Recommended FEMA funding solution

     The solution to the funding problem for FEMA.....presently being demagogued to death by the White House and the Democrats in the Senate....is to completely defund the stupid program and shut it down.

The above picture is from the Galveston Island area very shortly after the Hurricane of 1900, when that community lost as few as 5,000 to as many as 9,000 souls to the winds and storm surge.   We were just after a War with Spain, a difficult economic Panic, one thing and the other.   There was no FEMA, just a bunch of dumboes who got togther from various agencies....mostly charitable and private....some National Guard mobilized by the governor.... and rebuilt the churches and bawdy houses and saloons and emporiums and banks and schools.
       To review the totality of the entire event check out this official sight from the Galveston County Historical Society....to see how things were and should be again.   http://www.1900storm.com/


Back from the front....or is it the outback

     We drove back up from the Quinta yesterday to address further issues with the father-in-law's situation.   The drive up was uneventful, the bridge line was mercifully non-existent.    Sundays are extreme days for crossing into the United States.   Sometimes the line are two hours long and other times there is little or no wait.

     Things are well and good at our place and the surrounding area.   Considerable rain, a good cropping season for the citrus, sorghum, peppers, corn, and the like.

        The animals are all there, still spoiled, still with their same pecking orders and personalities.

       Perhaps our biggest problem was the fact that our potable water system has cut back on the time of delivery from 4 or 5 hours beginning at one or two PM, starting and maintaining a good flow which begins to weaken during the last hour....to now starting promptly at 3PM with very strong pressure and continuing in that manner for about an hour and fifty minutes.     The same amount of water might be being delivered.   The cistern fills very quickly, but watering the gardens has become something like a scene out of an old Charlie Chaplin movie with the Keystone Cops.

      A lot of things happened during the Old Gringo's time away.   During the next few hours there will be a lot of communication with the family, back and forth, and preliminary planning for exigencies.   During quieter moments efforts will be made to collect and process thoughts and impressions and transfer it all to the OROG community.

El Gringo Viejo

Mr. O'Bama, Truth is Smear...Fight the Smears....?

Dear Mr. O'bama,

      There is a guy with your same surname who says he is president of all 57 States that compose this once great nation.    He was out on the hustings yesterday talking about how the children cannot learn in bad buildings without this and that.   How children have to have new, shovel ready schools and government feeding programs, year 'round.   Otherwise they just can't learn.

      Perhaps you might know him or you might be related to him.   I understand he has blood relatives living in public housing and on stamps in Boston, Massachusetts.

      Hmmmm....Stamps?   Stamps....like tea tax stamps imposed by the British Parliament and King George III...?     OH!  No...nonononono....FOOD STAMPs....How silly of me.   The first Tea Party wasn't about Food Stamps....it was about tea tax stamps...in Boston Harbour...I forgot.  

      I beg your  forgiveness, because I was trained up in primary and secondary in un-airconditioned schools with a leaky roofs and minimal heating.    My mother studied in the hills in Tennessee in even lesser circumstance.   My grandfather had three grades of school in Pennsylvania, taught by a tutor in her home along with three other children.   He learned two trades by apprenticeship and had read the totality of two encyclopedias and the King Jame's Unabridged and a large collection of American and British authors, as well as other selections by non-English language authors, by the age of 15.   My mother's mother taught school in Tennessee with whites, Negroes, and Indians in the same one room school...essentially an antebellum hewn log cabin... six different grades and 13 different children.    All completed their studies later on and had high school diplomas and went on to trades and professions.     The relatives mentioned in this paragraph were all highly literate, eloquent in speech, and possessed marvelous reasoning capacity and handwriting style.

      Some say that guy with your same surname sees schools only as a system for egalitarian indoctrination and the forcing of a bolshevik socialist agenda on a trapped audience.   Some have observed that those who are intended to be destroyed are forced at the point of a gun to pay for the poisoning of the children who will destroy the same people who are paying for the poisoning.

     Oh!   You ARE the same guy....?    With all those relatives from Kenya, DWI, public assistance, and all.... within sight of the original Tea Party?    Wowsers, Batman....I hope you can change that picture....there are a lot of people who hope to have enough audacity to call you what you are, then.

