My kids cajoled me into taking them to the movies. It turned out that the starting time for Pixar’s hit animation, was the closest, so after asking, “What’s up with UP?”, I settled into my seat, knowing the cost of a movie ticket was definitely up. It turns out that I was floating around in the clouds, on a nostalgic and humorous adventure, surely more entertaining to a senior than the kids.

A guy loses his wife and can’t afford the trip to Paradise Falls that they had always dreamed of and saved for. When developers come to evict him, they are met by the deployment of thousands of air balloons, which tear his house from its moorings and our geriatric hero heads into the unknown. I couldn’t help, at this juncture in history and our economy, but think of our country floating away, carried somewhere by a lot of hot air. And inflation…of trillions of balloons.

One hundred thousand billion is a trillion. Two bailout packages of approximately 870 billion dollars each, on top of a three trillion dollar budget is almost FIVE trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money spent somewhere in one year by the Obama Treasury Press. Estimates are that our national debt will exceed 25 trillion dollars by the end of the current four year Administration, and that is only if watchdogs of fiscal responsibility are successful in applying some brakes to the careening behemoth our by the people-for the people government has become. President Obama and the majority Congress are the equivalent of a group of teenage girls at the Mall with dad’s credit cards. As long as a store—any store—does not decline them, the shopathon is on!

Worse still, the money paid out to stimulate the economy is being paid not to the unemployed, trying to survive a year of unparalleled recession, repossession, and downsizing; but to the leaders of the collapse. While it is true, poor people do not employ poor people, (jobs are created by investors and the wealthy) the fact that greed and mismanagement is only enabled by federal bailout, not curtailed, is painfully obvious.

The big three financial giants; Wells Fargo, CitiGroup, and Bank of America, have continuously shown huge profits, and have cobbled up lesser institutions that faced bankruptcy, such as Lehman Bros, Merrill Lynch, etc. These Corporate giant lenders avoided toxic asset losses, with substantial bailout money, then turned and bought the struggling competition with a Federal windfall. These BIG THREE held twenty percent of the nations deposits in 2007. Today they have 33% of the total deposit capital. This is not Darwinian; the fittest survived by taxpayer grants, in a hope the infusion of cash would be lent and stimulate the dead economy. Most of the money, however, went to killing off the competition. Who knows the full extent of government strings attached to the free money?

When aid is intended for a target faction and is intercepted by the reigning power, most of the money disappears and is somehow consumed by administration costs or other inventive descriptions of avarice. South American and African foreign aid was very ineffective due to the powers that volunteered to distribute it.

The self indulgent orgy on Wall Street is ongoing. CEO salaries and perks haven’t changed. Severance contracts and golden parachute deals are still crafted, while the ranks of the unemployed swell. Bernanke has declared the recession is OVER! We missed that memo! Mean while, paralleling UP, the balloons of national debt, taxation, and unbridled spending levitate our nation; to float sublimely into the clouds on a path to Paradise Falls, where the rich tycoon waits, with his nasty dogs, to devour us.  Good fairy story—bad reality—gotta start popping some balloons, America!

A senator called the US President a liar. The lie?  That illegal immigration would not impact the proposed national Health Plan. This “tempest in a teapot” has resulted in apologies and reprimands. Wow! Cue the Four Horsemen! The end of times is imminent.

President Obama has another great opportunity for a beer Summit. He needs to have Joe Wilson over for a Sam Adams in the Rose Garden. IT WORKED ON THE POLICE! Maybe not a Sam Adams, that guy was a rabble rouser—he called people liars; even kings who ruled over him. That makes his beer too outspoken for today’s non-confrontational climate. Maybe a Silver Bullet.

An irritated, and obviously frustrated congressman from South Carolina, tells the President of United States that he is ingenuous in his statement of fact and time stands still. Millions of non-citizens are already bankrupting Medicare and Welfare and the judicial and prison and school systems. It has the California budget in shambles. We are too PC conscious to tell it how it is. We are expected to refer to the millions who have illegally entered our country as “citizens who are not yet documented”.

But, the time honored rules of decorum and civility are compromised, and a censure or resignation must be imposed. Joe Wilson should not speak from the heart, but craft his words in a more elegant verbiage.  Maybe, “Sir, you spin!”, would be appropriate. Politicians and lawyers, for as long as there has been language ARE RENOWNED FOR LIES! They call it obfuscation, misrepresenting, or spinning.

I watched the video, and was not appalled, as many are. It didn’t seem acrimonious. It was definitely a different opinion, at a less than opportune time, (kinda in the middle of President Obama’s speech before Congress), probably a little disrespectful, but turns out to be true.

Either the President had bad information or was deliberately coloring the facts—neither of which exemplified being prepared. I can’t even count the number of “Bush Lied” posters and hecklers appearing over the last eight years, and during the last Presidential Campaign; it is certainly not the first time a President has been accused of lying. Or actually did. It seems Clinton had never had sexual relations with that woman. Nixon had never heard of a gate, absolutely not a Water Gate, he even had blank stretches of audio tape to prove it! What Bay of Pigs invasion? And the list goes on.

Joe said it was so, and it was. He apologized to the President and the Vice President, and it should be ended. But it is not over. The Potomac dogs are out, and Joe needs to say it ain’t so! An apology for a temper outburst is not enough—even though he charged the President accurately—the bill’s proponents have changed the offending omissions.

Americans  have honored and quoted outspoken and flamboyant remarks from leaders in our country for a couple of centuries now. I wonder what the offended lawmakers would do if Patrick Henry happened to listen to the deliberations on the Hill.

