Things fall apart

Joe Lieberman thinks that now, during a recession, is not the time for a massive overhaul of 1/6th of the economy. He has opened the door for a Democratic retreat on the issue of health care reform.

I think we all realize now that attempting vilify or otherwise dismiss the town hall protesters was a colossal miscalculation. Team Obama found, unlike when they successfully made the Clintons the enemy during the campaign, that making regular American people out to be the enemy and somehow a product of some nefarious zombie influence doesn't work well at all.

At this point many fellow liberals are losing faith in Obama. At the liberal bastion Salon.com, left-leaning pundits are hand wringing and wondering what went wrong and at The New Republic: what could have been done differently.

The Democratic leadership cannot even get their story straight when it comes to whether or not a "public option" is or is not to be included in ObamaCare.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

-William Butler Yeats

Face it, it's time to pull the plug on ObamaCare.

There's hope for you yet, Anderson Cooper

Perhaps CNN is starting to turn the corner.

Common Sense

serious leadership.

Pay to play part deux

Sensitivity

"It wasn't under me that we started buying a whole bunch of shares of banks. It wasn't on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement prescription drug plan without a source of funding."

That's his argument? Obama is using as evidence that he's isn't a socialist that the previous administration was? In a vacuum, Obama's policies and those he intends to implement either are or are not socialist. Why is this concept so difficult to understand? If someone asks me if I'm a Red Sox fan, I don't start talking about other people I believe to be Red Sox fans. I either am or I am not a Red Sox fan.

Liberals are such relativists. They can't just answer the question based on the facts.

It's always, "Well I may be guilty of X, but what about this person over here?"

So lame. Obama and his followers are way too overly sensitive about this question of Obama being a socialist. If he can save the country's banking system, I think it's worth allowing some pundits to be able to call Obama a socialist. But Noooo, it's all about how Obama appears above all else. Can someone please remind Obama that the campaign is over? It's time govern, not whine about your predecessor.

Obama's gonna have to choose between ego and saving the country on this question of nationalizing the banks.

American Zombie

Maybe you didn't catch the news but three major financial institutions were renamed recently, or at least they should have been. From now on, until the administration comes up with a real solution for the banking crisis, the new names of these institutions will be:

Citi Zombie Group
American International Zombie Group
Zombie Bank of America

The banking crisis is the circumstance that is the cause and in fact the crux of this entire problem, but almost every other ancillary subject is being addressed first by team Obama. Somehow we have time to address the funding of manure odor control but haven't yet lifted a finger to arrest the free fall of the stock market. As a leading indicator of where the economy is heading, the stock market at this moment sees no upside in the policies that team Obama has promulgated thus far.

Starting with President Bush and now continuing with Obama, the government has been pursuing an ad hock, piece meal solution to the banking crisis. Drips and drabs of government bailouts going in every direction with seemingly little to no rhyme or reason. Bush didn't have a choice really, he had to at least hand Obama a banking industry on life support rather than handing him a dead banking system. But at this point the government is simply propping up these institutions that have long since stopped being viable as money making businesses. Welcome to the world of zombie banks. Remember Japan in the nineties? Well, we're basically there now. No use in denying it.

Another fact that there is no use in denying is that we have now advanced into the territory of socialism. This country has been slowly marching towards European style democratic socialism for a while. Now Obama is sprinting towards it with all this spending and proposed wealth redistribution. But for political reasons, Obama and his supporters have to deny that their policies even vaguely resemble socialism. I'm not sure what the big deal is, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

It's socialism, so what. Maybe in this time of crisis we don't have a choice when it comes to resolving the problems caused in the banking sector because these institutions were allowed to become 'too big to fail'. So while Obama figures out a way to solve the banking crisis while not appearing to be socialist because he's afraid to be called that, I have the solution. Since I'm not a self-hating self denying socialist like Obama, I don't care if you call the plan I'm advocating socialist.

The only remaining solution to the banking crisis is temporary nationalization of the biggest most troubled banks. The share holders won't like it, but right now the entire market is in a free fall because there is no clear policy emanating from the White House. Is there any disputing that the lack of clarity is causing massive uncertainty in the markets? This should be elementary, but because team Obama has to play political games, they haven't embraced this obvious strategy yet.