       Please tell us that you are not laughing up your sleeve.   You wouldn't push for school funding and "Save the Teachers" programs just to dump money into the Godzilla Monster National Education Association which doubles as a source of campaign contributions for
Democrat Party socialist initiatives and destroy-America-first programs.   You aren't really that same person are you?   It must be somebody else.   No one would be stupid enough to vote for anyone who would say something as specious and banal as "hope and change" without seeking a definition of what the person saying such a specious and banal slogan meant by such a phrase.


THE O'BAMA PLEDGE OF Allegiance, Recognition, and Commitment

I kinda, like, you know
Recognize that it's a flaggy thing
Of a racist, imperialist country of sorts,
And to admit, what everybody already knows,
That we have been the source of all evil for generations,
Enslaving billions, hating people of colour, poisoning the earth,
Offending Mother Nature and all oppressed people.
We remember,  we lean forward.
Fundamental Transformation forever!
No justice? No Peace!


The New Pledge
There are No Angels, There are No Devils

Heading Back Down...

The Old Gringo heads back down to the Quinta for another stay.   This will be a long stay.   The matters  of health with the father-in-law are as stabilized as they will ever be.   He is at home and resting.

     The issues into which the Old Gringo goes are improved in terms of the bad news and improved in terms of the good news.   We hope for continued improvement on all fronts.    The political season is with us in Mexico as it is in the United States and in Texas.   It seems like yesterday that Felipe Calderon Hinojosa was elected by such a slim margin that the issue had to be resolved by an Electoral Court- supervised, National Recount, as required by the Constitution.    Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, the Conservative candidate, eked out a 100,000 vote victory in a three-way race, barely beating the ultra-leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

      Things might be even more interesting again, says Yogi.   A bill in Congress might still pass, which would require a run-off if no national candidate receives 50% plus one vote of the full electorate.   Mexico has no electoral college, and heretofore, under the rules prescribed, the candidate that would come in first place for Governorships or Presidencies....that candidate won the whole pumpkin.   Technically, for instance, if there were 10 official candidates on the ballot (possible but very improbable) and the leading vote-getter had 20% of the vote, and the other 9 divided up the remaining 80% of the votes, then the winner of the election would have been the fellow with the 20%.

A somewhat presumptious, but official
emblem of the PRI, using the National
Standard as a Party Medium

       There was no need for many years to worry about these mathematical niceties.   The old PRI would always win by overwhelming majorities all the way up into the 1980s.  Nine to one, five to one...such ratios were common.   During the 1980s, however it became a little more dicey.  The 1982 election was not a cake-walk and there were rumours of massive fraud.   The rightwing PAN actually started winning seats in the lower house of the Mexican Congress.   No one had ever heard of or dealt with such an event.

The "escudo" or shield battle emblem of
the Institutional Revolutionary Party

    The next election in 1988 was similar.   Challenges, strong challenges from both the left and the Right assailed the election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the PRI.   Official figures showed him winning with 52% of the vote.   Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of Lazaro the Expropriator, threatened blockages, barricades, and barrages saying that he had been robbed of the Presidency.   Manuel Clouthier of the Conservative PAN declared that he had also been robbed.    The press....especially the leftist international press, declared that Cardenas was obviously the true winner. Their thinking? Mexico has a lot of poor people....Clouthier represents the rich and there are fewer of them....everybody hates the PRI in the middle...so therefore Cardenas actually won the election.

This is the symbol and shield of the National Action Party.

Said to be the "Party of the Rich"it is actually an amalgam

of skilled blue collar workers,small business people, Country

Club rich, and professionals,and rural fundamental Catholics.

Very complicated nationalConventions as one might imagine.

Correlates to the American Republican Party...with very similar

divisions and point of agreement.

      The actual spot recounts of tabulations authourized by the Federal Election Commission for several thousand precinct revealed, however, that Clouthier probably had won the election, pretty much by the same margin as had his party-mate, Felipe Calderon Hinojosa 18 years later.    In any regard, Carlos Salinas de Gortari was declared the winner....and although a  member of the liberal wing of the PRI, he immediately began ruling from the conservative position.....engendering hatred forever among the Freida and Diego people in Mexico and among the Mrs. Mitterrand Nazi/Communist alliance, Vichy people in Europe.   That is why the pro-communist French bankers started the last international bankers' assault of the peso in 1993 at the end of his term.    It is also why they backed the pro-communist "sub-Comandante Marcos's"  Indian "rebellion" in Chiapas, in 1994.   That "revolt" solved all the problems, forever, again.    Marcos, by the way, refers to himself as a "hammer and sickle, Stalinist, Castro, Hugo Chavez classical communist".

