February 2009 Archives

Focus on the Family leader James Dobson has announced that he is giving up his chairman title and some administrative duties.

Dobson notes:

One of the common errors of founder-presidents is to hold to the reins of leadership too long, thereby preventing the next generation from being prepared for executive authority... Though letting go is difficult after three decades of intensive labor, it is the wise thing to do.

I think he and Focus could be more intentional about the transition to "the next generation." And I would suggest that Dr. Bill Maier, a longtime friend and colleague who serves there as a VP, be one of the faces of their next generation.

Maier, who used to be one half of the "Bill and Sylvia" show locally on KBIG several years ago (I'll leave it to you to figure out which half), is a gifted and thoughtful articulator for postions I disagree with.

Maier earns from me the highest accolade I could give to an intellectual sparring partner: "Supple." I don't enjoy debating with people who are rigid, whether they are liberal or conservative. I enjoy debating with people who are supple enough to engage with shades of gray. Maier exemplifies this. He is unceasingly gracious to people who revile his opinions, whether they yell at him or send him nasty things in the mail or bombard him with harsh emails.

Dobson, for all the skills he brings to Focus, has lost credibility with most people who don't share his viewpoint. If Focus is serious about engaging their larger society in a debate that Focus should be welcome to join, then Maier could be the solution. Yes, liberals will fail to believe that anyone at Focus could be supple, but most of them have not spent 10 minutes with Maier. And if they did, they would come to respect him, grudgingly if not quickly. That alone should be reason for Focus to bring him to the fore in coming months and years.

At my workplace, here's an example of true old-school media, and proof that not all innovation is technological. In fact, it was predicted decades ago by wise futurists that "high-touch" approaches would often rise up as a sort of reaction to high-tech.

Interesting article here on the federal budget process, and fascinating passage:

With all these expenditures, many are saying they doubt Obama can reach his deficit goal while keeping his pledge to raise taxes only on couples making more than $250,000 a year.

"He's going to have to start moving down the scale and raising taxes on people making $150,000, people making $100,000 and even people making $75,000," said economist Adam Lerrick, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "You have to increase taxes. It's very simple. You have to pay for this somehow."

This is the first time in my adult life that I've heard a conservative expert say higher taxes are necessary to pay for deficit spending. Usually they insist that if we just lower taxes, we'll grow our way out of the deficit. That's been the mantra during the Cold War, War on Terror, Iraq, and the famous Bush tax program for the wealthy.

But I suspect the about-face has to do with the fact that now it's Obama who's doing the spending.

Having said all this, yes, I too am concerned about the Obama spending proposals. He needs to model the willingness to sacrifice pet programs that he demanded two nights ago.

The news business is in trouble and newspapers are in even deeper trouble. And yes, I am aware of the irony that you're reading this on the Net, the cause of our likely demise.

Now I am not so old that I hate or fear the Internet. I am relatively Net and computer savvy; but if I am a convert, I am a recalcitrant convert and not filled with the convert's traditional zeal. I accept the inevitable but do not joyously surrender.

Big city daily newspapers are, in fact, doomed. We will not be spilling ink onto dead trees, driving them around town and then hurling them onto driveways in the future--in the very near future. The demise of newspapers is ordained but we have participated in moving the date up. Instead of jogging, eating low fat and getting plenty of rest, newspapers have feasted on a high fat, high sugar diet of too many empty calories and burned both candles and bridges at both ends.

Our city dailies could have prolonged their useful lives if they had remained family owned. They could have made money on their original cost basis. But once large groups started buying and consolidating, the die was cast. The Chandlers would be making money on the LA Times. However, when the Tribune had to pay the retail purchase price, the income of the Times couldn't support the debt. Then Zell bought the Tribune, and even after leveraging their pension plan, can't service his debt. Yes, profits would have fallen for even original owners because of the movement of advertising to the Net--to Craig's List and eBay. But the papers could have lived longer.

Word is out that Hearst is looking to sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle. It is already in a semi-partnership with MediaNews, out of Denver, which is also having debt service problems. The individual local papers now belonging to the three major media companies, might have thrived had not all the newspaper empires expanded and, like our other bubbles and empires, burst.

So now the large dailies and the smaller semi-local chains are cutting back. They are reducing pages, letting go their most senior writers and editors and taking more and more syndicated and news-service material. The city dailies, large and small, are losing their connection to their communities. They are losing talent, content and context.

In a desperate effort to stay technically alive, they are (in corporate-speak) "merging their synergies" and moving their community staff people to central locations. Few, if any, are left to cover the high school play or sports. No one is going to PTA meetings or to the neighborhood council. One paper is trying to cover Pasadena City Council meetings by webcam to a reporter in Mumbai. No, I'm not making this up. This is a doomed strategy.

LA Times raised its street price by 50% while cutting back on pages and killing their separate local section (named California until March 1, but was also Metro, Orange, Valley and Westside). On Monday it will merge into the front with the already merged Op-Ed and editorial. The biggest decision left to the suits in the executive suites at the Times is where to put their obits? This is one still profitable part of print. Do you put it in the front, in the sports, the business or entertainment? There is serious executive time being devoted to where the obits will go while (and you could see this coming, right?) they should be preparing their own obits.

This is sad but unavoidable. There is little point in fighting for the preservation of the buggy whip manufacturing industry, going into a career teaching Morse code, or trying to resuscitate Generalissimo Franco. Dead is still dead.

This is not a tragedy, just sad in its prematurity. I don't want to sound like the last carver of cuneiform, "Those darn kids. What value is ink on papyrus? It is lazy. Only carving in stone has lasting value." Well, yes, ink feels better, more permanent and real than electrons, but that is a generational feeling. The news can be as good or better electronically delivered. There is no a priori superiority of ink over electrons. The deeper issue is content.

Who will pay reporters to gather information? Who will fact check and edit? Who will decide what news is important? The news needs professionals.

In ten years our big city dailies will be gone. Maybe there will be two printed national papers (New York Times and USA Today), the weekly national magazines will be monthly but local papers with local advertisers will still be around. They will never make a fortune, but they will be economically viable. And that, finally, is some good news. Note that our beloved Daily News is concentrating renewed efforts and resources on the Valley. As we become more local, we evolve and by truly serving the local community, we give ourselves a chance for survival.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

...Of course it was the Democrats who got us into this mess. It's always the fault of the Democrats, no matter how many conservatives occupy the White House or Congress or the Supreme Court. If Reagan ran up deficits, FDR must have been to blame. And if the stock market crashed under Bush, it was only because liberals didn't let Bush regulate Fannie Mae, even though conservatives despise meddling with the free market.

When some conservatives hear minorities complain about how hard life is, they tell them to stand up and take control of their destiny, instead of blaming dark forces. But when it comes to actual governance, such conservatives resort to the same pattern, even though they've been running things for most of the past 40 years. It's interesting, really.

But Gail-Tz, how exactly would you make the case that Bush and a GOP Congress are less to blame for events of this decade than the Dems?

From today's NYT:

The Dow Jones industrial average soared 230 points on Tuesday as Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke calmed some fears that the United States was poised to nationalize major banks, wiping out shareholders. The gains came one day after stock indexes tumbled to their lowest levels in more than 11 years.

By 12 p.m. on Wednesday, the Dow was down 100 points and the broader Standard & Poor's 500-stock index was down 2 percent as investors again confronted the realities of a grinding economic downturn.

"Everybody was trading on emotion there, positive news, something to look forward to," said Dan Faretta, senior market strategist at Lind-Waldock. "Today we're giving back the gains. I think everyone's coming back to reality."

Books such as Infotopia and the Wisdom of Crowds have suggested, compellingly, that experts can't get it right as often as the mob can, or chance can. From the NYT again, here's another confirmation of that:

THERE'S yet more evidence that it makes sense to invest in simple, plain-vanilla index funds, whose low fees often lead to better net returns than hedge funds and actively managed mutual funds with more impressive performance numbers.

Basic stock market index funds generally aspire to nothing more than matching the returns of a market benchmark. So in a miserable year for stocks, index funds may not look very appealing. But it turns out that, after fees and taxes, it is the extremely rare actively managed fund or hedge fund that does better than a simple index fund.

Fascinated by some of the partisan jockeying. Obama concedes that we can't have big deficits, only to get sarcastic applause from the GOP congressmen who spent like drunken sailors for so many years. Obama notes less than subtly that "we inherited a big deficit" and gets huge applause from his party, while the GOP congressmen suddenly sit on their hands. I'm still looking for a response from a congressional conservative about why the tax cuts for the richest didn't have the desired result on the economy (unless this is what they desired).

