One Stop Market

Some may recall a time not too long ago when Bush could control the Stock Market simply by talking publicly.  Well with Obama it’s gotten out of control…

It’s pretty well accepted that capitalism is the most functional economic idea man has ever had and enacted upon, so we don’t have to go back and question capitalism on the whole as an economic system as our newest president elect would desire.  However, there are aspects of it’s ways that (as in any economic system) cripple the poor and make a few people extremely rich — the people that devote their time to figuring out how the system works and then putting all they have into manipulating it for their own gain.

Sometimes this involves stealing, but it never has to involve stealing.  Like Warren Buffet you can just study hard, read up on the right economic thinkers, and move to Omaha, Nebraska — the financial hub of the world (not).  But there is the possibility that you can “figure it out.”  That’s a very capitalistic idea.  In any other system you can easily label that “selfish” and even “illegal” to manipulate the system.  Here in the good old U.S. of A. it’s known as being really smart and savvy but that’s because there aren’t that many rules that can hold you back from “figuring it out.”  But there could be, and that’s what the regulators and those in power for regulation are working at this very moment. 

In a way, regulation takes all the fun and hope out of capitalism and makes democracy seem less cool.  Eventually, with enough regulation you end up with socialism (which would be the new Senate and Obama’s dream come true) and socialism is not capitalism.  In that case, I’m heading to Canada.  I don’t want to be rich but I am an entrepreneur and I do think capitalism is the only place where the term “entrepreneur” makes any sense. 

But let’s point out some ironies before we continue loving on capitalism.  First, the essence of capitalism lies in a big, fat gamble on yourself, the future, and your ability to adapt to whatever the future throws your way (such as an economic crisis).  The bank signs a few papers and you have a house that you’ll need to work and produce and profit year in and year out for the next 30 years to pay for, but you’ll pay for it twice over since the bank charges interest and the system supports itself from there.  However, gambling is illegal in Massachusetts.  Yet, I did take a trip to Suffolk Downs last weekend where you can bet (gamble) on a horse race or two. 

I gambled by going college.  I threw $100K on the table (that’s what it cost for a 4-year educated back in those days believe it or not) hoping that when I came out in four years the economy would be in a place that would value my education and therefore I could get a job that would earn enough money to pay back the loan and more! 

I will gamble when I purchase a home.  This is more obvious but if the market tanks, I can lose more money than my house is worth and my loan becomes stupid and I easily fall into negative equity (which is why people in this situation have no problem foreclosing).  I literally walk out of my house every day and bet that I’m not going to get fired or hit someone while driving or lose my wallet or be taken advantage of by the government.  

Shall we keep placing our bets?  I guess so unless you have any better ideas. 

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama was meeting on Monday with another former adversary, sitting down in Chicago with Senator John McCain to explore areas where the two might make common legislative cause.

The private meeting with the Republican senator, at the Obama transition offices in where the president-elect has been rapidly assembling a new team, comes four days after he met with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, sparking speculation that he might nominate her for secretary of state.

A day later, Mr. Obama met with another former Democratic rival for the presidential nomination, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a former ambassador to the United Nations who might now be in competition with Mrs. Clinton for the State Department post.

The meeting on Monday in Chicago, coming just under two weeks after the election, represented an unusually early effort at reconciliation after a sometimes bitterly fought campaign.

The president-elect and the Arizona senator hold relatively similar views on issues like climate change and ethics reform where cooperation might be fruitful. More urgently, Mr. Obama might be hoping for help in pushing for a new economic stimulus package that faces stiff Republican resistance.

Also taking part was to be Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a trusted McCain ally, and Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who is to be Mr. Obama’s White House chief of staff.

Advisers to both men have said that they did not expect Mr. McCain to be offered a job in the new administration.

Mr. Obama said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that there would be at least one Republican in his cabinet; he would not say when he might announce his first cabinet nominations, except to say “soon.”

While the Obama-McCain meeting came earlier than some past efforts at reconciliation between newly elected presidents and their vanquished foes, the president’s father, George H.W. Bush, met on almost exactly the same date — Nov. 18 — with Bill Clinton after losing to him in the 1992 election.

Mr. Clinton later called the meeting “very helpful,” though he found that his host wanted to talk almost exclusively about foreign affairs while he had hoped to pick the outgoing president’s brain on domestic affairs.

In 2000, it was not until Dec. 19 that President-elect George W. Bush called on Vice President Al Gore, though that was just a week after the Supreme Court resolved the Florida recount debacle; the two spent less than 20 minutes together at the Naval Observatory, the official vice-presidential residence, where the elder Bushes had once lived.

