Cobb

Flunking Out of the Economy

When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.
-- Commercial

E.F. Hutton hasn't spoken in twenty years. Have you noticed the silence? No? I didn't think so.

I am about to embark on an analogy. I don't generally do analogies because eventually they all fall apart. But this one has helped me to understand what I see going on, and I think it will help you too. It's an analogy to highschool, and it goes pretty far before it falls apart.

--start of analogy--

In this scenario, we have a highschool full of students. The highschool is the economy and the students represent the investments in that economy. The parents are the owners of those investments and the teachers are the bankers and brokerage firms responsible for watching and grading those investments.

So everybody wants every student to perform in this school, and the teachers are responsible for making sure that they do. So the teachers select a mix of students. Some teachers have advanced classes and high standards others, not so high. In fact Miss Lehman and Mr. Merrill were mixing a lot of subprime students into their classes.

Their argument was clear, and they had a lot of support. Just because these kids are subprime and come from poorer communities doesn't mean they too can't have the American dream, they said. So Miss Lehman said, in fact, I am going to stake my reputation on my ability to keep these subprime students afloat. Both she and Mr. Merrill to the hurrahs of most everyone said that the solution was to give extra credit. So they gave the subprime students extra credit and figured that sooner or later, they would perform.

But the fact of the matter was that when it came to passing their midterms, a lot of these students were flunking. In fact, a lot higher percentage of them were flunking than anybody suspected. The extra credit didn't help. In fact, it made the parents think that their kids were OK, but the parents didn't really look closely at the curriculum. They didn't realize that over time, the easy stuff would end and that because they weren't performing they'd have to go to summer school.

So Mr. Merrill had to flunk some of his students and so did Miss Lehman. In fact, the other parents started to doubt the reputations of Merrill and Lehman, so much so that they started to pull their kids out of their classes and put them in other classes. The problem was that Lehman and Merrill, but especially Lehman did not put their non-performing students in detention. They didn't want to declare them as bad kids, and kept using euphemisms and putting their reputation on the line. All the other teachers knew this - they started clearing their classes of subprime students who were bringing down the curve and threatening the reputation of the entire school. It took several years to reverse the trend. Mr. Stearns was the first teacher who got fired, still Lehman thought she could pull it off.

In the end, Merrill saved his class but now he's lost tenure, he's a substitute and all of his pupils are now going to be taught in the big lecture hall. Lehman has now been let go, and all of her students have to go elsewhere.

How is the school? Well, the good students are still good students and the good teachers are still good teachers. But nobody gets any extra credit any longer, and nobody gets graded on a curve any longer. The small, specialized classes for subprime students are all on the way out, and that's bad news for the OK students too because, well standards are back.

--end of analogy--

Somebody said yesterday that banks take your $1 and loan out $10 and that is how money is made. They literally bank on the chance that you won't demand too much of your $1. Because if you do, they'll have to demand a lot of their $10. Interestingly enough, people are making side bets that those $10 will be good, and when they lose those bets - when the banks say that they can't collect, then more people demand more of that $1. That's why the side bets are always in jeopardy, especially when the banks are not being honest about some fraction of the collectability of the $10.

So how much of the economy is the $1 and how much of the $10 is legitimately OK? That's the real economy, and that real economy is doing fine. How much of that $10 is not particularly legit, and how big are the side bets? That's the less-real economy, and that's the stuff that is in danger. The figure has been between $300 and $600 billion is the less-real economy. Some of that are bad assets, and the most visible part of it is the goodwill in stock valuation of the management capabilities of those bankers, which is what the Dow is pricing out as we speak.

When I watch CNBC, I listen for clues as to changes in that 300-600 billion figure, and I try to figure out by stock price which financial institutions have lost the faith that they can manage their securities. But I understand, which is why I don't panic, that the securities themselves are no more good or bad than they ever were. It's just about how much junk securities we can handle. Subprime mortgages are the people's junk bonds.

The Last Word on Palin's Fitness

You know what the question is. The answer is no.

My answer has always been "no and it doesn't really matter". But quite frankly, it does matter. And I'll tell you exactly why. If you ask me today who I'd rather have running the country between Palin and Rudy Giuliani, I'd pick Rudy. If you ask me who I'd rather have running the country between Palin and Thompson, or Romney or Tom Ridge, Palin would lose. If Palin were at the top of the ticket, in a contest between her and Obama, I'd pick Obama. But she's not.

I've got an itch in my head, and every time I hear 'Vice President' I think, 'leader of the Senate', the tiebreak vote. I don't think of Dick Cheney and all of the extra things he did. I think of the characters from '24' and 'The West Wing', party flacks and scheming rivals. I think of Vice President along the same lines as Majority Whip. The VP goes to the funerals of foreign dignitaries and rollouts of new weapon systems demonstrations. The VP debates the VP candidates during the campaign. But most of all, I think of the Vice President of the US, not as a second string quarterback, but as the President's man on the Hill, the liaison to Congress. When I really think about it, that's what I mean. So most of the time, I don't really worry about the likes of Dan Quayle in office. I mean exactly how did we suffer with Danny Boy? Everybody knows Palin's stronger than Quayle.

But, that's not the answer to the first question. Who would I rather have running the country? I'd rather have somebody who can do both, well. And I don't believe that Sarah Palin can do both well. She's not the second string quarterback. She's something else entirely.

I am satisfied that Sarah Palin has done exactly what McCain needed as far as the GOP is concerned. And I really love the fact that her nomination puts double emphasis on fiscal reform and fighting corruption. She's got maverick written all over her. She is a phenomenon to match Obama and she is the right breath of fresh air for American electoral politics. In short, as a candidate, she has perfection about her. She has thrown the opposition into fits, derailed their momentum, and exposed their prejudices. She has done so being second banana, which is exactly the right place to do it.

But.

She's not bringing anything to Washington in the same way GWBush brought nothing to Washington. By that I mean, when she comes as an outsider, all she can do is rip the Congress one way or another, rather than steer it from the inside like those who know the pace and flow of the Hill. That means she will be abrasive and will be stalled by legislative tricks, and the consequence of that is that McCain's agenda will have a tough time. The good news is that strategically, given Palin's direct, no-nonsense attitude for the country, rather than as an ideological partisan, she can take all of that public and invigorate a reform of Congress we haven't seen since Gingrich. That is a brilliant strategy and it is what McCain is trying to do. Bravo for him. It's a mixed blessing that could backfire in a time of crisis.

This week, we have crisis.

Crisis serves to remind us that when people run around with their hair on fire, they go to the biggest, strongest, bravest, smartest people they can find and they yell 'save me!'. And when they lack confidence in those in charge, they despair and grumble and backbite. Sarah Palin cannot lead the Democrats in crisis, so therefore she cannot very well run America in crisis. Now, Joe Biden can't lead Republicans in crisis, but to be honest, he'd fake it better. Obama could very well be Bushlike and rise to the occasion, but I have my doubts. McCain is McCain, a man built for crisis. In fact, the more conflict he sees, the better he gets. So we have two extremes on the right and two mediocrities on the left, in either case we have to pray for good weather.

We cannot wish ourselves into a better world. We have to deal with the one we have. You cannot be a real conservative and not expect chaos. Palin is not a natural conservative choice, she is a natural popular choice for social conservatives whose capabilities as a maverick says something important about a serious change in the domestic agenda. I like all that, but I go in with reservations. They are the same kind of what-if reservations I have in general. I quite frankly don't know who else McCain is going to pick or what exactly his domestic agenda is going to be. I'm all for bold action, but what's the action John? I'm all for a feisty, wildly popular partisan, but what's the agenda John? There's too much hope in this season's campaigns, and that makes this conservative uncomfortable. But I'll tell you my hope.

My hope is that McCain wins, because without a McCain win, the Republicans are sunk. With a McCain win, the Republicans moderate from Rovian tricks and work for the center and for the country. Country First is exactly what I want. If Republicans don't get the chance to do Country First, it will be 'Energize the Base' and we move more crazily to Right wing populism, and that even scares me. Sarah Palin is the smartest popular choice the GOP could have made; it could have been Ron Paul who is truly a crackpot. It could have been Huckabee, the Jimmy Carter of the Right.

If Obama wins, the Republicans have a better chance of going ape and reverting to extreme DeLay style arm-twisting in Congress. Why? Because a Democrat Executive and Legislative agenda under anybody but (ironically) Hillary Clinton will become a mad social scientist's dream. In other words, we go from Red and Blue to Black and White. The partisans in this country go berzerk under an Obama administration.

The risk of all hell breaking loose from external, uncontrollable factors that put Palin in charge of more than she can handle are slim but real and they really matter. But the risk of all domestic hell breaking loose from a retrenching GOP fighting as a minority against a Democratic full press on Washington is a certainty if Obama wins. And the reality of Obama's waffling and inexperience is as real as the redneck sensibilities of Sarah Palin.

Crisis brings clarity, and both sides give me reasons to freak out and head for shelter. But I'll take the possible risk with McCain over the certain risk with Obama.

On The Bush Doctrine

You won't find me talking much about 'The Bush Doctrine' around here at Cobb. In fact, the most clear and positive thing I've ever said about Bush, which I think should be his proper legacy has everything to do with his use of the Army and nothing to do with pre-emption.

What I have been saying consistently is that GWBush uses the US Armed Forces in a public, overt, coordinated way with full authorization of the US Congress, along with a compliant United Nations in coalition with multiple nations around the world. He is, in the best possible way, just like Dirty Harry. He is pointing the gun, there is no question he is pointing the gun. There is no question that he is the man behind the gun and there is no question about whether or not he is willing to use it. The only question is whether or not you want to defy him.

