Reality is a burden...and karma....well, let's just say, it's caught up.

Maybe Weds. night?

That was a real problem. On a good day, when everything was just perfect-we could get the patient down the hill and to the hospital in 35-40 minutes (the golden hour). We would transport them down the hill (mountain really) and we would call the hospital and they would dispatch their advanced life support ambulance to meet ours at the turn around half way down the mountain. But when does anything go perfectly in medicine.

My one experience involved a construction worker that was not wearing a safety harness and fell 18 feet from the roof of the gym and landing on the floor, hitting an I-beam on the way down. Our volunteer Ambulance crew was out on a run even further away than we were. Fortunately our Ag teacher was a well seasoned EMT (he ran the code and I handed him what I had in my first aid kit). It still took them over 30 minutes to hustle up a volunteer crew and get the ambulance to us.

We managed to get him down to the hospital, they stabilized him, and he was flown to Albuquerque (children went to Lubbock). There was no snow or wind so he got there fairly fast and survived. But, I have seen cases where we were not able to get advanced care for days because the planes were socked in due to weather.

Rural medicine is an entirely different ball game and I feel sorry for those folks in the mountains with the roads washed out. It will be double tough.

That Barack Obama is such a kidder. No matter how awkward the moment, he’s got just the right quip to purchase some wiggle room. Remember when his old Chicago banking buddy Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, first ran into that bit of trouble over his bank’s “London Whale” derivative scam? That scheme has already lost $6 billion with close to another $1 billion piled on by the SEC in fines last week after JPMorgan admitted it broke the law.

Well of course, being Obama, when the scandal first broke last year, the president picked a women’s daytime talk show, ABC’s “The View,” to deal with the scams of his leading Wall Street backer. “JPMorgan is one of the best-managed banks there is,” he told the “View” audience. “Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got, and they still lost $2 billion and counting.”

Yes, counting; that $2 billion is now likely to end up around $16 billion given the future legal fees and possible payouts allotted to countering the myriad lawsuits connected with this admission of illegal activity. That’s aside from the mortgage fraud, Libor rate rigging and energy manipulation cases still confronting the beleaguered bank. Thursday, on the same day that Dimon’s bank got slapped with the SEC fine, federal regulators revealed that JPMorgan had agreed to pay $389 million in penalties and refunds to compensate for a credit card identity theft protection scam after $309 million already paid out in that case.

It should be remembered that this same Dimon, who appeared before a Senate committee wearing presidential cufflinks, once worked with Sanford Weill in engineering the reversal of the Glass-Steagall law to make Citigroup, a previously illegal merger of investment and commercial banks, possible. But despite his record as a leader in the radical deregulation of banking that caused all of the trouble, Obama turned to Dimon for direction on fixing the economy.

If you still require to be disabused of Obama’s pretend populism, consider his decision to select William M. Daley, JPMorgan’s representative in Washington, to be his White House chief of staff. It gave Dimon the key White House connection to accompany the passkey he already had at Treasury with his pal Timothy Geithner as secretary.

It was a real cozy arrangement; Dimon was still a governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, where he had served during Geithner’s presidency overseeing the banking meltdown. Geithner had been instrumental in arranging Fed financing for JPMorgan’s acquisition of troubled Bear Stearns through a $55 billion loan and later an additional $25 billion in TARP funds.

Once appointed Treasury secretary,

(snip)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obamas_friends_in_low_places_20130924

Protecting Dimon is one of the less-lethal and illegal things he's done...

that is called being an accessory and you are held accountable to a degree at which you participated in the criminal act.

But what am I flapping my lips for. This is America, with liberty and justice for the 1%.

really turn this country around and bring some meaningful change. Like Bill Hicks said. "They take the newly elected president in a room and the lights go dark and they show him a movie of the Kennedy assignation from a different angle. The light come back on and they say any questions?" It makes me wonder what kind of dirt the PTB have on candidates. Or is it that the money is very good when they leave office? All I can do is shake my head when I think about O. I wonder if he turned out the way we wanted if the PTB would have killed him?

It's all about what is spinned



9/24/13 July Case-Shiller Housing Index Misses For Third Month In A Row, Pace Of Increase At 10 Month Lows

There was something for everyone in the just released July Case-Shiller house price index. On one hand, on a year over year basis, the NSA Composite 20 city index rose 12.39% in July, up from 12.07% in June, and in line with expectations of a 12.40% increase. This was the highest annual price increase since the start of the great financial crisis. On the other hand, the same Composite-20 Index increased by just 0.62% in July on a SA M/M basis, missing expectations of a 0.80% increase, and down from the 0.88% increase in June. This was the third consecutive miss on a M/M basis, and while the Case-Shiller index continues to still rise, the momentum as can be seen in the chart below, is starting to fade, with the monthly increase posting at the lowest rate since September of 2012 when the rise was 0.52%.


edit to add graph


And the performance relative to expectations:


more...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-24/july-case-shiller-housing-index-misses-third-month-row-pace-increase-10-month-lows

In his book, "Confidence Men", Ron Suskind writes that Barack Obama told Timmeh Geithner to come up with a plan to break up Citi. Timmeh just put it on the back burner and did nothing.

A couple of months later, at an Economics Advisors meeting, Obama asked how the plan to break up Citi was coming along (Timmeh was absent from that meeting). Christine Romer replied, "Mister President, there is no plan". Obama was visibly pissed, and said "There had better be". After the meeting, Romer promptly had her ass chewed off by Rahm Emmanuel for attacking poor little Timmeh, when he wasn't there to defend himself.

End of story.

How rotten is Citi? I got 15 credit card solicitations from them in just the last week, addressed to me, my wife, and my dead mother. And probably 10 the previous week. I just stick a page of the credit card agreement in the postage paid envelope and send it back. So far, the haven't sent any solicitations to the dogs yet. One can only hope.

Sara and Roscoe with a placard around their neck stating..."I went over my credit limit on my Citi Bank Cards and I didn't pay."
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Oh the humanity.....