Quote of the day…lighten up, don’t worry about the world.

“In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these.”

– Paul Harvey

My puppy dog re-enacting a fine scene from the 1987 Rob Reiner film, The Princess Bride…

Maggie Mae: “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!”

Cam Cardow National Debt Cartoon, again.

A Cam Cardow National Debt Cartoon, and U.S. National Debt Clock, here…

I am a sentimental cheese ball.

“Little Folks,” by Charlie Daniels

Little folks are people too
Very much like me and you
The little things they say and do
They kinda make your day
Foolishness and common sense
Through the eyes of innocence
Skip a rope or jump a fence
Gettin’ in the way

Daddy, why are you so tall?
Daddy, why am I so small?
Daddy, who makes snowflakes fall?
Could it be the Lord?
Chasing puppies, climbin’ trees
Bumping heads and skinnin’ knees
It’s not very hard to see
That

kids are God’s reward

Little folks get down and out
The girls will cry and boys will pout
Before you know what it’s about
They’re smiling once again
Colored kites on summer breeze
Jingle Bells and Christmas trees
Too soon they’re only memories
Do you remember when?

Daddy, what makes eagles fly?
What makes clouds float in the sky?
And Daddy, if I really try
Will I grow up someday?

But little folks slip through our hands

Like so many grains of sand
You’d best enjoy them while you can
So soon they fly away…

(….sometimes I find my self asking God, “Is this really MY son? It’s like God has lent me an angel to live here with us while it grows up. The boy is so amazing, unbelievably perfect, an incredibly undeserved blessing. Thank God; Do all things with gratitude. We are very lucky.)

Puppy smiles.

A poem, or something.

“A pleasant surprise”

Life is so strange and wonderful.

Moments come and go,

one after the other,

forever.

Blurred together,

Racing hearts Stop beating!

Just long enough

for the simple joy

of a “pleasant surprise.”

-Some things in life are just hard to describe.

…it has been a very long time since I wrote a poem, I’m still not sure if this one makes me feel proud or embarrassed…

….I started typing this post a few minutes ago, not intending to write a poem…I sat trying to put into words those times when you feel jubilation and sadness deep in your gut and all over at the same time. When “little moments” that are really nothing overwhelm you. Consume you, Pre-occupy you. Or, leave you with joy and wonder at the world but then leave you feeling sad…and that strange sadness does not necessarily make life any less wonderful (just confusing)–ok that was a horrible job of explaining something that I almost don’t understand. Ok, how about this: Despite Mind-made barriers, and irrational fear, wonderful things still enter our lives. We live in the moments and We are lucky in this way. Thank God.

Taxonomy Fail.

funny.

click here if you’re still confused.

Re-run blog! Baby’s first Christmas, again.

…recently came across this picture again, but this time found the obvious hope, joy, and optimism in my son’s eyes to be overwhelming. I am a very lucky man. Thank God.

Congress moves to force KBR and other defense contractors to stop using off-shore shell companies to avoid paying billions in payroll taxes owed to the US government…the contractors say they are “patriotically” passing on savings in the war effort by listing their US employees as being employed in foreign countries.

The following is an opinion piece published in the New York Times yesterday:

“Congress is finally moving to shut one of the more egregious forms of Iraq war profiteering: defense contractors using offshore shell companies to avoid paying their fair share of payroll taxes. The practice is widespread and Congressional investigators have been dispatched to one of the prime tax refuges, the Cayman Islands, to seek a firsthand estimate of how much the Treasury is being shorted.

No one will be surprised to hear that one of the suspected prime offenders is KBR, the Texas-based defense contractor, formerly a part of the Halliburton conglomerate allied with Vice President Dick Cheney. According to a report in The Boston Globe, KBR, which has landed billions in Iraq contracts, has used two Cayman shell companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions in payroll, Medicare and unemployment taxes.

