Joe v Joe
It is a race to see who falls out of the spotlight faster now that their “15 minutes” is up.
So who will disappear quicker? Joe Wurzelbacher or Joe Lieberman
Honestly I don’t care as long as they both go away.
This will mark the end of politics on this blog (your welcome).
Those that may from time to time want to see the political talk, I will be starting another blog just for that purpose, The Daft Dem. Because I don’t believe yesterday was the end… it was only the beginning.
But I will be happy to bring this blog back to a more cheerful and stop be “sooooo serious” (see Liz, I’m trying)
Next Week will mark the Return of TechParent Tuesday.
A New Beginning
I held off posting, fully confident that I would be able to write this post before Midnight (Eastern). Though I have to admit I was a actually a bit disappointed that it was not quite as easy as I had originally expected. At this point I am also a bit sad that the Democrats did not secure a Senate position strong enough that Joe Lieberman was relegated to a footnote. But in the end, the right choice (I believe) was made, and breathe a sigh of relief that my daughter’s future will not be screwed up by the likes of a wingnut like Sarah Palin. The devastation that was the Bush administration will not be carried on, and for that I am extremely happy.
Congratulations and Good Luck President-Elect Barack Obama and VP-Elect Joe Biden
The good (and important) parts of the bailout
Look, I am not any big fan of bailing out a bunch of Investment Bankers and banks. Fine, I am not a fan of the idea at all. And I am not going to spend too much time on the negatives, the golden parachutes, idiotic CEO pay scales, and the like. These have all been well documented and hammered home on virtually every blog and Tweet on the subject.
However, in all the negativity on the subject, something has gotten lost, and I don’t think (well I know, but I didn’t want to overstate it) many quite understand the gravity of the situation, and why it wasn’t just an “easy” decision for lawmakers to just tell these companies to, “go ahead and fail,” or ”you made your your own bed.” It just isn’t, as much as we would like to think it is, to untie these situations from the rest of the economy because of the scale of it all.
A car dealer not far from my home, Bigelow Motors, had been in business for 66 years. It had weathered upturns and downturns many times over the years, but they were basically forced to close their doors this past week. The reason? They lost their line of credit.
In my own business, there are times that I need credit to cover the time between when I secure the supplies I need and the time my client pays me. Without that line of credit, I am seriously hampered in what I can do and what orders I can complete.
This is a common way of doing business for companies big and small (only the size of the line of credit changes). From small corner delis that need to cover stock to mega corporation deals, there is very little that is done “in cash” because income and outlay do not always line up nice and neatly.
Obviously, the impact on business also affects employment as well. Everybody at that car dealership I mentioned earlier is out looking for a job now. Unemployment is up all over the place, and would only get worse as businesses need to either cut back or shut down because they are not able to conduct business as usual.
So, just understand, it was not a “no-brainer” to just vote this bill down. (Well, it was in that crazy first draft sent over from President Bush, but that was pretty much obvious to everybody except I guess President Bush and Treasury Secretary Pauson). Is it ideal? No. Did it have to be as quickly as it was? Unfortunately, Yes.
While people joke around now about how it hasn’t fixed everything already, this plan it going to take time to actually start having an effect, so even now we are still in crisis, but everyday that it waited is more time until implementation takes effect, and the more business that are apt to fail if this wasn’t passed in some form.
What I think a lot of people are shocked with, it that they got a good look at how Washington works. The sort of wheeling and dealing (and pork additions) that happened here goes on constantly. It is “how things work” and while this is no secret, it was clearly (and expensively) on display here.
I guess what I am trying to say here is, that I am not saying you shouldn’t be angry about what is going on. I sure am. But be angry at the right people, for the right reasons. Look to former Texas Senator Phil Gramm and his slipping in of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) that enabled things like the Enron collapse, and the bundling of “derivatives” that helped make this mortgage crisis possible. Be angry that this same Phill Gramm is on John McCain’s short list to be Treasurer of the United States. Be angry at those that politicized this process and demanded pork for their vote. But don’t take a “yes” vote in and of itself to be the whole reason. This really wasn’t an easy situation for anyone to swallow, and there are valid reasons to have voted for the bailout. The damage has long since been done, and now it needed to be fixed to keep the situation from getting worse.
