Yee-had!

Boy! Them Israelis know how to ring out the old with a bang. Talk about taking an elephant gun to rouse up some grouse. If I may paraphrase, it’s sort of like when you are sitting there reading of a summer’s day and a fly keeps buzzing around you but you just shrug it off because flies don’t bite. Then it gets your goat and you put down your book only to lose your page and now you are mightily cheesed off. The fly must die, you cry. Find the freakin’ swatter and come back to the hunt. No fly. You wait. You hear it. Poised, you stand upon the shaky ottoman and survey your empire. There on the ceiling. SPLAT! It was a largish fly and now its mass is spread, red and black, all over your recently painted ceiling. You know there will be a hew and a cry if you leave the drying carnage and you know that any argument defending your actions will not be appreciated.

So, instead of going back to your book you get a paper towel and some 409 and soon enough you are going back to what you were so innocently doing twenty minutes before, reading. Then you hear the fly’s brother coming for revenge and you contemplate an early cocktail. But instead you move to where there are no flies and grumble a little that a fly got you so worked up. You know there are flies and you think maybe you should have just held the swatter and idly wave it in case he comes around again. But you didn’t. You took decisive action believing, almost, that the other flies would know not to mess with you. That they would meet the same fate if they dared. But the new fly is filled with hatred over his lost brother and doesn’t care if he meets the same fate if he can just get some revenge. And he goes in search of you hoping to find you in the brief time on earth allowed flies. He also knows there will be other flies to come after him and that you have what they want.

In Gaza, where the Palestinians are crammed in like flies at a dumpster (it has the same land mass as two Washington DCs for 1.4 million inhabitants), the people have been fighting since they began to walk erect and could use their opposable thumb to swing a club. Palestinian Arabs claim Gaza as their homeland and while they have been there a long time, with mixed results, no one else quite sees it that way. They have been run over and run by the Egyptians, the British and Israelis and that’s just the last century. They never really had it all together but most certainly not in living memory.

Remember Ringo’s separated-at-birth-brother Yasser Arafat? The guy was all that for a while but soon realized that the cause would never be won and so cashed in depriving “his people” of the basic necessities while he banked billions. He turned down an Israeli deal that promised more self-rule and a real chance to have their own state and there has been little peace since. Good call.

But the new guys suck, too. The Hamas charter states: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” While Jihad means “struggle” in the Q’uran, mostly it has come to mean “wipe the sons a bitches off the face of the earth.” Hamas seems keen to do this where Israel is concerned even as other Muslim groups would like to see all of us Crusaders take a hike. In the most recent elections in Gaza, Hamas won big time taking 76 of the 132 seats to defeat the more moderate Fatah party. Now all of Gaza suffers the horrendous response to Hamas’ harassment of the all powerful Israel.

My man Zbigniew Brzezinski said this morning that the killing of (he said 400) Palestinians and wounding 1,400 more was too harsh. After all, with all of the homemade rocket attacks on Israel, not one person was killed. Morning Joe got indignant, as he is wont to do, and fired back with his typical bellicose bravado that a strong response is all these people understand. Joe’s a pretty macho guy. He’s a real toughy. Zbiggy came back with, “You have a stunningly superficial understanding of foreign policy in the Middle East.” I gave him a standing O, and Joe went ballistic.

There are always two sides to a story and this one has even more. Who knows what will happen, but I doubt I will live long enough to see the kind of peace in the Valley that most of us hope for in that land of endless jihad. It was interesting when I was bouncing around in Wiki-land that some wit had hacked in and when I clicked on the link for “Hamas” I came to this page. I reprint it in its entirety:

Fuck Hamas

Christmas tree hunting

I was moved by my sister’s piece in this coming Vermont Observer remembering very sweetly that our cranky old artist father had created wood-cut home-made C’mas cards that we painted in the colors with our own individual water color sets. One year he created an x-massy scene on the living-room wall with pastels. But the tradition that I remember now that had escaped me for years because it was just the way things were done at our house, was setting out the silver martini set for Senor Claus with my father’s favorite cheese (Liederekranz) and crackers. That it was gone in the morning goes without saying. Licked clean.

In the happy days of the fifties (not counting Korea, the cold war and polio), C’mas still held much of its charm. Though, I can never remember it being “magical” or that any part of it mattered as much as the loot under the tree, I herewith acknowledge that I loved the C’mas music that seemed to encourage the anticipation of the big day. And the outdoor decorations kind of confirmed that the great event was at hand. Mistletoe, however, appealed to the seamier side, the prurient and pimpled teenager say, who wanted something you don’t put on Santy’s list: sex.

I spent a couple of December 25ths in the army overseas. Germans were way into Sinter Klaus (or any holiday) and can’t nobody party like they do. But the barracks were devoid of the trimmings and there was never a tree for presents.

When I became a father, the spirit of the event came back and it was fun to get the kids worked up. In tiny little Freedom, not far from here, we had a big old farm house and we could cut our tree in the dense woods behind our field. I once made a tree-top star out of alu foil and I still have it, as I do some of the tree clingers Sonny Boy Jim made in grammar school. One year I traded Lance Cloutier a case of mustard (I was a mustard magnate during the ‘80s) to fashion a wrought iron hoop (see TSJ adverts) so that we could make our own barn wreath every year.

Going after the tree became a writable event when we all had kids of or around the age of believing, sort of. We had a tradition of going up to Jackson and meeting at the Lodi’s who had god knows how many kids at that point. Paul had one of the ur four door pick up trucks and we would load it up with giddy kids and groggy grown ups; saws and an ax; and of course a shot gun. We were in fact Christmas tree hunting.

In those days you were allowed to drive with open containers of eggnog as long as you were having fun and stayed off the main roads. Paul had the key to the National Forest. (Anybody who doesn’t know Lodi might ask, “How the hell did he get that key?” All of us who know him say, “How the hell did he get that key?”). The truck had four wheel drive and we would go up the unplowed trail till we couldn’t. Some of us had flasks in case the nog gave out. And there was always a whiff of spliff, if you were tall enough.

The main difference between a National Forest and a tree farm is the height of the trees. There aren’t a lot of short ones up in Carter Notch so we would cut down taller ones and make them smaller. The shotgun came in handy for knocking the tops off the real beauties standing tall against the sky. These usually turned out to be skimpy upon closer inspection and were discarded. Once, full of bravado (manufactured by Hennessy) I climbed up inside the branches of a spruce (I think it was blue), with my trusty buck-saw, because Flower (we were hippie to the core) wanted a particular top for her living room. I ascended slowly and painfully but committed. I descended rapidly and painfully and should have been committed. Down feathers from my new parka fell like, down feathers. But I got what I wanted, a mittened applause and some unsympathetic laughter. I don’t even remember if I got the top of tree. And our lovely Flower is no longer here to remind me.

C’mas trees are an obstreperous bit of biology. Their DNA is wired to fall over with the least bit of physics being involved. Once, I tethered a fully dressed one so that it could not possibly fall over only to wake up those still sleeping, with my obscenities, when I discovered early one morning on the way out the door for work, that what I know about securing a tree’s verticality could be written on a piece of tinsel.

Two things I miss still are the free eggnog at Carroll Reed’s on C’mas eve. One of my high school honies worked there and would spike ours, back when it was okay to do so, but only on that special eve. The other was that Horsefeather’s would special order oysters for us and we would pile in with our gin-cherried noses and make an afternoon of it before going off to the five and dime next door for cheapo stocking stuffers, because Ben and Brian had absorbed all our shopping funds.

Much about C’mas has changed, the main thing being me. I can’t fit a tree in my fuel efficient car and putting up the thing is now almost the chore it is to take it down. No matter how clever I think I am at putting things away the year before, they don’t seem to be where I thought. Going to parties requires too much planning, and driving after one is now forbidden. Nobody wants to hear my rendition of A Child’s Christmas in Wales any more, and I’m not all that keen on listening to little whosit scrape out an ear piercing version of Good King What’s His Face on his violin.

But still, I made the punch for the library party again, there’s snow on the ground and we’ve candles in the windows. There are half gallons of the good stuff for when T & D come up from Fla. and there’ll be three nights of dinner parties right here, with all kinds of cheery souls who will "help" cook and break dishes. No need to be a grumpy grandpigge. I can do this. And for all the sneering cynicism you read in The Jacket, I’m almost sure that the fat man, “Knows if you’ve been naughty or nice/ so be good for goodness’ sake.”

Christmas drear

O Gawd how I miss the campaign. We’re now down to yakking about puppy picks, what Michelle will wear to the balls, and whether the Smoker-in-Chief is mincing words about whether he does or doesn’t. Athens is in its third day of riots, the world economy is in a handbasket headed for Hades, we are fighting two wars, and we keep piling on the debt at home with a ho hum.

There is, of course, the Detroit debacle to perk us up. I hesitate to say “bailout” because I don’t believe that’s going to happen. I know bupkes about macro economics, except that “macro” means big, but when you look at the rate that Detroit is hemorrhaging dollars and the fact that new car demand is down from 17 mill a year to ten, anybody who can add and subtract would bet that there is no way that those companies can pay back these or any loans. They’ll take the money, reimburse their stock ops and let the chips fall where they may. Right now, Barney and Nancy want to give them a veto-proof $15 Billion dollars. Chump change in the world according to TARP. And they will have til March to get their asses out of its current sling and come back for more. What a plan! What a great country! What an eye-ache!

Some hotshot who works for Rick Wagoner, the top-kick at GM, actually tried to tell the booboisie this morning that Rick’s $16 mil. in bonuses, were really only a fraction of that when you figure the value of the stock. If you believe that then you will probably fall for his prognosis of GM’s overseas sales as solid. If there was any good news from Mo Town, why would it be an asterisk from this flack instead of a headline as big as The New York Post had for OJ’s recent change of address: "NOW ROT."

