The Comparisons Are Striking

Hey guys! Target acquired, there's Qaddafi!

Somewhere in the world, pigs are flying.  Don't ask me where, I cannot tell you.  Nor am I able to say whether they rocket through the air unaided like Krypto the Superdog or whether they have suddenly sprouted white, feathery avian wings to soar through the azure firmament, each a small, chubby Pegasus in flight.  I can only assert that they do, that they must!



I know this because something unprecedented is about to happen, a thing I thought impossible, and thus in need of signs and portents to harbinger its coming.  I am about to write something positive about Hillary Clinton.

I can hardly believe it myself, so poleaxed am I by this utterly alien desire.  But intellectual honesty is a quality we on the conservative side should cherish, encourage and practice.  Leave the Left in its tornado of random feelings to rage and emote.  Some of us have to act the adult in the room.

Even a Wisconsin SEIU thug public school teacher could probably discern that I am alluding to the ongoing crisis in Libya and our belated response to Quaddafi's murderous madness.  The rumblings from Libya started in mid-January, but were overshadowed by the attention the media was paying to Egypt.  And at first Quaddafi was exercising restraint in confronting the demonstrations and the stonings of government office buildings.  But anyone with half a brain knew that if Mubarak could turn his tame goons on the protesters, Quaddafi had the potential to be nightmarishly worse.

"It's a quarter  to 3  . . . ."

I worried about what Mr. Obama would do.  I don't see him as the kind of president who concentrates his policy-making on foreign affairs.  I've always seen him as more focused on the domestic agenda [more on this as time goes on].  But in the life of nations as in the lives of men, we often face exactly the challenges we are least prepared by temperament or experience to confront. Biden was wrong; well, actually he's frequently wrong, so I should be more specific. Biden was premature in his prediction that Mr. Obama would face an international crisis within six months, and the extra time Mr. Obama has gained does not seem to have helped his preparedness to meet the test when it finally rolled up to the White House portico.

He dithered a bit when open hostilities broke out.  [The Left hates that term, they prefer "careful consideration;" much the way Benedict Arnold might prefer his actions be described as "strategic realignment."]  I'll take the Administration at their word about concern for Americans still in country, so far as I am able.   But they tarried in doing so.  Things in Libya got hot, and  hotter, and then blistering.  The Chinese, the British, the Germans all sent warships as security for their evacuation efforts that took place on February 24 and 25 (and subsequently for the larger groups).  Our warships didn't arrive until a week later, and after our citizens were largely gone from Libya.  The remarkable thing about the delay being that we've had ships in the vicinity covering the Egypt crisis for weeks, so it was more about logic than logistics.  Finally, a month later Mr. Obama announces that Quadaffi has had his day and it's time for him to go.  I'd say we've left the territory of "consideration" and are in the very close vicinity of "dithering."

Frankly, I think Mrs Clinton would have handled it a little better were she in the Oval Office and not the KY Guy (and I am not referring to Kentucky).  Hillary is not even my eighth choice for President, but she's had firsthand experience in world affairs that Barack "Present!" Obama had never bothered to obtain while he was helping ACORN to get out the vagrant vote and enduring two decades of racist rants that he apparently didn't hear at Trinity United Church of Christ.  I can understand Mr Obama's desire to run away from comparisons to GW, but Mrs Clinton would not have let the pot simmer over as long as Mr Obama has just for appearances' sake.

[Hillary has never cared a whit about appearances as she understands her Equine constituents have a bottomless capacity to accept whatever they are told if framed as partisan rhetoric, and everything can be framed that way.]

Hillary Clinton had eight years in the White House, was abroad in a diplomatic capacity as First Lady, served in the Senate for eight years before becoming Secretary of State.  Say what you will about her taste for clandestine strongarm tactics (shhhh! don't say "blackmail") when applied domestically, it's almost refreshing to see her employ the same dirty tricks in the international arena in America's interests.


Apparently, Mrs Clinton has had enough of the "careful consideration."  In a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer datelined March 16, 2011, Mrs. Clinton announced that she would not return as Secretary of State in an Obama second term; nor in any other role, nor would she seek the Presidency herself.   I know, I know, politicians can always be talked into doing something they desperately want to do "for the good of the nation"  and "at the call of the people."  But I have the sneaking suspicion she means it.  She's not retiring, a politician with her history really can't retire; they just eventually become irrelevant to everyone else's plans and their calls stop getting returned.  That won't happen to Hillary for a long time.


[I have a mental dialogue in my head now between Bill and Hillary wherein Bill keeps asking her to consider something to keep her busy and away from home:  "Gee, I'm sure we could talk Obama into a Federal judgeship, maybe even the Supreme Court, no more campaigning and that's a job you could have for the rest of your LIFE!"]

You SUCK!

