Trav Trivia

Volume 4, Number 51

March 30, 2009 -- First, on behalf of our ex-president, let me thank you for your dollar. That is the dollar you are indirectly contributing to the George W. Bush Presidential Center, a huge complex on 25 acres at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It is being built as a nonprofit foundation that is raising $300 million in tax-deductible donations to pay for it. Tax deductible means that it is $300 million that will not go into the Treasury. There are 300 million of us in this country. That works out to a dollar a piece as your contribution. Except for those who actually donate a dollar directly in which case they have donated two dollars. The place will do more than house Bush memorabilia. It will have programs to further its mission on “domestic and international goals of the Bush administration.” There, now, doesn’t that make you feel good? Again, thank you for your dollar.

Our thanks are due to Wall Street for giving Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner a positive review for this second act performance in explaining how he is going to fix the banking system. They clapped hands, than shot the Dow up several hundred points. Now if it will just really fix the banking system.

As we now know it calls for investors to buy a trillion dollars or so of toxic assets with government backing them as though against the house in a crap game, a sort of how can you lose proposition. Andy Borowitz wrote a spoof of this in Huffington Post, having White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel declaring “Desparate times call for desperate measures. If anyone can convince investors to buy a worthless piece of paper, it's Bernie Madof."

On toxic assets, economist, author, columnist for the New York Times and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman is quoted in Newsweek Magazine as explaining to his class how trade with China works: "They give us poisoned products, we give them worthless paper." Krugman is not enthusiastic about the Geithner plan. He believes we should go ahead and temporarily take over the banking system now and get it over with. Sweden did, and made money when banks were returned to the private sector. Obama people, as quoted in Newsweek, say this is “deeply impractical.” Sweden is tiny with a population of 9,059,651 people (slightly less than Los Angeles County). “The United States, with 8,000 banks, has a vastly more complex financial system. What's more, the federal government does not have anywhere near the manpower or resources to take over the banking system.” And I read a short time ago that Geithner has not yet hired many people to fill Treasury jobs, that you can hear the echo of your footsteps when walking around the department. That would seem to leave room for all of those hedge fund partners who are going to help the Secretary at the crap table.

I, for one, am grateful that the President is keeping in touch. And that he has certainly been doing, turning up on television daily on every kind of program (although I have no knowledge that he has yet to do a soap opera, but then he is already in one: the government). “Over exposure” some critics say. “Undignified” say others. “He depends too much on the teleprompter” is a complaint. Michael Gerson, Washington Post columnist and former chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush, calls the teleprompter “a linguistic push-up bra” as a good thing. Those who are too young to have been around when all television was live with no teleprompter when disaster lurked in every frame may not appreciate fully its value. Would a teleprompter have prevented this quote, sent to me and attributed to President Gerald Ford: “If Lincoln were alive today he would be turning in his grave.” Perhaps Ford was making a joke. I hope so. And I still say it‘s good to have a highly visible president. We can see he is working all of the time, working on something important and not off somewhere cutting brush.

We should be grateful that being a Catholic is no longer seen as a disqualification for the Presidency, even among conservatives. One super conservative, and considered the putative Republican candidate for 2012, Newt Gingrich, just converted. You can see why the Church, the keeper of the flame of family values, would want him despite the little marital idiosyncrasies in his background, as reported by Christopher Buckley in the Daily Beast (Buckley says “As the saying goes, anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual class.”). Newt was married at 19 to his 26-year-old former high school geometry teacher, is said to have presented her with divorce papers as she was being wheeled out of the operating room after cancer surgery; he shed wife number two after being found out having an affair with a 19-year-old congressional staffer (while leading the effort to impeach President Clinton) who became wife number three. He makes John Edwards look like a choir boy. The Church does not seem to mind this sort of thing if you repent. It is hard to visualize Gingrich repenting anything, but I suppose we mustn’t judge. Wasn’t it the great St. Agustin who led a dissolute life in his young years, said to have prayed to God to deliver him from his wayward ways but said “not yet Oh Lord, not yet?” Perhaps Newt has gone past the “not yet” period of his life. He is a good catch for the church, better than Tony Blair who too went “poping” as they call it in England, but after he was out of power. Now if Gingrich runs the Vatican won’t have to threaten parishioners with withholding the taking of communion as long as they vote Republican.

I suppose we should give our thanks to some of the A.I.G. executives who received those outrageous bonuses with our money. Maybe they didn’t want to mess with an Italian from New York City, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who “persuaded” nine of the top ten in the group to give back the money, about $50 million in total. How he did that I don’t want to know.

