| I was eating lunch on the 20th of February with my 8-year-old Granddaughter and I asked her, "What day is tomorrow?"; She said "It's President's Day!" She is a smart kid. I asked "What does President's Day mean?" I was waiting for something about Washington or Lincoln .... etc. She replied, "President's Day is when President Obama steps out of the White House, and if he sees his shadow we have one more year of unemployment." You know, it hurts when hot coffee spurts out your nose. __._,_.___ | ||
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| Do Not Buy Prepaid Debit Cards Posted: 09 Jan 2012 09:29 PM PST This will be quick and easy. Do . not . buy . prepaid . debit . cards. Every prepaid debit card comes with exorbitant fees. There are fees just for buying the card known as issuance fees (although Walmart's card waives the $3 issuance fee if you apply online); there are monthly fees even if you do not use the card (although some companies will waive the fee if you add money to the card during the month); there are first-time use fees (called account opening fees); there are fees if you use the card; there are fees if don't use the card; there are fees if you check your balance; there are fees if you call for phone help; there are fees for making an ATM withdrawal; there are fees for attempting to use more than your available balance; there are fees when making a purchase and asking for cash back. Some companies even charge monthly fees after you have no money left and will collect those fees if you reload the same card later.
Checking her card's website, we see that there is a $3.00 Card Purchase Fee, a $3.00 monthly fee, a $2.00 ATM fee in addition to any fees charged by the ATM owner, a $1.00 ATM Balance Inquiry Fee, a $2.00 Cash Withdrawal Fee, and other additional fees. You get one free call to a live customer service agent per month - additional calls during the month will cost you two bucks. Although Ms Orman's card is a little better than most prepaid debit cards, I suggest you take the same money and find a bank that offers free checking. Unless you have absolutely horrid credit, they'll give you a debit card with no usage fees, no monthly fees, and you can check your balance or make withdrawals at your bank's ATM without balance inquiry fees or withdrawal fees. Disclaimer: I have been in the prepaid phonecard card business for more than 17 years and have sold prepaid debit cards for more than a decade. Now you may ask why I sell cards and yet advise my readers not to buy them. If I were a manufacturer of donuts I would give the same advice: do not buy donuts because they are not good for your health. At one time I sold cigarettes from my vending machines (see my article here) and if I were still in that business I would exhort my readers not to smoke (see my articles on smoking). Just because I make money in a business does not mean I cannot give good advice to my readers.
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Jan 10, 2012/ 15 Teves, 5772
Leftism Makes You Meaner
By Dennis Prager
Only a fool believes that all those with whom he differs are bad people. Moreover, just about all of us live the reality — often within our own family — of knowing good and loving people with whom we strongly differ on political, religious, social and economic issues.
That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner.
Two examples in just the past week offer compelling evidence.
Prominent left-wing commentators used the way in which Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of one of their children to attack — make that mock — the former Pennsylvania senator.
In a lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot of meanness. But one just assumes that some things — not many, just some — are off limits to political pundits and activists.
Among these few things, one has to believe, is the death of a child.
But I was wrong.
In 1996, Karen Santorum gave birth to a premature baby boy who died two hours later. After spending the night in the hospital with their baby son between them, the grieving parents brought the lifeless infant home for a brief period because, Santorum explained, it was important to them for their other children to "know they had a brother." The Santorums didn't want Gabriel Michael Santorum to be an abstraction to his siblings.
First, Alan Colmes on Fox News: "Once (voters) get a load of some of the crazy things he's said and done, like taking his 2-hour-old baby who died right after childbirth home and played with it for a couple of hours so his other children would know that the child was real ..."
Colmes was then interrupted by Rich Lowry: "You are mocking him. They lost a child, Alan. That's very serious and it's not something you should be mocking on national TV."
Colmes' response: "I'm not mocking the losing of the child. But what I'm saying is I think it shows a certain unusual attitude toward taking a 2-hour-baby home who died to play with his other children."
In addition to engaging in a cheap and mean shot, Colmes simply made up the notion that the Santorums had brought the baby home for their other children "to play with."
The next day, Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer-Prize winning left-wing columnist for The Washington Post, said on MSNBC, Santorum is "not a little weird. He's really weird. Some of his positions he's taken are just so weird that I think some Republicans are going to be off-put. Not everybody is going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the stillborn child whose body they took home to kind of sleep with and introduce to the rest of the family. It's a very weird story."
Four times Robinson calls Santorum "weird," using the story about the death of the child as evidence. He was wrong on an important detail — the child was not "stillborn." And, like Colmes, he made up a mocking detail — that they took the child home "to kind of sleep with."
The meanness of these comments is self-evident, as Alan Colmes realized and later apologized to Santorum. Robinson, on the other hand, never apologized — as RealClearPolitics, which has no political agenda, correctly reported — even though repeatedly challenged to do so on MSNBC.
I raise these issues for only one reason: to provide further evidence of my belief that leftism makes more than a few of its adherents meaner people.
I have had many interactions with Alan Colmes, and while we always differ, I never found him to be mean-spirited. I still don't think he is mean-spirited, and though I am not the directly offended party, like Santorum, I accept his apology, because I believe he meant it.
So why did he say what he said?
Because leftism fills many of its adherents with contempt and hatred. It takes a person of great character and self-control to continually imbibe and mouth the mantras of the left — that everyone on the right is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, islamophobic, racist and bigoted — and not become a meaner human being. If I believed just about everyone with left-wing views was despicable, I would be meaner, too.
