A really bad idea

We import too much oil.

We have to borrow billions every year to keep the government running.

So why not put in a new policy that rewards consumers for buying more gasoline that will be subsidized by the government through additional borrowing?

It sounds crazy, but that’s the idea that Senators McCain and Clinton are promoting. They want to eliminate the federal gasoline tax for the summer. It will save consumers 18 cents a gallon but will cost the Treasury billions. This will encourage everyone to load the kids into the SUV and drive to the shore this summer. Of course the kids will have the extra billions added to their future tax burden, or subtracted from their Social Security benefits down the road.

This is a very disappointing proposal from my man John and just the kind of short-term political expediency I expect from Mrs. Clinton. Senator Obama is against it, but he has his hands full trying to deal with his former pastor, so issues of substance may have to wait.

Is Obama a wimp?

Are any of you Obama fans out there starting to feel like Hillary is just having her way with your man? Toughness may not be the most important characteristic to look for in a President, but it is surely something most Americans want to see to some degree, and I’m starting to wonder if Obama is tough enough. Hillary just keeps beating on him day-in and day-out, and he doesn’t seem to be willing to fight back.

The Lord knows that Mrs. Clinton has some baggage in which he could surely find some ammunition, but he seems too cool to fight. He’s making it too easy for those who won’t vote for an elitist, and Hillary has him pinned him into his passive-aggressive corner where she doesn’t even have to take aim – all she has to do is fire away.

She's baaaaack!!!

Today is my birthday, and what better present could a guy ask for than to have his own U.S, Senator back in the race for the White House?

Note to Woody and Wilton: It is time to build the North Carolina fire break.

Those zany Dems II

That was such an interesting exchange let’s try to keep it going. And as much as I enjoyed the South Carolina travel log, I want to pick up on Hankster’s point that people don’t vote for people whom they perceive are looking down on them, it’s “the Dem’s black cloud” as he put it.

However, I believe the majority of non-investment-banker American’s know both parties look down on them. All the candidates are well-educated millionaires; even Barack made nearly $5 million last year. And they know neither party is going to do anything meaningful for them. Neither party will take on the corporate oligarchy that feeds and sustains them, nor tackle any important issue facing the nation.

But they think Republicans (at least until the current administration) will do a better job of maintaining a strong military and protecting the homeland, and probably little else that might screw up their lives.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are born scolds and meddlers. They won’t let you smoke anywhere, you have to accept a gay couple’s marriage as the same as yours, the woods are for hikers and skiers, not for guns, ATVs or snowmobiles, somebody else’s kid gets preference at the college your kid wants to attend, no dodge ball on the playground, no religion of any kind in school, and everyone is a victim.

I’m not saying these positions are wrong – in fact I favor a number of them -- but they are frequently being forced on an unwilling population, and the Democrats have a way of making you feel that if you don’t agree, you are a reactionary clod; someone to be bullied into submission or pitied as a fool. This gets old quickly.

A better strategy would be for the Democrats to pick a really large national problem, one that all Americans can accept as an appropriate target for our national attention and treasure. Then they need to find a way to come together as a party and agree on a plan to address this problem as a party. In this way they will distract attention from their not-so-latent social-engineering addiction and stand in clear contrast to the Republicans, who seem to have had no agenda of any kind since about 1982.

Do you think this is a strategy that could work? Then what is the issue?

Those zany Dems

First, let me just admit that I’m writing this post solely to justify publishing the photo of Hillary pounding a shot of something, someplace in Pennsylvania last week.

It takes a hell of a guy to make Hillary, she of the $109 million income fame, seem like a woman of the people, but Barack has done it with his general yuppie persona and penchant for making remarks guaranteed to insult the hoi polloi.

He may have regained some of the ground he lost by suggesting small town people were bitter and clingy, (who could have possibly guessed that someone in a San Francisco fund-raiser would have a recording device of them?) when he referred to Hill as “Annie Oakley” after she positioned herself as a huntress since childhood. Now she’s drinking boilermakers. What’s next Hillary? A big low-back tattoo and a sudden fondness for Newports?

I'll be traveling the next few days. TTYL.

Some good news

I’m starting to bum myself out with all the bad news and worse people about which I’ve been writing. But all is not lost here in America, land of the free, home of the “oh, what the hell, let’s give it a try.”