Party of the Democratic Revolution Partido de la Revolución Democrática

This is the Democratic Revolutionary PartyEmblem.

This is the extremely violence prone, communist-lite,

 party.   Same solutions.  Tax the rich and then

 imprison them or drive them out of the country.

 Nationalization of all forms of production,

 transportation, and commercial activity.

All group functions of this party are accompanied

by mountains upon mountains of litter and broken

store windows, bus and auto window, and graffiti.

     

       Presently the old, old Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) seems to be gearing up for the tailor's fitting, as they say. But, last time, six years ago, the consensus was firm and done. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had won the election four months before it had taken place. The Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD) was making a list of companies to be expropriated, and what war criminals and oppressors would be brought to trial. The Oppression of the Masses would soon become...unabashedly....the Oppression by the Masses as they said. The only problem was that with the approach of election day, certain irrationalities and arrogance began to show itself. Lopez Obrador eschewed the necessity for submitting himself to participation with the "others" in the televised debates. The reason? The election is already settled. This Al Gore-like attitude did not play well with the literate.

       So, AMLO's ethereal lead did what ethereal leads do so well. In one month's time, he went from a 48% level....ahead of both of his principal opponents by around 20% each....to a 30% level and a fight for his political life. He lost. Even though he cried foul loud and long, the fact is that the votes were essentially counted in public and recounted in public, and like Al Gore before him, with each recount AMLO slid further back. After-election polls showed that virtually all of the PRI votes would have gone to the PAN candidate were there to have been a run-off. That would have left AMLO and the PRD essentially representing a narrow band of ultra-leftist rich and extreme upper-middle class elitist "intellectuals" and a body of the "siempre pobres" (forever poor) who are ever eager to latch onto whatever free crumbs might fall from the table. AMLO tried to maintain himself in position for the nomination this time around of the ultra-leftist PRD, but even they tired of his Fidel and Hugo-like four-hour lectures about secular morality and the evil of being a Gringo and the evil of wealth and America and the evil of religion. He is actively campaigning for the nomination of the minuscule "Party of Labour" , the Partido de Trabajo which is an equally looney but much smaller marxist group.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FINALLY :

        This election will be a referendum on the very real war against the drug trafficking Cartels. Felipe Calderon Hinojosa began this war in earnest. It had been picked at around the edges for years. The number of conspiratorial intrigues is astronomical. There are too many big people involved in the business....too many big politicians....too many Roman Catholic Church people....too many of these, those, and thems to ever confront the problem in any meaningful way.
    BUT!    Felipe Calderon Hinojosa and many, many social scientists and just regular people had come to the realization that the drug trafficking business had become much more than just a bother. It had ceased being something that could be seen in the flashy cars, ridiculous ostentation of 60 room mansions with 5 swimming pools and pet elephants in the front yards...pet tigers....Bentleys....half-witted sluts with $ 1,000,000 body jobs who would always wind up looking like an 87-year old Eleanor Roosevelt by the time they made it to 23 years of age.(...a few even look as bad as Nancy Pelosi during one of her frequent bad-face days.)     People...almost everyone...had looked the other way....tolerated the excesses..."que asi' son" (that's the way they are) and somehow equivilated the drug-trafficking business as an extension of the common everyday corruption that Mexico had lived with from 1917 until nearly the end of the 20th century.

     BUT!    The old classical corruption was typified by an empowered middle or lower level clerk or functionary saying, "Very Well, this is all in order, but there are no official stamps available. You will have to come back in eight days when Sr. Lopez returns.   He is the only one who can put the stamp on". 

    "But, Senorita, I have come in from Yurirria and it was a 14 hour train ride.   I have brought what you said I must the last time I came in and it is extremely difficult now to go back and then return."

     The lower level bureaucrat makes a strained face.."We are very busy here and I am very tired.   It is impossible to make any exceptions.   Come back in eight or ten days.  Next!".