Didn't see the Jindal response, just read excerpts -- but it sounds like he took a classy and humble and thoughtful approach on behalf of the GOP. He's going to be a force in American politics. I do hear he's not necessarily looking at 2012, though.

If my observations are correct, then this school board election is going to have all the impact of a square dance. Part of it could be because most people don't even know that there is a school board election, including many teachers and other school personnel.
Take the recent informal survey.

Simple Question: "Do you know who's running for the school board?"

Simple Answer: "No" or "When you find out, could you let me know?"

Next I changed the question to "Did you know that there were school board elections?" But then I got several no's and an assistant principal who named two of the candidates, for which he should get some kind of an award, considering how well the others did, including me.

Underneath, it's your basic, everyday unabashed apathy. But who wouldn't be given that only the names and faces have changed in that merry-go-round of a school board? And what do we get for all their promises, false starts and speeches? Large class sizes, kids who can read about as well as a cantaloupe, a district that refuses to hold the parents accountable for anything (and believe me, they are accountable for just about everything) and a salary that has remained at a flat line rate no matter how much the cost of living changes.

Yet in spite of this, there are those brave souls who are running for the school board. May their journey be blessed.

My message to whoever wins is this: Take a long vacation, get some massages and stop and smell the roses because even Houdini would have had trouble wrangling his way out what you're going to get yourselves into.

Given this, the best candidate for the position is Mike Stryer, a social studies teacher at Fairfax High School. Stryer doesn't merely talk about accountability and change. He has a plan for achieving it. He has said, and it is true, that the district often deals with its problem students by shuffling them from school to another where they only wind up bringing their problems with them. But he wants to change all that by starting programs where they can redirect and re-channel their energies.

Another is that the mayor does not endorse him, which could be good given his love affair with the teachers, and he has the background for the job. He worked in international finance for 15 years before becoming a teacher and has managed employees and has worked at some of the world's leading financial institutions. So when the other board members start throwing money away, he will be the one reeling it back in.

True to form, the teachers' union has endorsed his opponent, Steve Zimmer. But beware. This is the same union that hasn't negotiated a teachers' pay raise in the last three years, that is unable to advise its members in how to deal with violent and abusive special ed students and is in cahoots with a law firm that can't do so, either. So mainly a walnut would vote for their candidate.

Besides, Zimmer's platform reads like a menu at a family diner where the parents get to choose from different entrees with different choices of side dishes. This form of education has been going on for years and the test scores have still been falling and the high school drop out rate is over 50%, so it doesn't work.

What does work is old-fashioned discipline and parental support, which is what has worked from George Washington on down. Parents do not have to have a formal education to instill these values in their children. They are what has made this country great and what has indirectly caused our immigration problem.

Not only do I think that Mike Stryer is the best candidate, but I hope that he'll win. And when he does, I'm going to buy him a giant bottle of aspirin.

As a new convert to and resident of Downtown LA, I was a little bummed to come across this somewhat recent LA Curbed post about the other paper's poke at LA Live. But I was even more troubled by the many ranting, snobby commenters who somehow think they had a magical solution to downtown that would have been so superior to the bright, cheery LA Live. The commenters come across as hip urbanites who find it easy to sniff at wealthy developers but who could never come up with a better solution.

LA Live may not be perfect, but it is a wonderful improvement over what existed here in past years. Having said that, I agree that it could have worked a little harder at creating some low-key places for locals to hang out. As such, LA Live mainly comes alive after a Lakers game or concert ends on a Friday night. It may need to lose a few high-end restaurants, which stand empty on most evenings, and add some coffeehouses and boutique stores.

Gideon Levy, in Israel's mainstream liberal Haaretz newspaper, meditates here on the conservative Benjamin Netanyahu's sudden desire to build alliances with the political center. Levy goads Netanyahu to carry out his more ambitious plans -- and in so doing, he indicates that Netanyahu and other hawks find it easier to talk a good game than to bring it to completion.

I awoke, as I usually do, to the witticisms of the L.A.-based Adam Carolla Show -- only to find Carolla and his sidekicks Teresa Strasser and Bryan Bishop discussing the imminent demise of their show, due to CBS Radio's desire to switch to a cheaper, musical format.

Carolla's common-man, common-sense comedy has been one of L.A.'s greatest natural resources in recent years, going back to his many years as co-host of KROQ's Loveline. His radio show had some rough patches (you could imagine this move as karmic retribution for his overuse of people like David Allen Grier, who is hysterical in all the wrong ways), but the show was at its best when Carolla, Strasser and Bishop simply bantered about the small and great events of the day. When no guests, or callers, or Danny Bonaduce, were there to step all over their subtle and perceptive humor, they shined best.

Carolla will say hard things that others are too timid to say -- out of sincerity and intellectual honesty, not out of a ratings-driven desire to shock. Strasser is a genuine public intellectual, a bright writer who managed to succeed in morning radio in a venue beyond NPR. (Now that is a shock.) Bishop is a sound-drop master and a foil who can add humor with perfect timing, by pressing a button or making a quip. Their ratings were solid and profitable -- yet they and other KLSX personalities have been forced off because CBS Radio felt a need to search for a still-better profit margin.

The word is that Carolla and his gang will continue to podcast in some form at AdamCarolla.com, which takes away some of the sting. Carolla will also get to spend more time at home while enjoying a contract payout, which will take away much more of the sting for him personally. But he could do well to add Loveline back to his routine, as his replacement there has been brainlessly circling the lower rings of Dante's radio inferno. Given how the digital video generation has no idea how to relate authentically with real human beings, Carolla's funny, spot-on relationship wisdom is crucial.

As for Strasser and Bishop, they deserve other new platforms soon for their many talents. Stay tuned to see what happens next in their careers.

Mr. Rupert Murdoch it's certainly no surprise to you that New York Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan would hotly defend the racist Post cartoon comparing President Obama to a chimp. That's what your shock and smut dealing Post is in the business of doing and it does it well. The idea of course is to get the tongues furiously wagging, get enraged emails, letters and phone calls pouring in, and then put forth the predictable defense calling this and other inflammatory cartoons a parody, a free speech right, and harmless spoofery. Allan didn't stop there. He couldn't resist the urge to take a swipe at Al Sharpton, branding him with the standard tag of race baiter and media hound for daring to call out the Post on the vile cartoon.

The furor might have drawn little more than a public yawn and shrug except for two small points. One is the long, sordid and savage history of racist stereotyping of African-Americans. A few grotesque book titles from a century ago, such as The Negro a Beast, The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization, and the Clansman depicted blacks as apes, monkeys, bestial, and animal like. The image stuck in books, magazines, journals, and deeply colored the thinking of many Americans of that day.

Yes, Mr. Murdoch, it's true that was a long time ago, and as Allan intimated in his lame defense of the Post cartoon, no sober person could seriously believe that anyone would liken the President or for that matter any black to a chimp. Unfortunately, a lot still do.
That's the second small point about the Post cartoon. Post Cartoonist Sean Delonas could so casually and easily depict Obama as a monkey because that image didn't die a century, half century, decade, or even a year ago.
In fact, exactly a year ago, Penn State researchers conducted six separate studies and found that many Americans still link blacks with apes and monkeys. Many of them were young, and had absolutely no knowledge of the vicious stereotyping of blacks of years past. Their findings with the provocative title "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," in the February 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was published by the American Psychological Association.
Please keep in mind Mr. Murdoch that the overwhelming majority of the participants in the studies bristled probably as undoubtedly you would at the faintest hint that they had any racial bias. But the animal savagery image and blacks was very much on their minds. The researchers found that participants, and that included even those with no stated prejudices or knowledge of the historical images, were quicker to associate blacks with apes than they were to associate whites with apes.

This was not simply a dry academic exercise. The animal association and blacks has had devastating real life consequences. In hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 the Philadelphia Inquirer was much more likely to describe African Americans than Whites convicted of capital crimes with ape-relevant language, such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." And jurors in criminal cases were far more likely to judge blacks more harshly than whites, and regard them and their crimes as savage, bestial, and heinous, and slap them with tougher sentences than whites.
The Post cartoon, Mr. Murdoch, was the complete package. It depicted violence, death, brutality, incitement, and animal like imagery. The topper was the not so subtle inference that the target of the chimp depiction and more was an African-American male, namely President Obama.

In recent days, Mr Murcdoch you've dropped a hint or two that you want to put the word balance back into the vocabulary of those who run your media empire. You can start by issuing this statement.