The citizens of Hawaii and Alaska deserve our thanks for not having among them any known hate groups, of the variety described by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. as “Klan cells, Neo-Nazi sects, gay-bashing ''churches,'' cliques of black separatists, white nationalists, nativists, racist skinheads and other merchants of venom who meet, plot and recruit in all 48 contiguous states.” He says here in the 48 we have 926 of them. I can understand Hawaii. Everybody could be too laid back to worry about really hating somebody, but Alaska? Home of Sarah Palin and that group her husband used to belong to that wanted to succeed from the United States? The group who hoarded guns and ammunition just in case they got into a fight with the central government? I suppose they don’t think enough of us to bother hating us. You are deprived. We have enough down here to send you a few that we’ll never miss.

Thanks to Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University for bringing us up-to-date on climate change. It has moved much faster than we predicted he says, and “We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations.” I would have been deprived of that information if he had not come forward. Thanks a lot.

I still get to write an ad now and then, or a PR release, or a little piece on food and wine, but I’m in the market for a regular freelance gig and think I may have found it. I want to offer my services as a ghost Twitterer. Yes, there are such jobs out there in cyberspace. Take it from this 26-year-old free lance writer, Annie Colbert, who says: “Twitter is the hipster bar, where you booze and schmooze people.” I’ll go for hipster bar.

According to a New York Times article (“When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking”), the use of this, a microblogging system that uses only 140 characters, is now a big marketing tool for celebrities, politicians, and businesses. Politician Ron Paul on the campaign trail assigned staff members to Twitter. Obama, both as candidate and President, has people to twitter. Britney Spears hired a person to twitter in her name.

I admit not everyone wants help. Shaquille O’Neal, whose “The Real Shaq” has about 430,000 followers who go for his personal news, jokes, and occasional trash talking about opponents, disdains help. “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you” Shaq is quoted as saying. However, since everyone is not as erudite as, or has the communicating skills of Shaq, I still think there are ghost opportunities out there. And think of this: very few big city newspapers have a circulation of 430,000. Here, then, is my classified ad, in less than 140 characters:

Situation wanted. Ghost writing for Twitterer. No subject too mundane to tweet. Menu of variety of faux activities and pretend locations from which to choose. Let me trick your tweet.

Of course there is no way for a follower to really know if the Twitterer is real. In fact there are some imposters out there that Twitter can’t or will not kick off. If all else fails and I don’t pickup an account, it might be fun to assume some identity and twitter away. Someone famous. William Shakespeare could come back from the dead and write tweets on current events.

Brandish not thy putrid toxic asset

purported banking wizard though thou be.

Take thy ill gained bonus gold and silver

then shove it where day light shall never see

Well, it is more or less in iambic pentamete

Volume 4, Number 50

March 23, 2009 -- On Thursday I did what millions of Americans do: I got up, made a cup of coffee, and turned to the editorial page of my newspaper, in this case The New York Times. There I read David Brooks’ column who in part had this to report:

“The U.N.’s International Labor Organization projects between 30 million and 50 million job losses worldwide. Central European countries are teetering; Japan’s economy is horrifying; and the Chinese job creation machine is losing the race against its demographic pressures.” He went on to refer to the “degradation of the entire global system.”

I went back to bed.

Among all of the evil things afoot, consider these: in Tulsa Oklahoma, one of the most deadly spiders in the world turned up in a bunch of bananas at Whole Foods; in Florida, there is an infestation of snakes, pythons big enough to eat anything but the Florida panther, that have escaped from pet stores only to breed and proliferate; ex-vice president Dick Cheney is going on talk shows as he did on CNN last Sunday to rewrite history; and ex-president Bush is taking to the speaking circuit, appearing in Calgary, the oil capital of Canada appropriately enough, at a $3,100-a-table event. Bush 43 has signed up to write a book about 12 major decisions he has made in his life. One of them must have been to accept a fat advance fee for the book. We’re talking real money here. Obama received $500,000 to allow turning one of his books into a children’s version, and so far his books have brought in $8,605,429.

This has been the week, of course, of national outrage. I’m outraged, you’re outraged, the Congress, the Administration, the Press are outraged, I think even the youngest member of my extended family, a little two-year-old girl is outraged. It is as though we all sat down and an AIG executive bonus stuck us in the rear. It is as though the world stood still while we milled around doing a James Cagney impression of “You dirty rats.”

That statement on the radio by Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) best expressed the sentiment of the nation in suggesting AIG executives should "follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things — resign, or go commit suicide.” Slash their wrists with deep paper cuts from a sharp-edged derivative document?

How outrageous is it? Pretty disgusting when at least seven executives are slated for more than $3 million each, compensation payable independent of performance. It is really the principle of the thing. The bonuses amount to just .097 percent of the billions in bailout money AIG received, hardly enough to be noticed or to make any difference in the operation They probably spill that much every day, kind of like dropping a few bucks in the empty can in the average break room to pay for coffee.