     The petitioner starts to leave and as he reaches the door a nice man comes around the counter and says,"I am between clients.  It is terrible what that girl did to you.   We are all very distressed with the way she treats our fellow citizens.   Look, for 200 pesos, you wait here, and I will take a taxi over to where Lopez is....he's in a bar watching the soccer match, he's not somewhere important.   He's a nobody just like you and me, but his brother is the Congressman for some place up in Chihuahua....he doesn't even live there...but he's the congressman....Imagine.   Lopez carries the stupid little seals with him.   Give me the money, I'll pay him, the taxi, and keep a little for my services and you can be back on the train heading west this afternoon."

     So the hapless citizen sizes up this somewhat corrupt advantage-taker, and decides to fork over the 200 pesos.   The man says, "No, no...outside."

     They go to the "sitio de taxis" on the busy boulevard in downtown Mexico City.   Suit wearing, polished on-call taxi-drivers are reading newspapers, wiping down their cars, gossiping in the midst of the crazy cacophony of traffic, harkers, pedestrians, and general urban madness.   "Luis!  Can you help me for a few minutes?"

     "You need to run to the Bar La Oficina to see Lopez?"

     "Yes, my client is in a hurry to make it back to the train station."

      And so the citizen is left on the sidewalk.   In all the dishonesty and theatre, one wonders if the two hundred pesos will become a "free beer coffee break" for the bureaucrat and the taxi-driver or if there will be some honor at the bottom of the garbage can of humanity.    After twenty minutes, Luis, the taxi, and the bureaucrat come up.   The documents are signed and carry the official seals necessary. The taxi driver has already been paid a generous minimum for a very short drive, Lopez made enough for a few more free beers, the kinder and gentler shake-down artist has his shekels, and the citizen is off to the train station.

      But wait!    The bureaucrat says, "Eh, momento!   Lopez had a toothache.   Take the taxi to the train station....why walk?"   The toothache has reference to the concept of this form of corruption...known as the "mordita" or "mordida" (the little bite), depending upon the context or tense.   If Lopez had a "toothache", it meant that he had decided to take only 50 pesos for doing what he should have done for nothing.   The other fifty pesos?   Well, the gallant corrupt lower bureaucrat "split the difference" and "spread the wealth" by paying for the citizen's "free" ride to the train station with the citizen's same money that had been essentially extorted from him to begin with.    A form of Obamathink.....perfected in Mexico many. many, years before this present batch of marxist bandits came to Washington, D.C.

      That, and variations of that process, is what corruption meant in Mexico.   Sometimes it was for a few pesos.   Sometimes it was for a lot of pesos.   It still goes on, although much diminished from its peaks in the 1972 through 1990 period.    The Cartel people on the other hand, were almost entirely outside of private-public sector debates and relationships.   They offer a deal....it is called Plata o Plomo.   One has the choice between silver or lead.    Private people pay money for protection,  or they take money to do things that are illegal....earning the double reward of being paid and not being killed or not having their daughters raped, tortured, and killed.    Public officials also have the same opportunities to "serve"and the same choice of rewards.

      Felipe Calderon Hinojosa threw into this mix the Army, the Naval Infantry, and an increasingly morally more straight than not Federal Police presence.    The Army in the early 1990s had a bit of a stain with the 65th Regiment of Infantry....also known as the 'narco-batallion'....that served up in the Sonora State area for about 3 years.   Its two commanding generals were taken down in an internal investigation conducted by the Army.    Those two officers were sent to military prison.   One has since died.     Almost all Mexicans and all Americans known by the Old Gringo say that the Army is an institution to be admired in Mexico.  The Naval Infantry has also come into that same range of esteem in the past few years.

      The war that Calderon chose to join Mexico into has been difficult.   Most Americans cannot understand what is going on, not because they are stupid, but because the foreign press does not report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  

        But, Calderon has known.
       After watching his State of Michoacan become a killing field, lorded over by wild-eyed, stoned, crazy killers....turning a decent little dump like Apatzingan, Michoacan into a hell-hole of zombies who worship "Santa Muerte", that all Mexico...even all of North America is at stake.  Obama and his "Justice Department" can play games designed to take down the private sale, possession and use of firearms in America with programs like "Fast and Furious", and Mexican officialdom can play the obligatory "It's America's fault" by saying publicly that they are swamped by private-sale American guns in the hands of the Cartels....but they know the truth and state it privately and with increasing frequency.

