Trifles from Anderson, Indiana

I remain convinced they need the loan but we need to be careful on how we give it. When one of my clients want a loan, they need a business plan. Why not the Big Three?

UAW's VEBA Board: Autoworkers’ Health Care Benefits in Peril comes from workforce.com:
Caretakers of the United Auto Workers’ health care trust are concerned that the slumping fortunes of Detroit’s Big Three automakers could leave retirees without health care benefits.

“Obviously, we’re as worried as” the public is, says Teresa Ghilarducci, a member of the 11-person board overseeing the UAW-run health care trust and a professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York.

She said that given the deteriorating financial state of the industry, the health care trust may not last as long as the 80 years UAW leaders first projected.

Not good at all. Especially for central Indiana. I recall writing a piece on the Tesla care. The New York Times has an update here.

From The IBJ:
Indiana University has launched a technology center to help scientists attract research funding and drive discoveries that could be turned into life sciences and information technology businesses.

The Pervasive Technology Institute will be funded by a $15 million commitment from Lilly Endowment, and be located in the new business incubator IU is building at 10th Street and the State Road 45/46 bypass.
Should we be singing Mystery Dance? ("`Don't bury me 'cause I'm not dead yet'")

Here is an idea from Scotland that has me asking - why did no think aobut this before now?

YOUNG SCOTS should sit a theory test and apply for a licence to drink alcohol, says a former World Health Organisation adviser on alcohol.

Dr Jonathan Chick, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University, has written to Shona Robison, minister for Public Health, in response to the Scottish government's proposal to increase the age for buying drink from off-licences from 18 to 21.

There has been widespread criticism over the plan since it was first suggested by the government in June. In his letter, Chick says rather than prohibiting those under 21 from purchasing alcohol, they should introduce a "licence to purchase or consume alcohol.

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He said this would allow the "20-year-old soldier returning home from the Afghan frontline to buy a bottle of wine."

The licence scheme would work as follows:

Those who wish to purchase alcohol from their 18th birthday would apply for a licence.

The applicant would be required to pass a theory test on responsible drinking.

The applicant would sign a declaration that the holder would not abuse the privilege and responsibility of being able to purchase and consume alcohol.

This license would be immediately removable by any presentation to police, health or social work as a result of excessive and dangerous alcohol use. (This would not require prosecution)

Retailers of alcohol would be prosecuted for selling to unlicensed young people.

The theory test, much like those which people sit when applying for a driver's licence, would be administered by schools, colleges and community education centres, where a small fee would be payable to the school or college by the applicant.

From The Sunday Herald and Glasgow:

One man patiently waited for more than 12 hours and was rewarded with a saving of £100,000 on the cost of a penthouse flat in Kilmarnock. Countrywide hoped the event would dispel the "doom and gloom" in the market and get people excited about buying houses again.

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The market certainly needs a jolt. The cost of homes in Scotland dropped 4% in the three months to the end of October, according to Lloyds TSB's price monitor. It was the biggest price fall in at least 16 years.

As bait for anxious buyers, solicitors were on hand at the Candleriggs branch with missives already drawn up.

At the event Mairi Eckford, managing director of Countrywide in Scotland, said: "There are properties being sold today for less than it cost to build them. The market is down, sales volumes are down and our sales people are demotivated. This event has given them a real boost of energy.

"We're surprised at how successful this event's been. It's really captured the imagination of the public."

She denied that the sale was a reaction to the appalling state of the housing market, insisting that it was a reaction to the annual Christmas slowdown that estate agents always face.

Get a realtor and a lawyer and make some publicity.

Kokomo has one. Maybe we could take some of the vacant lots we have?

Here is more information from Kokomo:
Mohler and Judy Netherton, her co-director, have a supply of canned and frozen fresh vegetables that will help feed the 80 to 95 people who eat lunch each Tuesday there through the winter months and into the spring thanks to the Community Garden.

“What I cannot use that week, or if they give me an abundance of vegetables, I can and put them in the freezer to be used later,” she said. “I have two freezers full of vegetables.