Last night, “60 Minutes” profiled John Kanzius of Erie, PA, a retired radio technician who was diagnosed with leukemia a few years ago. While undergoing one of his endless rounds of chemotherapy, and watching the eyes of the children who were his fellow travelers down this debilitating path, he told himself he had to do something to help find a better cancer treatment – one with no side effects.

Unable to sleep from the treatments, a thought grabbed him in the middle of the night. He went to the kitchen and pulled out some pie plates, took them to the garage, and started tinkering. In a few days he had cobbled together a machine that transmitted concentrated radio waves into the body. While harmless to people, radio waves will rapidly heat metals. Kanzius’ theory was that if you injected a liquid metal into a tumor and bombarded it with radio waves, the waves would heat the tumor and kill the cancer cells while doing no collateral damage to the patient. He tested the theory by injecting and bombarding….a hot dog. (Does it get any more American than that?)

Kanzius then spent $200,000 of his own money making a more sophisticated version of his device, which is now being tested in two major medical centers and being hailed by some as the most promising new cancer treatment in a very long time – perhaps ever. It’s worked great on rats, but human trials are still several years off, and Kanzius, alas, may not live to see them.
This is still a great country, with great dreamers, unafraid to challenge the impossible. They have to swim up steam every day to realize those dreams, but in this country you can still beat the establishment, the bureaucracy and the politicians with a better idea.

To see the “60 Minute” segment online click here: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml

Miscellaneous

It's amazing how fast life changes. My father fought as a Marine on Iwo Jima and today I played golf with a Japanese man whose uncle was killed there fighting on the other side. I doubt either man could have imaged today's 2-some.

If you have an iPod, download the Dwight Yoacam, Sheryl Crow version of "Baby Don't Go." If you can listen to it without signing along I'll refund your 99 cents. You might also try John Hammond's "If You Wanna Rock & Roll" from "Push Comes to Shove," but if you do you're going to want the whole album.

I was late to the "Into the Wild" party, but I read the book recently, and then watched the movie shortly thereafter, and thought they were both terrific. The story is an old one in which a young man searches for inner truth by freeing himself from the trappings and conventions of society. While the ending is tragic, the underlying story is uplifting. Sean Penn's translation to the screen does not disappoint. It has beautiful scenery, a fantastic cast, and a great soundtrack by Eddie Vedder.

I don't care what anyone says, these shows are not funny: The Office, Reno 911, Flight of the Conchords. Here's a book I want to read: "Unusually Stupid Americans" by Katheryn & Ross Petras.

Unemployed or jobless?

Politicians have so many tools in their bag of tricks. For example, there is the "unemployment rate" and the "jobless rate." The former only counts people who are "actively looking for work" while the latter purports to count anyone without a job.

The current unemployment rate among men 25-54 is 4.1% -- about average since 1960. However, the jobless rate among the same group is 13.1%. It's only been that high three other times since 1960, and all of them near the end of significant recessions.
Some jobless people are jobless by choice, but how many men do you know in that category? Has it he number risen significantly in the past year?

This is another worrisome sign that the economy is not in good shape, and a reminder that the politicians will paint any pig red and call it a rooster if they think even one person will believe it.

Volcker speaks

Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman speaking this week at the Economic Club of New York, said the financial engineers had created “a demonstrably fragile financial system that has produced unimaginable wealth for some, while repeatedly risking a cascading breakdown of the system as a whole.”

In other words, the really smart guys used their expensive educations and privileged backgrounds to invent new versions of three-card Monte, using their social and intellectual lessors as the pigeons. Along the way they donated to W. and Bill and Hill and Barack and JM and dozens of lessor lights. They got rich; everybody else got the shaft.

Our children will get the bill for all of it once Congress gets down playing benefactor by borrowing to placate all the victims. This is a familiar story.

Why people are hurting

Part of the reason the current credit-crunch is hurting so many supposedly middleclass people is that after a seven year economic expansion, real household incomes have actually declined for the average American. This is very different than what usually happens during economic good times (see chart) and it makes my populist blood boil.