In the end, the hesitation, deliberation, whatever you want to call it, didn't much help Mr Obama.  The Arab League, lobbying group for the Thugs On Our Side have done their utterly predictable flip only to flop the other way, playing both sides of the Arab Street.  [Frankly, the way sentiments and pronouncements flow in that part of the world, I don't think there is an Arab Street, just an interconnecting network of Arab Traffic Circles.]    Paying more attention to the resolutions of the United Nations (Parliament of Thugs) than the US Congress has got his Lefty base up in his face, with prima ballerina Dennis Kucinich first up in the spotlight, taking his theatrically sad-faced moral outrage in front of as many cameras as he can find.

And he was not the only one in Congress.   And I have to admit, watching that fat fool Michael Moore turn on Obama and demand he return the Nobel Peace Prize is hilarious.  As to the Peace Prize, well easy come,  . . . .

An Open Letter to Senator Bill Nelson of Florida

I don't know how much impact this will have on Senator Astro Boy, but one has hopes.

Stop! Stop! Stop, Astro Boy!


March 14, 2011

Dear Senator Nelson,

I wanted to write and let you know my support for the Republican initiatives to reduce the level of Federal spending from the ruinous levels of the last few years. I do not find it a dire state of affairs that the utterly reasonable proposal to return to 2008 levels of spending be enacted. But I am dismayed that a steady stream of Democratic Senators and Congressional Representatives get up in their respective chambers to belittle all the "drastic" cuts proposed by Republicans without making any suggestions of their own. Other than to raise taxes, which only a moron would suggest in the current economic climate.

As a man with an undergraduate degree in finance and an MBA in economics, as well as a life long interest in politics and history, it seems to me that Mr. Obama is making exactly the same errors FDR made under similar circumstances during the Great Depression. In his early years, Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to talk up a redistributionist, welfare state agenda, seemingly hostile to both wealth and business interests. And he was rewarded with an economy where investors were unwilling to participate at the risk their investments would be confiscated or taxed out of profitability. The temporary reduction in unemployment from 11 million in 1933 to 7 million in 1936 lasted only until the NRA was ended by the Supreme Court. Unemployment rose again to 11 million in 1937. In fact, nothing FDR did economically ended the depression; it was the war that did that.

Tell your caucus colleagues that we are at a pivotal moment in history. Even if they wanted to adopt dubious New Deal solutions, FDR did not have the current monumental quantity of accumulated Federal debt to deal with. We do.

And for the record, high-speed rail is another boondoggle that the voters of this state already rejected under Governor Bush. How many times must we keep banging our heads on that wall before we realize it hurts? Use your office to force the Interior Department to approve drilling licenses, offshore, onshore and in ANWR. They are sitting on permits for coal mines, too. The Obama administration is stealthily promulgating a policy of raising energy costs for all Americans in order to make the so-called "alternative" sources relatively cost-effective. Anyone who listened to him in 2008 heard him promise he would, and it was one reason I did not vote for him. But this hurts all Americans and you need to decide if that's the kind of thing you want associated with you.

VOTE FOR THE BUDGET CUTS!

Thank you,

Kevin

Gee, I know it's been a while . . . .

Once upon a time, I wanted to use blogging as an outlet for my restless brain. But I have a problem. I'm a bit lazy. And at times, easily distracted (can't say whether or not it's ADHD as I've never been diagnosed. Could be.) Moreover, I am in complete agreement with the following:

"I hate writing. I love having written." Dorothy Parker.

Had I taken up the virtual pen diligently then, by now I would be regarded as quite the prophet.

For example, I drove everyone I knew crazy in 2005 (the year I started this), when I announced flatly that the 2008 Presidential election campaign would not hinge on the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Coming out of Mr. Bush's second-term campaign, people looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Kerry-the-Peacenik had been eclipsed by Kerry-the-Sailor-Man, the Fightin' Patrician, and his secret, Christmas-time missions to Cambodia at the behest of President-elect Richard Nixon a month before Dick took the oath of office. That Tricky Dick was so Machiavellian!

[Have you ever noticed that LBJ is the one President all the other Democrats never want to be associated with? Ok, besides Carter; but Jimmy is still alive and still behaving like a bad-tempered Blanche Dubois battling a thirty-year episode of constipation. But when a Liberal mentions Viet Nam, they almost always skip over Johnson and zero right in on Nixon. Like Akhenaten of ancient Egypt, the priests of Liberalism chisel his name out of all the historical records, never to be spoken of or have tributes to his memory. Poor Lyndon; I doubt there will ever be a super carrier named in his honor.]

Iraq was in the news, it was commonly known we would not be out of the country or even winding down by 2008, so of course the campaign would once again be about the war!

Nuh UH, not me. I told my friends that the 2008 Presidential election would be about jobs.

I had been observing the changes in work life in my little corner of the corporate professional world in the last decade and was disturbed by the trends I saw and read about. I noticed that in the run-up to Y2K, and the gargantuan efforts to review all the legacy computer code that had been written since the dawn of the digital age, corporations had discovered that, like manufactured goods in the Seventies and Eighties, modern service-level jobs could be done vastly more cheaply in foreign lands. The simultaneous expansion of the Internet, fiber optic and satellite communications, and desktop assets had rendered eager English-speaking workers in lower wage nations as close as the guy in the next cubical for everything except a quick visit. "Outsourcing" had been the wave of the Nineties; the new fad was "Off-shoring." And for those companies that didn't "Out" you nor "Off" you, they were still not finished with you.