The big question for me is: Would we bail out American workers in Marysville, Ohio, making Hondas or BMW builders in South Carolina? I don’t think so. I think we tell them foreign fkrs to take a flying leap at a freakin' doughnut. But the argument, which we haven’t even heard a hint of from them, would be: We are American workers who pay taxes and all the subsidiary dependents of our industry would be screwed just as much as up in Detroit. If anyone is suggesting that GM's apron is more important because it’s bigger, than I want to know where the cut off is. What’s too big to fail, and, too small to care about?

But see, they are not asking for a bailout. American cars have one in the top ten car sales according to Consumer Reports. Why aren’t people buying American? I’ve had four Jeeps. I thought that was a good statement of how ‘mericun I am, although I now question why the dealer didn’t give me an Old Glory lapel pin so I could double down on my patriotism rush. Then, I found out that my ‘90 Wrangler was actually assembled in Comminist Chiner. What the hotel? YGBSM!

So, what is a patriot to do? Back up these billionaires on their boneheaded plan just so we can someday apologize to our children and their children for the extra gift they keep giving the gummint with every paycheck? Or tune into the post-season playoffs with a vengeance? Go Pats! (If they can squeak in past the New Jersey 'Jits.)

On another somewhat less sanguine note, I learned this morning from Dave Walker who was the head of the GAO (the nation's top accountant) that we’re broke, screwed and tattooed. By 2030 the entire budget will be spent on Soc. Sec., Medicaid and Care and interest on the national debt. That’s if things keep on keeping on. There will be ZERO money for defense (now 54% of our annual budget), twice as much for VA, about the same for education, right next to nada for infrastructure and scientific research. Even Ted Stevens couldn’t squeeze a nickel out of that budget.
Walker says that beginning next year and 20 years after, 78 million people will become pensioners and medical dependents of the US taxpayer.

If you haven’t seen this guy click here then pour a bracer and have a look. This interview is over a year old but I watched him say the same things today. Medicare, he says, is 5 times worse than SS. Now he is working for Pete Peterson’s new foundation so that he can do in the private sector what he could not in government. He said, “My new position will provide me with the ability and resources to more aggressively address a range of current and emerging challenges facing our country, including advocating specific policy solutions and courses of action.” Sweet.

Pete Peterson said, “The entitlement monster is unfunded. We are dangerously dependent on foreign capital. Our health care costs per capita are twice the level of the developed world. The goal is to integrate public policy and charitable giving and to answer this question: How do you educate a public that has become largely inert?”

Blog, Baby, Blog.

Would you like to be “vetted”?

The other day at the unveiling of the top cabinet nominees, some reporter asked President Elect Obama (PEO) If the campaign hyperbole wasn’t now biting him in the ass. BHO grinned that grin and said, “I know you’re having fun but…" and then he went on to say that “outside of the heat of the campaign” we have had good solid discussions and we are very much on the same page vis a vis the big issues that we are now concerned with. Which seems to The Jacket a tacit admission of the bullshit that goes on inside the holy hell of a campaign that absolutely requires the precision parsing of the opponents words to turn them on themselves only to be revealed later as “just kiddin’.” This isn’t news as in “new” but it is in the news that Hilary said this or that about the Senator before he was PEO and before he whupped her ass. And you may remember for his part he had reduced her touted “diplomatic missions” to “having attended some tea parties” in various world capitals.

Now AG Elect Eric Holder, who hopes to head Justice is being held to a different standard than he was when he was number two there and helped to pardon Marc Rich – but do we care? They’re all a bunch of scoundrels and probably the worst thing we can presently say about PEO is that he “palled around with terrorists” and he failed to leave church when he disagreed with his pastor’s theatrics. One could argue that he shouldn’t have been in the church in the first place. But that argument holds no water in that this is a nation of christian convenience, meaning that most of the voters are some sort of adherent to that religious philosophy if only because it looks good on their resume. So, go to church the candidate must.

PEO, when he was just plain BHO, played the hand that was dealt when he horned in on the game. He attended a popular black church so he could be seen with the people with whom he wished to rub elbows. And it works until you try to explain the Rev. Wright clips to the huge swath of guns & religion clingers. It isn’t up to those voters to fathom how the intricacies of politics works. They are supposed to take you at your word when they see you on TV. Or not.

Nobody is now holding McCain responsible for some of the dumb or desperate things he said back in September and October. Of course it doesn’t really matter now, at all. And his confessional concession speech that showed the best side of old McNasty is what most people will remember about him. It’s just the way it seems to work.

Holder was doubtlessly doing the Presidential bidding of the boss. Marc “Filthy” Rich was a fugitive of justice for twenty years making himself even richer by investing, illegally of course, in Iranian contracts and eventually enriching the Clinton Library with his ill-gotten lucre. Part of that joke is that Rich fled the US because he was convicted for not paying taxes. He couldn’t pay his taxes but he could contribute to the First Bank of Clinton Library. And the reason he gave for not paying is because (he says) he was innocent. That the over zealous prosecutor, one Rudolph Giuliani (Rudy? Overzealous?), tried him criminally when, Rich says, “it should have been treated as a civil matter.” Memo to Mark: Pay the damn taxes!

Anygate, AG Elect Holder, who had nothing to gain, except the ire of the Commander in Thief, did as he was bid. Conversations he was supposed to have had about the matter in the two years prior to the hurried pardoning process seem innocent if you’re not looking for trouble, and the opposite if you are.

Here’s my understanding of the “vetting process”: If I want to buy a horse, I take him to a veterinarian to look in his mouth and ears, test his feet and legs and stick fingers in every orifice to make sure there is nothing wrong with the horse before the sale. That is probably less painful and embarrassing than a political vetting at the cabinet level.

Christopher Hitchen’s assessment of Hilary Clinton not withstanding she will be confirmed easily as it is almost too embarrassing for colleagues to ask: “If you could lie about being shot at in Bosnia, telling the same story three times, how do we know you wouldn’t lie to us when reporting on matters of State?”

Politics is a gas but it often gives us gas. I have seen at the Selectmen level in tiny NH towns the cheating, lying and even stealing that goes on. It starts there and works its way up. However cynical we think we are, the general public is way too trusting. That’s why our Sheriff got away with charging new suits to the taxpayer and why Bill Clinton got away with getting a beanie in the oval office. If he could be whinnying amonst us, I’m sure Kurt Vonnegut would want to say, “And so it goes.”

The First Thanksgiving

The first Thanksgiving was at our house, 7 Maple St. in a shoreline town in Connecticut. Even without presents it was our favorite holiday. The right time of year with one last football contest between the two rivals. Cider from Ziggy York’s fruit farm and the thrill-seeking joy of zinging horse chestnuts at cars from behind a tree. The big deal though was the cousins coming down from Hartford which made for a houseful. Lots of cooking which my mother was up to. Great food. Great fun.

My mother died before I went in the army and my father a year after I got out. We had moved to North Conway before that and it is where I wanted to be. Still do. But there was a tug to the old sod and especially around turkey day. My older sister and her husband who still lived in Milford had become sort of surrogate parents in that we younger Cases could always crash at their house, sponge their booze and get laundry done. They had four kids and invited some of the orphans to join them for some turkey. I had a not yet one year old and my high school brother. Wife-one thought we should bring him up after the pere passed. My sister Mary was preggers and she and Brian came down with us. I borrowed Tommy Mulkern’s Plymmie station wagon for the six hour trip.

The only rule I remember was you could only spark up a new one when we hit a new highway. I made it all the way to Dover, maybe sixty miles, before I got popped for speeding with this comical gaggle of hippies at a time when the pigs were not cool with that scene. I had to go to the police station to sort things out. Quelle trip.
Some of the wine brought for the big day managed to survive the trip but we were a little bit giddy when we got to the house. I hatched a plan to surprise our hosts and when my sister opened the front door there was Taffy, Brian and I wearing only the ties we had brought to wear at dinner. As hoped for Giggy freaked out and I remember her saying she hadn’t seen me or Taff naked since she changed our diapers.
That set the tone for the next twenty five years. The group got bigger and included cousins, more and more spouses and once in a while some outside guests. I remember before we headed off to the Milford–Stratford hundred year old football contest, hearing my baby brother pop a cork on a bottle of Wild Turkey with his teeth. He spit it across the drive way and said casually, “I guess I won’t be needing that any more.” He was wearing roller skates.

We seldom sat less than 25 to dinner. My brother-in-law was a genius at turning the living room into a banquet hall with tables he had cadged from the private school where he taught. The neighbors were also into the bacchanalia that decended on them every fourth Wednesday in November. Thanksgiving eve, my young nepot Pete, who now owns all the music in NYC, would lead revelers around the neighborhood singing turkey carols which consisted largely of “gobble gobble gobble” to the tune of jingle bells. With his back up group (BUG) of twenty or so he would lead us in a song of his own creation. PETE: “I saw your hiney. BUG: boomp boomp boomp boomp. PETE: it’s white and shiny. REPEAT CHORUS. PETE: You’d better hide it. CHORUS and PETE again: before I bite it.” Well-wishers in the door ways of the neighborhood would raise an appreciative glass and wipe the tears from their eyes.

One year while we were making our bibulous rounds, a brightly painted papier mache turkey with a yellow bathing cap, a red rubber glove for a wattle, and wearing green tights, came out of the bushes doing more of a chicken walk than a turkey strut while holding up a sign that read EAT ME! He said he had stayed up the whole night before (wink, wink) fabricating this fabulous Melleagris Gallipolis and some how managed to pull the bit off without anyone knowing ahead of time. It topped the top. He also brought an album, one of those big round black plastic thingys that when properly spun will play music. None of us had yet heard of Bruce Springsteen. That has now changed. Thanks, Paulie.

