Personal Musings category archive

While I was looking at the headlines this morning, I remembered this building:

It’s an old debtors prison. It’s where persons who couldn’t pay their debt used to go until they could pay their debts. A student of the dialectic will immediately recognize the internal contradiction in that practice. Persons in prison generally aren’t in a position to earn money so as to pay off anything.

This is a new debtors prison:

Rant Follows

No. Not California.

Well, in addition to California.

Rich white guys who have jobs and work for the Wall Street Journal:

President Obama’s speeches on the economy are needlessly scaring the daylights out of the American people.

In an effort to ensure swift passage of his fiscal stimulus plan, which is aimed at arresting the recession, the president and his aides have used jargon that risks making it worse, to say the least.

Sorry, buddy. Whislin’ don’t put food on the table.

. . . makes great camping gear.

And lousy Senators.

I recently listened to this segment of Talk of the Nation (follow the link to listen to it):

Candidate Barack Obama received largely favorable news coverage during the campaign. Some critics believe that softer coverage has continued since he became President. Do you think journalists are doing a good job, and what questions do you wish they would ask?

One of the callers referred to Deborah Howell’s November 9, 2008, column, in which she analyzed the Washington Post’s campaign coverage (follow the link for the full column, which includes a lot of numbers and covers much more than the op-ed page):

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board’s endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

The caller posited that, since the number of stories favorable to Obama was greater than the number of stories favorable to McCain, the press therefore wanted Obama to win. (Read Ms. Howell’s column; the caller put words in her mouth. The caller’s word-twisting was positively Rovian and, laudably, the panel politely called him on it.)

His reasoning is purebred invalid syllogism:

The panel on the show took issue with the caller’s assertion of favoritism on two points:

• Reporting a more favorable story doesn’t mean that the reporter is rooting for the subject of the story.
• Reporting a more favorable story may reflect who’s in the lead; winners tend to get better coverage than losers.

Note that, in the U. S. press, George Washington gets more favorable coverage than King George III of England. Left unsaid in the discussion:

Reporting a more favorable story, whether it’s a story about a football team, a restaurant, a television show, or a political candidate, may reflect nothing more than that the subject of that story is better than the competition.

Furrfu.

Japanese electronics company Pioneer Corp. will cut 10,000 jobs globally to cope with sinking sales of car audio equipment and flat-screen TVs. It will also withdraw from its money-losing plasma display business.

Yeah, I know it’s absurd. No UAW in either Japan or the consumer electronics industry.

So too are Republican attempts to blame their mess on honest working persons.

Without pay.

I do not envy the governors, mayors, county supervisors, and their colleagues faced with balancing budgets because the bottom has fallen out of the economy, therefore cutting their revenues off at the knees.

A day after New Castle County Executive Chris Coons suggested 26 furlough days for county employees, the possibility of the state taking similar action to help close next fiscal year’s $606 million deficit loomed large.

Furloughs are among many options, including reductions in employee benefits, large cuts or possible tax increases listed as measures that could be used to put the state in the black. But Gov. Jack Markell has noted that, when laying off 1,000 state employees would save just $50 million, simple furloughs would make a minimal dent in the money gap.

A typical work year contains 260 or 261 work days.

Twenty-six unpaid days = 10% pay cut.

More below the Fold

And more and more of them are like this (*.wav, 27 seconds, edited to remove name and phone number).

No, I’m not calling him back. Given the terms of my mortgage, he can’t do any of the things he promises to do.

The Masters of the Universe aren’t.

This bozo causes me to be ashamed of being a Virginian.

No. Really.

Back in the olden days, when I was a beardless boy, it was taught that the purpose of a business in a capitalist system was to provide goods and services of value, act as a responsible corporate citizen, and, in the process, make a profit.

That has morphed into provide goods and services of value, act as a responsible corporate citizen, and, in the process, make a profit.

Rant Follows

No, not here. You betcha!

Sir Fred Goodwin and Sir Tom McKillop, respectively the former chief executive and chairman of RBS, and Andy Hornby and Lord Stevenson, respectively the former chief executive and chairman of HBOS, apologised to the Treasury select committee for failing to prevent the circumstances that led their banks being taken largely into public ownership.