The Palin Doctrine
Like many, when Sarah Palin was picked for a running partner, I said, “Sarah Who?” At first blush, I thought this was just an ill conceived move in desperation to try and grab, “disgruntled Hillary Voters” and women in general. (As I suspect many others have done as well).I held off commenting on this situation at first because there was little I was going to say that hadn’t been said far more eloquently by somebody else. But as I watch this from the sidelines, I am quickly starting to understand. This was no “fluke.” Sarah Palin fits perfectly into the Karl Rove built world of politics. I was both thrilled and disappointed when I read about the hackers that had gotten into Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account. Thrilled of course that now there was obvious proof that she was in fact doing what she was being accused of doing. She was circumventing public records Acts and using alternative methods to send e-mail so as to cover her tracks.I was disappointed that this was done, because it obviously gives Palin and her supporters the cover they need in this situation. They cry foul (which in all fairness it was), and can of course now claim that it was all a hack and that none of the e-mails were “real.” They would be lying through their teeth in doing so, but Palin (and John McCain) have both shown that even when caught, they will go right on lying. It is so bad that even Time Magazine admits,
The situation has gotten so intense that we in the media have slipped our normal rules as well. Usually when a candidate tells something less than the truth, we mince words. We use euphemisms like mendacity andinaccuracy … or, as the Associated Press put it, “McCain’s claims skirt facts.” But increasing numbers of otherwise sober observers, even such august institutions as the New York Times editorial board, are calling John McCain a liar.
I mean, how bad is it when Karl Rove is questioning your practices? No, Sarah Palin was no “accident.”
The Times reports that using webmail for official business was Standard Operating Proceedure in Alaska:
While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account “when there was significant state business.”On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”
She has shown herself to be willing to make up her facts as she goes along quite nicely. Whether it is her claim that Alaska provides 20% of the nations energy (Alaska provides about 3.5%), or flat out lying when she says she told Congress “Thanks but no thanks” for funding the bridge to nowhere. After all when she was running for Governor she said during an Interview:
Yes. I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now – while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.
Oh she eventually threw the project under the bus, but not until it had been all but killed in Congress, and had become the poster project for pork barrel spending.She has also shown the same cut-throat expectation of loyalty and will fire anybody that does not give her 100% support, that we have come to know during the Bush years. In other words, refuse to give Sarah the right answer when asked if you would ban books from the library that Sarah Palin doesn’t like and you are gone. When I first saw Sarah Palin, I likened her to Geraldine Ferarro, a poor choice done out of desperation. I was so wrong. While Ferarro was a poor choice, and her inept run probably hurt the cause of women in politics more than anything, Sarah Palin is far more dangerous than that.
Why do children have to die for common sense laws?
Abigail Taylor died Thursday from injuries sustained last June when when she sat on a wading pool drain; the suction so strong that it suck out part of her intestines. It is always a tragedy when a child dies, and always there is some knee-jerk reactions, some good and sometimes even some not so go. But when it happens for something incredibly stupid, it is all that much more infuriating.
On the heels of this incident, in December Congress approved legislation to “ban the manufacture, sale or distribution of drain covers that don’t meet anti-entrapment safety standards.” It was called the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act [pdf], the named for the granddaughter of former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, who was killed when she was trapped by the suction of a drain in 2002!
Now, I don’t understand why this wasn’t already a law, because it seems so brain-dead obvious to me as a parent, but can somebody explain to me, even after the first incident, and when people started lobbying for this law in 2002, it took 5 freakin’ years to get this written into law? Now, I am willing to bet if I left it at that, I would have somebody come along and say “there’s a war on and Congress had ‘more important’ things to contend with.” But if that is the case, then can somebody explain to me why Abigail Taylor had to die when over those same five years Congress sat back, played IM games with Pages, stuffed freezers full of cash, taking bribes, and making medical diagnosis via videotape. They had “the time” to do it, but it seems unless there is enough dead children for them to stop taking donations from corporations that are too cheap to manufacture these things safely, they just allow it to go on.
-
Sponsors
