Biden-Palin: Pay-Per-View

You want to take a whack at the $700 billion? Make Biden-Palin a pay-per-view!

I’m only about halfway joking here. If you’ve read my previous posts, you know how this is going to be scored – like a boxing match.  Jabs thrown,  power punches connected,  knockout blow. Maybe they’ll even have those little colored bars at the bottom of the screen.

Let’s say you charged about $50 for each TV connection,  with five people watching at each one, the total audience being 40 million. I’m not very good at math, but is that about $400 million? How about if you made it available worldwide? And do the same thing with the presidential debates while yhou're at it. Maybe you could even sell series tickets.

Well, OK, it wouldn’t raise all that much, but wouldn’t it be a start? Aren’t we in a crisis?

We’re already getting the Thursday party organized at my house – we have to find out where that Palin wine from Chile is sold. Somebody will have to bring the chips and dip.

Hey, don’t accuse me of trivializing this process! There are a lot of people who have beaten me to the punch in that department, as long as we're on the boxing theme.

There, now I’ve said it.

Catching Flies With #%$&@!

Thanks, Nancy. You just turned my 401 (k) into a 201(z).

It’s hard enough swallowing cod liver oil by the teaspoon. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted that the Republicans swallow their dose by the bucket, or the 55-gallon drum. Her unnecessarily partisan speech when the bailout bill was brought to the floor may have driven away the necessary Republican votes to get it passed. And with the number of Democrats opposed to the bill, she needed all the help she threw away.

Congressman Barney Frank observed that Republicans shouldn’t have let their hurt feelings destroy the process of saving the country’s financial markets. But why hurt their feelings in the first place?

It will be very interesting to see whom the voters hold this all against. Suffice it to say that if there were a choice for “none of the above,” at least in House election contests, that chamber would turn into one big mausoleum in January.

As I’ve said before, if we were just screwing ourselves, we could let everything collapse in a heap and have only ourselves to blame. But there’s a real danger of our taking the world with us.

At what point does this turn into a real emergency – and what powers would that give the Executive Branch? Do we have to wait for people to take to the streets? This territory isn’t just uncharted – it’s getting to be downright frightening.

So please, Ms. Pelosi, go kiss a few GOP behinds if you have to, in order to get a bailout bill passed. And for those whose behinds get kissed, well, please remember to smile and say thank you – and get back to work.

There, now I’ve said it.

Up the Flagpole

All the players in this historical financial drama are rushing for the final curtain, but many in the audience are saying, “Not so fast!”

This is coming largely from free-market advocates who say that Congress hasn’t taken the time to explore cheaper alternatives to the $700 billion bailout plan. They say the crisis mentality is largely artificial and has a political motivation, as members of Congress are really trying to get this done so they can rush home to their districts and campaign. The worst thing, the critics say, is that there is no guarantee this bailout plan will work, that it’s simply a symbolic gesture.

Symbolism is not the frivolity that some think it is. Those in the marketplace – including the foreign markets – expect somebody to do something. The plan is almost secondary to the action of adopting it. It’s truly a Hail Mary pass – but sometimes prayer is a last – and necessary -- resort. Or at least it’s important to see some folks on their knees.

Now the compromise plan isn’t making anyone very happy, but that’s why they call it compromise to begin with. It appears there will be no golden parachutes for the CEOs of the failed companies and that there will be congressional oversight so that the $700 billion isn’t doled out all at once. The CEO issue is the one that’s really resonating with the average bear – even though cutting back on compensation only represents a drop in a very large bucket.

To make a leap into the presidential race for a moment, the idea that a black man could actually be elected to this country’s highest office, even if he does lack some experience, is really resonating with people in the rest of the world, with whom our relationships are currently in the toilet. If symbolism is a little thing, give me a better explanation for the candidacy of Sarah Palin.

Sometimes, it’s all about running things up the flagpole.

There, now I’ve said it.

Out of the Park

If I hear the expression “hit it out of the park” one more time, I’m sure I will commit a felony, though what section of the penal code that will involve, I’m not sure of yet.

We’re Americans, and we have to score everything. In the big debate, neither McCain nor Obama hit it out of the park, the analysts said. But hey, was there a ground rule double, a bunt, or a sacrifice fly? I guess most people had it a draw.

Did you notice the approval bars that CNN was running continuously through the contest, to show how various constituencies were reacting? What exactly did it tell you? But hey, it’s a score.

