The Nightly Build...
Paulson Changes Course
Keven Ann Willey, in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog,
notes that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is saying that the $700
billion financial bailout program will not be used to buy troubled
mortgage-backed assets, but will be used to invest directly in banks.
Willey says she'd like to see a discussion of this change in course
among those who understand it.
That would make for a pretty small conversation. Lest anyone think
that comment was tongue-in-cheek, I refer you to the testimony of the
one person I would have predicted would have an explanation for what's
happening, Alan Greenspan:
"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending
institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in
a state of shocked disbelief."
Reader Eric Brandler suspects the taxpayer was conned and that there's
"no theoretical upside, only downside for the taxpayers" in this new
direction. It might not be as bad as that. The money the government
is investing in the banks is being exchanged for preferred stock, so
if the banks prosper, the taxpayer might still get his money back.
That's what we're being told anyway. The reality is anyone's guess.
Congress created the position of special inspector general to
oversee the bailout program, but the Bush administration has yet to
nominate anyone to fill that newly created position. The most
worrisome news about the bailout is the quote by the Treasury
Department's Inspector General: "It's a mess."
One good consequence of the long wait between the election and the
inauguration is that for a few months at least we truly have
bi-partisan self-interest in doing something about the problem. We
only have one President at a time and, for better or worse, right now
that's George W Bush, whose legacy would be even more tarnished with
further economic collapse on his watch. Barack Obama is keenly
interested in avoiding that, too, to prevent his watch from having
quite so deep a hole to dig out of. That all changes on January 20,
2009. Then, the Democrats will be in complete charge of the government
and the Republicans go into full stonewall mode, hoping to blame as
much of the continuing economic disaster on Democrats as they can.
You can get a sneak preview of that from some of the reader comments.
"Michael R McCullough" gives a conspiracy nut's view of the landscape
-- there's no problem now, but just wait until Obama takes over.
"Unless Obama and congress institute their socialist principles, there
is no cause to worry. ... This is a manufactured crisis and nothing
more."
"mr.ed" absolves Bush of all blame and explains just what the
Democrats are scheming to impose on America:
"Chris Dodd (D), the Senate Banking Committee Chairman IS SUPPOSED TO
BE IN CHARGE, not the President...that the Democrat-controlled House
and Senate are SUPPOSED TO BE IN CHARGE, but continue to be in
absentia. The handouts are a Democrat administration concept...it's
called speading the wealth...it's called SOCIALISM!"
If this is all the help Republicans can offer when their own man is
still President, maybe impatience for January 20, 2009 is the right
attitude after all. Lead, follow, or get out the way. It's time for
the Republicans to just get out of the way.
Street Renaming a Skirmish in Bigger War
Tod Robberson, in The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog,
gives us a backstory to the news that the Dallas City Council rejected
a proposal to rename Ross Avenue after Cesar Chavez. Robberson says
that renaming advocate Alberto Ruiz, when he met with The Dallas
Morning News editorial board several weeks ago, "could not have
been more insulting and abrasive." Robberson says that being
successful in politics is about being persuasive and Ruiz lacks the
diplomacy to succeed.
I don't know Alberto Ruiz, but my guess is that he wasn't
interested in persuading the DMN editorial board as much as he was in
doing some good old fashioned consciousness-raising in the Hispanic
community. For that, a little controversy goes a longer way than would
a quick, polite agreement to put new street signs up in some
neighborhood. My guess is that Alberto Ruiz has much bigger goals in
mind than just a street renaming and he is more than willing to lose
this skirmish in order to rally his side for the more consequential
battles to come. And that's a lesson Tod Robberson either never
learned or is overlooking as a possibility in this situation.
Consequences for California Prop. 8
Rod Dreher is at it again, publishing his soft bigotry in the
The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog. This time the target of
his complaints isn't Hispanics, isn't African-Americans, it's gays. He
reports that a financial supporter of California's Proposition 8,
denying gays the right to marry, resigned from his job as a local
theater director when customers began to boycott his theater in
protest.
Dreher says he's being persecuted for his support of traditional
marriage, that angry gays are driving the man out of his job, that
this is a return to the "blacklist" and "we don't want to go there
again in this country."
Oh, please. Quit claiming he was defending traditional marriage.
He was funding an effort to deny the benefits of traditional marriage
to gays, a right that was already established. He was taking away
rights from others, not defending anything. Reader "leslie" put it
best: "He lost his job, but not the RIGHT to have one. I lost the
RIGHT to marry."
If customers don't much care to see their ticket money get used to
pay someone who funds anti-marriage activities, it shouldn't surprise
anyone.
By the way, when the House Un-American Activities Committee starts
hauling theatre producers in front of them to demand to know if they
employ any anti-gay Mormons, then Dreher will have a historical analogy
worth scare-mongering about.
