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No Budget!

Posted by Bill Crawford on Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:16:12 PM
Steny Hoyer presaged Speaker Pelosi's announcement next week that there is no budget resolution coming for next year. They are simply going to pass continuances until after the elections. If the Republicans take the House back in November, they will gleefully punt the problem over to them.
 
In the same speech, Hoyer mused about the middle class tax increases that would be needed to get things back into order.
 
This is irresponsible. No, that's not ripe enough. This is nuts.
 
They do not have a plan B in case floating this news creates a financial s**tstorm. They simply can't get their own caucus to get together enough to structure anything. They have the largest majority of any party since 1993, and they can't muster even 180 votes, much less a majority. They are left with punting the deficits to Obama's blue ribbon commission, after the elections.
 
These people have to go. Those of you that voted them in, I ask you, what have you gotten? Is the Iraq war over? Has Guantanamo Bay closed? Has the Patriot Act been rescinded? Has immigration reform passed?
 
Oh, and one other (I have to): are we making any progress in the Gulf? Hell, folks, this is the party that believes in the power of government! They are becoming a chapter in a conservative textbook.
 
Yes, we can! The question has become: can what?
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Rahm Emmanuel Speaks His Piece

Posted by Bill Crawford on Monday, June 21, 2010 11:23:36 PM
I am a partisan. I am not in a position of power, and I have that luxury. The President's Chief of Staff does not.
 
Last week, Texas Rep. Barton apologized to the head of BP while he was getting the third degree from Congress. Barton said BP was getting a "shakedown". Like most other Republicans I have spoken to, I agreed with the use of the word "shakedown", but thought BP was not deserving of an apology. This is essentially what the position of the party leadership was when they asked Barton to retract his remarks, which he did.
 
Rahm went on to the Sunday talkies last weekend to pin the donkey tail on the Republicans, warning us that all hell would break loose if they were allowed back into power. They used more of the same loosey-goosey, inferential reasoning they did to pin the new economic crisis in 2008 on John McCain, because "he is a Republican, and therfore is at his heart, a deregulator"- conveniently ignoring all the times when John the Maverick told his own party leadership to stick it.
 
This is an election year of dissatisfaction. Both sides get angered over different issues. This year's tea partiers were 2004's Iraq War protesters. The Democrat problem is that the two sides think differently.
 
What follows is a bit of a simplification, but I'll stick with the results of my years of observations. Conservatives, when they are angry, will be able to list the reasons why to you at will. Liberals, when they react, tend to blur the details and personalize their anger. Clinton was immoral, and only balanced the budget when the Republicans forced him to. Bush was stupid, and Cheney was malevolent.
 
This discounts what you see in the media, where the ability to argue your point is a necessity, and the amateurs do not get face time on television. Conservatives tend to be Aristotleans, thinking their way out of every box (like their primal hero, Bill Buckley, Jr., who many of them were weaned on). Liberals tend more to be Platoists, reacting with the id and not always being able to explain exactly why.
 
The contemporary form of this is Glenn Beck: he drives them crazy, and they will tell you that, but they will struggle to tell you exactly why, when you ask.
 
The harshness of the liberal world is less a cultural phenomenon than a matter of timing. The number of ad hominem personal attacks in the worlds of DailyKos and MoveOn.org  compared to conservative sites like TownHall is because they were used to running the world here, and have been steadily losing ground for thirty years. Conservatives have been in ascendancy at the same time, and are not as bitter.
 
Personally, I have learned to live with this over the years. Those who disagree with me give me three strikes in politics. You present a point of view to them that they regard as beyond the pale, strike one. You get challenged on it and refuse to back down, strike two. Strike three comes when you gain a position of public power to bring your ideas into the political stream.
 