Unfortunately right now there is nothing illegal about this. The House has approved legislation to plug the dodge by treating foreign subsidiaries of defense contractors as what they are — American employers required to pay taxes. The Senate must quickly follow suit and not buy the contractors’ line that listing American workers at offshore companies is a cost saving passed on patriotically to the war effort. No less insulting, the Cayman dodge has been blocking Americans from the protection of labor and anti-discrimination laws.

The House has taken on another shamefully common abuse: voting to deny future government contracts to any company that fails to pay its corporate taxes, including an estimated 25,000 defense contractors keeping billions due the Treasury. The Senate should approve that legislation as well.

Companies enriched by taxpayers in the war boom should not be able to compound their profits by not paying their fair share of taxes. Congress must do far more to bring them to a full accounting.”

“Goldman Sachs: Having it their way at Burger King”

The following is an excerpt from the article, “Wall Street High-Flyers: having it their way at Burger King“

“

by Sam Pizzigati

Hundreds of migrant farmworkers marched through Miami this past Friday to protest a Florida tomato grower maneuver that will cut some tomato picker wages by 40 percent. The growers are refusing to honor deals the state’s top farmworker group has cut with McDonald’s and Taco Bell…

(why is this happening? Read on…)

…three American big-money powers — Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs, the Boston-based Bain Capital Group, and the Fort Worth-based Texas Pacific Group — partnered to shell out $1.5 billion to take the distressed Burger King off Diageo’s hands.

Actually, the three partners did a good bit more borrowing than shelling. Only $325 million of the Burger King sale price came from the partners’ own pockets. They borrowed the rest. That’s standard operating procedure in today’s big-time private equity deals.

Firms like Goldman, Texas Pacific, and Bain, typically buy up a hurting corporate property with borrowed money, then tap the company’s operating cash flow — fast food companies do generate plenty of cash — to pay off the resulting debt.

But, wait, if that cash is going to pay off the debt the new owners of a hurting company like Burger King ran up to buy the company, how are those new owners going to make the investments in marketing or research or customer service needed to make their dysfunctional company functional?

Now firms like Goldman, Bain, and Texas Pacific could always borrow still more money to pay for these needed corporate improvements. But those improvements could take years to show up in the bottom line of a company like Burger King.

Private equity wheeler-dealers don’t have much interest in waiting years for results. But they have nothing against borrowing. So they do borrow — but not to make lasting improvements in the companies they buy. They borrow to line their own pockets.

Last year, for instance, Burger King borrowed $350 million in February and then paid out $367 million in dividends to the company’s owners, the good people at Goldman, Bain, and Texas Pacific. Then those good people, who had been collecting a $9 million annual fee for managing Burger King, collected another $30 million for agreeing to cancel that “management” contract.

Four months later, Goldman, Bain, and Texas Pacific unloaded a quarter of their Burger King ownership stake in an initial public offering of company shares that brought in $425 million. The three partners, once the dust settled, had nearly doubled their original out-of-pocket outlay for Burger King in just four years.

Meanwhile, Burger King remains a troubled company, deeply indebted, with per-restaurant revenues, notes Business Week, “just a little more than half the sales of a typical McDonald’s.”

But Goldman, Bain, and Texas Pacific aren’t finished yet. They last month began selling even more of their Burger King shares, with none of the proceeds going back into the company. To make these sales as lucrative as possible, Burger King, naturally, needs to show top-notch, short-term profits. And that brings us back to Florida and Burger King’s hard-line against a penny-a-pound pay increase for the state’s tomato pickers.

The more pennies for those pickers, Burger King management clearly understands, the fewer millions for Goldman, Bain, and Texas Pacific.

Last year, analyst Eric Schlosser points out, the over $200 million in holiday bonuses that went to the top 12 executives at Goldman Sachs more than doubled the entire combined annual wages of southern Florida’s 10,000 tomato pickers.

This year, those top 12 Goldman executives will reportedly walk off with even more in their pay envelopes. Florida’s tomato pickers, courtesy of Burger King, can now look forward to a future with even less.”