Sunday Morning Coming Down

One of the more amazing things on Morning Joe.  Usually you can multi task while it's on.  Watching the panelist make faces as they listen to each other speak is an added benefit.  Sometimes the expression is snarky, sometimes it seems like they are waiting for their turn to respond and you can see the wheels turning.  Or sometimes they are just tuning out.  I don't see this kind of real give and take on other programs.  Maybe it's because the show seems less scripted or the players sometimes look like it is way to early to talk about this stuff or that they might have benefited from a little more sleep.

Once again I'm waking up early to get someone to school.  This is not a bad thing.  If the price of gas was lower, if it did not rain in the morning, if the traffic was not terrible I would not dread this task.  I get up early anyway and this has a tendency to regulate my hours and activities during the evening.  I was reading an AARP magazine and now realize that that I'm a little bit older than Mark Harmon who is also 60 years old.  Sting is also 60.  If NCIS were a little closer to reality Gibbs would really be building that boat in Mexico instead of getting in fire fights with his team.  Sting's music still resonates and I like some of the World Music things he has done. Speaking of music I think one of the thinks that puts you in a certain generation is the music you like or in some cases the music that you listen to.  I guess this is one of the reasons that it something you either keep up with or give up on except for special occasions....

I was struck how much money you would need to have in the bank to get $20,000 in interest these days.  Seems to be about $2,000,000 at the blistering interest rate of 1%.  I missed the run up in gold but am sure that gold has very little nutritional value and eventually will need to be sold to buy food, shelter, and transportation.  The recent volatility in the stock market says something for diversification, but the way the market is moving doesn't give me much confidence in the old buy and hold saving/long term investment ideas I grew up with. I'm getting convinced that much of the balancing of the budget on the back of public employees will not help grow jobs.  Even people who work in the private sector sometimes don't understand the value of economic activity.  Advertising pays for much of the news we read and yet there are many that would eliminate even the ads we endure on the net.  Who will collect and write about the news.  And the cur...

I'm struck by logical inconsistencies in much of the scandalous behavior we hear about.  If it's college football we are disappointed when we recruit star athletes and then are disappointed that they are not great student athletes.  In politics we spend a great deal of time raising money to run for office and then are disappointed that policies are bent to support those that contribute the most.  I keep saying to myself, what were they thinking and sometimes what was I thinking.  A lot of problems are self inflicted wounds.  This is nothing new, but you would think that there would be more progress and that things would get better.  Maybe things are getting better but we just don't realize it.  There are a lot of things happening and sometimes the information we act on is incomplete or there is a certain amount of inertia in things in that we continue to fight the last war or wrongly believe that our own experience is either a reason for things to stay...

A rainy weekend in the Keys is a tropical depression.  Florida has not had a hurricane landfall in about five years but it looks like we have a visit from Irene later this week.  This is my reading of the information on TV.  Let's hope the mountains of Hispanola are able to weaken the storm enough so the weather is not too catastrophic. I lived through Andrew and that once in a lifetime storm was enough for me.  The storm was bad and in many ways the aftermath was even worse.  Losing electricity when it is hot is uncomfortable at best.  If you have storm damage working with insurance companies will be as difficult as finding work before the storm.  If we could only have a selective disaster, one that left people alone but took out some of the vacant properties that the banks can't sell, might mean the end of problems in the housing market in South Florida.  But I should be careful what I ask for.  The power of a direct hit from even ...

I know I read this somewhere.  "Just because you are not guilty, doesn't mean you aren't responsible."  This is something that is kind of hard to live up to if you want to minimize the bad and maximize the good. What happens if you have limited connection to a broken system, what happens if you have limited resources to change things positively? What about paradoxes when you get unintended results from something that you do? I guess you can just muddle through things and try not to harm anything or anybody. 

