Jay Bookman

“While people on Main Street look for jobs, people on Wall Street, they’re collecting billions and billions in your bailout bonuses. Among the top 17 companies that received your bailout money, 92 percent of the senior officers and directors, they still have their good jobs. And everyday Americans are wondering, where are the consequences for them helping to get us into this worst economic situation since the Great Depression? Where are the consequences?”

– Gov. Sarah Palin,
in her address to the Nashville Tea Party

Meanwhile, top leaders of Palin’s party are trying to tap those same Wall Street bankers for campaign money.

Says the Wall Street Journal:

In discussions with Wall Street executives, Republicans are striving to make the case that they are banks’ best hope of preventing President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats from cracking down on Wall Street.

GOP strategists hope to benefit from the reaction to the White House’s populist rhetoric and proposals, which …

Continue reading Palin, GOP need to get their Wall Street story right »

Last week, Gov. Sonny Perdue floated a proposal to dramatically remake Georgia state government.

As Perdue describes it, the proposed amendment to the state constitution would eliminate four elected statewide officers — the commissioners of labor, agriculture and insurance as well as the state school superintendent — and replace them with agency heads appointed by the next governor.

The proposed changes would not take effect until 2015, long after Perdue himself left office.
As a policy proposal, it’s not a bad idea. For starters, it’s hard to think of any reason to keep electing the commissioners of labor and agriculture. They rarely make policy, and the public has little idea of the responsibilities of those offices or who even holds them.

For the record, Democrat Tommy Irvin, the agriculture commissioner, has held that post since 1969; Michael Thurmond, another Democrat, is a relative newcomer, winning election as labor commissioner in 1998.

The office of insurance …

Continue reading On his way out the door, Perdue has an idea »

Over the weekend, President Obama invited Republican leaders to participate in a public, televised summit to discuss health-insurance reform later this month.

“I want to consult closely with our Republican colleagues,” Obama said. “What I want to do is to ask them to put their ideas on the table. . . . I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats, to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward.”

After initially embracing the idea, GOP leadership is now having clear second thoughts. In a letter sent to Obama Monday night, House Minority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor set what seemed to some strange conditions on the summit: Before Republicans would agree to participate, Obama must in effect unconditionally surrender. He must agree that the Democrats’ current health-care bill is dead, and he must promise not to try to revive it.

It states, in part:

“If the starting point for this meeting is …

Continue reading GOP balking at health-care reform summit »

From Rasmussen:

“A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 75% of likely voters now say they are at least somewhat angry at the government’s current policies, up four points from late November and up nine points since September. The overall figures include 45% who are Very Angry, also a nine-point increase since September.

Just 19% now say they’re not very or not at all angry at the government’s policies, down eight points from the previous survey and down 11 from September. That 19% includes only eight percent (8%) who say they’re not angry at all and 11% who are not very angry…..

Male voters are definitely angrier than women. Voters earning $60,000 to $100,000 per year are more frustrated than those in any other income group.

Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Republicans are angry with the government’s current policies, which is perhaps not surprising with the White House and Congress both in Democratic hands. But 78% of voters not affiliated with …

Continue reading Riding a rising tide of raw, unfocused anger »

Advertising agencies get paid good money to know a culture’s soft underbelly, to spot consumer insecurities and exploit them to maximum advantage. You might say that commercials represent our collective dream world, playing back to us the sum total of our fears and hopes and anxieties.

So it was pretty interesting to see — between extended periods of excellent football — the spate of Super Bowl ads advising American men how to reclaim or cling to or even surrender their last remaining claims to traditional masculinity.

Is that really what we have come to circa 2010? Does the American male really feel that threatened? Madison Avenue certainly seems to think so.

Advertisers have long tried to identify their products with certain aspects of masculinity or femininity, so the approach itself is nothing new. Former Raiders star Howie Long, for example, pitches Chevy pickup trucks as a means to dramatize your heterosexuality. And beer companies have always appealed to masculine …

Continue reading Super Bowl ads and the issue of masculinity »

Damned if I know. But I’ll take the points and the Saints.

