Ralph Reed, Owner Of The Best Political Whorehouse In Georgia, Wants To Be A Congressman

I really didn't have anything to write about today, until I saw that Ralph Reed was planning to announce his candidacy for Congress tomorrow, Sarah Palin style - from his Facebook account.

I live three miles from Gwinnett County, where retiring Congressman John Linder was elected 18 years ago, back when "Gwinnettians", as the traffic reporters call them, were mostly white and mostly middle class.

Now the biggest Asian supermarket in town is in Gwinnett County, along with the biggest Hindu temple in the United States. The intersection of Jimmy Carter Boulevard and Buford Highway, which used to be major commercial corridors in Gwinnett County, looks more like you are in Mexico than Georgia. Gwinnett County is not as solidly Republican as your lazy media analysts will be telling you over the next few months.

49% of Gwinnett County was black, Asian, or Hispanic in the 2009 census, and something tells me that those numbers will be even larger after the 2010 census numbers are tallied.

The rest of Linder's district - Barrow, Walton, and a slice of Newton County - is still pretty white, but these are people central casting would go looking for if they needed to cast Tea Baggers. Which means that Reed may not have the bona fides he thinks he does with this crowd, who are all anxious to see some new faces for a change.

Which brings me back to Ralph Reed, the slimest political operator in the nation after Jack Abramoff. His political direct mail company is famous for putting out the kind of imagery that was found in the RNC PowerPoint last week. Ralph Reed isn't a dog with fleas - he is just a damn big ass flea.

As the owner of Century Strategies, Reed is one of the biggest lobbyists in this state. In a year when the dreaded "L" word isn't "liberal" but "lobbyist", he has no way to wash the stench of the "porkulus" he helps Fortune 500 companies obtain off of his hands.

Ralph Reed, the Bernie Madoff of GOP fundraisers, has relied on his schoolboy looks to charm the Christian Coalition crowd out of their hard earned money for decades to fight evils like gambling WHILE DOING CONSULTING WORKDOUBLE CROSSING AND DOUBLE BILLING INDIAN CASINOS interested in getting favorable regulatory relief from Congress.

"I'm proud of the campaign we ran," Reed, weary but ever positive, told TIME. "I'm glad we did it." He didn't want to talk about why he lost, but those who know him say he blames the media--particularly the Atlanta Journal-Constitution--for their extensive coverage of his business ties to Abramoff, his friend from their days running the College Republicans in the early 1980s. For a high-profile religious conservative like Reed, the stories of being paid millions by one Indian tribe to run a religious-based antigambling campaign to prevent another tribe from opening a rival casino made him look like something worse than a criminal--a hypocrite.

He had once called gambling a "cancer" on the body politic. And the e-mails to Abramoff didn't help, especially those that seemed to suggest that the man who had deplored in print Washington's system of "honest graft" was eager to be part of it. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!" he wrote Abramoff a few days after the 1998 election.

Time Magazine, The Rise And Fall Of Ralph Reed

In the world of political whoring, Ralph Reed has proved time and time again that he is willing to sell his narrow ass to anybody willing to pay for a piece of it.

The only good thing about Ralph Reed running for office is that this time, with the kind of ego he's got, he is guaranteed to lose a pile of his own money in the process.

"Change" Costs Money - Why Congress Is Like A Strip Club

I spent way too much time last week poring over the numbers of the Congressional Black Caucus and its affiliated charities. But in trying to give the story more context than the Two Erics who wrote the article for the New York Times were able to muster, I did come away with two things:

More than $13 BILLION dollars were spent by lobbyists on Congress between 2004 and 2008.

Only $55 MILLION dollars were collected by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and CBC related charities between 2004 and 2008.

that lead me to two conclusions:

Number One - the Two Erics should have been carnival barkers instead of reporters or the terrible financial analysts they showed themselves to be - $55 million dollars is less than one half of one percent of all the bribe money that changed hands during the same period.

Number Two - Change will cost money. For all those folks out here in the blogosphere who marched and called and voted for Barack Obama and now think he is a traitor, a turncoat of the worst order for not instantly swapping existing programs and policies for the ones you say you want, get your checkbooks out.