He is, also in the best possible way unlike Ronald Reagan who used subterfuge and deception and covert operations by the CIA against the specific laws enacted by Congress, sneaky, underhanded, half-assed and plausibly deniable. Against two bit ankle-biting countries. By GWBush standards, Ronald Reagan was a coward and a bully. That's the Bush Doctrine to me. Go in fighting in front of everybody. Call out your enemy, the Axis of Evil, and tell them to git on or get spit on.

Now. I want you to follow this link. It's going to give you names from Google about those people who advised and generated Bush's foreign policy thinking. Some if not most of them are PNACians. I've been a PNACian from the moment I heard about and understood their charter. What makes me ill is that those people who charge McCain of being a clone of GWBush in foreign policy neither recognize the role of the PNAC nor how it influenced Bush, much less how it compares with McCain's own worldview. They pretend that Sarah Palin should riff off exactly what the Bush critics' view of a Bush Doctrine without even being able to name the PNAC names themselves.

Even with the PNAC's existence as an influential moment in history, I find the Palin Dogpile unwilling and likely unable to articulate the evolution in the thinking of the parties involved. I recognized the limits. Which reminds me, I've got to go get Feith's book.

BTW, I think rational people shouldn't be surprised at the depth at which these operatives ply their trade. They've sunk their fangs into Wolfowitz and Bolton.

Tim Wise Off The Deep End

Palin Derangement Syndrome is now an official dysfunction.

I got a hot note off the Kwaku Network this morning and I think it deserves more than the average casual dismissal. My answer is first, and the entire original text is below the fold. It's essentially Tim Wise showing all the symptoms of political paranoia and attempting to weasel wordsmith racism into the very essence of Palin. It's crude, sloppy and ridiculous all at once. I used to respect Tim Wise, but I don't have to scratch my head to see where this is coming from.

My Answer:

Tim Wise is the number one theoretically correct anti-racist in America. He is not known to many black politicos primarily because he's an academic and not surprisingly because he is white. Wise believes, as I used to believe, that whitefolks need to undergo the same kind of personal identity update that blacks did when they refused to be called 'Negroes'.

The problem that Wise has, as do all of those who make a big deal about whiteness studies and white identity is that it is something that is observed, but not real. It's like Born Free, giving lions names - but lions don't have names and they don't think about themselves the way we think they think about themselves. Nor do whitefolks act white with any consistency. Nor do blackfolks act black with any consistency. You cannot redirect whiteness any more than you can redirect blackness. You just observe what it is at the moment.

What Wise and all other anti-racists should do is focus on punishing racism, rather than trying to redirect identity. After all the problem is not with Caucasians, its with racists. So here is the question everybody should ask. At what point is racism a crime, and how many people should go to jail?

Here is the most important test you can ask yourself with regards to race. Do you believe that the majority of a race of people has to fundamentally change in order for you to be successful? If you answer that question yes, then you are part of the problem.

A Dangerous Infatuation

Right now, my boy The Spy is freaking me out. First of all, he's calling me, which is just an extraordinary thing - he's usually dark. The news is that he's safe from Ike. I didn't even bother asking him what he was doing in Houston. Probably realigning ground station antennae in anticipation of the storm and getting last minute uplinks handled. Hmm. That's a pretty good guess - I bet that has to be done all the time for antennae and weather events of significant size. Anyway there's other news.

He's getting a bike restored. A Honda CB 750, one of the greatest motorcycles of all time. I already see the freaking brilliance of it. So guess what I found on the web...

My wife is going to murder me in my sleep if I even dream about having one of these. And suddenly it's the most desirable thing in the world.

Obama's February Surprise

This story doesn't surprise me. I should have made a bigger deal when Bush announced the withdrawal last week. Obama wants Iraq to hold American troops until after the election. What a shock.

WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.

More Clowns

You don't understand it and neither do I. The problem is that it probably cannot be dumbed down. What is it? The complex web of financial instruments and their dependencies; a sizable chunk of this latticework is crumbling on Wall Street. Assets keep changing hands but they don't seem to become safer. Nobody seems to be able to reboot this mess and the clowns keep spilling out of the circus cars of Lehman, and now Merrill Lynch.

When I started reading about some of the parties that were buying, or perhaps tendering offers to buy pieces of Lehman, I found C. F. Flowers. It's actually a company that is named after somebody who is living - a flesh and blood human being whose reputation means something. I contrast that with Merrill and Lynch or Pierce, Fenner and Smith, names of people associated with the investment banks who have been long dead. I suppose I could find out whether or not any actual Lehmans related to the original Brothers are surviving, but slapping them around won't give anyone any satisfaction as they have surely been disengaged from the business for a long time. I presume. Is it even humanly possible to be responsible in such affairs? Does the buck finally stop anywhere, or does it metasticize into the kind of black hole we speculated CERN would generate and pull all of the Earth into financial oblivion.

I know this much. There's a triparty repo involved somewhere. A short term loan of sorts negotiated through a neutral party where the buyer agrees to pay back some cash premium when... and then it gets fuzzy because there are 20 kinds. You see what's going on here is that we have invented a kind of money that only experts understand. Like the subatomic particles at CERN, they have strange half-lives, and it takes massive brainpower and compute power to recognize exactly which direction they go and how they spin. You can't even see them if you don't have the right apparatus - we know that they make up the fabric of everything but exactly how, it takes legions of experts who disagree to say exactly how.

All we know is that Lehman's muons have been decaying at an alarming rate and that all of Merrill's quarks will likely be absorbed into Bank of America's molecules. Bank of America has been buying a lot lately. Remember when they bought Countrywide? Will they become radioactive too?

The great irony of all this is that the most tangible asset we humans recognize, land, is the origin of this entire debacle. Or at least that's what we've been told. You know how war is, everything that goes wrong gets blamed on the enemy whether or not the causality is true. In the fog of these financial transactions, any number of failures can get rolled into the pot. Surely there have got to be a goodly pile of lies, misdirections, half-truths, and unspoken phlemballs of facts buried in all of that paperwork, otherwise how could those clowns, those bad loans, overpriced and underperforming assets keep coming out of those portfolios? Wouldn't a bank know exactly how many there were? No. They don't, and they pretend that they did, and they kept pretending and trading on the names of Lehman and Merrill, which at one time, for a long time, meant something. Now we don't know what they mean besides failure. Let us hope they get buried, in real ground, never to be zombified into existence again.

I wonder if Michael Milken is laughing today. I wonder if Ivan Boesky is giggling. Worse, I wonder if they're jealous. See, we don't know any names. There's no body to blame in all this. Somebody is getting away with murder - the murder of assets, and the murder of the name of Lehman. The murder of Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith and the investments of millions of people and hundreds of institutions all over the world.

You want to know something funny? Oracle Corporation is today worth nearly fifty times as much as Lehman Brothers. Somehow this company, which has assets valued around 691 Billion is only worth about 2 Billion. In software we trust. Google could buy Lehman, anybody could buy Lehman. Money is not the issue. The issue is whether or not the people can be trusted to do a good job. Too late for Lehman. Too late for Merrill. Now a different set of people will lord over the assets of Lehman, a different clutch of particle assayers will divine the composition and value of those strange financial instruments, as they most certainly have been doing for a while, perhaps accompanied by the occasional pool of drool.

Yeah, a bunch of experts just fired another bunch of experts. And then a new set of experts will takeover the assets of the fired experts. How many clowns will continue to spill out of the circus car that is Wall Street? Place your bets.

Palin v Gibson

Who do you trust? According to this website, a good deal of nuance was redacted from Palin's responses. I'm neither here nor there on Palin's geopolitics. I expect her to follow McCain's lead, period.

Explain Yourself

As I was explaining to somebody last night, the reason so many people don't 'get' Sarah Palin is because they only engage Republicans as 'them'. What tends to be so surprising about listening to me pontificate about conservative values is that it sounds logical but it remains incongruous. It's a dissonant cultural and racial thing because there remain large numbers of Americans who have no idea that there exist more than a few Cosby kids in reality. Similarly these folks don't understand how such a thing as a black Republican can be - to their minds it is oxymoronic. This is discussed at the Belmont Club today, very timely because, well we wasted a lot of time talking about politics last night...

Perhaps the problem has to do as well with his campaign consultant, David Axelrod. … Axelrod comes out of leftist Democratic politics … and he has specialized in helping his candidates prevail in primary races when winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to winning the entire election. … the general-election contest was a slow-motion coronation. … So this is new for Axelrod, as it is for Obama. They are not running in a mostly liberal, mostly Democratic state. They are running in a 50-50 country, in which far more people describe themselves as “conservative” than say they are “liberal.” For them, it is probably difficult to imagine that Sarah Palin has appeal, but she does.

Johnathan Freeland’s amazement at how anyone could take McCain and Palin seriously recalls the famous remark of Pauline Kael, who upon learning that Richard Nixon beat George McGovern by a landslide in 1972 said, “how could that be? I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon.” Kael probably traveled in a self-selected and heremetic social circle whose gatekeepers applied unstated but effective political filters. “All those who don’t belong, keep out.” But it is not just the Left which is cloistered. A glance at my social networking list would show precious few voters for Obama. If Obama were to win by a landslide I wouldn’t know anyone who liked him either. But while in the past the privilege of belonging to a circle was the province of the elite, today anyone can join his own ghetto. The Internet has made it easy for anyone to restrict his gaze to only what he wants to see. And from there it is but a single step to living in a self-referential world which could be shattered by exposure to contrary information.

