Now I know how Gregor Samsa must have felt.
It’s a terrible thing, waking up in the morning to realize that overnight you have metamorphosed into a conservative. How do you face your family?
I was shocked…shocked, to realize suddenly that I hate entitlements. It’s conservatives who preach against entitlements, right?
But there’s Boeing — feeling entitled to the $40 billion refueling tanker deal? They’re running full-page ads saying it’s not fair they didn’t get it.
And Billary is entitled to the White House?
John McCain is entitled to a free pass?
Stanley O’Neal steered Merrill Lynch into $27 billion in writedowns, and he’s entitled to a $160 million golden parachute?
James Cayne piloted Bear Stearns down from $170 a share to $2 a share, so he’s entitled to walk away with $40 million cash compensation plus $60 million more from selling his stock? That entitles him to a $26 million apartment in the Plaza.
And then the Fed arranges a Bear Stearns rescue, so you and I are entitled to pay for the whole mess with our tax dollars – even though the shareholders already paid for it with losses. That entitlement is so good we pay for it twice.
Logging companies are entitled to cut-rate leases for decimating old growth timber on Federal parklands?
Oil and gas companies are entitled to very cut-rate drilling leases? And then the oil company stooges in the Bush Bureau of Land Management forget to collect even that pittance?
Hedge fund managers are entitled to count billions of dollars of income as capital gains so that they can pay a lower tax rate than your mailman?
And conservatives are still entitled to wail in pious outrage against entitlements?
They cheat people who really need welfare, and then they turn out to be the biggest (and least deserving) welfare recipients of all.
I just looked again. I haven’t turned into Kafka’s cockroach after all.
They have.
Alaska’s senior assistant attorney general is Ed Sniffen.
FREE! BILLION DOLLAR MARKETING IDEAS!
For Orkin pest control — introduce the B/C Scrub. For $200 ($300 for large-format flat panel TVs), you treat the customer’s television set so that it’s completely free of Bushes and Clintons for eight years.
For newspapers, to reverse the decline in circulation:
Premium subscribers get a B/C-free edition guaranteed to carry no mention or image of a Bush or a Clinton, ever.
For network news, to reverse the shrinkage of audiences, ratings, and revenues: same deal – no Clintons, no Bushes, no problem. Family dinner will be reinstated, and everyone will watch the evening news. We may even reactivate Walter Cronkite.
It’s a classic principle of free enterprise and American marketing know-how: stop making your customers sick at the stomach, and maybe they’ll buy your product.
And the corollary to that principle: we customers will take our dollars where they are decently treated, and right now none of you guys qualify. Except Orkin. They, at least, know a bedbug when they see one.
For seven years our papers and our channels were filled with Karl Rove talking points and Bush administration talking heads, and now they’re spewing out Clinton talking points and dumping them into our living rooms.
Enough is enough.
Oh, yes, and for an extra five bucks, you take McCain prisoner again.
Tardy quote of the day (it’s from 1931). Mohandas Gandhi, when asked by a British journalist what he thought of Western civilization:
“I think it would be a good idea.”
Art Cashin on the current stock market:
“The best way to test for land mines is not with your foot.”
– CNBC Thursday morning, 3/20/08
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Zbigniew Brezhinski on Hillary’s claims to experience:
“She says she’s visited 80 countries. My travel agent has visited 150.”
“When John Kennedy was running for the presidency, no one suggested we should elect Mamie Eisenhower because she had eight years of White House experience.”
– MSNBC Thursday morning, 3/20/08
We could talk about Bear Stearns, whose stock went from $170 to $2, but let’s not.
Student Loan Sharking.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, it costs the federal government $2.64 for each dollar it provides or guarantees in a college loan. Hmm.
If I kept lending you money, for whatever reason, and it was costing me $2,640 every time I lent you $1,000, I think I might just give you the money. That would save me $1,640 even if you never paid any of it back.
Why does it cost so much?
In a separate news item, the U.S. Department of Education announced that 15 banks that lend money to students have all qualified to receive a subsidized rate of 9.5% on their money.
At a time when the government is paying only 3.4% interest on a 10-year treasury bond, charging 9.5% on a student loan is usury.
Which is what banks usury do.
Stump the Times
Jeff Leeds writes about Starbucks in Monday’s NYT business section – where the writers are supposed to be highly numerate, whether or not they’re literate.
The story exposes a deep, dark mystery.
Starbucks says it sold 4.4 million CDs last year. But critics of the company’s music business say the average company-owned store sells an average of only two CDs a day. Starbucks denied that claim but refused to give Leeds the real figure.
That stymied the writer, who grumbled and plodded onward. Elsewhere in the article, he mentions that there are 6,800 company-owned stores.
It’s hard, being an investigative reporter, trying to penetrate the veil of corporate secrecy. What are you supposed to do? – divide 4.4 million by 6800 to get annual sales per store, then divide that by 365 to find out that Starbucks sells 1.77 CDs a day per store? All the long division that’s fit to print.
One more double espresso, and Leeds may be able to stay awake for an entire story.
Whacky Wiki
Elsewhere in the business section, writer Noam Cohen juggles numbers like a stage magician in an article about the real and (mostly) imaginary problems of Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia. Cohen’s bid for the Nobel in mathematics comes when he takes a complex metaphorical abstraction and reduces it to hard-nosed quantification.
The abstraction: “Until recently…Wikipedia was run more like a store-front community center than a digital age powerhouse.”
Quantifying the store-front center: “What was a nine-person operation – a top 10 Web site had a paid staff of less than 10….” Got that? Nine is less than ten.
Measuring the magnitude of the digital-age powerhouse: “… has just recently grown to a 15-person operation.”
Should have had a chart.
“If Dennis Kucinich were a black woman, we’d have our nominee.”
In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said, “We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady.”
Say what? As Sinbad put it: “What kind of president would say, ‘Hey, man, I can’t go ’cause I might get shot so I’m going to send my wife…oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.’”
– from Mary Ann Akers in the WashingtonPost.com
“Really bad art requires special talents.”
Laura Shefler
“No bird soars too high, if he flies with his own wings.”
William Blake, in “Proverbs of Hell”
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“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
John Maynard Keynes
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“There are some people whom it is one’s duty to offend.”
Baron John Reith of Stonehaven
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“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
Upton Sinclair
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“Some great and glorious day the plain folks of this land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
H.L. Mencken
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“Actually, drunken sailors tend to spend their own money. By contemporary standards, they’re quite prudent.”
John Lanchester (London Review of Books)
Two non-political quotes, offered in response to trillions of requests that we post something that has nothing to do with the Texas and Ohio primaries.
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Art critic Paul Myerscough attended the showing at Christie’s in London of paintings about to be auctioned and offered this marvelous image of what was going on:
“A man leans in to inspect a detail on a Cy Twombly, looks at the price estimate ($3 to $4 million), then whips a tape measure out of his pocket.”
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Mike (a gaffer, mind you, but not in Washington) came up with this defining observation:
Michael Kinsley first said it, decades ago. In Washington, a “gaffe” is something you commit when you accidentally blurt out the truth.
