Category Archives: Politics & News

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Primary (formerly E Premte) Peeves

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“Which side would you blame for the stalemate preventing a budget/debt ceiling deal?” the Wall Street Journal asked.

How ’bout both?

We all know that this particular six month extension is 90% political and 10% to assure that interest rates go up at least a point or two. The Repuglican leadership absolutely wants to have this fight come out again right in the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign. At the very least it will distract Obama from his real job of running for reelection.

Reckless spending by Demorats is a completely separate issue.

The real issue is that the Demorats are fiddling while Rome burns. Except the Repuglicans are busy eating grapes to the fiddle music.

Now doesn’t that just peeve me off? Or worse?

Interest-ing

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“Vermont is a AAA rated state,” former State Treasurer and current Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaulding said yesterday.

The AAA Diamond Rating system “is North America’s premier rating program. Whether you seek simple roadside accommodations or a destination resort experience, trust AAA’s reliable Diamond ratings to guide your decisions. Some 32,000 hotels in North America and the Caribbean have achieved AAA rated;” many are right here in Vermont.

Being pathologically parsimonious, I stay exclusively in Motel 5s. (OK, there was that Motel 4-1/2 in South Carolina and my personal favorite, the 16 $CDN/night Bumblebee just over the border in New Brunswick.) No AAA surveyor worth his salt has ever stayed in a Motel 5 even with a broken down car.

I stayed in a jail once when my car broke down in central Jersey but that was free. Pretty nice cops in that town to take in a college kid in the pouring rain.

“When an accident is waiting to happen, it eventually does.” Economists Kenneth S. Rogoff and Carmen M. Reinhart wrote in This Time Is Different.

The Outstanding Public Debt as of noon on Monday, July 25, 2011:
$ 1 4 , 3 5 7 , 3 1 7 , 9 8 3 , 8 9 2 . 0 4

Three months and a week ago, Standard & Poor’s lowered its outlook for America’s long-term credit rating from stable to negative. At that time there was a one-in-three chance that S&P would downgrade the nation’s AAA credit rating. Fitch, Moody’s, and S&P rate the likelihood that businesses and sovereign nations will repay their debts.

Three months and a week ago, President Obama called for a bipartisan group in Congress to “begin negotiating” a $4 trillion debt-reduction package, the parties have not even agreed to its membership

Three months and a week ago, the Gang of Six — three Democrat and three Republican Senators — said they would deliver their own bi-partisan plan when Congress returned from its May recess.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that congressional leaders have trotted out yet another new set of “competing debt-crisis solutions.” This is so serious that President Obama “canceled fund-raising appearances” today. But the two parties still have no agreement about what to do before the August 2 default deadline.

Am I the only observer to notice that banks want interest rates to go up so the United States government wants interest rates to go up?

About $5 billion of municipal bonds are in default today. Yawn. Nobody cares.

Countries “can default on stunningly small amounts of debt,” Dr. Rogoff wrote.

I predict another week of Lindsay Lohan and Roger Clemens in the news.

Kenneth S. Rogoff is an economics professor at Harvard and a former research director of the International Monetary Fund. Carmen M. Reinhart is the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She directed the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland and was Chief Economist at Bear Stearns.

Stunningly large amounts of debt notwithstanding, the U.S. has plenty of cash flowing in to service the debt, so the country won’t default to its creditors. Nope. No chance. Won’t happen. Instead, President Obama announced that he won’t send Anne her Social Security check.

And we let these people who can’t figure out how to run the medical system and who stole General Motors from us use our credit cards to stay in the Five Diamond motels.

Talk about a train wreck.

Oxymorons

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I’ll bet you thought this would be about the maroons in Washington who suck the oxygen out of the air wondering whether Roger Clemens took steroids instead of buckling down to the business of running a government.

And, yes, Roger Clemens could probably do a better job at the business of running a government. Jessica Rabbit could probably do a better job at the business of running a government.

Heck, even the Great State of New York with its 783 year history of waiting until 2153 to pass the 1960 budget brought theirs in on time this year.

Word play maybe isn’t as much fun as sex but it’s still pretty satisfying (I may catch holy hell from the missus for saying that).

Last week, I noted that Washington is a fine mess (most everyone there is a real phony) but I didn’t have space to work in absolutely unsure, devout atheist, genuine-imitation leather, or half naked.

Of course I, like all my readers, am absolutely sure of everything I write. For example the true believers in anthropogenic global warming have literal faith that planetary temps have risen almost exactly 10 degrees since last week. I should note that many on that side of the aisle who believe implicitly in political science poo pooh the scientific creationism embraced on the other.

I AM™ increasingly irked by the food industry for selling me twelve-ounce pound cakes and 48-ounce half gallons of ice cream. Food giants take a different view of the smaller, lighter, easier to carry half gallon orange juice cartons so I invited Popsicle-Klondike-Ocean Spray-Slim Fast-Starbucks-Ben & Jerry’s-Breyers-Heartbrand-PepsiCo-Frito Lay-Quaker Oats-Tropicana spokesman Ross Messier to comment. He pronounces his name ROSS.

“We already sell personal servings in many markets. We see the bigger containers as our dual entree in the grocery and convenience markets,” Mr. Messier (pronounced MAY-she) said. “Convenience stores are big on Super-Sizing their offerings.”