Somebody counted off Obamaphiles from Obamaphobes and declared the Republicans as 'haves' and Democrats as 'have-nots', which is exactly why they don't understand Sarah Palin. She represents the 'have-nots' more than any of the liberal lawyers of the Left, and it makes Democrats crazy recognizing that the party of the 'Haves' haven't come up with a clone of Dick Cheney in this go round.

It takes some doing to get over this cultural and political dissonance, but that is the kind of thinking needs to happen to make adequate judgments. An example of that kind of dissonance transcendant thinking can be practiced at home. Simply sing the words to 'Amazing Grace' to the tune of the theme from Gilligan's Island. Go ahead, try it. It works.

You cannot just win by winning your people but by effectively governing over the opposition. Republicans who happen to be 'haves' are acutely aware of this - because the Left is always comfortable blaming America's problems as caused by the presumably immoral actions of the wealthy, and are always ready to tax them into submission, transferring their ill-gotten gains in a moral, welfare state, money laundering scheme. "All the money we spent on this immoral war could have..." is the prefix for a typical rant.

I'm not afraid of a nation under Obama, I'm a hedge-betting 'have'. But I recognize his Chicago machine scorched earth policy that buried the Clintons, who, not surprisingly conceded that Obama's dog has the biggest teeth. Have no doubt that the Clinton War Room will be reconstructed into the Clinton Armageddon Bunker, and the hardness of next battle for the Democratic soul gets kicked up a notch next season. Obama understands that he had to triangulate to win the country, but it leaves him less consistent than McCain, who was and is a maverick from the GOP Party line.

Still that seems to be something Democrats don't, or refuse to understand, which is why they freak when I speak about McCain and Schwartzeneggar in the same breath. These are men who know that progress cannot be made by strong arming the opposition. They defy the Republican stereotype, as Palin defies it. But they have always, these Dems, been able to neatly throw McCain into the Bush bucket, and the Republican Party into the guise of the Christian Right, social conservatives. It doesn't pay, in a race to the top of the Democratic pile to make real distinctions between Republicans. Now that Obama is at the top, their weakness is that their big supporters don't recognize the rest of the electorate for what it is. Instead, they assume we are all Bush Zombies, yearning for four more years. Again, this is why Palin who is not a geopolitical neoconservative wonk, like Cheney, is such a mystery to them. Palin is the 'Dirty Jobs' candidate who works bi-partisan miracles that leaves her state 8 billion in the black, and she looks like a lot of America. It's just an America which is sadly foreign to the Obama machine.

The Lehman Clown Car

OK. I know that I need to spend a lot more time following the markets but... This thing with Lehman losing practically all of its value is a head scratcher. It's been two weeks since I chatted with Mr Jones and he didn't mention anything about these guys. So please, somebody tell me in plain English what Lehman did that was so freakin' stupid.

It used to be an axiom of my old defenses of Affirmative Action that it might be slightly unfair, but it didn't take bums off the street and put them in charge of banks. Here is one of those days when it might not be a bad idea. On February 1 of this year, LEH was a $66 stock. Now it's below $4.

I know that Lehman used to be part of Shearson and that was once owed by American Express. Ownership has bounced around a bit. Wasn't it one of those LBO firms back in the 80s? Memory doesn't serve very well. Anyway, today they are the clown car of Wall Street and international finance. How long has this been coming?

Self-Determination

The Danger Zone with Doctor Mo

Two hours of Black Republicans. If you can stand it.

McCain's Multiculti Card

The McCain campaign did something yesterday that I don't approve. It answered Obama on his level.

By now we're all familiar with the lipstick nonsense. A non-policy distraction for the idiot media. But now that we're in the mud it always makes sense to fight there. After all, the mud is territory, and elections of this sort are zero-sum. For every voter who was willing to take Obama at his shallow words that in every policy nuance, that John McCain is a clone of Bush-think is a voter McCain cannot capture. So laughing at the shallow dig involving a pig is a noticable identifyer. How significant? Significant enough to battle over. And between now and every town hall and serious debate, that's what we should expect.

So Obama starts off with soundbite and McCain answers as if that soundbite were frought with sexist meaning. Crass move, but understandable. Since the Democrats are truly stunned by the Palin appointment, McCain is somewhat justified in assuming everything coming out of their mouths is about her. Well, they aren't justified but they're crafty enough to make it so. And in so doing, McCain has stolen a page from the multicultural playbook. As old as Bakke, as recent as Obama himself.

As sneaky as this rhetorical battle is, McCain has the upper hand, so long as he wants to play it this way. Anything that it is possible to interpret as a politically incorrect soundbite, McCain can exploit. It will work simply because there are more 'code words' in the language against women than there are against blacks. So in the short run, it pays for McCain to play this childish game. When neither campaign can stand it any longer, all will be forced to use the stultifying language of.. well, boring old white men. Until then, McCain can play sauce for the goose and let the chips fall where they may. The more he can trip up Obama for speaking in generalities and make him defensive, the more a call to experience will work in McCain's favor. So far it's working. Why? Because Obama is falling for it. This morning's idiot rumor is that the term 'community organizer' is now supposed to be a slight against Blacks. And guess what, there is even more idiocy - something about stinky fish that is now being floated as a sexist remark uttered by Obama. I say, at this level, McCain wins, because in the popular mind, Democrats will always have much more to explain for using what could be considered offensive language.

Note the politically correct standard is self-defeating, and now it comes down hard on the Dems. The standard has been, not what you meant, but what could reasonably be interpreted as offensive by some party. Republicans have always said, to hell with that. The irony is that standing by principles makes it easy for Republicans and hard for Dems, who have two Senators running against two non-lawyers. Guess which side is going to be tripped up by straight-talk?

If I were Barack Obama, I would show up smoking a cigarette and showing some hair on my chest instead of in a tailored suit quibbling about English diction and the interpretation of certain idiomatic phrases. He cannot win the language battle.

Of Pigs and Bulldogs

Comparative Retardation
We live in a remarkably juvenile media environment. It's really incredible sometimes how difficult it is to get some idea of what's actually going on in this world given what it's easy to know. Although I don't often listen to NPR, I probably should have listened today just to avoid Right radio's obsession with portraying itself as above the idiocy of TV news. Now I've heard the lipstick on a pig story spun about six different ways. I won't belabor the point.

Getting Fs
Apparently elsewhere the Dow did a great bit of rollercoasting. I haven't heard much intelligence about exactly what it means that the Feds have purchased those Freddies and Fannies. I expect however that I'll get a good rundown in the Economist next ish.

What's a Hadron Anyway?
Success of the LHC means that it didn't destroy the planet. But are there any Large Hadrons anywhere? I mean how long does this damnable thing have to eat Europe's Gigawatts before it produces evidence of some infinitesimal mote of matter? Or is it anti-matter? What does it really matter? I can't figure. I mean I love the idea that there are people out there brilliant enough to engineer this most complex machine on the planet, but it's not really usable or explicable by more than 5,000 of us. Even stories about orgies at Hef's are more useful in that though only a very very few get in, at least the rest of us can reasonably imagine what's going on, and have some degraded approximation of the event in our own homes. Hmm. Maybe if I put some aluminum foil in the microwave...

Smokin'
I think I'll try to change the news cycle by announcing that I am hoping that the McCain camp asks one especially idiotic question: Why can't Obama stop smoking? Nobody cares what he did in high school, he's a smoker now. What if he drops dead of lung cancer and we're left with Biden running the country? OK if they don't ask that maybe this; How is it that the Democrats say they are for change, but their candidates are East Coast lawyers? It's very hard to predict the stupid questions, but we might as well try our best to generate more.

A Stupid Question About Oil

One of the advantages of being smart is that you get to ask stupid questions without appearing stupid. Of course that doesn't stop rude people from suggesting that you are. So here's my stupid question of the day.

Aren't there those among opponents to the war in Iraq, especially those who feel deceived by the Bush administration claims of WMD, who want our oil? I cannot tell how many times I've seen the accusation here at Cobb and elsewhere that this war of occupation is all about oil. If the US truly needs oil then isn't there some expectation that along with bringing the troops home, that the US also bring home some oil?

Is there, anywhere in America people who look at the price of gasoline and say, Dammit I want my Iraqi oil? I mean seeing as it's not about 'freedom', or is it that we just punched the wrong country in the nose?

Kelly's Journey

A cat named Jon Kelly is about to go on the adventure of a lifetime. Dig this. He's a young Scot blogging for the BBC; he has embarked on a bus trip across the US from coast to coast interviewing Americans on their politics.  How cool is that?

We met at Starbucks yesterday morning and immediately hit it off and for 90 minutes I got to spew on about my favorite subject, me. The man takes shorthand! He actually used a steno pad. He got every word.

If you ask me, this is something of the future of journalism. He's going to be interviewing bloggers across America. Kelly seems to be uniquely qualified. He is patient, polite and pretty smart and I can't emphasize the importance of the first attribute. The long format is severely lacking in everything we do in the media today. You couldn't even get Dick Cheney in a 90 minute interview over the course of eight years, so it is no wonder Americans' ideas about the man are so abbreviated. How many would trouble themselves to read his biography? Somewhere in between the soundbite circus and the declining art of book reviews is the space that Kelly is filling.

I outlined to Kelly pretty much the entirety of my political evolution. The emotional transformation I underwent in Houston back in 2002 still remains painfully fresh. I really cannot talk about Stalin without it getting into my throat. He suggested, and I agree, that from an outsiders perspective he sees me and Obama rather similarly. I would just argue that I've evolved to what I consider some more mature and responsible political positions.