On the twentieth anniversary we decided to do a black tie dinner. I came up from DC, folks came down from VT and NH. Doc flew in from AZ and Mike from AK. One year Taffy came in from Paris but I don’t think that was the year. Anygate, the grown-ups towed the line in traditional garb. The college girls thought it was a hookers ho down or something and showed up looking like Miss Kitty or Madeleine Kahn in Blazing Saddles. I’m looking at the group photo right now (back when only Gig was gray) and I’m almost sure that some where Federico Fellini is smiling.

The kids grew up and got married and had to start sharing their Thanksgiving with complete strangers. Bob and Gig retired to VT and we tried to keep up the Hunter Thompson pace over there but it fizzled. Yet the tradition lives on in each of our own homes. We will be having twenty this year including two of us who were at the first Thanksgiving ever.

Let me try this again

If everybody in this fair land got health care, which would be run on the excellent model that the Veterans Administration uses, that could be the stimulus package the country needs right now. People wouldn’t have to pay for premiums and small business and large wouldn’t. That is cash in the pocket and that goes into the economy and investment for growth. Congress, teachers, state employees, unions, veterans, people over 65 all get some kind of insurance most of them paid for with tax dollars.

Preventive medicine saves money for the country. The poor use the ER for their primary care. Taxpayers pick up the tab. These same people tend to consider something “free” as having no value. They never consider preventive measures for whatever reasons, but that is not for us to speculate here.

My friend Dr. Malvesta (mal means sick in French) says it won’t work. But I would offer this explanation from the group, Physicians for a National Health Program:

“The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $7,129 per capita. Yet our system performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 47 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered.
This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $350 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans."

"Policies that work means that everyone must be included, and that risk must be distributed in an equitable manner, based on ability to pay," says a group member. Or as Karl Marx might have it, “From each according to their ability, to each according to his need.” Yes, it’s redistribution of wealth (like all taxes) and yes, using the term Marxism isn’t that popular with anybody. Get Over It! It’s just a tag on an economic theory which in the proper environment works. And is working right here in the good ol’ US of A. If you make more money in this country, then you get noodged into a higher tax bracket. While you may not like it, you accept it. Your higher taxes go to helping crack babies get a better shot at life, educating any and everyone, and bailing out fat cats who have been scamming the system since they got their MBAs. It’s just the way it works.

To quote one of my favorite philosophers, “Let me make myself crystal clear” (that would be Nixon, Henney): We invest speculative dollars in a proven system to save big time on government handouts. We also improve the quality of health in the nation which means we spend less on life’s losers. Also too, and this is the point right now, people on national health care and businesses of all sizes will have more resources for the things they need. And businesses in particular can be more competitive on a world scale because they won’t have the onerous “benefit packages” that include in large part health bennies.

Postscriptum: Even if the (formerly Big) Three get the $25 B, they have already stated that it will not be for investment in 100 mpg vehicles. It will go for “on-going costs.” This is chump change to them. Last quarter, GM alone lost $39 B. You’d think that would be a record. Nope. The record belongs to AOL Time Warner back in 2002, $45 B. They didn’t get a bailout and now they are trading at about eight bucks a share. GM is at $2.88 Time to buy, I’d say.

An idea for the bailout bucks

Let’s do a little ranting. There’s nothing else to be done because no one seems to have a real idea what can be done about the bailout. Yesterday, Hank Paulson who couldn’t explain a bus schedule, tried to convince Barney Frank the Commerce Chair, that it didn’t matter what Congress had legislated for rules in the $700 billion dollar handout to the finance sector because, “that was not our original intent.”

Frank cut him off three times as Hank tried to obfuscate the point by wandering way off from the reason he was there. Barney was actually waving the printed words of the stipulation at the insincere secretary which clearly states how the money could be spent, but Paulson was having none of it. He continued to bluster his way to the end of Frank’s time who finally threw up his hands in disgust. Hank had done his job. He had no intention of addressing the actual question or responding to the people’s representatives, and he didn’t. The frustration and arrogance in the room made for squeamish watching.

And it brings up the question that I had from the beginning of bandying about the $700B number. Who will be spending the money, and on what, and where does it all come from?

Our federal budget is $2.65 trillion as in - 000,000,000,000.00 - and $700 B may not sound like that much to Hank Paulson but here’s what the gummint was able to fund for this year with only 789 billion:

• Health/Human Services
• Soc. Sec. Administration
• Education Dept.
• Food/Nutrition programs
• Housing & Urban Dev.
• Labor Dept.
• other human resources

Next year the budget will be at three trill. Fourteen percent of that, or $420 billion will go for Medicare payments. That’s only for people over 65. How about taking the bailout billions (wherever that comes from) and finance a national health program like every other modern country has so that all citizens are covered the way federal and state employees, veterans, congress people and anyone else on the government teat is. That way the big three auto industries wouldn’t have that huge number for health benefits while the workers are working and even after they are retired.

That supposedly is the reason that the big three can’t compete with their foreign-owned competitors who, of course, build their cars in the U.S. Same kind of workers, same pay, but with no legacy funds eating up the profits. I guess that we are supposed to ignore the fact that America has been building the wrong kinds of cars and paying lobbyists obscene amounts of money to get away with it. Cars with lousy mileage fueling needless horsepower. Why do we build V-8s that go twice the top speed limit? Only in the last couple of years Jeep (Chrysler) came up with a competing model for the Hummer. We need more Hummer’s? Now these dubs come crawling to Capitol Hill wringing their hands while holding out their collective hat.

Mitt Romney, whose dad used to run American Motors and brought it out of a crisis similar to what we are seeing today, says in today’s NYT, screw ‘em. Well, not exactly those words, but he did say let them go into chapter 11 which is a vehicle (groan) for allowing these companies to hold off paying their creditors till they can get back on their feet, simply put. Not so simple will be restructuring the very complex labor agreements, specifically what the unions have perpetuated since there have been unions. Mitt says get rid of the old management. Bring in new truly creative people from unlike industries to get at real innovation. Set up for the future with an eye towards energy independence. I like it. Let him run it if he’s so sure it can happen.

The main thing going on here is business as usual. The greed heads are tripping over themselves trying to get their schemes through so they can get a taste of the $700,000,000,000 pie. There was even a bunch of plumbing contractors who formed a group asking for a chunk so they could rehab houses to get them back on the market. You can just imagine how the Treasury is being inundated with scams of all sizes. I don’t trust Paulson to do the right thing and if brash Barney can’t get him to answer a straightforward question, how is he or anyone else going to get a strict accounting of who is going to get some of this money? And oh, you flat-ass know they will be back for more.

The greedy will always be with us

“You must remember this/stable economies are such bliss.” You can play that again Sam. If we know, and I know that you all do, economies ebb and flow almost as predictably as the tides, what is it in the whacky human psyche that does not understand that to ignore history is to repeat the disasters that it offers up on a regular and predictable wave pattern?

We had a doozy of a recession with depression statistics at the end of the Carter and beginning of the Reagan administrations. I pulled the following from Wikipedia: “The unemployment rate in the U.S. reached 10.8% in December 1982—higher than at any time in post-war era. Job cutbacks were particularly severe in housing, steel and automobiles. By September 1982, the jobless rate reached 10.8%. Twelve million people were unemployed, an increase of 4.2 million people since July 1981.

“The recession came at a particularly bad time for banks due to a recent wave of deregulation. The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 (DIDMCA) had phased out a number of restrictions on banks' financial practices, broadened their lending powers, and raised the deposit insurance limit from $40,000 to $100,000 (raising the problem of moral hazard). Banks rushed into real estate lending, speculative lending, and other ventures just as the economy soured.

“The FSLIC pushed mergers as a way to avoid insolvency. From 1980 to 1982, there were 493 voluntary mergers and 259 forced mergers of savings and loans overseen by the agency. Despite these failures and mergers, there were still 415 S&Ls at the end of 1982 that were insolvent.

“Pressured to counteract the increased deficit caused by the recession, Reagan agreed to a corporate tax increase in 1982. [He did WHAT??] However, he refused to raise income taxes or cut defense spending. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 instituted a three-year, $100 billion tax hike—the largest tax increase since World War II.”

Mind you, this was twenty-five years ago when a new Volvo wagon was $7,000, the average price of a home in Greenwich, CT was $151,000 and KKR bought RJR/Nabisco for almost the same amount we just so casually gave to the auto industry to kind of help them through a rough patch so they could stay afloat till the real bailout bucks come in.

Reagan lowered interest rates rates from around 20 percent and by the time he was up for reelection the jobless number was down to 7.2 percent or just a little higher than it is now. Things turned around. That was then, but in between now was the 1991 recession. What, we didn’t learn our lesson? Hell no! People were greedy and we all saw lots of it everywhere. Why then the surprise when (Gee shock!) the housing bubble burst? Why the reprise of surprise when it happened again in ‘2001? And how could we be in this mess now?

BarackO said so many times on the campaign trail: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.” When the stock market dropped 23 percent on October 19, 1987 new regs were put in to make sure that trading would stop at a certain point if that were to happen again. Taking preventative measures seemed like a good idea to me. So if we know now what we know about housing bubbles and their predictable burstings, shouldn’t we be working on a solution to that?

But, nooooooo. The government and both houses decided that some un-named economic benefit derived to the country in the notion that the more people that live in their own homes the better it is for everyone. Really? How about all those taxes they don’t pay on the interest portion of their mortgage? Consider also too that most people move every seven years. I feel another eye ache coming on.

Consider this factoid when the Reagan recession started to recede: “Some of the most dramatic improvements came in industries hardest hit by the recession, such as paper and forest products, rubber, airlines, and the auto industry.” (italics mine.) I am inclined to say, no more bailouts and put a hold on handing out money to banks that only want to buy up more banks. It’s more greed no matter the spin they put on it. If money of this magnitude is up for grabs, the grabby will get it. The Russians are probably lobbying like a bastid for a piece and Curtis Sliwa is salivating for a couple of bills to bail out the Guardian Angels. I bet Ted Stevens is kicking his own butt that he can’t be in on the mother of all handouts, owing to the delicateness of his situation.

