Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Rush Limbaugh is still a big, fat idiot

I consider Morton Kondracke to be a conservative, but now the GOP attack dogs will undoubtedly call him a liberal, because he starts a recent column this way.

How can the Republican Party rebound? The first step would be to quit letting Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham set its agenda.

I’d add Bill O’Reilly to that list, but Kondracke throws a big blanket over the whole bunch of idiots by saying…

Step 1 is to fire Limbaugh and his ilk as the intellectual bosses of the GOP. They shouldn’t be muzzled, as some liberals want to do by reviving the “fairness doctrine” in broadcasting, just ignored more frequently.

Kondracke may work for Fox News, which otherwise would put him way at the bottom of my list of people to pay attention to, but he wrote a short and sincere book about his late wife, while she was in her final years of Parkinson’s Disease.

Saving Milly, which was made into a TV movie, is now out of print and available for pennies on Amazon. Kondacke was unhappy with the cut in federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, showing he isn’t driven by ideology. He was critical of gay activists for demanding so much money for AIDS research while complaining about having to wear condoms, but he wondered how people without his financial resources manage to care for a family member with Milly’s condition. All in all, Kondracke came across as very thoughtful and not at all driven by an agenda other than the reality of an illness for which there is neither prevention nor cure.

So now Kondracke is telling the GOP what it needs to be told but doesn’t want to hear. They won’t listen, they’ll only attack. It’s all they seem to know.

Bailing Building and Loan

Now CitiCorp or, CitiGroup, or whatever it’s called, gets a massive bailout in the blink of an eye. Why them and not the auto industry? As I’ve said, I think GM, Ford and Chrysler had decades of warning, but at least they manufacture something. All this money being borrowed by the feds that will eventually have to be paid back with higher taxes, and yet the credit market is still frozen.

Why, after all of this, is the whole concept of the global economy not being questioned more? Sure doesn’t seem to have been a very good idea, after all. I just watched a segment on The News Hour about the situation in England, and since September it seems to be suffering more of a short, sharp shock than what we have in America.

Let GM Suffer

OK, I know I said GM should be allowed to fail, but that was my immediate reflexive reaction. They should be allowed to suffer, the executives and the unions alike, but something will have to be done.

I abhor the idea that a corporation is “too big to be allowed to fail,” because it means companies are motivated to grow by any and all means — past the point of economies of scale and into inefficient bureaucracy — as sort of an insurance policy. But seeing 100,000 jobs disappear overnight, rather than maybe 25-30,000 as would be needed for a reorganization, is unacceptable.

I like an idea I heard on NPR while I was sick in bed. Let Exxon-Mobil loan the auto makers the $25 billion. Why should it be the taxpayers floating Detroit? Washington should strong-arm the oil companies. Get tough and threaten to put the CEO’s in front of a Senate panel, under oath. Start asking about price gouging, and don’t let the dramatic drop in gas and heating oil prices soften the questions about windfall profits. Why not?

And if the loan ends up coming from Washington, there better be a lot of strings attached, take it or leave it. No compromise on new mileage standards, for example.

Joe Sinnott depicted first black President in 1964

Various news services, including NPR’s website last February, picked up the story that in 1964 there was a comic book that predicted/depicted the first black candidate for American President. In January, this video about the comic book series was posted on YouTube. (Turn down the sound if you don’t like “Switched-On Bach”!)

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/NOV/TreasureChest.flv 448 335]

The man who illustrated those comic books is Joe Sinnott. I took this picture of Joe with his son Mark in New York on Saturday. Dennis provided the comics.

Joe and Mark Sinnott with Treasure Chest comics

Here comes the sun

With gas now below $2.50/gal. — excuse me, $2.25! — once again, we can be sure the run-up in price was due far more to speculation than supply-and-demand. Will everybody now forget the pump going past $50 for a fill up?

Here are a couple of interesting and complementary items about solar energy. The first one was sent by my father…

http://www.truthout.org/110508EA

…and this one is from tastewar.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21536/

tastewar mentioned something today that I’ve been wondering about — why are people excited about 45 mpg mileage? I bought a brand-new Honda Civic in 1989, with a standard transmission and no air conditioning, and in the warmer weather it got 65 mpg, no fooling.

Let GM fail

Ignoring for the moment my Honda’s CRV’s AC dying from the dreaded Black Death, American cars are junk. For nearly fifteen years I did a lot of business travel, and I rented many American cars; mostly GM, but also Ford and Chrysler, and every one of them was awful. The relatively few times when I got a Toyota Corolla or Camry, the contrast in quality was striking. And over a period of nearly fifteen years the American cars just didn’t get any better, at least not in comparison to most Japanese cars. “Have you driven a Ford… lately?” was used as a slogan for way too long. I’d driven a lot of Fords lately, but I didn’t want to own any of them.

The American car companies have had thirty years of warning that they had to change. The future was foretold when Lee Iacocca asked Congress for a bailout loan. Change or die was the lesson they should have learned, but did Detroit fix itself? No. Instead, it went back to lobbying against better fuel economy standards, then it ridiculed Michael Moore for “Roger and Me.” And look where that got them. Begging for a handout.

I say let GM go. There’s no point in trying to prop it up. OK, maybe there should be one American car company, just to keep things interesting. Call it General Ford. But for years and years, Toyota and Honda have been heading for the #1 and #2 spots, and there’s no point in denying any longer that they’ve arrived.