The question of what other folks in the world think about Americans is about a massive subject as there is. I think they are going to learn a lot. This is what Michael Totten has been doing for us in the Middle East, but Kelly's journey will be personal and fresh. Kelly immediately noticed how forthcoming Americans are when you ask them questions - or at least here in LA. We'll see what happens elsewhere. I really can't wait to see his blog.

UPDATE: Here's the piece.

 

Parsing the Text

Pat Buchanan was, of course, Nixon's speechwriter. I suppose that it takes one to know one. Nothing speaks to the relative absurdity of the moment so much as Keith Olbermann having the final word. Then again, they are only words.

Here then, are some boring words about good government from Sarah Palin.

I, for one, had no idea that the Exxon Valdez lawsuit had yet to be settled. It must be difficult for kneejerk environmentalists to try and snipe at Palin. That's a good thing. This is, by the way, the sort of interview that I have expected to see from her.

Every Palin Rumor

Some cat named Charles Martin has bothered with all of the nonsense dumped at the feet of Sarah Palin. I refuse to be astonished at the depravity of her critics. As of this morning there are over seventy questions asked and answered, few of which are in any way substantial.

Return of the Wimp Factor

I've been accused, by a mental midget, of being a flag waver. Here is how I wave the flag (on Sundays in September)

9/11 - What Would You Do?

New FICA Loopholes

I'm trying to get some idea exactly what Obama might do with FICA, seeing that he's moderated his rhetoric and tacked towards all of McCain's original positions on Iran, the Surge, FISA, gun control, the death penalty and abortion. It's clear that being a Democrat, you can always depend on him to raise taxes and increase government spending.

Depending on who you listen to, his idea to raise more revenue on FICA is either going to the big pot or back into Social Security. I don't have a definitive answer. Perhaps you do. That's a serious question because if he's taking money out of my check as FICA and spending it on something other than Social Security, that's messing with the locked box. So that's the first question I want to know.

Secondly, according to American Thinker, he was originally going to lift the cieling as a way to say he's sticking it to the rich, except the cieling was 102k (I thought it was 80K). Anyway, I always loved the fact that I would get no more FICA taken out of my check around September, so I always had extra cash for Thanksgiving and Christmas. So Obama is all about ending that benefit. But then he changed his definition and them made a loophole between 102 and 250k. But that article was written in June, who knows if he's changed his mind again.

Overqualified

I can't help but riff on Iowahawk. Suddenly, in the absurd, gallows humor.

No Race Cards Here

Loyola Beats Mira Costa

The last time I shed a real tear, as in cried, it was when I realized that I had allowed the application deadline for freshman year at Loyola High School to pass for my son. 'Nuff said on that. Since then, I have gotten used to the idea that Boy will accomplish what he needs outside of that well-wrapped universe, but every once in a while it stabs me like a splinter in my mind.

Whenever that stabbing pain arrives, I console myself primarily with the knowledge that he will be in a better position socially than I was, and that as a Loyola alum myself, I am quite capable of transferring those lessons I got. But then again, he won't live it.

Be all that as it may, I am coming back around into the old high school family slowly but surely. It has gravity. Last night I attended the opener against Mira Costa High one town over from me in Manhattan Beach. It was the second high school football game I've attended in as many nights (Boy's frosh team stomped North Torrance High something like 45 - 7 on Thursday - he got one unassisted tackle.) and also the second in about three decades. I can tell you that it's truly weird not to be able to see the replay or hear the commentary, but extra cool to be one of the few with binocs and see the fumble before the crowd does. Still, I have to bone up on my football observation skills.

What struck me most about this whole deal is that the spirit of the Loyola fan base is monstrous. I can't say that I know what to compare it to, but it was truly pretty awesome to see first hand. I never hated football, but I've always disliked the whole 'fan' thing. I'm not a very good booster. I like to play, I like to make a difference personally. But last night I put on the hat and sat in the bleachers and shared the binocs and met a whole lot of people I hardly expected to meet. It got to the point when I was asking strangers if perhaps I knew them. Marlon and Darryl, I knew and I rather expected to be there, pillars of the Family as they are. But seeing Michael and Kirk and Ty and Frank was pleasantly unexpected.

The game itself was jerky. It had no offensive continuity. As Coach Porterfield said, it looked like a bad soccer match, nothing happened until one team made a mistake. We counted at least five illegal procedure calls. There were about 4 sacks, several fumbles and interceptions. A pass interference and a technical foul within a couple plays of a punt return had everybody scratching their heads. And if that announcer says 'Boom Shacka Lacka or 'punting situation' one more time, I was going to scream. I don't know how bad high school football kicking games are supposed to be, but some of this was straight Keystone Kops. Nevertheless, there were some breakout plays especially by a kid named Jones, I think #84 and especially Loyola's #2, an unstoppable hole-splitting running back who seemed to break tackles just for the fun of it.

Most impressive to me was the energy of the place. It was standing room only from the opening kickoff until pass the closing 'boom shacka lacka'. I couldn't catch the chants that the Loyola student section was doing with their tomahawk motions, but that block of them about 20 wide and 8 rows deep was pretty awesome.

I think I could make this into a habit, that is, when Redondo Union is away. Go Seahawks! Go Cubs!

Just Happy

I think I finally found a picture that looks like I feel. The Spousal Unit took this one this morning before our sushi lunch near the beach. It's all good.

Party Over Here - Part One

I'm going to try and do the full canonical list of party spots in my black LA starting back in the day. I probably should rank them too. That would be quite a task, but I would open that one up to the crowd. What's weird now is that I don't have any specific stories. I can tell you exactly what shade of crowd it was but now all of the specific tales are a blur. Only a few specific stories remain.

The great majority of these clubs I attended between 1982 and 1989. A good seven years of partying everywhere I could between the ages of 21 and 28. Around 1990 or so, I rather went underground and turned my back on yuppie entertainments. I suppose you could say that all that partying never led me to The One. The perfect woman was not to be found in all those clubs - and having become a master at trolling them I had rather classed myself out. Which is to say that being a spoiled, good looking, well-connected young black professional who always went to social events looking for serious babeage and never for one-night stands, I became rather jaded. To this day I ignore most women that a lot of guys drool over. It's hard to describe, but I would simply say that my impossible standards kept me out of a LOT of trouble. Which is odd considering that I have a reputation, at least as far as my wife says, as a player. I was not a player, I just danced a lot, and I styled a lot.

It was the age when black producers were able to procure clubs in upscale white neighborhoods for the first time in LA history. So there was transition and crossover, sorta. Black DJs had a little bit more breathing space and got out there. So if you haven't experienced it, imagine you coming out of a club on Thursday night and there being three brothers handing out glossy invites to a party for Friday night. That's how it went around. Or maybe you would find the invite on your snazzy auto's windshield.

For me, partying had three aspects. First off, it's just what you do. You are young and single with time on your hands, the music on the radio still compels you to dance, get out there where it's playing loud. It's about Styling, Cruising and Dancing. The troika of being cool. Second of all there is The Mission. The Mission is to get the right babe, and this of course is hard work. You need to be constantly engaged at every opportunity because volume makes the difference. Thirdly there is the adventure of clubbing itself. To find yourself in a new and strange neighborhood dancing with somebody you never saw before has an interesting kind of subliminal validation to it.

The Red Onion on Wilshire.
The Red Onion was a reliable place. It was an after work joint that was perfectly conventional. You could expect the DJ to play all the right songs. It was a bit smallish for my taste and I always wanted to catch it early right during or after happy hour. Later than that it got too crowded and the crowd was, well, conventional, which made it rather ideal for dancing in suits. The

The Bit'n Apple
I went there only a few times. Most of the time, the clientele was too old for my tastes. Meaning divorcees and people with mortgages on the DL. It wasn't that I didn't appreciate the attentions of older women, it's just that I didn't need other people to know that. Besides, I hadn't given up hope on the primary mission and this place played a little bit too much Al Green and not enough Cameo. At least that's how I remember it. I also seem to remember that a lot of the Bit'n Apple crowd were people who didn't party on a regular basis. It was a safe place to recommend to your cousin from Kansas who didn't want to get too LA'fied.

The Golden Tale
This was my joint. I had a regular table and often hung out from the moment I got off of work. I used to explain that I worked in the building, but I was never able to work that line into a visit up to my office upstairs. Or at least not with a babe I didn't already know. GT was ground zero for The Babeless Crew, my gang of engineer buppie brothers, associated friends and lovers. It was a DJ joint with good food, two dance floors and sometimes live jazz. Everytime I hear 'Housequake' I think of GT, and I'm sure it became legendary all over.

Bourbon Street Grotto
BSG was just about the classiest joint ever. Tony was the man and this was his production. It was Thursdays, if I remember correctly, at the World Trade Center in downtown LA. Plenty of space, never too crowded 10 or 12 dollar cover to keep the riff raff at bay and an occasional live jazz or comedy performance. Some of the coolest people I knew would show u.

Inglewood Playhouse
I have to mention the Inglewood Playhouse because it too became a regular hangout. Every once in a while there would be a small black theatre company that would put on a production for young black actors and actresses who hadn't quite broken into Hollywood. We would hear about them and make it a date. It was a smarter thing to bring a date to the Playhouse than to go stag, but there were those who played the odds.

The Greenhouse
The Greenhouse was in a bank building right across the street from LA County Art Museum. You know, the La Brea Tar Pits. It was a short-lived venture but it succeeded in bringing some high quality clientele into circulation. I started to get in trouble with my class warfare-minded speech when I started describing the place like that. The thing I remember about the Greenhouse was what a goober it proved me to be. I recall that one of the producers was a woman who wore long dresses and I'm thinking that she raised money for charitable causes as well. So I came there thinking I might get into some deep conversations. This was in the days before I would take my writing public, so you could find me in a jacket and tie writing in my journal over in a corner. I never did figure how to connect with people there. Eventually, I psyched myself out of dancing and fell into alien observation mode. It was a very yuppie place that turned out to be not much fun in the end.