Democracy is such a pain in the ass. It’s nothing short of mind boggling that it actually works.

To: Robert Lyon Treat, ex-PFC, SFTG and 82nd Airborne (ret.)

Abn Bobby,

Does one wish one a “happy” Veterans Day? Mais non, maybe. It’s kind of a solemn occasion and instead of thinking about getting drunk on jug wine strung up with IV tubing in our BAMC barracks, I will concentrate on the real heroes like my Dad who rode a horse in parades down in Hartford during the first Great War. Also, too, I think very much of Captain Doc who lost his eye to Charlie and has never found it or the reason he was there. Here’s to good old Great Gran’pa (Charles Humphrey) Case who lost his health to dysentery while interred in Andersonville, a nasty residence that did not kill his enthusiasm for his country or fond feeling for fellow veterans. And there’s Captain Daniel Case who fucked over the Indians in a land grab that went horribly wrong for the wrong side. Then his son went after the Brits so we could have lower taxes, and white land owners could vote.

This morning I left a message for Jonesy on his ans. mac. He is most assuredly off to some parade with his beret verde ancien. He actually gave it to me one C’mas eve, long after he’d gotten sober. He and Maisly were in Rye with Jame and me. I sneaked it back to Maise so she could give it back to her father someday. I never got to wear one, since back in that day, the year Mustang came out with that frabjous convertible, one had to earn the hat. “Get your three” before you don the green beanie. Anyway, as you know, I went to Deutschland to help mop up the Marshall plan and check out the frauleins, but that’s for another time.

I remember that you went down to the Dom Rep for a little sun and some hot action. Even got to see some shooting and sew some sorry suckers back up. Good job being a medic, well for me anyway. Wearing whites every day as I walked (not friggin’ marched) to the ER for my 9 to 5 with occasional weekend CQ. Johnny Jones didn’t have it like that y’ know. Well actually, I didn’t know either till about ten years ago when he started to show me some pics and tell some stories about working with the ‘Yards’ and running a small hospital in the mountains somewhere. Let it suffice to say he buried way too many people for the experience not to own his soul from then till now.

Remember how whacked he was when we got back to State U.? I always thought he was a little outré but he shocked even me. He was like a little Che Gueverra riding around campus on his ten speed. I had no idea what he had seen and even if he had told me there is no way that anyone can recreate the horror of combat and indiscriminate death so that we could feel what they felt. Thank Cryce. He told me of one particular incident that gave me the heebies, and later I wondered (I still kind of do) why he didn’t break down at the memory. I also wonder if he has told anyone else about this stuff. How much good can it be to keep it in? How awful to have to relive it in the telling.

I don’t know what his dreams are like but I do know that the problems that plague him now are the same as everybody who has to pay bills, worry about children and be nagged forever about what might have been if he hadn’t witness the insidiousness of man’s ultimate struggle with man.

I think of Johnny, and my brother, and their buds on this day. I think of the guys we knew who did not come back and the one’s who came back like Bob Kerrey and Max Cleland. I think of that big black “V” in the ground at the mall. I can never look at that fucker Kissinger without thinking of his secret pact with Le Duc Tho to hold off on a peace agreement so that Stinkin’ Dick Nixon could get elected only to draw out the war for another five years with a death total of 5 to 6,000,000 Southeast Asians and 58,159 Americans. Thanks, you Dick!

I watched Wes Clark (it’s okay, he calls me Pete) on TV this morning and he said that he was happy that Veteran’s are now allowed to salute the flag instead of having to do the hand over the heart thing like civvies. It was a simple statement, but really emotionally charged for me. Then I laughed a little because I’ve always done that. One thing even my thousand and seventy-seven days in the Army couldn’t ruin for me is my own heart felt sense of small “p” patriotism.

oBAM!a

“Our long national nightmare is over,” Jerry Ford famously said when the Trickster flew off to sunny San Clemente for a well deserved rest. Those are the words that came to me election night and then again in the morning. Some TV talker said this that George Bush’s approval rating is the lowest since they started keeping track. My friends, let there be no mistake, the fundamentals of democracy are sound. We will turn this turkey around and do what needs to be done to some day fix the ills that beleaguer us so badly. Your President-elect is already asking for “a new spirit of service and sacrifice.” I hope he is right. We need this change. These two words no longer seem like just a lexiconical leitmotif to be implanted on the back of the eyeballs of the witless electorate.

But! The first thing we need to do is shove this victory down the throats of the defeated. Really grind it in. Make sure they know there is a new sheriff in town. Have ten times more inaugural balls than the Bushies did. All the staff at the WH will be lily whites. Draw mustaches on W’s portrait. Because, you know the “O”s are coming off the White House keyboards and the silverware is already on a truck to Crawford. Rahm Emanuel needs to strap on his jack boots and boot around some booty.

O wait a minute. That’s not what got this guy elected. This is the man, they said up here in the White Mountains a year ago, that is “too cool for school.” I don’t know how many times I have heard the likes of Pat Buchannan and Joe Scarboring say, “Barack needs to punch back. This isn’t the way politics works. Politics is a blood sport.” What say you now Joe Blowhard? Playing tough works for you because you’re a bleedin’ bully. You think maybe it’s time to turn that page? You're old hat at 45. There’s a new breeze blowing and it is going to change the way people get elected and the sliming will only be for slime balls and ye shall know them by that name.

I even saw Michelle Bachman (the bad Michelle) who called for a “media investigation” of whether BarackO and some others of his ilk were patriotic enough. I assume she means her standard of good enough. Chris Mathews jumped all over her ass and did himself a huge favor in the process, gee shock. Now, Bachman, who has the political courage of Joe Lieberman, is saying what a great day this is and that she is so proud of this nation because, as she somewhat ineptly put it, "In my district, I don't sense racism [she’s in Minnesota], and that's why I'm thankful that hopefully this will send a national signal across our country that America is not a nation made up of racists... On the same hand, I hope that the national media will not confuse disagreement with Obama's policy positions with being consumed [by] racism." In the seventh grade I was pretty good at diagraming sentences. But I couldn’t parse that one with a gun to my head. My dream ticket for 2012, Palin-Bachman, “We’re right because we are waaay right.” I would add, and out of touch with the new reality.

Speaking of pickin’ on Palin (which, Dear Reader, you know I am loathe to do), what up with what we are guessing is the highest echelons of the McCain camp trashin’ the Gov.? I mean, that ain’t right dawg. They plucked her out of obscurity. They told her what to say, how to dress, where to be. And now they are blaming her for being a “maverick” and goin’ all rogue on 'em?

Let’s pick on Johnny Boy instead. Raise your hand if you thought the guy who “has been fighting for his country since [he] was seventeen” ran a really good campaign. Keep in mind that a president has to be a good manager. My man Mac was a spoiled little shit all the way up, his nightmare at the HH, not included or to be trifled with. When you look at all his advantages he should have been a shoo in. I won’t retrash the guy, at this particular moment, but I do want to point out the way his “people” are behaving about their/his loss.

Most people agree with me (about this one thing anyway) that Almost Admiral McCain gave his best performance of his shitty campaign in his concession speech. Sort of like Teddy K when he lost to (OMG!) Jimmy Carter in ’80. Well, if that was Mac being Mac, how could Steve Schmidt not have known that is what people wanted to see and hear? No, Bullet Head wanted to tightly script the “maverick” candidate to hit all the talking points as he has done in all the other campaigns he has run, in the past.
Schmidt surely had to be scratching his shiny pate when he saw Mr. Too Cool for School gliding past the Clinton machine with everybody talking about the tenor of the Obama message and the smooth operation of their own machine. But he was out of gas. He had reached the full height of his own incompetence (which to be fair, we all do at some point). But he did it at the beginning of his tenure as head of the campaign.

There’s a new day dawnin’ my peoples. Don’t forget to sign up to serve and sacrifice.

Been wrong so long it looks like up to me

The first time I voted it was against Dick Nixon but then I got to do it again and the taste was sour. The first time was in my apartment in North Conway in 1968. A gaggle of us watched the tube and comically commentated while sucking down suds and spliffs. One of my old high school buddies was the only one pulling for the Trickster. He’s now a Federal Appellate Judge in D.C. who mentions Bush in his Christmas letter. The counting dragged out late into the night and I passed out thinking the old Happy Warrior (Hubert Horatio Humprhrey, for any of you not old enough) had won.

Four years later I remember fairly running along the streets of Georgetown after work heading to an election eve party no less tame than the one just mentioned. I had been working for McGovern in Maryland and California and was a volunteer for the DNC at the Watergate during the time it was robbed. My friends had bought a Nixon candle which had a wick on the top and was alit when I arrived. Cathy Medd said, “There calling it a landslide with 6 percent of the vote in.” I was crushed.

I voted for Carter but without enthusiasm. I voted against the Gipper cheerfully, twice, but I went for his veep against the Duke. Clinton was a no brainer. But then I got my ass handed to me when Antonin Scalia elected poor George Bush. Four years later I went to bed thinking John Kerry would be reporting for duty at 1600 PA Ave. I woke up at one in the morning being told by the scary visage of James Carville that there would be four more years of the nincompoop-in-chief.

A year ago I would have bet anybody that I would be voting for a pant-suit presidency on this very day. That did not happen. Although I had said that I wouldn’t have to hold my nose to vote for Hil, I wanted the skinny kid. I liked his easy grace and obvious intelligence. I thought, “Hell, I’d vote for him even if he was white.” And today I did just that.

