Recent Comments:
The $60 Million iPad-Controlled Gulfstream G550 Private Jet {Luxist}
Apr 3rd 2011 7:53AM "Eco-friendly touches?" Are we kidding?
A 'bizjet' is a federally-subsidized perk that allows a wealthy executive to take himself and his family (or maybe just his secretary) to some vacation spot without having to rub shoulders with the rest of us. (The federal government will cover 75% of the cost of putting a new bizjet into service, so long as the executive's accountant certifies that it is needed for "security." This was an amendment slipped into a post-9/11 bill by Oregon's Senator Packwood.) It isn't really for business, unless you believe that most business meetings occur in Aspen during ski season, on Martha's Vineyard on Sundays in August, or on Maui at Christmas--all times and places where you'll see whole flocks of 'bizjets.'
All this being so, rocketing around the world in what amounts to a private airliner, burning thousands of pounds of fuel per hour to transport just a few egos, is as far from "eco-friendly" as can be!
A friend of mine flies a Gulfstream for the aircraft's owner. He flew his employer and the employer's wife from New York back to their principal home in Denver a while back, with the departure time determined by the couple's desire to attend a party that evening. After dropping them off, my friend was directed to return to New York to run an errand: it seems that, in order to make the party on time, they'd had to leave New York a half-hour before the wife's favorite chocolate shop opened. So--
--my friend flew an aircraft weighing roughly 100,000 pounds on a round trip from Denver to New York and back, just to pick up a box of chocolate! (Apparently these people never heard of FedEx.)
Just remember, YOUR taxes helped pay for this extravagance...and all the eco-friendly touches in the world won't unburn all the fuel wasted on that absolutely unnecessary trip!
In case you think this is an isolated example, I should point out that another friend of mine flew a coast-to-coast round trip to fetch the owner's wife's poodle...and yes, I have many more examples.
Obama Picks Holder and the Vultures Start Circling {Blackvoices Main}
Nov 20th 2008 9:54PM It's really pretty funny: right now right-wingers are noisily carping about Holder's role in Presidential pardons granted at the very tail end of the Clinton Administration...
Ah, but just wait until the very end of Bush's term, when undoubtedly Bush Jr. will issue blanket Presidential pardons to his cronies and partners in crime: Dick Cheny and Karl Rove.
Suddenly, the talking heads will find something else to talk about!
Elective Emotionalism, Voting With Your Heart {Blackvoices Main}
Nov 4th 2008 11:33AM I read, with amazement, a comment above that "McCain will lead this country the way Reagan led us out of a similar envoirment (sic)." It's pretty hard to imagine how he would do this: after all, McCain voted with Baby Bush something like 95% of the time.
Hard to see how more of the same could ever get us out of the mess we're in now!
Further, Republicans should be honest enough to admit that with Baby Bush they've got exactly what they wanted; for decades they've idolized their tin hero Reagan, and Baby Bush pretty well repeated all the Reagan "successes": an illegal war (Iraq, an even bigger mess than Reagan's Grenada); a massive bailout of 'free enterprise' corruption using public money (Wall Street today, eerily similar to Reagan's Savings & Loan scandal--in which, by the way, McCain was deeply involved); illegal wiretapping (everybody now, the air traffic controllers' union in Reagan's day); a virtual 'class war' waged against every honest worker in the nation... and we could go on and on.
In the international arena, both Reagan and Baby Bush espoused a childish, bullying "unilateralism," better described as the notion that we have the POWER to do whatever "we" (Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce) want--and that we therefore have the RIGHT to do whatever we want. The Nazis couldn't have said it any better!
The whole world is waiting for America to grow up and start doing what's right for citizens--the citizens of this country--ALL of them--as well as the citizens of the world. Let's not let them--or ourselves-down.