This is what they will eventually do of course, just as soon as they devise a clever way of not letting it be called socialism somehow. So while America collectively watches their retirement funds evaporate into the ether, team Obama is busy calculating their own political appearance and concocting childish controversies about Rush Limbaugh.

Until Obama gets over his fears regarding what his detractors will be able to say about him, we will live in this new American Zombie economy.

Manny being... stingy

Manny Ramirez today was offered his third deal of the off season for an eye-popping $45 million for a two year contract. It's the same money he was offered in the first place months ago, when maybe the economy wasn't as bad as it is now.

He should take this money and be happy. If he doesn't take this most recent offer, he's out of his mind.

Especially when you consider that no other team has made an offer yet.

A Bitter Pill

Because of the tireless and unending Bush Bashing of the last eight years I was hoping that we could have at least a month or two where the president wasn't a primary source of the nation's ire. A honeymoon would have been nice, a respite from the ever present trashing of the commander in chief.

But the way Barack Obama has been acting the last couple of days is making that impossible.

And I was someone willing to give Obama a chance. Like an arranged marriage, I was willing to try to make the best of it. I had hoped that Obama's pragmatism and penchant for political expediency would win out over his left leaning ideology.

If Obama turned out to be a Ronald Reagan, great. Unfortunately, at this point he's looking more like a cross between LBJ and Jimmy Carter.

Hope and change?

More like fear and same. Within a week or so of the inaugural address the hopeful tone has all but evaporated into the frosty Washington DC air. In its place arguably the same kind of fear mongering that the Left endlessly accused the Bush administration of perpetrating to get things done. The difference of course being that the threat of terrorism is very real and the need for a pork laden spending bill to beat back "The worst financial crisis since the great depression", much less evident. (The stagflation of Jimmy Carter's early eighties was worse).

If Bush had done what Obama is trying to do he would have shoe-horned every Republican pet project into the Patriot Act. That is the equivalent. It's using an emergency to reward the special interests of your political party! With this so-called stimulus bill, the Democrats are doing an end run around the normal budget appropriation process in order to foist upon us their usual political agenda. They are using a financial crisis to lavish their supporters with billions of dollars of federal cash. They can't stuff the bales of cash out the door fast enough, it seems. We're told that it's such an emergency that we don't even have time to think it through really, just sign it. Hurry, hurry, hurry, it doesn't matter what we do, we have to do something, anything! This stimulus bill debacle is madness.

And it could be Obama's political death. He's been trying to scare us that "we will never recover" if we don't pass this bill. I'm afraid that Obama's political career will never recover if this thing passes and then fails to deliver as it will inevitably do according to any economist who understands the basic principle that we will have to raise taxes down the road to pay this thing off. And we'll have to pay this off right around the time that the inflation caused by this will be kicking in according to every economist who's name isn't Paul Krugman.

In one of Obama's recent partisan fear mongering speeches he proclaimed that, "somewhere a business is closing its doors". He has yet to explain how rewarding Democratic special interest groups and simply stuffing cash out of the doors will have a tangible effect on the businesses in danger of closing. A temporary payroll tax suspension will have a tangible effect on businesses and employees, irreversibly increasing the size of government and causing inflation down the road can only harm, not help the private sector economy Obama claims to be interested in helping.

A now we're told by Obama that tax cuts are "the failed policies of the past".

Really? That's interesting considering that Obama actually campaigned on tax cuts. How many times were we told that there would be tax cuts for 95% of Americans? Yet in place of tax cuts were getting the largest increase in the size of government since the New Deal.

Obama promised over and over in the campaign to go through the federal budget "line by line" and eliminate wasteful programs. Well, here's his chance to live up to one of his hollow promises. Don't hold your breath. Like the promise that he wouldn't appoint lobbyists and the promise that he would bring a new tone to Washington. So much for the new tone, in Washington DC it's business as usual as Obama is now digging in his heels in a one-sided partisan defense of Nancy Pelosi's Democratic spending extravaganza.

For Barack Obama the more things change, the more things stay the same.

I really am fairly surprised that Obama is behaving with such a tin ear. The people are starting to turn against this bill, so to entrench yourself in defense of it in its current form strikes me as politically tone deaf. And I've always known Obama to do what is politically expedient, just ask Reverend Wright.