"News Corporation pledges that the Post's offensive cartoon will not be circulated, or reprinted, or syndicated. Further, we have zero tolerance toward racially insensitive and inflammatory cartoons or editorial depictions of African-Americans and other ethnic groups. Finally, we apologize for the Obama cartoon and pledge in the future that the Post and other Murdoch entities will hold to the highest standard of editorial sensitivity in our cartoons."

You'll issue that statement Mr. Murdoch if you are personally repelled by the comparison of President Obama to a chimp. That is so, right Mr. Murdoch?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

Do bad guys learn nothing from the blunders of other bad guys? That must clearly be the case. Take Blago and Burris (please), and now add A-Rod. The distance between a lie and the truth cannot be bridged incrementally. Letting the truth come out slowly in dribs is not a smart strategy. If it is to come out, let it flow and make it a one or two day story and not on our radar for weeks or months.

A-Rod never used steroids he told Katie Couric. He wasn't even tempted. Then a couple of months later, when Sports Illustrated breaks the story, oh whoops, "Well, maybe I took something, but I was young and foolish and didn't really know what it was." This week he admits to some steroid use and apologizes but still is not sure what it was. Right, maybe girlfriend Madonna can credibly deny knowing what goes into her body, but not an elite professional athlete. This story will drag on, and he will be made smaller in direct proportion to his steroid use. Ironic, huh?

As for Senator Burris of Illinois. He testified under oath that he was not contacted by Blago or his agents, and there was no quid pro quo for his appointment to the senate. Then he changed his tune--possibly when he realized that some of Blago's brother's conversations were likely on tape. So he admitted being called, but said he refused to solicit money for Blago. Now he says, well, yes he solicited money but he wasn't successful. Oh, that is good. Entering into a conspiracy is ok. Lying under oath is ok because he was not successful? So, you could try to rob a bank and get off because of incompetence?

You cannot go from a lie to the truth in stages. If you have any chance of keeping your reputation, your job or your freedom, you better either stick with denial (as implausible as it may be) or come clean (as embarrassing as it may be). Drip, drip, drip will eat away at stone, your reputation and your future.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

The BBC wonders here if it's wrong to have more than two kids, due to the manner in which it strains the planet's resources. Heck yeah; as the second of three kids, I have no doubt that the third one was superfluous.

Okay, I do "kid," but I think it's not helpful to have more than two in this day and age. If every couple had one kid, over the next two generations, imagine how much easier life would be for those who follow us. Think about their needs, not Nadya's needs to have a large family or Gretchen & Bill's need to fill up the gas-guzzling minivan with the delightful screams of five little-leaguers.

How will we get the rapidly growing segments of our population, eg, the Third World, to go along with this? I dunno, that's the part I haven't figured out yet. And it won't make much difference for us in "developed" nations to hold the line when they won't.

Venezuela's Jewish community and other living things in the area had better buckle up. It's aye carumba time. Hugo Chavez is in it for the long haul now that his referendum scrapping political term limits passed by 54% in Sunday's elections. It wasn't the first time that that country's president tried to push the referendum through, which only goes to prove that practice sometimes does make perfect.

He will now be eligible to run that country indefinitely like Fidel Castro and other luminaries before him. One way that Sr. Chavez turned the lightning rod into a sweetheart deal is that he took a clue from the "Choirboy's Manual" where he decided to share and share alike by inviting other choirboy politicians into the deal. It was that and that other political ally, fear, when he convinced the masses, many who are only known by "X" in legal documents, that many of the government's services would be cut off should another heck of a public servant take over. They ran to the poling place in droves.

Aside from that, some theories have cropped up as to what caused this win this mambo ride around. The election was either rigged, the dead rose to vote like they have been known to in Chicago, or someone poured tequila into the water system.

But now that it is a fait accompli, some drastic measures need to be taken before a man, whose career could have a longer shelf life than radium comes home to roost.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I have turned to Rule One in the "Handbook for Dealing with Despots" which says to stage a coup through the alimentary route. The bottom line is that inside me there lives a frustrated head chef at a presidential compound just waiting to come out. So using the cholesterol do's and don't taped to my refrigerator door, here's what would come to Chavez's palate in my role as head chef.

Breakfast: Three eggs in butter, several sides of bacon, toast with butter and jelly and diet tea to throw that guy off the trail, a good cigar.

Mid-morning snack: Cheese and crackers, other cigars

Lunch: Chopped steak and shrimp scampi, a carbonated beverage of choice, Red Bull energy drink.

Dinner: Shrimp scampi and chopped steak, carbonated beverage, pecan pie and coffee with heavy cream

Bedtime snack: A stomach pump

I would walk the palatial pooch for him and dissuade him from engaging in any exercise regimen that didn't involve donning heavy sweats in the Amazon heat and jogging up a mountain.

And the rest would be history.

And it's all because I hold two things to be true. One is that that country is headed south in a hand basket and fast, and the other is that I am lucky to be living in this country where I can write these kinds of things.

My friend John Galt mentions here some global skepticism of Obama's stimulus bill:

Today, the world is responding to a president who is skeptical of free trade and urging us to buy American. The Economist - a periodical you have referenced several times on this page, especially when it endorsed Obama for president - is more or less saying the same thing. In fact, it urged Obama to reject the stimulus package if there was even a hint of protectionism contained therein.

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment. Here's the latest Economist print article on the bill, and here's the section that's relevant:

The fiscal stimulus plan has some obvious flaws. Too much of the boost to demand is backloaded to 2010 and beyond. The compromise bill is larded with spending determined more by Democrat lawmakers' pet projects than by the efficiency with which the economy will be boosted. And it contains "Buy American" clauses that, even in their watered-down version, send the wrong signal to trading partners.

For all those shortcomings, the stimulus plan gets one big thing right. Given the pace at which demand is slumping, a big, and sustained, fiscal boost is vital for America's economy. This package, albeit imperfectly, administers it.

That makes the inadequacy of the financial rescue all the more regrettable. Fiscal stimulus, indispensable as it is, cannot create a lasting economic recovery in a country with a broken financial system. The lesson of big banking busts, such as Japan's in the 1990s, is that debt-laden balance-sheets must be restructured and troubled banks fixed before real recoveries can take off. History also suggests that countries which address their banking crises quickly and creatively (as Sweden did in the early 1990s) do better than those that dither. This is expensive and painful, but cautious, penny-pinching governments end up paying more than those that tread boldly.

Doesn't sound to me like the Economist has the same concerns you do. As to how other major world economies are responding to the stimulus, there's this from Tom Plate of the Pacific Council on International Policy:

The whole world is on the edge of a nervous breakdown hoping and praying that the new U.S. federal stimulus package will begin to shove the American economy back up the hill.

Just the other day the government of China said as much, decrying its dependence on the United States. It grudgingly admitted that it is still hooked on U.S. Treasury bonds as the investment drug of choice because it is unable to figure out where else to park its well-gotten export-income gains. The problem with the U.S. economy, therefore, is that it is just about everyone's problem now...

Even Japan -- a genuine economic giant -- has stumbled back into recession. We all recall the country's "lost decade" of the '90s, when the central government in Tokyo reacted to the meltdown with all the alacrity of a backlash of taffy - and paid a stiff price. Obama had noticed that....

But amid all the misery, there are some bright spots. Stimulus packages are at work -- or are in the works -- almost everywhere.....

No one has raised fundamental doubts about the severity of the crisis. There is only a measure of disagreement over the dimensions of the overall enormity. Under this circumstance, action of some kind is almost certainly better than inaction of any kind -- because that would be the most socially unkind option of all. People are losing jobs, homes, careers, self-esteem -- and worse.

As I've said before, this defies my normal free-market instincts. I'd say, sweat out the fever, get better, and get back to work. But too many businessmen and economists, along with policymakers in every major economy, are convinced the patient will die if left untreated.

And despite some 20+ years as a quasi-libertarian, I'm beginning to look at past decades and realize that there's an imbalance in my thinking. Yes, government can be ineffective because it doesn't have a market reason to compete. But corporations can be irresponsible because they don't have a reason to worry about anything other than a short-term profit. Just as smart conservatives know they need liberal spicing and smart liberals know they need conservative spicing, smart government maximalists should know they need smart government minimalists, and vice versa. An all or nothing game is the worst option. And right now, we need to find the proper blend.

I'll soon ponder some examples of where government "gets things right," in ways the free market doesn't.

Only eight years ago Democrats were demanding a recount and questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. This year is already different. No, it's not a new spirit of bipartisanship. This year it's the office-holders who want a recount.