      Mexicans also know that the war is not what anybody wants, but a huge majority say, "Pero, que mas nos queda?"   -   What else is left to us?    The period right around April of this year is marked as a turning point....when people began noticing real improvements in social order.   It has been a one step back and two steps forward deal, but the flood of reliable "anonymous denunciatins" has been the cornerstone to the successes of the Mexican military as well as civilian authourity.

     So, while Felipe Calderon Hinojosa cannot run for re-election by Constitutional prohibition, and while he cannot claim victory quite yet concerning this matter, it is very probable that the PAN and their main opponent the PRI will campaign by saying that ".....certain modifications, need t0 be made...."   It is very doubtful that either of these two groups will turn away from the war.     This is because the common Mexican is in favour of the war....in spite of the fact that he does not like the war.    The people like to see the traffickers receive their just rewards.   The press, foreign and domestic, has been stunned by this attitude.    The Mexican press has changed its tune from "combatant neutrality" to "the Military engaged a group of armed thugs".    People go out of their way to complement those in uniform.

      Other gradual withdrawals from subsidies, the continuation of privatization of the Mexican economy, and the gradual shift from organic law to precepts more in line with Common Law are not going to be changed or challenged by either of the two main parties, the PAN or the PRI.    Specifics will be coming out from both Parties.   The Old Gringo will be sifting through positions of the candidates and the parties on the issues and reporting those matters as well as the best and most reliable polling data as we move towards the First Sunday in July, 2012.

Stand by in coming days and weeks for more of the above as well as stories about BeBe the Labrador, the old regular dogs, and more importantly, the cats.   Other social and business matters will be forthcoming as well.    Birds, butterflies, forest animals, rains, flowers, and the like will also grace these pages.

Thanks again for your time and attention.   Your following gives solace to the Old Gringo during these times of problems with the father-in-law.   We have used your blog to wring venom out of the heart and you have been good enough to tolerate our frustrations.
More Later as always.
El Gringo Viejo

Knowest thine enemy....

---

September 11, 2011, 8:41 am

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

Paul,

      You are not going to allow or not allow me to make a comment on this post...which was not a post, but one of your illogical, ridiculous contributions that are regularly printed in the editorial section of the Old Grey Lady with lamentable frequency.

      In spite of the fact that Rosie knows that fire cannot burn steel, she, like you, answers questions that do not need to be asked.   For instance, she apparently is asking, "How can a building fall from fire when the girders are made of steel?    There! You see?  With my brilliant question I have proved that George Bush blew up the Twin Towers and Building Number 7.   I am such a brilliant person!"

      Why would one waste time showing Rosie how steel is poured, in liquid form...seething, hissing, orangish-red swirling mass of hellish liquid that later becomes....like the magic of eggs that are made in a grocery store and placed in little styrofoam cartons 12 at a time....sheets and rods of hard metal-looking stuff ?

      What does Giuliani do that is so evil?   Is it that he objected to horrid, perverse people rubbing elephant dung into and onto a potrait of the BVM and calling it art?   Do you call it art, Mr. Klugman?    Are your heroes those who flock to the art galleries that might have a pickle jar with a crucifix in it, filled with urine, is "art"?
       What is to be expected of people at a time like 11 September 2001?  How does the reasonable mind comprehend it?    Pearl Harbour  was at least understandable in military terms....surprize attack....poorly guarded flotilla.... Japanese hegemony in the Orient.     But how can one understand people so devoid of souls that they will enslave the "Palestinian people" as a form of hostage to promote a false cause....that they will suddenly kill and maim without cause or rational reason women, children, Jew, Gentile, Muslim, Hindu, aetheist, or any other in the way of some deranged declaration of self-will.
       How is George Bush supposed to react?   Should he send a note saying something to the effect that "I got your message, and I agree with you.   America is a bad place and Americans are bad people so I am going to kill myself and everybody here.   You can have North America to include in your Caliphate.   Once again, please forgive us."

       You people are amazing.    You say among yourselves, "George Bush is stupid and ignorant.    Oh! My un-god!   He was born in Texas.    A place full of retards and bigots.   Stupid inbred hicks and hayseeds."    That is Monday.

         Come Tuesday and it becomes, " and then GHWBush gets into an SR-71 and flies to Paris where the deal is made to release the American Prisoners in Teheran the day Ronald Reagan is sworn into office.     And this man's son is appointed president of the United States so that he can continue the cover up of that incident and also protect the interests of Halliburton in the Middle East".     It would take quite a genius to orchestrate that.   Obviously, it could only be done by some intellect so advanced that only Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson could figure it out.   After all, Valerie was so smart that she could claim that Scooter Libby had outed her as a CIA employee, several months after she appeared in Vogue magazine talking about her life at the CIA, and after driving around for a good long while with a CIA parking permit on her auto's front windshield.