"Multitasking" became a buzz word (buzz concept? buzz idea?) that spread through the hive-mind of the corporate world, appearing in articles, advertisements, job descriptions and resumes. Work teams that lost a member often learned that job duties were being re-distributed amongst the remaining team and that the open position would not be filled. "Do more with less," we were told, "We need you to multitask." Job descriptions became cut and paste affairs. And the work day expanded. Managers, in conferences all day, became available for status updates at 4:00 pm or later and the handy Blackberry let them blast an e-mail to the whole team before leaving the conference table, just in time to dash any hopes of dinner with the family at a reasonable hour. The explosion of functionality in hand-held mobile devices meant that simply because you were watching Jay Leno didn't mean you couldn't respond to a few e-mails. After all, it was the middle of the day in Mumbai.

And everywhere I looked, there was an atmosphere of tension, of fear. Not a great, shivering terror. But a subtle fear, like a slight bad odor in the air conditioning you only whiff at certain moments and the HVAC guys swear has no cause they can find. An underlying tension in the way people work, a feeling of fragility in the fabric of their circumstances. The momentary, millisecond of defiance forming on their faces when yet another random task is assigned to them, something that might once have been given to the "admin" person in the group before those people became rare in modern corporations, followed by the downward glance and slight head nod of acceptance and capitulation. The constant dread that, despite all efforts to be an endlessly-busy, loyal, compliant drone, somewhere far away in the corporate HQ someone who has never been out to this facility and never looked at the work flow as it really exists (not the chart everyone knows is a joke) will put some formulas into a spreadsheet and calculate that the Manila office is getting ten new positions at a fraction of what the company currently pays for the same quality of work. Of course the quality is the same! And if it isn't, we'll pretend it is and then I can get my productivity bonus. Death from above, via Excel.

And people who were let go might find a new job. This was at a time when the published unemployment rate figures were low, remember. But I had a sinking suspicion that the figures missed something: how often people were RIFed from an $80K a year job and accepted a $60K one instead. Or whatever those figures would be in the prevailing wage. It's something I must research and may write about later, but I suspect the phenomenon was more common than full-employment statistics would convey. Full employment, but diminished means.

And the question I began to ask my colleagues over drinks some evenings was "What CEO wants to pay the wages they all want to see in the incomes of their customers?" You know the answer: the other guy.

And while "prevailing wages" in the manufacturing and service sectors were morphing from a local phenomenon into a world-embracing idea that included areas of extreme poverty, prices remained strictly local. Everyone wanted to pay Mumbai, but charge Manhattan.

I know, "So sad; too bad! That's Capitalism, baby." And I DO know, for once upon a time I studied Economics diligently. Once it became possible, once it was demonstrated successfully even a single time, it would spread through the corporate world faster than you could say "Harvard Business Review." And I know that it was a transitional phase. A stimulus that would lead to a societal response. That is the nature of things. What I suspected was that this time, the reaction from the people most impacted by the change would be expressed politically, in whom they chose to elect, rather than each individual family trying to adapt to the circumstances. They would tilt away from the Republicans and towards the Democrats because the Donks stock in trade is "Got a problem? Government can help!" Middle America was fed up, already working a second job to supplement the two incomes that weren't getting the bills paid, they wanted help and no one was listening. I figured the first Democrat contender to shut up about the war and start talking about jobs and incomes, not as a side issue but as the mainstay of his or her administration, would steal the primaries and then the general election.

[I always thought that the popular backlash against the Kennedy-McCain immigration bill in 2007 was at least partly because of the fears enumerated above. It's not the same thing I know, and defeating Kennedy-McCain did not do anything to staunch off-shoring, but I think it created among people NOT affected by direct competition with low-wage illegal immigrant workers a resonant feeling of sympathy and an outlet for anger for the pressures they did feel.]

I was wrong about the major issue of the election being jobs, to an extent, because I didn't see just how irresponsible mortgage lending had become. I worked for JP Morgan Chase at the time Bear Stearns fell in March, which I think of as the first shock in the crisis that really bloomed in the Fall. But I was right as well: The mortgage crisis is really a jobs crisis first, not caused by the insolvency on Wall Street and the ripple effects throughout the economy, but exacerbated by it. People lost jobs and companies curtailed hiring after Fall 2008 as the effects deepened, but declining incomes are what started off the mortgage crisis. People with well-paying jobs can pay their mortgages and don't need second mortgages or sub-prime rates. Areas with stable employment levels don't suffer steadily declining property values and stay "above water." More on this another time; this is a blog, not a book.

When the bailouts started and got widespread support on both sides of the aisle, that sealed McCain's fate. When both Pubbies and Donks find virtue in welfare statism, people turn to the party that had always spouted socialistic answers.

That's not to diminish Obama as a politician; his singularly blank resume throughout all his offices has proved no detriment to his career. If Bill Clinton was the "Teflon President," then Mr. Obama is the "KY Guy:" so slick, he's in before you realized he was trying.

Good to be back!!