I have been avoiding directly criticizing the President for about as long as I can on this blog. The issues are too important and Obama is acting far too partisan for me to keep that up anymore. For Barack Obama the honeymoon is over and the bloom is off the rose. Any notion of Obama as a transformational or transformative leader has been swept aside.

And unless a serious overhaul takes place, this bill that is being stuffed down our throat will be a bitter pill indeed.

Stimulus?

The massive spending bill being debated this week on Capitol Hill is not a stimulus bill. The $819 billion pork laden bill passed the House of Representatives yesterday and is now going to the Senate. Despite the fact the Barack Obama went and visited House Republicans in an effort to get them on board, the only thing bi-partisan about the bill was that both Democrats and Republicans voted agaisnt it.

Eleven blue dog Democrats and each and every Republican in the House voted against consigning future generations to pay for the subsidization of liberal special interest groups like ACORN and pet projects like global warming research.

Perhaps some of the items in the bill are worthy, but apparently not many can be accurately argued to be stimulative to the economy. So what we have then is a massive Democratic pet project spending bill not too convincingly masquerading as an emergency economic stimulus bill. Thank god no Republican voted for this thing (John McCain hasn't voted yet). The Republicans might actually be becoming a viable party again that stands for something.

Sadly, it is the Republican alternative proposal (which was voted down) that stood a chance of actually stimulating the economy. Cutting taxes allows the private sector a better chance to begin to dig our way out of the recession rather than relying on government make-work projects and theoretical R & D type projects to somehow lift us out of the doldrums. By cutting the corporate tax businesses will be able to plow some more money back into their own business and eventually begin hiring rather than firing. And cutting the income tax understands that the people know better how to spend their own money than the state does.

Spending 2.4 billion dollars on "carbon-capture demonstration projects" won't do much to stimulate the economy. Cutting certain taxes will have an immediate effect.

If Barack Obama is truly a transformative and transformational leader, he will listen to the Republicans and in the 'stimulus' bill include some more serious tax cuts and dramatically less Democratic pie-in-the-sky pet projects.

It's that simple. Barack Obama's legacy and the future of this country are at stake.

Happy New Year?

Some thoughts on the coming year.

It's all about the economy. By now, my following of the day to day ebb and flow of the daily machinations of the economy has nearly supplanted my following of the day to day political discussion and storyline. With an economy collapsing around us it's hard to take Rod Blagojevich, for example, seriously enough to require my full attention. On the other hand, the car wreck that is the economy is fascinating.

But because everything is everything, the economic discussion is the political discussion. Blago be damned. (or indicted, whatever works.)

While all of the conventional economic prognostications for the upcoming year range from dire to grim mainly because of job losses, I have what is ultimately an alternative point of view:

Everyone who has been coasting and/or gaming the system for the last ten years is in for a rough time. If you find yourself to be unnecessary to the functioning of your company or government agency then you should prepare now to be 'made redundant', as the say in England. In the upcoming pull back, people will have to re-invent themselves in order to continue bring home the bacon. Businesses will have to become lean and mean. People will have to take pay cuts, essentially, to remain employed. This will result in further diminishment of the profit margins of retailers and related businesses which will result is still more lay offs. But at some point, the descent in the amount of total jobs will become an ascent. It's then just a matter of holding on until that begins to happen. Also, there is only so much the government can do to artificially prop up an economy in descent.

The key to recovery will be found in the very DNA of us as Americans. Call it sunny Reaganism, but I happen to be of the belief that Americans are enterprising enough to find a source of income somewhere, in some corner of the vast economy should they find themselves to be laid off. Because, as in the real estate market, we have to find the bottom of this overall financial mess. We have to flush out all the Bernie Madoff's and people who at the end of the day don't work hard enough to deserve being employed or who have been otherwise dogging it. Those employees who have already been operating with a fire in the belly and the essential understanding that they're only as good as their last performance will, in all likelihood, be safe. Everyone else, I'm sorry to have to report, is on notice.

So while 2009 will be a painful year for many, the only way out is through. Ultimately, businesses that are not viable and employees who have been phoning it in for years deserve to and should be allowed to fail. Ridding ourselves of this dead weight will ultimately be to the benefit of our economy moving forward. So take heart, for as our old pal John McCain used to like to quote Chairman Mao, "It's always darkest before the dawn.".