Wednesday Here we are in Chicago. It has been an eventful day. Both Alex and I felt dazed when we got up. I could barely drag my fat old fleshy carcass downstairs and into my pool. But once I did, I felt a lot better. Swimming is like flying, as my smart nephew, Paul Landau, pointed out. Then breakfast, shower, get dressed, rush to bank. “Qui dit ‘banco’?” as the croupiers used to say at the Nassau casino when it was right out of a James Bond movie and I went there in 1966 with Alex in black tie. At the bank, I was notified of a breathtaking overdraft caused by some mischief scam from the Bank of America. Luckily, I could cover it but to think that B of A stoops to cheating good customers like us is really depressing. Then off to LAX with our trusty driver, Mr. Yakubov, from Uzbekistan. Then through security with all of my pals from TSA. They are the nicest guys and gals on the planet. Then, rush, rush, rush over to the gate and onto the plane. It was all going fine except that I had idiotically bought Alex a huge iced tea at Starbucks. She opened the top to put in Sweet-n-lo exactly as I opened my briefcase. She took off her coat with a huge swish and knocked the whole iced tea into my briefcase. Twenty ounces of iced tea and ice cubes on my speech, my anti-colitis meds, my Bose headphones, my passport. I went into shock. The attendants helped but it took a long time to get the water and ice cubes out and I was hysterical. “I guess it would have been worse if I had had a heart attack and died,” Alex said helpfully. My gift from Pop — I just closed my eyes and soon I was asleep just as he used to do when stressed. Next thing I knew, I was having a fabulous cheese enchilada and rice and beans. Then more sleep. Then, I read an article about President Obama blaming the lingering unemployment and problems for the middle class on rich people. That sneaking politician. There is just no necessary causal link between some people being rich and other people being poor in our society. It’s just Marxist nonsense to say there is such a link. People getting rich make other people employed and better off in general. (There are exceptions.) However, attacking the rich as causes of poverty just shows extreme ignorance and a malicious wish to make trouble. It’s the kind of nonsense we expect from dopey college kids — not from the President. Plus, what a HYPOCRITE!!! Mr. O gets a ton of money from rich Wall Street tycoons and always has done so. How dare he pretend that he’s fighting them (and why would he want to?). Plus, if you’re passing out blame for the recession, how about Tim Geithner, who was President of the NY Fed and agreed with every wrong move by Treasury Secretary Paulson that caused the crash? Why is he your Treasury Secretary when he had a huge hand in killing Lehman Brothers, which really started the downhill slide? (And how about the U.S. giving the Europeans advice on how to cut their deficits? That’s actually funny.) Well, bad on you, Mr. Obama, for taking money from the rich as fast as you can and also stirring up the crazies with your class warfare nonsense rhetoric. I really, truly thought Mr. Obama was better than that. Shows how stupid I am. Stupid and insanely trusting. That’s me. In Chicago, we checked into our hotel and went rushing out for dinner at Coco Pazzo. The chicken livers were amazingly good. Then on the way back to the hotel, my wife’s shoe lost its high heel. I took it to the concierge to get it fixed. As I talked to him, an astonishingly beautiful standard poodle, black with a large white collar, came in with a woman wearing a similar outfit. Like an old New Yorker cartoon. Then a malicious e-mail from some psycho about my wife and me. I wrote back, “We have been together for 45 years and we’ll still be together when you are rotting in hell all alone.” Toast and herbal tea, and now it’s time to sleep. Good night, moon. Tomorrow I am speaking in Lake Forest, where my dear friend John Hughes sleeps for all eternity. Talk about a genius. He wrote Ferris Bueller in one 48-hour stretch. I miss him. Thursday A mixed day. I got up at the Peninsula in Chicago, ate my stale toast, dressed, and my wife and I went downstairs to join my pal John R. Coyne, Jr., for lunch in the hotel lobby. John was his usual lively and insightful self. The food was so-so, but the service was just a cruel mockery. That place is beautiful but needs a manager who will get it running right. We talked about politics mostly. Plus lots of reminiscences of the Nixon days, when John, Aram Bakshian, Ken Khachigian, Dave Gergen, Ann Morgan, Jon Hoornstra and many others and I worked shoulder to shoulder to save the Peacemaker. It didn’t work. He was just on the wrong side. Jon, if you’re there, I love your e-mails. What a great President RN was — ending the war in Vietnam, opening up China, setting up serious environmental protection, the first nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Soviet, saving Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and trying to get universal health care through. All with the vicious leftists attacking him night and day. I love him. We talked about the brilliant Lee Atwater and how much he is missed. Then, after much struggle trying to get my wife her food, we left. Long nap, then out to Lake Forest to speak to a delightful group of physicians. Lovely men and women. Intelligent. Thoughtful. Caring. One of them, though, made a point that saddened me immensely. She said that hundreds of thousands of soldiers were coming back from the wars with disabilities. She said that the money burden would be enormous. “However bad it is now,” she added, “it will be worse.” Suddenly it dawned on me. It will be worse about EVERYTHING. Too much of the younger generation has minimal education. Minimal decent work attitudes (generally, not always). Minimal ability to get along with others. The nation’s intellectual capital, self-discipline capital, is vanishing. That’s a catastrophe. That’s it for the USA. Gar-nicht, as my sister would say. When the middle aged who have decent abilities leave the scene, good night nurse. Too sad to dwell upon. My audience was fantastic and I stayed for a long time with them. The great joy of speaking is meeting the audience. I hated to leave. They were literally locking up the room when I left. Then my driver took me back to my hotel. On the way, he told me how his kids had talked him into spending the last of his savings on a cruise to Belize with them and it was so expensive he also had to put some of it on his credit card. A cruise to Belize? Is he kidding? Why not just drive to a really nice neighborhood and park his car there and go for a walk? Putting a cruise on a credit card? Well, I should not throw stones. I make every kind of mistake there is. Every kind.
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Bad On You, Mr. Obama
When delegates to the Democratic National Convention arrive in Charlotte, North Carolina, next September, they may find the streets occupied by the
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a self-proclaimed democratic socialist , has been working overtime ever since the Occupy Wall Street protests began. He made headlines two weeks ago when he grilled Fed Chairman Bernie Sanders over the “ wealth gap ” in America: Since that contentious tête -à- tête , Sanders has ratcheted up his rhetoric, at one point labeling the financial industry as “the most powerful, dangerous and secretive” institution in the United States, reports The Hill. And his twitter account has been working around the clock. Among the incendiary tweets sent out by his staff this weekend are ones that, of course, bemoan the “wealth gap” in America: But then the Sanders staff went on to make a dangerous suggestion: customers should simply take their money out of the major banks and put it in smaller ones: This echoes sentiments spoken earlier by Dick Durbin (D-IL) when he suggested that customers unhappy with Bank of America’s $5 debit fee should “vote with their feet:” Other messages available on Sanders’s social networking page offer ideas that he says would “change the system to work for all Americans, not just the top one-percent,” including a Wall Street speculation fee and a cap on credit card interest rates, reports The Hill . And it does not look like his criticisms for the financial industry are going to slow down anytime soon. “I think the protesters deserve a whole lot of credit in focusing attention on Wall Street, which in my view, is the most powerful, dangerous, secretive major institution in the United States of America. And the more we learn about Wall Street, the more we learn about their reckless and illegal behavior, the better off we will be,” Sanders told the Vermont Reformer on Monday. Self-proclaimed democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) “There is a lot to be said about people coming together at the grassroots level at this time. A lot of people are hurting, we are in the worst recession since the 1930s and this was caused by the greed and recklessness of Wall Street. And what the protesters are doing every day is reminding us of that reality,” the The Hill reports Sanders of having said. It’s important to realize that behind all of this fiery rhetoric stands a U.S. Senator who is encouraging behavior that–if acted upon–could cause a run on some of the nation’s biggest banks. Runs, of course, can destabilize banks to the point where it has to file for bankruptcy. Several major banks filling for Chapter 11 would almost certainly cause a much bigger nationwide panic. Is that really an appropriate solution to the “wealth gap?” Original post: Could Bernie Sanders’ Suggestion Cause a Run on The Banks?
Originally posted here:
Could Bernie Sanders’ Suggestion Cause a Run on The Banks?
