Obsessing the Recession

I'M NOT sure when I first learned that two plus two equaled four,  but it has somehow stuck with me for many years.  But not being a disciple of  Pythagoras, I continue to have problems with simple numbers as well as explanations of why numbers are  so important in defining an economic recession.  It seems ages ago when the gurus who  inspect such events began to wonder when, if ever, the U.S would finally sink into a recession, as if everyone who had lost a job along the way didn't already know.  Forever in denial, the experts cautiously inched backward with such descriptions as downturn, economic  stagnation, slowdown, contraction   and  slump.  But recession?  Well the GDP and the real GDP, it says here,  have declined .3 and .8 pct.  respectively.   And real personal consumption is down .04 pct.  You could have fooled me.  

Alas, the euphemistic days are over.  Now the talk is about when did the recession actually begin! Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Hall, Stanford professor and chairman of the National Bureau of Economic Research Committee,  says there is a chance we can finally know the answer. He says:  "...the severity of the credit crunch could be enough for some committee members to make a recession conclusion as early s next month."   

Good.  I hope that such clarity  comes in time for Christmas shopping.   With the semantics of the country's recessive economic ills out of the way, it's time to head back to the shopping malls, just as George Bush once urged all Americans to do as his earlier remedy for a, um, downturn. Meantime,  the Fed has cut prime interest rates another .5 pct. to jump start the economy.  With the rate now shaved to a mere 1 pct., without any discernible help for the economy in the wake of all previous cuts, I wouldn't be surprised if the future cuts will be in eighths to give the Fed experts more room to convince the public that it is indeed trying to help us out of this mess.    Don't know that even that will work.  In fact until we know when the recession began, I'm not even sure that two and two are still four.  

A hit man for breakfast!

AS I WAS reaching for my morning Plain Dealer to enjoy the latest rerun of "Peanuts",  a thin 5x7" packet  fell from it to my breakfast table.  It was a packaged DVD titled HYPE the Obama Effect. Oh, oh.  Midnight in America,  from the same torpedoes  who have earned a longstanding reputation  for political smear-bombs.  I'd rather ignore this sort of wingnut crap, but when it is transported inside the PD's pages to thousands of readers,  ya gotta at least offer an alert about the crowd that is behind the so-called documentary.

The first hint comes from a  sound bite (which you can find on your computer) featuring Ken Blackwell.  You all remember how he led the Ohio Republican Party down to sorry defeat as a gubernatorial candidate in 2006.  To quote  Blackwell's assault  on Obama:  "It's only when you begin to peel back layers that you begin to see a disturbing pattern."   At this point I had to wonder how smart the movie's producers were to include a fast-talking loser in its pantheon and then have it circulated so widely in a state that has already passed judgment on his pathetic credentials. 

But the of real villain is David Bossie,  the head of Citizens' United, the rightwing group that has had a lot of foul things to say about past Democratic candidates.   Bossie is the same fellow who was behind the film Hillary: The Movie.  It didn't  quite fulfill his designs as a diatribe against Hillary because she didn' get the nomination.    You should also know that Bossie had a role in the awful Willie Horton commercial that helped sink Michael Dukakis in 1988.  Oh, and he was fired as an investigator for the U.S. House Government and Oversight Committee for leaking information that he edited to damage Hillary. He has also asserted that Chinese espionage is "a most serious scandal" in the highest levels of the government.  

Apart from all of this, no one has accused Bossie of littering expressways with his trash. 

And now, back to "Peanuts".      

Multiple @%#&%*@?! choice

I'VE DONE my  best to keep up with the McCain campaign's nasty name-calling and it's wearying, unlike anything I've covered since the days of LBJ, whose opponents were kind enough to unify on one word: Communist. Earlier, with Eisenhower, it was slightly more respectful:  They simply accused Ike of being a  comsymp, if you know what I mean.  Jack Kennedy had to defend himself against being called a Catholic, for heaven's sake.   And Nixon, was Tricky Dick, but firmly denied that he also was a crook.    Al Gore was described as an "alpha" man, but few people outside of   Maureen Dowd's inner circle quite knew what that meant.    I had better stop this little political history lesson before I  get to Bill Clinton and George Bush. The Internet, after all, has a mixed audience and kids.

