Our Wealthy Overlords

Our Wealthy Overlords — The richest counties in America are in the Washington D.C. suburbs where reside the federal bureaucrats who make their six-figure pay and get their early retirements on backs of those who have to actually produce things. richest counties

Forbes.Com reported last April that the three richest counties in the United States were: Falls Church, Va.; Loudoun County, Va.; Fairfax County, Va. with Howard County, Md. coming in fifth behind Hunterdon County, N.J.

These people don’t lobby for government programs because they want to help the poor or even, in many cases, to defend our country.

They want these programs because they give them soft, easy lives.

It’s sort of the same thing that motivated the Sheriff of Nottingham.


Richest counties in America

Be A Happy Hamster With A Treadmill Desk

It’s been around for a few years — one made by Steelcase was being discussed back in 2007 — but the day is dawning for the treadmill workstation.

Amazon is selling one for $479.

Anybody can be a happy hamster now. Burn calories by working smarter AND working harder.

Expect the caring fat cats in our progressive corporations such as Comcast  to start buying these in bulk.

Did you know that the employees of Philly-based Comcast have become Obama’s biggest contributors?

If these workplace treadmills were hooked to generators they could very well save the world. The rat race would become the green rat race as the lean and mean workforce gathers positive momentum and produces electricity while filling out TPS reports in pursuit of six sigma.

Obama stimulus money would certainly be available to hire the guy to beat the drum to set the pace and the large fellows with whips to inspire the slower hamsters.

 

 

Be A Happy Hamster With A Treadmill Desk

 

Gibson Guitar Raided By Feds

Gibson Guitar Raided By Feds — Heroic federal agents, Wednesday, Aug. 24, swooped down on the offices and factories of Gibson Guitar, an infamous maker of musical instruments based in Tennessee. They were looking for wood, the substance that is the cadavers of innocent trees and used by drug-addled “rock and roll” musicians to corrupt innocent minds.

Apparently, Gibson had imported some of this dead tree substance from India and failed to properly fill out the necessary paperwork.

The use of innocent dead trees to create paper for the federal government is acceptable.

Tennessee is what is known as a “red state” which means the people there don’t accept every word published in the New York Times as unassailable truth, nor do they vote properly. One can wonder at the fairness of the residents of such a place having jobs while those in right-thinking states such as New York and Massachusetts suffer from unemployment.

Our federal law enforcement deserves special praise for attempting to rectify this injustice.

Gibson Guitar Raided By Feds

 

Gibson Guitar Raided By Feds

Chris McNair, Greg Skrepenak And Trophy Hunting Feds

Chris McNair

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Harold Jackson, Sunday, wrote a moving piece regarding civil rights icon Chris McNair who at the age of 85 started serving a five year sentence in federal prison in June.

McNair was convicted of corruption charges in 2006 relating to gifts he accepted as a commissioner of Jefferson County, Ala. which includes the city of Birmingham. He had been out of office five years when the conviction was obtained.

McNair’s daughter Denise, age 11, was among those killed during the Sept. 15, 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham by members of the Ku Klux Klan. He overcame his anguish to become a community leader and an example of Christian forgiveness. He eventually obtained his political post during which he received almost $1 million from construction companies who would eventually win bids on a $3.2 billion sewer project.

While $410,000 of the money was in cash, some of it was for work related to building a memorial room for his daughter and expanding his photography studio.

McNair claims he thought the money was gifts from people who felt bad about what happened to his daughter and that it did not influence the way he voted.

Some will sneer at this. I’m not one of them.

I find it very believable that a popular and politically unsophisticated person can be tapped to waltz into office with eyes wide in wonder by the political bosses who safely hold the real power and get the real graft.

And I find it very believable that such a person would break laws without knowing it, which would mean he would not take the easy steps to cover his tail from an ambitious trophy-seeking federal headhunter that a true hack does instinctively.

In fact, what happened to McNair sounds a whole lot like what happened to former NFL lineman and Luzerne County Commissioner Greg Skrepenak.

Meanwhile the true hacks who get rich and powerful from sucking our blood while laughing at the law — the Barney Franks and Charles Rangels And Timothy Geithners — remain lionized and respected.

