Mushrooming pension costs take more and more of state budget
1 comment October 6th, 2008
My Tuesday column deals with Illinois’ soaring pension debt and the lack of will to do anything about it.
Archive for October 6th, 2008
Stocks plunge …. so much for the bailout …..
1 comment October 6th, 2008
The stock market is mirroring Asian and European developments. It’s down below 10,000 as I write this at 9:30 a.m.
The postal savings bank: an old idea worth bringing back
Add comment October 6th, 2008
This op-ed piece in The New York Times makes a lot of sense — and cents. I had long forgotten the fact that people in my parents generation used to save money in a Postal savings account — at the post office.
Congress abolished the savings plan in 1966, the story says, but in the light of the Wall Street calamity, which shows no signs of improving, it would be wise to revisit the idea of the humble postal savings bank, especially to encourage low-income and nontraditional savers to do just that — at their neighborhood post office.
It’s a great way to begin shifting foreign control of our assets back to the American people.
It’s about character, stupid
1 comment October 6th, 2008
Democrats think the election will be about the economy. To an extent, it will. It always is. But The McCain campaigners, no longer mavericks but 90-day wonder graduates of the Karl Rove OCS at Fort Atwater, have mightily changed the subject, going back to the Hillary Clinton playbook from the primaries.
From now on, it’s to be all-Ayers, all-Wright, all-the-time. The candidate doesn’t have to do it himself — besides Sarah Palin, McCain can rely on a bevy of rightist talkers, including but not limited to: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, Michael Reagan, William Kristol, Hugh Hewitt, Mike Gallagher, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage. These and other talkers blanket the airwaves, reaching 10s of millions of people a day, all day and late into the night.
As they have in the past, Democrats don’t take these commentators — the alternative media — into account. They do so at their peril. These folks have vast influence, as Rush likes to say, across the fruited plain.
The left has no one of the caliber of Limbaugh, the only witty, insightful and slightly ironic talker in a stable of GOP talking-point reciters. Limbaugh has made it plain that he hasn’t much use for McCain, who apparently has not much use for Limbaugh, who slimed him in 2000 when the ex-fighter pilot from Arizona was running against George W. Bush, the fighting ace of the ghost squadron of the Texas Air National Guard.
The only leftwing talker who is midly interesting and entertaining is Ed Schultz.
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