Nuance Not a Big Part of Campaign Rhetoric
Political campaigns don’t do nuance.
Take, for example, a story in the San Jose Mercury-News this weekend that questioned claims Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner has been making at nearly every stop during his run for governor.
The story noted that nearly half the $1.81 billion in insurance rate cuts Poizner touts on the campaign trail resulted from regulations written by his predecessor, Democrat John Garamendi. It also reported that a third of the budget cuts he talks about were imposed by the governor and the Legislature because of the state’s budget woes.
Newspapers being newspapers, with all that old-school MSM commitment to fairness, balance and the like, the story also reported that Poizner actually had to approve Garamendi’s regulations before they took effect and repeated the commissioner’s argument that cuts are cuts, regardless of how they come about.
Small Businesses Need Party Favors
Big companies are starting to dance it up. Wall Street firms are almost back to prerecession levels; Goldman Sachs’ third quarter revenues doubled and earnings tripled. Even Ford and General Motors have gotten a whiff of smelling salts.
But smaller companies on Main Street? They’re not at the party.
Just last week, the Credit Management Association of Burbank released its third quarter survey of 800 credit managers across the western United States, and 64 percent said their collections of trade credit remain no better than fair. Worse, 74 percent see no change in the near future.
Trade credit is heavily used by medium and smaller companies; it is an unsecured loan that is repaid when goods are sold. So the fact that most companies are reporting that collections of such credit are only fair and that three out of four companies don’t see any improvement soon, well, that doesn’t exactly portend a quick bounce back for smaller companies.
Meetings Mean Business in California
Although misinformed anti-corporate travel rhetoric is starting to subside in Washington, the media is still bent on keeping the controversy alive. Months of damaging negative press – often inaccurate – continue to haunt the meetings segment of the hospitality industry, which employs 2.4 million Americans and generates $240 billion in spending and $39 billion in tax revenue.
A great example of this is a local CBS affiliate’s implication that Caltrans employees lived it up on state funding at a luxury Palm Springs resort, which was hosting the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials convention Oct. 22-26. The report asserts that the trip violated non-essential travel banned by the State, but buries the fact that the trip was approved as an exception because it has been proven that these types of conferences not only foster collaboration, idea-sharing and generation, but provides an opportunity for California transportation officials to network with federal transportation officials and open up millions in federal monies for California road projects.
Trying the Alleged 9-11 Terrorists in Federal Court in NYC; A Trying Proposition
At first blush, it seems to make a
lot of sense. As National AG, Eric
Holder says, paraphrased, let them have their justice rendered within blocks of
the National Memorial where the Twin Towers that they destroyed used to stand. Unfortunately, that is also the prima facie showing on the criminal defense
side of our judicial system in support of a motion for a change of venue for
the trial on the basis that nobody could ever hope to have a fair trial if
conducted in the literal shadows of this horrendous crime against humanity
where thousands died so horribly on national TV and in reality.
I know, I know . . . we all have
our image of the quintessential old-timey situation where they catch the horse
thieves and somebody yells out -‘Let’s hang ‘em from the nearest tree,’ and
then somebody else, usually the justice of the peace, yells out – ‘No, let’s
give ‘em a fair trial first, then
let’s hang ‘em from the nearest tree!’
But, that is not what our legal system stands for in the modern post
WWII era, not since the Nuremberg Trials anyway.