The government is Oz

The Republicans have no heart. The Democrats have no brain. The only remaining questions are:

1. Does President Obama have the courage to force them to do what is right?

2. Who is Dorothy in this analogy?

David Brooks nailed the problem in his column today. The President may represent the politics of change, but this is the same old Congress. Shameless, selfish, short-sighted and stupid.

Yachts & Malls

As a stockbroker drives a prospect by the marina he points to a beautiful 40 foot yacht gleaming in the sunlight and proudly announces that he owns it. “Great,” replies the prospect, “but where are the customers’ yachts?”

I’m telling this old joke in honor of the release of Wall Street bonus data showing a very good year -- #6 all time, on par with 2004 when the Dow hit 10,000 and times were good. It’s a reminder of why people choose Wall Street careers: when you win, they win. When you lose, they win anyway. And when times are really tough we lend them the money to pay themselves well.

I’m not jumping off the Obama bandwagon yet, but I am very disappointed in how things are going so far. The recovery bill is either a toothless, pork-laden, business-as-usual Congressional welfare plan, or the administration has done a really poor job of selling its benefits. One of the reasons I voted for Obama was because I was so impressed with his communications skills, and the marketing savvy of his team, but those skills seem to have abandoned them now that they are in office. They couldn’t convince one Republican to go along with them?

Speaking of the GOP, the Times reports that they forced the Dems to drop the $200 million renovation of the Washington Mall from the plan. What in God’s name was the point of that? Have any of you been there lately? I walked from the WWII Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial last November and was shocked at the condition of the Mall. It looked like a public park in some third world country; it was truly an embarrassment and should be fixed immediately, although I think I could do it for $100 million if I didn’t have to check my workers’ immigration papers.

While all car sales are down, sales of small cars have fallen off the table now that gas prices are back to $2. Those of you with no sympathy for Detroit auto execs should ask yourselves what you’d be doing now to save your companies, and 2 million jobs. Would you make what people are buying, or stick to your philosophical guns and keep pumping out those roller skates?

Requiem

By JOHN UPDIKE

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

Larry Summers

No, that’s not Larry to the left. That’s a shot of Mickey Rouke in The Wrestler. The guy may be odder than a three-legged duck, but he can act. I recommend the movie, but I did have to look away from the screen a couple times (but not while Marissa Tome was up there). I can’t believe neither Clint Eastwood nor Gran Torino were nominated for any Academy Awards.

Larry Summers was on Meet the Press yesterday, and if he is going to be the administration’s chief salesman for the recovery plan, it’s in big trouble. He was inarticulate, unenthusiastic and unpersuasive. Meanwhile the whole plan is starting to sound like one big “earmark” bill to me; every tin-pot Congressman seems to be getting some chunk of real money for his or her pet local project. If they want to sell this plan they should consider the much-maligned, but very-effective-when-done-right PowerPoint presentation. Al Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award based on his PowerPoint. They can communicate a lot of information in a few pages and can be emailed to millions in a heartbeat. I’d rather take my chances that way than count on Katie Couric getting it right.

Do you think the reason Joe Biden has that permanent goofball grin smeared across his face is to show off his ten grand in dental whitenicity?

Doesn’t anyone pay the payroll taxes for their household help? Was this also one of Caroline Kennedy’s sins? The Gov would have us think so. Things are heating up among the Patterson/Clinton/Kennedy clans. Both New York and Massachusetts have mobilized their National Guards. There have been reports of skirmishes in the disputed West Berkshire borders region. Stay tuned.

I saw my man Steve Earle at the Tarrytown Music Hall Friday night. I wish he’d had his band with him, but it was a thrill to hear him anyway. The dude can do a lot with voice, guitar and harmonica.

John Thain: Aesthetic

I’m running out of things to say about these dirt-bag, lying, phonies who run our economy. Cousin Lunch, err, John Thain, is the latest example. He has the usual background: MIT, Harvard b-school, Goldman Sachs, New York Stock Exchange. And the usual sense of self-entitlement matched with complete lack of restraint we’ve become so familiar with these past few months.

It’s more fun to read about the $1.2 million redecoration of his office, but that was chump change. While CEO of Merrill Lynch he paid secret bonuses of between $3-4 billion to himself and top executive just days before selling ML to the Bank of America, who has taken tens of billions in TARP funds. He even paid his driver a $230k bonus. Thain needed to lean on his employer for all the financial support he could get because he was only paid $83.1 million in 2007.

If they weren’t stealing our money these guys would just be pathetic. They are such big weenies. Read this account of the redecorating. $800,000 of the $1.2 mil went to the decorator! That’s the depth of his lack of self-confidence. He had to hire the most expensive person he could find so they could select the perfect $35,000 commode! (Which Birdman has already pointed out to me is non-functioning.) What an incredible way to demonstrate his superior taste to the 40-50 other wing-tipped jerk-offs who put their feet up on his commode in the average year.

