Wagoner Out

Rick Wagoner, chairman of General Motors, was forced to resign by the Obama Administration as one of the preconditions for further aid to the ailing automotive manufacturer. Wagoner reportedly will receive $23 million in compensation. Not bad for an executive under whose leadership GM steadily declined. The phrase "too big to fail" has found its way into the lexicon. That seems to be another way of saying that, depending on one's station in life, negative consequences don't necessarily flow from bad performance.

John Hope Franklin 1915-2009

John Hope Franklin, who died earlier today of congestive heart failure, was one of the important historians of our time whose seminal work was "From Slavery to Freedom." He was 94 years old.

Too Much Obama

Perhaps the Obama Administration has a grander strategy in mind by showcasing the president in a number of unconventional settings: Obama filling out his brackets for March Madness; Obama holding town halls in California trumpeting his economic stimulus package; Obama appearing on the Jay Leno show and committing a misstep about Special Olympics; Obama on 60 Minutes talking about, among other things, his children's newly constructed playground equipment. But all I see is a president seemingly still in campaign mode and doing things that only provide fodder for his critics and detractors.

Monumental

A Washington Post article notes:

Virginia is home to what scholars say is the densest concentration of Confederate common-soldier statues of any state. Visitors from outside the South are sometimes surprised to see them: more than 100 unknown infantrymen, often in prominent places across the state. Locals tend to take for granted the lone figure that often stands near the county courthouse, commemorating what came to be known to some as the "lost cause" and to others as the war that ended slavery.

A. Melvin Miller, an Alexandria, Va. civil rights activist, makes the most interesting observation on why these monuments don't continue to generate protests. He says that are "just symbols of something, and if the thing they were a symbol of is no longer a problem, what's the symbol?"

Quote of the Day

"We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses - which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers - if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury."

Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., in a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner explaining $165 million in bonuses to executives after being the recipient of $170 billion bailout from taxpayers. Of course, these are the same executives who contributed significantly to the current financial crisis.

Bernie and Dante

Of Bernard L. Madoff, poster boy for Wall Street greed, Ralph Blumenthal writes that in Dante's Inferno, Madoff would be dispatched to spend eternity in the Ninth Circle of Hell:

Mr. Madoff was 700 years too late to join Dante’s Who’s Who of sinners, but it is easy to imagine where the poet would consign this scam artist, who admitted to stealing as much as $65 billion: to the Pit, the Ninth (and deepest) Circle of Hell. It is where sins of betrayal are punished in a sea of ice fanned frigid by the six batlike wings of the immense, three-faced, fanged and weeping Lucifer.

In Dante’s frightful underworld, sinners face a descending funnel of worsening torments keyed to their sins. The lustful are blown about in a whirlwind; the violent boil in a river of blood. But betrayers, alone at the bottom, are savaged by the one called emperor of the realm of grief, in person.

Sidekick

Alessanndra Stanley, in The Vanishing Sidekick, writes:

WHEN Jimmy Fallon showed up on NBC’s “Late Night” last week without a sidekick, it looked like yet another sign that the Ed McMahon era is over; so many talk show hosts work solo that the second-banana position seems almost as obsolete as the foretopman or the Linotype operator. Even the word sounds antiquated: current parlance favors the more “Top Gun”-ian term, wingman.

A real sidekick is something between a friend and a servant — a fervant. Sancho Panza is the exemplar, a paid employee who behaves as if he would gladly serve free, but another is James Boswell, so humbly devoted to his friend Dr. Johnson that he took on the role of amanuensis.

My earliest recollection of sidekick was veteran actor and the perpetually old Gabby Hayes who dutifully played second fiddle to Roy Rogers. Other than a source of comedic relief, Hayes did not seem to serve any other purpose.

The Road Not Taken

Brian Schott writes that one of Robert Frost's most famous poems has been widely misunderstood:

For decades, literary critics have pointed to a contradiction at the heart of "Road" that, once you see it, sticks out like a sore thumb: The two roads in the yellow wood aren't so different after all.

At the poem's start, the narrator hits the fork in the road, examines both paths and laments he cannot "travel both / And be one traveler."

