STEP AWAY FROM YOUR COMPUTER!

Well, then, I will go back to the garden. The peas, broccoli, onions, and cauliflower are calling me to come get them. Not to mention the weeds.

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Finally, no rain! I’ll be at the pool knocking back a few cold ones. Everyone have a great day.

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Stuck at work (sigh). I’ll take a break in a little while and walk out back and work in the garden for a few minutes. catlady is right: there are weeds calling as well as the cantelope plants that are growing large inside that are ready for transplanting outside.

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Good luck with that, trolls are called trolls for a reason, Andy showed us why at 8:57a with his cut-n-paste drivel that means nothing…

Go back to being a teabagging POS Andy, no one will be here today to see what you cut-n-paste from your RSS feeds…

ewwwwwwwwwww Trolls ewwwwwwwwwwwwww

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Redneck,
What do they cook at Simpson’s Trailer Park when they want to have a good time?

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Where’s my invite? I’m even from New England. Harrumph!

Guess I’ll go do that mowing thingy DB was talking about.

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Andy just eliminated the need for a gang of illegal alien yard slaves at the house with their environmentally devastating turf machines by knocking it out myself. If for some reason you should have a problem with my inherent conservative behavioral trait for taking care of my own responsibilities, instead of shirking them off on the government or some other entity, be sure to stop by and KMA.

DimBulb, Gwinnettian- Perhaps I’m not too late, Clorox scrubbing first, stain second. Use the best that they sell, it lasts twice as long as the cheap stuff. If you do proper surface prep.

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Sotomayor’s religion — and her lack of a record on abortion rights cases — has helped spark some concern among liberal interest groups that she may not be sufficiently pro-choice for some of them. The White House on Thursday offered strong, if vague, reassurances that she would support abortion rights.

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FA Cup: Chelsea 2 Everton 1

Frank Lampard with the game winner with 18 minutes left in regulation.

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Saul, come eat out of my garden–6 or 7 kinds of lettuce, 5 kinds of greens, peas, onions, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower are all ready. You can sit on the glider and pet my cats and dogs and try to lower your blood pressure a little. Listen to the breeze in the trees, hear the birds call, and look at 4 ranges of mountains, including Springer.

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Is this twitter “What are you doing”?

Drinking, smoking, pill popping, bbq ribs, hanging out at the pool.

The usual.

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Well the private sector failed, the hedge fund investors, with their top secret and totally deregulated headquarters in the Cayman Islands failed and odds are ten to one that the hedge fund investors sucked tons of money out of its GM investments, bonds and stock, and made a ton of money doing so, leaving the taxpayers and the GM employees to pick up the tab when they sucked the company dry, leaving a corpse. You forget, in a PUBLIC company, those who hold the majority of the stock, have a majority of the vote as to who and how the company is run

As many articles have pointed out, GM has been virually controlled by institutional investors for many, many years:

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How Hedge Funds Play GM
03/03/06 – 07:32 AM EST

General Motors(GM Quote), whose fortunes have long been tied to the American working class, is a playground for the rich when it comes to its stock.

Despite its populist renown, GM has long been controlled by institutional investors. That’s never been truer than now, as hedge funds specializing in distressed securities and so-called event-driven situations pile in with an increasingly complex palette of exotic wagers that embrace its common stock, convertible securities and bonds. While GM still boasts a high number of individual investors, they operate in a wonderland of esoteric gambles that could end up deciding the automaker’s fate. There is a lot to gamble on: Questions about whether GM can avoid bankruptcy, sell GMAC, and manage to avert a strike are all behind some kind of hedge fund trade.
Much of the trading involves GM’s voluminous publicly traded debt, a breed of securities that is effectively out of reach to the average individual investor. In many cases, however, these trades are either hedged or coupled with positions in the common — and unwary investors can easily find themselves being pulled around by the tail when one of them moves.

A lot of short-selling is in place, hedge fund managers note. About 15% of the company’s float represents short interest, or bets that the stock will fall — a pretty high figure. The short-interest ratio, as measured by the amount of short sales divided by the daily volume of shares, is only 5.51%, but this relatively low figure attests to the stock’s high volume more than low short selling, says a hedge fund manager. He compares those numbers with another large-cap name, Pepsico(PEP Quote), which has 1.7 billion of outstanding shares, 5.6 million of short shares and a daily volume of 4 million shares. The percentage of shorts is only 0.3% in the case of Pepsico and

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10271451/how-hedge-funds-play-gm.html

All the bull about the UNIONS is just that. Both the average investor, and the GM workers took it up the rear while the wealthy hedge fund or other institutional investors cleaned up.

Now they want even more. They want the government to save the principal of their investments, when they have made that back many times over by their professional manipulation of the market.

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And “The Street” is hardly your “liberal, marxist, socialist” source.

The fact is that the “free market” is no longer free and has not been for decades. Just like the selling short on the collaterized mortgage obligations and the other investors who took out Credit Default Swaps, betting that the price of both housing would drop and mortage holders would default made money when that happened, the were able to manipulate those markets to make SURE it happened and then expected to collect from the Investment banks that would have to pay off when happened.

The market has been controlled by those who can decide that they will make more money if the business they are investing in goes under, rather than survives, and they are in a good position to make sure it goes under.

