2008 Presidential Candidates

Here’s the scariest thing about the credit crunch. We don’t know whom to credit anymore. In boardrooms and showrooms all over America all you see are incompetence, failure and overpaid losers. Entire industries are about to go away, to China, to Japan, to nowhere, and the best the CEO’s of America can do is beg. Business by the incompetent, of the incompetent and for the incompetent is killing us.

We’ve got the top job covered. I’m pretty sure we hired a competent guy for that. If anybody can pull off the miracle of making Washington work, Obama can.

But the rot in New York and now Detroit is devastating, and we don’t get to fire those idiots, like we did our nation’s First Idiot. It scares me to death.

I don’t know how you take an industry that thrived for a century, whose brands were once beloved, coveted and iconic as a GTO’s split grille, and drive it straight into the ground, just because gas went up for a couple of quarters. I don’t know how you plow through a hundred years worth of profits in two. Call me naïve, but I actually thought it wasn’t possible to screw up that bad.

This isn’t Amalgamated Buggy Whip we’re talking about. Cars haven’t gone away, they’re still as necessary as ever. It’s not even an American crisis, the Toyota plants in the USA will survive just fine. It’s a management crisis of what we still call The Big Three, for no good reason.

General Motors gone? Ford history? Chrysler, Chevy, Caddy disappeared? Who did that? Is it possible to be that stupid by accident? Or were the Big Three killed on purpose? Maybe there was a hostile takeover by the Republican Guard when we weren’t looking.

And, of course I mean the Iranian Republican Guard, not the GOP Republican guard. Not that there’s all that much difference.

Sorry, that was a cheap shot, but I’m feeling real cheap these days. Great Depressions will do that to you. And this one is looking greater every day.

Seriously, where is the competence? Wall Street firms that survived two world wars and the first depression killed dead in six months. Auto companies that put the world on wheels, now reduced to begging for bailouts, threatening to go bust and take the entire American economy with them.

I want to help, but I don’t consider Detroit’s current management credit worthy. It’s not just money they’re fresh out of, it’s ideas, it’s smarts, it’s competence. That’s the real credit crunch.

I’m scared that 25 billion won’t do it. Detroit has blown through several times that much in the past few years. There is no end to their failures. These guys could screw up a wet dream.

Hell, these guys did screw up a wet dream. Most of us had our first taste of sweet, forbidden sex in their products. I mean, they used to call it parking. You didn’t walk to Lover’s Lane, you drove. In daddy’s car. And it wasn’t a Subaru.

So, what’s the solution? I don’t know. If I did I’d be sending off my resume right now. But I have one idea.

From what I hear, Detroit is well-endowed with homeless people. That is a class of folks who have loads of experience in Making Do With Less. Surely there is among them a genius of thrift, an Edison of improvisation, a Rockefeller of the Streets.

Find him. Or her. Job one for the auto companies for the next few years will be begging. Why not hire a professional?

Qaddafi sends maximum force to put down rebellion.

Sources reporting to World Tribune in an article from Cairo, Egypt says fighting between opposition forces and the regime of Col. Moammar Qaddafi has spread. Libya has imposed a news black out as thousands of government troops are rushing to several cities.

Qaddafi regime sources claims the fighting is a tribal conflict but Libyan opposition sources said tribes and other unemployed young men were battling regime forces in at least two cities in the North African state. Call it a revolution.

Government sources say, “Skirmishes between youths from Al Tabu and Zawia tribes evolved into larger battles in which several cars and houses were burned,” the Libyan daily Al Watan said on Nov. 7 before the blackout was imposed. .

Opposition sources said the fighting between tribal members and the regime began in the southeastern Libyan city of Kufra in early November and has now spread to the streets of Benghazi the second largest city.

30% unemployment, a dysfunctional economy and even the recent courtship by Russia has raised the level of discord that has now boiled over to street fighting.

Libya is governed by a so-called Jamahiriya (a state of the masses) in theory, governed by the populace through local councils; in practice, an authoritarian state with Qaddafi as its dictator. It has a unworkable amalgam of Italian and French civil law and Islamic law. It is without a Constitution, or political parties so effective opposition is almost impossible and chaotic.

95% of its export income is from crude oil accounting for 60% of private sector wages. Theoretically it has one of the highest per capita incomes in Africa but little of it trickles to the poorest and even its 45 billion barrel oil reserve allows little hope for a better life except for the elite.

Libya has claimed more than 32,000 sq km in southeastern Algeria and about 25,000 sq km in the Tommo region of Niger in a currently dormant dispute; various Chadian rebels from the Aozou region reside in southern Libya.

