News flash: bankruptcy is NOT about preserving the operations of a company. It never was. Bankruptcy is about the secured creditors getting the maximum return on their assets. If that means the operation continues, then so be it. Otherwise, the assets are sold so that the secured creditors get their money back.

The implications of trashing the interests of the secured parties are massive. First, this undermines the rule of law. Bankruptcy law has always placed the interests of the secured parties ahead of all others. This ensures that businesses can get financing they critically need since the lenders are first in line to recover their funds.

Second, lack of security will discourage investment in businesses that critically need it. Who will want to lend money if the contracts that protect that loan can be tossed at the whim of the executive branch? Its simple: no one.

Overall, the Obama administration has been turning this country into a banana republic. It started with the bullying of retirement funds over the chrysler case, the appointment of various “czars” with little to no congressional oversight and attempts to ram legislation through with little or no debate. Lets hope that SCOTUS will stand firm.

1. Always have 4-8 months salary in the bank, earning interest. I recommend ING direct. CDs are in the low 5% range, savings accounts are in the upper 4% range.

2. Never touch what is in (1) unless its an emergency. Note that a plasma TV and a house is NOT an emergency.

3. If you think you deserve something, you don’t. You don’t deserve Prada, you don’t need an iPhone or an iPod. You dont need Gucci, you sure dont need a new car if your current one works fine.

4. Never buy a house with less than 15% down. 20% or more is ideal.

5. You will get farther in your life spending modestly on a house and saving your money that you will by maxing out your income and credit cards on one that is 10x your salary. Buy the cheapest one you can get your hands on and pay if off as quickly as possible.

6. Avoid credit cards like the plague. Use them for large purchases, plane tickets, internet shopping, etc. Never buy something if you dont have the cash in the bank to pay it off immediately.

7. If you buy a house with an ARM, you will lose an arm….and a leg.

8. Unless you know them personally (and even if you do), real estate agents and mortgage brokers are trying to make you pay top dollar for something thats probably par for the course. Don’t fall for it. Ditto for car salesmen. They all get rich when you make yourself poor.

A manager at a Detroit meatpacking plant said Monday that 15 immigrant women were fired last month after attending a protest for immigrant rights. He said they had been told that they would be terminated if they missed work on the day of the protest.

“It was not fair,’” said Mercedes, a 31-year-old Detroit woman who attended the rally and was fired. “We went to fight for our rights.” Mercedes is undocumented and asked that her last name not be used.

This incident raises an interesting point: if all these “undocumented” workers are demonstrating, why doesnt the INS go round them up and ship them off?

Aside
As a child of immigrants, I feel that these people do nothing but further their own enslavement. Sure, they get paid, but how high can they climb up the economic ladder? Real wealth comes from education, hard work and a mastry of the English language. While my ancestors did not speak english when they came to this country, they worked hard to learn. They also educated themselves and worked just as hard at their jobs. The result: fulfillment of the American dream. I challenge my readers to show me a success story that happens without any of these things.

Lets be real, exploiting such workers has nothing to do with compassion, its about money. A business that employs so-called undocumented workers does not have to pay taxes that fund unemployment insurance funds or workers compensation funds. Such workers bilk social security out of millions upon millions of dollars per year. The same applies to state treasuries and the Federal government, to say nothing of the crime and unemployment that occurs among our own citizens that occurs as a result of our migrant worker population. How many members of MS-13 do you suppose waited in line for a visa? Simple: None of them.

The United States does not need any of these people to function economically. My dad paid for college in the 1970s by working in the areas these workers do: agriculture and construction, and there are plenty of high school graduates to fill these positions.

Legalizing those who have traveled here over the last 15+ years will only open a floodgate in the future. Why wait on a list for years, hoping your priority number for a visa will come up when you can creep across the border and wait for Congress to buckle under political pressure?

So how do we deal with it? Since most of these workers are employed in agriculture and construction, have the INS and local police spot-check construction sites. If they find illegal aliens working there, deport them that week and make the employer pay all the bills as a penalty. The border should be sealed off with a wall and the military and/or national guard should be deployed with the border patrol to ensure its security.

While this will no doubt cause a political uproar in Mexico, so what? Their government has done its part to help millions of their citizens sneak their way in. And whats this crap about our hospitals contributing to those in mexico?? We are on the verge of a crisis over health care costs in this country, and we are sending our money to MEXICO??

Why are we rewarding criminals and cheaters at the expense of our own people?

Posters, reading “Who dies for Bush lies?”

These posters have been on display in a window of the campus administration building for more than a month in a high traffic area of the campus.

