Maplewood Patch has published a feature article I wrote about Social Media Today, a Maplewood-based social media company that draws on the work of bloggers from around the world. It’s a part of my continuing effort to establish myself as the premier chronicler of the Maplewood BlogolopolisTM. (It may already be safe to claim that distinction, in that I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who has ever used that term.)
Parts of the rightosphere are in high dudgeon about the fact that President Obama, at the annual White House Correspondents Association yuck-fest dinner, laughed at “jokes” told by “comedian” Wanda Sykes about wanting Rush Limbaugh to die of kidney failure. (Here’s a 78-second video.)
There have been days of arguments at “the Id of Conservatism” – the Corner, NRO’s group blog — about whether Limbaugh brought it on himself. And about whether Limbaugh is good or bad for conservatism, about whether or not he’s popular (polls say no, ratings say yes), and about whether he’s ever changed anybody’s mind about anything.
At Best of the Web Today, James Taranto says:
In Obama’s wide grin as Sykes was telling her joke, we saw the smug look of a man who enjoys seeing his critics dehumanized. The president of the United States should be better than this.
The conservative whom other conservatives love to hate, Kathleen Parker, thinks the whole thing is overblown, and sarcastically suggests that we’re “on the verge of appointing a Special Commission on Acceptable Humor.” She says:
Lost in the frenzy is the more important matter of our thin-skinned intolerance and our reflexive lurch to take offense. We might remind ourselves that it’s always the fanatics who can’t take a joke.
I think she’s on to something. I get awfully tired of having the discussion framed by flame-throwing provocateurs. When Limbaugh famously was quoted as saying about Obama, “I hope he fails,” a liberal friend asked me how I felt about having Limbaugh speak for the Republican Party. That’s when I spoke the words from the headline above.
What do Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore have in common? Well, they’re both much richer and better known than I will ever be, because they’ve each attracted vast followings. Negativity sells. Personal attacks work. Would that it were otherwise.
I can’t get too exercised over Obama laughing at the idea of Limbaugh’s death. Who among us hasn’t laughed at inappropriate jokes? And Limbaugh, coiner of “feminazis” and other evocative slurs, is an enthusiastic practitioner of the “dehumanization” tactics that Taranto criticizes.
I wish I knew where I’m going with all of this. The post started as a vehicle for its headline and graphic, but beyond that, I’m not sure what my point is. Maybe something about the importance of the clash of ideas in a democracy? Sometimes when I write a blog post, the key conclusion that ties everything together emerges gradually as I think and type. And sometimes, the only way I can think of to end a post is to drive it off a cliff.
The group of secured lenders who were holding out for fair treatment in the Chrysler bankruptcy has disbanded, after two more defections in the face of pressure from the Arm-Twister in Chief.
“After a great deal of soul-searching and quite frankly agony, Chrysler’s non-TARP lenders concluded they just don’t have the critical mass to withstand the enormous pressure and machinery of the US government,†[said] Thomas E. Lauria, … the lead lawyer for the group. “As a result, they have collectively withdrawn their participation in the court case.â€
Welcome to our new, nationalized banking industry. Think twice before relying on contractual guarantees or the rule of law, especially if you’re doing business with a Democratic constituency like the UAW.
At least one of Chrysler’s “secured” lenders is vowing to stand fast against President Obama’s efforts to bully the lenders into abdicating their fiduciary responsibility.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Plans for a quick sale of Chrysler to a new company majority-owned by a union-aligned trust is “patently illegal” and will be fought in bankruptcy court, one of the holders of the automaker’s secured debt said on Thursday.
“We don’t succumb to pressure and don’t agree to unfair and illegal payment schemes,” said George J. Schultze, the managing member of Schultze Asset Management. “We’re not conflicted by TARP money or active stress tests.”
Good for him. I just hope he has bodyguards.
Obama is all too willing to stir populist anger in support of his favored constituencies. It’s important to understand just how perversely Obama is framing the debate — and why his cram-down tactics make it less likely that future troubled borrowers will be able to raise the capital they need.
In criticizing the “hedge funds” that refused the terms that might temporarily have kept Chrysler out of bankruptcy court, he said:
I don’t stand with them. I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities. I stand with Chrysler’s management, its dealers, and its suppliers. I stand with the millions of Americans who own and want to buy Chrysler cars. I don’t stand with those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.
OK, Mr. President, I got it: hedge funds = bad, families and communities = good. But at Pajamas Media, Tom Blumer reminds us that hedge funds manage money not just on behalf of rich people, but also on behalf of retirement funds, pensioners, college endowments and other constituencies that are every bit as much a part of the fabric of America as the UAW is.
He also describes the legal duty these secured lenders owe to the ultimate owners of the securities.
The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), passed in 1974 with strong bipartisan support, subjects retirement plans to a very strict standard of fiduciary duty, specifically:
(1) … a fiduciary shall discharge his duties with respect to a plan solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries and —
(A) for the exclusive purpose of:
(i) providing benefits to participants and their beneficiaries; and
(ii) defraying reasonable expenses of administering the plan
There is nothing ambiguous about this requirement and nothing about the word “solely†or the term “exclusive purpose†to misunderstand.
Mr. Schultze and the secured lenders are trying to protect their investors by enforcing the agreement that was made when the capital was supplied to Chrysler. In a bankruptcy, secured creditors are entitled to recover 100% of their money before unsecured creditors receive a penny. That’s the deal they signed up for, and that “security” is why they were willing to supply capital to a basket-case company. That protection was baked into the terms of the funding agreements.