And when one does cross a line that can’t be ignored like Jeff Epstein, well, it’s two years of house arrest.

Jackson is calling for a presidential pardon for McNair so the man would not die in jail.  I wouldn’t go as far as a pardon but Obama certainly should commute his sentence to time served. He should do the same for Skrepenak too.

 

 Chris McNair, Greg Skrepenak And Trophy Hunting Feds

The Latest Human Rights Corporate Takeover

By Dr. John Gilmore

For more than 200 years in the U.S., and especially since 1980, Corporations have been posing as the arbiters of justice in the U.S.. Corporations, through the purchase of the mass media, have been influencing U.S. Citizens and creating a false dichotomy between themselves and the U.S. Government since their creation. 

 

Today, due to tools like the internet that is not owned by corporations yet, we have discovered that there is no distinction between the U.S. Government and Corporations. In fact, if one traces the cause for almost every war one finds that most of them were fueled by corporate interest in order to “Open Markets,” for corporations.


The internet is causing problems. People are able to communicate freely and pass on information now through email and social media. This is a problem for the Corporate/Government agencies that want to control information and set one group against the other in order to maintain control. At present a new campaign is going on which is a backdoor method of controlling information exchange on the internet. 

 

The first step was
to create high speed internet so a few corporations could make money
off of and control ones connection to the internet. This has been
completed. The next step is to convince
companies like Comcast, AT&T, and others to voluntarily create a
“Three Strikes” policy. Your internet interactions would
be monitored and if you downloaded or streamed three files your
Internet service provider will respond to online file sharing with
censorship tools like: 

    *
Throttling down” your Internet bandwidth and speed;

*
Limiting your access to the Web;

*
Controlling what websites you are allowed to visit;

*
And requiring you to attend pirate school to be educated on copyright
law.


These actions, led by the Entertainment
Industry in the name of copyright violations (another corporation)
would take away your ability to share files, to read news, to
download information to pass on, and to even communicate with friends
and family members by sharing educational information that you find
on the internet. 

 

This, of course, would be a slippery slope. Do you
trust the corporations to decide what should be able to share? Who
would have ever have thought the the United States would be involved
in censorship? Yet this is a different U.S. The U.S. I was born in
would never have engaged in censorship. 

 

Now that corporations and
the government has merged our civil liberties and constitutional
rights have been abated and 97% of all news and print media are owned
by 6 corporations with the board of one made up of people from the
other 5, we find ourselves struggling to maintain our freedoms. We
find ourselves now living to support corporate interests who
themselves have said they have no accountability to anyone or
anything except their share holders and making maximum profit. Now
they are global. Whatever profits are made in the U.S. can now be
invested in poor nations instead of in the U.S economy where they
would create jobs. This is a different world.


There is no problem with this, if there
is a government that regulates or competes with corporations and sets
up trade laws. It seems, however, that the government has gone to
sleep. Getting rid of the government or weakening it isn’t working.
It is better, I think, to have Good Government, than it is to have
small government. 

 

Somehow we have come to the false assumption that
the government is the enemy and corporations are our friends. This
is only because they have both merged together. It is time to
separate government and corporations and create an honest, strong
government instead of one filled with fools who think the best thing
in the world—the best thing for the U.S., is to get rid of all that
has made us civilized and one of the best countries in the world and
take us back to Feudal system with CEOs and corporate heads taking
the place of the Kings, Queens, Dukes, and Barons and all of us
becoming serfs. 

 

We are on the way to serfdom and all of the old
battles between classes, races, genders, and religions are just
pushing us all to the bottom faster.

Barletta Bans Recordings At Town Halls

Barletta Bans Recordings At Town Halls — Newly minted coal-country congressmen Lou Barletta (R-Pa11) and Tom Marino (R-Pa10) have sparked fears they have gone Potomac by instituting recording bans at recent town hall meetings.

Barletta has denied the claim saying the event at which he banned personal recordings was a  “private” meeting.

To which he had opened to the old media who of course were given permission to record.

The congressmen’s actions were motivated by orchestrated attempts by Democrats to infiltrate the town halls with unruly disrupters whose antics would be recorded and placed on the YouTube in the hope it would indicate widespread grassroots opposition to Republican policy.

