Hillary's base

No matter how hard you try you will find it impossible to under estimate the intelligence and knowledge of the average Pennsylvania voter.

More here.

Experience, Clinton style

I used to be a tugboat captain. With that experience my wife is now entitled to be a tugboat captain.

Poll (2 parts)

Pick one:

Extraterrestrial beings visit Earth because

1. They think us interesting and want to be our friends.

2. They want to eat us.

3. Watching us destroy ourselves amuses them.

Pick one:

1. There are more than one type of extraterrestrial beings, from more than one place. Some want to be our friends. Some want to eat us. Some want to eat some of us.

2. There are extraterrestrial beings but they do not visit us and do not care about us.

3. There are no extraterrestrial beings.

Tell your friends.

Obama

I liked his speech a lot, though I think it went whistling right by the wad of chuckleheads that make up this country's core. The more I see of Obama the more I like him. Yesterday, in the speech, he seemed to put it right out there as he saw it, not contrived to meet what experts advised would reach the wad.

The more I see of Hillary's campaign the more I'm reminded of Karl Rove. The Clintons are beginning to feel like a virus.

Clinton and Obama

When one seems to surge ahead I begin to like the other one.

Mortgage problems? You're not alone

Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- GMAC LLC, the lending company that General Motors Corp. sold to a hedge fund manager, lost $724 million in the fourth quarter because home buyers didn't keep up with their mortgage payments.

Link

Behind on your mortgage payments? Maybe you can just walk away.

Lessers

Edwards is out. That leaves us with a choice between lessers.

Tips for the rich

Save yourself and your upper class friends and shoot everyone else.

Biggs's Tips for Rich: Expect War, Study Blitz, Mind Markets

Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Barton Biggs has some offbeat advice for the rich: Insure yourself against war and disaster by buying a remote farm or ranch and stocking it with ``seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc.''

The ``etc.'' must mean guns.

``A few rounds over the approaching brigands' heads would probably be a compelling persuader that there are easier farms to pillage,'' he writes in his new book, ``Wealth, War and Wisdom.''

Biggs is no paranoid survivalist. He was chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley before leaving in 2003 to form hedge fund Traxis Partners. He doesn't lock and load until the last page of this smart look at how World War II warped share prices, gutted wealth and remains a warning to investors. His message: Listen to markets, learn from history and prepare for the worst.....

The rich get complacent, assuming they will have time ``to extricate themselves and their wealth'' when trouble comes, Biggs says. The rich are mistaken, as the Holocaust proves.

...``Events move much faster than anyone expects,'' he says, ``and the barbarians are on top of you before you can escape.''...

From Bloomberg.com


I guess the barbarians he refers to are you and me.

Jim Culleny now Poetry Editor of 3QD

Sometimes you can have your day made by a whisper of good news about a good friend getting recognition for living generously and not compromising good sense and sound values

Jim Culleny is now poetry editor of 3 Quarks Daily, a site that deserves a visit. For a great picture of Jim, hit the “About” and scroll down being impressed, of course, by the rest of the fine 3QD team.

Maybe

flying saucers will save us.

Tighten your belt

Plenty if you can afford it, less for the rest.

The price of copper has tripled in five years. Zinc has doubled. Wheat and soybeans rose 70 percent in 2007. Futures prices of crude oil, gold, silver, lead, uranium, cattle, cocoa and corn are all at or near records.

A global boom in the cost of commodities, the staple ingredients of a modern economy, is entering its sixth year with no end in sight. Commodities have always been subject to boom-and-bust cycles, but many economists see a fundamental shift driving the markets these days.

As development rolls across once-destitute countries at a breakneck pace, lifting billions out of poverty, demand for food, metals and fuel is red-hot, and suppliers are struggling to meet it. Prices are spiraling, and Americans find themselves in what amounts to a bidding war with overseas buyers for products as diverse as milk and gasoline.

“It is absolutely a fundamental change in the global economic structure,” said Bart Melek, global commodities strategist for BMO Capital Markets, an investment firm based in Toronto. “Global commodities ranging from oil to base metals to grains are moving higher as billions of people in China and around the world get wealthier and are consuming more as they produce products for us, and increasingly for themselves.”...