In Chrysler’s case, as in many bankruptcies, the secured lenders were willing to settle for less than 100%, even while letting the unsecured lenders share in the settlement, for the purpose of trying to nurse the company back to health. Blumer explains:
In a normal bankruptcy, first-lien creditors get paid what they are owed before anyone else. Since assets rarely fetch their ongoing-use value in liquidation, it appears reasonable that Lauria’s group [the secured creditors] would have come down in negotiations from 100% to 65%, and then to 50%, in the interest of avoiding bankruptcy. Presumably, 50% is a reasonable estimate of what might be realized in liquidation.
But if the secured creditors think they can recover more money for their investors by forcing a liquidation, they have a fiduciary duty to do so. If they don’t get a higher payout than the unsecured creditors, they are betraying their investors, and making it less likely that troubled companies will be able to raise capital in the future.  That’s what Obama is trying to force by demonizing the holdout creditors.
The big TARP-program banks that agreed to the Chrysler deal had already had their turn at being beaten into submission less than a month earlier, when Obama told their CEOs “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”  In the face of that fairly explicit threat from the most powerful man in the world, it’s unsurprising that they would fall into line the next time push came to shove. I’m just glad that at least one smaller, less conficted creditor is willing to stand up for the rule of law.
President Obama’s ham-handed ultimatum to Chrysler’s “secured” creditors promises to have adverse consequences beyond just rewarding the UAW for helping to drive the company into the ground.  At Real Clear Markets, Bill Frezza asks some excellent questions:
Why would anyone lend money to heavily unionized companies knowing that if things went wrong, the president and his men could trash their security interests by executive decree, hold them up to public vilification, and subject them to future retribution by regulators?
Why would anyone buy the shares of TARP-backed banks or invest alongside them knowing that their executives have proven their willingness to sacrifice shareholders’ interests and throw co-investors under the bus any time the president snaps his fingers?
Why would foreigners buy the distressed debt of American companies knowing that this debt cannot be secured by law but only by political clout? …
The fate of Chrysler and its workers pale in comparison to the wrecking ball that would be taken to economic order if bankruptcy judge Arthur Gonzalez approves the administration’s plan to give Chrysler’s secured creditors the shaft. And what prize will we-the-people get in return? A doomed third-rate car company majority owned by its militant union run by Italian management building congressionally designed “green†cars no one wants to buy financed by taxpayers into perpetuity because no private investor in their right mind will touch the company with a ten foot pole. Is this supposed to be economic policy or comic opera?
Hat tip: Neo.
From his new op-ed perch as a New York Times token two-fer (conservative and bearded), Ross Douthat bids good riddance to Arlen Specter, and reminds us that ideas are more powerful than partisanship:
The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp — has calcified in much the same way that liberalism calcified a generation ago. And so in place of hacks and deal-makers, the Republican Party needs its own version of the neoliberals and New Democrats — reform-minded politicians like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, who helped the Democratic Party recover from the Reagan era, instead of just surviving it.
Hart, Clinton and their peers were critical of their own side’s orthodoxies, but you couldn’t imagine them jumping ship to join the Republicans. They were deeply rooted in liberal politics, but they had definite ideas for how the Democratic Party could learn from its mistakes, and from its opponents, in order to further liberalism’s deeper goals.
No equivalent faction — rooted in conservatism, but eager for innovation — exists in the Republican Party today. Maybe something like it can grow out of the listening tour that various Republican power players are embarking on this month. Maybe it can bubble up outside the Beltway — from swing-state governors like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, or reformists in deep-red states, like the much-touted Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Utah’s Jon Huntsman. But to succeed, such a faction will have to represent something legitimately new in right-of-center politics. It can’t sound like Rush Limbaugh — but it can’t sound like Arlen Specter either.
With apologies to William Buckley, conservatism needs to be about more than just “standing athwart history, yelling Stop.” Sometimes it’s appropriate to yell Stop, but there’s got to be more than that. The clash of competing ideas has served America well over the long run, and I expect it will continue to do so.
Update: Nevermind.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 2 | ||||
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Unlike many conservatives, I love The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He’s a very funny man, backed by an outstanding research staff. His views skew hard to the left, but he’s not an America-basher like Michael Moore.
The idea that he’s the primary source of information for legions of college students is a little scary… but anyone who watched the April 28 episode got to see a very spirited and substantive debate on the issue of interrogation techniques.
Because of careful preparation and home-field advantage, Stewart often runs circles around his guests. But Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies more than held his own, and in the process very effectively made the point that different people can honorably draw lines in different places.
In the heat of the debate, Stewart responded to May’s question by saying yes, President Truman was a war criminal because of the atomic bomb attacks. As Michael Goldfarb points out on the Weekly Standard:
He’s certainly not the only American who would take that view, but it’s a useful reminder that the most vocal and popular criticism of the Bush administration’s war on terror policies comes from people who, if they were being as honest as Stewart, would also judge Lincoln (suspension of habeas), FDR (internment), and Truman (use of nuclear weapons) as war criminals or tyrants or worse.
Somehow I think Stewart would moderate his opinions about Truman if he took a little more time to think about it. My take? Truman certainly wasn’t a war criminal. The Hiroshima bomb undeniably saved many American lives compared to an invasion, and may even have saved Japanese lives on a net basis. I’m more troubled by Nagsaki just three days later.