Funky Reggae & White Trash
This was, I have to say, my favorite club of them all. There is only one or two exceptions but that was because of particular experiences on particular clubs on particular nights. Overall, Funky Reggae was it. That was because it balanced out my dancing in suits. You see, if I was on The Mission, I had to go to my regular high maintenance clubs, like BSG and the Golden Tale with occasional forays to RJs and Carlos & Charlies. You simply weren't going to meet class babes anywhere else but weddings. Unfortunately, I didn't have the good sense God gave a spider monkey and never attended weddings. Funky Reggae was the club where I let down my hair, and it was there that I got to dance with Rosie Perez - on top of a speaker. Yes. It was the club where a brother in a black tank top and fingerless gloves could let it all hang out. I know, I'll never be able to run for Senate, but that's the way it was back in the day when I drove my red BMW 2002 with the bike rack on top. There was nothing quite like the experience of seeing young punkish, reggaeish, kids from everywhere in LA crush the dance floor to Dopeman. I always went to Funky Reggae solo. Hmm.

The Crush Bar
The Crush Bar was the dirty white girl club. If you could stand the smell of beer and wait for the right danceable song, this was the joint. Of course there was a lot of standing around and drinking beer and few of the really good looking white girls were prepared, but occasionally a brother wants to be the center of attention and doesn't give a rats who's watching. And on those occassions to the beat of 80s rock there was Hollywood's own Crush Bar. Always easy to get into, always cheap, always packed to the rafters with trashy chicks who dug dancing with black dudes with high top fades.

Chamineh
Chamineh I went to just once. Hated it. Why? Because I waited for a very long time to get in, and when I did get in, it was the exact same crowd as the Carolina West, but they were acting like they were all that. See here's the part where I have to really play the class card. I'm sorry but the Chamineh was ghetto. They had the kind of bouncers that didn't say please, meaning they were accustomed to dealing with roughnecks. OK that's all I'm going to say because I know a lot of people who liked Chamineh. It wasn't my speed, sorry.

Friday's at The Marina
If there was one club that was legendary above all the rest, it was TGIFridays at the Marina. If you could distill one or two reasons why it would be Tiny Lister and Eric Dickerson. You see both Eric and Tiny spent a lot of time at Fridays and everybody in the city knew it. Friday's had the longest lines to get in and nobody even danced. It was just a regular old TGIFridays, but damn! Basically everybody started the weekend there. Friday night you went straight to Friday's and found out where all the parties were at, but first you trolled at the bar. What Friday's was perfect for were the Three Girls. You know, those three black girls who always hang around each other. One is shy, one is fat and loud and one is just foine. They are the codependent trio and they occasionally grab a cousin or coworker to round them out. They are there at Fridays getting their grub on eyeballing every whicha way. The trick is to peel the shy one away, and then their wing-power disintegrates, but that's a lesson for Masters in Babe Administration, another day.

Feminism

Dysfunctional

Pakistan: A Bipartisan New Front?

"These are the days of concrete and steel.
Everything is possible but nothing is real."
-- Corey Glover

One of the implications of the jabs at McCain that Obama lobbed in his 'caves' soundbite a week ago was that he would be willing to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan. As I mentioned last Friday on NPR, this happens over Musharraf's dead body. Musharraf is now about as lame as GWBush. Actually lamer because his life may be in jeopardy - you know how it gets in Pakistan. News is trickling through that Bush is letting loose some dogs in cross-border skirmishes right now. So I would guess that there is some consensus in Washington that it's open season, or at least the beginning of open season in Pakistan.

I would keep an eye out for improvement in the American - Indian relationship, especially on military cooperation. Musharraf has been undermined by double crossers in the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. And they most certainly have tossed a fair bit of disinformation our way. Though I haven't revisited in detail the ways to look at the three legs of the Pakistani political stalemate, it's clear that as uncle Pervez steps down, the central government is getting weaker. Whether that means jihadis in country are getting stronger is anybody's guess, but surely America at this interesting opportunity doesn't appear to be beholden to any Pakistani leader in particular. Now is a good time for some covert and special ops.

BTW. France's Sarkozy is making moves towards the puny and weak Syria.

I read all this as a kind of shoulder shrug of the great powers. Clearly our Democrats have no respect for the ideas of strong allied nations and overt forces of liberation against presidentially identified evildoers. And Bush hasn't been able to convince anyone for several years, even though it's working in Iraq. This augers for a lot more military advisors, Contra forces, deniable special forces ops and the like - which is just what I think is happening in northern Pakistan as we speak.

If McCain gets elected, he is likely to continue with the shift of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, especially if Petraeus makes the case for a reasonable drawdown. The political prize of nabbing bin Laden, no matter how anti-Westphalian the means, has got to be too big a temptation to resist for the price of Vietnam & Nicaragua-style deniable ops. I cannot imagine that Obama would resist it given his calculations of individual solidier's lives over strategic military objectives. Who can doubt McCain wouldn't also slide a few of those troops over the nebulous border regions?

If the bad war is Iraq and Iran and the good war is in Afghanistan, and the deniable war is on Pakistani soil, is there no one to stop McCain or Obama? Yes, there is no one. After all, to whom in Pakistan is America accountable?

Succession Obsession

On Foreign Policy - What McCain Might Be Thinking

My man Benzon pointed this review of Phillip Bobbitt by Niall Ferguson several months ago. I just read it. Now is the time to connect the dots between what McCain might be thinking and what Bobbitt has said. While I still think in terms of Barnett, I know he has updated the Pentagon's New Map which is several years old now. Barnett wants to be a change agent in an Obama administration but I can't square his tolerance of Putin.

It is becoming clearer to me that McCain has stood up clearly against GTMO for symbolic but also good reasons. I still blame Congress for not being proactive in making a reasonably modified legality work for Bush, whose intent has been right. Well, here's the paras:

So how should you fight terror? Like the British soldier-philosopher Rupert Smith, Bobbitt argues that the Bush administration blundered in Iraq by waging the wrong kind of war. As a victory over a suspected rogue nation-state, Operation Iraqi Freedom was a triumph. But the “war amongst the people” that then had to be waged to convert Iraq into an ally in the war on terror was a fiasco. Bush had wanted an old-style victory-with-parades. In these new wars there can be no such resolution (hence Bobbitt’s earlier coinage, “the long war,” which a more sober Bush briefly adopted).

To make matters worse, the Bush administration has seemed to glory in its contempt for the rule of law, even as it has posed as the exporter of freedom. A member of the Democratic Party (and nephew of Lyndon Johnson), Bobbitt is damning about the deficiencies of the Patriot Act, the “prison colony” at Guantánamo Bay, the use of torture and the willful evasion of existing law that has accompanied it. Yet many of his fellow Democrats (not to mention many libertarians on the right) will be stopped short by what Bobbitt says next.

Bush’s instinct was not wrong. In this war, we do need pre-emptive detention of suspected terrorists; we do need a significant increase of surveillance, particularly of electronic communications; we do need, in some circumstances, to use coercive techniques (short of torture) to elicit information from terrorists. The administration’s fatal mistake was its failure to understand that these things could be achieved by appropriate modifications of the law. By doing what indeed was needed, but doing it outside the law, the administration undermined the legitimacy of American policy at home as well as abroad. Bobbitt is emphatic: all branches of government must act in conformity with the Constitution and the law.

With lawyerly precision, Bobbitt explores the classic conundrum of the “ticking bomb”: a detainee very likely has knowledge of a concealed explosive device that, if detonated, will kill thousands. In such a case, because the ends really do justify the means, the right thing may indeed be to torture him. But doing so, Bobbitt argues, can never be legal. The torturer would have to stand trial for his action, though with the strong presumption that he would be acquitted if he had succeeded in averting a disaster. Under less extreme circumstances, Bobbitt suggests, it should be possible for government agents to use coercive methods short of torture (sleep deprivation, truth drugs), but only with the prior approval of a jury.

In that last paragraph, Bobbitt uses what I am now calling the 'Man on Fire' scenario after the Denzel Washington movie - that we may have our own type of 'legal suicide' agents who would be sacrificed to our legal system in order that they may pay the price of freedom to safeguard consent. I think it goes one step further than my 'Monsters on a Leash' which is essentially the Bush doctrine of not ruling out anything, but trust us, we're Americans. I think anyone who genuinely had issues with GTMO and waterboarding as elements of the Bush Administration that went too far, must be put at ease by McCain's hardlines.

With regard to what I had been saying about International ID and The Last ID and Posner's CT Circuit which seemed to perplex too many of my readers, I'll simply say this: Everything that Alberto Gonzales got in trouble over with regards to updating the definition of enemy combattants under the Geneva Convention - which ultimately resulted in civil rights being given to Hamdan who is not a citizen is what I'm talking about. We ought to seriously reconsider who is whom. Again, if we are not exporting liberty, then we have no Constitutional authority to treat foreigners as protected by the US Constitution. If we are we need several very well defined shades of grey, issuing from our Congress and State Department. Now. McCain's elimination of torture and torture-like practices does not fundamentally alter the standing of domestic terrorists and enemies in the long war. We need to stop treating jihadi enemies of the West and of the state as mere criminals and their entry into the US as criminal tresspass. They're spies, at least. Bobbitt understands something profound, I think, about this grey area.

Anyway, I want to know that McCain has considered Bobbitt. We are evolving neoconservative geopolitics here.