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N.J, are you saying that the robber barons are so myopic that all they care about is short term profits as opposed to long term health for all U.S. citizens? Well– I am shocked, shocked to learn that there is gambling going on here.

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But 66% of GDP in this country comes from the consumer. The 80’s saw the dismantling/sell off of manufacturing which left service sector jobs. Outsourcing of the 90’s saw the dismantling of that sector. Consumer spending in the new millenium was driven by credit, primarily homeowners using the equity in their homes for purchases. Falling home prices have left many upside down in their mortgages. Jobs are lost and foreclosures lower neighboring home values feeding this cycle. I maintain that the robber barons are myopic and unwittingly or not, have killed the consumer. Keynesian theory that government spending will lift the economy relies on the fact that there is a work force, with good paying CAREERS that is productive and paying taxes.

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Good workout, good food and good wine to go with the good weather.

Slightly tipsy

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A job is also working in a factory making telephones (like my cousins did for western electric 20 years ago). A job is driving a taxi and making 60 grand a year. Its also just a different sort of career. And even if you change employers, if you are doing the same thing, that job is still a career.

Most of the people living in Georgia who are of an age where a college degree wasnt needed to get a decent job and were working industrial jobs making three times minimum wage or more are now working 8 dollar an hour security guard jobs in malls, hospitals etc. I know a lot of them. They used to be able to make rent, buy their kids christmas presents, etc. I know at least ten parents, single mothers, with dead beat dads who dont even come up with child support, who I GAVE money to last year so they could provide their kids with a christmas tree, christmas presents, and a christmas dinner. It was my christmas present to myself

Also jobs that you started when you got out of school and left when you retired. When I was getting out of college, there were a lot more jobs than careers, or to put it simply a job was a different kind of career.

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No, once jobs and careers were the same thing. You had a blue collar or white collar job. That was because regardless of the color, the one you went into was the one you ledft when you retired.

Most of the small businessmen I knew where I grew up, lived no better than most of their employees. The guy I knew who owned the diner downtown lived in a one bedroom apartment, he and his wife took the bedroom, their daughter had the living room. They guy who owned the insurnce company downtown, the same thing. My next door neighbor and best friend’s father owned a pizzeria and lived in the same sized apartment that my family with 7 kids lived in, and my dad was a contractor who built private houses from the time he got out of the navy in 1946 until the day he died.

No, where the real change came was in the tax code changes in the 1980’s Before this, there were limits that corporate executives could take in total remuneration. There were no enforced limits, the tax code just prevented them from deducting anything that went higher than 25 times what they paid their lowest paid employee. So if a company needed to do something to avoid taxes, they could give their employees an annual bonus, a christmas bonus, regular raises that kept up with inflation. Health benefits. Pensions. But the tax code changes allowed them to make a choice. Do I give myself a ten million dollar bonus, or do I give my employees a raise. Do I hire more workers. Do I give them benefits or not. My corporation gets the same tax break for either choice.

That also has played a large part in the stagnation of the American workers wages, while executive compensation increased 20 or 30 fold.

The excuse that these higher ranking workers need “incentives”. Their employees do not?

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NJ (aka scroll down) must be the world’s fastest typist, or is just regurgitating the party line.

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‘the strongest possible adjectives.’

That’s good.

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The right wing argument is basically full of flaws. While they talk about those who work hard earning the fruits of their labor, right wingers in fact have an immense disdain of hard work. They beleive that those who invest and sit on their fat asses collecting dividends who deserve the fruits of other peoples labor.

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It’s the weekend, and it’s late so maybe no one will notice these comments. But today I did step away from the computer to venture downtown on an errand. I’d never been to that part of downtown before, and what I saw absolutely shocked me.

I needed to be in the area around the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coke. That was just down the street from the Georgia Dome and not far from the Olympic Centennial Park. All prime tourist draws.

These places are in a slum. There’s no other word to describe it. If I had to go down there after dark, it would be in an armored car with a .50 caliber machine gun.

How in this world did the city’s leaders let this happen? If you’re going to invite someone into your house, do you put them through the gauntlet first? And expect them to come back?

The US is in a major economic downturn, and the call went out for suggestions for positive economic development that would yield long-term returns for communities. I really hope that a proposal for de-slumming this area was part of the process.

If it wasn’t, then it surely should be.

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OMG, just scrolled quickly through…looks like the people with no life spent their day here.

I didn’t even open my laptop until now. I spent the day…(1) ran 10 miles, (2) took down a tetanus fence, (3) tilled up my ENTIRE back yard, (4) unloaded half a ton of flagstone outta my minivan, and (5( cleaned up….all in time to go watch a kiddie movie in the park with my kid, then grab a bite to eat.

Know what I ate? Fox Bros version of a burger…omg. Please try it. It will make you stop time and be happy.

Now it’s time for a six pack of beer and a Harlan Coben novel.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, y’all!

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Dobbins is just full of leeches.

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Jaypat, It’s not all that bad. That area has been slowly de-slumifying on it’s own for years. The current George Bush economy has slowed the process since George Bush’s real estate bubble popped.

Thank goodness we have Obama, he’ll fix everything.

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