(President-elect Bush also called that day on Mr. Clinton at the White House. This time it was Mr. Clinton who guided the conversation to foreign affairs for most of a two-hour talk. It was unclear whether anyone brought up Mr. Bush’s vows, during the campaign, to “restore honor and dignity to the White House.”)

In Chicago, Mr. Obama might be mindful of the fact that former rivals can also be future foes. In 2005, Senator John Kerry did not wait even a week after the inauguration of President Bush before launching into barbed attacks on his health care plan as “window dressing.”

A week after the GOP’s worst electoral loss in decades, Republican governors are gathering in Miami this week for some serious soul-searching. Not only did Barack Obama rewrite the electoral map; congressional Democrats picked up more than 20 house seats in their second straight election — a feat not accomplished since 1930s.

So, if ever a gathering needed a Pollyanna, this week’s meeting of the Republican Governors Association was it. And it was a role filled by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.

“I have looked down in the grave for the Republican Party, and this ain’t it,” he said.

Barbour recalled the post-Watergate era when at one point during the 1976 campaign, the sitting president, Gerald Ford trailed Democrat Jimmy Carter by 32 points.

“I have seen a lot worse, folks,” Barbour said. “I can remember when Mary Louise Smith, the party chairman, literally appointed a committee about whether we should change the name of the party.”

Within the Republican Party, governors have more reason to be happy than most. No sitting Republican governors were defeated on Election Day.

Some Republican governors, like Indiana’s Mitch Daniels and Utah’s Jon Huntsman won by wide margins. And it’s among governors that Republicans see some rising stars-people like Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal.

At the conference in downtown Miami Wednesday, two main narratives emerged to explain the party’s problems. Jindal picked up one of the story lines — that the party has strayed from its principles.

“When the Republican Party is no longer the party of fiscal conservatism, when we start defending spending that we would have rightfully criticized on the other side — whether it’s earmarks or growth in discretionary spending or new programs that we never would have tolerated if the other side had proposed it — then clearly, I would argue that we’ve lost our way, we’ve lost the reason that we stand as fiscal conservatives.”

By getting back to basics — cutting taxes and spending and innovating in areas like education and health care — Jindal and other pragmatists say the party can rebuild its brand and restore voter trust.

But there’s another school of thought — that the GOP is staring into the abyss. It has to do with technology and demographics.

In a presentation to the governors, Republican consultant and pollster Frank Luntz laid out some stark facts. John McCain won just 32 percent of the youth vote — the lowest margin in history, according to Luntz.

Young people increasingly communicate and get their information over the internet. The Obama campaign understood that and compiled a list of 10 million names and e-mail addresses.

“It makes him and his supporters the most powerful special interest group in all of America,” Luntz said of the president-elect. “And 3 million of those people have donated to the campaign. We’ve never had that situation where so many people are so active and so engaged, and they can be reached by the stroke of a key.”

Luntz later added, “our candidate doesn’t know how to use” a BlackBerry.

That paradigm shift is the narrative Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman says Republicans must embrace. Otherwise, he says, a party that has trouble reaching Hispanics, women, and African-Americans is doomed to permanent minority status.

“And if we’re not able to identify the changing demographic in this country and the needs of that changing demographic in terms of the issues that really matter — education and health care and quality of life and jobs — then we’re going to lose and we’re going to keep losing big time,” Huntsman said.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty agreed that the party’s base conservative voters are important, but no longer enough. The challenge, he said, is to modernize the party of Ronald Reagan.

“He’s one of my heroes,” Pawlenty said. “But Ronald Reagan was president a long time ago. A lot’s happened since then. So the challenge for us is, how do you take those principles from the late ’70s and ’80s and apply them to the circumstances and issue and opportunities of our time.”

WASILLA, Alaska (AP) — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says she wouldn’t hesitate to run for the presidency in four years if it’s God’s will, even though she never thought Campaign 2008 would be “as brutal a ride as it turned out to be.”

In a series of interviews in the wake of last Tuesday’s elections, Palin said she had no problem with Republican presidential nominee John McCain, but that she resents rumors she said were spread about her and her family by the Arizona Republican’s aides. She emphatically denied that she was a drag on the GOP ticket.

“I think the economic collapse had a heckuva lot more to do with the campaign’s collapse than me personally,” the governor said in an interview broadcast Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show.

Palin also said “There were a lot of times I wanted to shout out, ‘Hey, wait a minute, it’s not true.’ It’s pretty brutal.”

Nevertheless, the relatively obscure governor of Alaska, whose selection for the ticket by McCain last August brought excitement — and controversy — to the 2008 campaign, said she would be eager to do it all again under the right circumstances.