At this writing it is unknown if foreign fighters or influence are involved in the current conflict.

It’s was always a bit startling to me to hear a student from Oxford or Cambridge say, “I’m reading ancient history” or “I’m reading Victorian literature.”  A statement of that kind is light years away from the basic orientation of the typical student in an American college or university.  There one hears, “I’m majoring in recreation management.”  (“Majoring”; another noun turned into a verb.)  The image that springs to mind is that of one of those semi-professional athletes managing to take a little time away from the football field to go to the gym and practice blowing a whistle and yelling, “Hey, listen up, you guys!”  I happen to know that one superstar running back, when he was at a Pennsylvania university (not Penn State; Joe Paterno still has standards, I hear), never attended a class in his four years there.  The arrangement was that his profs would give him Cs, but that he would not graduate.  When he arrived in the NFL he had to have tutors to help him learn the playbook.

When I began attempting to teach at what was then considered one of the three best Christian liberal arts colleges in the country, and was immediately in trouble essentially for trying to impose some academic standards in my courses, an older colleague pointed out, “This is a student-driven institution, and you’re expected to mollycoddle them.”  Another colleague remarked, “Don’t lower your standards.  Just lower your expectations,” but I knew that if I followed that advice I’d give all Fs.

At the end of the academic year the vice president for academic affairs (whatever happened to “dean”?)  called me to his office to explain that the tide of student opinion was running so strongly against me that he felt I should look for another position.  He explained that I was a scholar, and that this was a teaching institution, so I didn’t belong there.

What was that again?

Here is the sort of thing that was happening:  I was teaching second-year Spanish, and one day I called on a student to do a simple transformation during a drill.  He asked, “What kind of word is that second one there?”

I answered him, “That’s an adjective.  You do know what an adjective is, don’t you?”  I almost felt as if it were unkind to ask such an insulting question; mollycoddling, you understand.  He admitted that he didn’t know one part of speech from another because he had never studied English grammar.  My head was swimming at that point, because the next topic in the textbook was “Uses of the Imperfect Subjunctive in Adverbial Clauses of Purpose and Proviso.”

When I expressed my surprise, he said, “I’ll bet almost no one in the class has studied English grammar.”  I called for a show of hands, and virtually all of them went up.  The image of a flight school for pigs sprang to mind.  My job was to teach Spanish to students who had no clue about how English works.  Oh, yes, and to teach Hispanic literatures to students who were barely capable of reading Dick and Jane.

On another day, an alleged student asked me what tense a verb in his sentence was in.  I told him and then reminded him that he had, after all, studied that tense the previous semester.  He retorted sharply that he could not be held responsible for anything presented in a previous semester.  I told him to try that one on the Math Department and then come back so we could talk about it.  In other words, the concept of actually learning something was foreign to him.

Back to those Oxbridge people.  When they said they were “reading” in the various areas, they meant that they were expected to prepare themselves, under the guidance of their tutors, for some tough final examinations.  The fundamental way to accomplish this was to do copious readings of the pertinent texts.  Lectures on the various topics would be made available by professors who were first of all research-oriented scholars.  In the beginning, a university was a place where scholars got together to offer guidance to young men, and later women as well, who wanted to become educated.  (And yes, I’m well aware of the wild partying that went on the Middle Ages too.)

Actually, I believe it was Socrates who said education was a student on one end of a log and a student on the other.  So much for billion-dollar campuses.

Become educated?  What an antiquated notion.  In chapel at the above-mentioned college, one speaker asked the seniors in the front rows why they were there.  To a person they answered, “To get a degree.”  I was assured by a more experienced faculty member that anyone answering, “To get an education” would have been disgraced.

As a corollary, faculty members are expected to be oriented towards getting passing grades from their students in the form of evaluations.  At a university where I taught, I was on the Promotion and Tenure Committee when a friend of mine came up for promotion.  His student evaluations were stellar, but another professor, who had taken over a popular linguistics course of his, pointed out that his course was set up so that the students could cheat, and that he gave all A’s.  Ironically, the professor who pointed that out had a course of her own that ran on a point system weighted so heavily in favor of class attendance that someone noticed that a dog could be enrolled and, if it wandered into the classroom each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, would pass the course.

I can’t confirm it, but I have read twice of a study in which it was determined that only 30% of US college graduates can even read a label and understand what it says.  Surprised?  Come, now; these are the future leaders of America?  Or are they the present leaders?  Maybe this explains why our Congress gets a satisfaction rating of 9% and some of us wonder how it got that high.