AIG is not the only miscreant. According to NYT columnist Maureen Dowd at Fannie Mae they are forking over “$1 million apiece in retention bonuses to four top executives, even though the word retention in a depression is pure Ionesco. Freddie Mac, which has sought $45 billion in aid, has yet to disclose its planned bonuses.” Many of these people just take the bonuses and run. As in one case out of a staff of 167 only 20 to 25 stayed on. Retention of key people is one of the excuses used to pay a bonus. I say this is a national emergency. Let us institute a draft. Send these people a notice that begins “Greetings.” Send them to an ethics boot camp.

The other excuse is a legal one. Something about delayed compensation, contracted in advance. What kind of “bonus:” is this? Around 1970 The Tandy Corporation, headed by Charles Tandy had a number of companies big and small and Charles would only pay his CEOs a thousand dollar a month, the rest of their compensation came at the end of the year based on performance. The president of even the smallest company made over six figures, until one year one of the biggest showed a loss and the top brass, men of considerable means and expenses, found out that yes, for sure, they had just worked a full year for twelve grand. Their cries of anguish would rival today’s investors with Bernie Madoff. But that’s what a bonus is.

How could this happen? Those bonuses were already on the books before the bailouts began. If there is money in the till the bonuses get paid and taxpayers put money in the till. Why was the bailout money provided without rules against this kind of things? Many people in Congress of both parties, and in the Administration are uncomfortable dictating to corporation what they should or should not pay their executives. Sets a bad precedence. Democratic Senator Chris Dodd stripped rules for regulating executive pay from the bailout bill before it passed.

This is a field day for some Republicans who gleefully get to take shots at Democrats over this even though they were opposed to Wall Street salary caps, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Banking Committee ranking member Richard Shelby (R-AL) who were against it but now are for it. Like the used car salesman with one offer in one pocket and another in another pocket.

When in doubt, tinker with taxes. The House Passes a 90 percent tax on any company accepting more than $5 billion in bailout money but do we really want to do that? Congress could get mad at any particular group and punish them with a special selective tax.

The problem is less about bonuses but more about obscene executive pay in general. Less than thirty year ago the average CEO made about 40 times the take home pay of the average worker (Whole Foods had and may still have that as a rule), now it is about 400 times. The board of directors, appointed by the CEO sets the salary of the CEO, a cozy arrangement not in the interest of the share holders. Rep. Barney Frank for many years now has tried many times to pass legislation that would allow shareholders to control management pay. In the spring of 2007 he teamed up with then Senator Barack Obama to sponsor legislation on executive pay but business groups and the Bush White House shot it down. It passed the House but died in the Senate. Put into office only six months ago to shape it up, AIG CEO Edward Liddy is taking heat for the bonuses which he says he can’t legally do anything about but he asked the recipients to give back half of the money. He has not been knocked to the ground by the rush to respond, although some of those people are reportedly worried about their safety from the madding crowd and have hired private security. Makes your heart go out. Obama wants them to give it all back as a sacrifice ford their country. I say Obama could set a good example and shame them by himself taking a one dollar a year salary. After all he is set for life and has that eight mil revenue from his books to fall back on. And Michelle has planted a vegetable garden on the south lawn.

The scary part about the bonus flap is that if the anger it generated over what David Brooks reports is 0.001 percent of the annual G.D.P. prevents us from doing the things needed to stimulate the economy and get financial institutions back on their feet we will fail and as NYT columnist Thomas Friedman put it “deliver us into the catastrophic hands of a Republican opposition whose only known economic program is to reject job-creating stimulus spending and root for Obama and, by extension, the country to fail.” I may go back to bed again.

More is to come out on the banking plan Monday. According to Friedman “The U.S. government will create a facility to buy the toxic mortgages off the balance sheets of the major banks. They will be bought by a public-private fund or funds in which taxpayers will, in effect, be partners with hedge funds and private equity groups. The hedge funds will be there to provide expertise in pricing and trading the assets. The taxpayers will be there to guarantee — gulp — that the hedge funds won’t lose money if they take the early risks and to also lend them money to make some of the purchases. Taxpayers will benefit from any profits these partnerships make.” We are going to turn to, of all people Hedge Funds to save us.