“I’m like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door,” Palin said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. “And if there is an open door in ‘12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I’ll plow through that door.”

In the wide-ranging interview, Palin said she neither wanted nor asked for the $150,000-plus wardrobe the Republican Party bankrolled, and thought the issue was an odd one at the end of the campaign, considering “what is going on in the world today.”

“I did not order the clothes. Did not ask for the clothes,” Palin said. “I would have been happy to have worn my own clothes from Day One. But that is kind of an odd issue, an odd campaign issue as things were wrapping up there as to who ordered what and who demanded what.”

“It’s amazing that we did as well as we did,” the governor said of the election in a separate interview with the Anchorage Daily News.

“I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a $10 trillion debt in a Republican administration? How have there been blunders with war strategy under a Republican administration? If we’re talking change, we want to get far away from what it was that the present administration represented and that is to a great degree what the Republican Party at the time had been representing,” Palin said in a story published Sunday.

Palin has scheduled a series of national interviews this week with Fox, NBC’s “Today” show and CNN. She also plans to attend the Republican Governors Association conference in Florida this week.

Palin has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2012. She also could seek re-election in 2010 or challenge Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Still uncertain is the fate of Sen. Ted Stevens, who is leading in his bid for another term but could be ousted by the Senate for his conviction on seven felony counts of failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts, mostly renovations on his home. If Stevens loses his seat, Palin could run for it in a special election.

Palin and McCain’s campaign faced a storm of criticism over the tens of thousands of dollars spent at such high-end stores as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus to dress the nominee. Republican National Committee lawyers are still trying to determine exactly what clothing was bought for Palin, what was returned and what has become of the rest.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, flew to Washington on Monday to be welcomed at the White House by the current occupant, President George W. Bush, a man with whom he expressed a sea of differences during the just-ended election campaign.

After Mr. Bush and the first lady, Laura Bush, give the Obamas a tour of the White House, Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama are expected to split off for about 90 minutes of formal talks concerning the transfer of power from Mr. Bush’s conservative Republican administration to a presumably much more liberal Democratic leadership.

Mr. Obama will be seeing the Oval Office in person for the first time, a spokesman for him said, just 10 weeks before he will make history by returning as its first black occupant.

As the capital swirled with talk of an expanded bailout package for the troubled American International Group, of unemployment figures that continue to swell, of deep trouble in the auto industry and the urgent financial summit to be convened later this week by Mr. Bush, some of the more pressing issues awaiting discussion by the two leaders on Monday afternoon seemed clear. Similarly, two wars — on which the president and president-elect differ considerably — will demand careful and delicate coordination.

Mr. Obama has said he expects a “substantive conversation” with the outgoing president. Such first meetings are governed by no rules but are deeply immersed in tradition. Neither man was expected to issue any extended statement after the meeting, which is taking place unusually early in the transition.

Unless that changes, viewers will have to be satisfied with the images of the Obamas arriving at the White House for the first time after the election.

Josh Bolten, the president’s chief of staff, said that the president and president-elect will be alone in the Oval Office when they meet, without aides present.

“I’m sure each of them will have a list of issues to go down,” Mr. Bolten said during a televised interview with reporters from The Associated Press and The Washington Post. “But I think that’s something very personal to both of them. I know the president will want to convey to President-elect Obama his sense of how to deal with some of the most important issues of the day. But exactly how he does that, I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody will know.”

Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama have had relatively little personal contact before now, and by some accounts, when they have met, there has been some awkwardness.

Mr. Bush told a friend during the 2008 Democratic primary race that he thought Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York was “more experienced and more ready to be president.” But the same friend, speaking anonymously to disclose his private conversation with the president, called Mr. Bush “a realist” who was ready to move on in the nation’s interest; Mr. Bush’s postelection comments have so far been gracious and have emphasized a cooperative approach.

For his part, Mr. Obama and his aides have missed no opportunity to remind Americans that they have only one president at a time.

Even so, Mr. Obama and his team are moving expeditiously to plan the transition and a post-Inauguration agenda that aides said would probably include the quick reversal of some Bush policies, such as his restrictions on stem-cell research and on oil and gas drilling.

One thing is certain: The body language between the Obamas and the Bushes will be widely scrutinized and assessed, to see whether they appear to be comfortable working together or, as was the case with some past transition meetings, are straining just to appear polite.

Having had a chance to size up their new accommodations, and those who have occupied them for eight years, the Obamas are scheduled to return immediately afterward to Chicago, where the work of transition will continue.

A spokeswoman for the transition team, Stephanie Cutter, told Reuters today in Chicago that Mr. Obama would announce no Cabinet nominees this week.