Not only does the US Government bailout of financial giants Lehman Brothers (and others) make a mockery of the supposed "free market" concept, it highlights the lengths to which Bush and his cronies will protect themselves whilst simultaneously shitting in the mouth of democracy.
Tucked into the corners of shit-gripper Bush's bailout bill is the following clause:-
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
So, let's quietly steal this money from the taxpayers, fill the pockets of the already wealthy, then allow NO court in the land to even question what the fuck is going on.
Nice work if you can scam it George.
The Bush Administration's Bailout Bill
Sarah Palin
Oh, come ON people... how could I NOT get my shit gripped by this utterly fake weather girl?
• She boasted to the world that she sold the Alaska state governor's jet on eBay for a profit.
Sarah Palin, shit gripper, ACTUALLY sold it for a $600,000 LOSS to.... well, wouldn't you know it?.... to a Sarah Palin campaign contributor!
• She boasted that she told Congress "Thanks but no thanks on the Bridge to Nowhere".
Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, ACTUALLY supported the project initially, only reversing her stance after she had received $223 million in federal funds... which she then blew on other equally unnecessary projects throughout the state.
• She boasted to the world that she "championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress".
Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, as mayor of Wasilla, ACTUALLY employed a Jack Abramoff-connected lobbyist who successfully secured $27 million for "pork" in the town, the equivalent of more than $4000 per resident.
Oh, and as Governor, Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, has requested $453 million in earmarks, seven times the national average.
• John McCain told the world that he had found a running mate who "stopped government from wasting money"
Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, as mayor of Wasilla, ACTUALLY wasted $15 million (from an overall city budget of just $20 million) on a hockey arena whose construction was delayed because she hadn't bothered to properly finalize the purchase of the land on which it was to be built. This then forced taxpayers to pay out more than six times what the land was originally agreed to be sold for, and the city having to seize it under eminent domain.
• She stated that she was an "enemy of taxes", that "taxes were too high" and that Barack Obama "wants to raise them"
Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, ACTUALLY - as a result of the hockey arena fiasco mentioned above - RAISED sales tax by 25% to pay for the shortfall caused by her maladministration.
Oh, and Alaska currently collects the MOST taxes per resident of ANY state in the country.
• During her GOP convention speech she stated that she has "protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending"
Sarah Palin, shit gripper, as governor of Alaska, sought travel reimbursement for over 300 nights away. 300+ nights she ACTUALLY spent in her own home!
• Also, let us not forget that Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, tried to have Wasilla's town librarian fired after unsuccessfully trying to persuade her to remove/censor books which Palin found personally objectionable.
• Or that Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, preaches abstinence - rather than proper sex education - something which her daughter, Bristol, obviously took no notice of.
• Or that Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, believes dinosaurs roamed the earth 4000 years ago and is something of a bible-thumping religious nutcase who also thinks "God" wants America to drill for more oil in Alaska.
• Or that Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, is so eagerly "pro-life" that she wants to stop women having abortions even when those women have been raped, battered or abused at the point of conception.
• Or that Sarah Palin, shit-gripper, is so hypocritical about "pro-life" that she approves of the death sentence.
I could literally bang on for hours about how unsuitable this woman is for cleaning my toilet, let alone how she should never be allowed to have a say in how America is run.
Federal Government
The American public filed nearly 22 MILLION Freedom of Information requests with the federal government in 2007.
Only 1 in 3 requests was granted.
Seems as if you can't even discover the truth behind what's gripping your shit anymore?
Republicans in Macomb County
James Carabelli, the chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan is planning to block people from voting in the upcoming election if their homes are in foreclosure.
He told the Michigan Messenger “We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses”
However, a foreclosure notice is hardly PROOF that a resident no longer lives at an address, as many stay in their homes whilst negotiating and/or refinancing the mortgage.
If proof is needed for anything, let's state that Michigan is recognised as a key swing state for November.
Let's also state that majority of households who have defaulted on their loans - and thus could be prevented from casting their ballot on November 4th - are African-American families.... who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters.
Whilst the Republicans are saying they want to avoid voter fraud, they themselves can easily be accused of voter suppression.
It looks like the shit-gripping GOP is gearing itself up to, again, STEAL the election. Just like they did in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.