This is why conservatives going to Washington DC for the first time are told to not bother making friends in the press. Bill Safire, the lone conservative voice in the NY Times media world, only had people talk to him like a human being at parties because of an incident when he was younger where he saved somebody's child from drowning in a swimming pool. Absent that, he would have been dehumanized like Reagan, Bush, Trent Lott, Newt, Sarah Palin...oh, hell, you could draw the list as well as I.
 
The point is, when you can't state your reasons, when you demonize people like that, it becomes harder for liberals to pick up votes in the swing voter universe than conservatives. Obama got elected in 2008 with some pretty large swaths of middle America, and that group is staring down the tea parties now and comparing them to the open yaps of Bob Gibbs, Emmanuel and Dave Axelrod. Those guys are not facing an incompetent McCain now, and are not outspending their rivals by two to one nationally. Where do you think that is going to go in November?
 
Just an observation, folks. I've met plenty out there who disagree with me who can elucidate why. There are even a fair number who don't labor over the talking points when doing so. There is no monopoly on intelligence in one political ideology (the George W Bush argument notwithstanding).  However, you should take the Glenn Beck question out for a spin. Tell me if you get a different result.
 
 
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Obama's Oval Office Address

Posted by Bill Crawford on Sunday, June 20, 2010 9:26:43 PM
I tried to give myself some time here to absorb this thing, and not run with my first reactions. I should have known better.
 
Obama is up against it in the Gulf. It is going to get worse for us (and him) before it gets better. Let me lead off by saying that he has picked a bad time to develop a soft spot for golf. That particular issue doesn't rankle me at all, I realize that the Presidency is something that functions 24/7, vacation, tee time or Oval Office workday. But many of his supporters are placing him in the same basket as the BP Chairman going to a yacht race while they are working overtime cleaning up in the Gulf area.
 
But I digress. As always, listening to Obama the economy major is no day at the beach. I grew up to be a follower of Milton Friedman. This is a school that drills you in the head with Aristotle's "A is A" dictum: theory must be grounded in reality. Anybody who has learned economics at the University of Chicago will tell you how they were beat on the head with this constantly. That sounds like a wonderful theory there. Show me an example of how it worked. If you don't find a way to ground it in reality, it probably isn't.
 
So if you start prattling on about leaving the evil world of fossil fuels and moving on into the new green job nirvana, you wouldn't mind answering a few silly questions, would you? How on earth are the Chinese and the thousands of workers and citizens they are killing with open strip mining and dirty coal plants a shining example of the new green economy? How are we supposed to capitalize an economy based on new energy sources, when the biggest obstacle is the level of technology they still lack? How is California going to do anything but pour tax money down the drain on public car charging stations when the market for the cars isn't there yet, and those who have them have to leave them there for well over an hour every time to replenish? How craven is it to push the purchase of electric cars with a tax subsidy, when the tax money has to come from us, and our debt is going viral?
 
Naaah, forget that. Here is where Obama the willfully ignorant (economics) morphs into Obama the politically dense: how is it that nobody around you who prepared that speech  seemed to notice that the only thing you could talk about on the subject of the cleanup that everybody is getting migraines over is A) extorting money from BP for damages and B) your word that you won't rest until the cleanup is finished? Are you nuts? None of your pollsters are picking this up?
 
Enjoy the summer, Mr. President. The slick is still spreading, and only one person in this room campaigned the notion that his election would "heal the planet" and "lower the seas". You set the expectations. Live with it.
 
Don't blame me, folks. This is between the President and his voters. I don't expect the President to have all the answers. His supporters do, and Obama is twisting in hell for it. His detractors don't expect more than I do, and are simply giving him comeuppance.
 
This is an environmental disaster, and Obama's supporters live with two great subjects of the heart: abortion and the environment. There is no way of talking out of this for him. He needs a technological miracle. For the sake of the Gulf, I hope he gets one.
 
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Obama And Isreal

Posted by Bill Crawford on Sunday, June 20, 2010 9:01:29 PM
Barrack Obama truly is a funny duck. If you go by the things that come out of the mouths of this president and his appointees, we have practically closed the embassy in Isreal and brought the diplomatic staff home.
 
