I think there has been enough research to know that obesity is not a moral failure and it is a very complex problem.

Will Ramseys next money making venture be a diet book since he knows it all?

And like those who go into debt, he is going straighten out all those whose overeat.....and then laugh all the way to the bank !

I read the latest entry on the bankruptcy yahoo group this morning. There was a discussion about counseling for those who file under the new law .

These words from someone who filed and got the counseling are disturbing to me:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ she also told us how we should get another credit

card as soon as we could to rebuild our credit.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This distubs me for these reasons:

Credit card offers to the newly bankrupt are dreadful. Read about Fee Harvesters and you will know how dreadful these offers are.

How many who have filed bankruptcy really "need" to jump back into the credit card game shortly after filing? Are they going to make finance purchases that are going to require them to

"rebuild they credit ASAP ?

If I did the counseling I would offer this common sense advice:

Save, save save. Have an emergency fund.

Live below or at least within your means.

Join a credit union.

Get a few years of savings and a record of paying your essentials on time.

Then if you want to "rebuild" your crecit with a credit card, apply at the credit union and use the card wisely.

Don't be a sucker for the big name credit card issurersand the Fee Harvesters who don't have your best interest at heart.

A big lump of coal this Christmas Day to the GOLIATHS OF GREED and they know who they are!

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/11/chase_rates.html

Like Citi, they are eliminating universal defualt .

There new policy is called clear and simple .

What was the old policy, blurry and confusing?

Some at badcreditcards.org seem to think so. Chase has more complaints than any other co.

When the new policy takes effect, will they give those who they are holding hostage who are unable to pay their balances off a break and lower their interest rate that they hiked up with the old policy?

I doubt it!

This Thanksgiving Day weekend I am  thankful I no longer play the "credit card game".

Whatever they change their policies to, I don't trust the goliaths of greed!

Many know about this bank because of the  offers they send the newly bankrupt.
I hope that Denny Stanford will be known more for his
FEE HARVESTER worthless plastic than he will be known for any of his good works.
I'm not saying it's not good to give, but I think this mans giving has come at the expense of taking advantage of  the desperate, naive, and  clueless individulas who didn't understand what they were getting into when they accepted the offer for his dreadful, worthless pieces of plastic!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Where's the glory in creating a charitable foundation that's still around in a century? Denny Sanford wants his billions to help sick and troubled children--right now.
Ten years ago T. Denny Sanford, 71, sprang for a Falcon Jet to avoid waiting at airports. During the first flight Sanford, who was in the process of amassing a $2.8 billion credit card fortune, asked the pilot to detour and cut a circle over his old blue-collar neighborhood in St. Paul, Minn. A fellow passenger, Dana Dykhouse, who runs Sanford's bank in South Dakota, noticed that his boss had gotten quiet while staring out the window at the blocks where he had grown up. The mogul was a bit choked up.

It was a rare departure from Sanford's usual no-nonsense demeanor, self-described as "highly rational." "Very plainly, very succinctly, I look at life as an investor," he says. "What will give me or my community the best return?" This just-the-facts approach served him well in building his successful business career, Sanford says. He's now applying it to philanthropy.

He cuts checks directly from his bank account for needy organizations. No bureaucratic foundations or grantmaking committees for him. Proposals come in, his longtime assistant Cobyann Berglund reads them and either throws them in the trash or passes them on. (The least meritorious come from prison inmates and long-lost relatives.) His money, he's decided, will be targeted to help children. "They don't have voices," he says. "Give them the right values. Give them the love they need. And give them the health that they so desperately need."

And don't leave money to a foundation that will perpetuate itself. "I want to die broke," says Sanford. Biomedical entrepreneur Alfred Mann, Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar and Home Depot (nyse: HD - news - people )'s Bernard Marcus talk the same way. Their wills dictate that any remaining money be disbursed by a deadline--"sunset philanthropy," as it is called.

