Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Civics 101

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One of the advantages of working at home is that when I take a lunch break I can whip up a quick bite to eat in my own kitchen and then plunk myself down and read the paper or watch the news on TV.  Today I took a late lunch around 1:40 and snapped on CNBC to see what was going on in the market and with the government bailout.  What I saw was fascinating on multiple levels.

First, I saw the bailout vote appear to fail which caused the DJIA to plummet 300 points in about five minutes.  It was nuts and it was something I’ve never seen before, but I was even more interested in watching and listening to the Wall Street pundits react.

What became apparent very quickly is that as smart as these people were about markets they were equally dense in the ways of Washington.  They had no clue how Congressional votes worked.  Luckily they had a reporter that could explain what it meant to leave the vote open and how it was possible for votes to change even after they’d been cast. That news caused the Dow to recover a couple of hundred points.

Then it got really good.  They decided to listen to the House vote live and they came in just as a member of the House asked a parliamentary question and asked the Chair for guidance.  Well I think that caused the commentators’ heads to spin off because when the vote was actually closed a few moments later and the House moved on to another bill they didn’t realize it. They had to wait for an explanation from the reporter and once they got it and relayed it to the audience at large and the Dow and other equity markets took an instant plunge.

I don’t expect people who normally don’t cover government to know every intricate detail or parliamentary procedure, but if I knew I was going to be covering one of the most important stories of the day as it affects my area of expertise I’d make sure I understood at least the fundamentals of how things proceed on the Hill.   It’s pretty obvious that didn’t happen in this case.

I don’t want to be too critical of the financial pundits. Their day-to-day existence requires they be highly versed in finance, not in government.  However, I do find it interesting that they were temporarily flummoxed by things they should have learned in high school civics class. 

For what it’s worth I’ve found CNBC to be some of the best television news going these days. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s head and shoulders above the rest of the "news" channels.  Watching CNN gives me nausea, MSNBC and Fox should drop any reference to news since they’re essentially televised versions of the Daily News, and the networks are pretty much DOA.  I like public television for the overall news, but CNBC seems to be the best for business and finance. 

Share Your Creativity

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I received an email today that tickled me pink because it included me in a group the author described as the "Creative Cluster".  Very cool!  Anyway, the email was a forward of a call for submissions for an event titled Creativity: Worlds in the Making that is being put on by the Wake Forest University Office of Entrepreneurship and Liberal Arts and the Program for Creativity and Innovation.  Here’s the overview from the submission page:

This interactive symposium is designed to position creative engagement
as a core literacy in today’s global environment and to model fresh,
critical perspectives for creative research, collaboration and
outcomes, between and among diverse disciplines and communities. The
objective of the symposium is to stimulate new thinking about what
creativity is, how it is practiced across cultural domains and what its
potential applications can be, especially in relation to humane and
sustainable outcomes and impact. Diverse perspectives from the arts,
humanities, sciences and entrepreneurship will pose questions and
challenges about the role that creativity plays in higher education and
in society through its capacity to shape dynamic and interdependent
future ‘worlds’. The interactive format of “Creativity: Worlds in the
Making” combines keynote speakers, traditional panel presentations,
innovative performance and exhibitions with participatory working
sessions.

If you can get your head around that then I encourage you to submit.  Deadline for submissions is October 15, 2008 and the actual event is scheduled for March 18-20, 2009.

Couric-Palin Part IV

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Saturday Night Live has been pretty bad for a few years now.  It’s gotten so bad that we’ve pretty much stopped watching it in our house over the last few years.  However, they’ve struck gold with Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin impressions.  Last night’s opening, which featured a parody of Palin’s interviews with Katie Couric last week were a great example.  As Ed Cone wrote, it’s almost not funny considering how close to reality the parody was.  See for yourself below:

Handyman

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Yesterday my wife had wakened in the pre-dawn hours, packed up the youngest and headed to Virginia for our niece’s baptism.  I stayed home with the oldest two kids because they had various things scheduled for the weekend, including my daughter’s soccer game.  Well we had torrential rains so the game ended up being cancelled which left me with something I’m not accustomed to: a Saturday afternoon with nothing scheduled. I decided to take the opportunity to get some things off of my to-do list.

First up was assembling the dresser we’d purchased for the youngest’s room.  We bought it from God-forsaken Wal-Mart almost a month ago, but I hadn’t had the chance to put it together and it was weighing on me.  I opened up the box and was pleasantly surprised to find instructions that informed me that I’d need exactly one tool for the job, a hammer.  “Whoa,” I thought, “this is a job even I can handle!”

