Bob Hayes Online

Every blogger in creation – even the ones who should instead be concentrating on earning money so they can throw Blogger Bashes – will be blogging about the inauguration of Barack Obama today. And rightly so; it’s a historic event and an achievement of which our country can justifiably be proud. If you had told me thirty years ago that one day a black man would be president…well, I wouldn’t have blinked, actually, because I was ten and very idealistic about America. But if you’d caught me a few years later, when the cynicism had set in, I would have been surprised.

Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me, Mr. Obama is not, to say the least, on my political team. There is no doubt whatsoever that within a month I’ll be spluttering at the TV news and pounding out spasmodically pained editorial pieces about the latest Obama disaster and how he’s the Worst President Ever. But bearing that in mind, I do find myself with an elevated spirit today.

This is an optimistic moment for America, and – whatever policy disasters Mr. Obama leads us into – this cannot help but have a bracingly salutary effect on the racial divide in this country, which for years has been a quiet cancer on the soul of the republic. Every black child in the United States is about to see a black man taking the reins of the most powerful country of the world – a slap in the face to the still-animate ghost of a racist social order that proclaims blacks are fit only to entertain or to draw welfare checks, and a crushing blow to the “progressive” rhetoric of permanent racial oppression. To the person saying “you can’t do that because you aren’t good enough” and the person saying “you can’t do that because they won’t let you”, Barack Obama is a shining counterexample.

It’s nice to find out that my ten-year old self was the one with wisdom. Good morning, Mr. President. God bless you and godspeed.

Advocates of a federal solution to the economic crisis based on spending a great deal of money point out that we spent our way out of trouble during WWII. They are right. We did. It worked.

The problem is, we were able to do it because our federal government was so small. It did less, and much of what it did was done well. In comparison to its European competitors, however, it was rather small and unimportant – dingy, even. Our government was poor but honest.

Expanding a competent organization and increasing its power can, indeed, have a positive economic effect, especially when the competent government is faced with a powerful and effective outside enemy – there’s no luxury of wasting resources when the Nazis are at the door.

We currently have powerful enemies – terrorist regimes and groups worldwide – but they aren’t nearly so effective as the Nazis. We’re not in danger of being taken over by Osama Bin Laden, so our government has the luxury of taking things a little less seriously and being a little bit more wasteful.

And while elements of our government are quite competent at what they do, there isn’t a huge unused reserve of “competence” out there in the economy like there was in 1939. Our economic machine is running, broadly, at capacity now in productive terms, and long may it continue to do so – but some huge federal expansion now would be mostly cancerous and parasitic – three tumors for every healthy cell built up.

We no longer have a poor but honest government that can be assumed to use additional power or resources for the benefit of all. It would be nice if we did, but we don’t.

Our current situation, in fact, can fairly be described as the dark warning that should have been delivered to Washington in the 1930s: “Sure, you can grow out of your current problems. This is what you’ll look like when that’s done.”

First off, Happy New Year.

Second off, WTF? This ad is on the top of the Drudge Report as of this writing. God knows where else it’s been placed.

In no particular order:

1) You’re not welcome. Give me my tax money back, you corporate whores.

2) You didn’t have any money, so you begged for the taxpayers to bail you out, and they did (against the popular will), and the first thing you do is spend a bunch of money on an ad THANKING THEM? You know, my folks gave us some money to help us buy our house (thanks!) – I’m pretty sure that if we’d taken a couple grand of that money to put up a billboard in our town saying “Thank You!”, that they would have been pissed off. Because they gave us the money for a house, not for PR stunts. Chrysler’s money, ditto.

3) With public relations and economics skills like these, no wonder your company is in the toilet. It deserves to be in the toilet. Fail now, and get out of the way.

(Sorry, Joanne. But you know I still love ya.)