The military posture in the Red Sea area seems to state otherwise, though. We have not only not backed down from the carrier group support posture held for decades there, but we seem to be presently moving to something more aggressive to both Hamas and Iran.
 
My best guess is that Obama seems to think that he can do some sort of schizophrenic dance between his words and actions, and they don't have to correlate in any rational way. As the Commander In Chief of the military that is providing the bulk of the stability in the world, this is borderline insanity. America is not an entity that has the luxury of being a mystery to both friends and foes. Having to wonder where we are coming from, given our size and power, is inherently destabilizing.
 
Many people lamented Obama's inexperience in entering the White House. I took that with a grain of salt, as history is filled with relatively inexperienced people who stepped up to the occasion. In this case, though, it is becoming a two step between tragedy and farce.
 
Barrack has lived for years with the power of his open mouth. I can only hope he grows out of this and learns the lessons of the projection of force that any American President should already have when entering office. The track record there is not good. Truman never did. Neither did Carter. Clinton was smart enough not to override those around him who had more depth on the subject than he did.
 
I am sorry to say that this may be the best we can hope for here.
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Alvin Greene- What's The Big Surprise?

Posted by Bill Crawford on Sunday, June 20, 2010 8:45:01 PM
The guy appears out of nowhere? No, not really. There are lots of characters in the political world who live under the radar. No money, no followers, no press inquiries, but still out there, for one reason or another.
 
Alvin managed to come up with ten grand to get his name on the South Carolina Democrat Senatorial ballot. That shouldn't be a big deal on it's face, either- people who live under the radar often have money saved that nobody connects them with.
 
Now the concpiracy mongers come out in force. First, he was a Republican plant. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show picked this one apart pretty well ( http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-june-14-2010/alvin-greene-wins-south-carolina-primary ). The SC Democrats are scrambling to find a way to get this surprisingly stubborn black man to step aside, and are running into a wall. Their problem is that they think he is the wall. Au contraire, folks.
 
Alvin came out of nowhere and won the primary because it is a bad year for incumbents, Washington DC insiders and Democrats. He won because a majority of voters there were looking for "none of the above" on the ballot, and Mr. Greene was the closest thing to it they could find.
 
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Boycott BP?

Posted by Bill Crawford on Saturday, June 12, 2010 10:39:24 PM
The short answer is, maybe. But certainly not now. What this government is doing right now is putting their politicsal interests in front of actually solving this problem, and it is annoyinng as hell to watch.
 
BP is losing a ton of market share value right now, and more every time Obama opens his mouth on the subject. They need that money to stay alive and solve this problem. The White House is making that more difficult. He is also straining relations with our closest ally (BP is the largest corporation in Great Britain). Watching our President work over Isreal, our second closest ally on the planet, renders all that unsurprising. It is even money at this point that BP will declare Chapter 11 by year's end, primarily to structure a shelter from the oodles of Gulf residents who are presently lawyering up, egged on by Obama's open yap.
 
When this episode closes, if it turns out that BP used it's influence here to short cut safety procedures that caused this thing, I would sooner buy my gas at Citgo and send the money to Hugo Chavez.
 
By then, there will be hell to pay all around. Obama, the EPA and their terminal indecisiveness in the early going of this spill will not be something he can blame on George Bush in 2012, although he will certainly try. Obama's inaction, to either help BP solve the problem or take over is one of the fastest ways to take his core voting base and turn mister hand into mister fist. If this is still festering in September and a Gulf hurricane sprays oil on the coast from the air, he may as well have nominated a staunch pro-lifer to the Supreme Court.
 
Another annoyance: the people I have researched in the industry are astounded that nobody is suggesting to BP or to FEMA to start using the surface pump technology that has worked for many spills in the Mid East region. BP seems to be married to chemical dispersants and to boom sweeps. The latter would have been more effective at the start, provided that they used the oil collection to burn the stuff off, but nobody was open to having the ugly black smoke marring the skyline.
 
Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way. Obama is a great talker, but he is learning the price of standing up and announcing "the buck stops here", and then thinking his way through the problem like the damned lawyer that he is. I'm reaching the point where I think one of the qualifications for that office should be renouncing any Ivy League law degrees one may have earned in life. Once an ambulance chaser, always an ambulance chaser.
 
Final note: If I do end up boycotting BP, and I'm betting that may very well happen later this year, I will have to find an alternative. I like their fuel, because it doesn't have any infernal methanol in it. It is a purer octane for the car, and methanol wreaks havoc on the smaller two cycle engines, like in in the weed trimmers and blowers I use to keep my neighbors from knowing how disrespectable I may be.
 
I won't get started on methanol, save to say it is another uselss federal subsidy that makes fuel less efficient, more expensive and makes many grain foods and the beef animals that live off them more expensive for all of us. It is another episode in a long line of abject EPA stupidity, passed off to us as science. Like NTSB winter additives, added to gas every winter. Every region has a different formula mandate, so there is little regional crossover in availability, creating price increases. Oh, and it lowers mileage. And it is a carcinogen! Who the hell's in charge here?   
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The Great Culture War

Posted by Bill Crawford on Monday, June 07, 2010 11:53:16 AM
I bring this up constantly, in part it is a lesson I learned the hard way when I was younger.
 
The state of political discourse in this country is a joke. People are yelling at each other on the tube and on radio all the time. People talk at each other instead of exchanging ideas. My answer to that is, get used to it. It is a cyclical thing, and it is not primarily a political chasm.
 
It is generational. It is about values. The political differences are symptoms, the disease is culture vs. counter-culture.
 
It is the contemporary wave of a recurring phenomenon here.
 
There is a reason why we set our dinner plates like Europeans, with fork left and knife right, but unlike the folks across the pond, after we get done cutting, we switch the fork over to the right to eat. Do you know why this happens? Because circa 1770, the arguments between pro-independence colonists and Tories was so virulent that it became polite to eat with the knife in the weaker hand, so the table fights were less likely to cause injury.
 
Four generations later, the battles between the states rights people and the Abolitionists were legendary.  Four more generations later, the battles between the isolationists and the New Dealers were just as viscious. In each case, the winners of the debate wrote the history, and the losers went to their graves kicking and screaming.
 
Well, here we are again. Pick an issue, pick a side. I have both feet set in concrete on the culture side of the new war, and you could probably predict my views on a whole host of issues. The point is, this will not be over until the bulk of the Baby Boomers are pushing up daisies, and that isn't going to be any time soon.
 
Each of the other three chasms culminated in a huge effort that allowed one side to "win" and write the history- the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and WWII. The losers never stopped grumbling and protesting, they simply became textbook footnotes.
 
Well, a defining crisis is almost upon us. I think it will be America and Europe finally dealing with the radical Muslim problem. When we finally decide to act, it will remove the left from political congruity in the national debate here, just as Senator Taft went from being a debate center in 1940 to a grumbling old man in 1944.
 
That will only take the top off the acrimony here. The center will wish the left just shut up while the crisis is being dealt with, but Boomers were born with open yaps and had nobody to slap some common sense into them when they were young enough to still listen.
 
After it is over, the winners will write the textbooks for the children and the losers will continue to spittle on their blogs and whatever talk shows let them on. By then, it will become less topical and more an annoying white noise for all of us to try and tune out.
 
For the record, the structure of this homily is based not on my work, but the astounding generation research of Neal Strauss and William Howe, which I am always conscious of when I push forward on my book writing. Their seminal book, "Generations" was first published around 1990 and they had no idea which direction the elder Boomers would go in.
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The Government Hits A Dry Hole

Posted by Bill Crawford on Monday, June 07, 2010 11:25:19 AM
I told you I was a couple of updates short of guessing at an engineering solution for the BP problem. The political situation is easier to surmise. For starters, the government and FEMA are not taking the situation over from the oil company, which speaks volumes. Also, the various government spokesman are starting to float the notion that this problem will be with us a more than a few months. You won't hear this from Obama's mouth anytime soon (which is politics 101), but this movement flies in the face of his political philosophy here.
 
