When the CEO of General Motors was essentially fired by the US government today, I must confess that it took me aback a bit. Is this the price of bailouts that our government now has the power to force leaders of industry into resignation? If we buy the premise that we all now own GM and that GM must be accountable to the tax payer, then I suppose Rick Wagoner’s ouster is completely legit. Still, I get a bit of unease in my stomach when I see the government intervening in the affairs of a corporation like this. I’m not ready to call it socialism but it sure feels strange.
Then again, when I was laid off by a Fortune 500 company back in 2007, I sure would have loved to call up the President of the United States and say, “hey could you fire the CEO of the dumb-ass company that let me go?” Who knows, there could be a number of former (or even current) employees of GM who are dancing the jig right about now.
America Don’t Need No Republicans! We need British Conservatives!
Last week, in another attempt to prove just how brain dead they are, the Republicans released their 19 page alternative budget. Here was Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ assessment:
That this is the opposition party, should make American Conservatives despondent to the point of near suicide. They are being led by clowns. As he was exiting the announcement of this important Republican initiative, Representative John Boehner was asked if the alternative budget would have more bailouts. His response: “Uhhhh, we’ll see.”
The conservative cure my friends is to toss the entire Republican party and import the British Conservative party! As you watch this speech by European Parliament member Dan Hannan, think about doofus Boehner and contrast the two in your mind:
Now this fellow has bollocks, or balls as we would say. Direct, intellectual and incredibly articulate. Heck, maybe I’m just in love with the British accent? In any case, as I’ve been saying for some time now, the Republican party desperately needs an intellectual to take hold of the steering wheel. Watching Hannan only further drives home this point.
I ask my Republican friends, aren’t you tired of being led by Beavis and Butthead?
“If you or anyone else can help me understand this, I’d be appreciative”, referring to middle class conservatives identifying with fat cat financial predators.
It haunts me.
Not only because I yearn for connection, as does everyone, but because the most serious threat to America, Islam, is alien to liberals in precisely the same way as conservative thought. They aid and abet the Islamic agenda by acting as an infidel, just as Mohammad ( P B & J ) described. Mohammad knew how to crush such people. Islamic tactics were made and honed to subdue those who believe that people are good.
As much fun as it would be to pick on President Obama – and he is as fat, slow, clumsy, and ridiculous a target as one could hope for – his fate is sealed. Eventually the pork addicted Republicans, who have proved themselves to be as completely destitute of integrity as the Liberals have always said, will roll for the President in Act III of ‘Obama, a Shakespearean tragedy’.
How, though, can one draw a Liberal into such a paradigm shift? Rand used fiction to entice the undecided looking for entertainment. Rush uses disparagement to goad Liberals to substantively engage the reasoning beneath his monologues.
OK, the video I’m including below is not new. One of the disadvantages of using a TiVo is stuff you think is current, is not. Still, it’s funny as all get-out just the same. As a black man, I must confess to more than one instance of hearing about some criminal on the nightly news and saying “oh please, don’t let it be a brotha”. Sure enough, the star of the perp walk would be an African-American. To watch the nightly news (especially the local news) you’d think all crime was committed by black folk (unless you were in Iowa where there are no black folk).
So, I was greatly amused by “The Daily Show” “senior black correspondent”, Larry Wilmore pointing out something that I’ve observed myself lately. Namely that some of the most hated criminals in the world right now happen to be white. Now, when the news promo names the latest criminal about to make the perp walk, are white folk saying “please don’t let them be white”?
As Wilmore points out, the symbolism sure has changed in the past few months. The airwaves are suddenly full of articulate black men opining on the news of the day (Harold Ford, Jr., Clarence Page, and Jonathan Capehart to name a few). A black man in a suit suddenly reminds us of the President of the United States. In the meantime, a white guy in a suit may very well be the dude who trashed your 401K.
As usual, “The Daily Show” hits another one out of the park with the knowledge that much truth is said in jest.
When I saw some excerpts of Barack Obama’s unprecedented video address to the Iranian people, I first said, “wow, cool.” Then I watched the entire video and my “inner Iranian” said “who the hell do you think you are?”
What threw me was the following excerpt:
You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right — but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.
