Every year, I head to the nursery and get sucked into buying petunias, especially those hanging baskets that look like a cornucopia of magnificent blooms. Three to six weeks later, my petunias look about as scraggly as Gollum from The Hobbit.
Yeah, I dead-head my petunias. I’ve tried keeping the soil moist. I’ve tried letting the soil dry out before watering them. I tried sun, partial sun, partial shade, full shade, and artificial lights. I tried fertilizing and not fertilizing. No matter what I do, within 3-6 weeks, my petunias have gone to pot.
Next spring, I am banning petunias from my garden. I’m going all impatiens - the regular variety, double impatiens for hanging pots, and my all time favorite New Guinea Impatiens for some extra pizzazz. All I do is water these guys, and they flower all summer long - none of that dead-heading nonsense.
FOX News ran a story this morning entitled “Countrywide Ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo Charged With Fraud” by reporters Peter Barnes and Joanna Ossinger. My first thought was “Well, it’s about time!” My second reaction was to wonder “Where were the regulators?”
In the years leading up to the mortgage meltdown, foreclosure epidemic, and global economic crisis, rampant fraud was being perpetrated across the United States and probably around the world, too. We have regulators in place to monitor banking and investment activities, so where were they? Where were they when Countrywide and other mortgage lenders, driven by greed, were systematically transforming the American Dream into a nightmare? Were were they when Bernie Madoff was fleecing investors? How could a handful of individuals and companies hijack and wreck the largest economy in the world?
Aren’t regulators supposed to prevent these sorts of things from happening?