It is highly hypocritical of us even to keep calling these diploma mills “institutions of higher learning.”  The reason we were instructed to mollycoddle those synthetic students at that student-driven institution was that if we didn’t they would go to another school where they would be mollycoddled, and take their parents’ money with them.  Our school would fold and we would be out of a job.  And that’s the bottom line.

I retired early.

Iran Wants Cartel Weapon; Moscow Less Aggressive

Last Tuesday, October 21^st Russia, Iran and Qatar, that account for over 60% of global natural gas reserves, agreed to set up a “gas OPEC,” during a meeting in Tehran, Iranian Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said. The three largest gas exporters want to drive prices up, given the recent dramatic drop after the summer peak.

They have no power to change prices now, as gas prices are regulated by the oil and petrochemicals markets since there is no such thing as an independent gas market. The alliance established in Iran’s capital is in fact a “big gas troika.”

The OPEC-style gas cartel will be finalized on November 18 in Moscow which must mean the group’s charter will be adopted, a document which has been in the works for two years, ever since Iran initiated the idea.

The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) comprising 16 member states has no charter, its decisions are not binding on its members and it is no more than a discussion club. Forming a cartel has been discussed since 2001.

Adopting a single charter has been the long-standing stumbling block for a “gas OPEC.” Iran wants the gas cartel to be modeled after the original OPEC, setting quotas for gas production thus pushing prices up while damaging the U.S. economy.

Moscow is at least pretending to be trying to avoid aggressive policies suggesting that the new organization should manage joint gas projects and gas transportation issues.

Transporting natural gas is especially important for Russia and its gas export monopoly. It is crucial for Russia that Central Asian gas go through Russia on the way to Europe rather than bypass it via the Caspian seabed or go through its sly ally, Iran. US President Reagan blocking Russia’s gas pipeline into Europe nailed the Soviet Union’s economic coffin shut and pushed it over the edge into oblivion.

Gazprom’s gas supplies to Europe have been locked in to long term contracts for the next one to three decades. Iran’s gas industry is so disorganized that, despite its huge reserves, the country has to export Turkmen gas under some of its export projects. Turkmenistan, for its part, has shown a rather cool attitude toward the gas OPEC idea.

Qatar is a new player on the global gas market. Most of its projects are still in the works and involve LNG deliveries also to Europe, and again, under long-term contracts. If it tries to limit those deliveries, its niche will be immediately seized by rivals - Libya, Algeria and others.

It follows from the above that there is no global gas market; there isn’t a European gas market either. There are no “global” gas prices - they are set individually for each contract (usually a long-term).

As a result, the potential gas cartel cannot influence gas prices through restrictive quotas. By restricting exports, gas-producing countries would only harm themselves by cutting their own incomes. The crude oil OPEC cartel can impose quotas but members often cheat.

By a strange irony of fate, gas prices in Europe are based on the market value of crude oil and petrochemicals, which gas producers have no power over.

The disgruntled attitude of the three countries richest in the commodity is easy to understand. Oil prices have plummeted to half of what they were during the summer peak, and natural gas followed suit. Mr Miller and his counterparts are getting desperate because they cannot influence the process.

However, the very idea of establishing some sort of gas cartel is bound to raise concerns with European consumers, further complicating Gazprom’s investments in Europe, as if European partners weren’t already wary of dealing with the Russian monopoly.

The Russian government must certainly realize that “gas OPEC” is a harmful idea. Energy saying earlier this month that the wording was inappropriate because Russia has no intention of regulating gas prices or production levels.

This article include information published by the Russian news agency in English - RIA Novosti, and other open sources and the authors analysis and opinion.

Illegal Foreign Contributions Could Top $60 Million

Barack Obama reneged on his pledge to limit campaign spending to the federally funded $86 million maximum. McCain has stuck to his pledge which frankly has put him at a distinct disadvantage being outspent 4 and 5 to one in swing states. Many Republicans say McCain’s decision will be fatal to his campaign.

More than half of Obama’s contributions have come from small donors giving $200 or less. But unlike John McCain’s campaign, Obama won’t release the names of these donors.

The Obama camp claims to have 2.5 million donors in all. That’s likely hype. According to a Newsmax analysis, the Obama campaign finance records contain just 370,448 unique names. Newsmax contacted some of the donors that have been revealed and discovered some could not recall giving anything although their name and address appears on the reports.

A Newsmax canvass of disclosed Obama campaign donors shows many anomalies, including outright violations of federal election laws. For example, Obama has numerous donors who have contributed well over the $4,600 federal election limit. Many of these donors have never been contacted by the Obama campaign to refund the excess amounts to them. If an excess contribution is not returned in 60-days penalties can be applied to the campaign and contributor.