All over this great nation of ours, politicians are asking, not always rhetorically, "I raised money, spent months--even years--away from my family, went into fiscal debt, physical debt, gained 20 pounds on ethnic food and exhausted my spiritual resources--not to mention used up all my friends--for this? How about a recount?"

In our own fair state of California our solons (acting more like congested colons) have blocked every effort to pass a budget. They're afraid of wasteful spending and new taxes, they say. However their actions and inaction are driving down our bond ratings and thus increasing what the state has to pay to borrow money, in the unlikely event that anyone were willing to loan us any. The Gubernator, Der Arnold, must be wondering why he unseated Gray Davis for this thankless job. And to make the ironies yet sweeter, his big issue against Gray was the car registration fee. He won by promising to rescind Gray's unpopular raise and will exit having raised it further. Delicious.

Even in Illinois, the cradle of presidents, the pols seem to stay in infancy and not grow up. They no longer seem able to produce competent crooks and liars. Foul-mouthed and impeached, Blago bragged on tapped phones of the worth of the senate seat. "Golden," he advertised. He shoved Burress down the throats of the senate and made a further fool of Harry Reid (not too difficult) and now his nominee, Senator Burress, may wish he never solicited the job. There is likely to be a partisan, but still damaging, perjury investigation concerning Burresse's sworn testimony that no one representing Blago tried to extort money for the appointment. He now remembers (or recognizes the failure of his interrogators to ask precisely the right question) that Blago's brother asked for "fundraising help." What could that have meant?

As strange as it seems today, four months post election, some day either Al Franken or Norm Coleman is likely to get the job of Junior Senator from Minnesota. Then what? In the image from the Cold War rhetoric about nuclear war, "The living will envy the dead." I suspect the winner may envy the so-called loser.

Even our own dear Mayor Antonio might want to reconsider running for a second term and trying to govern a city that is fiscally broken. Won't be fun.

Okay, maybe Obama is still in the rush of his historic presidency, but even he must surely wonder late at night when he is alone with his thoughts, "I wanted this job?" If this has not yet occurred to him, it will. As they say, "Watch out for what you wish for; you might get it."
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

Nothing sends conservative talk jocks and corporate broadcasters fleeing to the barricades faster than even the slightest hint, rumor and whisper that President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats might push for reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. The jocks rushed to the barricades again when a few congressional reps recently said bringing back the Fairness Doctrine was a good thing. When top White House advisor David Axelrod coyly hinted that new FCC head Julius Genachowski might take a look at the Doctrine that set off even more panic that a return of the Fairness Doctrine was practically a done deal.

That's hardly the case. In June 2008, then Presidential candidate Obama flatly said that he did not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters. And other than the stray remark from Axelrod there's no indication that Obama has changed his mind on the issue. However, he should. The Fairness Doctrine though vague, loose, and virtually unenforced during the decades it was on the books did at least give some pubic space on the airwaves to an occasional dissenting voice. The thought of that is too much to stomach for the anti- fairness Doctrine fear mongers.

Their stock retort is that the Fairness Doctrine obliterates free speech, will lead to a government takeover of the airwaves, drive corporate broadcasters into the tank, and effectively muzzle conservative views. Conservative talk jocks and the media syndicates used the same arguments to prod Reagan and Congress to dump the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. None of this was true then or true now.

The Fairness Doctrine did not require that broadcasters give equal time to liberal or moderate Democrats to counter the hot air of conservative talk jocks. The Doctrine did not tell broadcasters who should get a talk show, what the hosts could say, or who they had to have on their shows. By the time Congress shelved the Doctrine, the FCC had virtually ceased even enforcing it. The Fairness Doctrine simply served as a broad guide to insure that stations give at least some time to differing points of view, i.e. views other than those of conservative white guys, and an occasional token conservative woman or black.

If enough listeners complained that a station was too lop sided in the parade of conservatives it had popping off on a particular issue, than it had to give "reasonable opportunity" to the other side to give an opposing view. The FCC didn't tell the station how much time to give, who to give the time to, or when to give it. The tepid requirement that an offending station bring some semblance of balance to a discussion of an issue did not drive a single conservative jock from the studio mics, diminish the power and profit of the syndicates, or chill free speech. It did just the opposite. The number of conservative talk radio hosts grew bigger, their influence greater, and the profits of corporate syndicates soared. In 1999, the five largest companies operated one out of five stations and generated nearly 50 percent of industry revenue. In 2006, they controlled more than one out of three stations and took in more than sixty percent of industry revenue.

The few successful challenges to a station that hogged the air with conservative talk resulted in more not less free speech, since listeners got to hear a few differing views. No more. In the two decades since the burial of the Doctrine more than a quarter of all broadcast stations don't offer any local news or public affairs programming. An even greater number of stations simply plop in a few minutes of canned news headlines.
Conservative talk radio has been a treasure chest of riches for the broadcast syndicates, and their talk jocks weld a power over millions that emperors, kings and dictators would drool over.

A near textbook example of that is the ongoing debate over Obama's stimulus plan. There was some hint in the early days of the congressional debate over the plan that a few House Republicans might be willing to back the plan. The conservative talking heads went to work and quickly changed that. They railed against it as a fatally flawed pork barrel laden, tax and spend, power grab scheme by Obama and the Democrats. This stiffened the spines of the GOP rank and file against the plan. Now that they have flexed their broadcast muscles and whipped the GOP back in line, next up will be to browbeat, cajole, and bully any GOP dissenters on health care, the environment, and any other big ticket issue that conservative talk jocks deem an Obama and Democratic party power grab.

All this of course with not a peep of an alternative view to be heard on their talk airwaves. Obama should bring back the Fairness Doctrine and help make sure that lone voice is heard.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

More thoughts from a "recovering libertarian"...

Several friends here criticize any economic system that isn't founded on massive tax cuts, which strikes me as "socialism for the satisfied" -- ie, we want all the costliest parts of our budget but don't want to have to pay for it.

President Bush, though he was a bigger spender than "true" conservatives would have liked, did model true conservatism in how he believed that tax cuts for high-earners would create jobs throughout the economy. What happened? Why did deficits bet bigger, and why did job growth rise more slowly than the overall population growth?

What are the signs, during his presidency or other recent ones, that classical principles of conservative economics actually work? And I'd hope that you would use successes of GOP presidencies as your proof, rather than failures under Dems.

I bring all this up because I'm thinking of a line from Machiavelli, about how many idealists imagine utopias that have never existed and never will exist, because people don't work the way that idealists expect.

Bringing Sharia law to the Northwest frontiers of Pakistan is a really bad idea, I'd say. The only good thing is that part of the country is already crazy, so a little extremist law there won't make much difference. But it shows the Pakistani government is pretty much out of ideas in how to fight the Taliban without further inciting them to blow up hotels in parts of Pakistan that I try to dine at.

I suggested earlier that Obama didn't need a stimulus package as much as he needed full buy-in on a stimulus package. That didn't happen, and I think some blame falls on Obama on that.

Conservatives are bothered by the $787 billion as being excess spending, though I'm still not sure if they're bothered by the $700 billion bank bailout money that has yet to pay dividends -- a bailout that the GOP initiated and which the Dems supported happily. Is the problem that the GOP leaders get upset when they can't lead the spending, or is it that they've become "born-again budget hawks"? I suspect the two are somewhat related. Spending looks more offensive when liberals do it.

From a CNN interview between John Roberts and Bill Clinton:

Roberts: What do you think of the job that President Obama did on steering the stimulus plan through Congress, and does he in fact have the experience necessary to be a good president, reach across party lines and craft a bipartisan bill?

Clinton: Well first of all, he has reached across, and it takes two to tango. I find it amazing that the Republicans who doubled the debt of the country in eight years and produced no new jobs doing it, gave us an economic record that was totally bereft of any productive result are now criticizing him for spending money. You know, I'm a fiscal conservative, I balanced the budget, I ran surpluses. If I were in his position today, I would be doing what he's doing. Why? Because the problem with the economy is the housing decline led to the general decline in values. Assets are going down. This stimulus is our bridge over troubled waters till the bank reforms kick in. He did the right thing, he did everything he could to get Republican support. He took some of their tax-cutting ideas.

But if you look at this bill, it is designed do three things. And it does all three. It puts money in the hands of people who need money to survive -- unemployment benefits, food stamp benefits, tax cuts. Second thing it does is to give money to state and local governments so they don't have to lay a million people off or raise taxes. Either one would be bad for the economy. The third thing is it does is create new jobs. Given the Congress he had and the environment and the speed with which they had to move, I think he did a fine job with this.