Charles B Rangel
Congressman Charles B Rangel failed to report over $75,000 of rental income from a villa he owned in the Dominican Republic.
Congressman Charles B Rangel is Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee... which writes the Federal tax code.
He claims he did not realise he had to declare the money as income, whilst his lawyer comments that "it would be inaccurate to infer that the congressman was trying to conceal a highly lucrative investment"
Surely the fact that it was "highly lucrative" was the very reason he tried to conceal the income?
Rangel refuses to resign his position - even as hugely embarrassing as his actions are to the Democratic Party ahead of the November elections. His statement of "I really don't believe that making mistakes means you have to give up your career", merely underlines his shit-gripping indifference to, and ignorance of, the very tax payers he is supposed to be representing.
Wal-Mart
In what is being contested as an illegal act, it appears Wal-Mart's latest attempt to control America is to tell its staff how to vote in the upcoming Presidential election.
The New York Times reported that Wal-Mart Stores Inc have been warning their senior managers that if the Democrats gain power in November, Barack Obama will "change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies"
By "companies" they mean "Wal-Mart" obviously
Store managers and department heads were summoned to mandatory meetings around the country where bosses stressed the impact if the Republicans lost the election.
A meeting leader in Missouri is quoted as saying "I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union"
Yeah, god forbid workers in the USA should get any rights. Un-be-shit-grippingly-believable.
An aside
Oh, please don't think things haven't been gripping my shit lately because they most certainly have!
However, I must apologize for the lack of shit-grippable entries.
Currently a shortage of available time to get here and write as often as I would like is.... well.... is gripping my shit!
Normal service - if such a thing even exists in the blogosphere? - will resume very shortly.
Promise
TV Commercials
OK, I get that TV commercials are a required evil that "pay" for most of the programing we receive.
But really, is it THAT necessary for THE FUCKING VOLUME of ads to be SO FUCKING LOUD when we break from the show we were enjoying?
The current Beijing Olympics is highlighting this eardrum-damaging craziness and it is gripping my shit!
Stop it!
(Please)
Whole Foods Market
Back in June Kroger supermarkets started recalling potentially-contaminated meat supplied to them by Nebraska Beef Ltd
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) stated that Nebraska Beef production practices were “insufficient to effectively control E. coli 0157:H7 in their beef products” The agency added that the products subject to recall may have been produced under unsanitary conditions.
At least 41 people in Michigan and Ohio were stricken with E. coli food poisoning that the FSIS linked (through epidemiological investigation and genetic testing) to Nebraska Beef’s ground beef products. 19 people or more had to seek treatment for related food poisoning in hospitals, including one Michigander who was hospitalized for kidney failure.
Following the announcement by the FSIS, Kroger seemed to respond rapidly and admirably.
Did the people at Whole Foods - whose motto is "Quality Foods from sources you can trust" not get the memo? Maybe no-one in the company is intellectual enough to watch the news or even read a newspaper?
Whole Foods failed to recall any of the meat they sourced from Nebraksa Beef until last Friday, August 8th.
Meaning they had been happily selling it for over a month since the problems were first acknowledged.
Whole Foods market themselves as a 'better than the rest' chain with a nod to 'cleaner, healthier living'. This is what their website states ... our business is to sell the highest quality foods we can find at the most competitive prices possible. We evaluate quality in terms of nutrition, freshness, appearance, and taste. Our search for quality is a never-ending process involving the careful judgment of buyers throughout the company.
However, it would appear this statement is mere lip service. Their search for quality must have ended, and their failure to quickly recall contaminated beef may have done a lot more than just grip some people's shit?!
One VERY poor management decision at Whole Foods Markets should have customers seriously considering if the chain's higher-than-average prices (for "quality" remember) are justified.
American Family Association
According to their website, the American Family Association (AFA) "exists to motivate and equip citizens to change the culture to reflect Biblical truth and traditional family values"
By biblical truth they must mean that hoary old fictional tale that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Indeed, a fine truth to live by.
The AFA is a VERY right wing conservative "pressure group" which attempts to police the entertainment industry (and "social culture" in general) over the things they believe attacks the association's own religious concept of "traditional family values".
The AFA is very scared of gay people.