Go on the Internet. Everything is rated from one to five stars. We all are assigned credit scores (not that those are of any particular use right now). No matter how good an eBay seller you are, there’s always somebody that wants to give you a low score and bust your average. It’s inevitable.

How good a life have we all led, on a scale of 1 to 10? I  guess I’ve done a passable job so far, but if I had my druthers, I think I’d rather have it expressed in a pie chart that a graph. As long as I get to enjoy some of the pie.

There, now I've said it.

Copybox Numbers

You have no idea what the title of this post means unless you watch HBO Boxing. They use Copybox numbers to keep track  punches thrown,  e.g., Rocky threw 140 jabs and 25 percent connected, while Bruiser threw 60 power punches and 10 percent landed.

Then the boxing analysts go to work. It's usually Jim Lampley and Larry Merchant, along with former heavyweight champ Lennox Lewis and sometimes the unofficial ringside scorer (and former dentist, I think) Harold Lederman. But even they can't tell you who won.

Assuming it's not an obvious knockout, that determination is made by the three official ringside judges. They may lead  to a completely different conclusion than those of all the analysts, but it's their decisions that count.

So how did I score the debate, you ask? Or maybe you didn't. Well, in general, I thought Obama held his own and displayed a more global or comprehensive grasp of the issues than did McCain -- but McCain fared a lot better than people thought he might, and scored points with his "been theres" and "done thats" Some made a big deal of his struggling with the pronunciation of the president of Iran's name. But hey, I used to be in broadcasting, and I can't do it.

The bottom line, of course, is that neither man scored  a clear victory,  leaving viewers and listeners wanting more.

But debates test just one set of skills, and we can't depend on these to form our opinions, if we're fair.  How do the candidates  perform in one-on-one extended interviews,  in town-hall meetings, even in Saturday Night Live show-ups? If the media are doing their jobs, their fact-checking keeps track of the lies told. All these elements go into the crock pot. After a little stewing, we can serve up an informed opinion.

Please give yourself permission NOT to have an opinion yet.  This is a really important vote you'll be casting. No one will hold it against you if you take your time.

There,  now I've said it.

Working the System

A lot of us are pointing fingers at the financial whizbangs and the CEOs that we blame for getting us into this meltdown situation. But the questions remains, were they doing anything illegal, or just working the system?

The FBI is said to be investigating many of these people now. But for the moment, it seems our favorite villains were playing with the cards that were available, according to the rules.

Who among us can say that we never worked a system if it was in our favor? Our accountant turned us on to a quirk in the law that lowered our taxes. Someone we knew got us backstage into a concert, even though we had no real reason to be there. Our uncle was the chief of police, so we didn't get a ticket when we should have. There are probably many variations of this. How many of us refused to work the system when the cards were in our favor? It's OK, you don't have to answer that.

The solution, of course, is repairing the system to that people can't work it any more, or at least not as easily.

Following the Wall Street collapse of 1929, some regulations were put into effect that are still bnefiting us today. If they weren't in place, we'd really be in a pickle. But not every loophole was plugged. And when it comes to money, new loopholes open up as the financial wunderkinds put their creativity to use.

So, we learn by experience --  in most cases, the hard way -- but we do learn. After the earthquake comes and the buildings collapse, the buildings that go up in their place are usually able to withstand greater shocks. That's what will happen when this current crisis passes.

Let's make sure we are grateful for the lessons learned -- and make sure that our leaders turn them into policies that protect us going forward.

There, now I've said it.

Grabbing the Wheel

The Bush administration, and Treasury Secretary Paulson in particular, have been getting a lot of flak over the plan to deal with the current economic crisis.  But hey, at least they have come up with a plan, which is more than most of the critics have done.

No, the Treasury Secretary should not have carte blanche to spend almost $700 billion without oversight. But he has done his job. There's a plan out there on the table to get kicked around, tweaked, picked apart, and transformed.

Is it going to work? You've seen enough of those disaster movies where the asteroid is heading for Earth,  and they launch a spaceship with nukes in it to deal with the threat. In some movies it works, and in others it doesn't -- but somebody has to try.