I’m convinced that China has the right approach for dealing with business criminals. As you may have heard, they just finished the trials of the executives accused of doctoring the milk supply. They are going to shoot two of them.

Inauguration Day

First of all, how about a big shout out to all those patriots on Wall Street for that rousing vote of confidence in America today – a nice 332 point dump to take the Dow below 8000 for the first time since Christ left Pittsburgh. Way to put country first boys.

My favorite part of the speech:

“Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old.

These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence: the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.”

My favorite moment of the day: When Sasha Obama gave her dad the big thumbs up after his speech. That one (to borrow a phrase) is just too cute for words. Aretha wasn’t bad, either.

My favorite inauguration moment ever: It was January 1973. Nixon II. No, I didn’t vote for him, but I knew a girl whose dad was a VIP. He was invited to one of the main Inaugural Balls, gave the tickets to her, and she invited me. How could I resist? My date enjoyed an occasional cocktail so we stopped someplace before the Ball. By the time we arrived at the Air & Space Museum she’d pounded down a half dozen tequila shots and at least a couple beers. The Ball was a total bore, so after a couple more shooters we decided to blow that pop stand. My date got impatient waiting in the coat check line and went off solo to help herself. Soon, a security guy was dragging her out. I jumped in and before I knew it we were both being “escorted” out. We were fortunate that it was a more innocent time. If it happened today I be facing life in Guantanamo.

Good luck to us all.

Geithner’s gotta go

I was really hoping we’d get through Obama’s nominations without any drama. The country’s problems are so large the last thing we need is a protracted fight on one appointment, no matter how big it is -- but he’s got to cut Tim Geithner loose.

It simply isn’t credible to believe that someone with his background could have failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in Federal taxes through a simple mistake. The man graduated from Dartmouth and received a masters in international economics from Johns Hopkins.

He didn’t grow up in the shadow of any smokestacks, either. His father worked for the Ford Foundation; his grandfather was an advisor to President Eisenhower. He was also no stranger to the complexities of living abroad, having grown up mostly abroad. He graduated from a high school in Thailand.

He had to know what he was doing (or not doing as the case may be) and it would be a very bad thing to start the new administration with a key figure, the man to whom the IRS will report, under this kind of cloud. In these troubled times (as they say on the nightly news) moral leadership is important, and Geithner has shown himself to be lacking in the necessary integrity.

The d’blank Middle East peace plan

Once, in a discussion of the never-ending conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, a friend asked rhetorically, “How can there be any rocks left on the West Bank? Haven’t the Palestinians thrown them all by now?”

This dispute is the root of all of our problems in the Middle East. Yes, I know, there’s oil, but that’s just money and there is always a way to divide up the money to make everyone reasonably happy. But Israel/Palestine is about blood and land, and it isn’t going to end until one of these parties is just gone.

So in my plan, we (the U.S.) would act as the broker, selling Israel to the Palestinians. They, of course, have no money, so they will have to get it from the Saudis, the other Arab oil states, and from Western European countries that depend on oil from that part of the world. And they will want to pony up because Part II of the plan is we move all the Israelis to the U.S. and leave present day Israel to the Palestinians.

This will end the conflict completely and for all time. It will require some negotiations on access to Jerusalem and other holy sites, but that can be worked out.

This plan may sound impractical, but it these days of multi-trillion dollar bailouts it isn’t really too big a task. There are only 7.1 million people in Israel, and at $100,000 per person in relocation expenses, it would cost only $700 billion to move everyone and set them up with a decent start in America.

Seven million people won’t upset the political order here, and the Israelis live on fewer than 8,000 square miles now. That’s smaller than New Hampshire, and since they’d probably prefer a desert climate it shouldn’t be hard to carve out space for them in the far west where the government owns millions of acres, and where a middle-sized state like New Mexico occupies 122,000 square miles – more than 15 times the size of Israel alone – and yet has fewer than 2 million inhabitants.

Hell, Ted Turner personally owns almost 5,000 square miles of U.S. real estate and he has a powerful need to save the world. I imagine we could work something out with him.

This plan would not only create peace, it would be a good deal for the U.S. economy. Those 7 million Israelis grind out an annual GDP of more than $164 billion from their sun-blasted, resource-poor piece of rock and sand, while fighting a never-ending war and devoting significant sums to defense. While well below the U.S. and Western Europe’s per capita GDP, it is first among the next tier; ahead of South Korea, more than double Russia’s or Brazil’s, and dwarfing either China’s or India’s output. They’d be a great addition to the U.S. economy. I say this is a bargain compared to the Wall Street bailout.

