Idol Chatter

How should we react to politicians hobnobbing with some of the same folks he or she has publicly denounced? Now I’m not necessarily coming down on President Obama who is attending a very swanky dinner to raise funds for the Democratic party – even when some of the Wall Street tycoons who have been paying themselves huge bonuses he’s publicly denounced will be there. That would be trying to paint him worse than any other politician which wouldn’t be fair. What is fair is to say that the president’s behavior does make him no different than your average politician – he is just another politician.

Fortunately I’m no idealist and I don’t put anyone on a pedestal so there is no resounding THUD as overblown, overly optimistic dreams of a super hero like leader hits the ground like a watermelon thrown off a tall building breaking into a thousand pieces and just leaving clean up for those who had hoped for so much.

And, it’s necessary affairs like these than makes you wonder how politicians make peace with themselves after catering to some of the very people they propose to be against. I’m not sure how they do it. Perhaps they argue that it’s for the greater good or that the ends justifies the means.

I certainly hope the dinner was tasty!

I’ll admit upfront that the following is a bit off topic. I’ve taken a little time off and in my rummaging around the Internet, I found some sites that I really like.

The first is for those of you who like to cook and, perhaps just as much, like finding good recipes and chatting about it online. The site, Home Cooking Connection, is a fun site with tons of great recipes and a forum for devotees to chat with each other. Aside from recipes, there are also good articles that discuss things like party planning and simple table decorations. So for a killer bacon dip, go pay them a visit.

But to be honest, more of my time has been working on my yard. I have to admit it, my landscaping (if I could even still call it that) had become hugely overgrown. So with the help of my brother-in-law all sorts of things have been ripped out and the place looks 110% better. While I was looking online for some yard ideas, I found Reel Yard which is a site that has a ton of good info about how to improve your lawn (my ‘grass’ had far too many weeds in it for my taste) and extols the benefits of using a reel mower to cut your grass. I didn’t even know those things existed.

Well that’s all for now, I’ll be back more regularly but for now, I’ve got a cedar stump to remove before sunset!

With the cash for clunkers program scheduled to end tomorrow night, the question should be asked who really benefited? Sure the folks who bought cars and got rebates benefited from a reduced price on their car and the auto dealers certainly liked the program but with billions of dollars spent, what did the country as a whole get?

The issue is that this was a very short term spike in car sales which isn’t likely to produce any significant long term benefits to the economy. We’ve given one segment of our economy a short term boost but without any real economic recovery to support continued sales, it’s just a shot in the arm that may make August economic data look better than it really is (if looked at a sustainable basis) and keep the unemployment rate from going any higher. It does not do anything to address any of the real underlying issues in the automotive industry.

Finally there are real concerns that all the cash for clunkers program really did was divert monies that would have been spent on other retail purchases have now be diverted to making a car payment that wasn’t in the family budget before this program Retail sales in July was weak and the back to school spending looks to be down this year. For those struggling in non automotive related retail sales, the cash for clunkers program was not any bargin.

Moreover, many charities that take on used cars are now reporting a significant drop off of donations since the used cars turned in under the cash for clunkers program must be destroyed. That’s frustrating to them and hurts those with limited means.

I’m not against some level of healthcare reform. It would be great to have existing condition exclusions eliminated for example. I’m also all for the creation of some sort of large demographic pool that is open to the public so that by distributing risks over a wide population, the cost of healthcare insurance can come down for individuals and small businesses who often get priced out of coverage.

But the real health issue that confronts this country is the fact that we have become a nation of sedentary, overweight, and lazy Americans. Obesity is at all time high rates, Diabetes continues to climb as a condition of our sedentary lives. And we eat poorly on top of sitting all day. Fast food tends to carry a ton of fat and the American love of French Fries has us consuming a fatty food that also has starchy carbs that hits our bloodstream quickly and causes our bodies to work at just controlling blood sugar levels.

Offering wider inclusion and lower rates to all Americans is great but if we don’t take responsibility for our health, the rate of disease incidents will continue to climb and so will our health costs. It’s inevitable without a change in ourselves, not our healthcare insurance options.

Getting fit is not that hard. Drink more water to reduce your appetite and improve your body’s metabolism is an easy step. Taking a few breathing breaks during the day where you breath deeply will better oxygenate your blood which can actually help you lose a few pounds. It will also relax you and stress reduction will reduce the hormone cortisone in your blood stream which had a whole waterfall of favorable impacts on your body.