In the past it has boycotted companies for offering same-sex partner employee benefits (including the family friendly Disney Corporation) and condemned others (Sears) for running commercials on TV channels such as the LGBT-friendly Logo.
More recently it has announced a boycott of McDonalds because not only did the corporation have a director on the boards of the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, but also because the fast food giant had sponsored a gay pride parade.
Apparently this boycott is "just about" McDonalds, as a corporation, refusing to remain neutral in the culture wars.
With hypocrisy already rampant here - why should McDonalds remain neutral when the AFA continually broadcasts its own lack of neutrality? - let us comment on something else that appeared on its website.
Remember me saying the AFA is scared of gay people?
Indeed, the association is so scared of gay people it even refuses to acknowledge their apparent appropriation of the very word "gay".
True to their word, the AFA website has a policy of always replacing the word "gay" with the word "homosexual"
So the website's auto-correct function blew a fuse when it wrote a piece about the Beijing Olympics, more specifically 100m track star Tyson Gay.
"Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has... "It means a lot to me," the 25-year-old Homosexual said. "I'm glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me."
You just know that for all their remarks, extreme hypocrisy exists inside this holier-than-thou association - so I eagerly wait for the time when, for example, a senior member gets done for pedophilia or an executive is unceremoniously outed.
Peddling this type of hate-filled agenda - and persecuting a whole sector of society - smacks of more than just a hint of Hitler - and it most certainly grips my shit.
Indeed, in my head, I have already started to auto-correct what the "F" in AFA actually stands for!
Precious NYC Mommies
New York City spent MILLIONS of dollars upgrading all its children's playgrounds, installing rubber safety matting to protect the little tots from falling off equipment and hurting themselves.
Seems as if New York City has no way of protecting those same children from stupid parents?
The city is now being sued by a number of parents - with the claims for "damages" being anything from $750,000 to $1m - because their kids burnt their bare feet on the rubber playground surface on what were extremely hot summer days.
This act of "nanny state" litigation brings up so many questions, including
1• What are parents doing taking their kids out to an unshaded playground in the heat of the summer?
2 • Why would ANY parent let their children go barefoot in ANY NYC park given the potential dangers of used syringes, broken bottles etc.?
3 • Ever heard of an invention called "shoes"?
Don't get me wrong. I feel sorry for the kids if their feet got burned and they suffered some pain.
But the parents/nannies pucker me right up and grip my shit because, as grown-ups, they should certainly know better than to let their kids play barefoot in that type of heat & environment.
It's the parents who have been irresponsible here, NOT New York City. Why should the city pay for your ignorance and stupidity?
Chevron
It's rare that I am open-mouthed at something I read - the inhumane actions of people rarely surprising me, quite frankly - but this past weekend I happened across something that gripped every conceivable dollop of shit in my system.
Mainly because it gripped it in so many varied ways.
I cannot recall ANY major news report or article on this scandal. Why is that? Has the story been somehow suppressed? It wouldn't surprise me if Texaco/Chevron had somehow managed to keep a lid on this, but you would think that in the ever-growing 'ecological climate' someone somewhere would have blown the whistle on this disgraceful corporate act?
Maybe there's just too much money and influence floating around?
Borne out by the details of an even more disgusting second act to this tale of corporate indifference.
For the past five years a lawsuit has been tried in Ecuador, which has accused Chevron of trying to squirm out of the responsibilities to clean up the rainforest and pay compensation to the many indigenous Indian peasants who have suffered physical deformities and cancer as a direct result of the disaster. A disaster, by the way, which has been described by some as an "Amazon Chernobyl".
Chevron, whose net profit for the past quarter totalled $5.98 billion ("crisis, what gas crisis?") have been resisting the charges, denouncing the Ecuadorian claim as nothing more than a "shakedown".
However, this spring a court-appointed expert recommended that Chevron pay between $7.2 billion and $16.3 billion to clean up the rain forest.
This somewhat moved the goalposts for the oil giant, suddenly forcing them to announce the decision to their shareholders and spawning the next - and quite incredible - piece of shit-gripping.
Chevron have rounded up a veritable army of lawyers and lobbyists and set them free in Washington.
That's maybe not surprising given the influence lobbyists currently enjoy. But what they are lobbying FOR most certainly is.
