Obama Doubt

Are you a sufferer? I’m not talking about “I Told You So” – an entirely different disorder. Did you vote for Obama and now question your choice?

It’s true that the President has made some serious errors in judgment. Health care reform is a good idea, but it’s a meal he should have served in courses. Closing Gitmo sounded good, but is it going to come back to bite us – indeed, has it bitten us already? You can add your own items to the list. And there’s the overarching question: Is he doing what he was elected to do?

I’m a Republican, and many of the things John McCain was saying in 2008 and continues to say today make sense – so much sense that Mr. Obama himself is saying some of them. I would have voted for McCain, were it not for the Big One in the errors-in-judgment department: Sarah Palin.

As far as I’m concerned, the selection of Palin as the VP candidate -- a potential spare President – represented a security risk of the first magnitude. Could anyone seriously conceive of a person with that level of ignorance about the world sitting in the Oval Office? McCain either actively supported this choice or went along with the campaign staffers who came up with it – some of whom are now admitting their mistake. That was a fatal error for me, and I voted Democrat.

Obama’s clearly in a lot of trouble. He may indeed be a one-termer. Is he damaged goods for the rest of that term? As I said in yesterday’s post, it’s only the end of the first quarter of this game, and attention spans are no longer what they used to be – and they were never long to begin with. Many of the presidents whom a majority revere today – FDR, JFK, Reagan and Lincoln, for example – had widely varying degrees of popularity during their tenure. And few were elected with the enormously favorable margins that Richard Nixon enjoyed to begin his second term.

So yes, I’m suffering from Obama Doubt. At the moment, it’s not terminal -- but check back with me later.

The Game Isn't Changed

President Obama’s State of the Union speech was a great speech, but no game-changer. But how many games do you remember a State of the Union speech changing, anyway?

Personally, I’m a little tired of the media hanging the President’s whole future on a speech. You know the thinking: “If he doesn’t hit out of the park this time….”

I didn’t hear much that surprised me. He did convince me that he “gets it” as far as the average voter’s real priorities are concerned: jobs, tax cuts for small business, etc. Health care wasn’t even brought up until halfway through the address. I think health care -- or at least health insurance reform – remains a major issue and of critical importance to the average American family. It’s just that we’re all tired of hearing about it. Republicans and Democrats agree on most of what needs to be fixed. So let’s tell ‘em to fix it!

Quite frankly, the only thing that really surprised me in the speech was that the word “nuclear” came out of Obama’s mouth without him choking on it.

None of us doubts the ability of this President to deliver a great speech. But a speech can’t really change the game, because the teams’ field positions are exactly where they were before Mr. Obama uttered word one. This is only the end of the first quarter. It’s all about where we go from here.

The Haiti Laboratory

The 7-point Haiti earthquake, as I said in an earlier post, is a clear candidate for the greatest tragedy of the century, which admittedly is still young. But at the risk of sounding cold, it’s a critical learning opportunity.

At some point we have to set emotions aside and look upon Haiti as a sociopolitical laboratory, if we can use that term, albeit an unwanted one What questions does it raise, and what answers will it provide, about human behavior in such circumstances?

Of course, all these situations have unique elements: Haiti is not California, nor central China, nor New Orleans, but since human beings are involved, there are common elements. This was a major earthquake that hit a population center – something that really doesn’t happen that often – so we need to pay attention to the questions.

Do we need to revise our estimates of how long human beings can survive after being buried under rubble? What causes them to survive so long – is it faith, temperament or genetics?

The stories of courageous family members digging out their relatives against all odds are heartwarming, but how is the great mass of the population behaving in unbelievably extreme circumstances? Is there any reason to believe people in more “civilized” places would behave any better? How do you think you’d behave after a week without water?

What role does communication play in affecting human behavior -- online, satellite and conventional (“old-fashioned,” if you prefer) methods?

There’s a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking in play here, revolving around the issues of planning and security. One camp says you have to assess the situation first in order to apply help most effectively, ensuring the security of those providing the help. The other says, jump in and help those you can, and when the victims see that they’re getting help quickly, security will take care of itself. So who’s right?

Retired Gen. Russel Honore, who was military commander in the Katrina hurricane response and now a CNN consultant, is in the second camp. He said early on that able-bodied Haitians should be recruited to clear landing sites for helicopters around Port-au-Prince, to get around the blocked-roads problem. Was that done, or was that idea even feasible?