An Economic Update

Back in March we talked about what was going on in the American economy. It was a pretty good discussion. Aside from the price of oil going way up and then coming halfway down again, what has changed? People seem anxious but not panicked. Are we slowly creeping back to normalcy or is there more grief ahead?

My guess is that the crisis seems to be contained, that the $600B in paper losses of mortgage backed securities has not resulted in fire sales of real assets and that the credit crunch is still targeted specifically at borrowers against home equity. The salutary effect may be that consumers may begin to up their real savings and quit being so luxurious with credit. But that will matter little if there is a real depression ahead.

What do you see?

The Palin Speech

I accept the call to help our nominee for president to serve and defend America, and I accept the challenge of a tough fight in this election against confident opponents at a crucial hour for our country. And I accept the privilege of serving with a man who has come through much harder missions and met far graver challenges and knows how tough fights are won, the next president of the United States, John S. McCain. (Cheers, applause.)

It was just a year ago when all the experts in Washington counted out our nominee because he refused to hedge his commitment to the security of the country he loves. With their usual certitude, they told us that all was lost. There was no hope for this candidate who said that he would rather lose an election than see his country lose a war. (Cheers, applause.)

But the pollsters -- the pollsters and the pundits, they overlooked just one thing when they wrote him off. They overlooked the caliber of the man himself, the determination and resolve and the sheer guts of Senator John McCain. (Cheers, applause.)

The voters knew better. And maybe that's because they realize there's a time for politics and a time for leadership; a time to campaign and a time to put our country first. (Cheers, applause.)

Our nominee for president is a true profile in courage, and people like that are hard to come by. He's a man who wore the uniform of his country for 22 years and refused to break faith with those troops in Iraq who now have brought victory within sight. (Cheers, applause.)

And as the mother of one of those troops, that is exactly the kind of man I want as commander in chief. (Cheers, applause.) Thank you.

AUDIENCE: (Chanting.) USA! USA! USA! USA!

Google Chrome

Yeah I got Google Chrome. Yeah it's fast. Yeah it's slick. Yes it's better than Safari. But it's not enough.

Four reasons.

1. It doesn't even support Google Notebook. What the hell were they thinking? Why release a new browser without Firefox's killer Google App? Makes no sense.

2. I can't change the color of the browser. It defies all of my Windows thematic settings, and I hate that color blue. It reminds me of the idiot defaults of IE.

3. No smart text stuff for Typepad. Various tabs and such don't show up.

4. No support for del.icio.us plug-in.

In these ways it is only marginally better than Safari. But it is fast and everything works. Still, I'm sticking with Firefox 3.

Traitor

Traitor is an extraordinary film about the moral courage required to fight terrorism. It is one of the first post-9/11 films that deals with Muslims in such a way as to require no disclaimers or moral fudging. It is probably the most honest film on the subject that is in any way entertaining. In fact it is marvelously paced and gives more dramatic tension to the consequences of moral integrity than any other film in the spy genre.

Don Cheadle plays a devout Muslim born in Africa, trained in North America, working in the Middle East. His background and motivations are opaque through most of the film as we discover him through his own circumstances and through the eyes of two FBI agents determined to bust him, outside of their jurisdiction. We discover him selling explosives and serving time in a Yemeni jail having been busted for the act in that country. His laconic performance shows a man both seemingly tortured by his conscience and yet determined to ply his trade as a demolitions expert in as holy a war as he can find. He is no crusader, nor pawn. He is a thinking man of God gifted with a dangerous talent trying to be of use in a world of incompetants in conflict. He incurs a life debt to a man in prison and discovers that man too is engaged in jihad against America, and gets deeper into a network of plotters with audacious plans in their war. He is both emotionally, spiritually and tactically tied into this network and becomes their technical mastermind, rising to the top of the FBI's counter-terrorism most wanted list.

As with all great thrillers, there is a twist. Cheadle's character, Samir Horn, is more than he appears to be, just as we have suspected at the beginning but began to doubt as he actually cold-bloodedly detonates a bomb at the US Embassy in France. As the clock ticks, Cheadle is a man trapped between his own conscience, a massive terrorist plot, and the closing net of FBI pursuers.

This flick is too good to spoil. See it. It is the best close-up drama involving contemporary jihadi terror ever made.

The Party Line on Palin

It's not too complicated to understand. Here are two other tidbits that didn't get into our conversation about Alaska. Her governorship, for what it's worth, puts her as the executive over 24,000 employees and a $10 Billion budget. That ain't hay.

But before I go into my other specifics, I need to link all parties concerned with the official Right Blogospheric answer(s), to the incredible amount of hatred and spew against Sarah Palin. I haven't really bothered much to get outraged because I spared myself the trouble of reading much of the degenerate nonsense. You can start and end with this post by The Anchoress. My favorite bit:

Then, Alan Colmes posted (and apparently immediately took down) a piece basically questioning Sarah Palin’s instincts as a mother (does he even have children?) because she, a month before her due date, and far away from her doctor, did not immediately fall apart when she noticed some amniotic fluid leaking.

This not being her first pregnancy, Palin did what a prudent, experienced woman who knows her own body would do; she called her own doctor, kept him apprised and did not panic. She made a scheduled speech, traveled home and went to the doctor.

The left is going to try to run with this? If Palin had a “D” after her name, she’d be praised for her calm, collected manner in the situation and we’d hear how it reflects how steady she would be “a heartbeat away from the presidency”, and we would all know, because everyone would keep saying it, that - of course she would have seen a doctor had she needed to - but every woman wants HER doctor with her when she delivers, if it’s possible.

People seem to forget that women managed to birth their children - and gain some wisdom about the process - long before hospitals and the AMA were around.

The left will try to make hay about Palin’s judgment. Most women will say, however, that Palin trusted what she knew about her body, and in God.

Do ya want more?

• American Digest

Bomblets Again

Somebody must have told Dani Sevilla about my problems with cluster bombs. You see, Sevilla represents Survivor Corps and they are testifying to the fact that Russia has used them against civilians in Georgia. I was contacted by Dani again today. I don't really know much about Survivor Corps, but I don't care. When it comes to cluster bombs, well, it kind of ruins my objectivity.

Back in the day when I was a freshly minted yuppie, I got all sorts of unexpected phonecalls to my new office in Southern California. Merrill Lynch wanted to offer me investment advice. The United Negro College Fund wanted my contribution. Amnesty International called me personally. They informed me first about what was up in Namibia, and then they told me about how the bad guys put shiny objects on cluster munitions in Afghanistan so that they would be attractive to children. Up until that moment I only had abstract ways of describing evil, a second later I was nearly puking up my lunch.

Many years later I had hoped to become the sort of man I couldn't be before - that could face harsh realities, and maybe I am. Maybe I'm not. But I'm certainly not so hard-eyed and pragmatic that I can take this kind of information without blinking. It still gets me in the gut. I cannot be politically correct in any direction when it comes to cluster bombs, and it doesn't matter what the reason. I'm scared to death of drowning and I'm one of those who still could make excuses for waterboarding. But a weapon that's designed to literally cost you an arm and a leg, I cannot under any circumstances put up with it. It just has that kind of emotional impact on me.

So there's two things to do. Number one go check out Survivor Corps' website and deal with that reality. Number two, forgive me for not giving any rationale or doing any homework like my usual skeptical self. Like I said, I just can't deal with the bomblets. I don't see why we should put up with anybody who does. Damn you Putin.

A President for Our Times

There have been times when I have thought about the perfect president for the job. We've all had various real and fictional people presented to us. Who would I choose if I were the great political Mattel designing President Ken?

First of all he would be Ken, not Barbie. Chief Justice Barbie, absolutely. President Barbie, no thanks.

The perfect President would be a man in his late 50s or early 60s who had already demonstrated his mastery, to world class standards, an endeavor of great leadership. Today's paradigm of governors is apt, more to very populous states than not, but not so much as I'd like. The problem with that entire paradigm is that it is one that requires a leader who presides over great bureaucracies and connives them one way or another. This is an exercise of great compromise by definition. That is because government bureaucracies are not agile organizations. They are not responsive to executive leadership primarily because they are not designed to be responsive to change. Rather, they are standard-making organizations, regulatory agencies that respond at the pace of legal reform - which is to say, very slowly. Thus a president is one who generally exerts political pressure through the force of his personal attributes to get bureaucrats to cut corners, or actually do the jobs they are not often demanded to do at anything other than a glacial pace. So by definition, a President has to be the kind of man, first and foremost who can place strongarm experts of his own choosing at the head of each of his agencies.

It seems to me that I'm a bit overly influenced by having watched Contact last evening, but it seems like the kind of man most appropriate is a multinational industrialist of the sort highly respected in his particular field of endeavor, but also well known and loved by the people. Steve Jobs comes to mind on the more people side. Walter Wriston on the more industrialist side.

It comes as no surprise that there are people who we know who could do anything they want, and we rather expect that they wouldn't want the job of President. There's no money in it, there is tremendous responsibility, and not much that you can actually make happen. But it is the job of a patriot who puts his country before self, and so I don't think you could have the perfect president without the absolute guarantee that he is the kind of man who would give his life for his country. In that regard, few offices are better preparation than that of a combat military commander. The man who could send himself and his men to their deaths with certain confidence that it serves the nation is the sort of conviction required. A leader who cannot live with the burden of life and death decisions is unfit. The President must honor his nation.

The people must love the President, and therefore the President must be lovable. There must be some aspect of his intellect and personality that makes him approachable, genuine, and possessed of the common touch. And I try not to channel Rudyard Kipling, but perhaps it is the universality of his great poem 'If' that makes those qualities so unavoidable.

