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Cutting 1%

The Republicans claim the largest spending cut in US history this weekend, by cutting $38.4 billion from the $3.7 trillion budget. This represents a one percent cut, and leaves us with a trillion dollar plus deficit. That is what we are left with- a one percent cut.
Putting this in perspective, it took George W Bush two and a half years to borrow a trillion dollars. It took Clinton three and a half years, George HW Bush three years, and Reagan did it in six. No other President has borrowed that much money. In fact, it took 204 years for the government to borrow its first trillion. 

Explain to me how Republicans are different from the Democrats, again.

By Divemedic, ago

Who do I pay?

Nineteen months. That has how long it has been since I last made a house payment. Some would tell me to pay, and to those people, I ask one simple question: Who am I supposed to pay?

I signed a mortgage with a company we will call Mortgage Trust Company*, and paid on it for two and a half years. It turns out, the mortgage was sold by Mortgage Trust Company, to Fannie Mae just 4 months after I bought the house. Mortgage Trust Company was the servicer. The problem is, Mortgage Trust Company didn’t tell anyone that it had been sold. Actually, not only did they fail to tell anyone, they even testified in court, producing (faked, forged) documentation to say that they still owned the note and mortgage. Fraud. Perjury. Forgery.

I sued them for that. They paid me a 5 figure settlement amount to keep that out of court.

Then, it turned out that Mortgage Trust Company had actually sold the note and mortgage twice. Not only to Fannie Mae, but to Nationstar mortgage. I don’t know how that was legal, since the note and mortgage had already been sold to Fannie Mae, but Mortgage Trust Company hasn’t seemed to care a whole lot about the truth.

There are now three different banks who claim to own my note and mortgage, but none of them can produce the original paperwork. Since the original note is a negotiable instrument much like an endorsed check, anyone wishing to foreclose must either produce the original, or be able to testify that the original was in their possession when it was lost or destroyed. Since no one can do that, I have thus far been in a free house.

Even if I had a desire to pay, or to turn the house over to the bank, which one do I compensate? This is why we are in the mess we are in now.

* Names have been changed to comply with the terms of a settlement agreement

By Divemedic, ago

Like the crane technique, there is no defense

In Florida, you cannot use the fact that a woman told you that she is over 18 as a defense to sexual molestation charges. Even if she produced identification that said she is of age. This guy may well be innocent, but he is going down.

Look what happened to this guy. The woman in that case was 13 years old. She said on her MySpace page that she was a 19 year old divorcee. Under Florida law, the belief that the girl is of legal age, and the girl’s promiscuity cannot be used as a defense. That is too bad, because this is the second time she has gotten a man thrown in prison because she lied about her age and had sex with him. The girl’s family admits that the girl still stays out late and has yet to delete her misleading MySpace page.

By Divemedic, ago

TEA party is politics as usual

Proving again that there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans, the darling of the TEA party movement and Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. What did he do? Well, he made all of these pretty speeches about how public employee unions were the enemy.

Then he went and gave the son of one of his contributors an $81,500 a year job. The boy’s qualifications?

Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions, yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker’s administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state.

How did Deschane score his plum assignment with the Walker team? It wasn’t due to his qualifications. According to his resumé, Deschane, 27, attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for two years, worked for two Republican lawmakers – then-Sens. David Zien and Cathy Stepp, now the natural resources secretary – and helped run a legislative and a losing congressional campaign. He held part-time posts with the Wisconsin Builders Association and the Wisconsin Business Council until being named to his first state gig earlier this year.

His father is Jerry Deschane, executive vice president and longtime lobbyist for the Madison-based Wisconsin Builders Association, which bet big on Walker during last year’s governor’s race. The group’s political action committee gave $29,000 to Walker and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, last year, making it one of the top five PAC donors to the governor’s successful campaign. Even more impressive, members of the trade group funneled more than $92,000 through its conduit to Walker’s campaign over the past two years. Total donations: $121,652.

That TEA party sure is reining in that abusive government spending.

Politics as usual. The only answer is to take the power away from government.

By Divemedic, ago

Pointless discussion

I had a discussion yesterday with an Obama supporter. I had made the comment that Obama had abandoned all the promises that he had made as a candidate. A nearby coworker jumped in and said that he had voted for Obama, and that the President was doing his best.
The conversation went like this:
DiveMedic: “Is this what you voted for? We are still in Iraq, still in Afghanistan, still have prisoners in Gitmo, and now we have invaded Libya.”
Obama Supporter: “Things are more complicated than that.”
DM: “He is the Commander in Chief. The way that works, is he picks up the phone and gives the order. The military obeys.”
OS: “He ended don’t ask, don’t tell.”
DM: “No he didn’t” (Obama signed a law in December that authorizes the President to end DADT, but the policy won’t end until 60 days after the President gives the order, which he hasn’t done, yet. You can’t give him credit for that one, yet.)
OS: “You just don’t like him because he is black.” There it is, the trump card. At this point, the discussion is over, because there is no possibility of having a discussion based upon logic at this point.

