BayouVixen's Blog

Back in 2001, I got fired by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., the owners of the Orange Leader newspaper. For about six months after that, I stubbornly tried to find another job in the business but met nothing but dead ends -- no one ever said so, but I have little doubt that my pay grade had a little to do with it and the fact that I was, shall we say, not a "team" player had a LOT to do with it. But for six months afterward I stubbornly tried to hold on to the house we'd bought in Orange, sucking down every dime of the 401K I'd built up before we finally had to call it quits and lose the house to foreclosure.

So for the last 7 years I've struggled with the stigma of a foreclosure on my credit report, living in apartments and rent houses ... when all along all I had to do was simply to tell my mortgage company they just needed to run to Congress to get the money?

I think Homer Simpson probably says it best: "DOH!"

The Senate's vote on a second bailout of mortgage lenders -- I'm glad to see that Sens. Cornyn and Hutchison voted against the measure, my respect for them has risen -- has moved the federal government into an all-new realm. The Nanny State has become the Rich Uncle State -- don't worry about your irresponsibility, the government will bail you out if you get into trouble.

That'd be kind of cool if my new Rich Uncle were just someone who is independenly wealthy -- but see, my Rich Uncle's money comes out of MY pocket. And he's not authorized to use it that way.

It was a Scotsman, Alexander Tyler, who observed in 1770 that Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government because once the electorate figures out it can vote itself gifts from the public treasury, fiscal failure is the inevitable result. We've been seeing that kind of irresponsibility at work since the 1960s, and it's getting worse.

Thanks to the unbridled spending of Congress and the Bush Administration, we are hopelessly in debt. I've heard one estimate that were this debt spread out evenly across the country, every single one of us would owe $500,000 to balance the government's books.

That debt is owed in huge measure to Communist China. Yes, Communist China. All the Chinese would have to do to destroy the United States would be to call in that debt and sell off all their American holdings -- the stock market would crash worse than it did in 1929 and we would enter a depression from which our weak, selfish, ignorant people would never recover.

Yes, a lot of Americans face home foreclosure. They took out loans they couldn't pay for. A lot of investors stood to lose a lot of money. They made loans they shouldn't have made. Call me cold, but having been in their shoes myself, I know what it's like. For seven years I've paid the price that these people don't want to pay.

I have a question for Congress and President Bush, one that was asked of Davy Crockett in the early 1830s. He related that he was out campaigning for his Congressional seat when he was admonished by a farmer for voting a $20,000 expenditure to help victims of a fire in Georgetown. Why, Crockett asked, would the farmer object to helping people out?

"Well, Colonel," the farmer asked Crockett, "where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity?"