Most troublesome are the more than 37,000 Obama donations that appear to be conversions of foreign currency. There is little or no regulation of foreign donations and a common practice is to use false names and cashiers checks to cover up the actual course.

According to a Newsmax analysis of the Obama campaign data before the latest figures were released, potential foreign currency donations could range up to a stunning $63 million in all. With the addition of $150 million raised in September, this amount could be much more

They say it’s all over but the shouting.

“AHHHHGRRHH!”

OK, now it’s all over. And that wasn’t me doing the shouting there, that was the GOP, the conservatives. Not all of them, not the rational ones among them, not even the McCain supporters.

Nope, the ones who are screaming in pain, moaning in misery, hollering in horror, trilling in terror and generally making an unseemly spectacle of themselves are the Obamaphobiacs.

These are the people who are sure that the coming of Barack Obama signals the apocalypse, the end of the world as we know it. You see them at Palin rallies hollering “Off with his head!” like hillbilly Robespierres screaming for Antoinette’s blood. You hear them on talk radio, choking on their own rage, crying “Oh, the humanity!” They can be found on TV, talking heads talking like chickens with their heads cut off, and making about as much sense. They are an American tragedy.

And the very worst, most tragic thing about it all is, to them, it’s real. They mean it. They are terrified by the coming Obama presidency. They have Obamaphobia.

Obamaphobia is a disease. These poor people are afflicted with a case of the willies—and I don’t mean the ordinary willies; I mean the Horton willies. But they are also my fellow Americans. They may think that I, and my like-minded comrades-in-Obama don’t care about them, but they are wrong.

We are all patriots, and so is he. All of us will spend the next four-to-eight years together, our fates linked, like it or not. I come here today, poor afflicted Obamphobiacs, to heal your pain.

First, take a deep breath. There is nothing to worry about. I have it on good authority that Barack will not be taking the oath of office from Louis Farrakhan. Rumors to the effect that the “Star Spangled Banner” will be replaced by 50 Cent’s “What’s up, Gangsta” are without foundation. William Ayres will not be going to the supreme court. William Clinton, maybe, but he’s a bubba just like you so don’t panic.

Really guys, what’s the worst that could happen? I know you’re scared that Obama is so liberal he might nationalize the banks and federalize everybody’s mortgage. That he’ll ignite class warfare by demonizing the Wall Street crowd and the Washington elites. That he’s going to tax and spend us into the poorhouse, going so far as to tax your feeble health care benefits. I understand your fears about him.

Oh … wait. That’s all McCain. My bad.

Let me try again. Here’s what you need to know about our next president. Barack Obama is not a Muslim, he’s a Hawaiian. He loves America just like you, maybe more than you because it’s been so good to him he’s going to be running the place in three months. He wants Bin Laden dead, just like you. He wants America respected in the world, just like you. He loves you so much he won’t allow gays to marry, even though, in his heart of hearts, I bet he wishes they could.

Some people are contemptuous of you, Obamaphobes, but not me. You are patriots and so am I. And the truest form of patriotism is pride. You’ll have to trust me on this, but once Obama is elected this country will experience a rush of pride the likes of which hasn’t been seen since VJ day. You can be a grump and wallow in anger and misery for the next four-to-eight years, or you can fight your disease and enjoy the sweet, hopeful moment.

I’m not saying you have to vote for him, I’m not even saying you have to like him. I’m just telling you it will be OK, the sun will still rise in the east, the flag will still have fifty stars, and your life won’t be any worse. How could it be? Unless you drown in the bile of your self-inflicted Obamaphobia.

Of course, if he turns around on the Capitol steps on 1.20.09 and barks “Who’s your daddy now!” at the television cameras, I think you should move to Argentina, because he means you.

LATE BREAKING NEWS! Hear Snark Twain live on The Gathering Storm talk show this Friday, Oct. 17, at noon. The subjects will be the election, terror, the economy and national security. Big laughs! A splendid time is guaranteed for all. Hear it live or in the archives at Blogtalkradio.com.

A Friday Newsmax article reports Former President Clinton complimented Sarah Palin’s political skills Thursday, but wouldn’t be drawn on whether his wife Hillary could run for the White House in 2012.

Clinton said he didn’t agree with Republican vice presidential pick Palin on politics, but warned fellow Democrats not to underestimate her calling her “…an instinctively effective candidate and with a compelling story.”

“I get why she’s done so well,” Clinton said. “It’s a mistake to underestimate her. She’s got good intuitive skills. They’re significant.”

Clinton said he thought McCain, a Vietnam War hero and veteran lawmaker, was a “great man” and that the Nov. 4 election would be close, but he predicted Democratic Sen. Barack Obama would emerge the winner.