Vegetables grown at the Community Garden are donated to organizations in Kokomo that feed the hungry, said Cindy Rush, who is employed by Ivy Tech Community College as the Community Garden coordinator.

The Community Garden distributed 15,989.5 pounds of vegetables throughout its growing season this year to 14 groups that either supply meals or operate food pantries.

***

Begun in 2003 with the help of Master Gardeners, the garden is located near Ivy Tech at the intersection of Touby Pike and North Street. Seeds, plants, fertilizer and other items needed are all donated and volunteers work to grow the vegetables.

Planning for the garden begins early in the spring.

“We take information from the last year, the things we learned and what we want to try differently,” she said. “Maybe we don’t want to plant so much zucchini. Last year, beetles ate all of our potatoes in the ground and I didn’t want to plant them this year. But, our volunteers insisted we try again and we got quite a harvest.”

A core group of 15 to 20 people regularly work in the garden, but new volunteers are always appreciated.

“We have groups who show up — Boy Scouts, Kokomo Kiwanis, Kinsey Youth Center, CAM,” Rush said. “We had a group from Delphi for Day of Caring, and Taylor students came out and worked one morning.”

Listening to the conservatives, it was the poor. Not that businessmen could ever be so overwhelemed with greed that thjey might be incredilby stupid. No, that would mean that capitalism does need regulation.

I offer the following as an antidote. First, Low-Income Borrowers Blamed in Bailout Crisis from The Washington Independent:

“The rest is a lie — and it’s industry propaganda,” said William Brennan, director of the Home Defense Program of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, who, in 1991, began raising the alarm over predatory lending in poor neighborhoods. “It’s also racist.”
Popular belief now holds that government regulators ordered Fannie and Freddie to buy more loans made to low-income borrowers, and that housing advocates applauded the agencies’ move to enter the subprime market. In fact, the exact opposite is true, Brennan said.

He was among many advocates, back in 2000, who warned that subprime loans were dangerous and decried Fannie and Freddie’s decisions. By purchasing subprime mortgage-backed securities, the two agencies ended up providing capital to predatory lenders — leading to the foreclosures of borrowers Brennan and others saw in increasing numbers coming to them for help.

And then 11 Racist Lies Conservatives Tell to Avoid Blaming Wall Street for the Financial Crisis, of which I am only going to quote the first:

1. The CRA was a liberal boondoggle designed to con banks into funding housing for undeserving, unqualified minorities.

False. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was the result of decades of disinvestment in poor and working-class neighborhoods. It was designed to put an end to "red-lining" -- a widespread practice in which banks refused to write mortgages for houses in certain neighborhoods, no matter who was applying or how creditworthy they were.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 had made it illegal for real estate agents and banks to discriminate against homeowners on the basis of race. Red-lining soon emerged as a not-so-subtle way to continue this discrimination, by declaring, ahem, certain neighborhoods as unfit to invest in. By 1977, the results of this practice were becoming all too obvious, so Congress stepped and gave lenders a choice: if you want the FDIC to insure your deposits, you need to knock off the redlining.

The CRA didn't force lenders to make riskier loans than they would have otherwise. It simply required that they take each applicant on his or her own merits, and give people in poorer neighborhoods the same fair chance at a mortgage that everybody else in town was getting. It wasn't about preferential treatment. It was just about basic equality.

Thanks to John and Paul for pointing this out to me.

I keep saying that I will write no more about the Governor from Alaska but a friend of mine pointed me to Beth Murphy's The word from Alaska in The Indianapolis Star. That left me no choice.

Seems Mrs. Murphy has some Alaska connections:
Amid all the Palin coverage, a familiar name popped up: Kim Elton, a former Anchorage Times colleague of mine. He's now Alaska state Sen. Kim Elton, a Democrat representing Juneau (and Obama supporter) who chairs the Legislative Council, which investigated Palin's involvement with the firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan. I contacted Kim, and asked him if he would answer a few questions, via email, and he graciously agreed to do that while he was busy with legislative organization in Anchorage.
Out of the three questions asked, I found these two and their answers interesting (in that scary way Palin has for me):

Does Sarah Palin have a future in national politics?"I think our governor does have a future in national politics, but I'm not sure she does in presidential politics. It's interesting to note she will apparently campaign for Georgia Sen. Chambliss in his runoff race and I suspect she will be hitting the talk circuit to keep options open. The internal GOP debate on where the party wants to go will either enhance her chances or . . .? I suspect she may want to go for the (Alaska Sen. Ted) Stevens' Senate seat if he finally prevails and is then bounced."

