The Choate-Weinberg Report

Doogie Howser Wants Your Money And Power

About two years ago I wrote about a kid named Barack Obama who made an announcement in Springfield, Illinois that he was going to do us all a favor and run for President of the United States.

I made the obvious comparison to the TV character Doogie Howser.

Well, the kid got himself elected President, and, listening to Tuesday’s press conference you’d swear that Doogie Howser is now President.

Barack Obama is a bright guy.

But, what he knows about how our economy and how business works would almost completely fill a highball glass with room left over for a lot of ice.

His latest idea is that the Federal Government should be entitled to simply take over firms which might pose a risk to the economy like the FDIC takes over banks.

Forget for a moment that the Supreme Court told Harry Truman that he could not nationalize the steel industry during the Korean War.

And, forget for a moment that the FDIC is a purely voluntary deal between a Federally run insurer of last resort and the nation’s banks where a bank agrees to be insured and then gets to offer absolute insurance to its depositors.  The quid pro quo is that if a bank fails, the insurance kicks in and the FDIC takes over the bank.

Remember that Barack Obama now wants to play the game just like the Russians do.

This nonsense came about as a result of the idiotic decision by the Bush administration to bail out AIG.

The logic was—coming from a former head of Goldman Sachs who was then Treasury Secretary—that AIG’s failure would have brought the financial system to its knees. That the credit markets would freeze and nobody would be able to borrow money. (We sure fixed that, right?)

So, instead of allowing that to happen, the taxpayers pumped about $180-Billion into the company.

That is as opposed to doing things the old-fashioned way—in bankruptcy court.

And, now, seeing what a success the Treasury Department made of that deal, they want the power to take over any firm.

Here’s a list of some of those firms:

General Electric, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Boeing, for starters.

Now really.  It’s bad enough that GE’s NBC Television Network is in the left wing tank, but would you really want the Department of the Treasury taking over GE because it posed a “systemic risk” to the nation’s financial system?  It could easily happen under the current proposal because fully half of GE’s business is finance.

Never happen?  They would have said that about AIG a year ago.

What about Wal-Mart?

You could make a case that the world’s largest company is simply too big to fail.

Do you really want Barack Obama running Wal-Mart?

Microsoft makes the software which runs most of the world’s computers.  A failure might turn the world off line according to Obama’s logic.

Sometimes it’s bad enough Microsoft runs Microsoft.  Do you want the Government running your computer’s operating system?

And Boeing’s failure would wreck defense procurement.  Or that’s what they would tell you, anyway.

Do you want to fly in a 737 built by the Obama Administration?

It’s the dumbest idea we’ve ever heard.  And the only thing between us and communism is the fact that such an idea is unconstitutional.

That, however, is merely an inconvenience to Doogie and his friends.

                             FRED WEINBERG

Makes Sense To Me

Last week, the other shoe fell in Ely, Nevada.

It was announced that LS Power had put their proposed coal-fired generating plant on "hold" .

That was the second shoe, the first being roughly the same announcement from NV Energy.

Global Warming, don’t you know?

Al Gore, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and their friends are bound and determined to take the myth of man-made climate change and break us.

So, we have a legitimate question.

Right there, on the corner of Tropicana and the Strip in Las Vegas, where a glacier used to be, stands the MGM Grand. Courtesy of global warming. Or, at least a temperature increase of massive proportions.

Was that a bad thing?

As many wisecracks as we can make about MGM/Mirage management, driving across a glacier to get from the West side of Las Vegas to the East side of Las Vegas would be a bit more intense than negotiating the traffic lights and the man-made bridges which were built by the aforementioned management on the strip.

Where is the scientific proof on which we are making trillions of dollars worth of future commitments?

Where is the smoking gun which says that if we dumb (and mostly conservative) earthlings don’t believe Al Gore we are condemning our planet to an immediate and painful death?

How did we go from "being good stewards of Mother Earth" to living without the inventions of the Industrial Age?

If Al Gore and Al Franken are considered experts, why not George Carlin?

We’re so self-important. So self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these people kidding me? Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven’t learned how to care for one another, we’re gonna save the f-----g planet?

I’m getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I’m tired of Earth Day, I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. They don’t care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.

Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are f----d. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!

OK, Perhaps he was a little more crude than Al Gore. But he makes sense to me.

FRED WEINBERG

Reid's Reign Of Terror Should End In 2010

The reign of Harry Reid should rightfully come to an end in 2010.

Surely, no Nevadan who can read, can countenance Harry’s hard left decision making process as it wreaks havoc on the state.

