For the past two weeks, I been doing rehab exercises for a couple of degenerative discs at the top of my spine, the price, my clever internist assures me, for walking erect all my life. One of the exercises requires me to nod my head several times like I’m answering “yes,” then do a “long neck stretch,” hold it for ten seconds, then repeat six times. The result of doing this over and over for 14 days has turned me into a sort of poor man’s Jim Carey cum Barack Obama, saying “yes” and “yes we can” to every challenge coming at us in 2009. In this positive frame of mind, I offer my New Year’s Predictions: (More)

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Nick Quits Drinking
by Ray Abernathy

Santa Fe, NM

Nick chuckled at any notion he’d have trouble quitting drinking — hadn’t he done it hundreds of times before? And didn’t he now have the additional motivation of a bad-news liver test? “You ignore this at your peril, Mr. Trulock,” the doctor had said. “I’ve opened up hundreds of guys like you, and you don’t have a liver, you have a rotten leather shaving kit. Give it up and we might get some regeneration going. Keep drinking and you got a year.” So it was that Nick Trulock found himself holding a quart of ten-year-old single-malt Glenlivet in one fist and a half-filled highball glass in the other as the clock on the living room wall of the house he shared with his girlfriend, Petula, ticked toward 11:00 p.m. on December 31. (More)

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The Bush auto bailout package provides welcome, if flawed relief from a calamity that could cost us 3 million jobs. But the hypocrisy of the Republicans is now exposed with the release of a report revealing that foreign auto manufacturers in our country have been feeding at the public trough for many, many years. And most of their plants are located in southern states represented by the ringleaders of the Senate GOP whack job on the U.S. auto industry. (More)

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Thanks to several weeks of gutsy guidance by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. House of Representatives last night approved $14 billion in loans for our battered and bruised auto industry. This morning, the Senate takes over. Barring some unforseen changes, the Republican minority will successfully filibuster the legislation, shove General Motors into bankruptcy and drive our economy into a deeper ditch. Speaker Nancy needs to abandon all hope for non-partisan comity when the new Congress convenes in January and retrofit her elbows with razor blades. The rest of us should get out our Freddy-knives for two of the architects of the coming Depression who are up for re-election in 2010 — GOP Senators Jim “No Gay or Single Mother Teachers” DeMint from South Carolina, David “Call me a Madam” Vitter from Louisiana, and 76-year-old “Mouth of the South” Richard Shelby from Alabama.  (More)

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On a hot day, my IQ usually ratchets up to about 99,  so I’m normally loathe to take on geniuses. However, I’m comfortable confronting the columnist Robert J. Samuelson for his bone-headed piece today in the Washington Post on why President-in-waiting Obama should confine his stimulus plan either to helping revive the economy, or to advancing ” a more ambitious social and economic agenda” that includes reforming health care, tackling global warming and restoring the freedom of workers to join unions. (More)

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When the late Lane Kirkland was president of the AFL-CIO, he often used a sardonic sense of humor to abuse a labor press corps he disdained. Once when a naive reporter asked if he thought America’s economy was fair, Kirkland replied that sure it was and he used ice as an example of how we share the wealth in our country. “The rich get it in the summer,” he said. “And the poor get it in the winter.” So it seems with the financial bailout — the Wall Street bankers and brokers and traders got the equivalent of ice in the summer; the auto workers got a massive cold shoulder in the dead of a devastating winter. (More)

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Okay,okay. I’m finally ready with my cut on the Obama victory. For me, it isn’t so much that he’s the first African-American president, or that he’s youthful and capable of carrying out the fantasies we all have about progressive politics and caring government. It’s that he’s a decent guy. That’s more than we’ve had for the past umpteen years and it’s enough for me. (More)

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Were you one of those nervous Nellies who worried that Barack Obama would fall victim to the “Bradley Effect,” i.e., the theory that a black candidate opposing a white candidate experiences a significant drop from pre-vote polling estimates to actual vote count? Now you never have to worry again: Obama actually ended up exceeding most polling projections when it came to the overall popular vote, and he flew past projections in most states. Prior to the election, for instance, Time/CNN had Obama with a slight 51-46 edge over McCain in Nevada; the final tally was 55-43. In Ohio, Time/CNN had Obama over McCain 50-46 going in; he came out 51-47. In Florida (final 51-49) and Minnesota (54-44), there was no Bradley effect — Obama finished right where Time/CNN had him pegged. There were slight dropoffs in North Carolina (51-47 to 50-49) and Virginia (54-44 to 52-47), but both within the margin of error, as they say. The same pattern held true in state after state.

What clearly emerged to replace the Bradley Effect is an entirely new phenomenon I am calling the “Obama Paradigm.” The Obama Paradigm (write this down, political reporters) holds that a black candidate running against a white candidate actually will finish ahead of polling projections when the white candidate:

A. Repeatedly attempts to simultaneously channel all three Peter Sellers characters from “Dr. Strangelove.”B. Spends the last three weeks of the campaign railing about smaller government and less government spending when economically-distraught voters are crying out for bigger government and more government spending.C. Picks a running mate who resembles and talks like Tina Fey.Again, write this down …..

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