Clinton is himself a rival of Obama and could have succumbed to schadenfreude here, but he found a basis for supporting Obama's efforts. And I think his approach is appropriate.

Still, Obama did blow it by letting Nancy Pelosi's troops run amok in the initial scripting of the House stimulus package. That got things off on the wrong note. That was bad faith on the part of the Dems, and it led to plenty of bad faith and sour grapes on the part of the GOP. We can all do better as a country.

President Barack Obama had barely finished uttering the oath of office when the talk started that he would be a one term president. This political doomsday talk was chalked up to a few bored reporters looking for something contrarian to say about Obama, the deluded hopes of hard bitten, spoil sport conservatives for a failed Obama presidency, and a few naysayers among economists who repeatedly warned that economic collapse would do in a young, inexperienced president. The first two reasons to think Obama would get a quick boot can be easily shrugged off.

Tying Obama's White House fate to public jitters over a hemorrhaging economy can't be so easily brushed aside. Obama pretty much said as much in an interview on NBC's Today Show two weeks after he was sworn in that if he didn't deliver he'd be "a one term proposition." This may not be a totally accurate prediction since in four years a foreign blow up, terrorist attack, cataclysmic natural disaster, a squabbling, headless, and discredited GOP and any of a number of other unforeseen things could make him shine. Any of them could just as easily be his ticket back to the White House. Still, the rise or fall of the economy is the only thing for now that anyone seems to think matters.
Obama has smartly hedged his bets on judging his presidency on the speed of an economic turnaround by repeatedly damping down expectations that economic recovery is just around the bend, and that he can wave a magic wand and make the economic pain instantly disappear. Obama's pleadings, warnings, and cautionary notes are his back door admission that Americans want and demand that he do something, and do it now to reverse the economic slide, and that there's little margin for error, and none for failure, if he doesn't.

Recent presidential history amply shows that the public is brutally unforgiving when the man in the White House doesn't immediately turn things around. In a look at how six of eight presidents fared since 1948 when the economy hit the skids or appeared to skid, the scorecard for presidents winning and losing because of economic woes is a draw. Three were beaten and three beat back their challengers. It came down to whether voters really perceived that their economic plight, or rather pain, would show no sign of a cure if they kept the incumbent in office. But even more important presidents had to do one crucial thing in the face of rising unemployment, recession, inflation, and public grumbles if they wanted to stay on the job. They had to assure a majority of voters that things would and could get better for the voters if they stayed in the White House and that any likely opponent couldn't do any better.

Presidents also had to have a lot of luck. W. Bush had that in 2004. He won reelection in part because memories were still fresh of the 9/11 terror attack. Bush adroitly played the terror card and convinced enough voters that he could beat back any new terrorist threat. But hard times, plant closures, farm foreclosures, and high unemployment even then had gripped big sections of the Midwest and as Democrats gleefully noted, growth was much slower during Bush's first term than during Clinton's second term.

Yet Bush also won in big part because overall unemployment and economic growth had slightly improved in the run up to the 2004 election. Bush used this to spin the news, even bad economic news, into a gain. He solemnly pledged there would be more economic improvement for voters if he was reelected. That didn't work for Republican rival John McCain in the make or break wind down months to the 2008 campaign. The financial plunge in September virtually sealed his loss.

Obama relentlessly painted a stark, grim and scary picture for workers and the middle class that the crash was Bush's doing and by extension McCain's doing. He masterfully sold the idea that things would only get worse if McCain was elected. He directly linked the perceived failure of Bush to right the nation's economic ship to McCain. And that McCain's policies would result in still bigger deficits, the prospect of even greater inflation and a more intense recession. Obama made voters believe that Republican economic policy would not promote recovery and economic security but increase economic pain for millions of wage earners; put bluntly economic collapse.

Obama has literally bet the bank that that the economic stimulus will turn the economic tide. Packs of Republicans and not a few economists warn that it won't. A few such as Rush Limbaugh even hope that it won't.

Economic failure alone may not spell a one term presidency for Obama. But economic success, even the perception of success, will help insure that Obama won't be another Jimmy Carter.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

As I keep thinking about resistance to Obama's stimulus, despite foreign governments' vigorous efforts to spur their economies, it brings back a childhood memory. As a kid, I saw how every other kid in school was getting major help from their parents to sell the stupid chocolate bars that our teachers assigned us to hawk as a fundraiser. Those who sold the most won prizes -- but I could never compete, because my parents weren't about to get involved. But those other kids had both their mom and dad pushing those candy bars down the throats of their officemates.

Or, it's like telling your kid he needs to suck it up and do his own science project -- even though every other kid is receiving massive assistance from his or her own parents. So while you show up with two tin cans connected by string, they show up with a working cold fusion experiment.

Fiscal conservatives speak of being able to compete in a global economy, sans protectionism. And fiscal conservatives condemn a "paternalistic" approach on the part of governments toward business. But the analogies above show that, if every other government except yours is being paternalistic, you're bound to lose the global competition.

And that, friends, is a conundrum. Would love to hear more from John Galt on this.

It's too bad Michael Phelps isn't a musician. Then that bong brouhaha would be applauded on an Internet photo gallery about hard-partying musicians. Instead he pursued a lifestyle where he needs to get up and don a Speedo just when the other guys start rolling in.

I know that experimentation is one of the follies of youth, yet as an Olympian and not a baseball player like A-Rod or Darryl Strawberry, Phelps has a message to send and an image to uphold. And that image does not comply with bongs and other drug paraphernalia. And while I buy my cereal for the taste and for the prize inside rather than over a picture on a box, the candidate that a company plasters there needs to mesh with its image. Which could explain why we are never going to see Snoop Dogg as Nike's spokesperson. The investors would pull out and the stock would plummet.

In the end, Michael Phelps is just going to have to take this as a hard-learned lesson on the gravy train of life.

Kellogg Corporation, the maker of Frosted Flakes among other high sugar breakfast cereals, may not have asked for governmental assistance yet, but their cultural tone-deafness is emblematic of what is wrong with private enterprise today.

Companies try to boost sales with celebrity spokesmen. Sometimes they create a natural synergy Bob Dole and Viagra. Often, it doesn't really fit. Bill Clinton and Viagra would just be wrong. Sometimes they run from a news story and then come back. Kobe lost some sponsors for a while following his rape charge. The sponsors are back.

But now Michael Phelps has lost Frosty Flakes. Why? He was photographed taking a hit on a bong. Whatever the legal consequences may, or should be, losing this particular sponsors is strange. While athlete thugs get charged with performance enhancing drug use and continue to play, while jocks build up rap sheets of criminal complaints from domestic battery to gun charges, Phelps is flogged for marijuana? Kelloggs is a producer of munchies. If they can't see the synergies here, just go out of business.

There's three cautionary tales in the Michael Phelps tokeing saga. The first tale is that you can be the toast of the town one day and toast the next day. One slip, one wrong word, or in Phelp's case a wrong photo and you burn faster than the Hindenburg.

The second tale is that maybe, just maybe, we're seeing what I never thought I'd see and that's the wipe out (at least momentarily) of the double standard in how certain real or perceived bad behaving celebrities are treated. That is black bad behaving stars are reviled, trashed, pounded, hammered mercilessly, and race and character baited while white bad behaving stars get moans, regrets, apologies, hand ringing and endless excuses made for their behavior.

The final tale is that we put guys like Phelps on Olympian pedestals, turn them into Demi-gods, slavishly fawn over them, and then when the inevitable happens and they act like humans, we scratch our heads in puzzlement and flagellate ourselves for being so dumb to glorify them. Do you think we or Phelps will learn anything from the three tales?

I'll agree with Jonathan that Michael Phelps has been found guilty of nothing worse than being a young adult in America today. In that sense, the loss of endorsement earnings may seem absurd and unfair. Next, a Hollywood starlet will be dropped by a shoe company for driving 56 on the 101.

But while advertising is a silly and obsolete enterprise (a subject I'll be writing about sometime soon), it's based on a company's perception that a spokesperson is a meaningful symbol of their products. Given the huge dollars that Phelps and others earn to serve as these symbols, I say that companies are free to dump them for the smallest blemish. Companies would be even smarter to realize that spokespersons are an outdated form of marketing altogether. My choices in cereal have nothing to do with my perception of an athlete.

Gail-Tz wrote:

Usually an audience will get up and leave the theatre at the end of a movie or sometimes a little before, but this one remained so transfixed that they stayed until the last credit rolled.

Aw, GT -- you gave away the ending! Good stuff, though. I've been exhorted to see it by others, and I think I got to get out there and hit the box office weekend finally, despite being buried under my own boxes from my recent move to downtown LA.