        Or, perhaps we can remember those noble moments....three weeks after the incident.   Hillary Rodham Clinton ....shrieking.....shrieking like a banshee....on the floor of the United States Senate...rattling a New York Post in her pure hands with the headline "BUSH KNEW".     She shrieked and cackled repeatedly  "BUSH KNEW!!  BUSH KNEW!!.....perhaps that was her lashing out because of the depression she felt, knowing that Chelsea was down at the Ground Zero Location when the planes hit....although as Rosie knows there were no planes, just halogenic images beamed up from American and British submarines in the Hudson River.




Below is a summary of  (Sir Edmund) Hillary's recollections about that fateful morning.   The words are taken from another source, but verified by national publications citied.

Hillary Clinton's Shameless Terror Tale

Hillary Clinton is one of the most shameless people and when she happens to come out of her cave to stand in front of a camera for a softball interview, her behavior becomes very apparent. Hillary Clinton appeared on NBC's Dateline and told viewers of a heartbreaking story about how her daughter Chelsea had cheated death that morning of Sept. 11th.

"She had gone on what she thought would be a great jog," Hillary Clinton explained. "She was going down to Battery Park, she was going to go around the towers. She was going to get a cup of coffee and - that's when the plane hit!"

Apparently Hillary Clinton's tragic tale of Chelseas near death experience was a big hit with the media. "At that moment, she was not just a Senator, but a concerned parent," TODAY show's Katie Couric told viewers.

Hillary Clinton's shameless exploit wasn't reported in the media when it was contradicted by Chelseas own take of that morning of Sept. 11th. After it was clearly contradicted by her own daughter, Hillary and the media didn't touch the story any longer. Chelsea Clinton wrote about her own experience in a Talk Magazine article.

Chelsea's story was simple: she did not mention any morning jog, she did not mention plans to go to Battery Park near the World Trade Center Towers, only to be stopped by a coffee break. In fact, Chelsea writes that she was at her friend's apartment on Park Avenue South miles from Ground Zero when she learned of the attacks!

"I stared senselessly at the television," Chelsea writes.

(Old Gringo's observations begin anew)
      But, of course, we have to cut Her Majesty some slack, because she was still dizzy from corkscrewing into....well, better yet, let me allow Her Majesty to explain it.....

 HILLARY CLINTON: "You know, we landed in one of those corkscrew landings and ran out because they said there might be sniper fire. I don't remember anybody offering me tea on the tarmac when that was happening."

    One must quickly note that Chelsea was honest in her remembrance of the events of 11 September 2011.   Her mother will be known in history as a mendacious, murderous, marxist hag.  While Chelsea could reasonably hate me for these observations, my only response to her would be that she, as a daughter, is too good for Hillary as a mother.

Read more: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wilmouth/2008/03/25/flashback-hillarys-daring-bosnia-mission-w-sinbad-amuses-beckel#ixzz1Xfm5Zxin

       What slugs and dregs we find on the left.   Pelosi, Teddy, Al, Jesse, Jeremiah, Weiner, there's not enough space in cyberspace for the roll call.   But one of the first in the roll call of dishonor, mendaciousness, and arrogance will be Mr. Paul Klugman.

More later.

El Gringo Viejo

Perry is Right, the Rev. Mr. Gov. Huckabee is Wrong - Blast from the Past, worthy of review

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    After the Reverend Mr. Huckabee's appearance on Fox and Friends - Weekend this morning, the Old Gringo was moved to respond.   The Reverend Governor has a bone to pick with Governor Perry because Perry came out, somewhat stupidly, four years ago and supported Mayor Giuliani for the Republican Presidential nomination.   As a fellow Dixieland Governor, perhaps Huckabee had a right to scratch his head and wonder.

     The Rev. Gov. Huckabee now figures turnabout is fair play.   If you do something stupid, let me do something stupider, seems to be his operative mode.   Huckabee, and his closest ally in the argument, Mitt Romney, has ridden to the half-defense of Social Security.    He and Romney both think that we need to be "reasonable" in how we deal with Social Security.   "It's a popular program with millions of Americans and has been a big help to millions of Americans in the past," seems to be their observation.   Little matter that Social Security is a cyanide tablet covered with an hypnotic chocolate sauce.

