Is This A Joyous Occasion? You Be The Judge.

We're All Bernie Madoff?

Swindler extraordinaire
By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON -- For anyone taking stock of 2008, Barack Obama is the inevitable choice as Person of the Year. But he's not the only American whose story suggests that this thrilling, dramatic, unforgettable year will be seen as a demarcation of grand historical eras, a bright line between yesterday and tomorrow. My choice for runner-up is Bernard Madoff.

In a sense, we're all Bernie Madoff. We've been running our economy in accordance with his accounting principles for a generation -- and now we face a most unpleasant reckoning.

As everyone knows by now, Madoff -- once one of the most respected financiers on Wall Street -- stands accused of being perhaps the biggest swindler in history. Before his arrest earlier this month, he reportedly told his sons that he had defrauded investors of up to $50 billion. He allegedly followed the playbook written more than eight decades ago by the elegant grifter Charles Ponzi, who used money from new investors to pay juicy returns to old investors. That works fine for a while, but every Ponzi scheme eventually collapses in ruin.

Wall Street veterans recall how investors once begged to be allowed to invest their money with Madoff. Unlike Ponzi, he didn't promise to deliver flashy double-digit returns overnight. He "earned" his investors 1 percent or 2 percent a month, bull market or bear, rain or shine. Because he didn't overpromise, and because he limited his clientele, he was able to keep it going for decades.

Such steady gains, unsullied by the occasional bad year or disastrous quarter, are patently impossible. Some potential investors took one look at Madoff's operation and took a pass. Some of the millionaires, billionaires and professional money managers who unwisely gave their money to Madoff were guilty of allowing greed to overwhelm their powers of observation and reason.

But not all of Madoff's investors could have been in the dark. At least some must have realized how unlikely it was that he had developed some sort of Holy Grail strategy or technique that would always make money, no matter what the financial markets were doing. Some investors, I would wager, must have calculated that they could get in, get their return and get out before the whole thing fell apart.

Which makes me wonder how many of us had our eyes open when housing prices were soaring in Ponzi-like increments -- by 10 percent or more a year, in some parts of the country -- while middle-class incomes were largely stagnant. How many of us stopped to ask just who was supposed to be able to pay $1 million for a standard suburban split-level, even if it had an upgraded kitchen with a Sub-Zero fridge?

The whole subprime mortgage industry was based on the idea that housing prices would always rise. Given that assumption, it was perfectly rational for first-time homebuyers to sign up for adjustable-rate mortgages that they couldn't really afford. From the moment they signed the loan papers, they would be building equity -- through appreciation -- that soon would make it easy, and lucrative, to refinance or sell.

In other words: get in, get their return and get out before the whole thing fell apart.

I'm not saying that average Americans were as culpable as Wall Street in creating this financial and economic crisis; our sins were venial, whereas theirs were mortal. Madoff's alleged fraud was at least straightforward. Much worse was the creation of exotic "derivative" investment products that were bought and sold with enormous leverage -- products whose true value turned out to be impossible to ascertain. As long as real estate values kept rising, it didn't matter what these chimerical investments were worth. What mattered to Wall Street was the ability to collect enormous fees from real people, in real dollars, for trading unicorns and dragons.

After the bursting of the Internet bubble and the housing bubble, I think we're done with bubbles for a while. Obama's first challenge -- and it may take much of his first term -- is to get the economy back into a pattern of tangible, sustainable growth. He will be able to thank Madoff for giving us the simplest possible explanation of what we knew all along but chose to ignore: that there's still no such thing as a free lunch.

Eugene Robinson is a Washington Post columnist. His
e-mail address is eugenerobinson@washingtonpost.com.

Laugh below:

Garrison Keillor: Perils Of Public Passion.

Perils of public passion
By Garrison Keillor

I have been trying not to think about the man and woman from Iowa who had sex in the men's room at the Iowa-Minnesota football game in Minneapolis a week ago and to think about the environment instead, or the future of American fiction, but it is hard to put something like lavatory sex out of your mind. And the environmental impact is slight. Some paper towels, that's about it.

The Iowans apparently did not know each other until they got really, really drunk and ran into each other on the concourse. Probably their shared Iowaness in enemy territory was an initial bond -- Minnesotans tell the same jokes about Iowans that used to be told about Polish people -- and they were a little happy about the fact that the Hawkeyes were walloping the Gophers (55-0 was the final score), and somehow the 38-year-old woman and the 26-year-old guy wound up in a handicapped stall in a men's room and had intercourse, which drew a crowd who cheered them on.

They were interrupted by a security man who spotted two pairs of feet under the partition and saw underwear on the floor and called police, who arrested them for indecent conduct, a misdemeanor, and released the male perp to the custody of his girlfriend and the woman to her husband. That is mostly all we know, except that the woman has told reporters, "It's ruined my life," which is pretty much what a nice Midwestern lady should say after she's gotten drunk and had sex in public with a complete stranger. It shows good manners. You can't have drunken public sex with a stranger and say, "I don't know what got into me!" You are supposed to sit in the ashes and rock back and forth for a while.

