Day: April 23, 2010

Gallup: 75% of Americans Correctly Blame Bush for Bush Recession

Jon Ponder

From left, Bush, Leach, Oxley
From left, Bush, Leach, Oxley
According to a new poll from Gallup, three-quarters of Americans still remember that the financial meltdown happened on George W. Bush’s watch.

However, just 19 months after the second greatest economic collapse of the past 100 years — and as a direct result of Republican efforts to rewrite the disastrous history of the Bush administration — a growing number of those surveyed said they are beginning to blame the Bush Recession on Pres. Obama. According to Gallup, in July 2009, only 32 percent — roughly the same number who self-identify as Republicans — blamed Pres. Obama. Now that number has risen to 50 percent. The jump in numbers was caused by the fact that 50 percent of independents and even 26 percent of Democrats now believe that Obama, who was a presidential candidate while serving in the Senate at the time of the meltdown, caused the recession.

[…]

Fla. GOP Invokes Loyalty Oath in Case Crist Jumps Ship

Buck Banks

The Hotline reports that the Republican Party of Florida is reminding members that in the event that Charlie Crist should run for U.S. Senate as an independent, they can’t support him, work for his campaign or vote for him, plus they have to request the return any campaign contributions they gave him. If they break their loyalty oath to the party, then all kinds of bad things will happen to them.

Verbatim

Buck Banks

Through the great banking houses of Manhattan last week ran wild-eyed alarm. Big bankers stared at one another in anger and astonishment. A bill just passed by both houses of Congress would rivet upon their institutions what they considered a monstrous system of guaranteeing bank deposits. Such a system, they felt, would not only rob them of their pride of profession but would reduce all U. S. banking to its lowest level. They saw their deposits which they had spent a lifetime to build up and protect with their good names confiscated by the Government to pay for the mistakes and dishonesty of every smalltown bankster.

— Time magazine, June 5, 1933.

Finally – a Good Use for Cows

Jon Ponder

Here’s how to stop climate change in two easy steps: First, stop having so many babies. Next, stop eating cows. We won’t hold our collective breath waiting for either of those things to happen, but, for now, a woman in Malibu, of all places, has found a new use for cows that is beneficial to the environment — it “heals the soil” — and could save cows from the slaughterhouse.

Former screenwriter Denise Ritchie and her husband rescued a dairy cow from a slaughterhouse, named her Bu, and gave her a contented life in a pasture at the coast outside Los Angeles. They use her manure to produce an organic fertilizer that could help save the planet.

Via the Los Angeles Times.

Last October, the Ritchies and Colum Riley, a business partner, began producing Bu’s Blend, now carried in 50 nurseries in California. Master gardener Spitz became a customer of the pricey fertilizer after studying various approaches to gardening and concluding that biodynamics “was the purest, healthiest and cleanest system.” Every seed she has planted using Bu’s Blend, she said, has sprouted and grown “big and beautiful.”

Malibu Compost pays organic dairy farmers an average of $10 a ton for manure. The payments provide a little cash flow for farmers, and the manure — piled in rows on Gena Nonini’s Fresno biodynamic farm — keeps Malibu Compost bustling.