Eight Feet Deep

Okay, I just a little bit ago figured out how to upload You Tube videos to my blog. But I haven’t figured out yet how to make my snide remarks along with those videos. So, I will leave those previously published video picture-type thingies to astound and confuse those who stumble upon EFD.

No, actually the raw video from the Family Dollar store happened right here in Beaumont. It has made the national news, you know, 4-year-old boy gets up in the middle of the night. He leaves the house. He walks across a 7-lane highway for at least a quarter-mile. He walks up to the Family Dollar store. Finds Door No. 1 locked. Tries Door No. 2. He walks in the store. Police come to the scene thinking it’s a burglar. The little boy is playing with toys. Hilarity ensues. Well, not really but at least the little kid is okay. The police are investigating the circumstances of his leaving the house but it may just turn out to be just one of those quirky little things young kids do … like …

The next video in which a 5-year-old sneaks off from daycare (yes, this too is in Texas, so what about it?) and goes to Hooters. Maybe he just needed a hot wing fix and maybe … well I won’t go there.

It all just makes me want to ask: What is it with the kids these days?

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.