"Slumdog Millionaire" is a must-see movie that is bound to garner at least one Academy Award. It centers on 18 year-old Jamal Malik, an orphan from the slums of Mumbai who winds up on India's version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"

He is so good at zeroing in on the answers that the producers and emcee believe he is cheating and have him arrested and tortured where the secret to his success is revealed. It is not in any extra-ordinary intelligence, he believes, but in his life, which relates to each question and is revealed through a series of flashbacks involving his brother and archrival, Salim, and the love of his life, another orphan named Latika.

We go from the afternoon he escapes from the outhouse his brother has locked him into so he can get an actor's autograph, which the brother later sells, to the murder of their mother by a mob and their escape on a freight train where they meet Latika, another orphan, who becomes the love of Jamal's life, to the Taj Mahal, the open air markets and the gangs and brothels of India.

It is about fate and destiny, making your own fate and destiny and love and life and perseverance.

After nine years of longing, he finally gets the girl, but rather than telling him she loves him, she says something deeper and more profound, which led one reviewer to reach for a hankie.

Usually an audience will get up and leave the theatre at the end of a movie or sometimes a little before, but they were so transfixed that they stayed until the last credit rolled.

It is just that darned good.

Wall Street types continue to puzzle me. From Marketwatch:

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Treasurys advanced Tuesday, pushing yields down the most since at least mid-December, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's plans to help troubled U.S. banks disappointed investors...

"Geithner is saying that this is going to take time and the markets don't work that way," said Jason Brady, who helps oversee about $6 billion in fixed-income assets at Thornburg Investment Management. "They want answers now."

They want answers now? They want to hear that it won't take time? Are they completely naive? Bush and Paulson told them all last year that everything was going to be fine immediately. How well did that work out? Are they childishly going to hold their breath and turn blue and withhold their investments until they hear what they want?

Again, it reminds me that the proper stimulus for the economy doesn't require spending trillions of dollars to bail out banks and build bridges -- it requires maybe just a few million dollars worth of Prozac.

I just came back from lunch with a penny-and-pound-wise friend who reminded me that these are the best times to increase contributions to retirement funds. But there seems to be no end to the arrogance and short-term greed of large portions of the investor class. They steadfastly refuse to see investment as a long-term prospect. And the economy suffers as a result.

The great mystery is still why President Barack Obama would whiplash obstructionist GOP congresspersons with Rush Limbaugh. A guy who a big majority of Americans don't like and who rates lower than any other political figure. That was the finding of the Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner poll taken back in late October. The poll released by a Democratic leaning polling firm may well be politically partisan and tainted, and Limbaugh and company loudly screamed that it was. But he is America's long time great polarizing talk show gabber, and it's a role he relishes.

Yet Obama still made him his straw man to demand that the GOP reps and senators get on board his legislative train to pass the economic stimulus package and any other legislation he and the Democratic controlled Congress want passed.

Using Limbaugh as a foil was a big mistake. This writer warned that Limbaugh would use Obama's taunt to further sell-inflate his importance as a public opinion and political kingmaker. Unfortunately, Obama's perverse hype of Limbaugh didn't end there. GOP senators and congresspersons dutifully kissed the talk bloviator's ring and swore not to say or do anything to frontally offend him. Former Republican National Committee chair Rich Bond was one of the few party men to dare warn against the GOP's grovel to Limbaugh. Bond bluntly asked whether there would be an all-white man litmus test for the GOP. Bond's bulls eye challenge to the GOP to stop paying homage to Limbaugh or risk an even bigger free fall will likely fall on deaf ears. The ascension of Michael Steele as the RNC's first African-American chief won't do much to change that for now either.

The brutal reality is that a narrow majority of GOP voters believe the party should think like Sarah Palin and be even more noisy and brutish in hectoring the GOP conciliators. Obama and the media's puff of Limbaugh, his rabid sprawling on-air following, and his ruthless and relentless self-promotion machine virtually insure that Bond's worst fear of a white man's litmus test for the party will hold.

Take Limbaugh's listening audience. It's overwhelmingly white, male and hard core conservative. That was and still is the GOP's bread and butter constituency. They vote, are outspoken on issues, bully and badger party moderates and dissenters, and when fully aroused can inflame millions of voters around the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and rights, and tax cuts. GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked on these voters for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance. The strategy was simple; say and do as little as possible about civil rights, talk God, country and patriotism, use racially tinged code words and furiously court white males. The strategy worked like a political charm for four decades.

Limbaugh knows that and is never shy about saber rattling the GOP and at times he can still pack a mean political wallop against GOP apostates. When Georgia rep Phil Gentry had the temerity to accuse Limbaugh of taking holier than thou cheap shots at GOP congresspersons, Limbaugh quickly whipped up the talk show pack against him. Gentry got the message to button it up, and he did. Limbaugh is not presumptuous enough to take full credit for pumping steel in the back of GOP congresspersons to oppose much of the Obama economic stimulus bill, branding it another "pet liberal project." But he's come close.

Limbaugh's finger in the dike last stand and hike in radio popularity ratings can't change one fact. The GOP is an insular party of Deep South and narrow Heartland, rural and, non-college educated blue collar whites. That's not a demographic to be totally sneered at, because the numbers are still huge. But the number of voters who don't fit that demographic are even bigger and are fast changing.

In the past decade the number of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters has leaped to nearly one quarter of the nation's electorate. At the same time, blue collar white voters shrunk from more than half of the nation's voters to less than forty percent. Obama handily won the Hispanic and Asian vote and crushed Republican rival John McCain with the black vote. In the next four years, the number of non-white and youth voters will continue to climb and the white electorate overall will drop even more.
No matter, Limbaugh has milked the Obama bash for all it's worth and at least for the moment has managed to cower a big chunk of the GOP into keeping the party the kind of party he likes. And he'll keep using a white man's litmus test to do it.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

No wonder American corporations are in big trouble, filing Chapter 11 (sometimes even Chapter 8) or pleading for bailouts. Once highly independent organizations that were always crying to keep government out of their business, now want Uncle Sam (that means all of us) to save them from their terrible business decisions. Their bankruptcies, of course, also cost us, since by stiffing their creditors, they weaken the banks, and we get the bill for bailing out the banks

While Kellogg Corporation, the maker of Frosted Flakes among other high sugar breakfast cereals, may not have asked for governmental assistance yet, their cultural tone- deafness is emblematic of what is wrong with private enterprise today.

Detroit can't or won't build cars that people want to buy. Major clothing companies can't design and produce fashions that people want to wear. Well, actually that may be the problem. They're designing fashions and not clothing.

Companies have always tried to boost sales with celebrity spokesmen. Sometimes they create a natural synergy Bob Dole and Viagra. Sometimes it doesn't really fit. Bill Clinton and Viagra would just be wrong. Some aren't really good fits but aren't hideously inappropriate like Tiger Woods and Buick. Some fits would just be bad, say Alberto Gonzales as a spokesman for the ACLU. Sometimes corporations having no sense but lots of cowardice and bail on their spokesmen. Sometimes they run from a news story and then come back-truth be dammed. Kobe lost some sponsors for a while following his rape charge. The sponsors are back.

But now Michael Phelps has lost Frosty Flakes and his Power Bar endorsement is said to be in trouble. Why? He was photographed taking a hit on a presumably marijuana bong. Whatever the legal consequences may or should be, losing these particular sponsors is strange and perverse. While athlete thugs get charged with performance enhancing drug use and continue to play, while jocks build up rap sheets of criminal complaints from domestic battery to gun charges, Phelps is flogged for marijuana?

Please. Finding a 22-year old who has not tried marijuana is like finding a cabinet nominee that has paid all his taxes and has the nanny thing under control. It is not that I'm encouraging anyone to use illegal drugs, it is just that we all know that they do. Show me a 22-yearold who says he has never tried an illegal substance and I'll show you either a friendless person or a liar.

I could actually understand Phelps losing his Speedo endorsement. Marijuana does not make you go faster. But Frosty Flakes of Power Bars? Come on. There is a completely natural tie in. "Dude, when I get the munchies and want a sugary snake, I go for Frosty Flakes." "Hey, you ever wonder how I cram in twenty-thousand calories a day? Well, I boost my appetite with a little THC and then I can stuff six Power Bars down and swim a couple of miles."