W. has taken care of the rich during his watch but neither he, nor any of his predecessors that I can remember, has done much for regular working people in this country. W. gave them the Medicare drug benefit, but stuck our children with the bill.

This is just one of many indicators that make me fearful for the long-term economic health of the country. We’re drowning in debt, our currency has become the peso of the early 21st Century, we don’t make anything here now except reality TV shows, celebrity blogs and designer water.
The really scary thing about all this is that I don’t think anybody really knows how the economy works. For example, has NAFTA helped or hurt the country? Well, it probably depends on whether you were a United Steel Worker or someone else.

That said, trillions of dollars of debt and deficit budgets stretching as far as the mind can imagine can’t be good for the country, and there is very little discussion of this in the daily political debates. We argue endlessly about how to cut up the pie, but spend no time at all trying to make a bigger pie.

Bullshit

George Carlin says we shouldn't worry about the decline of the auto and steel industries because they were never America’s leading industries anyway. He says what America has always led to world in, and where we still excel, is the manufacturing and selling of bullshit -- A#1, Grade A, bullshit.

If there was ever any doubt, it disappeared with the revelation that, since leaving the White House, the Clinton's have made more than $109 million manufacturing and selling bullshit. I don't mean this pejoratively. We all have our personal bullshit. I've made a living for almost 30 years selling my own brand. But what else can you call it when people are paying you vast sums to listen to you talk or to read your written bullshit?

And the $109 million is only the tip of the iceberg. The Clinton’s raised another $500 million to fund the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library where their bullshit will be on display long past the end of their mortal selves. This is multi generational, multimedia, manufacturing and selling of bullshit on a scale rarely seen outside of Hollywood or network television.

I once got to see it up close and personal. WJC attended a Fortune magazine conference in 1988 while he was the Governor of Arkansas, and I sat at his table at dinner one evening. I was in awe, and still am today, of his interpersonal skills and ability to appear to really care about whomever he is talking to. Hillary has the same willingness to sling it, but lacks the skills to sell it like Bill – however, sometimes it is less about ability than it is about connections.

Hillary is in trouble now

Noted Hiram College grad Wilton Connor stepped up to be an Obama volunteer for the upcoming North Carolina primary after meeting the candidate recently. That's Wilton in the middle as the candidate speaks to the president of Davidson College. I'm hoping we can persuade Wilton to contribute some dispatches from the front lines in the coming weeks.

MLK

I watched a lot of coverage of the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination this week. Two thoughts consumed me; first that it is remarkable how far we’ve come and yet how little some things have changed. On one hand we have a serious black candidate for President and a much larger black middle class, and on the other hand, black poverty rates have barely changed and some things, like black infant mortality rates are actually worse than they were in 1968.

I also was struck by how little I heard about King’s adherence to the principles of non-violence. They are mentioned, certainly, but as a throw-away descriptive phrase, the way we say, “George Washington, father of our country.”

Here was a man in one of the most dangerous places in the country, in one of the most violent countries in the developed world, who took up the philosophy of an Indian lawyer to oppose and defeat a 300-year-old social-structure, using passive resistance to open, state-sponsored brutality. I’d like to know more about how he chose that path. Do any of you know much about how King came to these beliefs?

What do we owe the Iraqis?

We’ve been in Iraq for five long, unpleasant, years. It’s cost 4000 American lives, unknown numbers of Iraqi lives, and countless hundreds of billions of dollars. I’m not sure I know anyone who thinks it was worth it, or who doesn’t want to get out of there as fast as we can. Senators Clinton and Obama say they’ll pull out quickly, regardless of the consequences. Senator McCain says we have to finish the job.

Colin Powell famously said that, “if we break it, we own it.” The question I’m asking today is, “What do we owe the Iraqi people?”

If, as everyone seems to believe, our departure means an immediate and bloody, three-way civil war in which tens of thousands more innocent lives will be spent, and in which the Iranians, Syrians, and possibly even the Turks are likely to involve themselves, do we have a moral obligation to stay until there is some reasonable semblance of stability and order?

Many people lament the damage the war has done to America’s image and moral stature around the world, but what will be the effect on our relationship with other countries if we leave Iraq in regardless of their ability to defend themselves? Will we be seen as trustworthy and responsible, or selfish and short-sighted? Will we be safer?