Link to more at NYT

Might as well face it, things are going to get worse even if we continue to ignore the facts.

Obama tilted to the right

From today's Krugman column in the NYT:

...The Obama campaign’s initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I’m sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from “morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending.” Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure — doesn’t that sound familiar?

Anyway, on Sunday Mr. Obama came out with a real stimulus plan. As was the case with his health care plan, which fell short of universal coverage, his stimulus proposal is similar to those of the other Democratic candidates, but tilted to the right. ...

Link

Which brings us to Edwards who remains my first and best choice and is treated quite nicely in the same column cited above.

Not ready for a Clinton rerun

It has nothing to do with Hillary being a woman. It has everything to do with some of us being sick of the entire Clinton package and not at all being pleased by the prospect of a rerun.

Change please.

Don't forget

It is not possible to claim intelligence or sanity if you voted for Bush in either or both presidential elections.

Business ethics 2.

Do not sell products or services you know you can’t deliver or promise deadlines you know you can not meet. Do not demand your employees deliver what can not be done because you convinced someone to purchase a fantasy.

Also, when faced with failure do not try to convince your client/customer that you have delivered what you have not. It is never ethical to employ illusions, unnecessarily complex data, magical graphs, high speed speaking, diversions and delusion fostering flatteries to make it appear you have upheld your part of a bargain.

Business ethics 1.

If you need to cut costs to keep the company profitable and cutting labor is the only option, it should be done by cutting the same percentage from every employee's pay all the way to the top.

The very last and worst option is firing or laying off anyone.

What Dan Fogelberg means to me.

At the University of Illinois, sometime in the 60’s Tom and I walk into to The Red Herring coffee house in the basement of the campus Unitarian church. Tom and I are both aging graduate students in English. Secretly, we both know neither of us will complete our dissertations. Dan Fogelberg and another young man with a guitar are performing. A 60’s student lefty style crowd fills the place. Hair, cigarette smoke, patchouli smell. For a short time Tom and I stand behind a railing which I remember as being slightly, but not a full floor, above the performers and most of the crowd. Tom and I may have taken LSD earlier in the evening. I look down on the performers. Fogelberg and the other player are in a pool of light, dark haired, seated and bent over their guitars. The audience is mostly in the dark and until my eyes adjust I can not see what women might be there. I am also looking for authenticity and the performers strike me as very smooth, somehow fraudulent, probably from wealthy homes in Chicago.

I may have dreamed all or some of this recollection because I see it as still photos maybe from the same set, maybe not. I am aware of some confusions in general.

I may have the same kind of advanced prostate cancer that killed Fogelberg yesterday. News of his death came yesterday evening, personal only in the shared cancer. The news followed my misadventures with my big blue truck with a snowplow. I tried to plow three driveways--I do not know anything about snowplowing—slid off the side of my own driveway, frantically dug my way into deeper snow, packed the snow tightly under the chassis, left the four wheels suspended and the front left fender dented but still resting against a smallish dogwood. I cut down the dogwood with a handsaw. My one working chainsaw is next door in the garage, lined up neatly with my brother-in-law Jeff’s saws. I get on my knees and dig out snow from under the truck furiously. Joanne, my wife watches. My number one dog is patiently in the truck. No. I tell my Joanne, I do not need Jeff’s help. Eventually I free the truck. The driveway is a mess, deep ruts, sprays of dirt and gravel are evidence of my urgency. My hands are freezing and I am worried about my hips; both are artificial.

Later, while watching football, after returning from a pool party for children at Shawnee Inn (it is one of my AA friend’s son’s ninth birthday party. My friend is a union laborer in NYC. Other guests include friendly people my friend met on the commuter bus during daily hour and a half to two hour each way, four hundred dollar a month bus rides) I learn of Fogelberg’s death. I scurry off to the computer trying to find out if Fogelberg died from “locally” advanced cancer (mine) or simply a more generally advanced cancer. I google and google and find out that Fogelberg was 56 when he died. He was diagnosed in May 2004. March 2005 for me. He was treated with hormone therapy. Me too. He believed he was in remission. I too think I’m doing pretty well. I wonder: did he have a long course, 43 sessions for me, of radiation? I discover a questionable old news story, later discredited, that centered around Fogelberg’s mother saying the cancer was in his bones and he was getting “experimental” treatment at Harvard. Fogelberg’s mother is very old, one story says, resetting the record to somewhat straight. Mine has not been discovered as being in my bones. (a brief subsidence of restrained terror).