My friend Billy Richards couldn’t even get a hair cut in the same leafy town in Connecticut where we lived when we were in High School. Nor was he going to be asked to join the Yacht Club. I wonder how he felt today when he filled in that teeny little oval that will choose an African-American to be the next president of the United States.

Beware the Jabberwock

I find the following, from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, an excellent metaphor for the current campaign, or anything else for that matter. I've always held an especial esteem for the Fruminous Bandersnatch and feel to this day that he has gotten short shrift from the liberal media elites.


`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?"
'Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.


`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I hope that this makes as much sense to you as the American political scene makes to me.

Off with her clothes.

The big deal (if it is a big deal) about Sister Sarah’s clothing scandal is how it looks to the little people from her “real America” who are already getting whacked by the pending doom that is our economy. I am not worried that a campaign would spend their donors' hard earned on making the candidate as appealing as possible. Or that they spend their money recklessly. Remember when Hillary had a $95,000 pizza bill back in Iowa? This is just the way they do things. But how does it get out? You don’t hear about overspending and mismanagement with the other side.

I purloined this from the HuffPo’s Sam Stein:
“Democrats (in this scenario) are not prone to forgiveness. After all, it was during this same campaign cycle that Republicans belittled the $400 haircut that former Sen. John Edwards had paid for with his own campaign money (the funds were later reimbursed). And yet, the comparison to that once-dominant news story is hardly close: if Edwards had gotten one of his legendary haircuts every singe week, it would still take him 7.2 years to spend what Palin has spent. Palin has received the equivalent of $2,500 in clothes per day from places such as Saks Fifth Avenue (where RNC expenditures totaled nearly $50,000) and Neiman Marcus (where the governor had a $75,000 spree)."

Palin received more valuable clothes in one month than the average American household spends on clothes in 80 years. A Democrat put it in even blunter terms: "Her clothes were the cost of health care for 15 or so people.” However, Stein leaves out that Edwards paid out $114,000 of campaign money for four two and a half minute videos of himself to someone he was boinking at the time.

The McPalin team was quick to point out that the clothes will be given to charity after November 5th. But I think I have a better idea. She should eBay the clothes after she loses. Just the silky stuff could pay back the $150 K and I’m sure a lot guys would like to get hold of one of those red leather Michael Jackson jackets that has become her sartorial signature. Of course that means that Baby Trig will have to give up his designer Dr. Dentons and the First Dude will have to trade in his suits and go back to oil skins and snowmobile outfits.

The tenor of the campaign loves this kind of mud to throw and, even if it is not a big deal, it becomes a red flag for other shenanigans. Because, there’s also too, the business of flying her kids on commercial airlines with her to more than a dozen events to the tune of $22 K at taxpayer expense. Surely the Gov. is entitled to fly first class. This includes a $700 a night flop at the Essex House on Central Park for her and Bristol who was not even invited to the event. You have to say, she’s a good mom. But a pricey Governor. She naturally wants to be with her kids so instead of working out of the capitol in Juneau where the law makers and department heads are, she stays at home. This part doesn’t seem right. She charges the state a per diem for each night spent in her own house. Three hundred and twelve of them! The legality of this move is now under review, by the GOVERNOR’S OFFICE. YGBSHM!

The likeable and smart Lawrence O’Donnel, an MSNBC mouth, who knows a thing or two about campaigns, is certain that all the hoopla “doesn’t matter.” He’s probably right. Even SNL only gave it one line this week. He told his fellow hecklers, “She doesn’t pick out the clothes.” The campaign (in its omniscience) picks out her clothing for the “look” they want to see, just as they put the words in her mouth that they want to us to hear. They seem to have gotten the wardrobe better.

In retrospect, Schmidt and company are going to wish they had let her speak more of her own words. The few times I’ve seen her speak on her own she was a different sounding, much more likable person. I was impressed with her interview when she said she would run things differently [from the campaign] in terms of how she presents herself and that she did not like the current content of the robo calls. It isn’t easy to for someone to have to change their personality on a dime to suit someone else’s idea of what they want you to sound like. She got where she is by Sarah being Sarah. The girl is all personality with an 80 percent favorable rating in her current job. She stands out like a tomato-red leather jacket. And then the campaign says, yeah but let’s tweak it. Let’s have a committee decide what should come out of her mouth. Of course that didn’t work so hot with Katie. Forced to read talking points off her lap she looked foolish. You might say it backfired. But they keep pushing her out there to shout “socialist” and “elite” to people who don’t even know what the words mean.

One other thought. Michelle O went on a TV program called The View in a $148 dress from the GAP and that’s what all the chatterers talked about for a whole news cycle.

McPain in my ass

McWrinkly Dude has just now and finally pushed me over the edge of a teetering purchase of respectability I had for the old Navy pilot now turned political whore. He is now on the stump saying over and over, “I’ve been fighting for this country since I was 17 years old.” Does he really think that? His 23 sorties dropping bombs from some reasonably safe height amounts to similar number of hours in the air “fighting” for our country. Someone figured out that he got a medal and a half per hour of “combat”— which is the way his deck has been stacked all his life.

His father’s considerable pull got Johnny into the Naval Academy (at age 17) and while he did manage to finish in the allotted time he did so without having applied himself in any way. He was in freakin’ college! Does that mean that everyone who went to college, even William Ayers, was also fighting for their country during those years? “McNasty,” as he was known in his putatively prestigious prep school, although I never heard of it when I was in DC six years, was almost thrown out of Annapolis twice (his Mom got him a reprieve) and spent most of his four years on probation. Then, with almost the worst grades in his class, he got into flight school, a prestigious and highly coveted slot. I have to believe that the Admiral had some-say so for the fair haired scion and future flier.

He distinguished himself as a flier by crashing three planes and getting one shot out from underneath him. One of the planes that he made an unscheduled landing in went short of the mark. He was used to commandeering navy craft to see his soon-to-be-wife up in Philly. After attending an Army-Navy game there and a raucous night of partying, he (again) stalled his plane and had to eject. Fortunately the crash killed no one. Is that part of fighting for one’s country?

A few months before his final flight he was in his plane waiting for take-off on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. His A4 Skyhawk was hit accidentally by a rocket from another plane. Not his fault of course, but would you want to fly with this guy? After the Forrestal incident where he hardly aquitted himself with valor, he told Johnny Apple from The Times, his new buddy, that he wasn’t so sure he “felt too good about dropping napalm on civilians.” Talk about valor; no wonder they gave him 28 medals.

Nobody can say what they would do while being tortured in any situation but according to declassified government documents McCain did receive special treatment at some points during his hideous captivity because Hanoi was anxious to trade in on his famous father who was ordering air strikes on the north. McCain III turned down early release which he could see would be a disastrous public relations ploy and a morale buster for the troops. Excellent judgment, but even he would agree now that an interview he gave to a Cuban psychologist, arranged by his captors, was not a good choice. In it he did not limit himself to name, rank and serial number.

Only the Swiftboaters of the last campaign would try to drag this guy through the mud and I am not doing that here. But there is a record and it is not one of “fighting since I was seventeen” and that’s what he said today at a rally. He was passed over for Admiral with every break on his side except a gift for hard work. He was a notorious philanderer and playboy which buried his chances. An excellent article in the latest Rolling Stone goes into greater detail if you can stomach it.

I think that Johnny’s chances to fly in Air Force One are sinking like so many of his aircraft. And when people are talking about his experience you would think that the guy who has been on the political scene all these years, “fighting” away, would have the clear advantage. But there is no experience that simulates the kind of decision making that takes place in the oval office.

Obama defenders tout his “first class intellect” as the principal qualification they would like to see from the next president. Or any president, really. We don’t get a lot of that in the White House. We do get some pretty smart ones. Some thought the Trickster was a brilliant operative, if just a little too evil. The Slickster wasn’t smart enough to stay out of trouble but his record speaks for itself. What we need is first class intellect and experience. But I suppose, if wishes were fishes we’d lunch on lox.

I’ll tell you what I like for experience: A scrappy, fatherless kid with a funny name that worked hard enough to scholarship into the most prestigious prep school in Hawaii, then get into Occidental, Columbia and Harvard, made president of the law review, made it to the Senate on his first shot and put together an organization and bankroll that beat the Clinton machine and now looks to calmly dispatch with Sen. McSpoiled for the most powerful job in the world and come away from it with people saying he did it with aplomb and his dignity intact. That’s what I’m talking about.

What you gotta ask yourself is: If the experience of hanging in the halls of power is so great, would you vote to keep W in, who’s been “at the helm” for the last eight years?

Plumber's crack

The whole country is talking about this guy but there seems to be a little gap between the image of Joe the friggin plumber, the center of the candidates debate on Wednesday, and the actual guy out in OH who doesn’t have a plumber’s license, whose real first name is Samuel and from what I can tell, he’s not even really bald! I think he shaves his head and then uses bees wax to get that reflective sheen.

"I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes $250,000 to $280,000 a year," he told Obama in an exchange that showed up on YouTube. "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" Keep in mind, he has not yet bought the three man operation.

Here’s the point that seems to be missing from the argument that simply stated is: If Joe buys the plumbing company will he pay higher taxes? No. The company may have sales of up to $280 K but Joe him self is not going to take a salary of $200 thou, which is what would be his “higher taxes” threshold as an individual. The $250K number is for a household. Joe is on crack if he thinks he can pull $199,000 out of his fledgling firm for owner’s compensation, but if he did, he would remain in the 36% bracket as opposed to the egregious, small-business busting 39%.

But Joe’s potential business has two helpers, at least one vehicle, an office, inventory, insurances, an accountant and an occasional lawyer all of whom/which will want to be paid before Joe gets to keep any of the total revenues for himself. Oh, and also too, he’s buying the business which means he will have debt, which is a good thing, because if things don’t work out then he can go chapter 13 and get a Bush bailout.