That being, government is the answer. The spreading oil slick is bad icing on the Obama cake: a made for TV reminder of the notion that "yes, we can" may not be all it was supposed to be. The BP disaster comes on top of the other two walls he has run into, the unemployment rate that doesn't seem to get any better, and the rapidly piling public debt that is now large enough to scare the crap out of even the non-accountant voters out there.
 
The swing voters that carried him into office have been a problem for him for a while. Many local races this year will be decided on the fact that the incumbents spent over a year dickering on health care (still largely provided by employers) while the unemployment rate was a huge problem. However, Barrack's base seems to be able to live with the public debt and double digit unemployment- after all, aren't they both a constant in Europe? To them, the only missing piece there is to raise the taxation level here to European levels, and things will stabilize.
 
The problem with the spreading oil slick is that it is an environmental problem, and (along with abortion) there is no single better way to explode the blood pressure of his base than to have an environmental problem that the government can't do anything about. Every time a dying pelican appears on CNN, the people that scream the loudest are the ones that gave him money first in 2008.
 
That's my simple political calculation, folks: while it is probably safe to say that many of the people Obama has surrounded himself with have the engineering acumen of a cinder block, they are wary political animals. If they could step in and solve this today, you could bet your children that they would. In other words, they don't know what to do.
 
There is advice, and there is advice. It's easy enough to tell somebody that when you are in a ditch, stop digging and climb out, but that assumes that the advisor is the only one with the God's eye view. Every accomplished politico is searching for the genius path out, and Obama may be onto something that nobody else sees. More to the point, he may think he is.
 
Obama's problem is that he needs his base to survive, and many of them are painting "incompetent" signs to hang around his neck. That can't be good.
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The Great BP Debacle

Posted by Bill Crawford on Saturday, June 05, 2010 11:13:36 PM
This is the big topic here. The fact that it still isn't quite solved is frustrating many, especially the side of the political spectrum that thinks the goverment can consistently do constructive things. I am a believer in a more limited government at the federal level because I am convinced that it tends to screw up everything it touches.
 
But this is not a political philosophy exposition- yet. I have made some observations, many of them annoying as hell.
 
It hasn't passed my attention that every solution that BP has tried involves recovery of oil, hopefully for the continuation of the refining process, and then part of their future cash flow. While I find this a little cynical, one also has to understand that they are going to have to pay royalties on every gallon of oil that comes out of that hole- what they refine and what the estimated spill is. They are a corporation fighting for their life, and some of this is understandable.
 
My engineering knowledge does not allow me to even make an educated guess on the possibility of DC forcing them to develop a large concrete sarcophagus to drop on the hole, and try and cut off the flow. I don't know the size of the dome around it, how near the floor surface it is, and I struggle with the effects of the pressure a mile down. If it were found to be realistic, that would be my next step at this point.
 
It will get potentially worse pretty soon. If there still is oil flowing up in August, it will be near the peak of hurricane season. This will do nothing to add to or detract from storm formations, but a hurricane growing over warm water often has an impelling effect, pulling water from hundreds of feet down into itself, and if oil gets pulled up with it, the rest of that equation should be obvious.
 
The bad news is, at this point, I think that is unavoidable, and FEMA had better start planning for it.
 
The most frustrating part is the abject stupidity on the part of Obama in all this. For starters, he is talking as if the liability for all this is completely on the shoulders of BP a priori, as if the incidents leading up to it have already been investigated. This is where his ambulance chasing lawyer side shines through for everybody. There is a time for that, and that is after the problem has been solved. Using BP as a political whipping boy only serves to force them to lawyer up, it doesn't help solve the problem.
 