Because your president cannot do it alone. Ten dollar words will lose against 10 million dollar fundraisers every day day of the week, and ten times over on Sundays, no matter how smoothly your president can speak, no matter how collegial he is, no matter how bipartisan, or no partisan - because even as he speaks to them, your Congress people have their hands out.

When Obama calls them in their offices for a private chat, guess what? They've got a big donor on the other line, waiting until they get done with the president.

How do you get the change you want? You are going to have to put enough money in the game to alter the balance of power. Its a lot like going to a strip club. You may have an earnest face, and talk a good game, but until you start shelling out those twenties, nobody is going to shake that ass for you.

Congress is just like those strippers - right now you are talking, your president is talking, and they are not listening, just like those chicks in the club can't see you if you aren't asking them to dance.

It takes more than two or three twenties to keep a stripper's attention, especially if they don't know you because you just started coming to the club. She knows that painting contractor or that lawyer who is in there once or twice a week are good for rent money, for a trip to the beach, for a new wardrobe or some jewelry - your two twenty dollar bills can't fill up her gas tank.

"Change" will cost stacks of greenbacks.

How does the new guy at the club get the strippers to give him that special treatment right away instead of hanging all over their Steady Eddie insurance agency owners and car dealers?

He can make it rain.

Just pull out a couple of stacks of twenties, bust the wrapper, and throw them in the air when a stripper is on stage.

It will cost more than a few thousand to get your Congress people to get off the laps of their Steady Eddie's and really push your agenda of change in a meaningful, fully funded way.

Unlike the Two Erics, I will tell you up front that the numbers I am about to give you are based solely on a strip club comparison, and absolutely NO regressive analysis or donor displacement theory or even a calculator was used.

"Change" - the real kind, the long term variety that will actually redirect the way or government functions, will cost $1.5 to 2 BILLION a year. Putting a few hundred million a year is the pot is a waste on time.

'Cause if you only make it rain in the strip club because its your birthday, and come back three months later, them strippers will smile at you and wave at you...

...from their Steady Eddie's laps.

It's the same wave your Congressman will give you.

Weigh Your Civic Consciousnesses Daily

I'm beginning a weight loss project.

Its not Jenny Craig, or Weight Watchers, or one of the hundreds of other weight loss brands out there. It's the "I Have Common Sense" program. "Eat less. Exercise more. Repeat."

As the mechanics of the process ran through my head last night - the recent review of my eating and exercise habits, the formulation of a plan to reduce caloric intake and increase physical activity, and then the actual follow through of the plan day after day - I thought about the present state of our political scene and our economic woes, and whether or not the American body politic is really ready to make the daily changes in our information gathering habits and our civic activities that are necessary to make significant changes in the area of political engagement, or whether we are just wasting a whole lot of hot air.

Congress is playing with itself right now, the way parents of unruly children do when they look at the chaos around their house, because both Congress and lazy parents know that to get and maintain order means that you are going to have to make a commitment to doing unpopular and unpleasant things until the unruly children or the underregulated industry realizes you mean business, and then be vigilant against the first, second, third, maybe even the one hundredth attempt to try to you, if need be, until the unruly children or underregulated industry believes that there will be consequences for inappropriate behavior without fail, each and every time it occurs.

All government agencies are not created equal. From the investors who have been taken advantage of by people like Bernard Madoff to the Congressmen who sat in hearings wondering how all of this chicanery by AIG and friends (Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, this means you too) in the financial markets had been allowed to take place, they all railed against the SEC for not doing its job properly. The IRS is feared by both businesses and individuals. The SEC is not feared – it is tolerated. The difference? The IRS agents can seize your property and bank accounts without a whole lot of red tape. The SEC can issue a judgment, which doesn't really mean anything. Or bar you from the industry, which as you can see with Mike Milken or Ivan Boesky, is sort of a "under your name only" detention program they have easily skirted after getting out of jail. The SEC might as well be mall cops. The IRS, on the other hand, has all the subtlety of a SWAT team breaking down the door to your house. When was the last time you were worried about a mall cop?