This is the perfect synergy of athlete, product and recreation. If Kellogg drops Phelps, they should be disqualified from any governmental assistance. They're just to out of touch to succeed. Hmmm. Wonder if they're stoned?
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

It is true what they say about history; it usually does repeat itself. Take what is happening to the Jewish community in Venezuela that culminated with the January 30 attack on Caracas' oldest synagogue, Tifferet Israel.

This was not an isolated incident of vandalism, but the culmination of attacks on Israel by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has accused the Israeli government of genocide against the Palestinians and more recently to a post on the government website, Aporrea.

On the site, 35 year-old mathematics' professor, Ernesto Silva, called the Jews squalid, anti-government conspirators and called for a protest at the Tifferet Israel Synagogue as well as that of Jewish businesses, the closing of Jewish schools and a nationwide effort to denounce the members of Jewish organizations.

"Publicly challenge every Jew you find on the street, shopping center or park," he wrote, "and shout slogans in favor of Palestine and against that abortion, Israel."

The government later removed the post and apologized, but by then it was too late and the damage had already been done. About a week later, on January 30, about 15 men, allegedly some of them security guards, broke into the synagogue, spray painted, "Jews, get out!" on a wall, destroyed religious objects and broke into the synagogue's database.

Seventy years have passed since Kristalnacht, that November 9, 1938 night when the Nazis looted and destroyed Jewish businesses in the state-sponsored pogrom that is considered the beginning of the Holocaust.

They say that bad things happen not because bad people do things but because good people do nothing.

____________________________________________________________________
President Omaba: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

Main Switchboard, (202) 456-1414, Comment Line, (202) 456-1111

Sen. Feinstein (202) 224-3841

Sen. Boxer (202) 224-3553

Rep. Berman (202) 225-4695 (Encino, Studio City, east end of the Valley)

Rep. Brad Sherman (202) 225-5911 (Reseda, western part of the Valley)

In her NBC interview Octuplet mom Nadya Suleman was irked at getting pounded for being a single mother with fourteen kids. Or in her words, "it's not as controversial because they're couples so its more acceptable." She had good reason to be irked, but she should be irked at herself too for doing much to reinforce that stigma. For the past half century single mothers have been ritually dumped on by everyone from liberal sociologists to Christian fundamentalists and even self-promoting gabber Ann Coulter. They are the fall women for every real and perceived malady in society; poverty, crime, drug use, personal profligacy, welfare dependency, bad acting, and even worse performing students, and of course, family breakdown.

As for Coulter, she got hammered for beating up on single mothers in her new book while letting the guys who shove the women into single motherhood skip away scot free. This was more a hit against Coulter than a real defense of single mothers. The perception is just too deeply ingrained that single mothers create babies and problems for a momentary attack on Coulter to change that perception.

Suleman is naive, in denial, or blind to the power of the negative single mom image to think that her pleading for the bashers to knock it off will fall on anything but the tinnest of tin ears. If anything, having eight babies, on top of six, and then hinting that her over the top baby making is a good thing without a prospective father sighting anywhere, fuels public wrath over the folly of babies and single mothers even more. But leaving aside questions of moral right, ethical propriety or even Suleman's legal responsibility, all have been hotly debated, the truth is that single mothers do not cause a terrible society, but do fare terribly in society.

And there are a lot of single mothers. At last count nearly 40 percent of children are born out of marriage. In the majority of those cases the mothers will stay that way. The figures for lower income black and Hispanic women almost all Suleman's age or a decade or even decades younger than her are far greater than for unmarried white mothers. The number of single mothers are inching up after a decade long drop from the mid 1990s to 2005.

The demographic of who gets pregnant and is single is predictable They're young, have multiple births, are non college educated, or even high school educated, and invariably poor. In their, Child Wellbeing Study, Princeton University researchers tracked 5,000 single mothers in who are charitably called Fragile Families. The women gave birth between 1998 and 2000 and all claimed that they wanted to get married.

The wish didn't get any further than a wish. In a follow-up survey, most did not get married and a fair share of them had more babies by multiple partners. They had done little to improve themselves educationally or boosted their income. The Princteon findings are not unique. This reinforces the belief that single mothers are inherently doomed to wallow in poverty and want, and that their children are doomed to be congenital gang bangers, drive by shooters, and drug peddlers and jail and early cemetery fodder.

Many single mothers swear as Suleman has that they will be good, devoted and loving mothers and that they will be able to foot the bill for their children's care and upbringing. That's not a small point in the furor over single mothers. The prospect that Suleman who's not only a single mother but an unemployed single mother who filed workers compensation claims, bankruptcy, and had a mountain of debt, might put the state (taxpayers) in hock for the medical care and treatment of the octuplets drew loud howls of protest.

This is not a totally unfair concern. Kaiser Hospital shelled out a reported cool million for delivery, treatment, and care costs for the octuplets. Few single mothers, and that certainly includes Suleman, have a prayer of paying this cost out of pocket. Suleman gave no indication that she had a clue that someone else will have to pay the staggering cost of their ongoing care.

This is not to pass moral judgment on Suleman's act, legions have already done plenty of that. Suleman may well prove her scoffers, bashers, and revilers all wrong. She may find a way to pay the freight for all 14 children, provide them with a warm, stable and loving home, and even stroll down the aisle with a mate. This would transform her from the poster single mom for irresponsible induced baby making to a true American motherhood success story. She would hardly be the first single mother to become a productive, paragon of achievement. Anything is posssible.

Whatever happens, Suleman was right that single mother's do unfairly get beat up on for creating societal's ills. Unfortunately Suleman insured that the beating will continue.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

It's unfortunate someone couldn't have caught Nadya Suleman and her physician, the experimenting Dr. Frankenstein, sooner so they could have tried channeling their energies into other areas.

One cannot help but wonder where that doctor's head was, although Suleman has already indicated that hers was nowhere around her shoulders when she told Ann Curry on the "Today" show that she wanted kids to help ease the pain of a lonely childhood. I don't know the exact reasons for having kids, but this I do know: That isn't it.

Also, aside from Jerry Springer and some Oprah shows, what private citizen goes on national television and advertises that theirs was a dysfunctional family when the average celebrity already has dibs on that market?

If Nadya Suleman wants to multiply like a fly, then that's her choice, but her doctor should be stripped of his license not only for participating in a Frankenstein-esque experiment but for selecting someone who is going to get John and Jeanette Q. Public to pick up the tab and who will probably peter out well before her kids hit that vast stretch of open space otherwise known of as adolescence.

Mariel wants us to leave Nadya alone. Fair enough. We skeptics are not planning on stalking her or locking her up. But just as she was free to do what she did, we're free to criticize a person with limited resources for hogging healthcare resources that are so precious that our new president considers it his top priority beyond the overall economy and national security.

I have many libertarian traits; my own blend could be described as a desire for a government that permits people to do anything and a culture that encourages people to do the right thing. Medical ethicists and talk-radio callers and all of us are correct to be discerning "what's right" here, even if it doesn't become a federal or state law.

I don't care when, where or how Nadya Suleman satisfies her desire to procreate. That's between her, her maker and that half-witted doctor. The only time I care is when it comes time to paying the bills. That's when my pain begins.

While some people do love kids, for others, the whole thing has become a giant Publisher's Baby Clearinghouse where the parents are the guaranteed winners while John and Jeanette Q. Public winds up paying the bill.

If I leaned that way, I would have had a daycare center full of kids myself. First off, they are a tax write off, and if a family qualifies, they can get money for rent, a monthly check, food stamps and medical care just to name a few perks (cha-cha-cha-ching). Which explains why some people become foster parents. At $500.00 per child, they let five, six or seven kids into their homes and castles and collect $3,500.00/ month in the process, while the rest of us slave away and support them.

Yet money doesn't appear to be a motive for Ms. Suleman who has said she loves kids. But if she feels that strongly about them, then she should at least find a way to support them rather than popping out several at once while allowing John and Jeanette Q. Public to pay for everything and her mother to provide shelter, although this woman, the only sane and rational person in the whole mess, has threatened to leave.

Add all the Nadya Sulemans of the world to all the bad home loans and therein lies an explanation for our current economic catastrophe.

Ok, I'll leave Nadya alone. But I say we go after her doctor.

Isn't one of the tenets of modern medicine "first, do no harm"? So what kind of doctor implants eight (or more) embryos in an obviously fertile woman who does not believe in selective reduction, potentially putting the mother and her babies at risk?

I don't necessarily think we should be legislating baby making -- although some European countries do regulate fertility clinics. But I do think fertility doctors and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine need to take a hard look at their guidelines and standards. Apparently, the groups have established that a 33-year-old woman like Suleman should not be implanted with more than two embryos during an in vitro cycle. So what are the consequences for rogue clinics? Nothing. What about counseling or a mental health evaluation for a prospective client, especially one who is a single mom with six other children? Not required.