Who is Barack Obama or any American President, for that matter, to define “the true greatness of the Iranian people”? Perhaps to the Iranian government’s mindset, their true greatness lies in their ability to kick ass? And when one looks at American history, we have certainly not hidden our propensity to go and kick some ass. So, not only does this excerpt strike me as condescending, it also smacks slightly of hypocrisy. We don’t hesitate to go to other countries and beat the crap out of them, particularly when we have financial interests there but we give Iran a lecture?
This video would have been fine and dandy if the paragraph I highlighted above had been removed. I think it is really cool for Obama to directly address the people of Iran and reinforce that we are all made of the same blood, bone and skin. It is when this shared joy over their New Year became an opportunity to tell them how to behave that we crossed the line from diplomacy over into condescension.
This week, based on his recent trip to California and the townhalls he held there, Barack Obama is more convinced than ever that his new budget (NOT the omnibus bill that recently passed, full of pork) will put our country on the right path. I’d challenge anyone to argue with his priorities: economic reform, education, a self sufficient energy policy and healthcare for everyone. The question remains: can he get it all done?
And now, the President of the United States of America:
I spent little over an hour today watching the live congressional inquisition of AIG CEO Edward Liddy. Later in the day, I listened to some of the congressmen talk about the case and I wondered if they were watching the same testimony that I was. In particular, I kept hearing this theme of “and some of the recipients of the bonus have left the company!”
Ehhhh, yes. That is the whole point. According to Liddy’s testimony, the $165 million in question was not a performance bonus, it was a retention bonus, and what’s more, it was no ordinary retention bonus. It was a retention bonus promised to AIG employees who had been informed that once they finished tasks X, Y and Z, their jobs would go away. The bonus was designed to incent them to complete their tasks in the face of an eventual layoff. Now quite frankly, I worked for a Fortune 500 company who had the audacity to lay people off and expect them to train their overseas replacements in the time between the layoff announcement and the actual day of separation. Needless to say, many employees by their actions (or lack thereof) gave a virtual middle-finger to the company under such circumstances and no real training of replacements occurred. Truth be told, AIG exercised an option designed to maintain employee loyalty in the midst of a wind-down. While the dollar figures involved might turn your stomach, the actual practice made complete sense.
Despite very clear testimony from Liddy, the story persists that these were somehow performance bonuses, or retention bonuses inexplicably given to departed employees. The fact is the employees no longer working for AIG who received bonuses had completed the pre-layoff tasks they had been assigned. They did their part of the bargain. Which brings me to the next part of my confusion with our legislators. It seemed that a lot of the vitriol today was aimed at the recipients of the bonuses. Now, call me a greedy bastard but if ACME Anvil Corporation offers me a $4 million bonus, I’m going to accept it gladly. The anger of Congress and the people they represent should be aimed at the AIG executives who conceived of this bonus plan and decided to implement it not the employees who were simply the beneficiaries of their company’s reckless decision, assuming you consider the decision reckless in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong. There is lots to be upset about with this situation. We don’t hesitate to tell auto companies to renege on their promises to their employees but we’re hands off when it comes to Wall Street. Clearly a troubling double standard. We’ve declared some companies (like AIG) too big to fail and as a result we reward their incredibly bad (and perhaps criminal) business judgment with bailout money.
It’s all very messy but all I ask is for us to at least get our facts right before we start identifying those who should be drawn and quartered.
In a departure from his usual weekly address topic, the economy, President Obama announces the new head of the FDA, Margaret Hamburg and her deputy Joshua Sharfstein. Both appointees have backgrounds making them well suited to their new roles. The FDA needs to get on the ball since much of our food and drug safety infrastructure has not changed since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. Most notably, Obama makes it clear that unsafe foods hit him where he lives. Sasha, his younger daughter is a big fan of peanut butter sandwiches, making the recent peanut contamination scare particularly troubling to the President. It’s kinda nice when you know that your President has the same day to day worries that you do and even better to see that he’s trying to do something about it on behalf of us all.
And now, the President of the United States of America:
I’ve stated in the past that George W. Bush’s best post presidential strategy is to lay low and hope that sometime down the line events prove him to be a better President than the current polls suggest. Unfortunately, some of Bush’s former minions are not taking the same advice.
