Conner's Blog

It’s Monday and I thought the day was going to go well, but every time I go to CNN or turn on the radio, I find more and more things frustrating me.

The US Congress is driving me up a ******* wall.  What is wrong with the Republican Party.  They want tax cuts for people who don’t have jobs and businesses that are failing.  Have any of these idiots read about this project called the New Deal.  It was successful if I remember my 8th grade history class at all.  In fact, Obama’s stimulus package reminds me of a few different things times this country has spent money to bring it back from a steep cliff.  The New Deal is of course a recent example, but the Reconstruction Era after the Civil war didn’t only focus on reestablishing Congressional representation and abolishing slavery.  It also required a large chunk of capital to rebuild the war ravaged South that was behind technologically before the war even started.

We gave Obama the largest winning percentage in recent history, yet our Republican representatives don’t seem to care one bit about the will of the people.  All they care about is pretending they are being fiscally sound and fighting the Democrats every step of the way.  My memory may be failing me but we tried using tax cuts to keep the economy going and that failed spectacularly.  We need to get people back to work so they can pay taxes.  It does not do any good to be fiscally conservative if every day that you don’t spend money your income slowly dries up.

I am not saying Democrats plan is perfect, but getting people back to work is the key to solving this problem.  Once the economy is back on track we can start chopping things off the budget, but until then paying people to work is the only solution that has a proven success rate.

So much to read, so little time.  Here is a new bunch of links to keep you from that project your supposed to be working on.

• We Got Served reviews Birchwood cafe, I’ve been thinking of making the trip to try it out and this definitly didn’t change my mind.
• Emily sent me here and I just had to re-post Jess’s found note.
• Ginger describes the mood around Best Buy Corporate since the layoff announcements.
• The Foshay Tower is one of my favorite buildings in Minneapolis and this photo is great.
• Paul gives us a bit of the history of the Minneapolis mass transit system before buses ruled the world.  He also gives us photos of lounging bears.
• Another reminder that outdoor Twins baseball is going to be awesome.
• Submit your ideas on what to do with the space near the Guthrie in downtown Minneapolis.
• Ed details the gaming of Digg by Village Voice.
• Reuben shows us one of the perils of biking in winter.
• You’ve probably already seen it, but News Cut links to the Blagojevich-Letterman interview.
• Coke is dropping the classic from their label.  It’s about time since kids these days weren’t born when New Coke hit the streets.
• If you don’t get this set of graphs, your not nearly as geeky as I am.
• I love this photo of a winter sunset over the cities.
• Katie takes a tour of the St. Paul winter market.  I didn’t know this existed and am excited to check it out soon.
• Unnecessary proposals aren’t new to Congress, but this one is just dumb.
• Finally, Cheap Healthy Good has a recipe that mimics the egg McMuffin.  I’ve made something similar to this before, but never quite went to these extremes.

Hope your week is going well, and if you are on Twitter, I’m looking forward to meeting you tonight or next Thursday.

With retailers already cowering in fear over the results from Black Friday already, this is a good time to step back and look at this unofficial national holiday.  Every year millions of people wake up early, drive to the mall or Big Box Store, and spend, spend, spend.  People will be injured and feeling will get hurt, someone will go to jail, and there is always the sad possibility that someone will be killed.  Of course, this year spending is expected to fall.  This appears to be somewhat of a surprise even though hundreds of thousands of people have lost jobs this year.

I know that the retailers will start freaking out after Friday; stock prices will drop, CEOs will be fired, and we will hear that the end is near.  What should really happen is Congress declaring a national Blue Law on the Friday after Thanksgiving.  The only thing that should be open are grocery stores and Chinese takeout places.  I’m not an economist but I think forcing people to drop the retail habit would be a healthy way to go.  It may cause our recovery period to take longer, but if consumer spending was no longer the prime economic indicator, we would be better off.  It might even force corporations to start trying to sell good and services to other countries, something that this country stopped doing.

Instead, people will do what they always do.  They will go out to get the “best deal” of the holiday season and put it on their credit card.  What does this say about our country?  If anyone really understood why we are in this mess, everyone would stay home Friday, enjoy spending time with their family, avoid crowds, save gas money, and save on interest payments.  One of the major causes of this crisis is everyone took on too much debt.  We went from a culture that saved, allowing banks to lend our savings to people and businesses to a culture where a good portion of our money was tied up into overvalued and mysterious financial instruments.  Spending is only a short-term solution; we need a solution that leads us to saving again.

1. I keep reading articles stating that we need a solution to increase spending to save the economy.  Why can’t people see that spending is what got us into this mess in the first place.
2. I once had someone say the difference between people in Asia and America was that American’s use credit, and people from Asian countries save before spending money.  I said the Asian countries were smart, turns out they were.
3. John Jansen declared the current crisis “the financial equivalent of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.”  That’s pretty bad, and it is the rich that are getting killed, most average American’s still haven’t felt the pinch from this.  Of course they were being pinched long before the markets started collapsing.
4. Wells Fargo made a good move, funny how they have capital to make this move. I’m going out on a limb and saying some smart people must work for Wells Fargo.
5. The bailout bill sucks, and it’s even worse with the added pork.  Good thing we have John McCain to tell us next week about how pork barrel spending is the reason we are in this mess.  (He voted for the bill.)
6. My new music player is Banshee.  I switched after Amarok lost my database for the 10th time.  I’m not quite as happy with the interface as I was with Amarok’s, but at least it’s stable.
7. Twitter had more difficulty staying up during the VP debate then during the presidential debate.  At one point I just got a server unreachable error instead of a Fail Whale.  That was a shock.
8. People keep writing about how Sarah Palin survived her debate against Biden.  Unfortunately, the presidency isn’t a play, you don’t get to rehearse your lines.  Yes I know Biden rehearsed to, but he at least could answer questions outside of his comfort zone.  Palin went from mortgages to energy in one question in the span of 30 seconds.
9. I’m leaving for the weekend today, I set my fantasy lineups and just hope that no major news breaks today or Saturday, could really use a win in both leagues.