As more and more newspapers fall by the wayside we are getting more of our news from sources that, as NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof puts it, “confirms our prejudices;” Or reports what we want to hear. Case in point: Fox News's Martha MacCallum last Sunday reported VP Joe Biden said “The fundamentals of the economy are strong.” She took it from Biden on the campaign trail last September when he "Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that's why John McCain could say with a straight face as recently as this morning and this is a quote, 'the fundamentals of the economy are strong.'" Kristof suggests “Tax breaks for liberals who watch Bill O’Reilly or conservatives who watch Keith Olbermann?” I’m sorry but like those governors from Texas and Louisiana and other states who say keep the stimulus package money we don’t want to help the unemployed, I say keep your money if I have to watch O’Reilly.

In writing about the bonus brouhaha and the hindsight of no-strings-attached in the giving of the bailout money, NYT columnist Maureen Dowd came up with a Gaelic saying: “Never bolt the door with a boiled carrot.” Colorful. When I think of the prototype Irishman I envision Bill O’Reilly standing in the pub bar with his pint of stout, loudly sounding off on things he knows nothing about (O.K. it takes one to know one), but the Irish do have a knack for aphorisms.

With a name like mine I can stake a claim on a smidgeon of Irishness in order to make a stab at it.

On greed:

Wall Street traders take care of the things that count … count one million, two million, three million or so in bonus money. (Not very pithy).

On wasting stimulus money:

Looking for a good crop? Plant the potato, don’t eat it. (Boring).

On being rapacious:

Offer a crocodile a helping hand and you’re going to pull back a stump. (No crocodiles in Ireland… on Fox News maybe, but not Ireland).

On selfishness:

Some people only see the gold in the golden rule (Not very original).

On gratitude:

Given a leg up some people just use it to kick you in the arse. (Not in the same league as the boiled carrot).

Better to leave aphorisms to the professional Irish. These don’t even sound good spoken with a brogue.

Volume 4, Number 49

March 16, 2009 -- I wish I still had my old felt skull cap, the one like Jughead wore in the Archie comic strip. It was covered with pins I got by sending in cereal box tops, pins of the intrepid speed aviator Captain Hawks, or Jack Armstrong, some Disney characters, and some pins denoting membership in product sponsored national “clubs.” We had depression victim borders then and used a lot of breakfast cereal so for the cost of an envelope and a three-cent stamp I could acquire a new pin every now and then to add to my collection. If I had that cap today I would feel right at home. It is beginning to feel to me like 1938 all over again.

There aren’t that many people like me still around who can remember life when so many people were out of work, so many people trying to find jobs. Reports are last month employers cut 651,000 more jobs. In the great Depression the “plant,” the life-line of our local community, went to a four-day work week in order to save jobs. You can see it now, businesses cutting back employee hours. And when my father was president of the local school board back then a decision was made that only unmarried women or women who were the sole supporters of their families could work as teachers, there was, as you can imagine, a near revolt (where was Carrie Nation when they needed her?).

Is the Depression here yet? But wait. Am I doing my tiny little part to make it happen? There is a growing chorus of voices saying if you talk about it, you make it happen. Even William Safire writing on language in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine quotes President Eisenhower speaking out against “doom and gloom.” There is a feeling that all the talk of the depression could become a self-fulfilling prophesy. The “depression narrative” Safire quotes Clare Boothe Luce speaking about “troubadours of trouble and crooners of catastrophe.” Later, the language guru himself, writing for Vice President Agnew, coined “nattering nabobs of negativism” (he was younger then and should be forgiven). The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson wrote about “overcaffeinated infotainers” offering "overload criticism.” I’ll buy that. But today is the spooky Ides of March and it’s hard to stay positive, especially in the face of the tsunami of constant criticism of policy and blatant obstructionism from the hard right. However, I hardly fit the description of “nabob.”

Where is our ebullience? Where are our “animal spirits” when we need it most? Safire gives the credit of “Animal Spirit” to Jane Austin whom I would never expect to be quoted on politics (“Pride and Prejudice” is hardly a political tome). Conservative columnist David Brooks and more-or-less progressive columnist Roger Cohen believe Obama should stop lecturing and start inspiring, kind of the F.D.R. “all we have to fear is fear itself” thing, although I would keep a little fear of the neocons on tap, too.

Cohen points to the cheerful, inspiring speech to Congress by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the man you find in the dictionary under the definition for the word “dour.” As the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart put it you know we must be in deep trouble when the British try to cheer us up. Turns out Brown loves America. Vacations regularly in Martha’s Vineyard, not the best place to take the pulse of ordinary American’s but we will take his kind words anyway.

