Boo to you Judge Rafferty and the New Jersey Judicial System

I just had my appearance before Judge Rafferty to explain why the Evil Empire of Wells Fargo should not foreclose on my house. What heartbreak! The Wells Fargo legal whore did not even deign to appear--we just heard his disemboidied voice floating over the courtroom from a conference call.

Did the judge look at the evidence I presented that WF had lied? No. Did he accept the word of the disembodied voice that he did indeed have in his possession the original mortgage note even though the disembodied voice (that could have been Tinkerbell for all we knew) did not bother to actually send it to the court? Yes, he did.

Slam-bang-thank you m'am our case was dumped into mediation as apparently all foreclosures are in New Jersey whether or not they are legal to begin with.

I sympathize with the overworked New Jersey judiciary as they are inundated with foreclosures. Well, I try to sympathize but I am unemployed and would love to have a job in a courtroom that races through cases so blithely. But really, could the judge have PAID ATTENTION to my lawyer who was physically present in front of him?

Maybe I should have unbuttoned my blouse. Twenty years ago that would certainly have caught his attention. Now he would probably have the bailiff remove me for trying to scare the court to death.

I LUV YOU TUBE! From the worst cello player in the world.

After weeks of nagging at my son for spending hours watching car crashes, bones breaking during football games and cats spinning on chandeliers, I finally broke down and explored You Tube. I am in love. There are episodes of old shows I love and have not seen for years, Pablo Casals playing the cello and demonstrations of crotchet stitches I cannot master. And, yes, cats spinning on chandeliers can be really funny.

Why oh why did I not discover wonderful You Tube before?

Speaking of cello music (which I can even though most people are bored by it but this is my blog) I love watching Pablo Casals because I have a glimmer of the difficulty of what he did with a cello. In my youth, I was the absolutely worst cello player in my school orchestra. I loved the way the cello sounded, like a deep rich voice behind the violin's squeaking, and I was determined to master it. Alas! I was so bad the teacher gently advised me to first just bow above the strings, then urged me to take up the bass violin and then I got the hint and quietly gave up music.

WELLS FARGO SUCKS!

I just read the news that Wells Fargo reports record earnings in the area of 3 billion dollars. This is exciting news to all the idiots on Wall Street who STILL have not learned their lesson that any kind of profit like this is an illusion. Wells Fargo appears to be making money because of its relentless practice of illegal foreclosing on property and refusing to spend any kind of money to hire a competent work force. This house of cards will soon collapse and WF will join the other evil financial institutions in bankruptcy. Or at least I hope so.

How do I know this? Because the WF thieves have been trying to foreclose on my house for months even though I had made all payments up to the time of foreclosure. And had proof. Apparently, the payments were "lost." Or never received. Or were stolen by aliens or something. For weeks we tried to find somebody with an I.Q. greater than their waistline at WF to straighten this mess out but to no avail. A real estate lawyer we hired couldn't understand a word they said or the statements they sent us. It is like they are speaking Martian. We are now trying to go in front of a judge to show our proof of payment but WF keeps canceling. I guess they are just now starting to figure out that they have made a mistake, which we have been trying to tell them for six months. We have drained our savings hiring a lawyer and our credit is now ruined because of them.

These people make Mr. Madoff look like Santa Claus.

We Wuz Robbed!

Let us bow our heads and give thanks that the Bush/Cheney crime syndicate has finally been cleared out of the White House, having laid waste to the land, their pockets stuffed with silver teaspoons, packets of Air Force One Sweet'n Low and probably the entire holdings of Fort Knox (sorry, folks, the gold has been missing for a quite a while and nobody wanted to tell you.). I wouldn't begrudge them any of this stuff just as long as we get rid of them, if only they had left ONE thing unruined. Just ONE thing left intact for us.

The bright side is that we now have a President who can speak English intelligibly and a Vice President who does not burst into flames when touched by sunlight. We can now watch the President make a speech without cringing in embarrassment at the thought of what other countries are thinking about this bozo and whimpering with terror at the thought that this simpering coward was actually the head of our Armed Forces. We no longer have to throw shoes at the screen during the State of the Union address (that Iraqi reporter probably just forgot that this was a live performance because EVERYBODY threw things when Bush was on TV), screaming "Where's the remote? Get if off!" Yes, life with Obama will not be simple but it might be a bit more pleasant.

I just finished reading Is Our Children Learning? : The Case Against George W. Bush by Paul Begala. Read it and weep. It was written right before George W. was elected for his first office and every warning about what he and Cheney were going to do to the country was right there in black and white. The Democrats should have handed out free copies of this book in the year 2000.

As an aside, I don't understand why these kind of books about "Bushisms" are in the humor sections of bookstore. They belong in current events, history or even horror. Being funny is not the same as being humorous. Humor implies gentle witticisms like Chicken Soup for the Soul. Selling the Bushism books in the Humor shelf gives people the false impression that they are not to be taken seriously. Actually, they should scare the shit out of all of us.