I’m sure he just meant spin, it only sounded like lie; our elected officials never call each other liars—once they get elected. Just spin it, Joe. It was only a word, not your shoe, hey, wait—Joe was shoeless!

My kids cajoled me into taking them to the movies. It turned out that the starting time for Pixar’s hit animation, was the closest, so after asking, “What’s up with UP?”, I settled into my seat, knowing the cost of a movie ticket was definitely up. It turns out that I was floating around in the clouds, on a nostalgic and humorous adventure, surely more entertaining to a senior than the kids.

A guy loses his wife and can’t afford the trip to Paradise Falls that they had always dreamed of and saved for. When developers come to evict him, they are met by the deployment of thousands of air balloons, which tear his house from its moorings and our geriatric hero heads into the unknown. I couldn’t help, at this juncture in history and our economy, but think of our country floating away, carried somewhere by a lot of hot air. And inflation…of trillions of balloons.

One hundred thousand billion is a trillion. Two bailout packages of approximately 870 billion dollars each, on top of a three trillion dollar budget is almost FIVE trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money spent somewhere in one year by the Obama Treasury Press. Estimates are that our national debt will exceed 25 trillion dollars by the end of the current four year Administration, and that is only if watchdogs of fiscal responsibility are successful in applying some brakes to the careening behemoth our by the people-for the people government has become. President Obama and the majority Congress are the equivalent of a group of teenage girls at the Mall with dad’s credit cards. As long as a store—any store—does not decline them, the shopathon is on!

Worse still, the money paid out to stimulate the economy is being paid not to the unemployed, trying to survive a year of unparalleled recession, repossession, and downsizing; but to the leaders of the collapse. While it is true, poor people do not employ poor people, (jobs are created by investors and the wealthy) the fact that greed and mismanagement is only enabled by federal bailout, not curtailed, is painfully obvious.

The big three financial giants; Wells Fargo, CitiGroup, and Bank of America, have continuously shown huge profits, and have cobbled up lesser institutions that faced bankruptcy, such as Lehman Bros, Merrill Lynch, etc. These Corporate giant lenders avoided toxic asset losses, with substantial bailout money, then turned and bought the struggling competition with a Federal windfall. These BIG THREE held twenty percent of the nations deposits in 2007. Today they have 33% of the total deposit capital. This is not Darwinian; the fittest survived by taxpayer grants, in a hope the infusion of cash would be lent and stimulate the dead economy. Most of the money, however, went to killing off the competition. Who knows the full extent of government strings attached to the free money?

When aid is intended for a target faction and is intercepted by the reigning power, most of the money disappears and is somehow consumed by administration costs or other inventive descriptions of avarice. South American and African foreign aid was very ineffective due to the powers that volunteered to distribute it.

The self indulgent orgy on Wall Street is ongoing. CEO salaries and perks haven’t changed. Severance contracts and golden parachute deals are still crafted, while the ranks of the unemployed swell. Bernanke has declared the recession is OVER! We missed that memo! Mean while, paralleling UP, the balloons of national debt, taxation, and unbridled spending levitate our nation; to float sublimely into the clouds on a path to Paradise Falls, where the rich tycoon waits, with his nasty dogs, to devour us.  Good fairy story—bad reality—gotta start popping some balloons, America!

The decision to release the mastermind of the attack on the  World Trade Center, has left a gaping hole in the fabric of justice, and voided the expectations of victims’, to have survivors and some kind of civilized law tribunal exact a punishment in their behalf. A couple of weeks after the release of Al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Mohammed,  a high court in Britain sentenced four British Muslims to 40 years in prison for plotting a similar attack on trans-Atlantic aircraft with liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks.

The outrageous lack of continuity and reason in this development should make all thinking humanity pause for a moment of deliberation about the right and wrong in each scenario. First, an admission by a captured criminal is not enough to hold him or punish him. Bin Laden’s twisted interpretation of a passage in the Koran which admonishes the reader “to slay the pagans wherever ye find them” was the motivation of his 1998 fatwa instructing Al-Qaeda followers to “kill Americans everywhere”. This fatwa galvanized Khalid into plotting, and executing, a heinous mass murder on American soil, which included an attack on our military center and an aborted attack on Congress.

A quote from Al Jazeera in April 2002 delivers Khalid’s own confession, “My work is to send a message to infidels that they should stop giving a hand to the coward Jews in Palestine…..I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z.” This operation took the lives of 2998 people, many of them courageous rescuers.

Unbelievably,  our own government played a part in his release, which culminated in a return to his home with an exaggerated HERO welcome. Congress debates today, about GITMO and its detainees, in an iconic and venerable building that Khalid Mohammed planned to be rubble, and would have succeeded there too, if not for some real Heroes aboard United Flight 93.

Abdulla Ahmed Ali, just sentenced for plotting “the biggest terrorist attack since 9/11”, will stay in prison for 40 years, along with three collaborators, for thinking about mass murder. The guy who admits to an A to Z implementation and successful attack is released in 8 short years, by a nation that owes real heroes. And we wonder about town meetings and protestors? Maybe it’s time to ask the mother country to help out.  The famous rallying cry in the night; Paul Revere’s, “The British are coming!” could be for a different reason today. We have lost sight of freedom and patriotism. And we have skewed the term HEROISM.

While chants and celebratory automatic weapons fire from the rooftops to honor Khalid Mohammed, a lonely voice, captured on an open cell phone still echoes in the forest at Shanksville, Pa. It is the calm resolute voice of a brave patriot, “Are you guys ready—let’s roll!”