Consensus seems to be that nothing good can happen until the banking system gets back on track and that is not yet happening, which is the cause of a lot of contentious breast beating. Will the plan of Treasury Secretary Geithner work? His idea is to team up with denizens of Wall Street like Hedge Fund people, buyout firms and other operators of that ilk in a kind of Mickey Rooney-ish “Let’s Put On A Show” to combine forces and buy up distressed mortgage assets, or we could call it the “evacuation” in the medical sense program to flush out bad assets to return the strongest banks to good health. Economists say it can work, but will it do so in time without rewarding the very people who got us into this mess in the first place? On that score A.I.G. while sucking up big bailout money is infuriatingly holding to the passing out large executive bonuses again.

The alternative to the Geithner plan would be to take temporary control of firms like Citi Bank and Bank of America, and yet another is temporary nationalization (which sounds better as “pre-privatization”). That way when banks recover you could sell the government’s interest back to investors and recover some, or most, of the money. Good Lord, who would have thought that someday the country would be held hostage by bankers yet. Visualize the scene in Mary Poppins at the "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank."

Unlike the rest of us the President seems to be able to keep his cool, and his “animal spirit” despite being squeezed from the left and the right by a series of interests: teachers unions; legislation meant to make it easier for workers to form union branches in their workplace; "Employee Free Choice Act;" means-testing health care for richer retirees; cutting billions of dollars of government farming subsidies; sending 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, while keeping a sizeable force in Iraq. It must take at least two file cards to make his to-do list every morning.

The state of things does not look good but we must be upbeat about it. The stock market decline has destroyed $12 trillion dollars worth of value, or either the value wasn’t there in the first place depending upon how you look at it, according to some expert named Lawrence Lindsey, but we must be of good cheer.

NY Times columnist Bob Herbert reports that the average income for the vast majority of Americans has been declining. “The standard of living for the average family improved not because incomes grew but because women entered the workplace in droves.”

Where were you in 1973? That was the peak income year for the bottom 90 percent of Americans, about $4,000 higher than now. Now let’s think positively.

As NYT columnist Gail Collins states we have a “health care system that’s still draining our resources and making our manufacturers unable to compete with companies overseas.” Instead of complaining we should cheerfully look ahead to getting it fixed. Prescription anyone?

I won't even add my comment on the dust up between Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart which has been all over the news this week, but many of us found it fascinating television. In case you missed it or would like to revisit it here are the links to the unedited version of the interview:

Cramer interview Part 1

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=221516&title=jim-cramer-unedited-interview&om_u=BNRSE6&om_i=_BJupJRB7gMU1sZ&

Cramer interview Part 2

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=220538&title=jim-cramer-pt.-2http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=221517&title=jim-cramer-unedited-interview

Cramer interview Part 3

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=221518&title=jim-cramer-unedited-interview

Can’t get politics out of my mind, even when having a glass of wine. Have you noticed that some winemakers are turning to catchy names and funny labels to attract attention? “Goats Do Roam” one South African vintner calls his wine in a bad pun on Cote du Rhone. Zinfandels from California are labeled “Original Zin” or “Zin of My Father.” There are wines from Australia named “Bitch.” And some from France carry the name “Fat Bastard.” If I am going to stay in a constant state of the union mode I need wine labels that fit. Like:

Dow More Low … or Yes We Chan-ti

We could prepare for a day like that dark day in 1929 when the stock market began to crash, with, say:

Pinot Noire Thursday

Bear Stearns stockholders; they were

Treated Chab-ily

In bailout, bankers were given a

Sauvignon blanc check

Well, I admit that is pretty low stuff, but so is the state of the things. Wine and the economy, it’s all Plonk.

Volume 4, Number 48

March 9, 2009 -- There were over 250 different communities of people speaking that many languages or more in what is now Mexico when the people we call Aztecs migrated into the central valley in the fourteenth century. By the time Spaniards arrived a century and a half later the Aztecs had achieved domination over them all, subjugating them, repressing them, exacting tribute. All that is except one big group they let stand free. Why? So they could have an adversary, to fight against, to hone their fighting skills, to keep from going soft (also a pretty good source for the human sacrifices their religion required, as much of Islam seems to needs a Great Satin today).

The point is everybody needs an adversary (we can’t all be Mother Teresa). Republicans, of course, have Barack Obama. As you may have noticed this week, Democrats now have … drum role, trumpet flourish please … Rush Limbaugh! And both Rush and the Administration couldn’t be happier. Democrats get to point to the bloated, Cuban cigar smoking, multimillionaire private jet owner, mean-spirited happy character assassinator as the very symbol of the excesses of conservatives in general, Republican party in particular. Limbaugh, on the other hand, gets to see his audience jump in one week from a reported 14.2 million to about 25 million (not official, reported). What great ratings for an entertainer. And entertainers get paid on ratings.