Who can manage these situations most effectively? Does there need to be a “czar” to run things – civilian or military?

In Haiti’s case, why did it take more than a week to figure out that victims in outlying cities also need help? Did Katrina teach us nothing?

Rebuilding Port-au-Prince will probably take decades, and some may be wondering, is it worth it?

George Clooney’s telethon took over most of the networks in the U.S. Friday as well as others around the world. It likely had much better pickup than the State of the Union message will get on Wednesday. The big question, of course, is what happens with the ADD-afflicted audience in, say, six months or a year from now.

The big overarching question is – are we really going to take what we learn from Haiti and apply it to the next disaster?

I Won't Hold It Against Him

I think a Republican victory in Massachusetts on Tuesday would be a good thing. If it happens, it will be a clear sign that the health care bill belongs in the circular file or the wood chipper.

I haven’t read this bill (as I’m sure most members of Congress haven’t). But from what’s been reported from many different sides, it’s a mess. There are things it does nothing about, like wellness, tort reform and drug prices. The problems that are addressed aren’t dealt with for several years.

Many will consider a GOP win this week a black eye for President Obama, but I won’t hold it against him if it comes to pass. He should be given a lot of credit for shining the spotlight on the need for health care reform. We all would agree it’s a job worth doing, and if so, it’s worth doing right. It’s very hard to scuttle a ship that’s been so long in the building, but let’s face it, this one just doesn’t float – and frankly, I would have just as much respect for the President let this one sink. Nobody is getting ahead with this bill except the special interests.

So will a Republican win inTed Kennedy’s home state presage a sweep for that party in the mid-term elections? Not necessarily. If you’re running for Congress –especially if you think this bill is a bad idea – you have an obligation to come up with something better. The health care debate has given us all a great education in how Congress works – and a yearning for a better way to make sausages.

A Nation That Needs Building

While only 10 percent of this century is in the books, January 12, 2010 will surely be remembered for one of its worst natural disasters, anywhere on the globe.

While one American religious figure (who needs no publicity here) has called the Haiti earthquake God’s payback for revolution and/or voodoo, it could be argued that this is God’s two-by-four aimed at waking the world up to a country that needs attention – but this presupposes that you believe that God is involved at all, a whole different discussion.

While the U.S. is busy with nation-building halfway around the world – supposedly in the interests of national defense -- Haiti is a nation that needs building right now. And it’s only 700 miles away.

Haiti is a poster child for “failed states.” Its government was incapable of responding to Tuesday’s cataclysm in the most basic of ways (indeed, the government itself is a victim). Haiti is one of the first independent countries in our hemisphere, but in 200 years – basically since the last big earthquake there – no one has really shown its people how to do things. It needs that kind of help, and in contrast to the countries we’re involved in on the other side of the world, I believe Haiti would welcome it.

A right-wing talk-show host (again, someone who needs no publicity here) has suggested that the Obama administration will use the Haiti disaster to burnish its image and boost its approval rating. I submit that there’s plenty of time later to judge motives for helping Haiti, but there’s no time now for such things. After seeing the images conveyed on TV and through social networks, who can even think of ulterior motives right now? We just have to help, in any way that’s available, as fellow citizens of Earth.

Name of the Game

In Yemen, there are a surprising number of fans of a popular English sport -- but they play by a different set of rules. It's called, of course...uh...Yemeni Cricket.

Sledgehammers and Flies

I love CNN, but ENOUGH already with the frigging touch-screen machine. Did they really need to use it to tell the story of the balloon-boy incident? Maybe it’s useful for elections. I suppose if I had spent a gazillion dollars on such a device, I’d be compelled to use it, too. But are you really going to watch CNN because they have a touch screen and can interview holograms?

I guess I’m getting old. When it rains, the weather coverage on some of the major-market stations gives me a headache. All that zooming in and out to tell me that it’s raining right down on my neighborhood. When I was in Florida a few years ago during an approaching hurricane, the TV stations didn’t just have satellite views; they could slice and dice the clouds sideways. But they still couldn’t forecast intensity correctly – the hurricane fizzled out before it reached Miami. The headache was the same, though.