Midwesterners have always needed to go elsewhere to misbehave and so when people head south to Florida or Arizona in January, purportedly for the warm weather, we know better. "Warm weather for what?" we ask. Public sex, most likely.

This is one area of life that American literature needs to explore. You read about the Iowans and you think, "I would never do such a thing as that. No no no no no no no." And it's the job of the novelist to create empathy and to write this story so as to put the reader into the toilet stall with a heart full of passion and his or her drawers on the floor.

I'm going to put them at a Minnesota Orchestra concert instead of a football game. He's there with a girlfriend he's trying to break up with. He's had two glasses of Merlot at dinner. Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" is the opener, and at intermission he brushes against a lady in the lobby and quickly apologizes, and she says, "Are you thinking the same thing I am?" He is. Men always are. "I said to myself during the Stravinsky," she says, "that I would offer myself to the first man who touches me." This is OK by him.

She leads him into the women's john and into a stall, and she says, "I never did this before," and he says he never did either, and the two of them have wild sex and it is magical, it is stupendous, until 50 women waiting for a stall start shrieking, "Hey, there was a line!" and pound on the door and security comes running and pulls them apart and they're arrested, and there's shame, of course, being led by police through a crowd of the sensitive and genteel ("They did what? You're kidding!"), but also pride -- they crossed a line and it feels brave and good and also it's their ticket to something better. He was National Guard but now he's thinking about acting school. She's thinking she'll write a memoir called "Lavatory of Love."

All very believable, but there's one detail I can't quite get my head around. Midwesterners I know would not, even if three sheets to the wind and overwhelmed by hormones, use a handicapped stall to have sex in, just as we would never have sex in a car parked in a handicapped spot. It's a basic taboo. The adultery we cannot approve of, the drunkenness is immature, sex with a stranger is definitely sketchy, but the handicapped stall is beyond the pale. As your mother would say, "How could you do it? What were you thinking?"

Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty" (Viking). He writes a column for Tribune Media Services.

The devil Was Out Today, Idolatory, Greed And Inhumane Behavior In FULL Display As One Of Us (The Only One We Know Of) Loses His Life In The MADNESS.

Watch the SAD video below:



And Listen To A Piece Of Advise Below:

Florida Supreme Court OK's Porn For Sex Offenders. You Go Figure.

You can read more here.

Check out the story below:

Florida sex offenders on probation can possess pornography so long as it does not relate to an offender's ''particular deviant behavior pattern,'' the state's Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The 5-2 decision overturned a 2006 Third District Court of Appeal ruling on a Miami case in which the appellate court said offenders cannot have any sexually explicit material.

In the Miami case at issue, Donald Kasischke pleaded guilty in 2001 to three counts each of lewd or lascivious battery and exhibition on a 15-year-old boy. He was sentenced to a year in prison followed by two years of community control and eight years of probation.

A search of Kasischke's home after his release turned up pornographic photos and a videotape. The porn contained images of young males having sex, but it could not be determined that any were underage. He was hauled back to prison in 2003, which the Third DCA ruled was appropriate.

Probation officers sometimes join local police on ''compliance checks,'' searching the homes of offenders to make sure they are obeying release conditions. Such searches led to the arrests in 2005 of two Miami sex offenders, one of whom had a copy of Maxim magazine and the other a Kama Sutra manual. Judges dismissed their cases.

The Supreme Court justices read the wording of the law, which includes the phrase about relevance to an offender's deviant behavior pattern, and they decided Kasischke should not have been reincarcerated.

Kasischke, 61, who has a doctorate in gerontology, is still locked up at Everglades Correctional Institution in South Miami-Dade County, but he will have a new hearing in Miami based on Thursday's favorable ruling.

''This case is a victory for due process and fair notice,'' said Thomas Regnier, the Miami-Dade County assistant public defender who represents Kasischke. ``Laws have to be clearly written so they're understandable. And when they're not clearly written, they can't be used against a defendant.''

TREATMENT PROGRAM

In Florida, judges must impose certain conditions on sex offenders who are being released on probation. Conditions include curfews, completion of a treatment program and not being able to live within 1,000 feet of schools or playgrounds.

Another condition of release -- the one at issue in this case -- is explained in Florida's statutes:

``Unless otherwise indicated in the treatment plan provided by the sexual offender treatment program, a prohibition on viewing, accessing, owning or possessing any obscene, pornographic or sexually stimulating visual or auditory material, including telephone, electronic media, computer programs or computer services that are relevant to the offender's deviant behavior pattern.''

