“Can’t we just all go out there and say everything’s OK?” - President Bush during contentious negotiations over his 700 billion dollar corporate welfare program

I make a comfortable living exposing defects in the work products of others. It matters not whether it be a system of integrated software components, a supply chain, transportation system or electrical grid; the search for defects in processes or their physical implementation that result in the failure of major systems must always start at the failure itself and work backwards until the root cause(s) can be found.

Most major disasters cannot be traced to a single point of failure. Rather they are the result of a combination of factors. Generally speaking, if any one of those factors is removed from the equation, the disaster becomes a near-miss. But the fact remains, every disaster is dependent upon one or more root causes that often involve human intervention. And many disasters turn out to be completely avoidable. 

The root cause of our current economic woes can be summed in one, single word:

Greed

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Technorati Tags: economy, finance, political commentary, Politics, socialism

“The Photographs of Senator John McCain have been removed temporarily while Jill Greenburg is in discussions with the Atlantic. Furthermore, we deeply regret the misspelling of the word “warmonger.” -  Statement from artist Jill Greenburg on McCain photo fraud.

With less than six weeks to go until the 2008 General Election, it is increasingly evident that Democrats are growing desperate. If America truly desired Obama’s brand of change, he would have left John McCain in the dust long ago, but they’re still locked in a statistical tie. Democrats were caught off guard and were completely blindsided by the McCain campaign’s brilliant choice of Sarah Palin to fill the Republican ticket and they have struggled to maintain their momentum ever since.  In recent weeks, the Obama campaign and their supporters have found it necessary to resort to pure lowbrow tactics and vicious personal attacks in order to try and mislead people into voting for him.

A recent analysis by the University of Wisconsin shows that seventy seven percent of Obama’s recent ads are characterized as negative, compared to McCain’s fifty six percent. I guess when your ideology is morally bankrupt or your basic arguments are intellectually inferior, that’s the kind of foolishness you have to engage in.

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Technorati Tags: Andrea Mitchell, Barack Obama, Carly Fiorina, Charles Gibson, Jill Greenburg, Joe Biden, John McCain, Kathleen Sebelius, Sarah Palin

“I graduated in 1979.  The Vietnam War had come to an end.  We weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point.  And so, it’s not an option that I ever decided to pursue.” - Barack Obama on why the U.S. military had no need for his soldiering services.

In my life thus far, I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited four of the seven continents. I’ve been to well over 20 countries and over half the United States. I’ve sipped sake’ with Japanese workaholics, and pounded ale with polished German and British executives. I’ve known seasoned sailors and Marines, farmers, well-drillers and have associated with people from every conceivable background.

I grew up on the streets of Los Angeles before it became a Third-World extension of Mexico because of an invasion of illegal aliens. I lived through earthquakes, mudslides, riots, firestorms and heatwaves along with a representative sampling of every conceivable type of human being on Earth. I thought I had seen just about everything by the age of 25. But every now and then, I read or hear something uttered by a candidate for national office that is so patently absurd, I simply can’t believe it. 

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Technorati Tags: 2008, Barack Obama, Chris Matthews, Illegal Immigration, Iraq, Keith Olbermann, patriotism, political commentary

Regardless of which political party you support, in order to gauge where exactly the country would be headed under a particular candidate’s leadership, most people would listen to the speeches, read the party platform, or in the case of Candidate Obama, simply take him at his word. Conventional wisdom holds that comparing a candidate’s voting record to their rhetoric exposes any weaknesses in their commitment to actually do what they promise. But if one desires a truly unvarnished look into the political future under either party, one need look no further than the 2008 National Conventions in Denver and St. Paul.

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Technorati Tags: 2008, Barack Obama, John McCain, liberalism, patriotism, political commentary, Politics, Sarah Palin