That’s Right Nate

Happy Labor Day!  I love working men and women.  I always have, but let’s face it every list I see of top Labor Day movies shows people getting all sweaty and dirty in a coal mine 16 hours a day or malingering on a picket line.   That sure isn’t my idea of labor.  Instead I searched my memory for the top Labor Day movies that I enjoy.  You won’t find many unions in these my friends.

10.  In Good Company (2004) – Dennis Quaid is an over the hill executive who still has a trick or two up his sleeve.

9. Pretty Woman (1990) – Richard Gere’s character works hard so he can play hard.  When he discovers the woman of his dream he courts her with a yacht.

8. Philadelphia Story(1940) – John Howard has worked his way up through the company and he’s set to marry boss’s daughter.  Unfortunately for him, she’d rather have Cary Grant who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  Breeding is important.

7. Sabrina  (1995) – Yes, it’s a remake, but I Harrison’s Ford character proves if you work hard for 30 or so years, you can eventually have a social life.

6. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) – A movie that proves we don’t need social programs as long as we have game shows.

5. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) – If there was ever a better movie about the dangers of the estate tax, I don’t know what it is.  Wonka leaves his factory to the very deserving Daniel after torturing a dozen or so candidates in the pre-cursor of today’s reality shows.

4. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) – The kind of high pressure business that built this country is the sight of a mystery.  In the end the guilty party is caught and punished.  I love happy endings.

3. Iron Man II (2010) – OK Batman is a millionaire, but he’s not an arms dealer.  Tony Stark is everything a leading man should be in this movie where he takes no flack from super villains or Congress.

2. Wall Street (1987) -A great movie, but like Trading Places it suffers from a depressing ending.  The first half of the movie can’t be beat though.

1. Citizen Kane (1941) – One of the greatest movie’s ever made.   Charles Foster Kane is a hero to myself and many other people who manage people for a living.

I just wanted to post this message for my readers alerting them to what is going on in the blog.  As you know, last week John McCain suspended his campaign until the country’s financial crisis was solved.  On Friday of last week McCain declared the crisis solve and resumed his campaign.  With the bailout coming to a crashing failure on Monday, it is quite possible that McCain will resuspend his campaign.  There are also 168 Hindu pilgrims killed today in a stampede, Chinese cookies laced with Melamine were found in the Netherlands, and the White Sox defeated the Twins 1-0 to win the American League Central.  If John McCain suspsends his campaign because of the economy or any other reason we will be suspending this blog in solidarity.

The news today is all about the Wall Street bailout failing and the stockmarket falling nearly 800 points on the news.  Sure that’s important.  You really can’t underestimate the effect of a collapsing economy on our country.  With that said, however, there are things that can never be bailed out.  Those things are called feelings.

Today during a speech, House Speaker and generally mean person Nancy Pelosi crushed the spirits of several Republicans.  According to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R), “I do believe that we could have gotten there today had it not been for this partisan speech the speaker (Pelosi) gave on the floor of the house…it caused a number of members we thought we could get to go South,”

Minority Whip Roy Blunt put the number of Republicans who switched sides after having their feelings hurt at a dozen.  However, Blunt also put the blame for the lack of agreement squarely on the Jews, saying “Clearly needing to respect the Jewish holidays of this week made the job very hard.”

What Nancy Pelosi did is unforgivable.  It would be like a high school girl who was asked to go to a Young Republicans informational meeting, but didn’t want to go so she said that her mom was picking her up right after school, but then at 4:30 when people were leaving the meeting they’d see her hanging out in the parking lot with her friends.  Where is the honor in that Speaker Pelosi?  Where is the honor?

I think that it is too much to ask House Republicans to overcome their hard feelings and put the country first when they feel so wronged.  The economy may be important, but its not as important as the feelings of those Republicans who were wronged by Pelosi.  I call on Pelosi to publicly apologize to each and every Republican whose feelings she hurt so that our country can move beyond this.

John McCain flew in to Washington today and managed to scuttle an apparent bipartisan agreement to bail out Wall Street, but with regulation and caps on executive salary and “golden parachutes”.  The agreement that followed 7 days of debate was praised by Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah), the top GOP negotiator in the Senate, said, “We have a plan that will pass the House, pass the Senate and be signed by the president, and bring certainty to the markets.”

