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In the cynic’s world, there are a couple of truisms that always seem to apply. First, “if you want to find the truth, follow the money.” Secondly, “no good deed goes unpunished.” A story published this morning on WSBTV.com illustrates the second point. It also is a verification of Kathy’s favorite saying that “you value what you pay for.” In 2005, the television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” remodeled a home for Patricia Harper and her family. Eighteen hundred volunteers worked on the home and Beazer Homes of Atlanta gave them $100,000 cash and paid off their mortgage. In appreciation for all this charity and good will, Ms. Harper and her family took out a $450,000 second mortage on the house. Ms. Harper couldn’t pay the second mortgage and so now the home is in foreclosure. So what did this grateful parasite say, “What’s going to happen is instead of paying my mortgage, I am going to take MY (emphasis added by me) money and not pay my mortgage because I am being harassed.” Well, Ms. Harper, why don’t you just do that with YOUR money. While you are at it, why don’t you just walk out YOUR front door and shoot the bird to your neighbors and tell them how grateful (?) you are. They probably won’t bail you out again, but if you wait long enough, the Federal Government will. Yelp, Ms. Harper is an outstanding citizen who appreciates both her luck at being picked by Extreme Makeover, the hours put in by the 1800 neighbors, and the money from Beazer Homes of Atlanta. Maybe, I should add another category to my posts of “Ungrateful Idiots.” If so, Ms. Harper is the first. Only in the nanny nation of America. By the way, I have included a picture from WSBTV of the house.
Tap Dancing in Clay
He could taste it
The passing
Years of Sunday chickens
And once a week passion
Drifted down the streets and lanes
Of familiar obituaries and neighborhood funerals.
The others had come together
Lured by the promise of suburbia
Financing by the government
Dreams of forever fences
Families like the old days
When generations stayed together
And made the land theirs.
The taste was bitter
Now, the once neat yards have been covered
By junk cars and stacks of tires
Scattered toys of too many children
In a house too small
That costs too much to keep up
And fix the siding
Patch the roof
Paint the woodwork
Plant rosebushes
And grass
To mow, water, and talk to Kill about.
Kill was the first one there
He came when the roads were dirt
Before trees became optional
Hindrances to 1200 square foot houses
And rectangular lots.
But he knew the dirt
How to make things grow
He still had his garden
But it wasn’t as big or neat anymore
And there was a fence around it
Not for rabbits
There were few left
Not for deer
He had seen the last one ten years ago
As it ran through
Chased by dogs and a hunter in a jeep.
As he stood at the fence and talked
Kill shuffled his feet
They used to slide quiet in the dirt
Now they felt like
He was tap dancing in clay.
From the Internet, a great satirical piece. For all the PC idiots out there, satire is a noun that describes “the use of humor, exaggeration, irony or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the area of contemporary politics and other topical issues.”
From The Times
July 25, 2008
He ventured forth to bring light to the world
The anointed one’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action – and a blessing to all his faithful followers
Gerard Baker
And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness. The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow. When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?” In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites. And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth – for the first time – to bring the light unto all the world. He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the Taleban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world. And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more. From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it. And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child’s very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light. And the Persians, who saw all this and were greatly fearful, longed to speak with the Child and saw that the Child was the bringer of peace. At the mention of his name they quickly laid aside their intrigues and beat their uranium swords into civil nuclear energy ploughshares. From there the Child went up to the city of Jerusalem, and entered through the gate seated on an ass. The crowds of network anchors who had followed him from afar cheered “Hosanna” and waved great palm fronds and strewed them at his feet. In Jerusalem and in surrounding Palestine, the Child spake to the Hebrews and the Arabs, as the Scripture had foretold. And in an instant, the lion lay down with the lamb, and the Israelites and Ishmaelites ended their long enmity and lived for ever after in peace. As word spread throughout the land about the Child’s wondrous works, peoples from all over flocked to hear him; Hittites and Abbasids; Obamacons and McCainiacs; Cameroonians and Blairites. And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child’s journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over. The Great Prophet Algore of Nobel and Oscar, who many had believed was the anointed one, smiled and told his followers that the Child was the one generations had been waiting for. And there were other wonderful signs. In the city of the Street at the Wall, spreads on interbank interest rates dropped like manna from Heaven and rates on credit default swaps fell to the ground as dead birds from the almond tree, and the people who had lived in foreclosure were able to borrow again. Black gold gushed from the ground at prices well below $140 per barrel. In hospitals across the land the sick were cured even though they were uninsured. And all because the Child had pronounced it. And this is the testimony of one who speaks the truth and bears witness to the truth so that you might believe. And he knows it is the truth for he saw it all on CNN and the BBC and in the pages of The New York Times. Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length. But when he had finished speaking his disciples told him the crowd was hungry, for they had had nothing to eat all the hours they had waited for him. And so the Child told his disciples to fetch some food but all they had was five loaves and a couple of frankfurters. So he took the bread and the frankfurters and blessed them and told his disciples to feed the multitudes. And when all had eaten their fill, the scraps filled twelve baskets. Thence he travelled west to Mount Sarkozy. Even the beauteous Princess Carla of the tribe of the Bruni was struck by awe and she was great in love with the Child, but he was tempted not. On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair and his successor, Gordon the Leper, and his successor, David the Golden One. And suddenly, with the men appeared the archangel Gabriel and the whole host of the heavenly choir, ranks of cherubim and seraphim, all praising God and singing: “Yes, We Can.”