In a previous column, I wrote about Thomas Friedman making one of the classic anti-Semitic libels when he wrote that the reason the Senate and the House gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing ovations was because "that ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby."
How does a Jew write an anti-Semitic libel? Because he's on the left.
That was the reason Rep. Andre Carson said that members of Congress who support the Tea Party want to see blacks "hanging on a tree." Because he's on the left.
Leftists' meanness toward those with whom they differ has no echo on the normative right. Those on the left need to do some soul-searching. Because as long as they continue to believe that people on the right are not merely wrong but vile, they will get increasingly mean. The problem for the left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the right as vile, it has to argue the issues.
| Having trouble viewing this email? Read it on our website. Sovereign ManNotes from the Field Date: January 11, 2012 Reporting From: Santiago, Chile Last week, the US government's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), an agency of the US Treasury Department, published its 2011 annual report. There are a few numbers that are pretty startling. We've discussed before that FinCEN is the executive agency tasked with ensuring that every US banker is an unpaid government spy through Suspicious Activity Reports. A Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, includes details of any transaction that may be deemed 'suspicious'. Naturally, there's no clear guidance on what is/is not considered suspicious. Banks, brokerages, money service businesses, precious metals dealers... even casinos are required by law to fill them out. If you withdraw an unusual amount of cash from your bank account, that could be deemed suspicious. If you set up a new payee in your billpay service, that could be deemed suspicious. Anything and everything is fair game. Banks and other businesses who do not fill out SARs face hefty penalties, including imprisonment. If they disclose to a customer that s/he is the subject of a SAR, they have hefty penalties, including imprisonment. When push comes to shove and they have to choose between a nasty penalty, or submitting a SAR about your unusual cash withdrawal, which option do you think they'll pick? Unsurprisingly, nearly 1.5 million 'suspicious activity reports' were filed across the US banking system in 2011, well over twice the number reported in 2004. On top of this, there were an additional -14.8 million- 'currency transaction reports' filed in 2011, a 6% jump over last year. It's an unfortunate trend which highlights not only the end of financial privacy, but also the massive amount of data being collected by the government to keep tabs on its citizens. According to this year's report, a full 36 distinct federal law enforcement agencies requested information from FinCEN (and even more who haven't). Three dozen. And that doesn't include state or local law enforcement. That there are this many federal law enforcement agencies to begin with is mind-boggling... let alone the thought that some knucklehead at the Fish and Wildlife Service has access to bank records. This is one reason why international diversification is so important-- the likelihood of such collection and monitoring is greatly reduced when you bank overseas. Moreover, should one of these dozens of agencies or courts decide that your 'suspicious activity' warrants locking you out of your accounts, they have zero jurisdiction overseas. This is a common tactic in the US; financial activity is one of the many, many areas with a 'guilty until proven innocent' burden of proof. You don't even need to be doing anything wrong (which is the case most of the time this happens) for one of these agencies to freeze your account 'pending investigation' with a simple phone call. Good luck getting it unfrozen. They don't have that kind of pull overseas. That's why we've been writing for years to more than 100,000 subscribers that the most important thing you can do for your financial security is to have a foreign bank account, no matter where you're from. Planting a 'banking flag' outside of your home country is a very prudent, simple insurance policy. More and more people are starting to wake up to this reality. FinCEN also tracks the Report of Foreign Bank Account and Financial Accounts, commonly known as the FBAR. This form is required to be submitted by any US taxpayer with foreign financial accounts whose aggregate total exceeded $10,000 at any point during the year. For example, if you have a bank account in Uruguay with $9,000, and a small brokerage account in Panama with $2,000, you would have to submit the form by June 30th of each year to the Treasury Department. In 2011, 618,134 US taxpayers filed an FBAR (which would have covered the calendar year 2010). This is more than a 100% increase over the filings just two years ago... a huge jump. I suspect the 2012 figures will show similar growth. As a percentage of the population, though, the number is embryonic. It still leaves 308,127,404 Americans who have no backup plan, no insurance policy for their hard-earned savings. In other words, 99.8% of the population holds all of their money in an insolvent, corrupted, government-controlled, unsecured (though cleverly disguised) banking system. Are you one of the 0.2% who is paying attention? If not, what's holding you back? I'd like to know. Until tomorrow, Simon Black Senior Editor, SovereignMan.com VIEW A PREVIEW OF THIS MONTH'S SOVEREIGN MAN: CONFIDENTIAL The world is changing daily. 'Solutions' to government debt problems now delay the inevitable for minutes rather than weeks and months. Simon spends this month getting a grasp on how some of the most experienced experts predict the outcome. He doesn't forget to interview someone who has lived through crisis. Each provides their action plan to survive and thrive. Simon wanted to give you a preview so you can read the details for yourself.  Neither this email communication nor content posted to the website SovereignMan.com is intended to provide personal financial advice. Before undertaking any action described in this letter, financial or otherwise, you should discuss your options with a qualified advisor-- accountant, financial planner, attorney, priest, IRS auditor, Tim Geithner... Also, nothing published in this letter constitutes encouragement to avoid or evade tax obligations in your home country. Furthermore, you should understand that SovereignMan.com may in some instances receive financial compensation for products and/or services which are mentioned in the letter, and in other cases, SovereignMan.com receives no compensation. The needs of the community come first, and the presence or lack of financial compensation in no way affects the recommendations made in this letter. Blacksmith Pte. Ltd. publisher of Sovereign Man No.4 Kiarong Complex Gadong 2nd Floor Block D BSB, Brunei-Muara BE1318 Brunei Darussalam If you no longer wish to receive our daily emails, click the link below: Unsubscribe |
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