In writing the Supreme Court's ruling, Justice Raoul Cantero III noted that the court considered all possible interpretations of the wording. The majority concluded that the phrase ''relevant to the offender's deviant behavior pattern'' included all items previously mentioned in the sentence. The justices who dissented -- R. Fred Lewis and Kenneth Bell -- argued that the language was meant to prohibit all pornographic materials.

Acknowledging that the law's wording is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations, Cantero said the court applied the rule of lenity to this case. That rule says ``when the language is susceptible of differing constructions, it shall be construed most favorably to the accused.''

DISSENTING OPINION

In his dissenting opinion, Bell called the majority's decision ``unnecessary and unfortunate.''

Editor's comment: Another sign of the times, requiring us to put a lid on crazy.

''Florida courts and law enforcement are left with a vague restriction on a sex offender's access to sexually stimulating material,'' Bell wrote. ``The statute is intended to prohibit offenders like Dr. Kasischke from possessing any pornography.''

Anyone Wondering Where Our Society Is Headed Can Check out This Story.

Read more from the Courier-Journal.

Here is an Excerpt:

When school starts in August, parents of sixth- through ninth-graders in New Albany-Floyd County schools can get a free home drug-testing kit to check their children for marijuana or other drug use.
Advertisement

But the American Academy of Pediatrics has raised concerns about such programs, this one operated through Project 7th Grade, a Phoenix, Ariz., group that provides the kits to school systems, police and other organizations at no charge.

Editor's comment: Another "sign of the times", indicating a need to "put a lid on crazy".

Heck even my Liberal "better half" agrees that this is WRONG.

You Won't Believe This -- Or Maybe Again You Will.

Here's what this is, and watch the video below:

In California, It's A Different Kind Of "Gold Rush". This Time It's The "Gay Marriage Rush".

Read more here.

I was watching CNN and one of the "women" featured on "Robin Meade's Morning Express" said that "she" and "her partner" were upholding God's Law.

I wonder which one she is referring to -- the one about "an abomination"? Or another one?

I can't seem to find in the Bible where God made a law for gays to marry each other.

Can anyone help me out?

Arizona Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, Takes Immigration Law Into His Hands.

Read about what the "toughest Sheriff in America" is doing about illegal immigration in Arizona, and watch the video news below:



As long as the Federal Government is willing to abdicate its constitutional responsibility in this arena, you will have law officers (and citizens) willing to step in to stem the uncontrolled tide of illegal immigration.

Can you blame them for being frustrated and reaching out for solutions?

Breaking news: Armed hostage situation is averted at University of Louisville campus health cennter.

Read about it here.

More updates to follow.

Update: police discover 2 dead children as a result of the hostage incident.

Stay tuned for more updates as they develop.

Update #2: From the Courier-Journal: "A 37-year-old Okolona mother has been charged with murdering her two children.

Gail Lynn Coontz, 37, is charged with two counts of murder in the shooting deaths of her 14-year-old son, Greg, and 10-year-old daughter, Nikki, police spokesman Phil Russell said.

Coontz is being treated at University Hospital but will be released later today to Metro Corrections, Russell said.

The two children died of multiple gunshot wounds sometime in the past 24 hours in their home in the 4700 block of Settle Boulevard.

The girl was a fourth-grader at McFerran Academy, 1900 S. Seventh St., and the boy was an eighth-grader at Noe Middle School, 121 W. Lee St., according to Jefferson County Public Schools spokeswoman Lauren Roberts."

Voyeurs rejoice.

Yes, rejoice, indeed and you can thank technology.

We need to put a lid on crazy, don't you think?

On the health front, the emerging drug to get HIGH on is: ordinary over the counter cold medicine. So SAD.

Read about it here.

No, I'm NOT speaking of the usual precursors for meth; these ones the drug abuser does NOT have to cook.

What will people who abuse their bodies with drugs think of next for their next HIGH?

So SAD.

Felons should NOT have their rights to vote denied them, UNLESS they have been convicted of election related crimes. Enough said, and enough already.

Yep, enough said and enough of this nonsense already.

Read the pre-filed bill.

Arizona's anti illegal immigration law is working, is it not time to try it here?

Read about it here.

Well, is it not?

Update 12/30: Kentucky tries to do the same.

**** "We will NEVER survive unless WE put a lid on CRAZY"! ****

Here's why.

Otherwise, we will pay a HORRIBLE price once these folks are released from prison, and they come back into society where they can practice their NEWLY acquired CRIMINAL skills from prison on us.

This is common sense, by the way. One, like myself, can be VERY STRONG on law enforcement and STILL be able to recognize that we do NOT need to incarcerate EVERYONE to solve our crime problems.

Alternatives to incarceration need to be explored and implemented QUICKLY in order, as my fellow Country man and world renowned Singer SEAL will sing while WARNING that, "WE WILL NEVER SURVIVE UNLESS WE PUT A LID ON CRAZY".