Would she have to tone down her "pro-America, anti-America" rhetoric? I think she is too locked into her rhetoric to easily back away from it, especially from the outpost of Alaska. If she does go to the Senate, that makes it easier to begin shifting to a new tone, but I suspect the old tone is the real tone.

Now could someone explain if Alaska is really as nutty as it now seems?

The best rock and roll song not written by Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins , Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent or Little Richard. Money, class, cars and a girl combined with great guitar and pounding drums.

The original:



And here is Keith Richards with the same song:

Yes, I know the headline is melodramatic, but that seems the bottom line of the argument for or against a government loan to General Motors. Tom Friedman over at The New York Times seems to be getting most of the heat for making the argument and I got to say rightly so. David Kiley at Business Week has Taking On The NYT's Tom Friedman's Indictment of Detroit that - to my mind - refutes Friedman better than I ever will.
In conclusion: Tom…I’m no defender of Detroit CEOs. I think, and have said, that the generation of management that has run the Big Three in the last fifteen years has been the worst in U.S. Industrial history. They have been incrementalists. Their idea of a long-range plan is 5-7 years. Toyota and Honda’s idea of a long-range plan is 25 years. They do have one advantage, though, in that they have a very predictable government energy policy to plan around. Have these managers shown an astonishing lack of vision, creativity, foresight and guts? Absolutely.
I cannot think but a few in this area who might think highly of GM (generally those peioeple who think the UAW as the worse thing that ever happened to American automobile industry), but I cannot say that not loaning money to GM is a good idea however poorly I think GM has been run (and for far more than the 15 years cited by Mr. Kiley).

From today's Muncie Star-Press comes these comments by the current president of the UAW:
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Even as Detroit’s Big Three teeter on collapse, United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said Saturday that workers will not make any more concessions and that getting the automakers back on their feet means figuring out a way to turn around the slumping economy.

“The focus has to be on the economy as a whole as opposed to a UAW contract,” Gettelfinger told reporters on a conference call, noting the labor costs now make up 8 percent to 10 percent of the cost of a vehicle.

“We have made dramatic, dramatic changes and the UAW was applauded for that,” he said.

Instead, Gettelfinger blamed the problems the auto industry is suffering from on things beyond its control — the housing slump, the credit crunch that has made financing a vehicle tough and the 1.2 million jobs that have been lost in the past year.
“We’re here not because of what the auto industry has done,” he said. “We’re here because of what has happened to the economy.”

Gettelfinger also called on Congress to act quickly on a bailout plan for the auto industry, saying action is necessary before President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January.

He said if one automaker were to file for bankruptcy, the others may follow. He said the automakers would find it difficult to restructure under bankruptcy laws and instead could end up out of business. “Would you buy a car from a bankrupt automaker?” he asked.

The Center for Automotive Research, which receives funding from the auto industry, has warned that the collapse of the Big Three could set off a catastrophic chain reaction in the economy, eliminating up to 3 million jobs and more than $150 billion in tax revenue over the next three years.
From what I could tell from last night on MSNBC, even Pat Buchannan thinks this is not such a bad idea. I think it was he who made the point that it was GM's factories which made the planes and tanks we fought with in World War Two. (Yeah, turf where Plant 11 stood was where we made the tools of war that brought down Hitler and Tojo - go and take a look.)

Howey's Political Report has Lugar proposing a deliberative approach (as he should considering how much of Indiana still remains beholden to the Big Three) but there is also a quote of utter stupidity from another Republican:
Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, said he would not support legislation to aid the auto companies and seemed prepared to let one or all of them collapse (New York Times). “The financial straits that the Big Three find themselves in is not the product of our current economic downturn, but instead is the legacy of the uncompetitive structure of its manufacturing and labor force,” Mr. Shelby said in a statement. “The financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem but their problem.”Not of national concern? Come on. What do people do to make a living in Alabama? What are they driving down there? So much for what is good for GM is good for the country.