And get some exercise!

Come on, exercising is not that big a commitment. There are many workout programs that you can do in your own home. In fact I recently found a great site, Press Play Fitness, where they talk about different, well balanced (weight lifting plus aerobic) programs. Imagine if all you had to do is just show up to exercise. Now isn’t that something you could commit to? Isn’t that something we really should expect of all Americans?

If we want to live in the best country on Earth, we need to make ourselves the best we can be.

Update: September 28th

I wanted to come back to this post because in addition to exercising it seems like we should be eating better as well. I know I need help in that arena so I was interested in this new shake I found. It’s called Shakeology and it had tons of good stuff in it. I’ve been drinking a shake for breakfast and I have to say that I feel better and I dropped 1lb this week. Now I don’t expect to continue to lose weight but it sure was nice to see.

OK don’t shoot me here because I didn’t tape President Obama’s speech last night so I’m writing on memory but I think I’m pretty close on what our President stated in regards to healthcare.  Some of the President’s positioning and arguments seemed far from logical to me.  Here are just two examples:

When asked by a reporter why he was pushing so hard for a bill before the August recess, our President responded by informing the reporter that healthcare costs had doubled in the last ten years which outpaced the average pay increases.  Now I’m not disputing this but I felt it was kind of odd.  Odd because just because healthcare costs doubled in 10 years hardly seems a just cause to push for a bill on what is a very complicated subject in a matter of weeks.  And I also felt that while a doubling of healthcare costs sounds pretty scary, a doubling in 10 years translates to just an 8% inflation rate. 

Sure we’d like to see that decline but college tuition rates have been running just about as high according to http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml which reports an 8% average inflation rate.  High tuition rates are shutting out many of our youth from attaining higher education and those who do leverage up with loans to make it through come out of college with a staggering amount of debt.  My point here is that sure we have issues to deal with to make our dear country the best it can be but healthcare is not our only problem.

The second comment that really caught my eye was when Obama inferred that doctors choose which care to give based on reimbursement.  I find that an insult to all the hard working physicians out there that provide the very best treatment they can.  And beyond that, the President only provided a vague argument about why his plan would force doctors to select the best treatment for a patient over the most lucrative one.

And this plan still hasn’t had it’s funding fully identified.  While the President cited a potential tax on those making over a million in income each year, I find it hard to believe that there are enough $1 million+ pre-tax income individuals out there to cover the huge gap.  I also heard, for the first time, the President say that he wanted to keep tax increases to fund this ‘primarily’ on the well to do.  It sounded like he was opening the door to taxing folks most of us would label ‘middle class’ – just a little.

We all need to research the bill emerging from the house.  If we have objections, we need to raise them with our congressmen and senators.  Don’t complain to your family and friends, complain to those who vote on the bill.

Now more than a week out from the day he passed away, the media is set to spend the entire day commemorating Mr. Jackson and covering the memorial service at the Staples center in LA.  Now I’m not suggesting that Michael in his heyday was anything short of spectacular in his artistic genius.  But that was back in the 80’s.  By the early 90’s there were issues with an alledged child molestation case settled out of court.  His appearance started to change to the bizare and his behaviour was at best described as weird.

Another alledged child molestation case and out of control spending led Mr. Jackson to close Neverland Ranch several years ago.

Mr. Jackson seemed to be a tortured genius and some of his contributions to the world of music certainly need to be acknowledged.  But a week and a half later, I grow weary of hearing more speculation on the man’s death.  I grow weary of what has been a rather one sided presentation of his life (most of the weirdness has been under reported).

Please let the man rest in peace and the rest of us move on to more productive issues.

Is this really news?

I’m still wondering about the so called racy photos many of which are tamer than what you can easily find in a Sears catelog in the ladies panties section.  I mean come on.

But the pot on this is deep and being stirred by many.  There have been accusations that the photos were dug up and released only because of Ms. CA’s stance on gay marriage.  When asked if she personally was for it, she politely said no.  Now many of us feel that this shouldn’t even be a question – that gay marriage isn’t any threat to the fabric of our society and allowing it provides a clear legal protection to loved ones.

But regardless of how you feel, she was asked and was courteous in expressing her honest opinion.  Even when it was a gay man asking the question and even though even she must have considered that to answer with how she really felt could cost her the Ms USA crown.  Now Ms. CA came in as runner up and the rumors flew that she would have won had it not been for her answer.