The situation in the UM Athletic Department is troubling but not entirely unexpected.  The "booster" in question is a bad person and has ripped off a lot of people including the UM.  There were players that accepted things that were against the rules.  The development people did not do an adequate background check of this person.  Athletic directors that served the university for the last 20 years were complicit in many of the problems that problems that keep popping up in college football and particularly at the UM.  Sam Jankovich, Paul Dee, Kirby Holcott and the current AD have failed miserably based on the current reports.  There is even talk among the chattering on the radio stations that the president of the university should resign if the allegations prove true. Paul Dee and his relationship the NCAA enforcement committee while this was occuring at the UM is extremely troubling.  Calling out other schools  while your own institution...

Last night I was hardly able to sleep.  The U looks like it will be the poster boy for bad behavior in college football again.  I am going to again invoke the famous saying down here.  "It's a Canes thing".  "You Don't Understand".  Sadly I think too many people will now say it's a Canes thing and we do understand.  I'm an alumni of the University of Miami.  I had season tickets for the football team for several years.  I now only attend games sporadically.  Getting around in big crowds is not worth the expense and effort these days.  I still watch games intensely on TV or listen to games on the radio.  I'm a fan, but not a "booster". Lack of institutional control is a given based on the story written on the front page of MIAMI HERALD.  This is not news among any of the major college football programs in the country.  It's only news if the NCAA has to enforce the unenforceable because things have gotten out of hand and...

Governor Perry should have to resign his office to run for another office.    If President Obama wanted to run for anything other than reelection he should also have to resign from office.  I'm of the opinion that running for office has gotten out of hand and you really can't tell when a politician isn't running for reelection or another office.  As much as they complain about raising money 24/7 and the fact that in the real world fund raising would really put a crimp in being a legislator, the world has been turned upside down and the legislative process is actually much more difficult than dialing for dollars.  A recent campaign to stop donations for incumbants isn't very likely to succeed but many of the long term incumbants are in such safe districts that money raised at home is doled out to other less senior folks as a form of influence peddling or used to scare off primary opponents. As a result talking points, fund raisers, and ...

I've given up a few battles lately.  I now carry a lot of change to feed parking meters.  In the past It was a game about beating the meter minder.  This may not mean much but I think the process of change began when I started picking up a passenger at the parent pick up point at school.  This is a surprisingly intricate process as it meant driving, mindfulness, and sweating or worrying about rain and pedestrians.

I wish I could follow plans that I make in the morning.  By noon I'm usually scrambling and trying to finish up a few things so I can kind of retreat.  I start out fast some times making a few trips to throw stuff out.  I like recycling.  I like doing laundry and I wash the dishes once a day.  (Usually in the morning.)  I over plan and under perform.  Then there is always something to slow me down.  Distraction is something I find simple and satisfying unless it conflicts with other distractions, which compete with having a life and some other dreams I have.

Not sure I agree with or understand current republican pledge to reject a budget deal that would cut expenditures ten times any increase in revenue.  This seems like a deal they should approve of immediately. Not sure which is more important: having a life or having a dream. I like the idea of being who we pretend to be.  Being is the operative verb.  Being is being and is harder to imitate because you can only stretch so far.

I'm kind of newly retired.  Left a job in government/social services and have worked at various part time and substitute teaching positions for the past couple of years.  Now I can say I've been through a few market meltdowns and have a lot of sympathies for people that are looking for their next job.  The skills required for the new jobs that are out there require skills which many don't have and a lot of the low skill jobs or entry level positions are being filled by people who would have gone on to other things but they stay on.  This is one of the reasons that we need to grow this economy.  Newspaper classifieds don't have many jobs and the search engines on the net are frustrating for many.  This is by design because there are so many people out there looking for work.  A successful job search these days is a lot more convoluted these day.

I woke up really early to check out what the financial markets were doing overseas.  The news was bad as there seemed to be financial carnage everywhere.  Then I settled into watching a discusion on Morning Joe where they were discussing the loss of thirty of our finest soldiers when a helicopter was shot down. My head went spinning around.  We are at war, we want to kill the enemy and they want to kill us.  This is not exactly a new concept but the response to the loss of thirty lives in a war as currently fought in the minds of most Americans is strange to me.  There have been about 6100 American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last ten years.  During the Viet Nam War there were almost 58,000 American soldiers killed.  About 20,000 were killed while they were trying to wind down the war from 1969 to 1973 (about 120 a week).  I never served in the military during the Viet Nam War and am not exactly a pacifis...