I come down on the side of not killing off the Big Three. I do not think that we need to give an unconditional loan to them. Two different things and one that seems clear to this small town lawyer that escapes the Alabama Senator.

Cold, wet and gloomy in Anderson today. For some reason this song has been in my head for a while. I never have heard Chuck Berry sing it, never heard anyone but George Thorogood . Take about 7 minutes out of your life and have some fun.

Wishing I was a young whippersnapper again? Naw, that wasn't me.

One last thing, turn up the volume.

I cannot resist this one. Dick Cavett writes in The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla:
It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.
I say let the Republicans have her. Let Alaska keep her. Without trying make a pun, she is very close to being a poster child for the Peter Principle.

One of the comments to the article does make the point about Palin's experience in beauty pageants that does need to be read. I think the writer is on the money.

That is what the Herald Bulletin reported earlier this week:
ANDERSON — Details of two preliminary options for city school closings, one of which turns Highland High School into a middle school, have come to light through an online discussion site.

Board members with Anderson Community Schools confirmed that information posted by a person using the screen name Patriot Dan is similar to an option presented to them by the school district’s administration.

The plan involves closing Edgewood, Eastside, Killbuck, Robinson and Southview elementary schools, as well as Southside Middle School. Northside Middle School would become an elementary school, and Highland High School would become a middle school housing seventh through ninth grades. Anderson High School would keep grades 10 through 12.
Close Highland after all the remodeling? That will make it one of the jazziest middle schools in the state. But closing Highland also raises another point that I will discuss below.

And what about closing our newest elementary school (Eastside)? That and closing Edgewood has to be risking a lot of angry parents.

And what about smaller classroom sizes?
A second option, wrote Patriot Dan, deals with Ebbert Education Center and Robinson Elementary and moving the location of the alternative school.

While some school board members dismissed the information as rumor, others said parts of the plans were similar to options they’d received from the administration.
Might have been more interesting to hear about the Ebbert rumors. It is not like our kids do not need a vocational school. All the reporter could get was that the building was getting old.

At least Tim Long seems to recognize the problem of Highland having a large rural area:

Not all board members could be reached for comment, but two said the post matched one option they have seen.

Of the first plan, Tim Long said “some pieces do fit.”

He worried, however, that changing the two high schools structure was too radical of a move to be a serious option. Long added that the plan described online seemed to not fully consider the district’s enrollment.

And why do all this? The article buries the reason towards the end:

Lowe announced at a school board meeting Tuesday that her staff had prepared information regarding possible school closings as a way for the district to handle a $5 million budget cut in 2010.And do we have that shortfall? Because we run our schools on property taxes and the legislature has capped those property taxes. Let us remember that we reelected Mitch without a clue of how the state government will meets its obligations to education.

Brevini official monitoring online 'bickering' from The Muncie Star has something for all of us to remember in this day of the Internet and local governments seeking foreign business. Remember everyone is altogether and easy to find.

Officers of Brevini -- which will relocate its national headquarters from a suburb of Chicago to western Delaware County in 2009 and 2010 -- pay attention to the Web site for The Star Press and are surprised by the amount of political in-fighting in the community.

"I mentioned to the mayor I was concerned about all this bickering we read," said Sal Spada, president of Brevini USA. "I don't envy her. I could never be mayor.

"Not everybody's going to be happy no matter what you do, we understand that. But some of the blurbs being published, it doesn't feel right."

At the time of the Brevini announcement, Mayor Sharon McShurley said she had played a role in landing Brevini even though the wind turbine gearbox plant will locate outside the city limits in the Park One/332 business park at Interstate 69.

Yes, it is past the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh day, but I could not let the whole day pass without a post. From The Washington Post I give you this editorial, Veterans Day:
"ON THIS DAY 90 years ago, 'the monstrous anger of the guns,' in the words of the British war poet Wilfred Owen, was finally sated -- but only for a time. It was on Nov. 11, 1918, that the most destructive war yet fought in modern history ended by mutual agreement, with the guns still firing madly and men still dying right up to the hour of armistice: 11 a.m. It was seen by Americans and their allies as a day of peace -- but it was also the day that set the stage for an even more destructive war two decades later.

