12 February 2009

I was reading this article in Newsweek while eating my toast this morning. I thought the last two paragraphs were extra poignant. I thought I'd share.

The article is refering to the bank stimulus package last fall, not the stimulus that is ready to pass today. The $18 billion that is mentioned is the number supposedly spent in bonuses paid to the higher-ups of all the big bank companies that Presiden Obama called, "shameful," last week.

"The Stimulus That Didn't Stir" by Jonathan Alter

Actually, $18 bilion smacks of, well, $18 billion. That's almost five times as much as we spend each year trying to cure cancer, which kills 500,000 Americans annually. It's twice what's in the stimulus for building mass transit, which creates thousands of jobs and cuts our dependence on foreign oil. The simplest thing would be for the banks to just collet the money back from the six-, seven- and eight-figure-income employees and lend it out to help get the economy moving again.

In the land of trillions, $18 billion might seem like a rounding error. But, let's review what happened to the average person in the last six months. First, these financial geniuses made a series of bad decisions that cost us a least 30 percent of the value of everything we own. Then we gave them $700 billion of our children's money so they could stay afloat. And now they're rewarding them selves for their incompetence with our tax dollars. This is what our casino culture has brought us, and it cannot stand.

08 February 2009

Names

Disclaimer 1: Please don't take offense. This is all in good, clean fun!

Disclaimer 2: No. We are not having kids. It would not be a wise thing for a school teacher and an unemployed student to do.

There seems to be a lot of pregnant people around lately (Annie, Melinda, Tara). Because of this, James and I have had a couple of recent conversations about baby names. If we were to stick with only family names when naming our children that we don't have, we would name the boy: Karl LaRon Binggeli. Doesn't that sound great? Or is LaRon Karl better?

Ok, we're kidding. We like both of our dad's a lot and they are both great men, but we're not so sure their names would be the best choice.

How about the girl? Well that's an easy decision. LaRonette Judith Binggeli. Isn't it a beautiful name?

And in other news . . .

Annie and Ross were pretty upset with me for posting the name Vladamir to my blog after they had confided that name with me. I'm really sorry, but I just felt like the blog world needed to know what the name of your future child is. Since the exploitation of little Vladie's name, they have since decided to change it. I promised them I would not reveal it here, but if I did, I would tell you that it reflects Annie and Ross' love of geography and is a state name that starts with an "N" and rhymes with "braska." (Ha. Ha. Ha. They'll never know I told.)