The hills are alive - with the sound of kvetching and retching

Forgive my ‘Yiddish-isms’. That’s what happens when you grow up in or near Miami Beach. Kvetching means complaining. I think you know what retching refers to. But the media echo chamber is so alive with pain and angst over what Obama should do, hasn’t done, the way he done did it that I can’t hear myself think.

Notable examples: all the screaming heads on CNBC, and most notably Rick Santelli. The print media and blogosphere - liberal, centrist and right wingnut - has joined in as well, and then they’ve given far more attention than should be warranted to that bloated, self righteous, self important default leader of the GOP, Rush Limbaugh, that I feel like heading for the nearest emergency exit post haste.

Can we all back up and breathe, before we completely loose track of the real issues?

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Why this bailout is NOT terrible

I’ve been harping on this for a while now, so I hope my regular readers will bear with me. At breakfast out this morning my mother continued the “bad behavior” drumbeat in regard to corporations and their CEOs. According to Winifred, this is the cause of it all. Corporations should be nice, and care about the environment yada yada. You would have been proud of me. I didn’t rise to the bait. She’s 91-going-on-92 years old and it would have been pointless.

Let me say it one more time: corporations are not people. They are bundles of contracts. They have no ethics or morality inherent in them. That’s why they require regulation by a government that has it head pulled out of its own backside. Americans made money ass over bandbox for decades in the middle of the last century - often referred to as the Golden Period of America - in spite of all the horrendous regulations. Gee, if regulations on corporations were all just inherently bad, how could that have happened? Let’s all go ask Phil Gramm - with some tar and a bag of feathers in hand.

So this afternoon, when I read this article from The Motley Fool online investment newsletter, which we’ve subscribed to forever - and got out of the market well in advance of this crisis, thank you very much Fools - I knew I had to post it.

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Loan us our share, and we'll put America back to work!

The following letter is written by neighbor, friend and occasional employer, Lori Carpenter. Lori is a highly regarded Professional Wetlands Scientist and Hydrologist. Her firm, Huffman & Carpenter, Inc.,  is internationally recognized for excellence.

I’ve followed Ms. Carpenters’ struggle to build an ingenously novel - and green -  product, with sound facts, brilliant data - collected over many years-  and grit, only to have banks turn her down, one after one. The dream and the product are real, the timing is terrible.

This is a cautionary tale that deserves another hearing.

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