Still, I have all of these terrible terms aimed at Barack Obama by the McCain School of Lesser Invective Politics, and I can't think of anything else to do with them but to dump them on anyone who has read this far.  So, here goes:

Lucifer admirer; traitor; terrorist; Muslim alien; socialist; uppity;  elitist; street man ; closet socialist; communist; dirtiest campaigner; redistributionist-in-chief; drug addict; most liberal member of congress; baby murderer; black power threat; unprepared; stylist without substance; Ivy-league egghead; tax-and-spend 

Democrat; and finally, a Democrat.  

You'd think that by now that a presidential campaign with a specific message would have settled on one.  You could think that, but you would be wrong.  

Condi: Out of the Frying Pan?

THERE ARE reports that Condi Rice, who will become a free agent when George Bush leaves office, is interested in joining the front office, possibly as president,  of the San Francisco Forty Niners.  She had been at Stanford U. before becoming a passenger on Bush's train wreck and is said to be "passionate" about football.  I would be shocked if it happened.  The Niners are dismally in last place with a 2-6 record. Why would she want to move from one loser to another one?    

Palin's home-front downer

IT USED to be a clever talking point for the partisans on both sides to note that even the hometown newspaper - the folks who knew the most about one's opponent - found reason not to endorse that opponent.  Well, now.  The largest paper in Alaska has endorsed Barack Obama!  Although the Anchorage Daily News insisted that both McCain and Sarah Palin were too "risky" to endorse in a troubled nation and world, here is the paper's conclusion about Alaska's governor:

        "Yet despite her formidable gifts, few who  have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth.  To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crises would stretch the governor  beyond her  range." 

          You betcha.  As Palin has become more of McCain's  chattering nuisance in the final days of the campaign, she has quickly reminded me of the disruptive student in a grade school class  who was constantly waving an  arm for permission to go to the bathroom.  

McCain: It's a question of answers

AS A college freshman,  I was terribly challenged by my first essay exam in a history course.  The professor, a tall distinguished man who wrote the book for the course, passed out blank 16-page  booklets for our responses to his questions.  I filled up the pages, turned it in and walked out of the room confident that I had nailed the test.  Several days later it came back to me with a big "F" on the cover.   I was shocked and met the professor at his desk.  "I clearly wrote 16 pages and you gave me an F!  How could you do that to me?"    With obvious experience in such student complaints, he raised his long arm and replied:  "Indeed, you did write 16 pages.  But I think you wrote that much in hopes that the right answer would be in there somewhere.  And I'm not confident that you still know what the correct answer is."

It might explain my reaction to Tom Brokaw's interview with John McCain on Meet the Press this morning.  To each question, McCain went on and on, zigging and zagging,  hoping to convince his  doubters that he knew the answer even if  it spun off from the original question.  

Fully conditioned by my old history professor, I had no choice but to give McCain an F.  

She said it wasn't so

FOOTNOTE TO the sad story of a confused young McCain worker who fabricated a report of being assaulted by a tall black man in Pittsburgh: Ashley Todd needs professional help rather than condemnation. But that's not the end of the story.  The condemnation should be directed at Matt Drudge, a modern carnival barker who gave the phony story national visibility, and McCain's communication director in Pennsylvania who reportedly called TV stations instantly to report a brutal attack on Todd.  How quickly the word spread to McCain,  Palin and Obama, too, all of whom are said to have called her with their concern before her tale collapsed.    It would be hard not to see a Willie Horton type racial subplot by the McCain people in a crucial battleground state in the closing days of the campaign.  They may or may not have orchestrated the hoax.  But they didn't hesitate to dive in to exploit the earliest narrative  before she confessed to police.   It's hard for me to believe otherwise.    

To David Black, Beacon Journal

OPEN LETTER to David Black, owner of the Akron Beacon Journal, Victoria, British Columbia:

Dear David, 

The exodus of many of the Akron Beacon Journal's most experienced news room staffers in recent weeks has created a sieve in the institutional memory of the once-proud Knight newspaper.  We need to talk about its consequences.