After losing the top slot, she was asked if she felt her answer led to her losing the USA crown.  She not only said yes, she lent her name to an organization that is against gay marriage.  Many of the Ms. CA contestents who obviousl did not win, started to bad mouth her including allegations that Ms. CA had a boob job.  Now that doesn’t seem to be the spirit of the competition.

Then the photos showed up.  Smear job?  Who knows but all the media attention then forced Mr Trump, owner of the franchise, to render a verdict.  Either way there was bound to be ‘controversy’ if only be the media who need a constant feed of news to report even if it’s not very newsworthy.  So tomorrow we’ll get a few more words and then, with any luck, this will go away.

Then maybe we can focus on more important issues like the pending insolvency of both social security and medicaid.  Who’s covering that?

We no longer need to hold our breath, the bank stress test rating the top 19 banks came out today.  While heralded as all 19 passing, 10 of the 19 need to raise significant capital over the next few months.  Moreover, there are no shiny rainbows to this report.  Considerable new losses can occur.

In a worse case scenario, if unemployment continues to increase coupled with the loss of equity in housing markets, total loan losses could hit 9.1% of total outstanding loans.  To put this in perspective this is a larger loss rate than banks had during the worst of the Great Depression in the 1931-32 time frame.

Unemployment does seem to be key here.  So the question then becomes whether President Obama’s plan will help the unemployment rate.  His own verbiage has changed from one of creating new jobs to keeping jobs to keeping govenment jobs.  Perhaps even he sees that the job creation isn’t happening as he gave American’s hope for.  Even Democrats are talking in hushed tones of a ‘jobless economic recovery’ that if left unmanaged could slaughter them in the 2010 elections.

I’d like to preface this post with a notation that I personally support marriage between gay people.  I am always surprised and confused about the objections those who are against it raise as not having any inherent logic behind it.  That said, I feel that as long as America has free speech, we can’t muzzle folks for having an opinion – especially when asked what their personal opinion is on national television.

I didn’t watch the pagent (had better things to do) but in catching the media buzz after the fact, one has to wonder why Perez Hilton asked such a pointless question.  A far better question would have been to ask the contestant to apine as to whether the issue should be governed by individual states as it is now or by the federal government and why.  Better yet force her to dig deep by then tacking on a second part to the question that forces the contestant to address how the resulting inequitable treatment of Gays between states is fair. But to ask the contestant what her personal opinions were was stupid.  Stupid because there is no good answer to the question.  There was certainly an answer Perez wanted to hear and didn’t but even if she had personally supported the issue of Gay marriage, she may have then offended some other judge.

Now Miss California has lent her name to an organization that is against Gay marriage.  This has offended some – even a few within the California state pagent organization.  This puzzles me a bit.  Again, while I do not support the outcome, the State of California recently took a vote on the issue and voted to retract Gay marriage rights.  So it appears that Miss California is representing her state – or at least the voting majority.

So it seems that the young lady is being harrassed for actually having the moral fiber to say what she believes even if that answer was going to cost her the Miss USA crown.  We don’t know if this runner up would have won with a different answer but the continued public angst against someone who’s willing to stand behind her beliefs says little about us as a country.

Instead I’d like to see someone from the Gay community have a meaningful discussion with her.  In a less harsh and critical environment, this young women and others in the US might just open their minds and begin to see that there can be a more encompassing view of how marriage should be defined.

Will the plan promoted by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to purchase toxic assets held by the financial industry work?  Well that depends on who you ask.  Even two Nobel prize winners in economics can’t seem to agree.  Michael Spence, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics says it will (or at least it can) whilst Paul Krugman, the 2008 economics laureate says it cannot.

So who is correct?  The issue seems to revolve around whether you believe that private investors will want to partner with the government.  As we understand it, the plan is aimed at financing $500 billion to $1 trillion in purchases of illiquid real-estate assets, using $75 billion to $100 billion of the Treasury’s remaining bank-rescue funds. It also will rely on Fed financing and guarantees from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.  According to Bloomberg.com, “A crucial question is whether private investors can stomach potential threats and scrutiny from Congress, whose move last week toward taxing employee bonuses may drive bidders away, said Carnegie Mellon University professor Allan Meltzer, 81, author of a history of the Federal Reserve.”

So we’ll see.

