ...

I doubt Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), co-sponsors of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, or members of their staffs actually wrote it. Few, if any, of the 219 representatives who voted for it or the 212 who voted nay had even read it. The full text of H.R. 2454 wasn't fully released until hours before the historic, transformational vote. Who was awake in D.C. when a 300-page amendment were dumped onto servers at 3 a.m the day of the vote?

Members of Congress knew little about the bill beyond what President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Markley, Waxman, and ex-vice-president Al Gore told them. If you think the cap-and-trade tax to reduce carbon dioxide emissions will only raise your household electrical bill $175 per year by 2020 as a Congressional Budget Office report claims, you also believe in the tooth fairy. The legislative and executive branches of our federal government have a historic tendency to botch estimates such as Social Security solvency, the cost of weapons systems, and Medicare and Medicaid subsidies.

In government I do not trust. It has a known track record. Legislation is crafted by lobbyists--in this case nearly 2,340 authors working for 770 special interest groups and companies. These groups spent nearly $90 million in 2008 for climate-change lobbying. Cap and trade taxes will eventually bring about a cleaner environment by making it too costly for "ordinary Americans" to live, work and invest here.

Reforming U.S. health care

Transparency in government hasn't extended to health care reform. Politicians in both the executive and legislative branches talk about reform, but just how it's going to be done hasn't trickled down to the masses. All we know is that the system is broken. All we're told is that it's going to be reformed by the end of the year while there's still political capital, or momentum, to do it. Anyone who questions how health care should be reformed is labeled as a fear monger, deceitful, or defender of the status quo.

Some of the most-balanced information--provided by both liberal and conservative thinkers--I've found about health care reform is here.

Protest funded in part by George Soros

If you're looking for the brand of change advocated by ACORN, AFL-CIO, AFSCME, Americans United for Change, Campaign for America’s Future, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Campaign for Community Change, Children’s Defense Fund Action Council, Communications Workers of America, MoveOn.org, NAACP, National Council of La Raza, National Education Association, National Women’s Law Center, SEIU, UFCW, USAction, and Working America, go to this site. It's utopian plus being quick and painless.

There are some potential reforms not advanced by the president and Democratic members of Congress such as tort reform, moving the U.S. toward a stronger dollar that buys more, and letting the basic economic laws of supply and demand work. Who pays Medicare write-offs, a prime example of government price fixing? We all do. Costs for services not covered by Medicare go up. Any person who pays out of pocket or participates in a private health-care insurance program makes up the gap. When any person buys goods or services from a corporation or small business, they pay more for those items in order to cover the hike in health-care costs paid by those employers. If those higher costs can't be met by price increases, businesses close or move elsewhere where costs are less.

The U.S. health-care system does resemble one of my father's patched-together, stop-gap fences. It does need reform. Some "reforms" have already been tried--they aren't change. Keeping the nation's rapidly growing debt in mind, government's past reform efforts have failed. I'm indeed a cynic when it comes to blindly trusting the president or any members of Congress, Republican or Democratic, to pull it off before 2010. The only fix I can be optimistic about is to reduce government price meddling and regulation (Can you imagine just what the paper costs that health care providers give us to comply with HIPAA?) so that the laws of supply and demand work.

Reform starts with the individual. If the true costs of going to the doctor, not exercising, drinking sugar-loaded soft drinks, smoking, and all the pills the medicos push become evident, an individual will be at liberty to spend less and live better. That's true change.

The Speaker's Carbon Footprint

It's not smart for bailout-seeking, corporate executives to take business jets to D.C. to appear before Congressional committees. Americans learned this firsthand from those House Financial Services committee meetings last fall.

"It's almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious," Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) told Detroit's Big Three auto execs. "Couldn't you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it."

Ackerman's house boss, Nancy Pelosi, doesn't get it. She has an affinity for travel on U.S. Department of Defense Gulfstream V long-range business jets, which are designated by the military as the C-37A. When told no "G5s" were available for Memorial Day travel, a house staff member, Kay King, said it would result in a very unhappy [sic] "peaker."

Ridin' High: Nancy on board?

Nancy, keep it up. All the carbon from the government jets in the gulfstream will impact weather patterns and throw the Earth into a Algore-anticipated heat wave. It will cause more mudslides, fires, water shortages, coastal flooding and other calamities that require massive infusions of federal assistance.

If not, people might lift up their heads from the slop trough long enough to see. When angry people go to the polls in mid-term elections such as those in 1994 and 2006, the House speaker has to downgrade.

Two Americas, a nation divided against itself cannot stand.

Brigid shared her thoughts about pie cutting and Ayn Rand. Many agree with her. Some disagree. And a few describe her as "arrogant" and "ignorant".

Such is life in the "Two Americas" of the workers and the greedy few. The Progressive movement is nothing new. Why anyone would associate its most recent orator, Sen. Obama, with hope and change escapes me. Sen. Obama hasn’t offered anything new. It is the same vagueness about government taking a little from the exploiters to close the gap between them and the exploited advanced for more than a century. It hasn't worked yet, and not for lack of trying.

The ignorant, arrogant journalists at the New York Times published an article Aug. 16, “Seeing Tougher Race, Allies ask Obama to make ‘Hope' specific.”

““I particularly hope he strengthens his economic message — even Senator Obama can speak more clearly and specifically about the kitchen-table, bread-and-butter issues like high energy costs,” said Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio. “It’s fine to tell people about hope and change, but you have to have plenty of concrete, pragmatic ideas that bring hope and change to life.”

Sen. Obama will tax the excessive, windfall profits of “Big Oil” and use some of the tribute money to give exploited Americans a $1,000 rebate. But he doesn’t address how he can force foreign-based corporations such as Dutch Royal Shell and the huge oil companies in Saudia Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, and China that dwarf U.S.-based energy corporations to pay taxes. If he can collect them, how will he keep “Big Oil” from raising prices or exporting the oil to friendlier harbors?

Sen. Obama might turn out to be another Barbary pirate and be placed on trial at The Hague. At the very least, he will scramble when the Saudis and Chinese stop funding the national debt, cease propping up our inflated currency, and end trade with us.

Americans have also invested in “Big Oil” and perhaps don’t even know it. Are you paying into a pension fund, saving to send your children to college, pay life insurance premiums, have certificates of deposit with a bank, or have a 401K plan? If you do, you are a stakeholder in “Big Oil.”

Who do we expect to bail out financial institutions when they fail? Could it be the promise of a $1,000 rebate could keep us from retirement or our children from obtaining the American Dream?

Al Gore compared Sen. Obama to the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, during the Democratic National Convention. Yet President Lincoln warned us that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. Progressives speak of fairness, a redistribution of wealth from greedy corporations and fat cats to those defined as exploited--Two Americas.

This is one nation. We imperil the republic to treat it otherwise.

Republicans sleep through economics and history courses, too, and that is why that party lost control of Congress in 2006.