I saw one of my favorite high-tech TV devices more than 40 years ago. The female weathercaster in Hartford, Conn. used to write the information in chalk on a clear plastic screen in front of her. But because (or so I was told) the station could reverse the polarity of the TV picture so the viewer could read what she was writing, I was really impressed by that girl’s ability to write backwards. The fact that her wedding ring was on the wrong hand kind of gave it away, but still…

In the really old days, the weather people used Magic Markers or something similar. There was a weathercaster at the station I worked for in Washington, D.C. who would begin his show by saying “Getting oriented,” and drawing a big circle on the map around the Washington area. That was on the 6 o’clock news. After the show was over, the weathercaster would go out and have his usual well-lubricated dinner. So when the 11 p.m. news rolled around and he said “Getting oriented,” he was successful at drawing the circle around Washington only about 60 percent of the time, hitting Richmond or Charlotte instead.

But at least he was the one with the headache.

OK Dave, We Heard You

I don’t know about you, but I’ve kind of reached my limit on people apologizing on the air for things. And of course, it’s usually men, and it’s usually about the same thing. Maybe it’s a real ratings booster when you hear that some public figure is about to issue a mea culpa, but it’s turned into a channel switcher for me – especially when it comes to men apologizing for the usual thing.

It’s unclear to me whether David Letterman helped or hurt himself by all this very public activity. I know two things: First, it’s going to limit his material for a while. He won’t have the standing to make jokes about the sexual misadventures of other public figures, especially politicians, and when you’re a comedian, that’s a problem. Second, most of us will forget about it in relatively short order.

You would think this lesson would have been learned by now: certain kinds of celebrity come with a price, There are just some things you can’t do anymore in the modern media environment, and your responsibility as a celeb is to a) not do them, or b) at the very least, get away with them. I’ve said many times that what President Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky was a security risk of the first magnitude – just my opinion. We all laughed at President Carter when he revealed that he had lusted in his heart – but he shouldn’t he get a little credit for not proceeding on to the next step?

Look – faced with the same temptations as some of these people, I don’t know whether I’d be able to resist -- but I’d sure as hell try.

In the meantime, I just wish some of those household names would go into their closets, as the Bible suggests, say a few Hail Marys or whatever is appropriate, and spare us the public spectacle.

Flying Down to Rio

Why the long faces about Chicago losing the 2016 Olympics? OK, I’m not from Chicago. And I suppose there are more than a few red faces now that Oprah, Michelle, and the President couldn’t make it happen. But isn’t it time South America had the Games?

South America is a continent. Yet the rest of the world generally seems to ignore it. How many news stories do Norte Americanos hear on a daily basis about South America? OK, there’s Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the Colombian drug cartels. And, oh yeah, the Falklands war, going back a ways. But South America gets so little respect, the rest of us don’t even bother to stereotype it anymore.

It’s been pointed out that a South American Olympic venue might be less subject to terrorism than a U.S. location. And who can argue with Rio as a physical backdrop? Brazil in general is considered one of the hemisphere’s leaders when it comes to energy independence. No doubt the country has problems, though they will now get more than passing attention from the rest of the world. Good heavens, we might even learn something.

And finally, who wants the Olympics anyway? They’re expensive, and often considered a giant pain in the rear end by many in the chosen community. I say, let the South Americans have their turn.

Hit the Reset Button

I’m probably contradicting myself here. I told you earlier that health care was the angel that we had to wrestle with, like Jacob in the Bible, until we got the blessing out of it. The angel, though, may not be Senator Baucus and his bill. Or maybe he’s Jacob and the bill is the angel. I’m confused.

The bill does good things and bad things -- but if it’s hundreds of pages long, it’s doing too many things. It’s just going to be another big game to play, like the tax system. But the bottom line is, this country isn’t ready for full health care reform.

We’re just too used to putting up with abusive systems, on the grounds that it’s the way life is. Most of us just aren’t dissatisfied enough. We’re not mad as hell, and we’re still OK with taking more of it. While insurance companies screw a lot of people, they perform a great service for others – they shield them from having to deal with costs. If your insurance company pays off on the $40 your hospital charges for a toothbrush, it’s not your problem – that’s what you pay premiums for. As long as you have a job and you’re covered, other people’s problems aren’t yours.

This will only be solved comprehensively when enough people demand that it be solved. We’re just not there yet. If we begin from the premise that there is a moral obligation to provide health care for all with a reasonable set of rules, we can make it happen, but most Americans just don’t feel that way about it yet.

