born live love die

I’m watching This Week in real time, i.e., not Tivo, and they ran an advert for Direct Buy.

I wonder just who is falling for this scam.  They say that they offer home furnishings at a high discount.  Think about that for a minute.  Why would this one outlet somehow have a better pipe to manufacturers when there is so much competition?  Direct Buy doesn’t make anything.  They buy from manufacturers, just like everyone else.  Therefore, any mode of efficiency they provide must come in the distribution channel.  What form of distribution can they manage that will be better than any other form?

The advert had a couple of shills on who said that they bought a dining table and four chairs for $1500 and it was virtually the same as a table they priced at $3500.  First off, paying even $1500 for a table and four chairs means that you have too damn much money.  That table and chair combo is being manufactured for somewhere around $100.  The workers who made it make very little.  The supply chain is adding margin to the cost.  Furniture sales are all about the sizzle and not about the steak.  Furniture showrooms always post bloated prices and then a sales price, trying to get people to believe that the sale price is somewhat of a bargain.  Still too high?  No problem, pay for it on credit.

Direct Buy is a scam.

One of my favorite songs is “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke.  I like the version by the Neville Brothers.  I think about that song sometimes and wonder how for people who lived in the 1950′s, long it would take for change to come.  I used to live near the Rainier Valley in Seattle.  I remember seeing a young black kid wearing a Detlef Schrempf jersey.  I was thinking about how much of a teasing the kid probably took from other kids, because this was Gary Payton’s town.  Then I wondered if he got teased at all for being a black kid who wore the jersey of a German.  I wondered if he got teased at all for it or if kids were past that.

Yesterday I was at Fry’s in Renton, checking out the crowds.  I saw a black guy in a black leather coat.  He was about an inch or two over my 6’4″, and he went an easy 260 or 270.  But it was the black leather coat that caught my attention.  It was big.  I sometimes buy XXL shirts because I can get the sleeve length in that size for my extra long (37.5″) inch arms.  This guy was good for 3XL or 4XL, easy.  His black leather coat was not a slick, cool, brotha’s hip coat.  It was not a coat that would make the anyone say, “Brotha’s stylin’”.  It was not something a guy would wear out to the club and get other guys to say, “Brotha’s here”.  The man was with his two small children and I think the coat fit that scenario better.

The coat was festooned with the symbols of NASCAR racing.  The man was obviously a fan.  But he wasn’t a fan of just NASCAR.  He was a fan of Kyle Busch.  Here’s his picture.

www.kylebusch.com was embroided across the top of the shoulders in large letters.  Large M & M’s, a Busch sponsor, were on the coat, along with other sponsor logos.

A guy, a NASCAR fan, took his kids to Fry’s to shop for some computer related equipment.  That isn’t very revolutionary, is it?  Sometimes, change comes in big steps.  Other times, it comes in steps so small that we don’t notice them.

Some people lost more than others in the current meltdown.  Here’s a list of the top 20 losers including this guy, who also lost his mind.

I just saw a bit of Obama’s press event yesterday announcing his economic team.  I can’t find the video on line but he was markedly tired.  Biden was up and bouncy, but that may be his experience of the last 30 years showing through.  Obama needs to center before walking in front of the cameras.

I missed two questions from this quiz.  How will you do?

Civic Literacy Report – Civics Quiz

I got a twinge of that feeling while watching William Weld on MSNBC.  The former governor of Massachusetts was droning on about things and he said that he was in the Reagan government and he and his fiscal conservatives joined with the social conservatives to do the president’s bidding.

This comment came after he came on to defend the bail out of a variety of financial institutions.  Gov. Weld, a patrician in every sense of the word, talked about being a Republican.  He said that Republicans stand for lower taxes and less government. This is an absolute lie.  He repeated that lie several times during the segment.  Zfacts has the truth:

Government spending went up under Reagan and the tax burden shifted to the middle class and lower middle class.  Reagan pushed the meme that government was the problem, but that didn’t stop him from expanding the size of government.