"Denny is the kind of hard-nosed guy who says, 'I don't want to create a permanent foundation staff doing things I don't approve of because it fits their cultural values,'" says Newt Gingrich, who gives Sanford advice on health care. "The Ford Foundation is the example of the worst thing that could happen," says Sanford.

So far Sanford has given or pledged $500 million to children's organizations. And he expects that the rest of his wealth will follow--a sum that could double or triple before he shifts completely from running his companies to full-time philanthropy. His two sons have already inherited small pieces of what's become a big business, so he feels no further obligation to them. He also does not want to burden them with giving away his money.

Sanford was born in St. Paul, Minn. His father ran a wholesale garment business. When he was 4, he lost his mother. At 8 he started working every afternoon and weekend, stocking his father's shelves. The summer after graduating from high school he was arrested during a drunken brawl. That earned him a 90-day sentence in juvenile detention. A judge let him out on day 36, after he agreed to enroll at the University of Minnesota.

At age 20 Sanford lost his father, as well. Graduation in 1958 led to a sales job with Armstrong Cork. After a year he started his own firm, Contech, representing manufacturers of construction materials. Contech went public in 1972. Ten years later, with 350 employees and $35 million in sales, Milwaukee conglomerate Rexnord bought it for $28 million. Sanford's take was $20 million.

Then 45, with two kids in college, Sanford tried to relax. He moved with his wife to Clearwater, Fla. He lowered his golf handicap to five and contemplated qualifying for the Senior pga tour. "That turned out to be a joke," Sanford says, though he sometimes plays in up to four golf tournaments a week.

Soon divorced and back in Minnesota, Sanford dabbled in venture capital. In 1986 he helped out a friend who was going through a divorce and needed to unload a ten-branch bank in Sioux Falls, S.D. for $5 million. Sanford bought it and renamed it First Premier. Since then it's added five branches but remains sleepy. The real action came from its credit card company.

In 1981 South Dakota weakened its anti-usury laws in order to attract Citibank's credit card division away from Delaware. In 1989 Sanford looked for growth by recruiting a young executive, Miles Beacom, from Citi. Together they spent six years testing various ideas. The best they came up with was offering cards to people with terrible credit--and monitoring them carefully to avoid delinquencies.

First Premier now has 3 million active cardholders. Its cards are to be avoided if possible--they have 10% to 20% interest rates but cost $175 in fees to get a card with a $1,000 limit. The typical customer stays only 18 months before graduating to something better. "We provide a lifeline for credit-impaired people," Sanford says.

The company operates out of a one-story brick office building across from a Land O' Lakes factory in Sioux Falls. With only $900 million in balances out at any moment, the business is risky but very profitable. This year it will write off $400 million in delinquencies; Beacom says the subprime mortgage mess is so far a nonissue. Last year it had $310 million in pretax profits, from about $800 million in total revenue, three-quarters of which came from fees, including onerous late-payment and delinquency fees, in addition to the initial charges.

There are no outside investors, but Sanford has given four percentage points of the business to each of his two sons--one's a ship captain, the other a physical therapist. If he had sold the company to Citibank or Capital One, it would be worth $2 billion to $3 billion by our estimates.

Despite the jet, Sanford's tastes tend toward the modest. He's never patronized an art museum or the symphony nor tended a vineyard in France. He prefers to dine on fast food and drove a beat-up Dodge Caravan for years before his embarrassed underlings persuaded him to buy an Audi.

As well, he's a fun boss. Beacom says he and other execs have many of their meetings in Phoenix at Sanford's winter home, where the boss cooks them breakfast in his underwear. After a day of budgeting they ride bikes. At night they either play cards or go out drinking and dancing. "We don't dance with each other," Sanford clarifies. On his golf shoes he's inscribed a nickname: Wolt--for "World's Oldest Living Teenager." Sanford is a downhill skier. Before he left Minnesota he raced sailboats on Lake Minnetonka. A second, shorter marriage, protected by a prenup, ended in 2002.

Sanford's first big gift was $2 million to the Children's Home Society of South Dakota, in 1998. Since then he has added another $15 million, allowing the organization to build an endowment and more buildings and programs for troubled kids in South Dakota.