I continued unpacking the box and neatly aligning all the pieces, found my hammer, and set to work.  I had the first three pieces together in no time and was trying to get the fourth piece on when I messed up.  I misaligned the male metal bracket of one piece with the female metal bracket of the other and they got stuck.  So I pulled and tugged and finally got them to separate with a real hard yank.  Unfortunately my index finger got in the way and one of the brackets opened it up right nicely with an inch long gash that was deep enough that you could see things you ought not to be able to see.

I went into the kitchen to rinse it out and realized that I might need to get it looked at, especially when I couldn’t get my hand to stop shaking.  Honestly it didn’t hurt, but it looked nasty and I figured the shaking was my body’s way of telling me I’d royally screwed up.  So I recruited the oldest to help me bandage everything in place and then headed to see the folks at Davie Hospital.

We use Davie regularly because even though it’s twice the distance than either Forsyth or Baptist it is never crowded and you can usually be in and out in under an hour.  Since it was a Saturday they were busier than usual, but I was out of there in about 90 minutes.  They had a med student look at me and she wasn’t sure if I needed stitches or if we could get away with glueing it so she recruited a full-fledged doctor to look at it.  His judgment was I just needed cleaning, steri-strips and a tetanus shot.  So a student nurse gave me the shot and cleaned out the gash, and then the doctor returned to show the student how to steri-strip it, all the while engaging me in a cynical discussion of the impending economic doom being foreshadowed in Washington.  It was a lot of fun.

The doctor also put a splint on the finger to prevent bending, and thus reopening the wound.  They sent me on my way with instructions to keep my finger clean and dry which seemed contradictory to me.  I’m still trying to figure it out, but I figure if I get “stinky finger” I’ll know I need to do something about it.

Once I got home I recruited the oldest to help me finish the dresser.  It took about an hour, which wasn’t bad considering I was greatly hampered by the mangled finger.  Pictures of the dresser and finger below.

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Properly Arming Your 7 Year Old

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When I was growing up my mother forbade me and my brother from having toy guns lest we grow up to be card carrying members of the NRA, or even worse, hunters. I once asked her why she hated hunting so much since we regularly enjoyed meat products in our home and she confessed that it wasn’t the hunting that bothered her as much as the idea that we might actually bring home something that she’d have to clean.  Obviously she’d never seen me shoot and had disregarded my lack of desire to freeze my butt off while waiting for an animal to wander within three feet of me, which was my effective range of accuracy. 

Of course her toy gun ban simply caused us to continue a proud American tradition of turning any inanimate object into a weapon with which we proceeded to slaughter each other and our friends in continuous mock battles loosely predicated on our abyssmal knowledge of great American wars.  You can be sure that we would have given anything, and I mean years’ worth of 50 cent weekly allowances, to possess the rubber band gun featured below.  Heck we thought our Daniel Boone replica rubber band guns were cool, so this thing would have been revered.

North Carolina’s 4th and 5th Districts Could Be Interesting in a Month

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Thank God we only have a little more than a month until "Decision 08" as the tee-vee folks have dubbed this year’s election. That said I think there might be some interesting developments in two of North Carolina’s Congressional districts this year.

I’m beginning to believe that populist Democrat Roy Carter might have a chance at taking out Virginia Foxx.  She’s having a hard time painting him as a typical dirty-word-liberal, and her close ties to the Bush administration aren’t helping her. I’m not sure how the whole Wall Street bailout thing is going to work for her, because the last I heard she might be one of the House Republicans against the deal.  It might end up being a plus for her to be able to say she fought against bailing out the "fat cats on Wall Street", but on the other hand she might be too closely associated with the folks that got the country into this mess.

Over in the NC-4 Democratic incumbent David Price should be a lock in that district, but I’m getting the sense that challenger BJ Lawson might give Price a tougher run than people would imagine.  If nothing else I think Lawson is providing a lesson to other candidates in how to use the web as a campaign tool.  He has a very good blog while Price has a website that looks like something straight out of 1999 without any real substance. A perfect example of how much stronger Lawson’s online presence is, check out his extensive blog post about the government bailout versus the absolute lack of information on Price’s site.  Price doesn’t even have the typical, lame press release which of course makes his site uber-lame.

