Banking Takeover?

According the news I’m hearing on the radio the president’s bill for bailing out the banking industry contains no provision for Congressional oversight. That is the same kind of hands-off policy that got our economy into this mess. If we hand over the $700B or more to the banks with no oversight, the taxpayers won’t be taking over the banks, rather the banks will be taking over the US Treasury. Congress needs to have oversight authority.

Also according to reports the banks say that if oversight and limits on executive compensation then they won't sign up for a bail out. How dire an emergency is it if they can walk away from the deal? The way this situation has been presented to the public is that we either bail them out or they go broke and take all our retirement plans down with them. The executives should not be given seven figure (or any) parachutes as a reward for running their institutions into the ditch. The average citizen is not rewarded for screwing up on the job. Why should they be rewarded? Fire them and let them apply for unemployment benefits. Let them try living on that for a while and maybe they’ll learn the value of a dollar.

Broadband Beavers

We went to the annual watercolor show in Old Forge yesterday at the Art Center. The show was good, as usual, with watercolors from all over the country. I had a hard time which to vote for as "viewer's choice". I ended up voting for "Backwoods Highway", an Adirondack scene but there were two others I really liked as well. One, "View from the Courthouse" was a whimsical village scene looking down on a street corner with bright colors and distorted perspective that gave it the look of an illustration for a children's book. The other was "Winter of '07", a view of two houses with a man walking by in the snow. Actually there were others that were equally good. It was hard to choose.

We bought the catalog. An older man ahead of us complained about the $12 price of the catalog comparing it unfavorably to a subscription to American Artist. Evidently he does not understand that the magazine has the advantage of scale. When printing editions that run to 6 figures in size and are supported by advertising the cost per copy is much less. I did not point that out to him but later thought perhaps I should have.

Going and returning from Old Forge we passed through Racquette Lake where some prankster has planted a satellite dish atop a beaver house that is in a marsh along the road. The idea of beavers passing the winter watching TV and surfing the Internet amused me so I took a photo, one of only 3 I shot yesterday. There wasn't much fall color and the light wasn't good for photography but it was a very nice day for just living and enjoying the day.

There Should Be Outrage

I hear this morning that the Associated Press has objected to the McCain campaign's distortion of things they reported about the Obama campaign. What the McCain campaign did was to cut & paste words and phrases from articles in the same manner an extortionist clips words from a newspaper and glues them in a different order and then plugged them into TV ads to give the impression that AP was saying something about Obama that it did not. A search of the headlines on-line this morning however reveals that AP's protest was apparently low key as there is virtually no mention of it. There should be outrage. In distorting their words to discredit Obama McCain has also discredited the veracity of the AP.

For a candidate who pledged at the start of the campaign to stay positive and deal with issues, the recent ads run by McCain are shameful. If a candidate will lie and cheat to get into office, how can we trust that person to be honest and trustworthy in office?

Different?

Tonight on the news Charles Gibson interviewed Sarah Palin. She continues to present herself as a change candidate, a Washington outsider, but when asked questions with a request for a yes or no answer she repeatedly answered in 273 word sentences that avoided answering either yes or no. Even when the question was repeated and the request for a yes or no response was repeated she continued to evade giving a direct answer. Different? She sounds exactly like the current president and VP to me.