      When questioned about whether, in fact, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, the good Rev. Gov. Mr. Huckabee finally suggested that perhaps it might be a "modified" Ponzi scheme, but....since the central government can print money, there is a final, fail-safe system that guarantees that Social Security can and will always pay its obligation.    It might pay with money that cannot buy anything, but it will pay.

      Those payments ultimately will have to be something like.."Do you want a system by which the Government sends you a check for 40 billion dollars that can buy perhaps a half-slice of stale bread and a 5 billion dollar lottery ticket.   Or, should we "democratically vote" for a system that would continue to provide 1,000 dollars per month as previously established....that 1,000 dollars would be enough to buy 3 grains of salt, for delivery in six years."   

      You see?...It's not a Ponzi Scheme...we complied and paid all of our obligations.

     The Old Gringo reminds people that this is not a far-fetched comparison.   I witnessed it in Mexico during the 1970s and 1980s.   Luis Echeverria Alvarez and Jose Lopez Portillo, two of the very worst presidents of Mexico ever, drove the currency and the economy into the tank by printing money to such a point that it is difficult to describe to people nowadays.

      Figure that in 1900, cavalry and other soldiers at Fort Brown, in Brownsville, Texas and others at various other forts and outposts on the Texas border with Mexico created disturbances on-base, protesting the Quartermaster's decision to pay the soldiers in greenback dollars.   They had been told that one of the benefits to serving on the border was the soldiers would be paid in Mexican coin at the rate of one peso to one dollar...and that that payment would be made in silver or gold equivalent.

      There was a settlement of sorts, when the quartermaster's people finally went over to the banks in Matamoros and exchanged dollars for rolls of Mexican silver 10 centavos (five pesos the roll) to be used for the monthly paymaster muster.

       Figure that the Old Gringo could buy a hamburger, a Coca-Cola in one of those nifty small green bottles, and leave a gratuity at a decent place in Miguel Aleman, Tamaulipas across from Roma, Texas in 1963 for ONE PESO!!  The gratuity  left was in the form of a huge and beautifully stamped copper 20 CENTAVO coin!!!!    For a decent meal, in a decent place, with normal looking clients and workers.

       By 1976 - 1980 the two above-named socialist-slug Presidents  had debased the currency and confused the Mexican economy to the point that it set Mexico back a minimum of 30 years in terms of socio-economic development.    They and their leftist, rational, reasonable, compromising, let's spread the wealth, social engineering  advisors, Secretaries of This and That had decided that the problem with Mexico was that there were too many poor people and too many rich people   So...they made it difficult for businesses to make profits and they froze rents and other charges, redirected agricultural harvests out of production areas and into areas that had no market for such products or capacity to process the harvests....they nationalized everything from two boat family net-fishing operations to the entire sugar processing industry.   They regulated the banks in increasingly un-predictable and capricious ways, ultimately nationalizing them.

      The peso began a trek that took it from 12.50 / 1.00 against the dollar...already beat up from the turn of the century due to the excesses and stupidity of previous socialist experiments and ensuing corruption which is endemic to all socialist governance.....to even new heights, or lows depending upon whether the truck hit you from behind or head-on.    After the episodes of the 1970s through about 1988 when some braking had been forced by reason to be applied, the peso finally began to slow down in its collapse.   Before it was done, however, it had fallen from the 12.50 level mentioned above to 4,000.00 / 1.00 .     Quite a legacy for the 20th century.   And to think that the Morgan Trade Dollar was devised to be 10% larger than the silver Mexican peso back the the 1870s so as to counteract the dominance of the Mexican currency piece as the primary medium of currency for international trade in the Orient.

        The Old Gringo carries to this day a beautifully engraved and stamped COMMON CIRCULATION COIN OF CURRENCY , a .720 fine, silver Mexican 50 centavo coin...known as a toston...to remind him of the danger of "being reasonable", "being moderate", "willing to compromise", "thinking rationally", "establishing a moderate, predictable discourse", and all the other bilge that brought Mexico to its knees back then, Germany of course after World War I, almost Canada durng the early 1990s and again ten years later;

Zimbabwe, Argentina, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, etc. etc. etc.   were all reasonable, adult, rational, forward looking, willing to compromise.