Remember, you read it here first when you see a straw taped to the side of a “half gallon” OJ carton and a wooden spoon on the ice cream tub at the Quick Stop next year.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3066/2764922038_9ce559c4d7.jpg I bought a new shirt last week. It’s a nice, blue, button-down, pinpoint oxford that drapes superbly and has a marvelous hand. The girls wouldn’t let me buy the one I really wanted, though. Maybe because it had a random pattern.

I’m in rather a financial pickle as so many are in these perilous times, but I like fine clothing, have a good eye, and even have my mom’s sketch books for inspiration. Oh, I know. I generally wear khaki slacks, button down shirts, and Bass Weejuns with no socks but I truly believe I could develop a line that caters to early adopting young taste makers who love the originality and eclectic style of mature clothing lines. And by “mature” I mean “old.” All I really need is a nameless celebrity to endorse me!

For the record, I wrote this whilst sucking on a sweet tart in my home office where the IRS prohibits personal business. I gotta get back to work.

Rolled Oats

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According to the NYTimes this morning, “Speaker John A. Boehner told his fellow Congressional leaders and President Obama that he did not spend 20 years working his way up to the top job on Capitol Hill just for the cachet of the title — he wanted to accomplish something big…

“The speaker’s lofty ambitions quickly crashed into the political reality of a divided, highly partisan Congress.”

Having Congress is like having 535 wives. If you think having one wife who doesn’t listen, just imagine…

That’s why I didn’t want to write about politics this morning; Washington is a fine mess. They’re smmoooooth but they just. don’t. listen.

Oatmeal raisin cookies are a significantly healthier breakfast than a smoothie.

My good friend Liz Arden had a smoothie for breakfast this morning. Despite the date, it didn’t come from the 7-11. She blended her own rolled oats, cranberry juice, yoghurt, fruits, and protein powder. She says it tastes like ice cream. Really? We’re alone here but this is a family column so I can’t tell you what that particular flavor and texture combination evoked. I can say that acrid, gooey, whitish, slime doesn’t seem all that appetizing to me.

Anyway, the rolled oats got my attention. I likes oats. That grain forms the basis for my third most favorite sandwich bread and my third most favorite cookie. We still buy Arnold Oatnut bread because I haven’t put together a recipe to bake it here at home and I’m noshing on an oatmeal raisin cookie right now.

Rolled oats. Did you ever wonder how Quaker teaches oats to roll over? Do they have classes? Do the slow oats get special tutoring while the quick oats command higher prices in the marketplace? Can oats learn to sit up and beg? Do we need to do some genetic engineering so they can shake hands?

Wikipedia reports that professional trainers should most likely instruct the oat’s owner to train his or her own flake; available group classes continue the lessons for the more mature grain. Grains can be so stick-in-the-muddish that the owner must repeat and reinforce the techniques taught in the original class.

Owners and groats who attend class together have a unique opportunity to learn each other’s likes and dislikes and how to work together to become flakes without being, well, flaky. Training is most effective if all oat handlers take part in the training to ensure consistent commands, methods, and enforcement. Classes also help socialize the flakes to the other flakes in the round cardboard shipping tube. Training classes are offered by many brands, including Better Oats, McCann’s, and Quaker.

Probably just as well that Ms. Arden had neither fresh prunes nor fresh raisins for her smoothie.

It’s all better than tipping cows, I suppose. After all, I’m pathologically parsimonious and they take umbrage at my usual 10 percent.

In the real world of agribusiness, grain processors apparently employ no private trainers. They use heavy rollers to press oat groats into flat flakes, then steam and lightly toast them.

Independence Day

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“Too often in recent history liberal governments
have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy.”

Here’s a revolutionary idea.

Independence Day commemorates our declaration of independence from the King of England. The revolution officially began two days earlier when the Second Continental Congress approved the legal separation of the American colonies from Great Britain, a resolution proposed by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia in June. After voting for independence on July 2, Congress debated and revised the Declaration itself for two whole days and approved it on July 4.

In the centuries since, only the 111th Congress has moved with anywhere near the speed of that first gathering, since the 111th Congress passed trillions of dollars of spending on millions of pages of bills in less than 100 days. And no one in Washington read any of them.

The Declaration of Independence fits on one page. Everyone in the Continental Congress read the whole thing.

In Peoria just one hundred fifty-seven years ago Rep. Abraham Lincoln said,

Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government.” … Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. … Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.

Lincoln spoke of the enslavement of persons. Today our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust by a government that would enslave We the Overtaxed People, taking more and more of our rights and our land and our life’s blood to its own purpose.

Just to rekindle our liberal friends, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the “loose fiscal policy” quote.

The 112th Congress is back to its usual wiener roasts and Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus is indeed still fiddling in Washington.

Two hundred thirty-three years ago today, General George Washington marked July 4 with a double ration of rum and an artillery salute for the soldiers who fought off the foreign monarchy that did enslave us. It is now time to mark July 4 with a double ration of electoral salute to those who would be the modern monarchy of government.



Much of our litigious life today grew out of English Common Law. We abandoned one really good idea in the first Revolution, though. We abandoned the No Confidence vote.

An earlier version of this column appeared in 2009.