That is, if he can get a loan at all. Has he not heard that the banks that have received a piece of the $700 B “rescue plan” are still loath to lend? They are said to be hoarding the money because of the riskiness of investing in our country’s solvency. But even as I click and clack, the leader of the free world is saying to the US Chamber of Commerce, and me, that because of the actions of his administration, we are on the road to a better brighter future. In fact his plan sounds damn good. But it is also factual that he is full of shit and none of his big promises have panned out. We haven’t found bin Laden, the war is not nearly over and of course Brownie was a total loser and three years later New Orleanians still struggle for promised relief. So Joe, don’t hold your breath.

I thought BHO was a little snarky in a clip from the campaign trail when he quipped something along the lines of “How many plumbers do you know that are making $250, 000 a year?” But the point is well made. Although that kind of cash is not inconceivable for owners of plumbing companies, it isn’t bloody likely that a guy with his own truck and his wife doing the bookkeeping is pulling down that kind of long green. Certainly not around here.

And yet dissecting the veracities of Joe’s narrative now trumps the most important story in this country since the twin towers vanished. The carnival barkers would rather talk about how many times “Joe the plumber” was mentioned during the candidates debate than they would try to parse the candidates economic proposals for their audiences. SNL should be a hoot this week.

Joe’s fifteen minutes of fame won’t hurt him. It may even help him to get a loan. He certainly won’t have any trouble developing a customer list especially if he has already registered “Joe the Plumber” as a trade name. No, it looks like the worst problem Joe is going to have is making the painful three-point hike into the 39% tax bracket. I would love to share his pain.

First amendment.

My old pal and favorite skipper Christo Buckley got whacked from his job writing a column at the magazine his father founded. He had written in the new, and quite good, Tina Brown blog, The Daily Beast, that he was endorsing Barack Obama. This of course was a great get for Tina since Chris’ pop was famous for being one of the loudest architects of the revival of conservatism in the last century. He, WFB, also founded the bible of that movement, The National Review.

Until 24 hours ago young Buckley (younger than me anygate) had a column in his Dad’s old rag. Nice touch with the père no longer whinnying amongst us. But the backlash from people who had no business sticking their nose into a Brown blog was so overwhelming that when he playfully told Publisher Rich Lowery that he would send a letter of resignation, it was accepted before the ink was dry.

I’ve tried to read the NR a couple of times because they have some pretty good writers. But it so smacked of one-sidedness that I realized they weren’t trying to reach my ilk but more interested in pandering to the base, which is to say bowing and scraping to the one-eyed shrew, the buck almighty. Buckley said that the magazine was deluged with hate mail and the repeated cries to “cancel my subscription.” He notes that had happened even when WFB was in charge and he would retort, “Cancel your own goddamn subscription.”

Why is the idea of free speech so loath to the lapel-pin patriots who certainly must know that the first amendment is FIRST because it is the most important. When Sarah Palin nailed what she thought were hecklers at a rally, she made sure to remind them that people are dying in battle to protect your right to say whatever you want (which in this case was, “Could you speak up?”). We all have the right to say whatever we want, legally. You might get punched in the nose for expressing your opinion but basically we agree that it is a “right” and it is immutable. BTW, if there is a fire in a crowded theater, it’s okay to alert the patrons.

Here in the North Country, which is right now pimped-out in the panoply of autumnal awesomeness, we have a local rag that people love to rag on. They call it all manner of names that they think cute and pretend to barf when ever someone asks, “Did you read that article on whatever in the Sun?” Not the sports certainly, but the other stuff. The paper is such a hot topic that I was told the reason I didn’t get hired (years ago) at the Granite State News was because I had defended the Sun. Now there is somebody making their living on the first amendment actually telling me that there are certain things you shouldn’t say, even if you are asked?

I sympathize with Buckley having been fired from the Carroll County Independent at the beginning of the summer for writing a letter to the editor in the Sun. The publisher dropped me within hours of the letter's appearance. Dig it: A newspaper man fired one of his writers for writing in another paper! I still can’t believe it. But having been fired a good deal in my longish life I took it with equanimity because I knew that I couldn’t stay if they wanted me to back off of certain subjects or even just warned me to not write in other publications. It was of course very flattering to think that what I wrote had such impact. Not.

The Sun actually does its job of informing the people. They go beyond their mission of “printing the truth,” mostly, and provide just a shipload of entertainment mostly in the free form ravings of the letter-to-editor writers. This first amendment avenue, for those not fortunate enough to have their own blog, is a gift to the people. While many of us make fools of ourselves on those pages there are abundant laughs and even some information that can be filed under “useful.” It’s a great way to get stuff off your chest and for many a chance to see their name in print and wonder if they should have gone to J school, the better to change the world.

I feel like Thomas Paine in a way. He too worked for free. There endeth that tie except that he was pretty passionate about his pamphleteering. The free press is a really good thing and I worry that we take it for granted. Buckley’s firing is a symbol of those who would curtail that right and practice, that makes America a place of envy to many.

All to say, Buckley’s got nothin’ on the Pigge when it comes to getting canned.

“That One” takes a knee

I think that Johnny Nutjob truly meant to say “The One,” as Obama was dutifully dubbed after the Berlin rally. McCain meant it as an homage to his nemesis who even he sees as having attained the magicalist of all numbers, forty-four.

It is curious and comical to watch and read the “experts” who preface most questions about the race with, “I’m not in the fortune telling business but…” But what? Kiss my butt Jack. You all slip it into the conversation constantly: “He’s on a glide path as long as things stay static…” yet you would never sully your patinaed halo of sanctity as a down the middle professional news-whore by actually saying, “Here’s what I think.”

Well, here’s what I think (and I have my network’s permission to say so). B. Hussein Obama takes VA, PA, OH, CO and Florida, Florida, Florida. And he does it with style and grace and come January 20th, 2010 when he gives his first of eight State of the Union addresses we will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about? Why were we worried when he took the oath of office on Mao’s little red book that he had borrowed from Billy Ayers? (That’s the only part I’m kidding about.)

Hell, Bullet Head Schmidt, bring it on! O yes, you can claim that he is from Africa (ain’t we all?) and you can say he is an elitist and try to say he is out of touch with the common voter, and you can say that he palls around with commies and still sneaks cigs, but your guy is a dud. His campaign has flatlined. Except for the perky veep pick.

Very interesting to read this morning that Christopher Buckley, with profuse apologies to his absent pere, is endorsing Obama which is the first time he has ever voted D. He says sadly that McC is not that man he used to be but has become a sputtering, spitting-mad man promising the most unattainable goals to try to woo the uninformed voters who may not have made up their minds yet. McCain’s pledge to balance the budget has about as much possibility of happening as did the eighteen cents a gallon gas rebate that he promised before last summer. I don’t care that blondie promised the same thing; she lost too.

There is so much to read and listen to while trying to sort out what is really going on that it becomes somewhat mind numbing and like the state of the economy it feels whelming. Thursday’s stock market close has the Dow off 38 percent for the year. The crash of ’29 marked the same indicator off 47 percent.

The Crash signaled the beginning of the world wide depression which, in this country lasted about ten years. Setting up for World War II helped to bring us out of it. Strong measures, my friends, and especially for a military as strapped as ours is now. Then there is the human cost. Seventy million people lost their lives in that one, almost a tenth of them in the Holocaust. I don’t think this is a very good option for ending a depression should that eventuality obtain.

What is going to happen? What will the next president (That One) do when he begins to grapple with the myriad other messes that W has left for him? To me it is almost inconceivable that anyone would want this job no matter the perks and prestige. Surely the world is in a better place to recover now from this economic maelstrom than it was 70 years ago. But what I think about is the new position of the players. Iceland is borrowing money from Russia? That can’t be good. China is solvent and we’re into them for a Trillion? Yikes! The Japanese are shoring up the prestigious Morgan Stanley? Is this a time warp?

Buckley’s argument, though hardly original, has it that Obama does have the temperament, judgment and brains to lead this nation. I would add that his superlative organizing skills has to give him a commanding lead over the guy who didn’t acquit himself adequately at Annapolis. McCain gets too much credit for surviving, in life and on this campaign. His desperate veep choice and the all or nothing style he is employing this very day, says absolutely nothing that recommends him to take on the behemoth problems that face this government for another decade, at least.

Now picture this. It turns out that BHO, at eight years old, helped Billy Ayers plan the bombings. McC becomes POTUS 44 and shortly into his administration, his cancer comes back, he develops a staph infection in the hospital and shortly Sister Sarah is number 45. Do you think she will be able to handle all that is to come? You betcha!

Debate night

What do Mc and Billy Ayers have in common? Neither went to jail for wrong doing.

Professor Ayers and his equally famous wife Bernadette Dohrn turned themselves in to the authorities and then skated on charges up the ying yang (which has nothing to do with “yin” or “yang”) of blowing up people and things, because of “prosecutorial misconduct.” Say what? These assholes never had to do a day? That is mystifying indeed.

But the McPalin ticket is trying like hell to connect Barry with Billy’s crimes. At the same time they are claiming that McWrinkly Dude was “exonerated” by his fellow Senators and so the Keating smear doesn’t stick, in their minds. But he wasn’t.
Part of the problem is that campaign people can’t tell the truth and think they are not being dishonest when they dish some distortion, but rather, being clever. Somebody says, “My opponent is not telling you the whole truth when he/she says blah blah blah,” and the other person says, “He called me a liar.”

Censure is a warning to a member of Congress if they broke a law or committed a crime. "Censure is a procedure for publicly reprimanding a public official for inappropriate behavior… It derives from the formal condemnation of either congressional body of their own members. The word “exonerate” is not attached to this finding, as it usually is to most comments from Mc III’s protectors. It certainly would have been if it had been deemed that he had NO record of inappropriate dealings with the sleaze-bag S&L snake, Chas. Keating.