After months of what seemed to be unrelenting bad news, over the last week we’ve actually gotten some good news.  CitiBank reported last week that they were going to earn a profit.  GM indicated they could get by for now without any additional funding.  And for many folks, most happily, the stock market has been trending up.

The US economy is the strongest in the world.  We know we will recover from this recession but it’s just uplifting to hear some good news.  Now we can sit back and consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe the economy has hit it’s low point and is just beginning to bounce back.

Of course recovery won’t happen overnight but it will happen.

After being briefed that the nation’s unemployment rate could increase to 9% today, it’s reported that President Elect Obama is now looking to create or save up to 3 million jobs.  This is a half million more jobs than he had set as a goal last month and now 3 times what he pledged during his election run.

The number coincidently covers the expected number of future job losses now being forcast as the economy continues to wallow in what is now the worst recession in decades.  While admirable to want to keep the nation employed, one has to wonder if these notions are a bit to simplistic.  For one, it ignores the fact that the skills of the people now losing jobs may not come close to what is needed in the government manufactured ones.  Moreover, the concept of bring major government projects aimed at increasing employment to actually getting folks employed quickly is unrealistic.

The unpleasent truth is more likely that we are going to struggle for another year or two before the economy begins to right itself.

OK this is not one of those subjects I tend to spend much time on but in watching the evening news I saw this short spot on how there isn’t the money there used to be in recycling.  Kind of a bummer really when you think about it.  Many of us need a bit of encouragement to ‘do the right thing’  – especialy businesses.  If we can incent them to dispose of trash in an environmentally friendly manner, all the better.

If businesses go from making money by recycling to having to pay for pick up, one has to wonder if they’ll start to opt for just sending it to the landfill.  That would be unfortunate.  Regardless of what you believe about the cause of the worsening of our fagile balance here on Earth, we should all do the right thing to keep our planet not just good for our lifetime but good for the multitude of generations to come.

With the blow up of Sarah Palin’s wardrobe expenditures reportedly totaling around $150K, Campbell Brown of CNN’s No Bias, No Bull put the issue up for pubic debate – do women have to work harder than men?  Are they judged more harshly – especially when it comes to how they look?

We could probably go round and round on this issue.  But perhaps the more interesting subject is how put together do you need to be to step into the political limelight at the level Sarah Palin has?

Sarah’s background is not one the oozes money.  Pictures released of her old wardrobe pre VP run showed a women doing her best with a limited clothing budget but you wouldn’t cite her as having great fashion taste.  Others running for office come from a situation of greater incomes (didn’t Obama make several million last year?) and frankly years to build up the stylish wardrobes they sport.

Looking at all the candidates and their wives (since Sarah is the only women I’ll throw the wives in too) you can see that they all dress extremely well.  I mean come on, if anyone doesn’t think Obama is spending a ton on his wardrobe, not to mention his wife Michelle’s understated high style selections (how often have you seen her look drab or wear the same outfit twice?).  And McCain has a solid wardrobe that probably costs more than it looks and his wife Cindy (who has a fortune) is often sporting top designer wear with lovely if pricely jewelry.

Perhaps the real issue is whether we’d really take anyone who shops at Target seriously.  The unfortunate truth may just be that we are more influenced by the proverbial ‘book cover’ than we want to admit.

This week the girls go bonkers. Well maybe or maybe not, I suppose it depends on your point of view.

In the Democratic camp, Barbra Streisand takes out after John McCain. Clearly this gal does not like that guy. Well when your are so deeply entrenched in the democratic leftist mentality this type of attack can hardly be surprising. Babs calls McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin ‘desperate and irresponsible’ and that it was pandering to women.

Pandering? Well that’s a personal call but one could argue that Obama’s pick of Biden was uninspired and unimaginative.

In the other corner, Elizabeth Hasselbeck from The View takes a shot at Michelle Obama after John McCain’s wife Cindy was interviewed on ‘The View’. According to Elizabeth, who as far right as Babs is left in her political views, she enjoyed that Mrs. McCain came on just to talk and took a shot at Michelle who apparently had a rather extensive list of subjects that were not to be brought up.

Maybe Mrs. Obama had an ‘off limits’ list but come on Elizabeth, it’s The View, not 60 Minutes. Give Michelle a break – she’s not running for office, her husband is.

Perhaps both gals ought to stop spewing negative feeds about what they don’t like and spend more time bringing focus to issues we really need to deal with. That’s a vote to grow up gals!