Tonight on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleisher got into a heated debate with host Chris Matthews. The second half of the debate appears below:
Primarily because of Matthews’ abrasive style, one could go back and forth on who was scoring more points in the debate. Fleisher held his own for the most part and Chris unnecessarily hit a very raw nerve by reminding Ari that 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch. It’s only at the very end of the interview that Fleisher proves why he and every other save-the-Bush-legacy talking head need to shut the hell up. At the 7 minute mark in the video, in defending the invasion of Iraq, Fleisher says:
After September 11, having been hit once, how could we take a chance that Sadam might not strike again?
To my astonishment both Chris Matthews and later Keith Olberman let this comment go by unchallenged! Perhaps Chris was just too tired by that point in the interview to actually hear what Ari said. “How could we take a chance that Sadam might not strike again?”
Sadam did not strike us the first time! What does Fleisher mean by “again”?
With this one sentence, Ari blew his entire argument out of the window, perpetuating the myth, even after Bush is gone from the public scene, that somehow Sadam was responsible for 9/11. It gives further evidence of the constant state of delusion in which the Bush administration was mired. Fleisher says this foolishness with such conviction that I find it hard to believe it is a put on. The Bush White House really believes that Sadam was behind 9/11 and no evidence to the contrary will ever convince them otherwise.
My heart went out to George W. Bush when he left office. I was mortified when he received boos at Barack Obama’s inauguration. More recently, I’ve almost admired Bush’s restraint now that we know that Bush’s legal advisers essentially gave him carte blanche to run a dictatorship. So now I tell all those well meaning associates of the former President who want to ensure his positive place in history to do so by just shutting up. The only thing that will redeem the Bush presidency will be the eventual establishment of a stable democracy in Iraq, which can then be traced back to Bush’s efforts.
For now, to use a now infamous phrase, all the talk in the world will do nothing more than put lipstick on a pig.
For those who have a hankering to express themselves in comic strip form but have no artistic ability, there is hope!
http://stripgenerator.com provides you with all the artistic help you might need. You simply provide the dialogue and voila you’ve got yourself your own politically sharp, socially relevent comic strip!
The bad news is, at least for the time being, the strip images are not reproducing that well within WordPress, so I’ve taken advantage of stripgenerator’s blogging capability to set up a sister site devoted to strips. I don’t know how often I’ll update it, but you’ll find it in my side bar. It’s called “Rutherford Illustrated”. If I tire of maintaining two different sites, I may abandon the help I’m getting from stripgenerator and resort to my own primitive drawings in the tradition of Cloak and Badger’s brief experiment in cartooning (now sadly defunct).
One Price of a Bailout and the Conservative Cure
Take my Boss … Please
When the CEO of General Motors was essentially fired by the US government today, I must confess that it took me aback a bit. Is this the price of bailouts that our government now has the power to force leaders of industry into resignation? If we buy the premise that we all now own GM and that GM must be accountable to the tax payer, then I suppose Rick Wagoner’s ouster is completely legit. Still, I get a bit of unease in my stomach when I see the government intervening in the affairs of a corporation like this. I’m not ready to call it socialism but it sure feels strange.
Then again, when I was laid off by a Fortune 500 company back in 2007, I sure would have loved to call up the President of the United States and say, “hey could you fire the CEO of the dumb-ass company that let me go?” Who knows, there could be a number of former (or even current) employees of GM who are dancing the jig right about now.
America Don’t Need No Republicans! We need British Conservatives!
Last week, in another attempt to prove just how brain dead they are, the Republicans released their 19 page alternative budget. Here was Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ assessment:
That this is the opposition party, should make American Conservatives despondent to the point of near suicide. They are being led by clowns. As he was exiting the announcement of this important Republican initiative, Representative John Boehner was asked if the alternative budget would have more bailouts. His response: “Uhhhh, we’ll see.”
The conservative cure my friends is to toss the entire Republican party and import the British Conservative party! As you watch this speech by European Parliament member Dan Hannan, think about doofus Boehner and contrast the two in your mind:
Now this fellow has bollocks, or balls as we would say. Direct, intellectual and incredibly articulate. Heck, maybe I’m just in love with the British accent? In any case, as I’ve been saying for some time now, the Republican party desperately needs an intellectual to take hold of the steering wheel. Watching Hannan only further drives home this point.
I ask my Republican friends, aren’t you tired of being led by Beavis and Butthead?
Respectfully,
Rutherford
WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance
March 30, 2009 at 8:49 pm Rutherford 4 comments