Doing nothing is not an option. Jus the fact that there is a plan on the table is something to calm the markets. Many of the reforms put in place after the crash of 1929 are still working our favor today. That's why there hasn't been a run on the banks.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal to lift Americans out of the Depression -- with a little "d" as well as the upper-case one. The launching of those programs accomplished that goal -- even though as time went on, the programs' effectiveness was questioned. But just the fact that someone grabbed the wheel and started steering made the difference.

Let's hope they come together on a plan quickly in Washington -- that needs to happen. But let's give everyone credit for tryihng.

There, now I've said it.

Feel the Pain

This financial crisis can get you thinking what things cost and what they're really worth -- and how we've been insulated from having to deal with pain.

Let's take housing. In California, it's very expensive in some markets, thought not what it used to be. The price of a home was driven up in the Bay Area by a lot of factors  -- fear being one of them. Prices got bid up because folks felt that if they didn't get into something ASAP, the price would go even higher, and they'd be out of luck. Plus, the dot-commers out there, many of whom made their money on products just as ephemeral as today's investmnent bankers, had money to burn. The rest couldn't afford to compete unless they got a banker to give them a loan they weren't qualified for to buy a house that probably wasn't worth the zillions being charged -- or shouldn't have been -- but that was what the market bore. You find out what something is really worth when the market collapses  -- but we're insulated from those things, most of the time.

Take insurance. No one living could afford to pay the out-of-pocket costs for health care these days, so you have to have insurance to insulate you from that level of pain. So the hospital charge for a toohbrush is $40. Your insurance company pays it because it's "reasonable and customary." OK, so maybe they only pay $25, and you get the bill for the rest. Then you get angry, because you wonder why they're charing that much for a toothbrush in the first place. If you -- and everyone else --  had to pay for it totally out of your pocket, would the hospital be able to charge that much for it? 

There's another thing about insurance. It's like one of those bulletproof vests the cops wear. They're great as long as you don't get shot in the legs or the head. That would hurt! Folks are finding out that they're really not insured against all that much.

Take the Iraq War. Lots of people thought that was a good idea -- a lot more people than those getting blamed for it now. Most Americans were insulated from sacrifice. The cost of the war wasn't really part of the federal budget. There were no war bond rallies, like during World War II, to raise money for it. And instead of a draft, the government just called up National Guard and reserve units to take on multiple tours of duty. Many of these have been some of the top prfofessionals in oucr communities, not kids just out of college. But unless you are part of a family that lost a loved one, you probably haven't felt very much, because your daily life hasn't been interfered with at all. If there were a draft, do you think there would have been an Iraq War?

Sometimes it's better to feel the pain, to have to pay the real cost of something.  Feeling pain often protects us from real harm. Maybe this financial crisis will strip off the insulation and make us sit up and pay attention.

There, now I've said it.

Other People's Messes

It seems unfair that we have to clean up other people's messes  -- but we do.

Why should we bail out Wall Street? These are the guys that got us into trouble, right? But we're all in the same boat,  and the boat is sinking. So everybody has to do the bailing, When we get back to shore,  we can fire the captain -- but first we have to get back.

And while there's a lot of pain to go around, it isn't  just the fincincial whiz kids who deserve to feel it. A lot of people benefited from the air in the bubble. Remember, just about everyone's property values have gone up. A lot of stockholders have done very well. Families are living in houses thanks to loans they shouldn't have qualified for. The shame is that they needed to get loans they couldn't qualify for to pay the outrageous prices in the first place --but that's water under the bridge, just co continue with our nautical theme here.

The Iraq war is a very similar situation.  President Bush will leave office with a mess that others have to clean up. We all want to walk away from it, because we didn't create it. But it wasn't just Bush that made the mess -- he had lots of help. From most of us, in fact. Barack Obama can boast all he wants to that he didn't contribute to it,  but even he recognizes we have to clean it up.

Saddam Hussein was largely our mess -- we armed him in the early days as a defense against Iran. Osma bin Laden was once the darling of the West when he was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.You can't just demonize one or two people. Devils tend to travel in packs, which is why they said their name was Legion in the Bible.

I've always been of the opinion that the bad guys always get what's coming to them, though it's usually not as soon as I'd like. I may not even be around to see it. In the meantime, we all just have to get out our bailing cans and keep dipping. That's the only way we're going to keep from being shark (or barracuda?) food.

There, now I've said it.

American Idol This isn't

On Sunday I got two forwarded e-mails, saying that PBS was doing an on-line survey. The question was, "Is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president?" There are boxes for yes, no, and undecided.

