Category: News and Opinion

My friend Regina reports in response to my Who Killed the Waltons blog that a Mrs. Godsey on that show was most likely a tea bagger.    This is a shocking revelation that pushes tea bagging back to the show’s origins in the 1970s and perhaps even further back to the time in which the show took place, the 1930s.

·         As someone who’s been

Has the Obama Administration lost its mind? “Uncle Sam is landlord for at least 90 thousand homes that owners lost to foreclosure, and tens of thousands more in the pipeline as families are evicted and properties are appraised…Today the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is asking for information from industry and the public on what might be done with the inventory currently held by mortgage giants Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration…One option: turning foreclosures held by the government into rental homes. That way, cheap foreclosures would not compete with other houses on the sales market. Local companies would probably be asked to manage any government rentals.”

Here’s the Republican commercial: “At one time this was a solid neighborhood of decent, law abiding families who took pride in the homes they owned. But then the federal government took over a bunch of houses and started renting them out to poor transient people from out of town. Now crime is up, there is trash in the street, property values are collapsing and people have started to flee. It’s this neighborhood today; it could be your neighborhood tomorrow if Socialist social engineer Barack Obama remains President.”

My wife and I were in Paris one year when France won the rugby world cup and we marched up the Champs Elysees towards the Arche de Triomphe with thousands of Parisians shouting out “Viva la France” to groups of celebrants carrying their flag.

Hopefully, this is my last time dealing with this topic. I am simply responding to a column written yesterday by Howard “Gatemouth” Graubard, who has promised to leave Room Eight New York politics and open his own blog site. He also promised to take some of the writers from Room Eight with him, in hopes that this site will die on the vines. Some fine chap he is. Obviously wishing the worst to a place where he was afforded the opportunity to express himself freely for almost six years now.

Yes it was the same old same old among the GOP presidential hopefuls marching through the fields of Iowa.  You know the drill, gay bashing to appeal to religious kooks, tipping the hat to wealthy fat cats by equating corporations with people something that will make Justice Scalia a curiosity to future historians and so forth and so on leading one to wonder with this drought of ideas why does Iowa have such a big say in the future of America.

Bob Turner admits he was pandering to the National Review.

There are many who are getting a sense of deja vu about the Obama Presidency. Like President Jimmy Carter, President Obama is dealing with quagmires that have built up over many years that will make the American people worse off for some time to come. The weight of those challenges, and the unwillingness of Congress to impose the measures needed to turn things around, is making him seem hapless and impotent. Moreover President Obama underestimated just how rotten our economy has become at its core, and what a hard slog it will be to find a bottom. The measures he managed to get passed were conventional measures for a conventional recession, not an economic structure in collapse at the end of a 30-year debt binge. That 30 year era followed another era that collapsed under President Carter.

But Jimmy Carter had a Democratic congress, whereas Barack Obama is facing a Republican congress. That makes his situation more like that of President Harry Truman, whose term I didn’t live through personally but read about in the award winning book. Truman was unpopular due to the problems in the country, including a far more brutal war than the one we are in, and yet could run against a “do nothing Congress.” At the time, as well, part of the Republican Party had fallen into McCarthyism. You can’t say politics today are more divisive than that. To put on a respectable face the Republicans nominated a respected and reasonable figure, Thomas E. Dewey, the Mitt Romney of his day, but Truman won anyway.

According to the Attorney General, as quoted in the Daily News, stock prices are volatile because people distrust Wall Street. “The trust bank is empty and we have to restore public confidence in the instruments of government and the instruments of the private sector,” Scheiderman said. Scheiderman said people need to believe that Wall Street “is not a rigged casino.”

Actually, stock prices are volatile because they are too high, because the suckers have too much trust. The dividend yield is 2.0%, down from a historical average of 4.3%. Those running the rigged casino are looking for the signal to get out before the suckers. Scheiderman is repeating the Spitzer line, and perhaps enough trust was restored after 2000 that the suckers were fleeced again. What people need to believe is that Wall Street is, in fact, a rigged casino, and that government will not be trustable until all those incumbents are tossed out. The real debate is whether our public and private institutions can be reclaimed, or the best we can hope for is to rebuild after an institutional collapse that we only hurt ourselves more by forestalling. The problem, Mr. Scheiderman, is the values of Generation Greed.

As a former Republican I have observed that the GOP has been in a train wreck and many of its members are in a state of trauma unable to effect action.  Oh the party has not lost power but instead undergone a seismic shift in demographics.