How Come So Many Layoffs?

A friend of mine thinks all the massive layoffs that increased right after the elections are caused by greedy corporations that "don't want to give Obama a chance".

Of course, he thinks everything is pretty much caused by greedy corporations and Republicans that "don't want to give Obama a chance".

I think it's kind of like skydiving.

Why do people skydive? Because you have the thrill of falling and soaring like a bird, then your parachute opens and you drift safely to the earth.

It's a risk, but the rewards are pretty great, so people pay a lot of money to skydive and pilots and ground crew and chute packers and parachute sellers make money.

Now imagine someone removes 50% of the panels from everybody's parachutes. Now when you jump out of the plane, you'll still soar all right, but when the chute opens a lot of the fun of the thing goes out of it. There is all that terror and screaming and then when you hit the ground there will be the broken bones and the months in the hospital and a good chance you'll be dead.

The risk factor just went up to the point that it's no longer much fun to jump out of the plane. Taking 50% of the panels from the chute took all the fun out of skydiving. So instead of skydiving, you do something else with your money besides hire chute packers, pilots and ground crew. You don't buy expensive parachute equipment. Instead you do something cheaper and less risky.

I hear that attendance at the movies is way up!

Economics 101.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom

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Who Lied about Saddam's WMD's

Simple question.

Did President Bush make up a story about Saddam' wanting to acquire yellowcake uranium for his nuclear program?

Conventional wisdom assumes that he did in order to have an excuse to invade Iraq.

Did Saddam Hussein have any WMD's or materials for making WMD's?

Conventional wisdom says no! Saddam was simply tired of all those pesky weapons inspectors and there really wasn't anything dangerous in Iraq any more.

The truth, it turns our is somewhat different. In a July 5, 2008 story in the Associated Press and printed in the archives of none other than MSNBC and CBS ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334 ) is this delightful story that got zero coverage in the media. Had it been a story about how Bill Clinton had saved the free world by bombing a Sudanese aspirin factory, it would have been top news for a week. Instead they buried it.

So what's the story? The United States in June 2008 removed 3500 barrels (that's 550 metric tons for those of you who are counting) of yellowcake uranium from a secret storage facility in Iraq.

Why did the President keep it a secret when telling about it would have helped him politically?

Well, they couldn't get it our of Iraq because no one wanted it transported through their country. So we kept it's existence secret till we moved it out so that terrorists in Iraq wouldn't know it was there and attempt to take it.

There are a couple of conclusions you sorta have to come to.

1. Saddam did have materials for weapons of mass destruction. Stick yellowcake in a SCUD and blow it up and voila' you have what's known in the terrorist world as a "dirty bomb" - the holy grail of Al Quaeda. Boy howdy would they have loved having this one.

2. George W. Bush was right about the danger posed by Saddam. He had at the very least the capacity to produce dirty bombs. Anyone believe he wouldn't have developed (or at least tried to develop) actual nukes if we'd simply left him alone for the past 5 years? Anyone believe he wouldn't have shared that sort of stuff with the same terrorists that his own former ministers claim he had dealings with? Remember he was paying cash rewards to the families of terrorists who blew themselves up in Israel.

Now, the same guys that have repeatedly said, "Bush lied" and there were no "WMD's" even after 550 TONS of proof showed up in Canada last summer want to be elected to run the country. They say, "Iran is only a little bitty country and not a threat." They say, "If we just reduce our military so that we're no longer a threat, then the world will love us again." Want to bet whether or not they are right?

The same guys that for the past 8 years have been saying that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were in splendid shape and told Presiden Bush that we didn't need to do anything about the subprime mortgage problems when he warned them about it want you to give them a whole bunch of money and supreme power to "fix" the economy.

The same guys that have been in control of the Congress for almost 2 years, during which time, the U.S. economy has taken a nose dive into the dumpster, want you to give them a super majority and the White House so they can really fix things up!

ARE YOU PEOPLE NUTS! These people are not your friends. I'm not sure they're even real people. I'm not sure but I think wherever they came from, there were pods involved....

I'm just sayin'

Tom King