The Armistice of 1918 was really a defeat in disguise for Germany and its allies. The highest military leaders of that country knew their army could not go on, but they refused to associate themselves with what was, in effect, a surrender, and so they left it to the country's new, democratic civilian leaders to conclude what peace they could. Thus the forces of revenge -- extreme nationalists, racists, militarists and a wide range of preachers of hatred -- could claim that the country had not really lost the war but had been betrayed by liberal democrats, socialists, pacifists, Jews and others. And as they railed and ranted about the 'November criminals,' those in the West who had warred for four awful years saw in November 1918 a symbol of futility....

Today we have narrowed Nov. 11 to its rightful focus. This is a day of personal memory, a day of honor for our veterans, especially those who have died for their country. After nearly a century, it is still a poignant occasion, especially in Europe, where millions died. World War I, though, was the last war of the poets. Today our elegies are photographs, row on row, printed on certain days in this newspaper and in other places. The smiling faces of those lost to war are disturbing, moving and, in their own way, eloquent. But they leave one still wanting more power in our words, wishing that we could fashion memorials that might move some few souls a century hence, like the words of Wilfred Owen, killed in action on Nov. 4, 1918. "What candles may be held to speed them all?" he asked of the young men dying all around him:

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Here is how the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council site describes itself:
The Council is a formal interagency body empowered to prescribe uniform principles, standards, and report forms for the federal examination of financial institutions by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), and to make recommendations to promote uniformity in the supervision of financial institutions. In 2006, the State Liaison Committee (SLC) was added to the Council as a voting member. The SLC includes representatives from the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS), the American Council of State Savings Supervisors (ACSSS), and the National Association of State Credit Union Supervisors (NASCUS).
Yep, this ought to get a lot more scrutiny in the months ahead.

Some interesting stuff in The Atlantic's The Obama Win: Explanations And Theories:
President Bush and Republicans were sent to the doghouse. This was a huge opportunity year for Democrats, and Obama took advantage of it in every possible way -- great campaign, virtually no mistakes (dealing with the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the "bitter/cling" remarks are the only two I can think of.), they built a huge organization (the DNC and Howard Dean deserve some credit here too) and an unbelievable $630 million+ financial machine. Two times as many voters said they were personally contacted by the Obama campaign as by the McCain campaign.

But why, in the middle of a crisis, did Americans choose an unknown Illinois senator with a funny name over a war hero they've known for years?
And then comes a long discussion of exit polling data. Bottom line? The better candidate won this time.

Interestingly, I read Richard D. Kahlenberg's What’s Next for Affirmative Action? the same night I had a visit from my oldest sister. She explained to me why she had not voted at all this month and her concerns about our having a black president. I did not say much other than roll my eyes and grit my teeth. What tied sister and The Atlantic together was this paragraph:
In the coming months, Americans will watch closely to see how America’s first black president governs on issues of race. His supporters are divided. As a recent Washington Post article noted, some black supporters see Obama’s election as “advancing the black community,” while some white volunteers are thrilled by the notion of “post-racial” politics. In liberal academic circles, where Obama has strong multiracial support, the notion of colorblind policies is considered naive, even reactionary. But the Obama crowds in South Carolina memorably chanted “race doesn’t matter” after his victory there in the Democratic primary.
So did most of us. It is not as if we were voting for 50 Cent.

Obama himself has sent mixed signals on the defining issue of affirmative action. On the one hand, he castigated John McCain for supporting an anti-affirmative action initiative during the campaign. On the other hand, when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama whether his own daughters deserve a preference in college admissions, Obama said no, because they “have had a pretty good deal,” and went on to say that special consideration should be provided to low-income students of all races.

I remember this question about affirmative action. I thought the question was blithely stupid. Just as George W. Bush was a legacy for Yale, the Obama daughters will be legacies for Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard (I do not recall where Michelle Obama attended law school). Obama took the advantage to use the answer to suggest something very important. Kahlenberg picks up on this point and makes a few of his own.