Does anyone have BHO’s email address?

Made in Detroit

1950 Mercury 2 door Sport Coupe

Chopped, channeled, decked, Frenched, molded nose, Louvered, posts slanted, '52 Desoto grille, '52 Buick headlights and side chrome, '64 T-Bird rear seat, Cadillac front bench seat, Alpine stereo system, Chevy front clip, Chevy 383 stroker engine, Chevy 700R4 tranny, Chevy 12 bolt rear end, 4:11 gears

The ad you'll only see here

[body copy below]

We got you to sell your 20 MPG Suburban to buy a 16 MPG Sequoia. We convinced you that your 33 MPG Malibu actually gets worse mileage than our 30 MPG Accord. We convinced if you quit buying GM, Ford and Chrysler that we will build more plants, but we just announced we are closing our NEW Prius plant in Mississippi. Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Ford, Lincoln, Mercury and Pontiac scored above average for JD Power Quality, while Acura, Nissan, BMW, Mazda, VW, Subaru, Scion, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Land Rover and Mini all scored below the industry average – and you still believe American brands can’t compete. We got billions of dollars in incentives paid for by the tax payers to build the few plants that we do have in America and you don’t care. And the best of all, we didn’t even have to make you believe that the auto loans were really a free money bailout…you came up with that one yourselves

What to do?

The unemployment rate just hit 7.2%, the highest since 1993. It’s hard to imagine what this country must have been like in the early ‘30s with unemployment at 25%. And I can’t even figure out which way to root for the next wave of stimulus programs. The op-ed page of the Times today had the perfect competing bookends for all the arguments I’ve been hearing.

David Brooks summarized the research (including a book by Obama’s incoming head of the Council of Economic Advisors) that says there is zero evidence to show any of this stuff actually works. And then right across the page there is Paul Krugman, who just won a Nobel Prize, ferkrizakes, saying that Obama isn’t going to spend enough.

I can't stop wondering: what is this country going to do when all these bills come due right about the time the baby boomers start totally overwhelming the social security and Medicare funds? Oh, and by-the-way, China has already begun reducing the amount of U.S. debt they are willing to buy.

Give Rick a chance

There are two things that have been on my mind lately that I’d like to throw out for your comments. The first is a question: What, exactly, do the people who are criticizing the Israelis, expect them to do in lieu of their current actions against Hamas?

Should they simple accept that Hamas will launch 10-20 rockets per day into Israel and do nothing? And what exactly would be a “proportionate response?” Would that be to randomly fire an equal number of unguided missiles into the West Bank and let them fall where they may, regardless of the distribution of the civilian population?

My other thought is directed to all people of a more liberal persuasion: You should give the Reverend Rick Warren, and more importantly the people who follow him, a break over his speaking at the Obama inauguration.

I realize he and his followers stand for some things that you could never support. But while he is probably well to the right of you, he is a long way from the extreme end of the belief curve, and represents a moderating influence on many people.

Barack Obama only won 53% of the votes in November, which leaves a lot of Americans looking at him sideways, just waiting for a signal that he truly doesn’t care about people like them. Inviting Warren to speak was a political olive branch to a group of people whose support Obama will need if he is to solve the many problems facing our country. These problems are big beyond the imagination’s ability to grasp them, and we can’t afford a continuation of the political and social polarity that has kept us from addressing them for decades.

By definition, that means working with people with whom we may not be in complete agreement, and someone has to be the bigger person – the one who takes the first step. Isn’t that why you voted for Obama in the first place?

Today is our birthday

So, the first Daily Blank post was one year ago today. In it, I asked, "who cares who won the Iowa caucus?" Obama did, but I didn't even mention his name, and I think I've keep up that same level of political insight and finger-on-the-pulse-of-America relevance for the past year.

Fortunately, I've had a great group of people along for the ride who are not a bit shy about pointing out the occasional flaw in my logic. For that I am grateful. I read every response and enjoy your opinions almost as much as my own. Please keep them coming.

I pretty much chilled out for the Holidays -- which was much needed as the old blood pressure was getting pretty high over the whole Wall Street/Washington rape of America. The Times had two more excellent pieces on the topic this weekend. The first by the always good Joe Nocera on Risk Management, which goes a long way towards explaining how the math geniuses either helped pave the road to hell, or how their work was misused; it all depends on your point of view.

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn co-wrote an op-ed piece (The End of the Financial World as We Know It) that digs deeper into the complete uselessness and corruption of both the SEC and the risk rating agencies. Lewis has written some excellent stuff on the crisis (see Portfolio link) and offers some specific suggestions for reforms. If we don't get fundamental regulatory reforms out of this disaster then we really do have the government we deserve.