Bailout!

The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation. (George Washington)


The life-affirming thoughts I think and the choices I make are the tools I use in shaping a life of meaning and purpose. (Collee Zuck, et al., Daily Word for Healing, p. 290)


Your attitude about who you are and what you have is a very little thing that makes a very big difference. (Theodore Roosevelt in Acts of Faith by Iyanla Vanzant, 24 November)


I know not when my own harvest will come, but I must prepare for it by tending my seed and nuturing my plant along the way. (Soul Searching, p. 345)

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• Yesterday I didn't post to my blog. I had an accident. I typed what I wanted to post and lost it. I'm not sure what happened. Needless to say I wasn't too happy. I wasn't up to attempting to type the same thing a second time.

• Did you know you can play an MP3 player through your car radio. Here's how I did it. Our minivan has a tape cassette player. I plugged in the tape adapter and then plugged that into the MP3 player. That's all there is to it.

• Have you ever thought about how many Buicks Tiger Woods has helped to sell with the television commercials he made? General Motors paid him $7 million dollars a year until this month for those commercials. Maybe one of the reasons the auto makers are in trouble is because of the bad business decisions they've been making.

• On December 4, 2008 The Washington Post ran an front page article announcing that the local bank, where we do our banking business, is going to be purchased by a leading credit card company, Capitol One. Notice they didn't call Capitol One a bank. Capitol One was originally part of the Signet bank of Richmond, VA and was spun off. How did this bank purchase come about? Capitol One, which apparently is in trouble, recently got a $3.56 billion bailout from the Treasury Department. Apparently Capitol One will use $520 million of that bailout money to buy Chevy Chase Bank. Chevy Chase holds $490 million in non-performing assets, the result of risky adjustable-rate mortgages. With that much bad debt why would Capitol One want to buy this regional bank? Here's why, Chevy Chase has $11 billion in deposits. Now I don't know much about economics or money management. But there's one thing I know something about. When a fish smells bad I know it. This fish stinks to high heaven.

Mr. Dickie