News tidbits

And here I was afraid I did not have much to blog about today. Silly boy!

NPR was talking about last night's South Caroline Democratic debate and the acrimonious exchanges between Clinton and Obama. The ones they highlighted had to do with these two candidates charging each other with liking Reagan's ideas, which, apparently if you are a Democrat, amounts heresy or at least an insult. Personally, not all of Reagan's ideas were bad and to carte blanc toss out the baby with the bathwater is the sort of oversimplified campaign rhetoric I would expect from candidates of this caliber. Anyway, NPR then put on an expert from the Annenberg Center for Checking Politician's Claims or some such. Apparently Clinton "grossly exaggerated" what Obama said and took it completely out of context. Obama, while he implied much by pointing out that Ms. Big Corporate Lawyer Clinton was on the board of Wal-Mart, did not technically fib because she was.

Switching topics, one politician noted that, in regard to these economic stimulus packages everyone is suddenly proposing, he didn't see how they would do anything other than stimulate the Chinese economy. He has a sort of point, although in a larger sense anything that moves money is good. Even if we sell a Chinese radio in Wal-Mart, Americans had jobs in a store to sell it, sales tax was paid, and governmental employees had to work to process that. Maybe even accountants and lawyers benefited.

One of Tom Clancy's great observations which may or may not be his originally is that The Market, meaning the NYSE, is as much about confidence and perception and self-fulfilling prophecy as anything. If people think they are in a depression/recession then they will change the way they act (meaning how they use their money) and that change, in the form of caution, when applied over a broad enough swath of the population create a recession. Similarly if enough people sell a stock because they are afraid the price will drop, guess what? The price starts dropping. Go fig. The Market is all about perceptions. And as everyone knows, currently, the herd is thundering mindlessly along following the current, panicked, perceptions, pulling itself with it past any semblance of reason. At the present course, all the lemmings will soon dash off the cliff, not knowing that they might have had a choice. It would be so easy to blame the Press for its constantly negative reporting as it tosses out phrases like "the R-word" which it immediately explains means "recession" like we were a bunch of third graders sharing naughty words in the back corner of the playground. And to some extent, the Press is at fault, but to say this is all their fault is simplistic. After all, even the Press is entitled to act as if the average might grow a brain sometime soon and actually think about events. Can we really blame the Press if our societal appetite is for candy journalism and mental pablum? Can we blame them if they give us what we seem to want, easy solutions, simplified problems, and emotionally evocative sensationalist reporting?

Sometimes it seems like the best argument against democracy is the people in them.