Jim Manis on Most Anything

Jim Manis can formulate an opinion about a good many things, including those about which he has little knowledge. (And some dude named "Lazlo.") Visit The MagicFactory.

Friday, August 28, 2009

A Sea of Red Ink: Are we drowning or swimming?

Paul Krugman argues that we are swimming and will reach shore as long as the sharks (politicians) don't pull us under. Krugman sees red as life giving, while conservatives, who splashed merrily in it when they controlled the White House and congress, are claiming otherwise.

Back in the late fifties, my dad bought a house, and he needed a loan. It was the only loan my dad ever had in his nearly 90 years. Eventually, he paid the loan off, and he owned the house, which was worth considerably more than he paid for it, including interest. In fact, it's worth well over ten times what he paid for it.

On the other hand, we all know of those folks earning 30K a year who bought a house with a subprime loan for 250K or more and it turned out the house was only worth maybe half that much. So how do the numbers look for our present economy? Are we in debt too much to survive? Krugman doesn't think so, but then there is the concern about whether we can actually pay the bills or not. Do we have an income and is it sufficient to pay the mortgage?

This Day in History:

Today marks the 46th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech, delivered from the Lincoln Memorial, and ranks with those moments when your kids ask you, "Where were you when …?"

I was on the couch in my parents' living room, about to begin my senior year in high school, resting after morning football practice in preparation for the late afternoon practice, while I watched the speech on our black and white TV. It was the most moving speech I'd ever heard.

I like to point out to people, that when they have the opportunity to watch the speech pay attention to the uniformed police officer standing next to Dr. King. Watch the man's expression throughout the speech.

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Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Don't Twitt Me:

Claire Cain Miller reports in today's New York Times on who's using the hot new texting service, Twitter, and who's not. Turns out adults and not teens make the most use of it. Teens have little interest in the service. According to the article, Twitter seems "lame" to most teens. They're far more interested in announcing who they are on Facebook than reporting every move they make or participating in a broad conversation by "shifting the conversation" in the new texting medium.

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Tuesday, August 25, 2009

How We Learned To Love the Bomb, and Lost the War:

Okay, this has nothing to do with World War II, but it does have something to do with Japanese success and American failure: Sarah Arnquest briefly interviews John Creighton Campbell, who is something of an expert on the Japanese health care system and explains its superiority to the failed American system.

The key here is that the Japanese seem to care about one another rather than competing.

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Friday, August 21, 2009

Down with PowerPoint:

Thinkers are starting to rethink the notion of using slide presentations. (Yes, I can here you all thinking, "Thank God!") Joe McKendrick writing for Smartplanet remarks on one of the problems: a speaker talking to the screen while the audience watches. There are plenty of other problems. McKendrick reports some of them. Reducing decision making to a bullet list is another.

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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Justice Scalia Wants to Kill an Innocent Man:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was in the majority in voicing his opinion that evidence discovered after the conviction of Troy Anthony Davis, now residing on death row in Georgia, should not be considered in whether to go ahead with Davis's execution.

The case has gained world-wide celebrity as overwhelming evidence, including testimony from the prosecution's chief witness, indicates Davis is completely innocent of the crime of which he was convicted. In short, another man has confessed to the crime, the same man who claimed he witnessed Davis committing the murder.

Scalia, however, will have none of this. He wants his convicted murderer executed. It will make him, Scalia, feel really tough, kind of like sitting in a duck blind with Dick Cheney. The fact that Mr. Davis is black and poor and lives in Georgia, a long way from Justice Scalia, makes the justice's feelings on the matter all the easier to come by. Justice Scalia is all for the law, regardless of who is penalized, as long as it doesn't affect anyone he knows personally.

(See The Washington Post article.)

Unemployment Overtakes Subprime Mortgages in Foreclosures:

It's bad enough losing your job or losing your home, but to lose both just smacks of 1932. Today's Washington Post reports that unemployment has now become so severe that more people are being kicked out of their homes because they don't have jobs than are losing their homes because they fell for the subprime con.

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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Yes, he did!

How long have we heard that e-mail is not private, that any e-mail message has a public component, which is why it looks like a memo. In fact, it should never have been called "e-mail," but "e-memo," but that just doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Marketing would have suffered.

So here we go again. The boneheads in the Bush White House tried to run their clandestine politically motivated firings of U. S. Attorneys by using e-mail. Duh! And good ol' boy Karl Rove is back in the picture. Thousands of pages of e-mail is being used in the Justice Department investigation and much of it indicates the degree to which Rove and other political lackeys were involved in the decision making process. It would be nice to see someone go to jail for this, but that's not likely to happen. Jail time is almost completely reserved for the poor.

(See today's New York Times' story.)

"This is about the dismantling of this country":

New York Times reporters Ian Urbina and Katharine Seelye quote thirty-five-year-old Katy Abram as shouting in the face of Senator Arlen Spectre yesterday in Pennsylvania at a town hall meeting about health care. Urbina a Seelye said the statement received the loudest applause at the meeting. "We don't want this country to turn into Russia," Abram's said.