Here is my take on that: Obama is smart enough to know that this whole thing is his problem now, and his first priority is to try and walk through all this without taking the political hit.
 
Earth to Obama: you already are. Your supporters are getting riled up for you not solving this, more than any other single reason. It's already in your lap. Stop trying to dump it elsewhere.
 
After that, we have the even more abject ignorance of a six month moratorium on ALL drilling. Are you crazy? Do you know what that will do to oil prices this winter? Why stop shallow drilling? How does that apply? Why not safety inspections on the deepwaters (there aren't that many), and get them going this month? What, are you stupid? Why don't you bring Bill Clinton in to teach you how there is no political future for you if the economy tanks worse than it is now?
 
Evidently there is nobody in Obama's Cabinet to beat some sense into the man. This is another occasion where I am not surprised. The Chicago Mafia running the White House would be better off having Mayor Daley take over.
 
Politics is a rough game. The phenomena of last year's genius becoming today's dunce is as old as the hills. Again, I ask, is there anybody in the West Wing who knows any history at all?
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Turkey, Isreal And Our Values

Posted by Bill Crawford on Saturday, June 05, 2010 10:45:33 PM
The short skinny is that, with the creation of the incident in the Gaza blockade, the Islamabad government has announced to the world something many have suspected for a while now: the Western, pro-American sentiments they have shown us since 9/11 are now pretty much history, and the Turkish government seems to be angling to be some sort of gravitational center in the Muslim world. This is not good.
 
Looking deeper, there are some more troubling things afoot here. For a long time here, there have been many who have lamented that much of the Islamic resentment towards us has been borne of our support for Isreal, which therefore wasn't worth it.
 
There is an element of truth to this, which begs to be followed by the qualitative question, is our support worth it? George Marshall resigned in 1948 from Truman's Cabinet because he and the President were on different ends of that answer.
 
I agree that in 1948, it was clearly a more open question, but in my mind, at present it is not. This is where the Obama administration comes in.
 
After the Gaza flotilla incident, our Sec State chimed in against the Isrealis in one news cycle. The relations between Obama and Netenyahu are strained. No, that isn't quite strong enough. They are akin to FDR and Hoover's relations on the car ride to the 1933 Inaugural. Worse than that, there are West Wing people trying to quietly float the notion of a "nuclear free Middle East"- more to the point, asking Iran to give up their nuclear ambitions in exchange for Isreal giving up the nukes everybody knows it has. Even if both sides agreed and did it (not going to happen), it would be about the most destabilizing thing you could ever to to the region.
 
Which brings us to our President. We have seen cycles of Presidents veering between being an Isreali ally and being an 'honest broker' in the Middle East. Jimmy Carter was the most maddening at this game. Obama seems to be married to the broker end of the spectrum, no matter how much it annoys or scares our best friend in that hell hole.
 
in 2008, I had my head handed to me on many occasions for bringing up the preachings of Jeremiah Wright in trying to draw a picture of Obama. This President spent twenty years listening to the sermons of a Black Liberationist, and some of it has obviously rubbed off.
 
I, for one, am not surprised. Are you?
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RIP John Wooden

Posted by Bill Crawford on Saturday, June 05, 2010 10:28:20 PM
What a life! The man was an old fogey in the '60's, for gosh sakes. He must have been nearly a century old by this point.
 
His players could tell you a myriad of stories, all of them laced with a remarkable similarity. They would say that a 1970 player could walk into a 1960 practice and fit right in. He had the most organized practices and pre-game drills anybody ever saw. The UCLA players would watch their opponents warm up and wonder how they had a chance in hell of beating the Bruins.
 
And through it all, they would tell you that Wooden never, ever spoke of winning or losing. It was all about how you carried yourself, how you followed the rules, how you added to the team and the mental path you approached life with.
 