When a campus condemns a students criticism of the left while actively patriotic displays, it is obvious that a bias exists. But is academic freedom at risk?

The administration did not punish Diamondback cartoonist Daniel Friedman when he published a cartoon mocking the death of Rachel Corrie. The university did refer to the cartoon and the paper as “an embarrassment”.

There is a campus policy prohibiting the display of flags for “safety” reasons. This policy was used to prevent such displays during the first Gulf War in 1991.

I recently read this article by UMCP Junior philosophy major Yarden Catz, who targets David Horowitz. Horowitz promotes an academic bill or rights, which is supposed to prevent politically-motivated grading and hiring.

For instance, a right wing student (such as myself) gets into a disagreement with my professor in a class discussion by saying that Marxism is bad. Since the professor disagrees with me, he may fail me. Or if I, as a professor of history find evidence that a key first-hand account of a slave is really a collection of second hand acounts, I could be fired by my left-wing administration.

Says Catz:

“Horowitz tries to motivate the need for this bill by a series of junk studies that “show” the overwhelming majority of professors are leftists. Upon closer look, it turns out these studies surveyed only select departments such as gender/women’s studies departments, English and others. Of course, nobody bothered to check the political leaning of people teaching in business schools or various engineering departments, where I assure you Marx is not generally cited with enthusiasm during coffee break. And as Horowitz knows, his “study” will yield much more useful results for his hypothesis if he picks on Berkeley or NYU rather than, say, Oral Roberts or other conservative schools.

Catz continued:

“The bill also claims that “academic institutions … should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.” This principle can amount to nothing less than an end to any sort of substantive argument put forth by any academic institution.”

While Catz says that a academic bill of rights would end substantive argument, I disagree. A bill or rights wold protect students from politically-motivated punishment from their professors for expressing an unpopular conservative point of view. Leftist professors such as Nicholas de Genova, Ward Churchill and Peter Kirstein would as well. The bottom line: policy defending academic expression benefit everyone and harm no one. Lets clean the mud off our ivory towers and make it happen.

But Zucker said he is wary of some of these advances, especially the blog craze and its effect on TV.

“We pay too much attention to blogs,” he said. “It is absurd how much attention they receive.”

Zucker is annoyed, but in reality I think he’s scared. Scared, because blogs have the ability to bring balance to the media world. Blogs brought about the fall of Dan Rather, from CBS in 2004. CNN systematically buried evidence of atrocities inflicted on the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein over the greater part of a decade.

If the mainstream broadcast “media” is willing to ignore the heinous acts of a dictator, why isn’t it the responsibility of the public to bring that information into the public view. This is what makes the internet a powerful tool: no matter what the bias in the mainstream “media”, individuals have the choice to look elsewhere for their information and may balance whatever they read against any other typing head. Due to the bias shown by CNN and Dan Rather in memogate, it comes as no surprise the people want to read differing points of view. Perhaps free competition is why the networks are so upset, but its exactly what they need.

A new law in Florida allows citizens to defend themselves of attacks in anywhere they are allowed to be legally. From the article:

“Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which took effect Saturday, removes a duty on the part of citizens to retreat in the face of an attack as long as they are in a place they have a legal right to be, including a public street or their place of business.

It also gives immunity from criminal or civil charges to a shooter as long as the person shot is not a police officer. “

Of course, the Brady Bunch is not amused, handing out leaflets with such hysterics as

“Please avoid unnecessary arguments with locals. Starting today, they may be more inclined to shoot you

This law fills an important deficiency in our legal system. This is, of course, that you may be prosecuted and jailed for defending yourself and your family from a dangerous intruder.

The Brady bunch, like many anti-gun groups, want you to believe that the police will protect you from dangerous criminals. But this is not the case. Ask Freda Elliott. She took out restraining orders against her ex husband in the courts, was watched over by friends and co-workers and called 911 just like the Brady Bunch says we all should. Ultimately, she was gunned down in her home while crying into the phone to a 911 operator. Or, does the Brady Bunch expect women in her position to use their shoes in their defense?

I have no wish to become the victim of the savage maniacs whom the Brady Bunch seeks to empower – coming home to find that members of my family were slaughtered while hiding in the closet, waiting for help that was too little too late.

Make your home a Castle, not a Chateau.

In spite of arguments to the contrary, the Second amendment is not a relic, and it does not exist to protect hunting rights. It exists to protect citizens from an all-powerful ever-intrusive government. This is why it is second, not seventh, eighth, or tenth. Liberalized gun control such as this preserves individual freedom and individual responsibility. Lets drop the Bradys and stand our ground.