Billy didn’t even get a censure. He went on to lead a productive life, still married to the same gal, the rakehell bomb-throwing Bernadette, and they have raised their two kids to adulthood. He has met Obama who talked with him and probably figured that he was an okay guy with some wild stories about his past. But then he is also a friend of Mayor Daly and sits on and ed. board and a charity with Barry, or has at sometime. What is a little curious is that they live three houses from each other and even though Billy has contributed to the Obama campaign back when BHO was representing their district, no invite for a drink or something?

Nobody’s sticking up for terrorists of any stripe. This has more to do with the low sunken point of the campaign and how desperate it looks for Johnny Mc. How could he think that sending Sarahcudda after BHO would improve his image as a take charge guy? It makes me wonder if they aren’t just using her for bait. Let her dangle the Rev. Wright out there so that David Axelrod has to return fire on the Kenyan Witch Doctor incident and poke fun at the speaking in tongues that supposedly goes on at the Wassila Assembly of God Church. I guess there’s no footage of that or it would be more popular than a Tina Fey send up.

Even a died-in-the-wool serial cynic like The Smoking Jacket feels an eeriness about the seriousness of this global financial meltdown. If you watch CNBC for a half an hour you find they have lost their bonhommie and sense of humor. It’s no time to joke. The Today Show had Jim Cramer on again this morning because yesterday he advised TV land to “sell your stocks if you will be having a foreseeable needs for liquidity over the next five years.” He didn’t do his screaming thing but he was pretty forceful and Breathless Curry could only repeat, “really, REALLY?”

Today he calmy repeated it even when Meredith tried to make the connection to “yelling fire in a theater.” The Today Show does not like to upset their viewers. Cramer, to his credit stuck to his guns and said, “What if there is a fire?”

This is topic numero uno. This is what we should be hearing about tonight at 9 p.m. We don’t need no stinking mud slinging and gargantuan whoppers that debase all sides. Let Sarah do the one thing she’s good at because that’s why they hired her. It’s why LA lets Manny be Manny. It’s all she’s got. But the candidates should not pull this crap. I truly hope that Sen. McCain is working his ass off right this minute preparing to make this a debate about where this country is going in terms of financial security and what role we will play in the global financial community. What will he do about it should the fates treat him kindly (?) and put him in charge of this mess?

He’s got to prove that he is a better leader than a pilot. He doesn’t have to out do Obama so much as he has to let his supporters see that he really does have a plan that people can get behind and at the same time make them think that he can steer it though without dumping it in the drink, or clipping some low wires, and especially not getting shot down.

Bad Ass ets

The Senate has now passed the bill from hell and we don’t yet know what Congress will do. They surprised us last time. More importantly, I don’t know what I’d do if I had to vote right now and I’ve heard the arguments for both sides. I still feel so strongly that there will be obscene amounts of money stolen out of the bill from the money monsters who will game this piece of business to a fare thee well.

Already the senate version has tax breaks for Puerto Rican rum producers and some “wooden arrows for kids” company in Oregon. I kid you not. It was for $7 mill. If Ted Stevens wasn’t in court yesterday, for supposedly taking bribes, you can be sure he would have grabbed a taste. The purpose of these sweeteners is to sway the votes of the left or right side of the aisle. If these schmucks won’t stand up now for the right thing to do for their country without being bribed, when will they? It is almost impossible to comprehend the selfish and stupid thinking that makes these people tick. They seem to be proudest of their contributions to political gamesmanship and what they can get away with, but are absolutely spineless when it comes to their duty to make the best decision.

One interesting point is that the voters “seem” to be overwhelmingly against it though I heard a pollster yesterday that said that it was more like 45% that want the “rescue plan.” (“Bailout” being too strong a term for voters who will be easily tricked by this nuance.) And some congress members have claimed that they are voting with their constituents in mind. That should be good. But someone else has pointed out that individual members are sent to congress to do what we cannot do and that is to access and assess the information and do what’s best for the country. They know the little tricks of wording in the bill. They know what the pitfalls down the pike will be. They know the people to ask when they don’t know.

The Monday vote being so close in a 435 person chamber does nothing to clarify which is the way to go. I am instinctively opposed to giving the government this much rope. I do not trust the administration to do the right thing. I am fearful of Jim Cramer’s assessment of Bernanke and Paulson as being the wrong people for the job. But I am equally fearful that if the liquidity markets fail, it becomes a world wide problem.

McCain says he would “fix the system.” But he voted for the Senate versions with the goofball earmarks. He claims “this bill will prevent financial disaster” but cautions that “it is just a tourniquet.” That makes me wonder how much the actual operation will cost. Obama voted for it. And the coin canny Warren Buffet has said that he will buy $3 billion of the bad-ass assets. But even there, you know he’s just skimming the cream and leaving the taxpayers with the toxic wasteland that is the worst of the worst.

What would you do?

Be very afraid

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” If the bill passes with this in it, Xiao Bushie will still have 3 months to dip his mitts into the bail out money. It is the Bush way to suspend the very underpinning of what makes Democracy work as well as it does. No pins is not good for the highly touted “transparency” which in large measure helps to keep the gummint honest.

This is so scary. Why would the Executive branch, within which the awesome responsibility will reside, need to insist on no judicial review. Isn’t that what criminals do when they turn states evidence so they won’t have to go to jail for things they haven’t yet been charged with? The 32 word sentence should be the deal breaker. Chris Dodd’s attempts to make provisions that would disallow such unfettered mastery over the financial lives of the citizenry have already been quashed. The Paulson polemic mimics what the bloody “Bush Doctrine,” preemption before you get caught, really means. They lied about the war then lied about blowing it. Called “quaint” the Geneva Convention rules. Brownie doing a heck of a job (think what New Orleans would look like with even a lick of that $700 B). Managed the budget and deficit into a staggering shag-up that some people’s grand-children will be paying for ad infi their lives.

McCain’s little trick, make that a BIG trick, to supposedly suspend his campaign to go roaring into the White House to solve what could be one of the biggest issues of this country in modern history, is about the only transparency in his campaign. If you can’t see through this gimmick, you ain’t been paying attention. It is as desperate a move as picking Palin. But it should show to most voters that he is relying on hoodwinking us which means he thinks that our level of nincompoopery knows no bounds. I can see Steve “the Bullet” Schmidt glowing over the plan and thinking, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. At least that’s what I think he’s thinking.

Will McCain show up tonight? The Smoking Jacket has learned that nobody actually knows. The multi-millionaires in the punditocracy who get paid to prognosticate, begin their answer to that question: “Well Pete, nobody knows for sure what the Senator will do, but… Then while they are getting paid more per word that some of us make a month on Social Security, they blab on. If I knew what the “it’s time to fish or cut bait” statement of definitiveness meant, I would tentatively hazard a speculation that if you held a gun to my head I might guess that a no-show would be a major blow to the campaign. What ever people think of Obamaian wisdom and judgement, you must know (or can learn here), the dude has a crack team of advisers that any campaign would love to claim and they are all over this. They are working around the clock so that whatever eventuality happens they will have the best possible response. “There is no advantage too small to take” and certainly that is true in this universe altering game of the White House race. But you knew that.
Click on Sue Bru’s column on the right (of this page) for a catch-up course on what’s taking place till now.

Supposedly, 100 million people will watch the debate. That is the number of voters in the country. Picture an up-market bar in Manhattan, DC, SF, or St. Looey say, with all eyes turned to the tube to see if McCain shows. Rehearsal dinners from sea to shining sea will halt in the middle of toasts to watch the white haired wrinkly dude greet the nation with that insane rictus. Voter age college kids will cancel their frat party to pay sober attention to this terribly important first debate that will pretty much control the polls on Saturday morning. If I had a tivo, I’d watch Larry King and Jamie Lynn Spears with pictures of her first breast feeding.

In Webster World there was only one big development. While she refuses to make eye contact, I can tell that she knows I know something or know somebody who does know, who in this case will remain OTR. A second secondary (or even flimsier) rumor has popped up and has confirmed (for me) that Margie may be looking at charges. This would make my heart soar like an eagle (thank you John Ashcroft) because I am a petty and vindictive little shit who will have revenge no matter the cost.
 

They don’t really know, do they?

Where are the wanker wonks of economic policy on this crisis? We haven’t really heard from BarackO on this and he has Paul Volcker, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers on his team. He even has William Donaldson and Paul O’Neil, two republicans working with him. We’ve heard quite enough from that genius Phil Gramm, McCain’s guru who told us to “quit whining” because it was a “mental recession.” Gramm’s wife helped the Enron people figure out their mess. That’s just what we need. Actually, it looks like what we’re going to get.

Hank Paulson, who is said to be a very smart guy and respected on all sides, has asked us for $700 billion of our tax dollars to buy up the devalued mortgage bundles now risibly called “securities,” a misnomer if ever there was one. The idea being that eventually, when the next real estate boom gets rolling, they will be worth more than they are now and can be sold in an up market that will pay back the money into the treasury.

But they are not telling the public the whole truth. Just like AIG went from needing $40 B to $75 B and then got $85 B, all in the space of three days, we are now looking at the 700 number with no explanation how it got to be that high. Part of it, I read this morning, is that other bad debts, like credit cards and car loans, will also get paid off. But they will likely be written off. We really don’t think the government is going to buy those bundles and then a few years from now try to collect on them, do we? Hell no. The money will go to the schmucks who made the bad deals. This is supposed to shore up our economy and the people with bad credit will only have to wait a few years before their mail box is stuffed with card company offers of 0%.

Paulson sounds almost believable but what is he saying? We cannot trust just one guy to be making these decisions, but wait TSJ reader! Since the likely scenario will be that this Secretary of the Treasury and the next will in fact be making these decisions with the concurrence of their boss, you now gotta ask yourself, who you really want to be the one person who will say yea or nay to the next Treas. Sec.