There are many coaches out there that have copies of his life pyramid and use them for their own purposes. I've met three of them in my life that use it exactly as Wooden did. The man was a lighthouse in a foggy world.
 
In the NCAA Hall Of Fame, Wooden and his Bruin dynasty have a whole wing dedicated to them. I think about them every time I watch an NBA game where somebody stares at the arc of his jump shot, watches it bounce off the rim and can't seem to make it back down the court in time to play defense.
 
The man left a trail of constant success, and his acolytes all over the countyr will continue to follow it. Success in life as well as on the court. If a few of their students manage to make it to the NBA, and one less player is looking out first for a spot on the ESPN highlight reel, his life will have had that much more impact.
 
Rest in Peace, John Wooden.
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Controlling The Information

Posted by Bill Crawford on Saturday, June 05, 2010 10:14:48 PM
The expectation was that Bob Gibbs could open up the press gathering early this week by announcing the creation of 430,000 new jobs, along with a drop in the unemployment rate to 9.7%.
 
The problem was that the compost those numbers were built on was public knowledge days before the Labor Department released the official info.
 
Here is how it breaks down: over 90% of those new jobs are federal government jobs. Almost all of those are Census Bureau jobs.
 
Wait, it gets better. Reports have been coming out from all over the country that Census workers are being hired, trained and almost immediately laid off. Then they are rehired, sometimes more than once, so they can count as a new job each time. This was all supposed to happen under the cover of darkness, so we would all marvel at the economy rebounding.
 
Maybe if this was Chicago, it all could have been sat on. Instead, the Labor numbers came out, even the wire services were following it with the bulls**t it was based on, and the Dow Jones dropped 300 points in one day.
 
A great historical lesson passed by us way back in 1986. Chernobyl blew up, and the Politburo realized within two days that they no longer could control the information about it. It was said to be the beginning of the end of the Soviet Communist Party.
 
Obama's West Wing is chock full of academics. Didn't any of them take any history courses? Even at the 100 or 200 level? The internet has created a world more transparent than ever. Even amateurs like me have access to information. Did they really expect to get away with this stuff?
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Deficit Madness

Posted by Bill Crawford on Monday, May 31, 2010 2:37:04 PM
Here I go again, and not about the spending in D.C. I speak of the deficits in about a third of the States, and in many Counties across the nation. Many of them have been holding off on the toughest decisions, relying on a pastiche of federal grants and aid to patch their budgets together.
 
Well, that is coming to an end. This year's budgets will be a nightmare for them, and the next two years will be a rancorous series of union contract battles, which run in different cycles than the annual budgets. This is not a pleasant time to be a public service union member. Telling them that their salaries and pensions put the private sector to shame is not going to placate anybody.
 
California, as usual, is the worst nut case. Not as badly mismanaged as Michigan, but much larger. They are also indicative of the Progressive argument about where the problem is: the problem with California's budget is that Proposition 13 (1978) and it's structured limitations on property tax increases have hampered the ability of Sacramento to balance the budget.
 
That's right, folks. If they could only increase taxes to a responsible level, there would not be a problem. Segue to Washington, present day. Trillion dollar deficits are on the horizon, and a blue ribbon commission is set to come up with a solution, AFTER Election Day (of course). What do you think will be the top five suggestions posed by them?
 
So, there is a simple menu out there. Three items, take it or leave it. Public service layoffs, public service pay cuts or tax increases to make you blanch. Cap and trade energy taxes, or value added, take your pick. Axelrod and company have already made their preferences known. If the Democrats hold either end of Capitol Hill this year and Obama gets re-elected, it will be posed to all of us as a referendum on tax increases.
 
So, there you have it. That's where we are going. Another proverbial fork in the road, albeit a big one. So, which is it folks? Do we want to be Europe, or do we want to be different?
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Obama's Narrative

Posted by Bill Crawford on Sunday, May 30, 2010 10:46:43 PM
This White House will never fall to the Bush reluctance to talk their way through life, and have other people (mostly detractors) write the bulk of their history. Obama knows that a narrative is needed to get past encroaching image problems, and will adjust accordingly.
 