        IT IS ALL THE SAME BILGE.   Socialism begets unpayable debts and destroys nations.   The only solution is to somehow climb back out of the mid-air free-fall, like a cartoon character, and re-establish either a hard currency or at the very least a harder currency.

      The leftwing politicians in  Mexico had tried to  solve the problem of the poor people not having enough money and the rich people having too much, finally by making it possible for any impoverished Mexican to have 1,000,000 pesos in crisp, new 50,000 peso notes; very pretty ones with flowery emblems, official markings, revolutionary slogans and heroic images of heroic  heroes.....and with the 1,000,000 pesos a person could not buy a set of tires for his Volkswagen.    At one point, the nationalized banks were paying 150% interest on deposits of 360 days.

The 50,000 peso note in Mexico during the late 1980s
to which the Mexicans referred as "papel hygienico"
(toilet paper) and/or El Toston (the fifty cent piece).
In 1960, had there been such a thing as a 50k peso
note, it would have had a value of 4,000 USD.  By the
time the 50k note was published, it was worth a little
more than 12 USD.   The fruits of Socialism.

      The Old Gringo knew of some other Old Gringos back then who would play the interest rates and "let the Mexicans buy me another Oldsmobile"...who actually put money in during those days.   There has almost always been a set of independently well-to-do Old Gringos who liked to dabble in the interplay of Mexican Government paper, and Mexican bank paper interest rates.   Kinda fun if you like that sort of thing.   A person needs to be rich enough to allow the sure-to-follow increasee in interest rates to make up for any loss of principal due to devaluations.   It usually would take about 18 months to be back ahead of American CD rates.

         President Miquel de la Madrid finally began to return the banks to the private sector and,  in one of his last acts as a controller-by-decree, he ordered that the exchange rate of the peso to the dollar be frozen and further ordered massive spending cuts to balance the Mexican exchequer (the coup de grace for socialist programming and engineering).   That meant those last Old Gringos essentially made 150% on their Mexican Treasuries, even in dollar terms....because no Mexican government paper or bank, public or private has ever faulted on a peso debt.   A bunch of Oldsmobiles were bought on that trade.
 

       In the 2006 presidential elections Lopez Obrador, the pro-communist candidate for the Revolutionary Democratic Party of Mexico, laughed when it was brought up to him by press people...,"What you are proposing is just like what we went through in the recent past during the 1970s and 1980s.   Don't you think the people will reject that?"    Through his sinister giggling he responded, "The people have short memories.   We know how to implement those same policies, but this time, we shall do it more forcefully.   There will be no place to hide for those who exploit''.  Thank the Great Yahweh, Lopez Obrador lost.

      Therefore, the Old Gringo points out...Mexican Social Security (their socialized medical system), and all things in the government and in Mexican heavy industry...everything....everybody...learned clearly that socialism "gives" money to the poor, but that money  cannot purchase anything.  It has highly diminished purchasing power.  The solution of giving every derelict stumbling our of this bar to enter into another bar  a handfull of 50,000 peso notes for one more drink, is where we are heading....actually it is where we are.   And where we are soon to be is in a place where Michelle O'bama will be dropping bales of Margaret Sanger Commemorative  Golden Coathanger 1,000,000 dollar bills out her vacation planes so that all the little people can have lots of money.

      Didn't work for Eva, didn't work for the Weimar Republic, didn't work for nobody, nohow, never will.    The Buzzards they do gather.    So, esteemed Rev. Mr. Gov. Huckabee and Gov. Romney...you all are good fellows, hearty fellows well met, but if you say that the American Social Security System is not a Ponzi Scheme, you are both wrong....very wrong.

      The last note is...Anyone operating a gaming arrangement identical to the Social Security System....operating it privately in ANY AND EACH OF THE 57 STATES IN THE COUNTRY THAT I AM FINALLY PROUD OF FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE....  that person can be and frequently is correctly arrested and convicted of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud, to wit: the operation of a PONZI Scheme!!!!!!

Thanks for your time and attention.

EL GRINGO VIEJO

  And yes the Old Gringo would vote for Huckabee, Romney, or Perry for President. although he would prefer to re-establish Texas as an independent Republic with treaty-based associative agreements with whatever is left of the other 56 united States of America.
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