I was going to make a list of all the children in the celebrity-worship news that have been born to parents who are not married, but then I discovered that even the dictionary says that the term “bastard” is archaic and old-fashioned when used to describe a child born out of wedlock. That makes me wonder if there is a new term and if marriage and childbirth have any relationship any more.
Marion lost the election. I don’t know if he ever filed the report or paid the penalty. I do know that he blamed his loss on “those crossovers” and promised to be back. I can’t wait — more idiot fodder.
So, the bailout is now passed with a guarantee from the White House of “no veto.” I feel much better now. Nancy Pelosi and the sponsors of the bill are seeking to “save” homeowners (?) from a new American monster called “repossession.” They are treating this “new” evil as some kind of disease that is rumbling unchecked down the streets of America. They have succeeded in creating a new set of victims: those poor souls who suddenly find themselves beset by the monster, who is threatening to destroy their piece of the American dream. A quick recap of how we got here. The housing industry and the banks were perking along in America as they built and sold new houses to people across the United States. The race-mongers and the poor-pimps went to Congress and complained that certain members of the American population were not getting a bite of the American Pie. These were low-income families, surprisingly mostly black, who couldn’t qualify for normal loans from those evil things called banks. Not surprisingly, the Federal Government ordered the banks to create programs so that these “persecuted poor” could buy houses like all the rest of the people in the United States. As the government ordered, so did the banks. They were tasked with insuring that certain numbers of the “persecuted poor” were put into houses now. This led a lot of people, poor and not-poor (read Ed McMahon), to start buying houses they could not afford. To insure success in obtaining a mortgage, real estate agents, loan brokers, and buyers began to lie about their income and anything else that would guarantee the house-sale and mortgage. After all, lying on applications to get free money is considered as just “sticking it to the man.” Strange mortgages were created that home buyers could use to qualify for loans on houses that were many times way too expensive for them. This was no problem they assured themselves and the agents assured those who asked because the housing market was booming and one could always sell. Then the boom went bust, and they were left with houses they could not afford and could not sell. Since they could not pay, the banks threatened the repossess,a procedure that can take six months to a year, because after all the house was bought with the bank’s money. So, the howl started from them and the poor-pimps about how they were being denied their place in America. My question is why should the taxpayers, the vast majority of which are current in their mortgages, bail out a bunch of losers who made wrong choices and basically committed fraud. If you lie on your mortgage application, that is fraud, no matter who told you to do it or why. Go bail yourself out with your own money, not mine, I am sure Nancy and Henry have some extra cash laying around that they would happily give you. You don’t deserve a piece of the American Pie, you and all who participated in this fraud deserve a jail cell–oh, that’s right, the jails are now full of other persecuted victims.
This morning, I had a checkup. As we finished, the doctor, a captain in the Army, said that he wanted to follow up with me in 3 months. He was going to be out of town for a month and would give me a call when he got back. He went on to explain that he needed some additional training in gunshot trauma. The Army, he said, didn’t want to send him to the Middle East for less than 6 months, so they were sending him to the second best place to study gunshot trauma — Cincinnati. I thought for a second that he was kidding, but he reassured me that he was serious. It seems there is a lot of gunshot trauma in Cincinnati. I just wonder if he will get an award and why we don’t get the figures from Cincinnati on the daily news like we do from Iraq.
Soldier 1: Do we have a national song?
Soldier 2: I think so.
Soldier 1: Is that like the National Anthem?
Soldier 2: Yeah, like the Pledge of Allegiance.
Soldier 1: That’s not a song, it’s a poem.
Soldier 2: Well, it could be a song. It was written by that guy on the boat.
Soldier 1: Yeah, and didn’t he die recently.
I had to move away because I was laughing so hard. Another retired soldier sitting next to me moved also. As he sat down close to me, he smiled and said, “Government education.” I said, “and they give them guns.”
Isn’t this a great country when the number one problem among the poor is obesity?
I was reminded today again of my new rediscovery of Hopkins’poetry:
THE GRANDEUR OF GOD
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wing.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