Internet security companies realized long ago that the people they were up against – black hat hackers – were a sophisticated, highly motivated type of criminal element. So guess who has ex-hackers on their payroll? The SEC is in the business of hiring Boy Scouts to catch the financial equivalent of computer hackers – brilliant people who understand how to use the architecture of a system against itself. So hire a few of these guys to work for us. Or if there is no way to pay the kind of money to these people as civil servants it might require to get them onboard, put out Requests For Proposals for consultants that can contract with the agency to provide the kind of intricate analysis needed to keep the SEC at the heels of all the rule benders (do I have to type Goldman Sachs and Jp Morgan here again?) and out and out frauds.

The media, who claims it is working on behalf of the public, is a part of this too, playing with Congress and the White House as if it is one of those perennial "bridesmaid, never a bride" types who uses her dowry to attract one suitor after another in order to amuse herself before sending them packing. And we the public are lazy enough, or brain dead enough, to watch each new suitor’s arrival as if it some new kind of drama or intrigue between them might entertain us more than the last one did. How can you change the media’s focus? Since the thing we call the "news media" is really two entities - the news gathering and disseminating half, with its lifeless legs and foreshortened arms lashed to the back of the advertising delivery half, which holds up the people you see on TV or read in the paper – you can worry their sponsors the way the American Cancer Society worries smokers, day in and day out. Some of them are already falling. Hopefully the others will get back to their original mission.

There really is nothing that Kim Kardashian, Chris Brown, Alex Rodrieguez, Madonna, The Final Four, BMW, Mercedes, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Tag Heuer, Bruno Magli, Jimmy Choo, American Idol or 24 can help to provide you with any additional insight or motivation about regarding the things we say are most central to our lives. How big Kardashian's butt is this week or how much the latest top of the line Mercedes costs is what we end up knowing when we focus this kind of time and energy on these things. Does that mean these things are all bad? I may have a taste of chocolate now and again, but it is a far cry from my old approach, which was to supplement my nightly quart of chocolate ice cream with raids on my emergency chocolate stash, or have a bit with my morning coffee. A little entertainment news can go along way. the good thing is, the same people are always in the news, so if you miss something this week, you'll probably see it again next week.

There are things we as citizens can do to reshape our cultural and political landscape, the same way there are things, like curtailing my immense love of chocolate, that I can do to reshape my body. We've done them before, without one hundred percent support of the people, the same way I'm going to lose this weight without having to give it one hundred percent of my attention. But they were painful times, and often produced imperfect results, whether it was the American Revolution, or the Civil War, or Prohibition, or the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam War protests.

Maybe we all need to be a little bit hungry all the time, not for food, but for entertainment and fluff, in a way that makes us savor smaller portions even as we gaze at the emerging musculature of our new found civic duty in the mirror.

Maybe, just maybe, what we are experiencing these days has made enough of us uncomfortable with what we are seeing and hearing to commit to changing our habits and our activities in a way that make us active players in our political and social scene.

I will be weighing my civic consciousnesses daily - my body, once a week.

Dancing With The One Who Brung You

After listening to the TV pundits and reading the opinion columns the last few days, all of them railing about the failings and deficiencies of President Obama with hyperbolic vigor, a vision came to me.

I imagined that instead of Obama, we had President John McCain standing behind the White House press room podium, intoning, in the manner of Ronald Reagan that "the fundamentals of the economy were sound."

I pictured Vice President Sarah Palin on Meet The Press, stumbling over an incoherent explanation of exactly how a proposed trillion dollar tax cut package actually creates those jobs we need to boost our ailing economy.

They would be facing the same problem President Obama has - a Congress dominated by leaders on both sides of the aisle who have come to worship the rigid, severely restricted boundaries of their respective ideologies. Tax cuts, which seem to be the only tune Republicans can all whistle together, don't mean a god damned thing to you if you have no job. Funding projects slated to start three years from now, which appears to be a constant theme running through the Democrats list of proposals, mean even less.

Which means your president can be as bold and as visionary as Jesus - and get the same kind of bloody reception.

Or he can try to figure out how to get a passable economic recovery package in front of the members of Congress, which means appealing to their political needs and desires. Coming back to the nation empty handed with his Boy Scout values intact is not an option for President Obama.

He has to "dance with the ones who brung him", even if they are a little embarrassing.