The news this week was dominated by the Rush Limbaugh story. Starting back in January, Limbaugh began saying he wanted Obama to fail culminating with his ninety minute harangue to cheers and standing ovations at CPAC, the annual gathering of conservatives held last weekend. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, told CBS that Limbaugh is "the voice and the intellectual force and energy” of the Republican Party” and thee you have it. There you have it. The line drawn in the sand. In all fairness Rahm was not the first observer to make that statement. In the absence of someone strong, national Republicans figure Limbaugh fills the bill.

Limbaugh, himself while wallowing gleefully in his new found role of king of the hill, claims the White House is picking on him as a distraction from their failed policies. His authority is hard to deny, however, when any Republican even hints at the least bit of criticism they face storms of complaints and are forced to retract and apologize, as did party leaders from South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey to RNC chairman Michael Steele. Every one of them had to issue apologies to Limbaugh after letting reason get away from them by suggesting Rush's rhetoric is "ugly" and that he was wrong to say he hoped President Obama would fail.

Progressives and conservatives alike have weighed in on this subject with language both colorful and descriptive. A few samples:

“Limbaugh looked more like a bouncer at a strip club who spent all his tips on one bad outfit” wrote columnist Timothy Egan in the New York Times.

Staunch conservative David Frum had this to say in Newsweek: "With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence -- exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix" to the GOP.” He may have 25 million listeners but that leaves another 275 million to be revolted Democrats hope.

Thomas Schaller in Salon calls him a “self-professed talent on loan from God … more 'I's' in his CPAC address than in an Idaho potato.” That’s the journalistic equivalent of throwing vegetables at the entertainer.

In Huffington Post, Tom Watson had this to say: “Rush Limbaugh leaned his meaty hands on the lectern at the CPAC conference and slipped a greasy dollar bill into the G-string of the writhing conservative dead-enders packed into the garishly lit Omni Shoreham in Washington DC.” That one ought to win the annual Lytton Strachey (you know, the “It was a dark and stormy night” guy) award for best (read colorful) opening sentence of a novel.

Then there was Alex Baldwin, also in Huffington Post, saying: “Limbaugh … massaging the hate gland of so many economically displaced white voters.” Baldwin more or less has it right. You can’t really blame Limbaugh. Hate broadcast has been around since the invention of radio. Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic, Hitler loving Priest of the Little Flower started it in those per-war years and it’s been with us ever since. Like any other entertainer, Rush has developed a stchick that is popular and earns him a great deal of money. That stchick panders to our very worst instincts and is despicable, but lay the blame on his audience, not Rush. Broadcast in unforgiving. If he lost his audience he would be off the air in a blink of his piggy little eyes. As Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post points out he is a “business man promoting his brand, which he has done successfully for two decades.” Two decades of Rush. Time flies when you are having fun. The rest of us should be given medals or ribbons like they do in the military for length of service having to listen to him. Limbaugh has issued a challenge to the president to debate him on his show, kind of a Burr/Hamilton kind of thing but probably more lethal.

On Sunday’s talk show circuit two prominent conservatives had the guts, or the gall, to voice near criticism of Limbaugh. On “Meet the Press” Newt Gingrich said that it's "irrational" to hope for the President of the United States to fail. "You've got to want the president to succeed," said the former House Majority Leader. "You're irrational if you don't want the president to succeed. Because if he doesn't succeed the country doesn't succeed... I don't think anyone should want the president of the United States to fail. I want some of his policies to be stopped. But I don't want the president of the United States to fail. I want him to learn new policies." Senator Lindsey Graham had this to offer: “He doesn't play in the Republican Party. He is not an elected official. He has been on me for two or three or four years for different things and I take it for what it is worth. ... Stop talking about Rush Limbaugh at the White House."

Wonder if Gingrich and Graham will get the hundreds of ugly e-mails from Rush fans, and if they will cave and apologize. Of course both of them would prefer to think of themselves as leaders of the party, not Limbaugh.

If the coverage of Limbaugh this week seemed over the top, get used to it. As the official designated boogy man out of control of the Republican Party we are in for four more years of the hoopla. I miss Paris Hilton.

While it is hard to believe, there were a few other things of interest in the news this week. The Administration’s huge budget is in the hands of Congress and who knows how that will turn out. Conservatives are crying “pork” and “earmarks” but it comes down to things like this. Again, on the Sunday talk show circuit, prominent Sen. Graham said "We do need earmark reform. I wish the president would veto the bill, we'd get back together and come up with the earmark reform process."

Reminded that he himself had inserted 37 earmarks in the legislation, including $950,000 for "a convention center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina": he said "I voted to take all earmarks out, but I will come back in the new process and put that back in." That’s the way to get rid of earmarks? He lost me there.

