AIG shows why it's in bad shape--Poor judgment

People are rightly mad over AIG's "spa" event for it's executives.

Not only does AIG get into trouble for bad business, they put their lack of business acumen on display by sending executives to a spa AFTER they get a tax payer funded bailout.

I can tell you that I'd like a spa trip at someone else's expense. Maybe Congress will grant me such a boon because after the last eight years, I could surely use a little massage and hot mud...

Bailout in haste--repent at your grandhildren's leisure.

I've been a little troubled by the proposed bailout.

Here's a story that tells a little about it.

My problem is one of competing concerns.

On the one hand, I think the government should help stabilize the market because the volatility we have currently is nothing but trouble for jobs, business, and growth.

On the other hand, I worry that the changes in the law over the past few decades have created a situation where well-financed, and well-connected interests with access to information unavailable to the rest of us, have created a mess where a few profit while the rest of us to pay the tab.

As it stands now, my generation and succeeding ones will pay for the preceding generations inability to delay gratification. The "Me" generation is so stunningly self-centered. Why should my generation (Gen X) be forced into parenting the Boomer's excesses?

We have financed increases in wealth for a small number through policies that a few trickle-down ideologues have convinced people are in the country's best interests.

This is absurd. Trickle-down is only a euphemism for Marie Antoinette's line of "Let them eat cake."

This bailout represents emergency CPR for a few companies and industries that have profited from the rest of us. Now, when they get caught without a chair in the economic game of musical chairs, they scream for help, despite the free market ideology they've trumpeted for years.

The failure of the administration to properly plan is not cause to hand over a blank check to cover their incompetent asses for their ideological idiocy. The public apparently feels the same way.

We should all have serious concerns about an administration that waits too late to fix a problem, then tries to use the immediacy of the need created by their dilatory response to demand change without oversight. This smells of Hitler demanding emergency powers from the German Parliament to fix a fabricated crisis and then seizing power.

Congress is doing the right thing by slowing down the train.

1st Amendment is doing its job of encouraging homophobes into the open.

And yet another story from the Washington Post that underscores why we need Free Speech.

When we protect free speech, we encourage the open discussion of whacky notions and outright stupidity, like the one displayed before Congress by a homophobe. Now that everyone knows who she is and what she believes, we can exercise our 1st Amendment right to not associate with her and her kind.

It's only by encouraging wing nuts to express their idiotic ideas that we get to do what America does best---ridicule them for the morons they truly are.

Thank God for the 1st Amendment! It gives us such entertainment.