That is why, when comparisons started appearing in the media between the BP disaster and Hurricane Katrina, the narrative that appeared usually led off with "hitting the ground from day one", as if we are all supposed to believe now that the Deepwater platform wasn't one mile down in the Gulf for a week before the White House started talking like it was a problem.
 
That's the fault of the expectations he set up for himself. Just as Republicans always get called out for moral deficiencies, Democrats set themselves up as the people that make government work effectively. When they can't, the naked emporer problem gets borne anew.
 
The truth is, drilling is done a mile down not because there is no oil in more accessable places. It is done there because the the environmental movement won't allow it where it can be seen from shore. It is a new process, this is a new problem, and nobody has a handle on solving the BP problem because it is uncharted territory. I don't expect the White House to have the answers- but his supporters obviously do. Obama set himself up for this, and I have no sympathy.
 
Narrative two: Rep. Sestak was promised a "job" by the administration if he dropped out of the primary run against Specter? Sestak was obviously not aware that such a quid pro quo was a felony when he answered that media question earlier this year. Obama is doing his best to avoid getting dumped in the 'that's how the boys do it in Chicago' dumpster. They'll beat any prosecution problems because Eric Holder will not act on this and it's not likely a Special Prosecutor will appear on the horizon, but this President campaigned as someone who was above all this.
 
Narrative three: the whole "reset" thing with the State Department was supposed to gain respect from all the people who were giving us crap in the last decade. It's not helping us get anything done in the Middle East, it isn't helping with the UN Security Council and it certainly isn't helping us deal with North Korea. Meanwhile, people are still trying to blow things up on our planes and in our cities. The White House takes pains to show us who the world respects us more now, in our new humility mode, but I'm not seeing it.
 
If Obama gets his head handed to him in the upcoming elections and he is regarded as somehow ineffective and overpromising, how will he even hold onto his base in 2012?
 
If BP can't get this straightened out soon and oil is still coming up this summer, and FEMA can't do anything, how on earth do you think it will play out in Jay Leno's monologues?
 
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RIP Dennis Hopper

Posted by Bill Crawford on Sunday, May 30, 2010 10:14:07 PM
Dennis Hopper, iconoclast and a true rebel in the sometimes still-too-uptight Hollywood world, kicked the bucket this week.
 
In the 1960's, the California film world was going through a shakeout, where the last vestiges of the studio managed industry were drying up and the independents were starting to be the new order. When Hopper and Pete Fonda whipped up "Easy Rider" and it managed to find an audience, it ripped the floor out from underneath what the conventional wisdom said was needed to get a film past production and into theater distribution.
 
Dennis, like Jack Nicholson, seemed to play a series of characters who were extentions of their natural personality. Like Nicholson, he only managed to make a career out of that because there was a fountain of on-camera talent to make that happen.
 
There was a film he made in the early '90's called "True Romance", where he played the father of a character that a crazy mafia guy (Chris Walken, natch) was looking for. Walken was trying to find out where Hopper's son was, and told him that he was going to die slowly if he didn't start talking. There was a moment where Hopper decided that he wasn't telling and his life was now over, and when you play the scene back, you can see the subtle but effective mannerisms that convey this- the work of a master. Anyway, he bums a Chesterfield off of Walken and starts a history lecture about how Sicilians were taken over and inbred with African blood by invading hordes centuries ago, and finishes by calling him an eggplant (the worst thing you can call an Italian). Walken admires the bravado and laughs, while he borrows a pistol and empties the clip into Dennis. By the way, the movie got even crazier after that, you should check it out if you haven't seen it. (The cameo of Brad Pitt as a total stoner is priceless).
 
I will miss him, he was a real character, and totally without pretention. Godspeed to Dennis and his family.
 
 
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