The President is trying to argue that reform can be accomplished without raising taxes. It’s beginning to rhyme with READ MY LIPS, and he’s painted himself and this effort into a corner. If we really want reform, it will likely involve raising taxes. If there’s a real commitment to reform, that wouldn’t be an obstacle. But we’re not ready. The declaration “We can’t afford it” can be easily translated: that’s not a priority now.

The perfect doesn’t have to be the enemy of the good, but with all due respect to the legislators who have worked so hard on trying to reach a compromise, it certainly should be the enemy of the s—tty. I say, hit the reset button and start over on this, and bite off what we can really chew.

Choose Your Words

In a recent post, a fellow blogger I know expressed concern about “defeatist” Democrats in Congress who favored a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. Personally, I don’t care for terminology like “victory” and “defeat” in the kinds of conflicts we find ourselves involved in today. Even “mission accomplished” has a bad sound now.

When it comes to Afghanistan, it seems to me there are two reasonable goals. The little one is whacking Osama bin Laden. I’ve heard all the arguments about how Al-Qaeda is a hydra-headed entity and that taking him out wouldn’t accomplish anything. I disagree. Such an act would have a tremendous symbolic impact around the world. Of course, it would have had a much greater impact if we’d done it in, say, 2002.

This can be done with relatively few operatives. When the Israelis want to track down international terrorists who have done bad things to them, they put teams together, send them into whatever countries their targets are living in, kidnap them or kill them, and apologize for it later (if they even bother).

The big goal in the region is keeping the terrorists away from the nukes in Pakistan, and the question is, how do you do that? Is it by nation-building in Afghanistan – or should we really be nation-building in Pakistan – or both?

So how many troops does it take to destroy the terrorist elements in those places and help stabilize the governments involved? I’m no military strategist, but based on what’s happened historically, the U.S. is not going to accomplish these ends with 10,000 or 20,000 more troops. This is a commitment that would seem to involve hundreds of thousands – a Vietnam-level commitment at least.

And as I’ve said before, if you really want to go to war, the whole country has to be involved – basically every American family – and that involves re-instituting the draft. It’s not fair to be sending the same people over for five our six tours. With a draft, if the President and Congress really wanted to fight a war, they’d have to bring the country with them.

I don’t envy the President having to make a decision about how to proceed. But instead of dealing with “victory” and “defeat” and all the emotional baggage packed into those terms, I hope he works with colder terms like “cost-benefit ratio.

In the end, “victory” means, to me at least, that we can answer yes to the question, “Are we safe now?”

Wrestling With the Angel

From all appearances, this health care debate is a giant boondoggle. The bills to reform it are thousands of pages long and nobody really knows what’s in them. Lobbyists are swarming over Congress. Fist fights break out at town hall meetings, where “ordinary people” are outnumbered by members of interest groups. And of course, it’s the wrong time to be thinking about this, many say, in the middle of a deep recession when so many have no jobs.

But is it the wrong time? I submit that if everything in the economy was going swimmingly, there would be less interest in reform, not more. When things are good, who’s interested in changing anything? Success is something you don’t generally feel like messing with.

As for the town halls, fist fights at least show that citizens are involved in this debate. The difference between a member of a political interest group and an “ordinary” participant is as thin as the color of the T-shirts being worn. And can you think of a time in recent memory when there were town halls around the country about a particular issue? Wouldn’t it be nice if we’d had them in advance of, say, our invading Iraq?

This debate is forcing the populace to pay a lot more attention to the influence of lobbyists in Congress, and is prompting individuals to mobilize -- and no lobbyist can outweigh the influence of an engaged electorate.

If you’ll pardon me for going biblical on you, there’s the well-known story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. The match went on all night, and the angel tried everything to escape Jacob’s grasp, including knocking his hip out of joint, but old Jake would not let go until he got his blessing. I believe that’s the attitude we need to solve the health care problem. We have to resist the pressure to meet some artificial deadline or just let go completely. If we wait for a time when things are better, well, they’re just never going to be good enough, so let’s finish what we’ve started.

The P Word

PANDEMIC! Doesn’t that sound awful, like WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE? It’s just one of those words whose definitions we think we understand, but don’t. The dictionary says pandemic means “occurring over a wide geographic area and affecting an exceptionally large proportion of the population.”

There’s nothing in there about severity. In other words, if hangnails were contagious, and all of North America got them at the same time, that would qualify as a pandemic.

