The Ol' Commander Guy

"The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear -- I'm a Commander Guy."

President Bush
Washington, D.C.,
May 2, 2007

Village (of North Hudson) People Speak Out

What's The Price Of Snake Oil?

"In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you're not. Love it or leave it."

Hunter S. Thompson
on George W. Bush

Nitwitastan Secedes From Union - Unveils New Logo

Nitwitastan, ( a newly formed anarchistic individistate, that recently declared it's independence from the United States of America) has a new logo.
The Omnipotent Most High and Mighty Emperor and Infallible Leader of Nitwitastan, Dr. Dan "Flash" Billiamson unveiled the new logo today at his press conference on the shores of the Namakogan River. No mainstream media were in attendance, however ontheborderline.nut crack reporter N. Onimous and Dr. (of Liberty) Mark Bubonic (Co-Author of the vanity press worst seller "The Price of Spin") were in virtual attendance via the internet to report on this historic event to the borderline faithful.

Wanted: Farmer to Front for the Nation's Elite

The Institute for the Preservation of Dynastic Wealth is seeking an active or former family farmer to serve as our new spokesperson.

The search coincides with the hearings on the Estate Tax being held by the Senate Finance Committee on November 14th. We expect Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) will be using this well-worn but never-proven talking point, so we thought we'd help by finally making the search public.

The need for an actual farmer reached a new urgency last May when presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani was forced to cancel a press conference with an Iowa farm family. At the last minute his campaign aides realized that with a mere 80 acres, the family was not actually rich enough to be affected by the tax.

Qualified candidates must be an heir of a family farm that had to be sold to pay the Estate Tax.

Find out more..

Read the Press Release.

It's A "Free Market" Not A "Fair Market"

A U.S. Senate subcommittee on Tuesday hauled credit card companies onto the mat for their practice of using credit scores to increase the interest rates cardholders must pay.


"If a customer's risk profile increases, we may increase their annual percentage rate. This is largely due to the nature of a credit card compared to other loan products -- every credit card transaction can be regarded as a new loan, and we are financially responsible for every loan that is not repaid."

Roger Hochschild, president and chief operating officer, Discover Financial Services.

"Credit card companies go too far when they hike the interest rates of consumers who are faithfully paying their credit card bills, just to squeeze more finance charges from them. Some credit card companies are foisting interest rates as high as 25 percent or 30 percent on responsible consumers, claiming they have become greater credit risks even when those same consumers haven't missed paying a bill in years."

Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Investigations Subcommittee.

Read more...

Can They Drug Test This Guy?

The New Road to Serfdom: The Shock Doctrine

"In the early ’80s, as Margaret Thatcher attempted to hack away at England’s substantial public sector, she found a frustrating degree of public resistance. The closer she got to the bone, the more the patient wriggled and withdrew. Thatcher doggedly persisted, yet her pace wasn’t fast enough for right-wing Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, her idol and ideological mentor. You see, in 1981, Hayek had traveled to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, where, under the barbed restraints of dictatorship and with the guidance of University of Chicago-trained economists, Pinochet had gouged out nearly every vestige of the public sector, privatizing everything from utilities to the Chilean state pension program. Hayek returned gushing, and wrote Thatcher, urging her to follow Chile’s aggressive model more faithfully.

In her reply, Thatcher explained tersely that “in Britain, with our democratic institutions and the need for a higher degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times, the process may seem painfully slow.”

The Hayek/Thatcher exchange is one of many revealing historical nuggets unearthed in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein’s ambitious history of neoliberalism. Hayek isn’t the star of The Shock Doctrine—that dubious honor goes to his protegé and fellow Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman. But Klein’s totemic, capacious and brilliant alternate history of the last three decades of global political economy can best be understood as a latter-day response to Hayek’s classic right-wing manifesto, The Road to Serfdom."

Read more of Christopher Hayes review on Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism at In These Times.



Watch Klein's short movie The Shock Doctrine.

The Road to "Free Market"

Chile, 1973
50,000 tortured
80,000 imprisoned
Public spending cut by 50%
Incomes for the rich up 83%
45% of population in poverty

Invasions – Iraq, 2003
The most privatized war in modern history
US decrees 200 state companies will be privatized
Hundreds of thousands killed
4 million displaced

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear -- fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer."

Hunter S. Thompson

Summing Up The GOP Candidates

"The two of them (John McCain and Mike Huckabee) seem often to be operating on a different - and higher - plane than the quarrelsome Giuliani and Romney, whose mutual contempt is as palpable as it is persuasive...Fred Thompson appears perpetually grumpy - a presence hard to imagine inhabiting the Oval Office. The three House members - Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter - are exercising their lungs but running for exercise, happy to be part of the proceedings but with no hope of being nominated."

David Broder

Read more @ St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Red State Rhetoric

A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it.
George W. Bush

Well we can try to measure democracy, just as you measure temperature with a thermometer, or pressure with a barometer.
Hugo Chavez

Ron Paul Knows Who The Corporate Rapers Are

As an avowed environmentalist, it is good to see a true conservative like Ron Paul real gets it. When it comes to who is responsible for polluting our environment, he knows that the "free market" means accepting a total responsibility that has long been shunned by the greed heads of corporate America. He understands that corporations must pay for the full cost of production and can no longer get away with ignoring the externalities of their production processes and must be regulated into paying for the full cost of production. Read on...