On the other hand, as the first black president, Obama is uniquely positioned to help persuade civil rights leaders that it is time to resurrect King’s idea of affirmative action as a set of programs for low income Americans of all races. He could point to King’s political insight that only a class-based emphasis would forge a potent black- and working-class-white coalition for real social change. And in phasing out race-based preferences, Obama could simultaneously put real money into the enforcement of important anti-discrimination laws to protect against bias in education, housing, and employment, a part of the colorblind agenda that no president has fully funded.

Race exists as an important distinction in American history and thus law. Check out the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Many think we are past all that. I say the simple answer is that we are but that answer ignores the entire Jim Crow era. I will assert here that nothing has poisoned race relations as has affirmative action. On the other hand, I can think of other reasons for our not having promoted an affirmative action based on economic class.

In college admissions—the subject of the ongoing litigation—Obama could back a vigorous program of economic preferences that indirectly addresses our nation’s history of slavery and segregation and the ongoing reality of racial discrimination. According to a 2004 Century Foundation study by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, economic affirmative action—looking at the income, education and occupation of an applicant’s parents, and the level of poverty in her high school—will produce almost as much racial diversity as current race-based affirmative action: the result would be 10 percent black and Hispanic representation at the most selective colleges and universities compared with 12 percent currently. But counting other economic factors—such as wealth (net worth)—should boost racial diversity further. Wealth represents the accumulation of income over time and thereby more closely reflects the legacy of past discrimination. Likewise, because homes represent the biggest source of family wealth for most Americans, giving low wealth students a preference will also capture ongoing racial discrimination in the housing market.

With Obama, I think he will surprise us.

Some good news from The Herald Bulletin:

ANDERSON — Former General Motors Plant 18 could soon see new life and be back on city tax rolls.

<a href="http://ads.cluster01.oasis.zmh.zope.net/oasis/oasis/oasisc.php?s=1075&w=300&h=250&t=_top" target="_top"> <img src="http://ads.cluster01.oasis.zmh.zope.net/oasis/oasisi.php?s=1075&w=300&h=250&t=_top" border="0" width="300" height="250"> </a>

The plant, abandoned upon GM’s exodus out of Anderson, has found a potential buyer, and city officials say the buyer is serious.

“I feel very comfortable with the buyer,” said Charlie Braddock, Redevelopment Commission attorney. “They know what they’re buying; they’ve already got an intended use for it.”

Economic development workers generally do not name potential developers until the deal is sealed, as most companies request confidentiality.

Plant 18, on Scatterfield Road, includes the building, garage and parking lot to the north of the plant. It totals 22 acres between two parcels.

Now cna some explain to me why no Plant 20 remains vacant?

From The Indiana Lawyer's Courts leave election law questions unanswered:
In the days leading up to an Election Day where thousands of Hoosier voters had already cast ballots before polls even opened, Indiana's appellate judges issued a pair of election law rulings that leave more questions than answers and will likely lead to further review.

That review may evolve into post-election review, as parties get through today's historic presidential election and examine the next legal steps in cases of first impression arising from two of Indiana's most populated counties.

The state's Supreme Court and Court of Appeals issued rulings on Friday and Monday in one or both of these cases - Marion County Election Board v. Raymond J. Schoettle, et al, 49S00-0811-CV-586, that involved the process of reviewing absentee ballot challenges; and John B. Curley, et al. v. Lake County Board of Elections and Registration, et al., 45A03-0810-CV-512, that left early voting locations open.

Both decisions pointed to uncertainties and ambiguity in state statutes on those issues, but the public importance and limited timeframe before the election left the courts with little recour"

I took a short gambol through The National Review this morning. Some small sadness, some recriminations, and then the frothing from Preventing National Suicide.

Was it only me that thought McCain's and Conservative criticism of Obama applied even better to them? Or when it did not apply better to themselves, that the criticism had no place in reality? It just seems like so much frothing at the mouth to me.

Obama shares one quality with Tony Blair - English is not a second language to either.