BTW, the only reason I found Lawson’s blog was because of the bailout post, which showed up in today in one of my Google Alert updates.  Google’s love of blogs is in and of itself a great reason for any candidate to have a blog.  Others would include the ability to communicate directly with constituents, the ability to frame an agenda without relying on mass media, and looking a little less out of it to the increasingly influential Millenial voters.

Back over in my home district I just found Virginia Foxx’s updated web presence which includes a blog and links to online video and pictures.  My hat’s off to her and her campaign, because it’s a vast improvement on her old site.   She’s only posted twice to her blog, but hopefully that will change as we enter the last month of the campaign.  She should check out her fellow Republican over in the NC-4 for a look at how it’s done.  Foxx’s opponent doesn’t have a blog, but he also has online video and links to Facebook and MySpace where he has profiles that look like they need to be fed and watered.

One of 4,300

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WXII is reporting that only about 4,300 households have lost power in North Carolina due to the storm that cannot be named.  Unfortunately we, along with two of our neighbors, were among those 4,300. Our power went out at 9:30 last night when the transformer on the poll next to our house blew.  That knocked out service to us and the two houses to our right, but the rest of the neighborhood was lit up like a Christmas tree.  In a way that’s more frustrating than having the entire neighborhood go down because you can literally see everyone else enjoying their evening in standard American energy hogging style.

Thankfully the power company was outside within an hour and we had power restored by 11:30, just in time for a midnight snack in front of the boob tube.

Mia’s House

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PhotoYou may recall that we adopted a puppy when we returned from our vacation in early August.  Mia’s been an, uh, interesting addition to the family.  If nothing else she’s annoyed the heck out of the elder statesman of the house, Arthur. They’re constantly
bickering over food and she’s constantly nipping at him which leads to a constant stream of “don’t touch me” yelps and
“please tell her to leave me alone” cries from Arthur.  It’s like our
kids multiplied by 10.
PhotoActually she’s been quite the influence on him.  For instance she’s taught him there’s no reason to accept confinement and now the two of them regularly collaborate to break out of various rooms, pens, etc.  She’s also given him amnesia when it comes to manners.  Before Mia’s arrival he never sniffed at things on the table, or jumped to get treats out of your hand.  Now he’s acting like a reprobate and we’re having to remind him that we don’t have to put up with that mess.  Thankfully you only have to tell him once.  Mia, on the other hand, gets me to talking like I did 10 years ago when the kids were toddlers.  “No, no, no, no…NO” and “Down, down, down, down…DOWN” and “Shhh, shhh, shhh, Shut Up!” are now the most often heard sentences in our house, and usually they’re followed by strangled curses like “Son of bi-gerching. What did you just do, dabberflabbit.  You little shicker…aw, dadgummit I just stepped in this pile of -, OH MAN MY NEW SHOES!  One of you kids better get this mutt outta here before I sell her for parts.”

Then there’s the chewing.  If it’s on the ground it’s munched, and it doesn’t matter what it’s made of.  Metal?  No problem.  Wood?  Yummy.  Clothing?  Rags.

Yeah, we love her.

Battle of the Green Eyeshades

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Winston-Salem is home to one large bank, BB&T.  We used to be home to Wachovia but then they went and "merged" with First Union and moved HQ to Charlotte, so we here in Winston have just one major bank that we call our own.  Thus it was with a little bit of hometown pride that I read in today’s paper that the bank’s head honcho sent a letter to the Congress critters detailing why he thinks the bailout stinks.

For John Allison, the high-risk rollers on Wall Street are getting
too much of the ear of Congress and having too much say in resolving
the financial nightmare that they created.

That’s why Allison, the chairman and chief executive of BB&T
Corp., submitted a 14-point letter Tuesday to all 535 members of
Congress with a simple message regarding the proposed $700 billion
bailout.

"There is no panic on Main Street and in sound financial
institutions," he wrote. "The problems are in high-risk financial
institutions and on Wall Street."

He said that it is important that "Congress hear from the well-run
financial institutions, as most of the concerns have been focused on
the problem companies. It is extremely important that the bailout not
damage well-run companies." Allison’s opinion is seconded by local
community-bank officials and community-bank trade groups.

"Community bankers did not create this financial crisis, but our
banks and communities are clearly feeling the impact," the Independent
Community Bankers of America said in a statement. "As the fundamental
drivers of local economies — we could be in a strong position to help
resolve this crisis."

Go get ’em Mr. Allison.

links for 2008-09-24

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