Did the authorities and the media panic the population? In the beginning, they did not know what they were dealing with in swine flu, and it was the fear generated by the uncertainty that caused the problem. Many media outlets that I watched bent over backwards to avoid blowing this out of proportion, but the little P word kept coming up.

A couple of years ago, my wife had a business trip to Miami, and I went with her. It was in August, and a tropical storm named Ernesto was bearing down on South Florida. The TV stations pre-empted all their programs and went into 24/7 disaster mode, as the storm was forecast for a direct hit on Miami at Category 3. Are you impressed that your local TV station has Doppler radar and neighborhood zoom graphics in its weather segment? You should live in Miami. You’d see each cloud bisected and trisected every way from Sunday. Their weather graphics would blow you away a lot faster than the hurricane.

At the Cuban restaurant Café Versailles, where we went for lunch, the whole building was boarded up, and we almost left until I saw a little sign saying “Abierto” (open) near the door. At our hotel, the staff took all the blades off the ceiling fans in the open-air bar. People scrambled into stores to buy water, batteries, etc. I have always been fascinated by hurricanes, and I was thrilled to be in Miami at that time (cheap adrenaline thrills at the expense of others, as described in an earlier post).

So along came Ernesto, but he miraculously fizzled to a weak tropical storm within the space of three hours. The TV stations no longer had anything to talk about, The NBC affiliate news staff said, “We’ll keep you updated on Ernesto, but now we return you to our regularly scheduled program: Fear Factor.”

As one local Miami ham radio operator put it on the weather net, “Well, they’re real good at tracking, but they suck at intensity.”

So were all these preparations and media warnings a waste of time? Ernesto could easily have intensified to a Cat 4 or 5 as quickly as it weakened. And that 3.2 earthquake that woke you up last week could have been a 6.9. The swine flu could just as easily have been 1918 all over again. Nothing wrong with a little fire drill now and then. And one of these days, we’ll just about get it right.

There, now I've said it.

Saying What You Mean

I think we should cut Joe Biden a little slack – his superiors certainly haven’t. Asked on the Today Show whether he’d advise family members to avoid air travel to Mexico because of the swine flu, the Vice President said he’d advise them, and Americans in general, to avoid unnecessary air travel, or travel in “confined spaces” like subways, altogether. The White House, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and even Biden’s staff spent the rest of the day making woefully inadequate explanations of what he “really meant to say.” It was perfectly clear to me.

This is not a new concept. I know people who travel frequently on business, and they maintain that they catch more colds during the winter months due to their time in airplanes. It’s not just one person coughing on a plane, but usually multiple people if there’s a full flight, and you’re dealing with recirculated air. This wouldn’t keep me from flying, but I can understand my friends’ concerns, and Biden’s. I don’t think it was “fear-mongering.” He was asked for his advice – he didn’t issue an executive order. And let’s face it, the explanations of what he “meant to say” just dug the Administration into a much deeper hole than he did.

Then there’s Carrie Prejean, Miss California. During the Miss USA pageant, this young lady was asked a question about same-sex marriage, and said she believes marriage should be between a man and a woman. She deserves – and received from some quarters -- praise for saying what she believes. But last night on Fox News, when Greta van Susteren asked her a few follow-ups, like how she felt about civil unions, she said those involved should have “some rights,” and when van Susteren asked if that included adoption, Prejean said she didn’t want to get into politics.

OK -- I have defended beauty pageants, making the point that many pageant contestants are not the airheads they’re often taken for. In the case of Ms. Prejean, however, while she’s to be commended for telling us her true feelings, she clearly hasn’t thought about this whole issue very deeply, and she’d better start doing so if she’s going to be a national spokeswoman for heterosexual marriage (or at least learn some lines). I’m not going to call her an airhead. But after last night’s performance, it’s safe to say that she isn’t exactly a Rhodes Scholar, either.

There, now I've said it.

Ghost Stories in the Dark

A lot of our modern news reporting reminds me of sitting around a dying campfire on a summer night telling ghost stories, each storyteller challenged to raise the fright level over the last.

Take Melissa Huckaby, charged with the murder of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, which on its face, may qualify for the crime of the century – but that’s not quite enough. Reporters have dug up information suggesting that Huckaby has kidnapped children before and given them drugs. She also may be an arsonist. She did have past convictions for petty theft and also had a nasty divorce. Oh, did I hear them say that the Cantu murder occurred in a church?