In 2002 Sanford had a clarifying experience. He pledged $35 million toward a $125 million football stadium for the University of Minnesota's Golden Gophers. (His "kids first" philosophy hadn't fully crystallized.) The gift turned out to be a bust after the university more than doubled the cost of the stadium and refused to give him naming rights unless he coughed up more. Sanford, fuming, withdrew the gift. His conclusion: avoid big bureaucratic institutions when it comes to charity.

That fiasco got a lot of attention in Sioux Falls. "I was cringing," says Kelby Krabbenhoft, the head of a hospital system then called Sioux Valley Health. Krabbenhoft, an energetic former college basketball star, persuaded Sanford to give $16 million to a children's hospital that Sioux Valley was building--the first new children's hospital in the U.S. in a decade. Sanford got his name on the hospital. The new building will have 60 beds and look like a Disney castle. Sanford then funneled $15 million through Sioux Valley Health to the nearby Mayo Clinic to set up a partnership around pediatric research. Krabbenhoft also helped Sanford place $20 million with the University of South Dakota Medical School, which also took the Sanford name.

In February Sanford pledged $400 million to Sioux Valley Health, which promptly changed its name to Sanford Health. Krabbenhoft says the money will be used to transform his hospital system into a Mayo Clinic-like medical destination for pediatrics. The money will fund a research project to solve a previously intractable problem--along the lines of the Salk polio vaccine. The problem has not yet been identified, but early bets are that it will focus on autism. The new children's hospital helped induce Dr. Eugene Hoyme, an expert on fetal alcohol syndrome, to leave Stanford to take on the tough task of building the pediatrics department from scratch.

The rest of the money will go to help Sanford Health build a futuristic campus, to fund other pediatric research endeavors and to seed Sanford primary care pediatric clinics, which will be situated around the country and maybe the world. Denny Sanford says he hopes to turn Sanford Health into a brand, like Mayo, and to attract other donors who will build the "Joe & Cathy Smith campus of Sanford Health" in places like Phoenix or Orlando.

Sanford is coy about when he might cash out the credit card company and what will happen to the rest of his fortune. He recently established a foundation--which he is quick to say has no staff and will simply receive his money if anything happens to him before he can donate it. He's begun to dabble outside South Dakota, spending a day with Yankees manager Joe Torre, who has a charity that focuses on abused kids. He gave $7 million recently to Hole in the Wall camps for seriously ill children, which were started by Paul Newman in 1988.

In speeches Sanford likes to share the gimmicky slogan: "Aspire to inspire before you expire." But even if he does expire prematurely, his desire to die broke will be fulfilled through his will, says his attorney David Knudson. "It's a huge burden to place on someone else," Sanford says. "I like to think I have enough years left to spend all this money."

It's that time of year again and my phone is ringing off the hook. Thank goodness voting in Northern VA will be this Tuesday. The calls will stop for awhile.

Last time I had this many calls was when VA was choosing a new Governor. I remember election day that year. I got over twenty calls "reminding" me to vote. I was out the door at 7 AM and voted early.

I wrote to the Congressman of this district and told him I didn't like all these phone calls. He was not sympathic at all. Basically just told me there were certain calls that were excempt from being on the do not call list and politicians are on that list.

Most of the calls I get are recordings. One was a real live person though and I asked her, do people like these calls? She laughed and replied, no they hate them. I said, well, why do you make them then? She told me she didn't even live in the state of VA and was hired by her employer and needed extra income and that was why she did it. She added she didn't even know these people who were up for election. I found that interesting. So I guess some of the donated money is used to hire telephone pests! I won't be sending anyone any money.

I have never made up my mind who I am going to vote for by a telephone call anyway!

Have you?

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/469109231?z00m=10482251

Please pass the link on.

Thanks

"You know who I feel sorry for in this whole thing? The undercover cop. How'd you like to have that job. Sit in an airport bathroom all day, your pants around your ankles with a coffee and a donut waiting for guys to hit on you." --Jay Leno