Much public discussion about what direction the country should take. E.J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post asks whether the country should reverse a three-decade-long trend of rising inequality in incomes and wealth. He quotes Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director: “Over the past two or three decades, the top 1 percent of Americans have experienced a dramatic increase from 10 percent to more than 20 percent in the share of national income that's accruing to them." Now, he said, was their time "to pitch in a bit more."

Also, “America hasn’t seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.” Timothy Egan wrote we’ve had “capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself.” The Time’s Joe Klein: the “past 30 years have been such a violent departure from the norm, such a profound destruction of the basic functions of government, that a major rectification is called for now.”

And I love this one from Thomas Friedman in Sunday’s NY Times: “We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese.”

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz notes the Dow dropped from over 14,000 to 9,000 in the last year and a half of that other guy's term. Dow was 9,034 on Jan. 2. I didn’t have the stomach to see what it was at the end of the week. I can only take so much punishment.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a visit this week that nobody seemed to notice. While here he awarded a “K.B.E.,” for “Knight of the British Empire” to ailing Senator Ted Kennedy. That would have been unbelievable forty years ago and therein lays a kind of tale of redemption.

Another subject much talked and written about this week is Twitter. And it is being written about in a lot more than 140 characters. It is a twitter frenzy. Celebrities, politicians sending out little tweets of no more than 140 characters about all of their activities as they happen, no matter how mundane. Just 140 characters is a challenge, kind of like the Japanese poetic format, Haiku, which requires three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Why not combine the two, and write tweets in Haiku as you go about informing people in a series of tweets about what you are doing? For example:

Up up and awake

Now it’s time to start the day

But need coffee 1st

My e-mail beckons

Promises amazing abs

In just 5 minutes

If you follow me

As I go about my day

I say get a life

Imagine how someone could tell a complete little story with Twitter. Like this one, inspired by a mild joke making the rounds of e-mail. Five, seven, five syllables. Guy bringing his friends up to date.

Met her in a bar

Took her to my car and there

Had my way with her

Began to write tweet

She said be sure to tell them

You just got herpes

It must be tough out there in the dating world. I will stick to Haiku.

Volume 4, Number 47

March 2, 2009 -- In the early 1960s when I taught an advertising course at the University of Houston I used a little parody of an advertisement on selling a used wooden pencil that had lost its eraser. As I remember it, it went something like this:

This handy, portable writing instrument is of prime wood with a lustrous yellow finish. Completely latex free, it is self contained, no wiring, no power connection, no battery or chip needed, ready to use the minute it is removed from a simple hand sharpener. Thoroughly tested, it is good for many hours of use. Will not leak to stain hands or clothing. Money-back guarantee. Call today for a free trial.

If I say to you that I thought of this after listening to the speech Obama made to the combined houses of Congress that is not to say I don’t believe in what he said, nor that I doubt is sincerity, or believe that its aims are not genuine; it is to say I believe the man is so good he could sell anything, and thank God he is on the right track, because if he weren’t I believe he could sell me that used pencil. I thought the speech was perfect in content and delivery.

The reception it got was very positive. There were 52 million-plus television viewers, about half of the people with their TVs on at the time were watching it. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post said it best for me: “Speeches are great, and President Obama does them very well. Laying out broad principles and directions--that's the essence of White House leadership.”

It was very well crafted, and polls indicate the public loved it. Of course Republicans, conservatives, far right-wingers did not agree with any of it. The traditional opposition rebuttal was made by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the rising star of the Republican Party in what was universally graded as a disaster by one and all, of all political stripes. You would never know from watching it that this man is considered brilliant, a Rhodes scholar once accepted by both the law and medical schools of Harvard and Yale. The Los Angeles Times also sums up it pretty well: “Off-putting. Amateurish. Disastrous. The delivery totally unmatched to the content.” Republicans all thought it was a disaster except Rush Limbaugh who said: "I love Bobby Jindal…he's brilliant." He comes by brilliance in a family way. His father was an engineer and his mother a L.S.U. doctorial candidate in nuclear physics. He is no Slumdog immigrant from India. But even an evil genius needs to be brilliant.

As for content of his speech, Amy Sullivan of Time Magazine made the comparison many people saw: the governor resembled Kenneth the intern on "30 Rock" telling a “creepy bedtime story about the magical gumdrop Land of Tax Cuts and the evil Democrats who lurk under your bed.” New York Times columnist Gail Collins said it was a “message to the nation that the Republicans were not going to have anything important or useful to say about the current economic crisis.” It’s as if they say “what crises?” These people must not have 401ks, or own stock (the market hit a low it hadn’t seen in eleven years). They must keep their money in a sock or under the mattress.