I’m sure if they shave the back of Huckaby’s head, they will find the number 666 neatly tattooed above her right ear. Someone better get on the phone to Wes Craven – there’s definitely a movie here. I’m curious, however, in what country this woman is going to get a fair trial. If little green invaders come to Earth, let’s hope they’re available for jury duty.

What is the take-away from this reporting? Even your next-door neighbor from a respected church family could be a monster waiting to strike. You can change the scenery – make it Wall Street, and there you have Bernie Madoff. It all happened without warning, the story goes, until we get to the part about the obvious signs being there that were ignored – or no one listened to those few would who were trying to give us the heads-up.

It’s not that we shouldn’t hear about this stuff. It’s just seems to me that the media enjoy it a little too much, and so does the audience (My name is Mike, and I’m an adrenaline junkie….)That’s why horror movies have always done so well at the box office. But the stories that used to scare us aren’t good enough anymore, so the next camper has to tell us a better one. We all need to have our world rocked once in a while, but when does the rocking stop?

SARS and the bird flu didn’t quite cut the mustard, but now we have the swine flu. This could be the greatest pandemic to sweep the globe since 1918. Or not – we won’t know for a while yet. I do agree that most health authorities are taking the precautions they need to take. But in the meantime, it looks like we all get to share a good shiver.

The Fickle Media Spotlight

By now, you have heard the tragic story of Sandra Cantu, the 8-year-old from the California Central Valley city of Tracy, who had been missing for 10 days. Sandra’s story led the evening news in the San Francisco Bay Area almost every night since her disappearance. Hundreds of volunteers came from all over the region to help authorities search for her. There were tearful nightly appearances by family members and neighbors, and there were candlelit prayer vigils. How did it end? The little girl’s body was found by farmworkers in a suitcase pulled from an irrigation pond.

The Cantu case provides a disturbing parallel to a 1997 case I covered as a radio reporter in Southern California. Anthony Martinez was 10 years old when he disappeared from the town of Beaumont, not far from Palm Springs. While he was missing, his story led TV newscasts all over the region. Volunteers turned out in droves to look for him. There was a “prayer circle” one weekend in a local park, attended by Beaumont’s mayor. This story also ended badly. Anthony’s body was found about two weeks later in the foothills near what is now the Joshua Tree National Park.

These stories always bother me, for reasons apart from, or in addition to, the tragic circumstances involved. Exactly how do these cases become media events? Why do certain kids get the attention, when there are probably hundreds of other missing children around the country whose stories don’t make that level of news? Do they have better PR, with more media-savvy relatives? Are they cuter than other missing kids?

True, the media have to cover these stories, and it’s clear that the best way to dramatize any story is to focus on individual examples instead of statistics. But what conclusions are we to draw? Does this coverage teach a valuable lesson about adults doing a better job of watching kids, or does it just make parents more paranoid?

Does the coverage pump up false hope? When the tragic end is revealed, are all those volunteers feeling as if they wasted their time? And most disturbing: is all that praying a waste of time?

In the case of Anthony Martinez, a suspect is in custody and the wheels of justice are grinding away. As of this writing, the facts in the case of Sandra Cantu have yet to come out. But I wish I could come to a conclusion about all of this. Maybe that’s part of the pain we feel after these cases – caused by the inability to wrap them up and file them away under some neat philosophical heading. At least, that seems to be my problem.

There, now I’ve said it.

PODCAST

Subscribe Free
Add to my Page

Making Folks Whole

A key feature of the Obama administration’s plan for reviving the economy involves making the banks whole, but what about consumers? As some top economists have been telling us, until the federal help gets down to the household level, it won’t be enough to start the nation’s economic engine.

Much of this unwholeness has to do with credit cards. Comedian Jon Stewart recently proposed that the feds give consumers enough money to pay off their credit card debt. They’d be whole, and the banks would be, too, at least as far as that segment of their balance sheets goes.

But how do you give consumers the money while ensuring they actually use it to deal with their debt? You could offer them a choice: The feds could say, we’ll pay off your credit card, but in return, you agree to hold only a single card with a credit limit of $1,000. Or, the card becomes a charge card only – you have to pay the balance off at the end of the month. Those cardholders with existing credit lines who don’t need the help and want to continue with their card companies could do so under their current terms. Simply put: If you accept government help, you live with the conditions imposed. But you don’t have to accept that help.