I go outside to prepare my wife’s car for work. I scrape off the snow and ice, fill the reservoir with windshield washer fluid, decide to take the car into the street and turn it around so she will be front out in the morning better able to avoid the new trenches in the snow. While backing into the driveway I become slightly disoriented (caught in a Fogelberg cancer fog bank?) and back directly into my big blue truck ditches. I work the car hard. It is a company car, a new dodge with fine, brand new tires. Forward, reverse, forward reverse I force it ever deeper into the ditch. Thank god the tree is gone but I will miss it and be sad in the spring, (I hope). My brother-in-law Jeff comes over. Jeff is a pressman on his way to the night shift in a printing plant more than an hour away in Hazelton. Jeff is a handy dude, like Joanne and all her siblings and for the moment he is fresh, warm and rested and most importantly,distant from the realms of his own chaoses. He takes over and soon the car is free.

A long night of little sleep follows with thoughts of cancer. Am I being too optimistic? Am I out of touch with reality? Are my doctors hiding or sugar coating the truth? I do not know the answers. I must think of other things. Like the lottery, like the marital problems of a friend, like my son-in-law’s job loss, like my own loss of a client and the disappearance of another, is my incompetence with engine driven vehicles a sign? Was last fall the last season with the Harley? Whistling past the graveyard I try hard not to think of Dan Fogelberg sailing through the summer, as the news stories say, and whistling his own way through the treacherous rocks in the Maine waters..

Global Warming Reality Check

If you are concerned about global warming and catastrophic climate change you should get to know MIT grad Steve Kisch. Visit his web site where you can find this article How it will end which if you have any sense will scare the shit out of you.

Here's a quote from the article:

...The bottom line is this: unless we change our ways, there is more than a 5% chance of a mass human extinction in less than 100 years. I'm just telling you what the overwhelming scientific consensus is. Whether or not you choose to believe it is, of course, up to you. If you do disagree, what is the scientific basis for your disagreement? Do you know something the scientists don't?

So what really killed us? Greed, fear, short sightedness, and an inability to create a government that serves the public interest.

Much as we may hate to admit it, our own government, which we empower to make decisions for us, is essentially no smarter than the frog in Gore's movie. Special interests, driven by short-term greed, control government decisions in America. Politicians, fearing they will be not be re-elected, pay attention to the people who are willing to spend big money to get their way. And despite all the awareness about global warming that has been generated to date, the public is still short sighted and doesn't demand change. That lack of public outrage is why top staffers in the House complain that they can't pass even the simplest of measures to combat climate change, such a bill to increase mileage standards for cars.

It's likely that we not outraged because we will not feel the full impact of the ecological catastrophe we are creating today for another 30 to 50 years due to the thermal inertia of the ocean. The climate changes we are seeing today are just the tip of the iceberg; they are from our emissions from more than 30 years ago. Our emissions today are much higher than 30 years ago. But most people don't know that. They look out the window and things look fine. It seems just too impossible to believe that we could all be dead in less than 100 years. So we choose to ignore what the scientists tell us. The most unequivocal and important scientific consensus in our lifetime and we choose to ignore it. How smart is that?...

Is waterboarding torture?

If Mukasey does not know if waterboarding is torture, there is an easy way for him to find out. He can experience it himself. There are certainly plenty of experts in the CIA or Blackwater who could strap him down and give him the treatment. Then he’d know.

Addiction and secondhand smoke

Here’s something to consider. For many dually addicted it is easier to get off and stay off booze than cigarettes. Could this be because total abstinence from alcohol is possible while it is impossible to avoid second hand smoke? How would ex drunks in recovery fare if they had to swallow a few spoonfuls of booze every day?

Just sayin’, after passing through a few clouds downtown and finding myself wanting a smoke.