Fertility treatment is a big business and people desperate for a baby (or eight) may be willing to shop around until they find a doctor willing to ignore guidelines. Births of triplets and greater multiples have a 97 percent chance of being premature, which bring the cost of delivery and neonatal medical care to $51,000 per birth, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Plus, the children are at greater risk of severe health problems and developmental disabilities.

There should not be regulations on who gets to reproduce, but there should be repercussions when doctors aid in reproduction that is dangerous to mother and child.

I don't want to get too Zen here, but should you be allowed to do something just because you can? I don't believe the state should legislate the number of births, the marital status or economic standing for parents. Sill, Nadya Suleman's fourteen children are a public issue that involves not just the right to have children but the technology that society allows to be brought into play.

Anti-choice people don't want us to play God. Fair enough, but aren't we playing God with the reproductive technology of in vitro fertilization and implantation? Shouldn't the ability of a patient to select a procedure--whether reproductive or plastic surgery--be limited by some grown-up's view of the physical and emotional state of the patient? Is a baby-obsessed person (as Nadya's mother calls her) able to give informed consent to implanting eight eggs? Is her doctor obligated to implant every egg because it's technically possible?

If you were a doctor, say a plastic surgeon, and Michael Jackson came to you for more nose work, would you be legally or morally obligated to fulfill his desire just because you could and he could pay? If you believed that doing a procedure wouldn't meet the deeper desire (or neurosis) of the patient, would you still give them what they demanded? What Nadya did shouldn't be against the law, but it is malpractice.

It may take Child Protective Services a while to get on the case or for Nadya to collapse under the strain, but can I find just one of you who believes that she will have custody of all her kids in three years? As Mariel wrote, "send her pampers," but my advice is to omit your return address. Although, one way or another, you and I will be helping to raise these kids.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

Who really knows whether Nadya Suleman is a wacko, delusional, a deadbeat mom, or a genuine, caring feeling mother. She's been hailed, but mostly reviled with one or more of these tags. The near universal opinion is that the eight pregnancies could and should have been avoided.

We do know this. Someone will have to pay for the care and upbringing of Suleman's eight strong brood (plus six others). That someone almost certainly won't be Suleman. That someone will be taxpayers. We will have to foot the bill for neonatal care, doctor and hospital visits, as well as getting back and forth to those visits, ongoing home care, and dozens of other big and little hidden costs of health and child care times eight. The tab will likely come to millions. Kaiser has already forked out a cool million or more for the birth and deliveries and extended care at its Bellflower facility.

Make no mistake the kids have to be cared for. And here's who should pay for that care. Kaiser which milked the mother and the story for all it was worth (Kaiser grossed 34 billion gross last year) should pay. The insurer of the doctor, clinic or the fertility drug mfg. which egged (pun intended) her on should pay. The throng that allegedly cheered her on and defended her decision to have all eight should pay. The Catholic Church and the legions of anti-choice groups that praised her for her decision to do the supposed morally right thing and not abort any of the kids should pay. Pay Pay Pay all and but please let the taxpayers off the hook.

I'm pro-choice, and that means a woman should have the choice to have no babies, or to have 14 babies if her body is up to it.

And that's the choice that Nadya Suleman, the Whittier mother of six who recently gave birth to octuplets, made when she found that all her fertilized embryos were viable. Apparently, her belief was that terminating them was killing them, and it was her right to make that choice.

Yet, people who know nothing about this woman have been weighing in on her character based on a few questionable facts, and concluding she's some sort of horrible person because she wants to raise a bunch of babies. Some have even suggested that she be prevented from having babies because of her mental state. Wow! Does anyone really want to start down the slippery slope of regulating who gets to reproduce?

No one should force a woman to make a choice about having or not having babies. That's what being pro-choice is all about. Besides, my grandfather came from a family of 22 kids, and he turned out ok.

So please, leave Nadya alone. She's got enough to worry about with eight preemies. And if you can't leave her alone, then at least send her a pack of Pampers.

Can Tom Daschle, Tim Geithner and Nancy Killefercan save our nation? Yes, today we look at them as either incompetents or tax-evading scofflaws, but we can also see them as rolemodels leading us to fiscal responsibility.

As a nation we are in a panic worrying about the lousy economy and the staggering deficits. Republicans accuse Democrats of being big "tax and spenders," motivated by some perverse love of imposing taxes. Democrats accuse Republicans of being "spenders without taxes--and therefore without income. Let's agree that as Americans we have a society and economy that is based on living beyond our means. As long as real estate goes up, our unreal estates become ATMs and the bills seems like it will never come due. As long as the stock market goes up, we can spend money as if we actually had it. Intelligent people might differ on when the bubble would burst, but we must agree that the nature of bubbles is to burst.

So now we're all worried about how to spend our way out of a problem caused by spending money we didn't have. How can we save the economy? How can we spend even more money we don't have? These are good questions, but both sides seem to forget the income side of our economic equation. We don't need to raise taxes. We need to collect taxes.

For years we assumed that Democrats vote taxes for Republicans to pay and that poor Democrats didn't really have to worry about paying. The Republicans spent millions trying to figure out tax dodges, shelters and how to open off-shore bank accounts. It turns out that Democrats have more money than we might have guessed and they don't like paying taxes either. While Republicans evade with clever schemes, Democrats seem to plead incompetence.

The new head of treasury, who is responsibly for the IRS, didn't know he was supposed to pay self-employment tax, and then when he found out, he only paid the money due within the statute of limitations. Not till he was nominated for Secretary of the Treasury did he feel that he should pay all his back taxes. The nominee for the new position of making sure the government ran honestly also forgot to pay taxes and withholding on some of her personal employees. And Daschle forgot that the car and driver he was "given" were taxable as compensation.

I'm not sure which explanations I prefer--being clever schemers or incompetent dufi. Whatever your personal preference, at least we have a solution.

Since just three people--Daschle, Killefercan and Geithner--ponied up a couple of hundred thousand bucks in back taxes and penalties, imagine how wealthy we would be if people paid what they actually owed? So, all we have to do is go through the lists of all the bonus-receiving executives from Wall Street, all the major contributors to both parties, all the lobbyists and, of course, the entertainment industry; then we simply nominate them to serve in the government as advisors, in cabinet positions, special assistants to the president and ambassadors. If nothing concentrates the mind as much as the prospect of being hanged in the morning. Surely the second best concentrator of minds would be the prospect of being confirmed by Congress. The money would just flow in.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org

HONG KONG -- I continue to soak up the economic news here, in this finance-obsessed city, and ponder whether traditional capitalism is being forged into something new in the crucible of global economics.

Just a few years ago, smart people claimed that states are becoming less relevant than markets. But now that the markets are collapsing, all the businesses in Asia and America and Europe are begging states to bail them out. After all, GM can't force you to buy its car; but GM can beg Uncle Sam to tax you in order to bail out GM. It's happening around the world, as China and other nations are readying massive bailouts and job-creation programs.

The premise of libertarians and small-government conservatives is that the market should run free, unfettered by government policies, taxes or regulations. The rub is that, when industries in Country B are getting a boost from Country B's tax coffers, you're no longer in a "free market." You can have a market that's regulated to a larger or smaller degree, but you no longer can claim to keep government "out."

Chinese officials are apparently worried that their investment in America's massive debt could be threatened if other nations start pulling out of investing in America's debt. I'm not sure exactly how that would work, but I could imagine some market forces or political forces pushing money from Dubai, Russia and elsewhere away from America, causing the U.S. to suffer and leaving China holding the bag.

It's a lot of things, but it's not a "free market" anymore. Governments run economies. Our government has run a debt-ridden economy -- and thus is now even more beholden to various to outside forces than would otherwise have been the case.

Okay, they've had enough fun in Sacramento. Playtime is over, and posing time has come to an end. Our legislature has a constitutionally mandated duty to put a budget together. They are now, and have been for many months, in breach of both the law and their duty. Who pays for their reckless fecklessness? We do. We pay in higher interest rates, in having to borrow funds and now by their withholding not only services due us but also our own money.

Are these budgetary issues really impossible to fix? Let's find out. First withhold their pay and move to collect all monies paid out to them since they have been in constitutional breach. Then cut off the air conditioning and heat in their offices. Stop paying their staffs. This mess that they have created should have shared consequences.

If they remain in breach, then it will be time to consider a tax strike. They don't give us our money--well, we might want to withhold the money they think is theirs!
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.org