Healthy Eating

For a while now, I’ve been paying close attention to my diet, avoiding fatty and sugary foods, falling off the wagon only for savory carbs.
That, plus occasional exercise and meds, have caused my blood pressure and cholesterol levels to plummet, and that’s good.
I’m so tired of being good, though.
I want a thick steak, a lobster, a salad with about a cup of Roquefort dressing, and a piece of pecan pie with an equal amount of whipped cream.
After all my clean living, though, if I ate a meal like that, I believe my stomach would eject itself.

Delahunt Was Right (Again)

Thanks to our congressman Bill Delahunt and his colleague Stephen “Iron Worker” Lynch for voting against the second, pork-laden version of the so-called bailout bill, which was passed by the House after it grew from $700 billion to almost $1 trillion.

Post-Bailout Dismay

Can’t express it any better than this, from Quin Hillyer of The American Spectator:
“Matters got worse when, after principled House members of the right and left combined to slow down the legislative stampede, the Senate decided to collectively play mob boss. By attaching this incredibly important and deservedly controversial bailout bill to not one but two utterly unrelated bills — one on mental health, and one on tax policy — the Senate stole the House’s constitutional prerogative to originate all revenue bills, used extraneous items as both bribe and blackmail to force the House’s hand, and muddied waters that needed clarifying.
“Meanwhile, the presidential campaign is marred, on one side, by a radical and utterly unaccomplished leftist ideologue joined by a serial plagiarist and exaggerator, and on the other side by a man temperamentally unsuited to the presidency joined by a running mate of high character but embarrassingly low familiarity with national affairs of state.
“Yes, this is bad. Actually, awful.”

No Guts, No Glory: It’s Stupid Season

While Obama and McCain stand around with egg on their faces, Bob Barr and Ralph Nader are the only candidates who showed Presidential judgment in rejecting the terms of Congress’s bailout bill before it came to a vote.
And what’s with Obama’s nonsequitur about increasing the level of FDIC insurance or the McCain campaign’s blaming Obama for Congress’s most recent exercise in self-destructiveness and irrelevance.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi had to give her enemies yet another excuse to complain about her leadership style. Her attack on the Republicans was unproductive and pointless.
Yup, it’s the end of September, all right.

Home Brewed Coffee

These days, it’s almost impossible to avoid preachy advice columns about how to save money, and coffee shop prices seem to be a favorite target.
“Better to home brew”, although the lady who drank her morning cuppa after it was filtered through a bat that had hidden in her coffeemaker might disagree.
These discussions remind me of a group of masochistic housemates I met years ago who were insanely, nuttily frugal.
One of their economies was to brew coffee only once every several days. I don’t recall the exact schedule, nor why they thought that this saved money. I do recall their otherwise dour faces breaking into dreamy smiles when they thought about being able to drink coffee on the day it was brewed.
An example of collective insanity, which is perhaps why this particular memory is paradigmatic for this particular point in time.

Videos on the Subprime Mess, McCain Supporters in Manhattan

Who’s responsible for the subprime mess? Check it out.
The world of tolerance that the Obamaites want us to embrace, filmed at New York’s Upper West Side on September 21 of this year.
By the way, am I the only person in the United States who questions the assumption that credit will dry up if Congress doesn’t bail out the banks? Anyone else ever heard of private capital?

Gone Insane

The MSM, docile for so many years about the Bush administration, has flipped its collective lid about Sarah Palin, making itself the focus of so-called “news” stories while ignoring events of actual substance, like her visits this week with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Sarah Palin can’t win for losing. She’s treated with venomous condescension on the one hand for her supposed lack of foreign policy experience, then excoriated when she meets with heads of state, and why? Because her campaign hasn’t given the press the access they, in their infinite wisdom, believe they deserve.
As far as John McCain’s wish to postpone the first Presidential debate until the negotiations on the infamous bailout deal are over: seems to me that the next President, be it McCain or Obama, really needs to be involved in this, and postponing the debate for a week wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Whether or not McCain or Obama has economic expertise is totally beside the point: that’s not their role. Rather, as the titular heads of their respective political parties, they have to have a seat at the table.
This bailout is historic, both in terms of its size – potentially over a trillion dollars – and its precedent-setting nature. It is a shift to pure socialism in the ravaged, beating heart of world capitalism. It is also at the center of this campaign’s major issue: the state of the economy.
Thus, first-hand knowledge of both the negotiation process and those involved with that process are not just political niceties, they are crucial components in setting the context for the next President’s economic policies.
Anyone who doesn’t understand and support the importance of participating in the development of “corporate memory” probably has never been in a leadership or policy-making position themselves. And, as is the case with Palin, the media’s inability to grasp this is makes me more than a little sick with disgust.
Furthermore, I don’t appreciate the Obama campaign’s temper tantrums in reaction to McCain’s wish to postpone – not cancel – the first debate. It doesn’t portend well for Obama’s ability to roll with the punches or to distinguish between important versus trivial matters in responding to the unexpected. It certainly says nothing good about his leadership abilities.
The Obama campaign’s current emotional overreactions to virtually every obstacle or slight, real or imagined, are wearing me out.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama’s original political strategy was the “2010-2012-2016” plan: Governor or re-election to the Senate in 2010, then a bid for the White House in 2012 at the earliest.
Too bad for the rest of us that he didn’t stick to it.