It was an effort to mimic action in 2009 and 2010 by Tea Partyers which led to big Republican gains last November.

What should be remembered, however, is that it wasn’t the angry protestors who made the Democrat incumbents look bad but their responses to them. The incumbents, perhaps most famously Arlen Specter,  were recorded being abusive, mocking and dismissive to them, after which they arrogantly ended constituent meetings completely.

If Barletta and Marino follow that path they will be one-termers.

If they, however, let them obscenely and abusively vent and are judicious in their response the strategy will backfire badly on the Democrats.

The Republicans simply have to make sure they have their own recordings to put on YouTube.

It remains to be seen if they are smart enough to do this.

Barletta Bans Recordings At Town Halls

Development Trend For Peasantization

There is set of people that has the strange desire for order in the lives of other people and that, that they have been somehow ordained to be the means to do so. Development Trend For Peasantization

One of their latest conceits is the transit-oriented development which is basically putting in a high density development of homes, apartments and offices around a 19th century commuter rail station in the middle of a successful suburb.

Peasant homes for peasants you could call it.

If done properly, the developer will be able to sip a Chablis before the gas-fire in the fireplace of his McMansion’s living room as he watches through arched windows the deer play in the snow of his two-acre backyard and think warm thoughts about his “little people” scurrying about like happy hamsters in his new community, and feel as though he has just saved the world.

An attempt is being made to put one of these in Middletown Township, Delaware County, Pa. on the old Franklin Mint property with the proposed Wawa Station on SEPTA’s Media-Elwyn rail line as the transit hub.

It would have 1,200 residences including “luxury” apartments; 798,000 square feet of office space, and 235,000 square feet of retail space.

And in Montgomery County, Abington Township has signed on to a  transit-oriented development centered on SEPTA’s Noble Station on the West Trenton Line which will allow for increasing the residential unit density from eight per acre to 300 on an 8-acre tract next to the Baederwood Shopping Mall.

Someone is going to point out that starter homes and apartments are needed, and they would be right. But rather than break things that are fixed — like low-density, affluent suburban townships — how about we try to fix things that are broken.

Like, well, Philadelphia.

In 1950, Philly had a population of 2.07 million ; a population density of 16,286 per square mile. Today, it has a population of 1.55 million and a population density of 11,457 per square mile.

Clearly, it can fit more people.

And  historic North Philadelphia Station and the Broad Street Subway line would make great hubs for transit-oriented developments.

Now, some will point out that nobody who loves their children would willingly subject them to the city’s public school system. True!

But  school vouchers would easily solve that.

Other cynics might say that these are very high crime areas. Also true! But if you really had confidence in your ability to order the lives of others you would have the faith that responsible homeowners in self-contained communities would push out the “no-snitch” crowd.

And if not, well, maybe you shouldn’t try to break things that are fixed.

Development Trend For Peasantization

Nazi Midwinter Holiday Reprise

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has repented like The Grinch and returned Christmas to the Christmas Village sign at the traditional seasonal outdoor market outside City Hall.

But why did he even consider taking it down in the first place? Should Christmas be a dirty word? Those who want to make it so should remember whose footsteps they are trying to follow.

The Nazis hated Christianity and Christmas posed a problem to them since it was Germany’s most popular holiday. Rather than ban it, they tried to replace it as described in this story at the TimesOnline, the website for the paper most of us in the U.S. know as The Times of London albeit in the U.K. it is simply the Times.

The Nazis replaced carols praising Jesus with secular songs about the season — winter wonderlands so to speak. They insisted Christmas trees be called fir trees, light trees or Jultrees.

They insisted the event, Julfest or Wintersonnenwende (Winter Solstice), be one  to remember Germanic ancestors and soldiers. Here is an example of how it was supposed to be done according to a popular women’s magazine at the time:

 

 Nazi Midwinter Holiday Reprise

Something like that could never happen in Pennsylvania or the United States, right?