Abram has found herself on a bus traveling at high speed and headed for a deep canyon and a crash that will destroy everyone on the bus. And she's complaining because someone is telling the driver to avoid the canyon. Turn left and we won't all die. Abram doesn't want the bus to turn. She wants it to go off the cliff. And take all us with her.

The other day my daughter IMed me, asking how it could be that a whole roomful of people could be so stupid as not to realize that Medicare is a government program, even when Medicare is their primary healthcare provider?

Well, do you realize there are probably more members of the KKK in Pennsylvania than in Alabama?

Note the final paragraph of Urbina a Seelye's article. It's all about power.

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Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Revenue Down, Profits Up, Huh?

Laura Conway reports for NPR on the baffling contradictions streaming from the current economy. Employment is down, but productivity is up.

In the meantime, Hannah Seligson reports in The New York Times that college grads are heading towards China and its booming economy. (Check out the haze in the photo that appears along with the Times' story.)

(This page is devoted to those who wish to keep the government out of their Medicare.)

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Thursday, August 06, 2009

What's in It for North Korea?

Everyone is speculating about North Korea's motives in handing over the two kidnapped journalists returned to the U.S. just yesterday by former President Bill Clinton, but I think Gail Collins (Op-Ed, New York Times) has it figured out: "Maybe the nation’s elite were involved in a high-stakes scavenger hunt, with a list of items that included a 1979 almanac, a matchbook from an Indonesian nightclub, and a picture of Bill Clinton sitting next to the Dear Leader and looking like he was stuffed."

Hang on to your news feeds. Judge Sotomayor will be announced as the U.S.'s first Latina Supreme Court Justice sometime later today. The Republicans will breath a noticeable sigh of relief in the hope that they can stop alienating America's Hispanic population and making themselves even more irrelevant, maybe. (They still have to feed their hate-filled base, after all.)

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Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Flash Trading:

The process by which a few stock traders manipulate the market to the detriment of the whole economy will start to be moderated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to The New York Times. Flash trading is accomplished through the use of high speed computers that allow a few investors to buy and sell at near the speed of light, incorporating fancy algorithms to make the decisions without human interference, pushing prices up and down without actual regard to stock value.

What People Are Buying with Their Clunkers:

Today's Washington Post reports that people are trading their gas guzzling clunkers in for "the Ford Focus, followed by the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Toyota Prius and Toyota Camry." On average the new cars get 10 mpg better gas mileage than the cars that are being traded in, but the average is still low at 25.4 miles per gallon.

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Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Once upon a Time in America:

We were the greatest country in the world. All a young fella had to do was keep his nose clean, get a job with a good company, like GM or Ford or one of the military manufacturers, and not do something stupid to get fired, and he had a job for life. That golden age lasted from 1945 to about 1975.

Our young fella could expect to have a steadily increasing salary, a decent retirement package, health care, and the ability to educate his kids who would certainly do even better than he did. That's the way America worked. It's how things worked for him, didn't it.

Funny how that 30-year period of history has come to stand for all of American history.

Michael Luo reports on what happens to today's laid off workers in The New York Times, shedding light on what has been happening to people's incomes over time. Things generally do not get better, folks. America is the land where anyone—but most certainly NOT EVERYONE—can get rich. Few grab the golden ring.

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Sunday, August 02, 2009

What Would You Do with a Spare $100 Million?

Andrew Hall has a contract with Citigroup. Mr. Hall is one of the oil speculators who benefited from the shrewd manipulation of the oil markets last year that helped drive the price of gasoline and home heating oil above $4 a gallon, playing a significant part in Bush's economic meltdown of the world economy. Citigroup can afford to pay Mr. Hall his money, but ONLY if it can use part of the $45 billion it got from the taxpayer bailout.

In short, Mr. Hall will get super nasty rich when you taxpayers pay him off with your tax money after he helped manipulated you into double-digit unemployment. No wonder people like Mr. Hall voted for George W. Bush and donated to his campaign funds. (See The New York Times' story.)

(This has been another story devoted to the memory of the man who spent eight years in the White House playing pocket-pool while the world burned.)

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Saturday, August 01, 2009

Why Southerners Hate Government:

Shaila Dewan reports in today's New York Times on the economic situation in Jefferson County, Alabama, where government corruption, ineptitude and political infighting have bankrupted the county, bringing human services of all sorts to a near halt. If you want to understand the southern perspective, this is a good place to start. By the way, the practice of slavery continued in this county well into the 1920s, sixty years after the Civil War. Black males were continuously rounded up in Jefferson County by the sheriff, on flimsy charges, jailed, and then "rented" to the northern owned coal and steel industries that boomed with the cheap labor in the early part of the twentieth century.

Have You Traded in Your Clunker for Cash, Yet?

Is the "Clunkers for Cash" program a runaway success or a program that has gone off its hinges? The house had to approve more cash yesterday because so many people are trading in their 16 mpg sport utility vehicles for 18 mpg ones. Am I missing something here? (See The New York Times' story.) I thought the idea was to boost mileage, at least get everyone driving vehicles that have 25 mpg ratings and preferably higher. The savings a two or three mile-per-gallon increase can easily be wiped out through just a small amount of extra driving.

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