These forwarded e-mails had an air of urgency because the yesses were outnumbering the nos by something like a 56 to 42 percent margin, and that the "no" side better get organized because the "yes" side is mounting a successful campaign. Of course I voted. If you have been reading Coughswitch, you probabloy know where I stand.

And then I thought, hang on a minute. A poll is just a poll. I'm not faulting PBS for conducting one. But is it really a matter of such urgency that one side wins or loses one of these things?  All the pundits, after talking about polling data for hours, end up in the same place: The only poll that counts is the big one in November.

Now I also hear all the pundits talking about all those undecided white women out there who could swing the election. It's assumed that almost all Republicans will vote Republican but that only some Democrats will choose Obama/Biden and that the white women and "real people" Democrats will be so disgusted that Obama didn't pick Hillary that they'll vote Republican.

But I haven't heard much about a segment that I belong to. What about Republicans who are so angry at the selection of Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential candidate that they'll either vote for the Democrats, or, if they can't bring themselves to do that, not vote at all?  Don't some Republican women find it a little insulting that experienced, intelligent Republican female candidates were passed over for Sarah Palin? Anyone hear of Kay Bailey Hutchinson or Christine Todd Whitman, just to name two?

The object of the race is to win, but Jeez Louise,  is Sarah Palin the best the GOP can do?  Louise wasn't busy -- maybe they should have put her on the ticket.

There, now I've said it.

Barracuda Calls

I can't help myself. Sarah Palin is drop-dead gorgeous. As long as you don't have to listen to her.

The cheekbones are just exquisite. But they'd be obscured by the necessary addition of duct tape.

The governor's voice makes nails on a blackboard sound like the New York Philharmonic. Now, look, I know I'm being unfair. God knows, Eleanor Roosevelt was nothing in the voice quality department, either. But would you really want to listen to Sarah Palin deliver a State of the Union address, which she may have to do someday? Don't get me started on what the content of such a speech might be. I'm just talking about the sound here. It's purely superficial.

I notice that any number of women are wearing Sarah glasses. I think I saw one of the Weather Channel meteorologists wearing them on the night her contact lenses may have been uncomfortable. The stock market may be having its problems, but find out who makes those and invest. The stock will either take a big jump or a big drop Nov. 5.

But whatever you do, ladies, please don't try to sound like Sarah. Leave that to Tina Fey.

There, now I've said it.

Net Worth

The federal government has come up with a plan whereby it -- meaning we -- will assume the bad debts of the financial institutions in trouble. Now you're probably really mad. Why should we be on the hook for a situation we didn't create? Why don't the bad guys take the fall?

Why were there no whistle-blowers out there? Because everyone was in cahoots? Partly, but it's mostly that these new financial instruments like "credit default swaps" appeared on the scene so stealthily -- and the results were so good -- that most of the experts didn't know how or when to blow the whistle. When it comes to regulation, it would be great if there were a financial FDA that could give these things some kind of test on a limited scale before they're actually put into widespread use.

You can lock up all the bad guys you want and deprive all the evil CEOs of their assets and turn these miscreants into the nation's newest homeless. But that's not a fix. These institutions are really too big to fail. It would be one thing if we had just screwed ourselves, but it's not that way. The United States economy is largely owned by foreigners. When AIG was poised to go down, for example, it was going to take hundreds of billions of dollars in Japanese investment with it. And if foreigners lose confidence in their U.S. investments and pull out, this week's calamities will seem like minor foreshocks of the Really Big One.

It all goes back to the question of what has value. Value comes from whatever people have confidence in. The value is in the confidence itself, not the investment object. A lot of people lost confidence in stocks this week and put their money into gold. Why is gold valuable? OK, it's pretty, it's resistant to corrosion, and it's a wonderful electrical conductor, but it really doesn't have much else to recommend it. You can't eat it, drink it or power anything with it. You don't have to think about it or understand it, but you know that a lot of people have confidence in it, and there's where the value is.

So what our leaders have to do is restore the confidence -- the trust -- in the American economy, which really is too big to fail. When the airplane loses power and starts to go down, the pilot pointing a finger at the co-pilot and saying, "It was your job to check the fuel before takeoff today" doesn't solve the problem.

There, now I've said it.

It's a Good Thing

The great national nightmare, to paraphrase the late Gerald Ford, isn't over, but I think we're past the really hard part.