So how could this brilliant guy do so badly? Kathleen Parker, conservative columnist and fan of his, writes: “Jindal seems to be handicapped by handlers who either don't trust him or have no faith in Americans' intelligence.” Don’t write him off after one bad performance. Get used to him. He’ll be back in four years, or eight years, or both.

Meanwhile, Jindal is busy being the point man, turning up on talk shows, for the Republican governors who are saying with disdain that they will turn down stimulus money, as beneath them, even though they have huge budget shortfalls, as in his case more than $1.7 billion. His state is 4th in children living below the poverty line and 46th in high school graduation rates. The kids don’t count. Ideology counts.

Joan Walsh of Salon thought it was weird for Jindal to use “Hurricane Katrina as an example of why government can't be trusted. Bobby, Katrina is why Americans believe Republican government can't be trusted. There's a difference.” She also pointed out that he claimed Obama wanted to impose “government-run healthcare, which is a lie.” In many ways, Jindal, said to be brilliant, young, not your usual all-white country club Republican, seems to be an obverse Obama (I’m trying to avoid saying “evil twin”).

In general, conservatives are wrestling with words. Like nationalization and socialism rather than the impact on the lives of millions of people. On Huffington Post, David Sirota reviews our history of nationalization: “about 45 million Americans rely on public power utilities for their electricity”; subways, commuter trains like New Jersey Transit, a public bus or Amtrak; U.S. Postal Service; Veterans Administration providing a fully nationalized system. In World War I, the nations' railroads were successfully nationalized; in the 1930s, the Reconstruction Finance Corp. bought millions of shares in over 6,000 banks; in World War II, government took control of the economy's entire pricing system for consumer goods. Perhaps, then, if we ever have an emergency we might do something like those. A finance blog, Calculated Risks, believes instead of calling it “nationalization,” just call it “pre-privatization.” Or call it anything, even Betty Boop. That way members of Congress with conservative constituents could go back home for reelection without having to say they voted for in “nationalization.” President Obama’s big new budget is in the hands of Congress. Paul Krugman, from his lofty perch as a Nobel Prize winner for economics, says “President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break … a fundamentally new course. … good priorities and plausible projections … this budget looks very, very good.”

NY Times columnist David Brooks, who these days can’t seem to decide which hat, his faithful Republican Homburg or flashy new Obama sports car cap, sees the efforts “to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half” as a gutsy crap shoot." If it works, wonderful. If not, “liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.” And we will have to take Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize away from him.

Here are some things to think about:

“We emerge from the Grand Illusion, a time when the human herd frolicked in limitless pastures to the seductive lilt of Ponzi promises. Bernard Madoff’s investment firm did not buy any securities for clients in 13 years. And nobody noticed.” (Roger Cohen in the NY Times)

The economy shrank at an annual rate of 6.2 percent last quarter (not as much as did my modest assets).

Colorado state senator says HIV testing for pregnant women rewards "sexual promiscuity." (Say what?)

General Motors’ burden is that it has to pay health costs equivalent to $1,500 for each car it sells. (Not a cough in a carload).

The word “Bill” is the insider’s breezy new word for “a thousand million” (much easier to Twitter).

Rush Limbaugh to convene a "female summit" to figure out why women hate him (Maybe because you called them “feminazis?”)

In 1980, the top-earning 1 percent of Americans accounted for 8 percent of the total income pie; by 2006, they grabbed nearly 23 percent (corporate CEOs stuck in their thumbs and pulled out plums).

In rambling through a host of columns, blogs, news items, and Web sites throughout the week collecting a little something here and a little something there to stitch together for this weekly report, now and then a word pops out that bears remembering; a word long forgotten, a word seldom used, a word not yet in the vocabulary, saved up to be put to use. This week there are several left over that seem to a shame to waste.

Obama in a “Sisyphean” struggle. I hope it’s not Sisyphean. That sounds more like something I would be involved in. No end in sight. But he has the apercus for it (if you know the meaning of that one without looking it up I hereby award you the Mensa award of the week). And when it comes to Obama’s plans, you can call me a paladin.

I hadn’t seen anyone use the word Chi-Chi in years until this week, nor have I used it. Sporting a pony tail and a beard I don’t believe I would risk turning the guy next to me at a bar and telling him he looks chi-chi. That would be parlous (said to be the new fad word for perilous) in either of its traanche meanings (trying to use the current term for divided, or split, and probably using it wrong).

No, another word I haven‘t thought about in a while came up this week and gave me pause for thought: cachet. Everybody needs a cachet. What is mine? Pretend punditry? Love of limericks? Laying waste to wine? Have you thought about your cachet? I’ve got to give mine some more thought. Soon. Because as in this quote from the late writer Ben Hech: "Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away."