Continue reading And the winner of the Super Bowl will be … »

I started casting around for train-related songs for this morning’s post, which of course is a rich vein to mine. Not surprisingly, given the role that railroads have played in Georgia’s history and culture, several songs relate directly to the Peach State.

Most famously, of course, there’s “Midnight Train to Georgia,” made famous by Atlanta’s own Gladys Knight and the Pips. Billy Joe Shaver’s “Fast Train to Georgia” has also been covered by a lot of artists, including Johnny Cash. (Cash’s “Destination Victoria Station,” a now rare collection of railroad songs, is a lot of fun, with the notable exception of “City of New Orleans.” That’s a good song, and Johnny’s a great artist, but that’s one combination of song and singer that just didn’t work.)

But for tonight’s kickoff of Travelin’ Music, I’ve selected “Bringin’ in the Georgia Mail,” as performed by the Sam Bush Band, in part because we haven’t done enough bluegrass here. I first noticed Bush when he played behind Emmylou …

Continue reading Georgia, trains and bluegrass: What more you want? »

The latest job picture is more than a little confusing. On the one hand we lost another 20,000 jobs last month, yet somehow the unemployment rate fell significantly to 9.7 percent from 10.0 percent.

How could that be? Well, the decline in the unemployment rate is a statistical, not economic, phenomenon. Previous surveys had missed a substantial number of people who had gone back to work. The suddenly lower unemployment rate, in other words, is not an improvement in unemployment; it is a more accurate, updated picture of unemployment.

For the moment, the more important number is the job loss number, and a couple of charts can tell you more about that than words or numbers. The first comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, charting the three-month rolling average of job losses through the Great Recession. You see the job losses beginning in the spring of 2008, accelerating through the summer and then bottoming out in January through March of 2009.

That chart tells us that …

Continue reading Trying to make sense of a confusing jobless picture »

OK, take a deep breath. Ready?

Austin; Boston; Charlotte; Dallas; Denver; Fort Collins, Colo., Hartford; Honolulu; Houston; Miami; Minneapolis/St. Paul; New York City; northern New Jersey; Oakland; Orlando; Portland, Ore.; Providence; Riverside, Calif; Roaring Fork Valley (Aspen, Colo.); Salt Lake City; San Bernardino; San Jose; San Francisco; Seattle; Stamford, Conn.; Tucson; Vancouver, Wash., Washington, D.C.; Wilmington, Del.

Those are the cities scheduled to receive a total of $1.8 billion for transit projects this year from the Federal Transit Administration. As you may have noticed, traffic-congested metro Atlanta is nowhere on that list. Nor is any other Georgia city.

Through the Atlanta Regional Commission and the Transit Planning Board, metro leaders have made it clear that they want transit to play a major role in the region’s transportation future.

But through the state Legislature, the governor’s office and the state Department of Transportation, leaders at …

Continue reading Ga. keeps getting left behind at the train station »

State Sen. Chip Rogers, R-Woodstock

Somebody alerted me to this bill last week, but I have to admit that I didn’t take it seriously at the time.

However, the visionaries at the Georgia General Assembly sure did.

From the AJC:

The Senate voted Thursday to protect Georgians from evildoers, covert corporations and rogue doctors, seen and unseen, with the passage of a bill that would make it illegal to implant a microchip into someone without their permission.

The bill, ironically sponsored by Sen. Chip Pearson (R-Dawsonville) and Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers, would make it a misdemeanor to implant someone against their will with a microchip, sensor, transmitter or other tracking device. The Senate passed the bill 47-2.

Pearson said that he knows of no case in Georgia where someone has been involuntarily microchipped. He added that during his preliminary meetings on the bill, no one came to complain about it, and he has heard of no conspiracy plots or theories to put …

Continue reading Georgians to be saved from illicit microchip implants »