By Divemedic, ago

Just call 911

Just call 911. That is the advice that people give when they tell you that only cops and the military should own guns. Tell that to the woman in this trial.

She tried to call 911, but he tore the phone from her hands and smashed it. He then tore off her pants and raped her. After he was done violating the woman, he robbed her and forced her to go for a ride. Asked what she had thought during the assault and its aftermath, the woman told transfixed jurors, “I kept thinking, ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be one of those people who just disappears and their family can never find.'”

The rapist had been arrested 18 previous times in Lake County, including once for sexual battery at age 14, and had only been released from a 14 month stay in prison 5 days before he commited this crime.

A firearm is the only weapon that places a smaller woman on an equal footing with a larger, stronger male opponent. If this woman would have had one, perhaps she would have been able to protect herself. Or do you feel that a rapist’s life is too important? When this man eventually gets out, will he kill someone?

By Divemedic, ago

Merit pay isn’t

Rick Scott just signed a law that forces merit pay on to teachers and school districts. Merit pay is a code word for “no raises” and has very little to do with merit or with increasing incentives to excel, and everything to do with cutting the pay of employees. How do I know that? I will explain…

Firefighters are not hired here in Florida the way that they are in most other states. Here in Florida, we are a ‘right to work state’ and in combination with some other factors, this has made the way we are hired a bit different. In most states, the fire and police departments hire you, and then put you through a training academy. Not so in Florida.
Here in Florida, you attend the fire academy on your own dime. Like college, you pay to go to the school and attend the 480 hour school on your own. Then, you take and pass the state firefighter exam to get your license. You also have to attend the 266 hour EMT school on your own, and pass that state licensing exam. There is also a state required 16 hour EVOC course. Since many departments will not hire you unless you are a paramedic, you also attend paramedic school and pass that licensing exam, another 1200 hours. In total, it takes about two years to become a licensed Florida firefighter.
Then you start looking for a job. You take any job you can get, because your firefighter certification is only good for two years, then if you are not working by then, you start over.

What does all of this have to with merit pay? Well, when I was originally hired by my current department in 1998, you were hired at a base rate of pay, which in my case was $8.44 an hour. You received an automatic 8% raise every year on your anniversary date. All of that changed just two years after I was hired when we went to a ‘merit pay’ system. Merit pay started out great. It was designed so good employees got a 5% raise, and outstanding employees get a 5% raise and a $1,000 bonus. The first year, I got both. The second year, the raise went away, and good employees got a $500 bonus, and outstanding employees got $1,000. I got $1,000. The third year, outstanding employees got a 3% raise. No one else got anything. I got nothing that year. Not only were raises getting smaller, they were getting hard to earn. Less than 2% of employees got a raise.

After my fire department had done this for about 5 years, we were the lowest paying department in the area. We were bleeding people like crazy. We hired 40 people, and a year later all but two of them had left to take jobs with a higher paying department. They were taking their skills and education where the money was. So, the department gave everyone a 10% raise. That was in 2005. I have only gotten one raise since. I make just 3% more per hour than I did in 2007. We still do employee evaluations, but there is no longer any money tied to it. Explain how a merit pay system that gives no raises can possibly incentivize anyone into doing anything.

This is where our education system is headed.

By Divemedic, ago

Tell me

Jessie Dotson was born in 1975, but his troubles with the law didn’t begin until he reached the ripe old age of 15, when Dotson was charged with disorderly conduct for making threats against his mother as she tried to discipline him. A month later, he was charged with assault after a 13-year-old told his parents Dotson punched him in the face and threatened to “put him in the hospital” if the younger teen didn’t bring Dotson $25 the next day.

The following year (1991), Dotson wanted to beat up his brother, so his mother locked him in a bedroom. Dotson escaped by breaking open the door, and then punched holes in the walls and threatened to kill his mother. He was arrested for disorderly conduct. That same year, the 17 year old Dotson was also arrested for possession of a sawed off shotgun and a pistol.

In 1992, he was arrested again for disorderly conduct because of a fight with a neighbor.

It was in 1994 when he was arrested for committing his first murder and served fourteen years in state prison. Just three days after his release in January of 2008, Dotson pulled a gun on his brother and threatened to kill him over a coat that Dotson was attempting to steal from his brother. The brother called the cops, and no arrest was made.

Dotson went to the brother’s home several weeks later, and shot or stabbed everyone there. Six people were killed by gunfire, including Dotson’s brother and three other adults, Dotson’s two nephews were stabbed and murdered. The nephews were 2 and 4 years old. Three other children, aged 2 months, 6 years, and 9 years, were left for dead after also being stabbed.

Since Dotson was under age in 1991 when he was first caught with firearms, tell me how gun control worked.
Since possession of an unregistered sawed off shotgun is illegal, tell me how registration worked.
Since he was a convicted murderer, tell me how gun laws worked.

By Divemedic, ago