Category: Orphans

New consumer price and housing start data for November were released today, and if you can think of those two economic indicators in geographic terms you would say they both “went (way down) South.” I have to point out the Bloomberg piece I am linking is technically incorrect in saying the cost of living dropped 1.7 percent last month. It actually was the consumer price index which sank to a level not seen since the Great Depression. The difference in the two terms explained by the U.S. Department of Labor notes:

“A cost-of-living index measures differences in the price of goods and services, and allows for substitutions to other items as prices change. A consumer price index measures a price change for a constant market basket of goods and services from one period to the next within the same city (or in the Nation). The CPIs are not true cost-of-living indexes and should not be used for place-to-place comparisons.”

Okay, so much for the economics lesson today. The linked article does quite fluently explain the general gist of things, which are certainly less than rosy.

Even if you don’t pay attention to such trends as I am forced to do, you must have seen the correlation. Remember when gasoline was $4 a gallon and milk was somewhat close to that? I may be wrong about milk prices because I don’t drink milk very often. But you see my point. Oil prices high = Higher consumer prices. Oil prices low = Lower consumer prices. And when the equilibrium goes out of whack, timing is everything. Or so someone once said.

What is probably the most disheartening facet of this whole economic funk is that it unlikely to end next year as some elected officials have predicted. A piece on CBS’ “60 Minutes” Sunday pointed out that a couple of so-called “exotic” mortgages are primed to reset which could extend the mortgage crisis for years.

If all of that information isn’t enough to make you want to take to bed for a decade, Scott Pelley’s news story also said similar shenanigans have taken place in the commercial real estate market as happened in the residential market. So not only will we have an extended mortgage crisis for years we face the same with the commercial real estate market.

That is to say, quite crudely, we’re f**ked.

As the world surely knows by now, the lame duck President George W. Bush himself had to duck yesterday in Baghdad when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at him during a press conference. Bush later remarked to journalists:

“I didn’t know what the guy said, but I saw his sole.”

… which is pretty funny if you like puns. As much as I have disliked the president’s policies I have to admit he does have a pretty irreverent sense of humor that I appreciate.

Meanwhile, shoe-thrower Muntadar al-Zaidi has become a folk hero in the Arab world where the symbolism of throwing shoes and calling Bush a dog makes a bigger splash than it otherwise would in the West. I do remember a State Department fact sheet before my ship pulled into Indonesia some 30 years ago explaining that in the Islamic faith the soles of the feet are seen as unclean. Later, while some shipmates and I visited in the Jakarta home of the guy who became our unofficial “taxi driver,” we were all self-conscious about crossing our legs so as to not show our soles. It brought a laugh from our driver who said he was Christian and not Muslim thus it didn’t really matter to him.

Bush, rightly, looked frozen as the reporter threw his shoes. I can’t blame him. If I was as soundly disliked as him around the world and especially in Iraq, I would have still been shaking. After all, one doesn’t know what’s in or on those shoes. It could be a shoe bomb or it could be shoes filled with dung, as in if the foo s**ts wear it. That is not to mention that a couple of shoes might not feel very good when they hit you upside the head. I once saw a 25-pound chair flying through the air toward me in a courtroom when an armed robbery defendant hurled the chair at the crime victim who sat near me. Luckily, no one was injured. So, softy that I am, I feel sorry for Bush as far as that incident goes.

The press, whose job it is to make mountains out of molehills, are now asking why the Secret Service allowed this to happen. But I don’t see how it could have been prevented. Backgrounds checks are run on reporters who attend presidential press conferences and are in press pools — I was in something like 3 or 4 presidential pools — but I have no idea how stringent the background checks are. It’s not like how the feds would check you out if you were being appointed to the Supreme Court. I would suspect it is more on the order of looking up criminal histories on Public Data.com., or when you are stopped for a traffic violation by police.

Short of a psychological profile of each reporter — which I would imagine as something so scary they’d never let journalists near the president — it beats me as to how something like that could be prevented. Reporters and camera people get scanned for weapons so I don’t know. Perhaps the only thing to stop it would be to take the journalists’ shoes and belts away and maybe their tape recorders as well as pens and notepads. I suppose I shouldn’t give the presidents’ folks any ideas though.

This started off as a really s**tty day. It is one of those kind of days where you start out screaming at some customer service moron in Bangalore or wherever and it just goes downhill from there.

But the trend has reversed itself somewhat this afternoon as things and myself begin to calm down. For the past three years during which I have had a half-assed freelance writing career I have always had the constant of, no matter how crappy my day was, pulling up the blog In the Pink Texas and getting a laugh or a bunch of laughs to lift my spirits.

It isn’t just that ITPT blogger Eileen Smith is a wit. Rather it’s that wit plus her hilarious following who provide their input on the majestic and the not-so-grand who have drawn me to ITPT for these years like onlookers at a car wreck. Hmmm, okay, maybe not the best example but it’s Friday for God’s sake.

Nonetheless, ITPT only moved to Texas Monthly.com it turns out. That’s something in of itself, but I don’t have the time to nor really want to examine the implications of such move and the state of today’s media. For those of you who haven’t read ITPT regularly, it’s not really that far-fetched that something like that would happen since Eileen is editor of TM-dot-com.

So that helped improve my day.

Then I learn from the Office of the Press Secretary in College Station, Texas, (Say what?) that my good ol’ buddy Gee Dubya, that ol’ presidential piss ant (and I say that in a somewhat less-than-spiteful way) has given federal employees Friday, Dec. 26, (Boxing Day in UK-like countries)the day off. Working part-time for the gub’mit I now get paid for not working Christmas Day and the day after instead of just Christmas. I like very much that concept of not working and getting paid for it. It seems like that should have been my major in college instead of journalism.

So now Gee Dubya toward the end of his almost eight-year reign of bulls**t did something which additionally helped make my day a brighter one.

So now it’s time to quit while I am ahead.