Yeah, Phil Gramm stepped down as McCain's economic advisor after his comment about Americans being whiners, and the recession being psychological.**
**The actual quote is "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession....We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline."
But you know full well that Gramm is still The Dollar Man for McCain. The fact that Gramm has a PhD in economics apparently lends him a presumption of respectability and has convinced McCain that Gramm must know something about the subject in which he got his Doctorate. But your degrees don't define you nearly as much as your values and perceptions do, and no degree can impart wisdom and objectivity. And who is Gramm?
And here we go again. Uh-huh. Seems our beloved gummint has conclusively proved that WT7, as in World Trade center #7, fell down and went boom due to an aggravated fire, and that "conspiracy nuts" should be all ashamed because we fail to get the joke.
Not the first time for me, of course.
I spent a chunk of yesterday taking phone surveys for my local Democratic Party. The goal was information, not persuasion. Three simple questions: Do you plan on voting for Obama, do you plan on voting for the Democratic candidate for governor in Vermont, and which issues are most important to you as a voter? I come away with two distinct impressions: (1) very few people are home during the day, and (2) an appreciable number of citizens have bought the Republican smears of Barack and Michelle Obama verbatim.
Meanwhile, back at the shamolic economy, courtesy those lovable buffoons known as our government, the word in the wind is that a big US bank is about to implode...
But which one?
After watching the presidential forum at Rick Warren's Saddleback church on Saturday, I was amazed at how complimentary the media has been of John McCain's performance. The media was so kind to McCain after the forum that they missed (or ignored) the biggest jaw-dropper of the night -- his answer to the question of which Supreme Court justices he would not have nominated.
Among the hired guns and tonsils that represent American Business interests at every level, and in every noook and cranny of America, my vote for the most shameless hack is the one and only Neil Cavuto of Fox. While many others on Fox and CNBC and the major broadcast channels mouth the same line--notably Lawrence Kudlow--Cavuto appears to be the standard bearer for the "business is sooooo ethical" scam.
Since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act following the Enron debacle, the business community has ascribed every form of evil to that law. Hannah Clark of Forbes once described how the business world feels about the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act this way:
According to critics, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has caused a litany of ills: Executives are retiring early, public companies are going private, foreign firms are listing abroad and U.S. firms are losing their competitive edge. The sweeping law, written in the wake of the Enron scandal, has served as a scapegoat for all the evils facing corporate America since it was passed in 2002.
The legislation has been demonized by "libertarians" large
(the Cato Institute) and small (
John Stossel). But guess what...
Ever notice that any attempt"any attempt at all"to restrain corporate actions in any way"any way at all"immediately produces a spate of articles and studies showing that the attempt is outrageous (or destructively expensive or costing jobs or putting the US at a disadvantage or contrary to the universal desires of God and nature)? Take corporate taxes (I wish the government would take some).
According to USA Today, the much insipid TSA has decided it's time to take on general aviation...
Sort of, that is....
So Obama has the audacity to point out that under-inflated tires can save as much oil--now--as we might obtain from the GOPs new drilling proposals--years from now. Well, it doesn't take the GOP (Geniuses on Parade) long to think, "Eureka! This could be Obama's Dukakis in a tank moment. Assemble the ridicule brigades! Call up the derision squad and arm them with extra irony and exclamation points!!!!!!!" But.....
