Grown Ups Talking

New York is bursting into buds and flowers. Despite the wildly fluctuating temperatures, it’s been a very pleasant week with sun and rain and visiting relatives.

Without the rain, you don’t enjoy the sun, or so us former New Englanders opine. New England is famous for heavy winters, sweltering summers, and amazing practically tropical thunderstorms.

Which got me thinking about Obama.

Throughout his administration, P. Bush was excoriated by every right-thinking person in the world. The relentless pulse of heavy-handed brutality and retrograde policies emanating from the White House was terrifying and humiliating, practically tropical. Americans were so horrified all we could do was vote in a drastic change.

So you figure, without Bush, there would not have been an Obama. In fact, without the economic meltdown, there would be no stimulus package.

Now granted, the meltdown will take many years to recover from.

But think of what Obama is pulling off now. Major health reform? A new railway? A government-encouraged, planet-saving green industry?

And none of it could have been done without good old P. Bush.

Who knew? —Pomerol

The weather has been veering wildly from early spring with blue skies and balmy sunshine; to deepest winter with snow drifts, biting cold and pissed off birds.

Of course, teaching last night in my cramped, windowless, classroom on the coldest day of the year they had the air conditioning on.

Yes, the upside down world is normal now. Nature itself seems to be reflecting our upside down global economic bouillabaise and there’s no end in sight.

Thomas Ricks, author of “Gamble”, a look at the Iraq War, said on the radio,"Obama has inherited the worst foreign policy situation in the history of the United States, and the sad part is, it’s not even his biggest problem.”

We have been lulled into a credit stupor where dreams come true without doing any work. We are all birds shivering and stamping our claws and cursing the altogether expected, but still terrifying economic ice storm.

Poetry, ay? At this point we may end up with not much more than words.—Pomerol

With Fox News behind them every step of the way, Republicans continue their political posturing on the stimulus package. Now that the bill has become law and states can take a chunk of money and start moving in the right direction (and by the right direction I mean job creation), a handful of Republicans refuse to break with party lines for the greater good. They are grandstanding–running around the country telling all who will listen that they refuse to take the money.

Fine. Shut up, go home, and try to piece together your states with no help.

It seems they are having a problem figuring out how to spend the money wisely, and admitting that Obama has done a good thing. As our president said yesterday, “If we agree on 90 percent of this stuff, and we’re spending all our time on television arguing about 1, 2, 3 percent of the spending in this thing … that starts sounding more like politics.” Amen.

Republican governors like California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, Florida’s Charlie Crist, and Indian Mitch Daniels, all support the president’s efforts and plan on taking the money and running their state.

Loud mouth opponents, who insist on channeling Ronald Reagan, such as Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, and South Carolina’s Mark Sandford, are whining about deficit spending. Funny, I don’t remember this trio feigning indignation about deficit spending when Cowboy Bush was in office.

Louisiana and Mississippi regularly rank as two of our nation’s poorest states, with median household incomes of $39,337 and $34,473 respectively. South Carolina is somewhere in the middle with a median household income of $43,508. The lower numbers represent about half the household income of our three richest states Maryland ($65,144), New Jersey ($64,470), and Connecticut ($63,422).

Furthermore, the governors of those states, O’Malley (Maryland), Corzine (New Jersey) and Rell (Connecticut), plan to accept and use the funds to stimulate their state economies. Well, isn’t that a novel idea.

To the governors that continue to fiddle political tunes while their states burn, I say, governors heal thy states. I know I am mixing metaphors, idioms, and Bible quotes, but it can’t be any worse than the Republican hogwash, I mean rhetoric, that we have to endure this week. – Chianti.

After eight long years of Cowboy Bush’s self-aggrandising claims that he was a “uniter” we may actually have someone in the White House that unites the nation.

Yesterday, President Obama was said to “woo” Republicans ahead of the House vote on the stimulus bill – which is now up to $900 billion.

To do that, Obama went to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers, which is an unusual move for a president. This trip to Congress seems to indicate that he is the roll-up-your-shirt-sleeves kind of guy he professed to be during the campaign. He is a do-er and a uniter, in Bush parlance.

This reminds me of an old boss I had, one that I appreciate more as I get older. Super smart, funny, great with people, a real straight shooter that ran a division of a Fortune 200 media company where I used to work.

When a pipe burst in the old New York building that we called our office (causing one of our back rooms to flood), he was the first one into the water, socks and shoes off, pants rolled up, giving orders to the underlings about calling the facilities department and forming an assembly line to clear out the stock room which contained the books, reprints, magazine back issues, and other things we sold.

He was a do-er, not afraid that doing real work would tarnish his lofty Group Vice President and Publisher title. In a nutshell, he had intelligence, confidence, and the respect of the people that worked for him – a mix that is hard to beat.

From up here in the cheap seats, I’d say Obama has that same mix of qualities, which means that the stimulus bill may be passed in record time. If that’s the case, it will put unemployed people back to work, and bring financial relief to others. That would be a great way to kick off the new year – with hope. – Chianti

Oh the best of all possible times. The New Year beckons as we raise our hung-over eyelids blearily into a remarkably uncertain future and listen to the know-it-all pundits speak wisely about the economic upheaval that less than six months ago they swore would never happen.

“Don’t believe everything you read in the paper” is a wise, smarmy self-satisfied saying, but these days it sounds like one of the ten commandments. One advantage of impending middle-age is you start to realize how clueless everyone is. It makes you feel a lot smarter, though also a lot more scared.

Our New Year’s was a muted, practically middle-aged, affair. We sat and watched television til midnight, then stepped out to the edge of the bay where teensy little fireworks streaked out of the darkness but quickly disappeared.

The Bush administration has, in the words of John Stewart, “time for one more big fuck-up” before he disappears quickly into the wilds of Texas. Fireworks in Gaza have been the real thing, wiping out everyone one in their path. You can just see Cheney and the Israelis working it out. “Wait for December, the Yanks will be obsessing over the economy, Bush will be ham-strung, Obama won’t be in power yet, you’ll have a month to do whatever you want.”

Will Obama have the guts to tell Israel to stop murdering? We can only hope.

Me, I’m crossing my fingers and going into an extreme health routine. Something tells me it’s going to be a tough year. —Pomerol