By 2010, his rigging of the Ely power plants should have resulted in major electric bill increases in Las Vegas.

When some normally reliable Democratic voters ask why, the proper answer is, of course, that Harry not only torpedoed the construction of 3-megawatts of power generation in Ely but the lack of those plants will have forced NV Energy to purchase power for Las Vegas in the spot market at spot market rates.

Ever buy a lobster in a restaurant at "market rates"?

Well, you can live without lobster, but try living without air conditioning.

We should have had a clue as to what was going to happen when Barack Obama, in a fund-raising stop during the campaign told his sycophants that people would be free to build coal fired plants but his administration would bankrupt them if they did.

No publicly held company can engage in that course of action because the Federal Government has at its disposal unlimited lawyers and an unlimited budget to destroy them. Ergo, no coal fired plants in Ely, no matter how clean they would be or how necessary the power they would generate is for the future of Las Vegas.

Here’s the problem.

While the left wing of the Democratic Party has embraced "green" generation technologies, they haven’t ever discovered an inconvenient truth—that solar and wind power work much better on individual buildings than they do in a farm feeding a grid.

But the lefties—in a compromise to suck up to their reluctant campaign contributors, the power companies which own the grid—want big projects of wind farms and solar farms. They want to spend billions on projects, which are destined to fail.

Now the problem is that, since they are in control of the lawmaking process, they can get their way through sheer bullying and it doesn’t matter what the facts are. Democratic Senators such as Harry never let the actual facts get in the way of their theories, such as they are.

The only way to derail this green at all costs mentality is to take out a few of their key leaders.

Nancy Pelosi could get reelected if she got caught in an act of necrophilia. In fact, it might start a new trend in her San Francisco district.

Harry, on the other hand, represents a mostly sensible state. Nevada can be persuaded that Harry isn’t good for its future.

Take Harry out in 2010 and Barack Obama—ever the pragmatist—will change course on a dime.

As we’ve always said, Obama’s biggest problem isn’t Republicans.

It’s Harry and Nancy.

Obama has a normal tendency to bear left.

But he’s smart enough and some of his staff is smart enough to bear to the center if the left proves a political liability.

What Nevada’s task is, is to explain through taking Harry out in 2010 that the hard left IS a political liability.

We have every confidence that Obama would make an immediate adjustment.

Now, it’s up to the GOP to find a candidate they don’t have to apologize for.

FRED WEINBERG

How Stupid Can A Bank Get?

Some banks deserve to fail.

Unfortunately, our government doesn’t think so.

Take the example of Wachovia (now a part of Wells Fargo, because it sort of failed).

They hold a loan on the Riviera Casino.

Now, the Riv isn’t the MGM, but it’s a respected icon on the strip which has had its problems but happens to be current on its loan because they work real hard at doing what hotel-casino companies used to do—attract gamblers with reasonable prices and friendly service. You remember when Las Vegas did that, don’t you?

So, based on its track record, Wachovia loaned the Riv’s owners $245-million. And here’s the best part: the Riv is current on its payments.

So what does Wachovia do? They sent the Riv a notice that they’re in "technical default" of the loan because they refused to sign a new agreement with the bank which would allow the bank to strip all of the cash out of the Riv’s accounts if they felt like it.

Essentially, the bank wanted the right to close the place down by taking all of its cash as part of the loan.

It would be the same as if your friends at Visa had the right to take your cash without getting a court order, first.

So, now, Wachovia has a loan on its books which is in default. And what does that entitle them to do?

Why raise the interest rate to a "default" rate. And maybe make it so difficult for the Riv to stay current on its payments that it will actually as opposed to technically default on the loan.

Then, the morons at Wachovia could close the casino, fire the employees and, maybe, get their money back by selling the assets—mostly the Strip real estate.

Now that’s the mentality of some banks in America today. The same banks which we have and are still bailing out with tax dollars.

No wonder bankers have become less respected than lawyers and used car dealers.

For the record, Wachovia is now owned by Wells Fargo which should know better.

Why bankers get this arrogant over a loan which is current is a complete mystery. Frankly, if I were the CEO of Riviera Holdings, I would, a) file a Chapter 11 petition and sue the crap out of Wells Fargo in an adversary proceeding in front of a bankruptcy judge. The bank might find it a very unprofitable venture and exercise better judgment in the future.

And, if they don’t, maybe the Riv ought to suggest to its loyal customers that they bank elsewhere.

You never know how many people might take their advice.

FRED WEINBERG