McSame has been anything but lately. He says the economy is “fundamentally sound” one day but something else the next. He’s now conveniently for regulation, and suggests that maybe a commission can straighten this whole thing. Let’s wait till the next administration to get to work on that, is his thinking. His pandering is just more playing to us dopes who, he thinks, don’t know noffink. He wants to believe that should he possibly get into the WH, others will do his thinking for him, sort of like the guy who is in there now.

This is an argument that needs to take place because I believe that people who are undecided, if asked, will pick the Harvard hotshot over the bottom feeding legacy guy who barely made it through the Naval Academy. He may be a great pilot, but…never mind. I believe that the Obama skeptics (and you know who you are, you blue collar catlicks clinging to your guns) are going to have to take a very close look at the quality of leadership that is required for this situation because only the President will be able to say “no” to the Treas. Sec. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. It could get very ugly. Does anyone think that a guy who admits to being out of touch with how the national economy is run would be the best one making decisions on recommendations from just one man? If Phil Gramm is that man, the mackerel snappers amongst us can kiss it all off. He will invariably do what’s best…for the richest five % of the country. It would be like letting Paul Wolfowitz into the DoD with no rules.

Bush is now asking Congress to rush the $700 B through. So you know it MUST be wrong. Xiao Bushie, whose only true business experience is trading on his family name, and I must say he has done this brilliantly, is the last guy we want trying to figure out a fiasco of this proportion. This hurry up mode suggests to some skeptics that there can only be something in it for him down the line. “Congress wants strict oversight with an equity stake. The administration wants flexibility.” If I want to borrow a bunch of money from you but I insist on “flexibility” on how it will be repaid or what it will be spent on, you are more than likely going to say no. What does Bush want with this money? What has he not already bought that this now gives him the means?

I like what Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, said. “It would be foolish to waste massive sums of taxpayer funds testing an idea that has been hastily crafted.” O yes it would. This morning Paulson and Bernanke go in front of the banking committee to make their case. It should be veddy interesting. As Incurious George says, “The whole world is watching.”

And here it is, your moment of Zen. At the end of a longish article in today’s NYT, that never mentioned specific downsides to the bailout, came this: “Officials said that the administration was also prepared to adopt conflict-of-interest rules for any private firms that are hired to help the Treasury manage the bailout program. Some lawmakers were worried that such firms might also own assets that could grow in value depending on how the rescue plan was run.” The crooks will be in charge, gah fo’bid.

The gift that keeps on giving

The feisty frequent traveler (picture a hungover Madeleine Albright on steroids) has told somebody that she is canceling her plans to move to Michigan where her “boyfriend” lives (she’s older than I am). What we think is happening based on the flimsiest of rumors and snarky speculation is that she got dumped. The wildest buzz, from the impeccably secure source of my dentist’s wife, is that she may have to stick around to answer some sticky questions about her performance when she was at the Tri County Cap, another government sinecure that she managed to snooker for twenty or so years.

We do know that she said she didn’t get fired from that place that her bullying helped to build, earning it the sobriquet “Marge Mahal,” but some higher authority (like there could be?) tried to split up her job and give her first choice, for less pay. But in the murk of the latest whisperings winding around the old court house in Ossipee, some of us are very curious to see if Marge is giving up on her Michigan beaux who she has been meeting, we suspect, at the semi-annual conferences. She has after all given up her cozy if contentious slot as a commissioner which pays about ten grand (?) a year for a once a week gig. Some cynics will wonder if she will give up going on these ridiculous conference trips all over the country if there is no boyfriend waiting at the other end of the flight. Maybe the commissioners should send him a bonus for saving the county money.

I know of at least one person who thinks that Margie will try for a job in some sort of supervisory capacity when the new nursing home is getting built. I would think that she should not benefit from such a position after lobbying so heavily for the new building. It would be such an obvious conflict of interest, not that I think that would stop her from trying. But I do know others who will try to stop her.

In other news: The re-count on the Carroll County sheriff’s race has concluded that there was a one vote discrepancy and that Frannie Lord lost by 17 votes instead of 18. I can’t help but wonder if that letter that Michael Callous wrote to the Daily talking about the potential sheriff “swaggering” along side his foxy blond wife in “six inch heals” (sic) was the death knell for Lord who most thought would win handily. Not trying to stir things up here, much. I’m just sayin’…

I have a question for Hank Paulson: Say a person sells their house because they are moving to a new job. Is it possible they won’t be able to buy a house where they are moving to because they didn’t get enough for the old house and the credit is now so tight because of all the loser loans that got us into this trillion dollar mess? Who bails their sorry ass out?

I forget how many years ago it was when ballsy Lee Iacocca went to congress to get a bail out for Chrysler. Bodacious audacity, it was thought at the time. 1.5 billion freakin’ dollars to help keep a company afloat that employed tens of thousands in the heartland, never mind all the derivative companies through out the land who depended on the vast car manufacturer. Well, they did it and got paid back. But even in today’s dollars, does 1.5 BILLION compute to 1.1 TRILLION? And aren’t we mostly bailing out egregiously greedy Wall Street hot shots who would sell anybody anything for an ounce of Colombian to do with their friends on their 60 foot Cape Hatteras in Long Island Sound? The old argument that Wall Street “doesn’t make anything” is a good one in this case.

And what is really bugging me is that over the last weekend AIG was looking for another 20 billion from a private source to make it 40 billion in order to survive. It didn’t happen. By Monday they were asking the government for a little help to the tune of 75 billion. Paulson and the CNBC barkers (not Erin Burnette though) were saying no way. The next day, the newspaper of record had headlines in rather large font saying the gummint (emphasis on the last four letters) will loan AIG 85 billion. Ten more than they were asking for. I just want to know if any lobbyist made money on that transaction and I bet one of our polymath commenters will tell me.
All in all it’s been a good week, for Wall Street. And me, for getting to pick on the Barge some more.

It's the stupid economy

“The fundamentals of the economy are strong (my friends) because the American worker is strong,” said the economic numbnut who is running for the highest office in the world. McCain couldn’t find his economic fundament with both hands. His understanding of what’s happening on Wall Street is that there need be no panic because the Americans have strong backs; just not enough jobs. And of course if they do have a job and hurt their back, they probably don't have adequate healthcare.

What is fundamental to the downer that is our economy right now is the housing crisis which through “greed and stupidity” has allowed the subprime mortgage fiasco to fester into a world wide crisis because the holders of the loans and collateral have no way to collect what is owed to them and can’t figure out some way to keep the payments coming in. TSJ has said before that some of this problem could be resolved by not upping the rates on ARMs at the consumer level. Think: half a loaf is better than none. If the lender started out thinking they were going to make money when the initial low rate period expired, too bad. Now you have to eat it. Work with Mr. Risky. Why foreclose and then have to play realtor in one of the worst housing slumps in modern memory?

And who in the Senate Commerce committee allowed the sleaze bag mortgage companies like the one I worked for to give loans to the riskiest possible candidates? That doesn’t make sense to anyone. Only the mafia makes loans to risky borrowers, but then they have ways of convincing people to pay them back.

How is it that McCain can go on the morning shows and not have a more complete answer to the direct question of what to do? I think you have to identify the problem, analyze its provenance and then offer up ideas for resolution. Mc saying that the “alphabet soup of oversight agencies needs to be consolidated” is much like closing the barn door after the horse is already gone. Why, when he was a sitting Commerce Committee member and chair (I think) did he not see the potential for the greed-heads to bend the rules and the resulting long term effects?

On Bloomberg Television this weekend, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank noted that, as a leader in the Senate Republican caucus, McCain did nothing for years to deliver reform in the face an impending credit crisis:
So here’s the record – 12 years of Republicans, including John McCain being a committee chairman for much of that period. Zero – zero enactment of any reform.

Well, nobody expects Barney to be singing McCain’s praises and it is most unlikely that McCain would put him on his bi-partisan admin but if Sen. Mc had done anything in the last twelve years, this morning would have been a good time to point it out instead of the clunky ingenuous sounding, “Look, the American people are the soundness of this economy.” More pandering to the dopes (he thinks) are going to vote for his ticket because they will believe any bullshit he tries to shove up their fundament.

And yet, I can understand why, even if he did know anything, he would be very unwilling to address the economic evils of the land. The US has an anual budget of almost ten trillion dollars. It has a debt of nearly ten trillion dollars. This administration took over with a budget surplus of $200B and now it’s in the red $400B. Who cuts taxes when you have war to run? And who offers to extend tax cuts when the economy sucks? You need to go to this page—www.federalbudget.com—to see how your taxes get spent. And remember a billion dollars may not seem like that much anymore but you can still buy 1,000 million dollar homes with a single billion dollar bill.

It is very interesting to look at this page to see the undulations of the fed def. Truman had a war going on while he was doubtlessly still paying for the one he helped to finish, so his was pretty high. Then it went down even under the tax and spend dems. In fact during Carter’s admin it was the lowest it’s been in the last sixty years. Reagan pushed it back up and the Slickster, with Bob Rubin’s help, brought it back down. W has added more than $400 billion to it after blowing the Clinton gain, and it’s climbing. He just offered Texas to pay 100 percent of the clean up down on the Gulf coast. The little dude can’t spend it fast enough.

If the economy is the main issue in this presidential race, I’m gonna go with the guy who has Bob Rubin on his team.

BTW/WTF W/ AIG? Here’s what they need to do before getting a taxpayer bailout: Go chapter 11, which is a “reorganization” with a judges permission and finite rules. Fix it, get better, pay people back. AIG isn’t just gonna collapse and go away. They are all over the world. Someone will pick up their slack if they fail. And just when did the thieving slime ball insurance companies of the world stop making money?