Both political parties are fooling themselves with the labels "liberal" and "conservative" – almost all of their members are centrists, men and women who don't have the guts to back anything but the party Kool-Aid if their lives depended on it. I don't know why they even waste time swearing themselves in, because the things they pledge to honor and uphold in that ceremony simply do not occur.

The president needs to get his hands on a pile of cash, metaphorically speaking, that can be allocated in ways we haven't tried before, even though the last two piles we've spent on the banking industry, another a method we haven't tried before, hasn't shown any immediate relief. The president needs the ability to intimately influence the distribution of these dollars, and he needs it now.

And the pile needs to be a lot bigger than the one Congress has come up with, not to solve our problems, but to even have a chance at stemming them. Two trillion dollars is the bare minimum, and even that may not be enough. I'd add another five hundred million just to mess with the deficit hawks, who have been swooning like Scarlet O'Hara over the thought of borrowing one more dollar when we already owe so much.

But there is no one in any country in the world except the United States that really believes we have the capacity or the will to pay our deficit off – and frankly, they don't care, because they like getting the interest.

It is almost painful to watch men who appear to have common sense look so pained when they talk about the enormity of the deficit, as if it is some kind of moral failing, inconsistent with our nation's values, when it is in fact an exact reflection of who we are and what we believe, because if we don't believe in anything else in America, we believe in "buy now, pay later."

"Buy now, pay later" is why the banking crisis hurts so much.

So man up, representatives of the people, and represent something besides some god damn slogans for a change. Hand your president the biggest pile of cash you can gather, and tell him he has our lives in his hands. Find every program and agency available that can begin deploying any infusion of cash they get in 90 to 180 days - not just the "shovel ready" ones, but the "classroom ready" ones too, to start retraining all of us whose jobs are never coming back.

Try to expand your horizons beyond the narrow confines of the yesteryear platforms your respective political parties cling to far enough to be able to actually see the people you say you represent. Because the bills they get in the mail don’t come in red or blue envelopes. The groceries they buy don't end up in red or blue bellies.

You might not want to dance with one you brung, but the jobs you save this time, Congressmen and Congresswomen, may be your own.

The Real Uglydolls of DC

So I am clicking through the papers this morning when I see on the front page of the Chicago Sun Times a headline teaser that catches my eye – "Sasha's dad has cool job, but pals will marvel at Uglydoll". Sasha is my favorite of the two Obama girls, with full cheeks and button eyes that remind me of one of my cousins during their childhood. But its this "Uglydoll" reference that's got my attention, because I've never heard of them before.

Another click and I've got the whole story about the Uglydoll, an accidental toy design that seems to be the rage among the younger children of the well-to-do. I look down the page while I'm reading and there they are, the entire cast of Uglydoll's are all lined up for a photo shoot.

They are definitely ugly.

When I enlarge the photograph, the first thing I think about as I look at these things are the hacky sack and Birkenstocks, two items I'd never heard of until the first time I went away to summer camp. To go from my black middle class life into this world, where kids might have diets based on their political convictions, rather than what their mothers had in their refrigerator, or wear expensive clothes that looked like they came from Goodwill - that was a learning experience.

I clicked the arrow at the top of the group picture, and there they were - Uglyworm, Wedgehead, Deer Ugly, Chuckanucka, and so on - the whole line of Uglydolls shown one at a time. I thought about the mischievous Sasha, lining up her own collection of Uglydolls for her friends and renaming them after the new faces that have been popping up alongside the old ones with which she's so familiar.

It’s the kind of thing we all used to do as children when the adult world began to intrude on the cozy one we'd created for ourselves. After looking at the third or fourth one, I started reverting back to my childhood as the faces of the dolls started to suggest to me the faces of members of Congress.

If you click through these pictures of these misshapen beasts for yourself, you might see what I see. Harry Reid. Nancy Pelosi. Hillary Clinton. Mitch McConnell. Barney Frank. They're all there, in all their wedge headed, worm bodied, three eyed glory - the Real Uglydolls of DC.

The members of Congress might not be actual Uglydolls, but there are some ugly undercurrents going on in its halls this week. The House Democrats appear to be backpedaling away from the Obama stimulus package they were so "rah rah" about last month. Senator Harry Reid's own brand of electoral redlining, where he rejects all the black candidates for the vacant Illinois Senate seat, is very likely to be captured on tape in a conversation with Rod Blagojevich.