You don't have to be a Harvard-educated economist (full disclosure: I went to Princeton) to figure out what is happening to our financial structure. It was all about lending money to those who couldn't pay it back, and then insuring the financial institutions against the consequences. And at least some of the poor unfortunate victims have to shoulder some of the blame: They lied on their loan applications. But no one bothered to try to catch them at it. They were just having too much fun.

So it's all collapsing in a heap, and everyone is feeling the pain. Good! That's what pyramids and bubbles are supposed to do -- collapse. This was like a giant Ponzi scheme. The only unanswered questions involve whether those in charge of it all should be in jail; but the jails have too many people in them now as it is.

We will likely enter into a period of regulation. It's necessary, because neither socialism nor the free market work in their purest forms. Socialism doesn't work because people don't want to give up what they feel they have earned -- that's human nature. And free markets don't work because people can't be trusted when the money is sitting right in front of them, waiting to be collected. Again, human nature.

What we will find to fix this is a mix of government regulation, and yes, self-regulation. The bankers probably won't put themselves into this situation again, at least for another 30 years or so.

The great thing about hitting bottom is that the only direction to go is up -- and you can bet that the rebuilding will be done on much more solid ground. There are some very spiritual lessons to be learned here. It gets you thinking about what really has value, and what doesn't.

When we're done with home loans, maybe the next collapse will come in the credit card industry -- and then maybe the HMO system, and who knows? Maybe even the tax code. It would involve learning the hard way -- but if we had to rebuild all of these things from scratch, maybe it wouldn't be so bad after all. We sure wouldn't be making the same mistakes anytime soon.

There, now I've said it.

Spare President

Let's not minimize this, folks: The Vice President is a spare President -- and we need a full-size spare.

Did you ever drive one of those compact cars with the undersized spare tire? When you blew one of your regular tires, you had to put the little spare on. You weren't supposed to go full speed, and you were urged to change it at the next gas station. If you traveled a long distance on it, you could damage your car, or so they warned you.

Suppose something happens to John McCain. Do we really see Sarah Palin making nominations to the Supreme Court, or sitting across the table from Putin, or brokering a peace between the Israelis and Palestinians? In the modern world, we just can't afford to limp along to the next station.

Does Mr. McCain expect us to believe that out of all the qualified Republican women out there today, this is the best he can do? What does his selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate tell us about the cabinet secretaries he will choose, or the advisors with whom he will surround himself?

OK, so Barack Obama didn't pick Hillary, and that wasn't too bright. But Joe Biden is a full-size spare -- we could run with him till the next election, if anything happened to Mr. Obama.

I'm not saying that Sarah Palin isn't intelligent, or principled, or a good governor, or a good mother. I don't live in Alaska. She's just not ready for the Big Show. It's clear to me that "gotcha" questions in five-minute interviews don't work on people like her. But I'd like to see how she performs in a half-hour or hour-long unedited interview. Maybe Charlie Rose should have a go. Or maybe we can pray for the resurrection of Tim Russert.

As for the need for change in Washington, it's my experience that the people most qualified to fix something that's broken are those familiar enough with it to know how it's supposed to work in the first place. That job description fits John McCain. It doesn't fit Ms. Palin.

I genuinely like Mr. McCain, and from an ideological point of view, prefer him to Barack Obama. But the prospect of Sarah Palin filling in as President of the Ubited States represents a risk I'm not willing to take with my vote.

I want to be a good Republican -- why does the party have to make it so damned hard?

There, now I've said it.

Paying Ike's Bills

Don't beat me up too badly -- this is my first blog post ever.

So here are all these thousands of people in Galveston who were told to leave, and didn't, before Ike showed up.

The National Weather Service was using phrases like "certain death" in its warnings. You would think that would get the point across. Apparently not. Now, many of these people who survived are having to be rescued -- for free.

For the next hurricane, how about this: If you are subject to a MANDATORY evacuation order (Why do they call it that if you can ignore it?) and a means of evacuating is made available to you if you don't have any of your own, and you still choose to stay, and you call 911 and they have to come and rescue you, well, they should send you a bill for the personnel/helicopter time, etc.

If people knew that they would be accepting a major financial risk if they chose to stick around for a hurricane, maybe the "mandatory" evacuation order would mean something.

At the very least, paying the freight would be a way of expressing gratitude if they saved your life, right?

There, now I've said it.