It was after he repeated that lie for the third time that I started muttering about burning the bastards down and reaching for my pitchfork.

Isn’t it funny how these people who are ardent supporters of the free market system can easily argue for a more pragmatic approach to fiscal management now that their controls free method hasn’t worked?  These arrogant bastards who so easily look down their noses at wage laborers and fulminate about the evils of labor unions are now asking for handouts to stabilize the market.  It will also stabilize the value of their rapidly diminishing pile of lucre.

I think we should let the banks twist in the wind.  The government should start a bank to ease the credit crunch.  This new bank should provide the services that ordinary banks would provide, e.g., loaning money, taking deposits, in places where the ordinary banks are not liquid enough to perform this function.  It would be a stop gap measure with a limited life span.  It could do this by buying a position in existing banks, but maintaining control after the purchase to make sure that taxpayer money is not being pilfered.  It could establish a new class of bank, e.g., Federal Community Bank, in places where the local banks have been poorly run and have insufficient liquidity to be viable.

The truth is that commercial lending activities will rebound.  There is no need to keep them under the banner of the banks that currently exist.  Let those existing banks and were well run profit from their prudent management by not being forced into government programs.  Let those banks that were poorly run fail and their investors bear the burden of that failure.  That is how the system should work.

Sebastian Mallaby on the nuts of the crisis:

Yet, in the course of this crisis, an estimated $11 trillion in household wealth has been wiped out.

Bush, et co., have added 5 trillion dollars to the national debt, most of it borrowed from Asian banks, and burned it in the deserts of Iraq.

No one should have been surprised by the results of the deficit spending undertaken by Bush and his cronies.  They ran an average of deficit of $500 billion per year.  The absorbtion of international credit by the US over the last 8 years is enough to generate oscillations in world credit markets.

Good riddance to all of those clowns.

I think that Bush will pardon a bunch of people and dare the Democrats to investigate his presidency.  Bush is belligerent and arrogant.  You can count on more stone walling.

This country has transgressed in many ways over the last 8 years and there many not be a form of redress that actually gets to the heart of the matter.

For those people that Bush pardons, I think the Congress should get them up in front of investigative committees and grill them.  If they lie, they should be prosecuted for perjury. If they don’t lie, they should be disbarred for their actions.

All of these people are lawyers and they have abused the public trust in so many ways.  They should not be allowed to continue as officers of the court.

There is the saying that all history is revisionist.  Maybe.

Obama is now choosing his cabinet and references have been made to the last President from Illinios.  Matthew Pinsker quotes Doris Kearns Goodwin:

“Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet,” is the way Obama has summarized Goodwin’s thesis, adding, “Whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was how can we get this country through this time of crisis.”

That’s true enough, but the problem is, it didn’t work that well for Lincoln. There were painful trade-offs with the “team of rivals” approach that are never fully addressed in the book, or by others that offer happy-sounding descriptions of the Lincoln presidency.

Pinsker goes on to detail some of Lincoln’s political rivals that were included in his cabinet and how he kept them at arms length until he had the polical power to dispose of them.

Consider this inconvenient truth: Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term — one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust.

John Hay, one of Lincoln’s closest aides, noted in his diary that by the summer of 1863, the president had essentially learned to rule his Cabinet with “tyrannous authority,” observing that the “most important things he decides & there is no cavil.”

Lincoln’s cabinet was was the result of his rather precarious political starting position.  He didn’t have the confidence of the nation behind him and the last thing he wanted was a crowd of political rivals touring the country, inviting and formenting political revolt against him.  “Keep your friends close, your enemies closer” is one way to say it.

Another way is, “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”

Obama’s political starting position is not anything like Lincoln’s.  Obama won a clear majority of votes.  The country is not fractured but united in purpose.  Obama’s talk is not a signal that he is willing to negotiate away his positions to attain political unanimity, but a signal that he has the position to get what he wants and if political factions want to be heard, they need to come to him.  Obama has already reached that point of  “no cavil”.