Obama is RIGHT About Kanye West....
Talented teenage country singer Taylor Swift won a coveted award for Best Female Video at the recent VMA event and was delivering her acceptance address, when singer Kanye West took the mike from her to make it clear that in his pompous judgment, one of Swift's competitors, R&B singer Beyonce Knowles, deserved the award instead. (I don't think I've ever seen an award presentation hijacked before.) It is painful to watch the heartbroken reaction of the tall, beautiful blonde; you just want to reach through the television screen, wrap your arms around her, and comfort her, reassuring her of her worthiness as a recording artist and the quality of her work. But later in the evening Beyonce Knowles, in an extraordinary spontaneous display of sportsmanship and character, took time during her own unrelated acceptance speech to invite Taylor Swift back onto the stage. [I was not surprised by Ms. Knowles' grace and generosity. My favorite music video is the late Luther Vandross' "Dance With My Father"; one of the most charming vignettes during the video features Beyonce dancing with her dad.]
Barack Obama, in an off-the-record comment, when asked about Kanye West's rude interruption, called him a "jackass". I have a number of disagreements with the President, but I think in this case he was spot on. Most young people start out like Taylor Swift, admiring veteran professionals as role models. To win a major award for the first time--and then hear someone you respect professionally trash your efforts in front of you and millions of other people is a real-life nightmare. Of all people, Kanye West should know that; he was once in Taylor Swift's position of receiving an initial external validation of his professional efforts. [Kanye West, perhaps mindful of the negative live audience reaction, has appeared on Leno's new talk show to apologize for his reaction, but there are no do-overs in life; Taylor Swift will never again have her initial moment in the sun. I do give Leno credit for asking exactly the right question everyone in America wanted Kanye to answer: What would his beloved late mother have thought of his behavior?]
Does that mean I agree with music award winners? Certainly not. I have no problem for Kanye West having a different preference for the category in question, but there's a time and place for expressing it without raining on another person's parade. I still can't believe the 1975 Oscar for Best Original Song went to "I'm Easy" versus Diana Ross' lustrous "Theme from Mahogany", and I once got into a heated argument with my favorite cousin over the 1977 Grammy for Best New Artist (How on earth could they choose Starland Vocal Band, a one-hit wonder, over one of the best rock bands ever, Boston?) [Of course, probably the very same geniuses followed up the next year putting one-hit wonder Debby Boone up over another of the best rock bands ever, Foreigner.] While talking about awards, I still think that Steven Spielberg was robbed at the 1982 Academy Awards: "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial " should have won Best Picture.
ACORN Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Vote fraud under investigation in several states involving the community organizer group ACORN doesn't phase the Democratic Party (primary beneficiaries of ACORN's efforts). After all, paying someone to supply voter names, regardless of their validity, is rather like certain unethical doctors or businesses exploiting anti-fraud deficiencies in the Medicare/Medicaid payment system. "No harm done", insist the shameless apologists. "After all, they got caught, didn't they?" [The next thing you know, they'll be handing out gold stars to plagiarizing high school and college students for doing a public service in keeping teachers on their toes!] For a party largely priding itself for protecting workers and attacking business management for greed and corruption, the Democrats see no consistency problem in throwing flagged ACORN employees under the bus and in refusing to hold organizer management responsible for inadequate quality controls and supervision and dysfunctional compensation policies. In fact, the Democrats have continued to insist on rewarding ACORN management with millions in taxpayer money, growing that ACORN into an oak tree. But if you examine the tree closely, the bark crumbles to the touch and small branches break off--the tree is dead, rotten to the core.
It looks like ACORN has finally had its day of reckoning, done in, as Jon Stewart humorously puts it, by the underground investigation of a couple of cast members of "High School Musical 3" (i.e., not by The New York Times or 60 Minutes); I guess voter fraud in several states isn't a big enough story; no doubt the liberal mass media journalists felt that the same management that allows voter fraud to flourish was, no doubt, more competent and vigilant in other domains as well...
Both Houses of Congress this week, in a rare bipartisan moment, stripped ACORN funding, no doubt prodded into action by the incident Jon Stewart references above, whereby a couple of young adults in the posed as a pimp and a prostitute and went to ACORN Housing in the metro DC area, looking for facilities to set up a brothel. In essence, they were advised on how to window-dress their operations to work around the law. Hearing stories of ACORN personnel helping enterprises deploy underage Latin American prostitutes is nauseating.
The Fed Reserve Implementing the Politics of Envy
The Fed Reserve, aided by new Obama crony Daniel Tarullo, is looking at expanding its reach into compensation practices, potentially affecting thousands of bank employee pay, something I regard as an abusive violation of equal protection and which involves the same type of stealth abusive executive power grab, without Congressional advise and consent under our Constitutional balance of power, as Obama's unconscionable proliferation of unaccountable czars. Picking winners and losers allows other companies (maybe even foreign-owned) to poach the best and brightest, the Fed unfairly depriving them of the fruits of their labor. If the Fed is legitimately concerned with issues of risk, it should focus on more relevant issues, including the proper securitization of loans and the nature and extent of reserves; it should not be in the business of sanctioning success.