        The paper's former reputation as a leader in the state's governmental, political and hometown coverage was the proud creation of John S. Knight, a widely respected publisher, editor and, most of all, journalist whose determination to provide quality on its daily pages worked its way down to the exacting placement of commas in the most routine stories.  He had a love affair with Akron while building a newspaper empire. 

        The city that he  loved thrived with a strong industrial base,   an important university campus in its midst and a cultural heritage reaching back nearly a century or so  to Gertrude Seiberling's music salons at the Seiberlings' Stan Hywet  residence.  Even today, when many cities are losing their orchestras, The Akron Symphony Orchestra  remains strong and vital.  So does the more than century-old Tuesday Musical Club.  And in the visual arts, it recently opened its door to an impressive addition to its art museum. 

        I make a special point of the city's  cultural commitments  only because  the Beacon Journal's longtime music critic, Elaine Guregian, turned off her BJ computer and joined the Cleveland Orchestra's front office, with no indication as yet that the BJ will replace her with someone of equal professional value.

         But there's more:  popular sports and general columnists have vanished through the front door, unwilling  to commit their future to a paper that you have been decimating since you entered the scene as a reclusive publisher largely concerned with weekly newspaper ownership (roughly 150, many that are said  to be easily circulated free of charge to the readers' doorsteps.)

        Lest you accuse me of being ignorant of the great pressures on newspaper publishing in the modern world, I am not.  As a  veteran newspaperman myself, I regret the threatened demise of my profession.  However, I remain confused by an apparent game plan that a  half a loaf is better than none, and then a half of a half, etc.   I must ask: What do you have mind as a publisher?  At what point because of the shrinkage do we stop referring to your paper as a newsaper?  What is your obligation to treat not only the paper but the city with professional concern so that you would still merit with pride your name on the paper?

     

       Many people in this town would like to know.  Unless you can explain how the loss of your best reporters and editors can improve the ailing look of the Beacon Journal these days,  you will only make matters worse for yourself  with the paper's readers.  Perhaps you might consider a visit to Akron someday to offer some answers to these questions.  Otherwise, why should anyone care about the bottom  line for a newspaper that has already lost its soul?

Respectfully, Abe Zaidan 

 

          

Just in time for Christmas

JOHN AND SARAH are now off on what they are calling their Joe the Plumber campaign tour to lure blue-collar workers in the final days of their  war hoop.  I have to salute them:  Never has an obscure human being meant  so much to the rhetoric of a presidential campaign as Joe the Plumber.  His name will be added to the pantheon of  American pop culture alongside Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman as inspirational reminders of how pro-America goes about its seasonal business.  Obviously blindsided by the introduction of a free agent into the McCain playbook, it appears anti-America Obama has nothing to match it, proving once again that he doesn't have the imagination and experience to run the country.    So much for the October surprise.

As long as we are in the business of naming names, Palin, who is failing as McCain's first-round draft choice,  says that when somebody called her a "redneck", she said "Thank you."  There's obviously a tough woman under that $150,000 designer wardrobe.  

Palin's window dressing

THE LATEST dollop of yeast to be injected into the public's rising disaffection with Sarah Palin is the news that the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 on her and her family for the sort of wardrobe enhancement that would not be stylish for moose-hunting. Most of her clothes were purchased at Sak's Fifth Avenue and Nieman Marcus, the sort of tony emporia that you wouldn't expect to find  sharing a shopping strip with Sam's Club.   Although the honorable intent  of the shopping spree was to spruce up Sarah's image  (along with daringly letting her hair fall  fetchingly as a pro-American woman)  it's doubtful it will do much for her other image down in Smalltown, USA, where people are only interested in bargains at 75 pct. off. .   Even though some Republican contributors are showing signs of dismay by such profligacy,  Pish-posh, responds the RNC.  So let's hear what Tracey Schmidt, the RNC's spokesperson has to say:

          "With all of the important issues facing the country right now it's remarkable that we're                talking about pantsuits and blouses." 

Besides, Schmidt reminds us, the clothes will go to "charitable purposes" after the election. Palin, after all, knows a lot about charity inasmuch she was charging the state of Alaska per diem for the days she stayed at home from the governor's office. 

Youbetcha she does.