The plan which McCain unveiled later at a White House meeting would relax regulation and temporarily get rid of certain taxes in the hope that they could bring more money into Wall Street.  Thank goodness for John McCain and his willingness to go out on a limb in favor of deregulation.  Wall Street should not have to accept this bailout with strings attached and he knows it.

Henry Paulson may just be the only person in this country who can solve the nation’s economic problems if there are any.  Paulson’s ambitious plan to help out Wall Street sounds like exactly what this country needs.

For the small sum of between $700,000,000,000 and $1,000,000,000,000 the federal government will help both American and foreign banks recap their losses resulting from some unfortunate decisions and bad loans.

The main thing to remember here is we all deserve a second chance.  While some of these companies may have been a tad foolish with their money, there’s no reason they should be punished for it.  Who hasn’t bounced a check or got hit by a late fee?

The democrats want to put back all the regulation that John McCain fought so hard to remove.  They think that just because they spend $1,000,000,000 they should have some right to call the shots.  All I know is when you give somebody money you don’t attach strings to it.

The best part is we could get some of this money back if some of these bad debts get repaid.  I was worried that the government might want to “bail out” private homeowners as well.  Fortunately, Paulson put my mind at ease when he commented Sunday morning that just because home buyers bit off more than they can chew, “they still need to live up to their obligations”

John McCain hasn’t been afraid to run a maverick campaign this year taking on his own party when he felt it was in the wrong.  Today, tensions escalated even higher when McCain took on himself.  These two have a longstanding grudge and this campaign has only seemed to exacerbate things.

Things reached a boiling point when Senator McCain called on the Federal Reserve to get out of the business of bail outs. “The Federal Reserve should get back to its core business of responsibly managing our money supply and inflation,” the Arizona senator told a group of business leaders in Wisconsin, an electoral battleground state.

McCain went on to decry this corporate welfare which he feels is not only unnecessary, but damaging to the economy.    This has never been the business of the Federal Reserve nor should it be.

This statement evidently rankled McCain who said of the AIG bailouts, “There are literally millions of people whose retirement, whose investment, whose insurance were at risk here. They were going to have their lives destroyed because of the greed and excess and corruption.”  In supporting the bailouts, McCain saw them as the only way to keep the problems of Wall Street from doing serious harm to Main Street.

I have no problem with McCain taking himself on, but I want to remind McCain that he has a long history of service to this country and as a POW I would hope that McCain can avoid using personal attacks against himself.  This Fall I hope the voters will be given a clear choice to pick the McCain they want based on which set of his principles they most support.  This is change that we can believe in unless of course we decide that change is not one of those principles we support.

I’m getting really tired of talking to lie-berals who don’t get the economy.  Today we learned that the unemployment rate fell from 5.1 to 5% last month.  Good news right?  No, of course not.  The lie-berals want to tell you that the US lost 20,000 jobs in April.  I’m sorry, but if the unemployment rate went down what does it matter how many jobs we lose?

McCain proposes a wonderful idea–a break from federal taxes on gasoline over summer.  The lie-berals claim that all the savings will go to oil companies and that even if the oil companies didn’t just use the tax breaks to fatten their own wallets, the average American family would only save like $30.  Well what about those of us who like our air conditioning and drive a car that’s a bit more full sized.  I figured with my Jeep Cherokee I’d be saving $100.  This is about shared responsibility.  If your car gets good mileage great, but what about the rest of us who are getting 10 miles per gallon.

The lie-berals will tell you that times are tough, but that’s not even remotely true.  The market is up  almost 11% in the last few weeks.  Junk bonds, those risky corporate IOUs, are rallying. The value of financial shares, bank loans, tricky credit derivatives — up, up, up.  Many on Wall Street, the epicenter of the credit mess, seems to think that the worst is over

Don’t believe everything you hear America.  The weak dollar is going to give us an amazing economic turnaround.  There’s money to be made.  Take that extra cash you have gathering dust in the bank and hit the market.