This would not preclude the banks from loosening up the restrictions on the bailed-out consumers after, say, one year. But the banks would have to hang on to those deals they make.

The other leg of this stool is revising the whole credit score system so that it’s based on individual creditor performance. A bank’s relationship with the cardholder should be based on that relationship only, not on how that debtor is performing with other creditors. If a debtor accepts direct federal help, perhaps one of the conditions could be the imposition of a baseline credit score, which would go up as the consumer responsibly deals with debt going forward.

Once consumers are made whole, they will resume spending, because they’ll feel better. Will it be at the same level as the old days? No. The nation’s economic engine will be running at much lower RPMs.

But really, would that be so bad? Does reality have to bite?

There, now I’ve said it.

About Face

I changed my mind, bit the bullet and joined Facebook.

Concerns about privacy caused me to hesitate, but as I often tell anyone who will listen, the privacy horse left the barn a long time ago in this country, so why not?

As of this writing I have a dozen Facebook friends, most of whom I used to work with. What amazes me is how much these people have to share. Particularly the women. They all seem to have hundreds of pictures of themselves. Now I’m three times their age in many cases, and I have a only a third as many photos. And no small number of those are from film, so I’d have to convert them into jpgs for posting. That’s a lot of work. If I wanted to make Facebook a full-time job, I’m sure it would be easy. I think it must be a consuming occupation with some of these folks. And I see how this amoebic acquisition of friendships can become addicting.

But here’s my problem. My life just isn’t all that interesting, and I have no way of holding up my end in the sharing department. I was a journalist for a long time, and spent most of it concerned with what was happening to others, not to me. In this profession, we’re often so involved with others’ lives that we sometimes substitute that for living our own. But maybe that says more about me than about the profession.

I do hope my newfound friends forgives my lack of production. There will be very little to post on the wall for a while -- just for perspective, I have about enough for a Twitter a month, or a Christmas letter every couple of years. As for Facebook, I enjoy reading about what’s happening to people I know, although I’m still partly at the “What’s the point?” stage of the whole experience. I think there is one, which I expect to fully grasp in time. For now, though, please be patient.

There, now I’ve said it. Your friend, Coughswitch.

Go Figure

The current economic downturn offers many reminders that we shouldn’t take things too personally. I was really offended about a notice I received until I found out that many others are having the same experience -- but it still doesn’t compute.

I have been dealing with a particular credit card company for more than 25 years. I have never had a late payment in that time. On rare occasions I could only make the minimum payment; other times I have been able to pay the balance down to zero at the end of the month.

Recently, I received a notice that as of mid-April, my annual interest rate would be increased to almost 18 percent. “Extraordinary changes in the economic environment,” they said. This particular company received federal bailout funds, and the major federal interest rates are almost zero, so where does the company come by the 18 percent figure?

That’s only half the story. The same company sent me a promotional offer saying that if I transferred a balance over from another card, I would enjoy zero percent interest on that amount for an entire year. So times are so tough that my regular rate will be 18 percent, but they can still offer zero percent on transfers.

Then there are the penalty rates. If for some reason I am late on a payment, the company has the right to raise the rate to almost 30 percent. Now in these extraordinary times, it might not be unusual that someone would be late on a payment or unable to meet a minimum. So if the company can’t get the regular payment out of a debtor in that situation, where do they think they’re going to get the 30 percent interest from? And you’re trapped: If you cancel your account, your credit score could be damaged, so the personal finance gurus say.

One of these, Suze Orman, is telling us that paying the minimum amount on your card each month isn’t good enough to protect your credit score or your credit line. Which sounds to me like the minimum payment the credit card companies want isn’t a minimum at all. It would be nice, then, if they told us what the real minimum is. Please don’t get me started on the whole FICO score thing – that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.

Many of these credit card issues will go away when new federal regulations take effect – but they don’t until 2010, so how are the card companies going to be treating customers between now and then?

In a much earlier post we speculated about the end of the credit card. The cards won’t go away, but put me down for this prediction: within 10 years, the revolving balance thing will disappear, going the way of credit default swaps and other such instruments. Either the banks will eventually conclude that revolving balances are bad business, or more likely, they will be flat-out illegal. There will be cards, but you’ll have to settle up every month, just like in the old, old days. Junkies, the street will be dry before you know it.

There, now I’ve said it.