Nazi Midwinter Holiday Reprise

HB 2497 Pension Bailout Unconstitutional

HB 2497 Pension Bailout Unconstitutional  — HB 2497 aka  Gen Theft was sent to the governor’s desk for a signature Nov. 15 after a 165 to 31 vote in the Pennsylvania House. The sick thing is that 32 minutes earlier a vote to declare the bill unconstitutional passed the House on a 128-68 vote. This means that 37 legislators ended up voting for a bill they had voted to be unconstitutional.

Bob Guzzardi of LibertyIndex.Com lists the bovine 39 as:

Republicans: Matthew Baker (Tioga), Kerry Benninghoff (Centre), Martin Causer (Bradford), Jim Christina (Beaver), Paul Clymer (Bucks), Gary Day (Berks), Sheryl Delozier (Cumberland), Garth Everett (Lycoming), Will Gabig (Cumberland), Matt Gabler (Elk), Mauree Gingrich (Lebanon), Glen Grell (Cumberland), Marcia Hahn (Northampton), Ted  Harhart (Fayette), Sue Helm (Dauphin), Tim Hennessy (Chester), Rob Kauffman (Cumberland), Mark Keller (Franklin), John Maher (Allegheny), Sandra Major (Susquehanna), Ron Marsico (Dauphin), Ron Miller (York), Dan Moul (Adams), John Payne (Dauphin), Tina Pickett (Bradford), Jeffrey Pyle (Armstrong), Thomas Quigley (Montgomery), Marguerite Quinn (Berks), Kathy Rapp (Forest), Dave Reed (Indiana), Doug Reichley (Lehigh), Todd Rock (Franklin), Curtis Sonney (Erie), Katie True (Lancaster), Randy Vulakovich (Allegheny) and Katherine Watson (Bucks).

Democrats:
  Retiring Speaker of the House Keith McCall (Carbon), Dwight Evans (Philadelphia) and Brendan Boyle (Philadelphia).

HB 2497, which will certainly be signed by Gov. Rendell, bails out the Pennsylvania’s near bankrupt public pension system and was strongly supported by the Pennsylvania State Education Association and other public employee unions.

Is it stating the obvious to note that the very sweet legislative pensions are also saved by the bailout? What heroic public servants we have voted to represent us.

Commonwealth Foundation estimates that the bailout will cost the average homeowner $1,360 annually by 2012  in state and local taxes.

Will our state courts find the bill to be unconstitutional? People, the bill bailed out the judges’ pensions too.

HB 2497 Pension Bailout Unconstitutional

HB 2497 Pension Bailout Unconstitutional  -- HB 2497 aka  Gen Theft was sent to the governor's desk for a signature Nov. 15 after a 165 to 31

1 In 3 Need Gov Permission To Work

1 In 3 Need Gov Permission To Work — About 1 in 20 Americans needed government permission to work in the 1950s. Today it’s 1 in 3, according to Commonwealth Foundation. The loss of freedom comes from requirements for training, fees, licenses and other bits of red tape magic aimed at keeping the Dolores Umbridges of the world happily sipping their tea in bureaucratic positions of power.

A Illinois man, as a remembrance to a friend killed by a drunk driver, began offering tipsy bar patrons a free ride home. He was busted for “operating without a transportation service license” in a sting orchestrated by the local taxi drivers and the police.

In Pennsylvania, an ad hoc barter system popped in where residents gave rides in return for services to the Amish who have a religious prohibition against owning or driving a car.

The state’s Public Utilities Commission pushed  police to set up stake-outs to catch these violators of the requirement to have a transportation license.

It’s for our own good, of course.

“We are trying to protect the public interest and public safety,” a PUC spokeswoman said.

An excellent and scary article by  Katrina Currie of Commonwealth Foundation points out that an attempt was made by the Pennsylvania legislature this year to require a license for interior designers. What was the public safety issue? The danger of mauve rugs clashing with orange walls?

Ms. Currie notes that in 2008 the state sued a a mom for $10 million for selling items on eBay without an auctioneers license and that Philadelphia bloggers now must have a $300 business privilege license if they want to sell ads on their site.

A third of Americans need Big Brothers permission to work. Fighting to stop the encroachment is not enough. It’s time to start being a little like Harry Potter and start fighting to roll it back.

1 In 3 Need Gov Permission To Work