"Imagine that everyone living in one suburb, rather than using regular trash service, were taking their household trash to the next town over and simply tossing it in the yards of those living in the nearby town. Is there any question that legal mechanisms are in place to remedy this action? In principle, your concerns are no different, except that, for a good number of years, legislatures and courts have failed to enforce the property rights of those being dumped on with respect to certain forms of pollution. This form of government failure has persisted since the industrial revolution when, in the name of so-called progress, certain forms of pollution were legally tolerated or ignored to benefit some popular regional employer or politically popular entity.

When all forms of physical trespass, be that smoke, particulate matter, etc., are legally recognized for what they are -- a physical trespass upon the property and rights of another -- concerns about difficulty in suing the offending party will be largely diminished. When any such cases are known to be slam-dunk wins for the person whose property is being polluted, those doing the polluting will no longer persist in doing so. Against a backdrop of property rights actually enforced, contingency and class-action cases are additional legal mechanisms that resolve this concern...To the extent property rights are strictly enforced against those who would pollute the land or air of another, the costs of any environmental harm associated with an energy source would be imposed upon the producer of that energy source, and, in so doing, the cheap sources that pollute are not so cheap anymore."

Ron Paul
Republican Presidential Candidate

Read more @ Reason online.

Rev. Jimmy Swaggart Endorses Rudy!

Rove Is Back: Enough Time With His Family

Part II:Hey Don't Touch the Suit

The View Out Back: 120107 13:53:07

"The sad part about life at this point is there's no horizon; the horizon is the cemetery. You always remember the fun things you do with your family."

Ike Joles

As the picture indicates, it's starting to look like winter out the backdoor. This morning there was no snow and now the ground is starting to get covered and the wind is blowing from the east -- an "ill wind," as we say around here. I see the snowmobile markers are staked out in the nearby fields and by tomorrow morning the sound of snowmobiles may echo in the neighborhood -- it the weather forecasts are correct. That means I maybe able to get the cross-country skis out, after the shovelling and snow blowing gets done.

The picture is the first one I've actually transferred from my digital camera to my computer to this blog site. I've had the camera for about four years. I inherited it from my Dad who received it from us as a Christmas present in 2002. He died in 2003. I finally figured out how to work the thing this summer and now -- with the snow falling -- I finally moved the picture to my PC. I one point in life, I could take picture with a 35mm camera, develop them in a darkroom and print them in a processes that involved the use of chemicals and darkness and the danger of overexposure that could take and hour or two. Today it's point the camera, push the button, plug the chord from the camera to the computer and unload the picture to the blog. Takes about 5 minutes with no smudge or cleanup.
Before the snow got going this morning, I headed to town for my Saturday routine. Having breakfast at the local cafe, I came across an interesting story in The Country Today newspaper about a guy name Ike Joles. Joles now lives in Luck and spent the first few years of his life living in a tent with his family back in the 1920s. Spending his early childhood living in a tent gave him a great perspective and the realization that material possessions don't matter.

This story made me think of how times change and the lessons we get passed do to us from our fathers change with those times. Times have definitely changed and we've gained more gadgets that we know what to do with. We might know how to program a cellphone but we are clueless as to how to fix it when it breaks. But then again, why fix it when you can toss it away and get an updated version that is slimmer, more complicated and fashionably cooler for half the price of the old one. Practical knowledge has been been tossed into the ditch somewhere along the information superhighway.

At the age of 52 and an avid music fan, I've traversed through a progressive mazes of recorded music options. It started 1964 with me spending my paper route money to buy a "45" of Jan and Dean's "Dean Man's Curve." I moved into LPs with the purchase of Credence Clearwater Revival's "Green River" in 1969. Then there were 8-tracks, cassettes and reel-to-reels and now CDs. I do know there are MP3 players, but I haven't got there yet...and may never get there.

Recently while browsing for CDs at Wal-Mart, a middle aged man asked the kid working if they carried tape for reel-to-reels. The kid said, "you mean like cassettes?" A nearby manager stepped up and volunteered that he'd heard of reel-to-reels before but had never actually seen one and had no idea where you could get tape for them. It's rather humbling to think that in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s reel-to-reels where a symbol of high-tech savvy. But then again, in the late 1960s, having an actually stereo was pretty cool. Cars had AM radios and then came FM and now there's satellite radio.

And the day the Joles family tent caught fire and everything burned, Ike Joles said, "The old man stood there and cried like a baby." Today, he could have got a much better one on sale at Wal-Mart, charged it on the credit card and worried about paying for it some other day. And in 1930, my Grandma used to walk to job that she got paid in chickens. She couple cook from scrath, knit, sew, can everything, fish and shoot a gun. Grandpa caught a huge catfish on the st. Croix that fed the family for a couple of weeks. He built the boat he fished in and the rod he caught the fish on.

Today, people are afraid to drive from New Richmond to Hudson without a cellphone -- in case something happens. And so it goes...

Humble beginnings
Born and raised in a tent, Luck man has led adventurous life
by Heidi Clausen
LUCK - From his birth in a tent somewhere outside St. Louis, it seems Ike Joles Jr. was destined to lead an adventurous life.

Out of that humble beginning came an entrepreneuring spirit that has served him well throughout his life.

Mr. Joles, 83 and living in Luck with Florence, his wife of more than 60 years, has been known to try almost anything once.

For decades, he and his family made a living selling medicinal herbs picked from here to Florida and Christmas trees cut by hand from northern Wisconsin woods.

Over the years, he also served in two wars, worked as a landscaper, owned a bait shop, managed a hardware store, ran a youth Bible camp and worked as a newspaper printer, among other titles he's held.

But life hasn't been all work and no play.

Read more @The Country Today.