The President must have a vision of the world that is shared with the great leaders of the world. He must be able to create and sustain a path in the world for America that other world leaders understand and respect. He must remind them that he is capable and serious, diplomatic and possessed of integrity. He must be seen to have power and wisdom and that he rides atop his nation's government not for his own or provincial purposes but for great and beneficial purposes in the world.

The President must have courage, most especially the courage to face the worst news without losing faith that some good can be made of it. He must face failure every day and give people the confidence they need to face doom as well. He must leverage people who too are courageous and never surrender or compromise honor merely because failure is a possibility, probability or even an inevitability. The President cannot be cowed. He must be unabashed and leverage the infinite spirit of the people to accomplish what he must.

The President must demonstrate an understanding and respect of the political will and trends of his own nation. He must put himself inside of that framework and make his priorities clear in terms of the direction he will push his party and the nation. He must do so without cowering before or pandering to  popular opinion or special interests, and he must do so in a way that is predictable and responsible.

The President must wield power with grace - to rule in such a way as to make it absolutely clear of his authority yet also make it clear that he has patience and a certain amount of humility. He must tolerate his detractors and distinguish before the people those who are personal vs political foes as well as enemies of the state. The President must have a clear conscience and understand exactly how he is accountable to God.

The President must have the intellectual capacity to understand the implications of all his actions and the acumen to communicate various levels of certainty and capacity to his charges and to the nation. The President cannot be baffled by bodewash or flattered into foolishness. The President must not be afraid to approach complexity by leaning on chestnuts. Moreover the President cannot be bothered to fix what's not broken. He should be able to switch contexts rapidly and integrate new information into his view constantly and not be overwhelmed by detail understanding how much he ought to know and delegating the appropriate portions to experts at his command.

The President must be a respecter of people and processes understanding as he must that the pace of change must be acceptable to the people in charge of carrying it out. He must give his people a fair chance to meet his expectations, and not be afraid to cut them loose when they don't perform adequately. And through such machinations, he must be steadfast in his aim and not be daunted by the challenges of achievement.

The President must retire quietly and go about his business, leaving his legacy in place in the form of the accomplishments of his term in office. He should shutup and go home and never again become a player in politics.

What America Needs

What I'm going to try to do is be as objective and non-partisan as I can in describing the challenges that I think face America in 2008 and how those challenges should be met. It is my way of starting a discussion that acknowledges the strengths and weaknesses of the parties, the press and the public in meeting those challenges, and what that means to us now and going forward. Incidentally, I have been contacted by a reporter from the BBC, and this will be part of the background of our upcoming discussion.

1. Economy
As a first priority, we need to better understand the origins of the credit crunch, how it affecting banks and the banking system and what we can expect to see, given how the economy works its way through this. Months ago when Bear Steans collapsed, a very sharp guy on CNBC got on and said point blank that this was all about bad, risky loans and that the economy was destined to lose about 300 Billion in capitalization - basically out of the arteries of banks and loan originators and all those that depended on them. I've heard the figure doubled since then, and I've heard Cramer (yeah I know) say basically not to trust as an investor, any bank whose stock price is below five dollars. That includes WaMu, btw. Mr. Jones, my neighbor at Morgan Stanley has told me that all of this credit crunch is consumer credit not business credit, and that basically the second deed business is going to dry up for a while. Now holders of these risky loan portfolios are trying tricks to re-class them and or sell them so that they don't get earmarked as 'non-performing loans'. That means everything up to and sometimes including margin calls on their borrowers and double and triple checking the valuation of collateral. Those tricks notwithstanding, there needs to be a plan to define a bottom to the housing market and get everything in play reassessed so that we can put a floor on this problem so that it slides no further.

I think the President should order that some national real-estate and loan portfolio reassessment take place so that all of those risky properties can have some government guaranteed lowball asset value, then once that is established (through Moody's or some such) the fire sale can begin and end in an orderly fashion. We need a real floor, not a speculative floor. And if that means the government is going to own your house, sobeit. The floor should be guaranteed through an emergency period of about 12 months and set up in such a way that most of the distressed properties are actually bought and sold.

2. National Security
The president should lay out a 20 year strategy for dealing with Jihadis, the Axis of Evil, revanchist Russia, India, China, Brazil and Turkey as stratgic partners. There should be a proactive strategy for victory in every theatre including domestic terror that is clearly spelled out to the American people and the people of the world. We should have something that approaches a calculatable prognosis for when American military assets will be deployed and to what degree, and every nation clearly identified as friend or foe with the kind of color based system we are all aware of. Which nation is public enemy number one? How many UN resolutions does it take? There should be few surprises. Let's get beyond the Vietnam Syndrome and the Powell Doctrine. The world knows what's going on in Darfur, the world should know what we intend to do about it. We are the world's policeman, period. Let's set up a global neighborhood watch.  Global warming is nowhere near as important as local warring.

3. Energy Security
I phrase it this way because I'm biased but not perhaps in the way you think. I believe that American dependence on foreign oil is only half the battle - because the entire world depends on foreign oil. We need to be responsible for moving more of our transportation needs to electricity. The crunch is clearly on oil for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. We need to advance technologies in the transportation sector which will quickly replace fossil fuel use. Again, this is an area where the responsibility is primarily ours because we can.

I have no qualms about clean coal. Whatever my doubts about the politics surrounding climate change, it's clear to me that there is no excuse not to minimize the environmental impact of increased use of coal to generate electricity.

4. International ID
This is a new issue but I think it is critical. As far as I'm concerned, we cannot have a successful global economy unless and until we come up with a way to secure individual identity around the world, universally. Everything that is transnational in nature requires this. It touches on every aspect of who we are and what transactions we should be able to access as human beings.

5. Liberty
I am firmly convinced that American Exceptionalism is real and that we have a duty as a constitutional democratic republic to use our influence to spread the concept and best practices of individual liberty around the globe. That should be done primarily through armed peacekeeping interventions bankrolled by the State Department and secondarily through humanitarian relief.

6. Health Care
The government ought to spend some money to put one channel on television - or how about 12? I have a channel on my TV that is strictly dedicated to Salsa Music. How is it that I can have that but not have something that describes America's health care system as it actually is?  I do not believe that Americans have nearly enough information to make their own health care decisions, much less to be able to make reasonable decisions on policy. I think we all have yet to sustain an informative conversation. Still I think that there are a number of things the government should do.

The government should support standards of care that are transparent to providers and consumers. Like the USDA grades beef, we should know whether our hospitals are A, AA, Choice, or Prime. Furthermore, we should know exactly how much it costs to fix a broken leg, much the same way we have access to pricing for lasik surgery. I should know about how much I should expect to pay over a lifetime for health procedures the same way I should know about what kind of repairs I should expect to pay for on my car. Why isn't there a Geico lizard for health care? Because it's a big scam and everybody knows it. Sunlinght, sunlight and more sunlight.

Secondly, we should know about mortality and morbidity statistics so that we can assess the risks to our good health.

Thirdly, we should refrain from imposing behavioral standards in individuals, but make them aware how these standards should affect the amount of health care they should get. We should make clear distinctions between the cokehead and the inheritor of Tay-Sachs when it comes to health care options available.

All of these things are based on a core philosophy of consumer education which creates incentives for providers to participate.

7. Tort Reform
First kill all the lawyers. Second, rejigger the courts. I very much like the idea of increasing the maximums at small claims courts and certifying more acredited assistance providers. Make more of the legal system, self-serve. Americans need the ability to have confidence that the overwhelming majority of actions in their lives are not necessarily bait for insurance fraud and legal torts. I should be able to bungie jump or ride a motorcycle or smoke a pipe or play tackle football or slum it in bathouses and bars without worrying that some attorney isn't lurking in the shadows scheming a way to pay for his kid's college tuition on my misfortune and somebody else's desire to have a zero-friction life.

The President should initiate a broad class of personal immunities which have the same effect on torts as Acts of God.

{more later}

Famous Kids from the GDZs

There were several remarkable benefits about being hooked up to the social scene of my black LA. The first and most obvious was that there were some awesomely good looking young ladies and gents. As I peek into my Wayback Machine, I remember so many different trends of fashion that it's almost embarassing. The second was our association with celebrity - we were always arm's distance from the truly famous, if not rich, blackfolks in LA. The third was that, well, you were hooked up. Every party you went to, you were likely to see and be seen by somebody you know, or knew you by reputation.

Although I brag on it mostly now, throughout my association with the People of the Dons, I was more or less ambivalent. Rather I should say that I was conflicted. On the one hand, I knew that I wasn't one of the true core members of actual rich kids. I lived on Wellington, not Northridge, and it wasn't even the best part of Wellington. When lots of young adults had a huge room to live in at an attractive address and allowed to save money for their own condos after college, I was paying rent. And I also knew that we had more of our share of cokeheads and dealers, and all of the other dysfunctions of life in the fast lane. Still, I didn't miss an invite if I could help it.

Fame, as I said, is the great plum prize of the scene. And while I myself was somewhat comfortable in the second tier of the broad black LA pecking order, I wasn't often far from the hubs. The problem with fame is that it's all relative. Being the homecoming queen at Dorsey or Crenshaw High meant nothing to the white kids in the Valley, but it meant everything here in the 'hood. I can only communicate what seemed to be those excellent pinnacles at the time. Well, actually, I might as well get some of my own piece out of the way if I'm going to be the John Cheever of View Park. First off, I would say that having some reasonable good looks myself I was part of Makasi Sharo which was widely acknowledged as having put Alpha Phi Alpha back on the map. What's this you say? Makasi Sharo was the name of my pledge line at Cal State Northridge back in 1982. It was the first line at that school's new chapter, Pi Kappa, and established from Gamma Xi at UCLA. We started off with a Jewel Line, meaning seven pledges, just like the number of the original founders.  The line was an unusual combination of talents including the star and captain of the track team, the president of the Black Student Union, the president of the Black Business Association, the top pianist at the school, and the three who eventually crossed, myself, D and B. D is The Spy and B is Baby Boy from my profiles of them in The Regulars. We were roomates, line borthers and ace boons in the early 80s.