Don't blame A.I.G. We knew what it was...

A snake once begged a monkey to give it a ride across a river. "Just do me this once favor. I promise I will not hurt you." It hissed. The monkey, who was a soft touch, agreed and allowed the snake to ride on its back as he swam across the river. The snake, as soon as it reached dry land, bit the monkey. The monkey, as it lay dying, gasped out "Why did you bite me? You promised you wouldn't." And the snake (All together now!) replied "WELL, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT. YOU KNEW I WAS A SNAKE."

Yes, I know we are all dying to stake down A.I.G. and its loathsome spawn of greed in front of a firing squad and blast away. But before we give in to this temptation, let us remember who is really at fault here.

We are.

In the immortal words of Pogo "We have met the enemy and he is us." We are a nation founded on the spirit of revolution and yet we have dwindled into a nation of consumers. We allowed others to think for us because it was easier and much less unpleasant to just put down that book or newspaper and turn on the TV. We have allowed that snake to ride on us because we grew up in a sheltered time when we were the Kings of the Jungle and didn't have to look where we were stepping. We looked the other way while Ronald Reagan et. al. started destroying our country and then keep looking away while George W. Bush stole that election and finished the job. Our forefathers would have dragged George W. and his Nosferatu of a V.P. out of the White House and strung them up in the Rose Garden for treason. We shrugged our shoulders and said "Oh well. "

Our country desperately needs to change. But it will not change until WE change. Don't expect snakes to change.

Bernanke has spoken--RUN!

From today's New York Times:

“We’ll see the recession coming to an end probably this year.”
With those words, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke staked a marker on what he believes will be the end of the malaise that has descended upon the United States economy. And, he said on a “60 Minutes” interview that ran Sunday evening, the country will begin to recover next year — “and it will pick up steam over time.”

I used to believe that our nation's financial system was run by benevolent wise men who, after a long period of study and meditation on a mountain top, made careful and well thought out decisions on how to steer the ship of state past the shoals of debt and penury into the the safe harbor of prosperity. A few years ago I started to pay close attention to the shenanigans of our fiscal system and I have come up with a simple but brilliant observation:

Whatever Bernanke predicts, the opposite will happen.

And so, I have decided to pack my bags and get the hell out of the USA because obviously the malaise of the US economy will not only continue for decades but become progressively worse. I don't understand why people are STILL paying attention to this bleating. I admit I know nothing about economics but even I know that the man is either a blithering idiot or the puppet of some nefarious secret cabal bent on making us all into starving serfs. Or both. The Federal Reserve needs to go. It has been sucking our blood long enough. I could do a better job running the economy by examining chicken entrails.

My grandparents fought like to hell to get into the United States and here I am trying to get the hell out.

The problem, however, is that there really is no better place to go. Except maybe Canada. Mexico is disintegrating into chaos, Iceland (once the happiest country on earth) is bankrupt and Ireland's economy is headed down the tubes right along with ours.

Calling Dr. Kildare

I spent quite a few hours yesterday watching the 1960s doctor show, Dr. Kildare, on YouTube yesterday. What memories! This show for some reason (probably the work of the AMA who doesn't want us to remember what American medicine used to be like) is not generally available on DVD. For the youngesters out there, it used to be that for a small fee you could visit a doctor who would treat you and write a prescription for a medicine you could afford. This doctor treated just about anything and if he couldn't you went to a hospital where you stayed until you were better and left without becoming bankrupt or having to remortgage your house. You were actually admitted to the hospital EVEN IF YOU COULDN"T PAY ANYTHING because you were sick and hospitals were not in the business to make money, but to make you better.

Anyway, Dr. Kildare and Dr. Gillespie treated patients in this idealized environment with respect and compassion. The patients were PEOPLE, not diseases.

And there were actually these wonderful beings working in the hospital called NURSES. These kindly creatures, administered medicines, fed, bathed and even talked to the patients in their charge. I know this is a fact because I remember being in a hospital in the early 1970s and nurses gave you a BACK RUB every night. And they wore these cute little caps, too.

The last time I was a hospital patient about a year ago, I think I saw ONE nurse the entire three days I was there. It was a fleeting glimpse of a figure, so I am not 100% sure that is what it was. Instead some kind of patient care people zoomed in and out with medicine and other people dropped trays of food on the other side of the room. If you were bed ridden you were out of luck.

I spent the entire three days without a toothbrush, clean night gown or clean sheets. I finally went down to the gift store and bought myself a toothbrush despite being chased by a security guard, who told me that patients weren't allowed in the gift store.

Of course, there were down sides to the good old days of medicine. No CT or MRI scans or noninvasive treatments. Many times you had no idea what was wrong with you until it killed you. However, since I have no medical insurance I have no access to these miracles anyway. So I guess I would be better off back in the 1960s. At least I would get a back rub before I died!