The same Senator Reid is expected at a showdown this week when Roland Burris comes to claim his Senate seat, a showdown in which Reid will have to rely on chutzpah and his steely eyed gaze, since the law and Congressional precedent seem to be working against him.

I can see Sasha in her room now, bringing the Wedgehead Uglydoll to within a nose breadth of her face to interrogate it. "Are you telling my daddy the truth? Can you be trusted? Or do you want to spend the night in the closet? Alone? In the dark?"

Why Big Three Push $70 Per Hour Wage Fallacy

I was watching the news the other night when I heard Brian Williams read off of his teleprompter "retailers fear lower consumer spending will translate into sharply reduced 4th quarter earnings." This led into a two minute report from a mall somewhere about how sluggish holiday sales have been after Black Friday. Then a couple of commercials came on.

After the break, Williams then proceeded to read this tidbit off of his teleprompter, without a trace of irony - "reports indicate that the savings rate of the average American is lower than it has been at any time in the last thirty years" - nor a change in tone or cadence from his earlier pronouncement that consumers had to "start spending more" if retailers had any hope of staying in the black this year.

"Damn," I said to S., "looks like we just can't win - we should be saving and spending at the same time. No wonder people are losing their minds."

I was about to leave the room, reminded by these back to back statements why I didn't watch the news, when they switched to a story about the bailout talks on Capitol Hill between Congress and the Big Three automakers. The story was led by a snapshot of an assembly line overlaid with graphics that read "U.S. Autoworkers - $70/hour average wages".

I had to clench my teeth to keep from howling manically in outrage. After a couple of deep breaths, I said to S. "it's this kind of blatant bullshit reporting that gets me hot. Over $25 of that figure are costs that the corporations agreed to pay for benefits to old employees, costs that do not benefit the person who is working at all. Moreover, these companies have already set aside enough money to cover most of this cost. Do the news people just take the press packets and regurgitate them these days?"

EXCERPT from "Assembly Line" by Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic

According to Kristin Dziczek of the Center for Automative Research--who was my primary source for the figures you are about to read--average wages for workers at Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors were just $28 per hour as of 2007. That works out to a little less than $60,000 a year in gross income--hardly outrageous, particularly when you consider the physical demands of automobile assembly work and the skills most workers must acquire over the course of their careers.

More important, and contrary to what you may have heard, the wages aren't that much bigger than what Honda, Toyota, and other foreign manufacturers pay employees in their U.S. factories. While we can't be sure precisely how much those workers make, because the companies don't make the information public, the best estimates suggests the corresponding 2007 figure for these "transplants"--as the foreign-owned factories are known--was somewhere between $20 and $26 per hour, and most likely around $24 or $25. That would put average worker's annual salary at $52,000 a year.

I couldn't watch anymore.

Why are the corporate spin doctors pushing this $70 an hour narrative so hard? Because they know what I know - that if they don't get the airwaves filled with half truths first, someone might decide to start delving into the really juicy stories, the ones that involve the details of executive compensation packages.

Think about it - you've got the three CEO's from the automakers on TV all week - doesn't it strike you as odd that not one in-depth report on the details of their compensation arrangements has been broadcast by the major news outlets? That not one executive compensation specialist has been featured, with accompanying graphics that show U.S. auto execs incomes as compared to, say, the Japanese auto execs?

These are the real legacy costs, the ones that will get paid even if the ship sinks.

A few tidbits, gleaned from the Too Much Online, the website of the Council on International and Public Affairs, might give you a better sense of perspective on all this.

In the fiscal year that ended in March 2007, Toyota’s top 32 executives — a group that included CEO Katsuaki Watanabe — together pulled in $7.8 million in bonuses on top of salaries of $12.1 million. For the comparable period, one single GM exec, CEO Rick Wagoner, raked in $10.2 million.

Then again, it probably takes a lot more effort, ingenuity and know how to consistently lose market share, reduce profitability, and ignore consumer desire than it does to run a company successfully.

Back in 1984, to discourage the then-emerging golden parachute phenomenon, Congress stuck executives with a 20 percent tax penalty on any “change of control” termination pay that exceeded over three times an executive’s average pay for the previous five years.

These taxes can mount up quickly.

