Author: Glenn Hauman

Going from 74 degrees in Orlando to 9 degrees and a wind chill of -3 in
the parking lot at Newark Airport. And why precisely did I come back?
Oh, right– too many crying children at Disney World, combined with a
sudden drop below freezing for the denizens of Orange County, Florida.
Suffer. Consider it payback for electing Katherine Harris.

Due to extreme overcommitment of time, I won’t be posting for a day or
three, unless I have access from the road. Have fun. I don’t expect to
see my comments despoiled again when I get back.

Say no more.

Everybody’s talking about the Bush plan to cut taxes on dividends and
how this is a giveback to the rich. While it does appear to be that,
I’m not sure it’s the main reason– after all, we’ve seen that GWB has
no problem finding other ways to give money to rich folks– so let’s
examine some other motives.
I think Bush is trying, in a ham-fisted way, to help promote something
resembling corporate responsibility. Earnings and profit numbers, as
we’ve all seen, can be faked or falsified– but dividends can’t. If
ABCDEFGHInc. has to pony up cash every so often, it acts as a pretty
quick check on the company’s viability. If a company doesn’t pay a
dividend, it’s a speculation.
Another possibility– Bush could be trying to promote huge comapnies
giving up large hunks of their cash hoards, and using that to help give
a goose to the economy, without having to take money out of the Federal
till (or by raising taxes and redistributing it. Heresy!) After all,
Microsoft, Cisco, Qualcomm, and Electronic Arts are all companies with
cash reserves in excess of $800 million and no long-term debt. They
probably should be paying dividends. And if it helps control rampant
CEO salaries, I’m all for it.
Bush’s plan, however, does kneecap a lot of companies that don’t pay
dividends– to wit, start up, high tech, and growth companies– in
favor of serious old money corporations that are not exactly what we’d
call nimble. (According to CNN quoting
Multex Investor, only 17.5 percent of technology companies with a
market value of at least $500 million pay a dividend. But more than
half (52.6 percent) of all other companies of a similar size pay one.
Which means that a lot of people will sell off stocks in the kids and
start buying the blue chips– which means that their stock prices will
get a sudden boost. How many of Bush’s friends stand to benefit from
that? (And how many of Bush’s enemies does it hurt?)
I’d love for somebody with a stronger economics background to take a
whack at this. JBrad? Max? Arnold? D-Squared? Anybody?

UPDATE: Silly me. I forgot to include Dreck and Dwight Meredith.

…or in other words, Happy New Year.

I’ll resume regular posts shortly, and yes, first things will be addressing the reply from Steven Den Beste. Hey, if he can take two months to reply to me, I can take two weeks to reply to him…

Until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post gives a list of the top ten most abused forms of cultural criticism here.

Even your humble correspondent has fallen prey to some of these traps, but I won’t refresh your memories as to which.

So Trent Lott has gone bye-bye. I kinda suspected as much when Oliver Willis posted this:
\\SATAN: Lott Should Step Down
Deepest Darkest Bowels of the Soul, FL – Citing the increasingly harsh
legislative atmosphere, as well as a “public relations nightmare”,
Satan announced today that he believed that beleagured Senator Trent
Lott should step down from his position as Senate Majority Leader for
the Republican Party. “Look, I had an entire legislative agenda on a
pro-evil platform prepared for 2003. It’s not every day I get a
Republican congress and White House. I’m talking earth-pillaging,
suppression of the poor, and other nefarious deeds that you associate
with the Hell/Republican party coalition. Lott’s verbal gaffes are
endangering all that”.\\

It seems that I have been taken to task for something I’ve written over
at Peter David’s website,
specifically, for daring to suggest that the Comics Journal piece on
Carol Kalish was somehow less than worthy of being in first place at Google, in an introduction to the reprinting of Peter’s eulogy of the woman he just named his daughter after.

Dirk Deppey gives an understandable defense of his employer, Gary Groth, at the Comics Journal’s iJournalista! weblog. I have no idea if Deppey ever met Carol.

Groth’s essay– which I’m intentionally not
linking to here, as per my earlier comments; if you want to get there
you can do so by cutting and pasting
http://www.tcj.com/2_archives/e_groth1191.html– is a true charmer, and
shows why Gary is so loved the world over. While rereading it, I get
the same feeling I got when right wing commentators who disliked Paul
Wellstone made disparaging remarks about his funeral, coldly calculated
to bestow some political advantage and personal glory to their own
positions. It is mean spirited, it mocks other people’s grief and
shock, and it belittles her memory and achievements.
I could spend hours going over Groth’s column to rebut his points
(“Like JFK, the adoration heaped upon her has proved far more voluble
after her death than during her life…” no kidding, dope, who expects
to be giving praise for a lifetime of work at the age of 36, when it’s
reasonable to expect that she has decades more to go?) but I recall
that many letter writers to TCJ and the Comic Buyers’ Guide did so at the time– letters which, alas, don’t show up on either website. You can find references to them here.
Instead, I’ll just address the first error I come across in his– why,
that didn’t take long at all. Eight words in. “Carol Kalish died on
September 5 from heart failure at the tragically young age of 36.”
Carol Kalish didn’t die from heart failure. She died from a sudden
brain aneurysm.
Really, how seriously can you take an essay entitled “Lies We Cherish”
that commits factual errors in the very first sentence? It makes one
wonder exactly whose lies are being cherished.
If Mr. Deppey believes that it’s inappropriate to hope that an article
like Gary’s is not the first thing people find when looking for
information on a person, then I can only hope it doesn’t happen to him.

My friend Ed makes a suggestion. Fleshed out with my own take on it, it
runs like so:
Why not avoid all the insanity of a strike and strike preparations,
which are pricey in their own right, by making a modification to the Taylor Law
that prohibits public employees from striking? Instead, change it so
that all contracts for public employees must be settled by one full
year prior to expiration. If no agreement is reached, they will be sent
to binding arbitration to be ruled on not less than 6 months before
expiration; such arbitration is binding for no more than one fiscal
year, to give time to rehash out the issues again.
This little addition to the law could have save New York City $10
million dollars in implementing contingency plans yesterday. Wouldn’t
that have been nice to have back in these cash strapped times?