As it happened, Makasi Sharo, was pledged up and down the state of California. We got the party started wherever we were paraded, but the fact of the matter was that it was 80% Spy. Spy was cursed with killer good looks - not just rock star good looks, movie star good looks. And he had the extraordinarily double-edged quality of saying exactly the truth of every situation. Cracks me up just thinking about it. Anyway, you couldn't be Spy and not be famous - so we partied everywhere. As I often found myself as his negative wingman, keeping the floo-dogs at bay, Spy grew tired of the club scene that still occasionally fascinated me. Of course he was the one that had to remind me to obey the dress code, something I was often unprepared or unwilling to do. I couldn't quite do it right - I actually liked dancing with chicks better than talking to chicks in clubs. Me, I wanted to talk politics anyway.

Of all the party people we encountered over the years, the most notorious was Jim Brown himself. I didn't find myself at a Jim Brown party until I was in my early 20s, but some people I knew had been there as teens. The last one I went to was at the beginning of my association with the Babeless Crew, brothers I hadn't seen since summer at Paul Revere. Some readers at Cobb may know that I happened to skateboard with some of the innovators of that sport back in the summer of '73 on the asphalt berms of Paul Revere Jr. High in Pacific Palisades. I was next in line to get some kid named Peralta to shape me a new wooden board in wood shop - or at least I think that was his name. But I didn't end up at Pali High. Still, that summer I met Tony and John and the man I called Slim along with my old best freind Ebon Grant, who has disappeared somewhere along the way. That summer we were fanatics, as 12-13 year olds tend to be, about Bruce Lee, soccer whistles and those brand new sneakers called Nikes. We ran things at Revere and parted ways - I didn't see them again for 14 years. I was the insult king of Revere that summer, and I still felt it necessary to apologize for that behavior more than a decade later.

That night at the Golden Tale as I apologized to Slim, who would later introduce me to my wife, we reminisced Paul Revere and recalled our P.E. teacher Mr. Merryman who died of a heart attack, not long after he was fired for licentious behavior. I wasn't the only boy to have his ass pinched by the notorious 'Merryfag'. While on the subject of sex, nobody could tell if Baum's real mother was Linda Lovelace as he claimed. But they did recall him having the Z Channel and porno at his place. I never got out to Baum's house, and I never could make the party at the beach that he threw complete with overnight camping. He was going to hook me up with Flip Wilson's daughter. It was one of those sad moments when I realized that I was always so close and yet so far from being top dog in a social scene. There was, of course, no way that my parents would let me go to a sleepover in Pacific Palisades 30 miles from home.

Later, when Bret Easton Ellis wrote 'Less Than Zero', I recalled my close encounter with white rich kids in Palisades, and how we bussed blacks were some of the first outsiders encountering the complete freedom, even anarchy that they enjoyed. How they wore beat up clothes like surfers to disguise their wealth and how they chose insouciance as the form of their privilege. I never forgot how jr high school teachers deferred to them, coming as I had from Holy Name where we could be swatted for showing up out of uniform. Half a world away, we pledged allegiance to the Delco of the United States of Delco and to the Delco for which it stands, one nation under Delco with Delco and Delco for all. Why? Because it was funny as hell and Mr. Schutze in electric shop couldn't do shit about it. We actually played cards in class. The game? Bullshit.

By the time the Cosby 80s were in full swing, Moleman and I had established GDZ Productions. We threw beach parties and I was the marketing manager. My access to all the coolest electronic publication technology at Xerox where I worked allowed me to make some uber-cool flyers. At least I thought so. The significance of the stars we were at arms length from now grew. I mean it seemed like everybody knew Todd Bridges' family back in the day. But now, we knew the Partners In Crime, aka Robert Townsend's homies including David Alan Grier and all them. One dude close to the ambit of the Babeless Crew, Rusty Cundieff was the writer of one of the funniest and smartest black comedies of all time 'Fear of a Black Hat'. Around that time, I was chasing after a young lady who was basically not having me. I tend to be ridiculously intense and when I'm really deep into a babe, I give off stalker vibes. Only my casual flirtations bear fruit. Don't ask me why. Anyway, she was working for HBO and allowed me to hang around some so it was at that time that I got backstage passes to rehearsals to Townsend's upcoming HBO special over at the Wadsworth Theatre. Had you known me at the time, I would have told you that Bobby Brown has this new look and new song called My Prerogative and it's going to blow the roof off. Yes that Bobby Brown.

That was the golden age. For that brief moment in the late 80s, men like Townsend and Cundieff and Spike had attention in the right places. Bands like Tony, Toni, Tone were hot, Janet Jackson was doing "Diamonds", Prince was playing jazz with Madhouse, Miles Davis was playing hiphop, Quincy Jones put Back on the Block in rotation, and GDZ was morphing into The Black Chill, renting cabins up at Big Bear and Jet Skiing. Black people? Jet Skiing? It seemed like an era where we People of the Dons were finally going to get recognized not playing downscale roles, but more like we were in the society we created for ourselves. We had made it through the Crack Wars...

But alas it was not to be. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy E and NWA saw to that. Los Angeles, in the end, became their town, not ours.

Barack's Aggregation?

From today's NYT.

There are 57 blacks out of the roughly 300 people on the Obama campaign’s national finance committee. Each member commits to collecting at least $250,000 in campaign contributions, a formidable task that typically requires deep business networks, something relatively few blacks had until fairly recently.

The list of top Obama bundlers includes people like John W. Rogers Jr., the founder of Ariel Investments, the country’s first black-owned money management firm; William Kennard, the first black chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; and Mr. Davis, who drove across the country 45 years ago as a newly minted college graduate to take part in the March on Washington on 1963 and went on to serve as the first black parks commissioner of New York City and the first black president of Lincoln Center.

Mr. Kennard and Mr. Rogers are among a half-dozen black bundlers who have raised more than $500,000 for Mr. Obama, putting them in a select group of just three dozen fund-raisers.

Among my nightmares is the resurgence of a blue dog coalition in the Democrat party that looks like a rogues gallery of Colin Powells and Thurgood Marshalls. Of course there are such chaps in every major metro under 100 Black Men and such Boule banners I assume, but I expect not so many ideologically conservative. So while it is true that some old Talented Tenth dreams die hard, there has been but only one that I've nursed along through my conversion to the Right. That is Aggregation.

Aggregation to me is a sort of breakthrough at the brass rail and Harvard Club - some conglomeration of African American families with Old School Values and old, or at least aging money. When there was Reggie, the baron of Beatrice, there was some beacon of hope, because his mentor was the great Lee Archer. Now I suspect Archer would berate me for spending so much time in the airy world of the chatting classes, but I cannot deny the part of me that is a writer - a non-profit writer. Yet he's still the man who represents the sort of company I rather expected to emerge in these post Civil Rights days. As it stands far too many are still too shy or muddle-headed to cop to conservatism. Reggie is gone, but we still have men like Richard Parsons, a Republican.

Chances are we're not likely to get such a story out of the Times about those like Parsons or Denzel Washington and Republicans they would support, and we bloggers slog it out in relative anonymity bearing our burdens. But I think as easily as we got Obama, America will see its future in yet another political phenom on the Right. It is only a matter of time and exposure.

As that time ticks away, so does much of my enthusiasm for a proper Aggregation, and I feel less need for a black nationalist anything - even endowment for black highbrow history and such things I've dreamed of doing when I was more certain than I am now that riches were in my future. After all Thelonius Monk doesn't need a 50 acre campus and conservatory built on a hill. We just need not to lose those masters, a far less expensive task. Modesty, perhaps, is the best approach to all that Aggregation stuff.

Yet and still there are days when I wish my bonhommie with the likes of those I grew up with and around, those social skills and associations which made it natural for me to assume leadership in various black organizations in my youth translated into more well capitalized pursuits. There are days when I look at the folks around me and wish we all had a couple orders of magnitude more scratch plus the ways and means to keep it and pass it on. Every time I see a black kid wearing a t-shirt funded by white liberal paternal political sentiment be it wrongheaded or not, I wish it was from a foundation he might have known the board of, growing up in his own black neighborhood. Every once in a while I hate the fact that so many of us are sponsored, that we fill out applications, that we are looked up in databases, that our connections to power are modern and abstract. Every once in a while I wish there were organic dynasties of more than rhythm and blues.

Wouldn't it be nice to head back to Bowen, North Carolina and hang out with my cousins who own several thousand acres out that way? Wouldn't it be nice to know that the Bowen Building just two blocks north of the White House is one of the properties I own but couldn't account for in an off the cuff interview question? Wouldn't it be nice to be a part of a legacy or a process of building one in the private sector? You might say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Gustav, John and Sarah

From the Washington Post:

We must redirect our efforts from the really celebratory event of the nomination of president and vice president of our party to acting as all Americans," Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters in Jackson, Miss., where he flew to inspect hurricane preparations. "There's very little doubt that we have to go from a party event to a call to the nation for action, action to help our fellow citizens in this time of tragedy and disaster, action in the form of volunteering, donations, reaching out our hands and our hearts and our wallets to the people who are under such great threat from this great natural disaster.

Not politics as usual.

BTW. All the extended family is in good shape, evacuated days ago.