That is compensation slang for a compensation program that attracts, retains, and motivates persons.

The often unstated truth is that, for most persons, pay in and of itself is not a motivator. If persons believe they are being compensated fairly, they just don’t worry about pay all that much. (Lack of pay, of course, is a motivator of sorts.)

In contrast, perceived unfair pay is a hell of a demotivator.

Wall Street, though, speaks as if pay is the only motivator; that is their defense of their bonus practices.

Dave Weidner considers this on MarketWatch:

If, as you threaten, we lose the so-called “best people” on Wall Street, then so be it.

If these are the same “best people” that former Merrill Lynch & Co. Chief Executive John Thain talked about in defending the 11th-hour bonus payout he made before his deal wit (sic) Bank of America closed, then what happens without the best people? Does Merrill lose double the near $30 billion it lost last year?

The big gray monster in the room that no one mentions is this:

Considering their performance, these were clearly not the “best people.” Indeed, they were clearly not (recalling the classifications in the old Sears Catalog) the better or even the good people.

They are buffons who drove their companies into the damned ground and are pulling the rest of us behind them.

Pay for performance my anatomy.

Calm down all ready, suggests the Booman.

Frankly, I do not think we have a 24-hour news cycle, not here in politically-oriented Blogistan (left or right).

We have a 24-hour hysteria cycle.

Not every event in every day is the life or death of the Republic, for heaven’s sake.

This morning, Joe Scarborough was on Weekend Edition Saturday. (You can listen to the interview here.)

Among other things, he bleated about not expecting Obama to take off the gloves so quickly, as if, somehow, Mr. Obama was being gratuitously partisan.

Combating intransigence requires firmness.

In observing Republicans in their natural habitat, one must watch their actions and discount their words.

Scarborough left out the part about the Republican Party’s party-line intransigence, their insistence on demonstrating fealty to their corporate masters and to clinging to the policies of de- and non-regulation, tax cuts for the rich and big business, and tolerance of lawlessness, so long as it is the rich who are acting lawlessly, policies that have not just failed, but that have proven inimical to the safety and welfare of the nation and its citizens.

Then there’s that Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq.

Yes, quite the upstanding little group of folks.

Once again, disregard their words and watch their actions.

Republicans define “bipartisanship” and “compromise” as getting what they want the way they want it.

Nothing else does for them.

Q. E. D.

A bit of a fuss down the road over a new Hooters (emphasis added):

“We all know what Hootersis (sic) about,” she said. “If it was a family restaurant, it would be called Scooters. The waitresses are scantily clad. They’re provocative, and I don’t know whether that kind of establishment belongs in a neighborhood shopping center.”

Marc Clymer, president of the Meadowood Civic Association that represents the neighborhood behind the shopping center, echoes those concerns.

If it were named Scooters and everything else were the same, there would be less fuss. Hooters is really rather innocuous compared to any Delaware beach in July.

The fuss about Hooters had more to do with its name than with the activities.

Read more »

Politics is classically defined as the art of the practical. Republicanism is the art of the intractable.

If Mr. Obama tried to appoint me to something, I’d never survive the headlines.

I’ve been filing income tax returns for 40 years. I’ve made three or four mistakes. All have been resolved with no hard feelings (I won some, I lost some), but my public career would already be toast.

Why the hell any person of honor is willing to subject him- or herself to the pie-throwing contest that passes for public discourse is beyond me.

To hear the Republican Party prattle on about “fiscal responsibility” as if it were something that the party actually understood is sick-making.

Delaware Liberal has another take.

My mp3 player classifies its contents by all this fancy meta stuff, such as “Genre,” “Artist,” “Album,” and several others. Since I use it for podcasts and radio shows and those classifications are for music, they are pretty much irrelevant, except for “Artist.”

But wait! There’s more!

After the fuss over Zoe Baird some years ago, there really is no excuse for persons in public life not to be certain that their dealings with anyone who has done work for them in their homes are squeaky clean. (The Baird case involved undocumented workers.)

At the same time, I wonder . . .

Read more »