He decides to take the one with "perhaps the better claim / Because it was grassy and wanted wear." This observation, however, is immediately taken back: "Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same."

The next line too stresses the similarity of the two paths: "And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black."

Only in the fourth and final stanza does the narrator, imagining a time in the future, transform the path he chooses into "the one less traveled":

The Triumvirate

Charles Blow, in Three Blind Mice writes of the disarray in the leadership of the Republican Party:

The Republicans have reached a new low, literally.

According to the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the percentage of Americans who view the Republican Party positively is at an all-time low. Meanwhile, President Obama’s positive rating is at an all-time high, and the Democratic Party’s positive rating is near its high.

Why? Because the Republicans have dissolved into a querulous lot of nags and naysayers without a voice, a direction or a clue, and we are not amused.

And who has surfaced as their saviors? Bobby Jindal, Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh — the axis of drivel.

T.O. Finds a Home

The narcissistic Terrell Owens has found a home with North America's Team, the Buffalo Bills. According to reports, Owens signed a 1-year contract worth $6.5 million. Given Mr. Owens' track record in previous stops - San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Dallas - quarterback Trent Edwards is on notice of what to expect of this wide receiver who is so emblematic of what is so wrong about professional sports in the 21st century.

Michael Jackson

On the occasion of Michael Jackson's announcement of touring again, Daniel Frankelstein posits that it is impossible to separate his often bizarre eccentricity from an appreciation of his artistic achievements:

It is impossible to appreciate or enjoy Jacko in the same way as it was when - say - he sang so gloriously in the Jackson 5. Hardly anybody who listens to him now does it without his biography influences the way they listen.

Melding what we think we know of the artist's life with what we are hearing in his music is a natural human reaction. It's what we do. Anything else is an incomplete account.

As a practical matter, for me it is impossible to listen to Jackson's P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing) and not think of his trial on charges of pedophilia.

T.O. Gone

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones did the improbable and cut the narcissistic wide receiver Terrell Owens from America's Team. As an unabashed Dallas Cowboys hater, this is an unwelcome development. I was looking forward to more years of turmoil and dysfunctionality that have defined the Cowboys in recent years.

Obama, A Socialist?

Harold Meyerson, in Who You Calling Socialist?, brings some perspective to the charge that Barack Obama is a socialist:

If Obama realizes his agenda, what emerges will be a more social, sustainable, competitive capitalism. His more intellectually honest and sentient conservative critics don't accuse him of Leninism but of making our form of capitalism more like Europe's. In fact, over the past quarter-century, Europe's capitalism became less regulated and more like ours, one reason Europe is tanking along with everyone else.

Take it from a democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn't that the woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves.

Judging by the failures of the great Wall Street investment houses and the worldwide crisis of commercial banks; the collapse of East Asian, German and American exports; the death rattle of the U.S. auto industry; the plunge of stock markets everywhere; the sickening rise in global joblessness; and the growing shakiness of governments in fledgling democracies that opened themselves to the world market -- judging by all these, a more social capitalism is on the horizon because the deregulated capitalism of the past 30 years has blown itself up, taking much of the known world with it.

So, for conservatives searching for the culprits behind this transformation of capitalism: Despite our best efforts, it wasn't Bernie and it wasn't me. It was your own damn system.

Moonwalking Michael Steele

In response to CNN's D. L. Hughley's characterization of Rush Limbaugh as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele answered: "No he's not. I'm the de facto leader of the Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, the whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it incendiary. Yes, it's ugly."

Then after Limbaugh pretty much dismissed Mr. Steele on his radio show, the chairman did what Republicans typically do after crossing the pill popping blowhard, he apologized: "My intent was not to after Rush - I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate." Indeed.

Self-Evident

This falls squarely in the category of a self-evident truth: Defense Secretary Robert Gates considers "Obama more analytical" than George W. Bush.

Take Me to Your Leader

Appearing on CBS's Face the Nation, White House chief of staff Rahn Emanuel cast right wing blowhard Russ Limbaugh as the intellectual force behind the Republican party. It should be clear at this point that the GOP is a party without any leadership and it is politically advantageous for the Obama administration to fill that void by by anointing Limbaugh as its titular leader. Such a strategy contributes to the marginalization of the party.