The really “gross” part: Most of these executives, explains this new RiskMetrics report, will not have to pay a penny of income tax on their severance windfalls. Their companies will pay the taxes for them.

I don't know if the same definition of wealth redistribution applies to the kind of free market capitalism to which the American captains of industry subscribe. But if my math serves me correctly, when a collective like a corporation, that is owned by millions of shareholders, including many of the people it employs, reduces the earnings of the collective to pay for the tax burden of an individual executive, that is an example of the redistribution of wealth that is so clear cut it could be used to illustrate a high school economics textbook.

The bailout legislation that Congress passed earlier this fall barely puts a dent into any of this. Under the bailout, execs whose companies get gobbled can still collect up to three times their recent average annual pay in severance — and, if their company “grosses up,” not have to worry about paying taxes on any of it.

Can you recall, just off the top of your head, anybody bailout executives other than the Big Three CEO's who have been asked to alter in any way their employment agreements with their "on the brink of failure" companies, the ones that couldn't go on another month without a quick multibillion dollar rescue?

I couldn't think of any either.

Corporate boards are rushing this fall to change how they measure executive “performance” — and the new yardsticks they’re adopting let execs claim they’re “performing” fine even if a company’s share price and profits are shrinking.
“With the stock market in tatters,” reports Financial Week, companies are “shunning such traditional incentive-pay factors as earnings per share.”
Among the new CEO performance yardsticks: easily manipulable measures like “customer satisfaction” or progress on meeting “environmental” standards.

I joked yesterday that "peeing straight" must be one of the new corporate metrics, because that's the only target these guys could possibly have been hitting. With performance yardsticks like "customer satisfaction" being considered, I guess "accurate waste elimination" can't be too far down on the list.

Send In The Clowns

This isn’t a lame duck session, this is a damn clown show. The Treasury Secretary and President Bush team up to scare Congress into handing out $350 BILLION dollars to shore up/bailout/subsidize the financial sector, and now the son of a biscuit-eater bankers won’t return a phone call – unless they need more money.

The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride in from Detroit, first in their spit shined corporate jets, then again, after being rebuffed the first time, with their hats in hand, long faced and remorseful, as if their sad features had been painted on by the people who do the makeup for the Ringling Brothers circus, all this for 24, no, scratch that, 34 BILLION dollars to keep ALL of their companies afloat.

Is this a joke? Is Harry Reid serious? Has Nancy Pelosi lost her mind?

These pimpernickels are really wasting time being sanctimonious about a measly 34 BILLION dollars when they just flushed 350 BILLION dollars down the toilet - I mean, loaned it to - oops, I mean "invested" in such creditworthy entities as AIG, Washington Mutual, and Countrywide?

The Wall Street bankers STILL won’t call anybody in the government back, have not cut ONE dollar from their bonus plans, which apparently reward their executives for peeing straight without hitting the toilet, since that’s the only target they could have possibly hit in the last twelve months, and these cartoon characters we have clogging up the halls of Congress are sweating the Three Horsemen over this 34 BILLION like we’ve never thrown good money after bad before.

We will lose more money in AIG alone than the automakers need, even if you double the 34 BILLION to a nice, round 70 BILLION that is more likely to be the final tab, but these elected nincompoops, who claim to represent us, are prancing around the Capitol Rotunda as if they are proctors at an SAT exam.

Half of Congress can’t spell “derivative” - most of Congress have no idea how to read the arcane minutia that garnishes a Wall Street balance sheet. These are the Keystone Cops who are demanding that Barack Obama do something NOW, as if he is John Shaft instead of the president-elect.

And we wonder why the kids seem to be schizophrenic these days? It’s amazing more of them aren’t prescribed mind-altering psychiatric drugs, with adults who claim to be leaders acting like this.

Don't get your panties in a wad, Barney - pun intended. I'm sure you guys will come to your senses and realize that the money set aside for more fuel efficient cars can be reallocated to this crisis. In case you don't know how to do this, you can feel free to call any of your constituents who had to "reallocate" money earmarked for home improvements or savings accounts when gas was over $4.00 a gallon.

Hopefully these next 46 days will be long enough for you guys to realize that the Barack Obama you elected didn't come with a cape or super powers.