They are lobbying the Bush administration (an administration run by a bunch of 'oil men' remember) to.... get this.... pull all US trade preferences for Ecuador if that little country's "leftist government" doesn't quash the lawsuit
It's quite incredible isn't it?
But I'm not quite done yet. With my rectal muscles already at bursting point in the ol' shit gripping department, I can report that a spokesman for US Trade Representative Susan Schwabb has confirmed her office is "considering the request"
How can it even be considered? Why is it not immediately laughed out of the room?
The government is actually"considering" imposing trade sanctions on an entire country to punish the people of that country because they had the temerity to file suit against an oil company for creating a major ecological disaster in their rivers and streams.
After all that, I definitely need some fruit'n'fibre.
Verizon
Dr Herman I. Libshitz is a retired physician who lives in West Philadelphia.
He and his wife own a summer home in Reheboth Beach, Delaware.
The summer place had a simple dial-up service for the internet, which Dr Libshitz decided to upgrade to DSL.
He contacted Verizon to get the service installed.
Who were unable to complete the job because when Dr Libshitz was prompted to create his user name and e-mail address, the system spat his request out.
Why?
He called the Verizon help line, only to be told - and I am NOT making this up - "We can't install it because your name has 'shit' in it"
Annoyed, he asked to speak to a supervisor. Who gave him exactly the same response, having the additional balls to actually suggest Dr Libshitz could simply misspell his last name in order to confirm the account! (WTF?!)
The good doctor, a Vietnam war veteran who had previously signed his own proud name to several hundred academic papers without incident, decided that Verizon wasn't for him and stuck with his AT&T dial-up.
This kind of moronic 'holier-than-thou' censorship nonsense really grips my Libshitz. (I say that with every respect in the world)
Psychiatric Research
Three prominent psychiatrists - Dr. Melissa Del Bello, Dr. Alan Schatzburg and Dr. Joseph Biederman - recently admitted to Congress that they had all "under-reported income they had received from drug companies".
All three are considered "Key Opinion Leaders" within the psychiatry community - indeed, Dr. Schatzburg is the president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) - and all three have been vocal advocates of using anti psychotic drugs to treat children believed to suffer from bipolar disorder.
This despite the fact that the drugs in question have been approved ONLY for adults. There is also a big question mark hanging over the legitimacy of "childhood bipolar disorder" by other mental health professionals too, some saying it is usually just "kids being kids".
Call me crazy (and I'm sure some of these professionals would) but do you think there could be ANY link between the payola these Doctors received from big pharma and the recommendations they subsequently made?
Powerful anti-psychotic drugs for children, basically being prescribed for YOUR kids directly by the drug industry.
Everyone should be having their shit gripped by that.
The Airline Industry
Let it be known that, in the aftermath of that disaster, the Airline Industry has maintained the very real potential to actually kill hundreds, maybe thousands, more civilians as a direct result of their continued negligence.
Following diligent Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) investigations, it was determined that the cause for the explosion/crash was an electrical short circuit which ignited gasoline vapors in one of the plane's major fuel tanks.
To combat the accident happening again, the FAA has spent the past 12 years having to fight over the issue with the Airline industry, first strongly recommending, and - more recently - having to ORDER the industry to retrofit a new safety device to the fuel tanks of up to 55% of all commercial planes currently in use.
The industry - complaining about 'cost issues' in today's marketplace (apparently, each plane would cost $90k - $300k) - has so far been surprisingly successful in resisting the necessity. Its latest delay tactic with the FAA - and here's another shit-gripper folks - is that it is negotiating to be permitted to take another NINE years to carry out the necessary work!
For those poor at math amongst us, that means it could take a mind-boggling and staggeringly immoral 21 years from the date of the crash to fix a very important recognised safety issue on many of the planes we happily board each and every day of the week.
For us at IGMS, three things spring to mind here.
One, this stinks - and I mean REEKS - of more lobbyist interference.
Two, it seems that insurance against a class action lawsuit - let's suggest "negligence leading to murder" shall we? - must be less costly than actually carrying out the work.
and three, if the officials at the FAA actually HAD any hairy danglers at all - or even serious influence - they would simply ground each and every plane until the work had been carried out. You can bet your sweet derrière that the companies would get the work done then!
Just a thought for everyone as they board their next flight. Happy traveling!
This little dude on the toilet was created by lego artist