This isn't a conventional blog, largely because I'm not motivated to put that amount of effort into it. Besides, it doesn't use any of the ordinary blogging channels. I do not offer a forum for comment, rebuttal or the preachment of others, and I do not intend for this to be an interactive forum. I will be adding to it as the whim strikes, not with any sort of regularity or on any schedule.
January 26, 2010:
I was always a fan of Phil Ochs. One of his anti-Vietnam-War songs was "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation." The refrain line went
Lyndon Johnson told the nationThe number increased with each verse.
Have no fear of escalation
I am trying everyone to please
Although it isn't really war
I'm sending fifty thousand more
To help save Vietnam
From the Vietnamese
While working in the yard, I came up with
Barack Obama tells the nation
It isn't really escalation
And all our plans must not go up in smoke
But in this "necessary" war
I'm sending forty thousand more
To save Afghanistan
From the Afghan folk
also January 26, 2010:
A while back, coming home from work, I was behind a car with an Obama "Hope" bumper sticker. I decided that I could do something more appropriate to the caption:
Bank of America has paid back $25 billion that they got in the bailout, so that they can get away from the increased scrutiny that having taken the Federal money committed them to. Citibank has been talking about doing the same thing, for the same reason.
Using the 10:1 leverage (very conservative) factor of bank loans to deposits, that means that BofA has taken a quarter of a Trillion dollars out of the potential loan pool so that they can pay bigger bonuses to their Mahogany Row residents. Now that's real social responsibility.
SCotUS is reviewing the law that restricts corporations from direct participation in political campaigns. The argument has been presented that corporations have the same civil rights as citizens, specifically in this case the right of freedom of speech.
I submit that this is fundamentally false and that a corporation is not and cannot be considered to be a citizen in that a corporation is shielded from many of the liabilities of a citizen: a corporation cannot be deposed; a corporation cannot be incarcerated; a corporation cannot be called to jury duty, as an example; a corporation is recognized in other areas of the law as having fundamentally different responsibilities and liabilities than a private citizen. A corporation is by definition a public, and not a private, entity.
All corporate speech should, indeed must, be considered as commercial speech, which has long been recognized as having different rights and liabilities from private speech. To the degree that corporate speech is not commercial, the case can be made that the officers of the corporation are not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders. If their participation in favor of or against a candidate is considered to be fiduciarily responsible, then the question of graft must be raised — what are they buying (or selling)? or what is the basis of their investment? or if the participation constitutes neither of those, why are the officers spending the shareholders money?
I heard another health-care discussion recently where it was stated that one of the reasons that hospitals were concerned was that Medicare (put forth as the model for "government-run" plans, only pays 97 cents on the dollar for the care given and billed. this led me to wonder what percentage of care given is paid off at 0 cents on the dollar, as the indigent and uninsured end up using the emergency rooms — the most expensive level of care short of the ICU/CCU — as their primary care source.
There is also the social cost of the increased morbidity that results from a condition being left until its acute symptoms force an ER visit.
For some reason, I seem to be the only one bothered by the Jim Crow tone of describing Barack Obama as America's first black President. He is mixed-race, as was Tiger Wood before his downfall. In pre-integration days, any black-African ancestry was sufficient to make a person black. There were special terms for 1 parent black (Mulatto), 1 grandparent black (Quadroon), 1 great-grandparent black (Octoroon), and they were all treated as black in the eyes of segregationist law. The terms have pretty much been deprecated and the segregationist bias was supposed to have become a thing of the past. And then along came Barack.
It has been a staple claim of the conservative wings of the national parties that Government should be made smaller and that there should be fewer controls on public life. They do, however, widely espouse increases in the military — manpower, material and budget, at the very least — and the police forces — local, customs, border, and now TSA — as though those were not government functions.
There is also a continuing drive to, as it has been characterized, "legislate morality." To those of us not in the movement, this reads like "Let's get Government out of the boardroom, and back into the bedroom, where they belong."
When the national economy imploded in the middle of 2008, newsreaders were struggling to come up with a name for the event.
I commented at at the time that we had had a name for the phenomenon for twenty-odd years: "Reaganomics."
Quite a few people at the time predicted that kind of denouement from the policies enacted in the middle 1980s and the broadly promulgated view that Government should be considered an evil and that Big Business should be given free rein. This was also the period when "Greed is Good" was put forth as a desirable social attitude.
During the Bush administration, it was popular to accuse the White House of not having an exit strategy for their excursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't believe that was true.
The various news coverages have characterized the inner circle as "neocons", college liberals who converted to Conservatism in their later years, not an uncommon path of development in and of itself. Given the "apostasy", though, and being acquainted with the phenomenon of the reformed drunk (younger readers may be more familiar with the smoker who quit), I do believe that they were convinced that all those downtrodden Muslims would, given the opportunity, see the light and become small-d democrats and participating Charismatic Christians. Given that change, the aftermath of the invasions and "liberations" would have followed naturally, with stable, trustworthy governments arising, and exit would have occurred as a matter of course, without need for special planning or prolonged transition.