Idol Chatter

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.

I was just reading the following over at the Washington Post:

The Treasury on Thursday offered six life insurers capital infusions under the Troubled Assets Relief Program. The precise terms of the proposed investments have not yet been negotiated.

All of the life insurers that received the offers have stock that is publicly traded, providing a constant measure of investor confidence. They had to apply for the money by last November, and some took other steps to shore up their finances during the long wait for Treasury approval.

Now it appears that some companies including Ameriprise Financial will be declining the funds.  Decline free money?  Now on the surface that may not seem very logical but like most things in life, the funds come with some hidden costs.  The Washington Post article speculates that one main consideration may be that the funds come with restrictions on executive pay.  Now that may be a factor but frankly I’d have to suspect that possible dilution of the company’s stock value is a bigger concern.  After all, if stockholders see their stock prices decline, they are more likely to vote out the CEO and other key officers.

What is more interesting is that most of these companies are deciding they just don’t need the money because they are not financially strapped.  If that is the case, why are they being offered the money?  If the Government has funds to give out, what about more ways to send funds to small businesses which are likely to be decimated in numbers by the time this economy turns around.

The current administration continues to help out the industry giants who severely mismanaged funds while almost completely ignoring the Mom & Pop shops who continue to face squeezes on their credit lines and credit rates.  This at a time when revenues are down is just going to kill many businesses and further increase this nation’s unemployment rate.

If only some of that attention and financial assistance that big companies are being offered who don’t need it were directed to small business, we just might see this economy pull out a bit faster.

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.

It’s April 15th and that means it’s tax day here in the US.  You need to file today (your return or an extension).  When we look at how much we pay in taxes we have to wonder how this amount could go up if the current administration continues to spend at a hectic pace.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the wealthiest 5% cannot pay for the spending increases contemplated in the budget Obama wants with a modest increase in the tax rates.  That means that either less must be spent or more will see taxes increasing.

So think about how much more you want to pay the next time you hear the administration touting how the full budget must be approved.

In what seems to almost be his trademark style, President Barack Obama is taking Europe by storm in what is his first visit as our President.  His wife, Michelle, our first lady is making an almost equally impressive impression as she meets with England’s Queen as well as normal school girls.

What is not clear is whether there is any real progress being made in a cohesive effort among the world’s leading countries to end the current recession.  Certainly the President brought enough staff to get that job done but the likelihood of accomplishing anything meaningful in such a short time frame is not probable.

Meanwhile the economy continues to show us a mixed bag.  Home sales are increasing but prices are lowering.  Unemployment continues to increase and has been recently reported as high as 8.5% but in March the stock market posted a 20% increase.  It is likely that we will continue to see a lot of volitility until all facests of our market start to move in a more unified upward trend.

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.

President Obama campaigned on a message that he’d be the agent of change for America.  And he’s shown that in full force in his few weeks in office.  But when voting for change, how many Americans figured they’d be voting for the implementation of the Obama cult, the new, apparently required religion the President and his staff have for America?

One of the hallmarks to any cult is the requirement that there is no dissension.  No contrary views are tolerated and if you speak against the cult leader that is considered a threat, not just to the leader but the cult community as a whole and those dissenters are quickly eliminated.

In this writer’s opinion, the Obama administration has adopted a cult mentality.  They rode in on a wave of optimism and took every opportunity to blame every ‘bad’ issue on the prior administration, whether there was any truth to it or not.  Well that’s not so surprising I guess, you could call that business as usual in our Nation’s captial. I found it interesting, however, to see the Wall Street Journl come forward questioning who’s really to blame for recent events (read that article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123604419092515347.html) but this article will, not doubt, be labeled as wrong by team Obama.

What is most frightening is that the tactics adopted by the Obama team to stem any negative feedback continues to grow.  President Obama has taken every option to try to publicly ostracize republican congressmen and senators who do not agree with him (which would, of course, be most of them as Obama’s policies lean heavily towards socialism).  Then there was this weekend’s incident where Rahm Emanuel publicly labeled Rush Limbaugh as the official voice of the republican party.   Most of us republicans who heard Ralm’s comments sat back and asked “since when did the Republican party anoint Rush as it’s party spokesman?”

Well, folks, here’s the plan.  Rahm knows (as so does President Obama) that Rush does NOT represent the party.  Mr Limbaugh is an outspoken member of the Republican party, no doubt, but to say he represents us as our party spokesman would be crazy unless your plan is to make being a republican a matter of public embarrassment.  Look with Rush’s personality, it’s easy to demonize him.  By labeling this outspoken, far right, now demonized person as the party’s ‘voice’ you create public hatred of all republicans.

Moreover, the current socialistic Obama agenda creates labels treating those who have worked hard, seen success and, as a result, have accumulated a little wealth as greedy, perhaps unethical individuals who should now be punished with much higher taxes.  The socialistic agenda focuses on providing national healthcare (certainly we all want affordable healthcare – it’s just how we get there that should be debated) over tax breaks and clear incentives that would keep small businesses afloat.

If one wonders why we need all this spending, do it quietly as any public dissension is quickly squashed.  The American public should be clearly told just how big Obama’s budget will grow the deficit.  The deficit will grow by many many times what it was under Bush and there is no funds to cover it.   Obama’s administration must hope that sales of government securities will close the gap over what Obama wants to spend and what is likely to be covered by tax collections.  Did you know that nearly half of the proposed budget is not going to be covered by normal tax collections?  How long do you think it will take before the view of who are considered wealthy drops to much lower levels.  It’s easy to snub our noses over those making $200,000 getting taxed more heavily but what happens when that threshold drops to $100,000 or $75,000 or lower?  How long do you think it will take before we are all paying much higher taxes?

Mark my words, when any of this is mentioned in the public media, the Obama administration will act quickly and promptly to not only criticize alternative points of view, they’ll demonize those folks.

So beware.  The new era of socialism is at hand and being mandated as our new creed.  Wave so long to the era of policial debate.  Wave so long to a true two party system of government.  If you are not with Obama, you are against America.  The cult of Obamaism is winning.