S&P has spoken.  The same agency that allowed stinky mortgage based securities to have higher than justified ratings until it was too late is wrong again.  To compare the current US debt problems with what is currently happening in Europe as of the August 8, 2012 is over blown. The debt problem is overblown what is not overblown is the country's political response to it's fiscal problems.  A pox on both your houses.  The Ryan Plan to deal with funding issues related to medicare financing was DOA after Republicans realized the political headaches it would cause.  The Democrats coulda, woulda, and shoulda beaten them around the head with policies that would have raised costs for the elderly poor that already made other plans based on current medicare promises. Sadly and I think S&P is correct in saying that the political situation in the country is not positive when dealing with this situation.  The brinksmanship of the debt ceiling deal was ...

There have been more than a few stories about the evils of proprietary schools.  In these days when it seems to be more and more important to have credentials, I think it is very important to review the credentials of the school one attends before they pay a lot of money to attend classes. Many of these schools spend a great deal of money recruiting students but don't spend as much money on placing these students in jobs after they complete classes if they indeed complete their classes. Maybe these schools schould be more selective in the actual enrollment of these students.  Many would be considered high risk students with poor records of achievement and little chance of successfully completing a technically demanding class. I would have two suggestions that would help the situation.  Strangely to some I would encourage those that are in a tough situation where they have lost a job that is unlikely to come back to go back to school and improve your skills in an a...

Congress wants to leave DC to continue the 24/7 campaign.  There is a lot of unfinished business.  There has been a lot of talk about appropriating money for the FAA.  Appointments from the Administration for the Consumer Protection Agency, judicial appointments and working on appropriations could all use some serious attention but it does'nt look like it is going to happen.  This is not a partisan issue.  Congress is just being congress and we are not being well served.  And they have the gall to suggest that others have too much vacation time.

There are a ton of phrases that should not be used if you are an elected official or are engaged in political speech.  Tar Baby can be safely added to the list.  If you have been elected or want to argue about politics these days even as a member of the public or just talking around the table and have not vetted everyone about who they voted for in the last election you might want to consult the political code word dictionary before you open your mouth.  Not everyone can be bailed out of a bad situation or has enough back class or a life time of work like Juan Williams who has been been able to land on his feet and write a book about it. At best you should just bite your tongue.  Don't try to be too folksy or descriptive.  It's hard enough trying to explain yourself without having labels like racist attached to everything you do or say these days.

Summer in Miami requires figuring out a way to escape the heat.  Since my retirement I've been reading more and the latest book was about letters between John and Abigail Adams.  I'm working on Stieg Larson trilogy and spend the better part of Saturday afternoon at the Flagler Dog Track that has been renamed the Magic City Casino.  This seems reasonable as I do some volunteer work and work two half days a week for the Miami Herald and don't have any self destructive habits to fill in the rest of the schedule.  At least that was what I thought until last week.  I've upgraded my cable and get a lot more channels. Nerdishly I used to watch CSPAN, MSNBC, and the occasional USA marathon.  Now with more channels I've learned the equivalent of speed dial on the remote and have access to TVG which shows live horse races accross the nation.  In my opinion Hialeah Park compares favorably with Saratoga as a venue.  Ojala that they could run the th...

This question is asked on several talk shows.  I think it's an interesting wrap up to a show.  A few days ago I learned that Congressman Allen West of Florida does not live in the district he represents and that the practice is legal.  The Constitution only requires residency in the state for service in Congress. I wonder if the people that voted for him care about where he lives.  Ironically he lives in Debbie Wasserman Schultz district and he could not vote for himself and probably would have lost to Wasserman Schultz had he run against her. Sunday evening I learned that passage of the debt ceiling in the House of Representatives will require a lot of conservative and moderate democrats vote along with a relatively small number of republicans.  I know the legislation to be passed is complicated and relates to a plan to reduce the deficit along with passing the increase in the debt ceiling and won't satisfy the more extreme positions in ...