He was elected in 2000, and is serving in his 6th term in Congress. He is pathetic on education issues and school choice reforms in particular. He voted in favor of No Child Left Behind, and earlier this year, was one of only 4 Republicans to oppose reinstating opportunity scholarships for poor children in D.C. He is a restrictor of free speech. He supported McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform,” along with 527 reform a few years later. He even opposed a bipartisan bill to ensure that campaign finance laws would not apply to bloggers. He is a defender of seemingly every liberal spending program, including: the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Amtrak, Headstart, Americorps, the National School Lunch Program, the Legal Services Corporation, etc. He is serial reauthorizer of farm subsidies, highway subsidies, and energy subsidies. He is profoundly unserious about cutting spending. He voted to earmark funds for Kentucky’s tourism industry, the DC metro system, a National Mule and Packers Museum, researching the genetic makeup of grapes, the Bronx Council of Arts, etc. He consistently votes against the conservative budgets offered by the Republican Study Committee (with one exception, which must have been a mistake). He opposed comprehensive reforms to the budget and spending process designed to limit government rather than expand it, probably because they were opposed vigorously by the appropriators. He voted for the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the expansion of SCHIP, and voted to block the Bush Administration from controlling Medicaid spending. And in this age where every Republican tries to outdo each other on repeal of Obamacare, he voted to expand one of its grant programs earlier this year. He is a regulator. He voted for Sarbanes Oxley and led the effort for higher CAFÉ standards on cars and trucks. He voted to over regulate credit card companies so that they increase costs on consumers. And before it was fashionable to Drill Baby Drill, he opposed lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf. He was one of only three Republicans who voted for all of “Six in 06” priority bills of the new Democrat Majority in 2007 (increasing the minimum wage, adding price controls in Medicare, Democrat PAYGO, etc.). And of course, he voted to massively increase the nation’s debt limit by a trillion dollars this past summer with virtually nothing in exchange for it. He currently has a 52% on Heritage Action’s scorecard. He represents a district that is currently a +12 GOP district. George W. Bush and John McCain won the district convincingly, as did Tom Corbett in 2010. (To give you a sense for how conservative that is, Jeff Flake’s district is +15 GOP, and Mike Pence’s district is +10 GOP.) Meet Todd Platts. He represents Pennsylvania’s 19th district, and he needs to be primaried.
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Returning an Obscure Congressman to Permanent Obscurity
[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here . Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.] From the official Playstation blog: We want to let you know that we have detected attempts on Sony Entertainment Network, PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment (“Networks”) [abbreviated as “SOE”] services to test a massive set of sign-in IDs and passwords against our network database. These attempts appear to include a large amount of data obtained from one or more compromised lists from other companies, sites or other sources. In this case, given that the data tested against our network consisted of sign-in ID-password pairs, and that the overwhelming majority of the pairs resulted in failed matching attempts, it is likely the data came from another source and not from our Networks. We have taken steps to mitigate the activity. Less than one tenth of one percent (0.1%) of our PSN, SEN and SOE audience may have been affected. There were approximately 93,000 accounts globally (PSN/SEN: approximately 60,000 accounts; SOE: approximately 33,000) where the attempts succeeded in verifying those accounts’ valid sign-in IDs and passwords, and we have temporarily locked these accounts. Only a small fraction of these 93,000 accounts showed additional activity prior to being locked. We are currently reviewing those accounts for unauthorized access, and will provide more updates as we have them. Please note, if you have a credit card associated with your account, your credit card number is not at risk. We will work with any users whom we confirm have had unauthorized purchases made to restore amounts in the PSN/SEN or SOE wallet. Read the whole thing . You will know if you were one of the targeted ID’s because you will get an email from Sony. Personally with that PSN outage a few months back, I have decided not to keep any credit card information associated with my account. Instead I buy physical Playstation gift cards when I want to download something, limiting my exposure. So as of right now, if someone hacked my PSN account, they could buy a whole whopping $0.96 cents of crap. Don’t spend it all in one place, hackers! And while surely those who use Xboxes will have a snicker, let’s face it, sooner or later it could happen to you, too, and it might be wise to follow the same approach, with this and other online accounts. H/t: Joystiq . [Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]
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PSA: A Big Attack on the Playstation Network’s Security
