I bought two tires for my truck yesterday.
Wow! You might ask if that’s all that I have to write about. No, but it’s a good starting point. You see, the tires were the cheapest I could find at $71.00 a piece. So, with tax I spent over $150.00 for two with the tire store having to order two more just like them for me to complete the set.
Well, I needed them. My Ranger bounced along the road every morning as I headed into work. The rubber was worn and sculpted into bumps and gouges, and the ride was anything but smooth and my gas mileage was slipping toward Hummer territory. The two tires placed on the front sure smoothed out the ride, and the steering. It was a pleasure riding to work this morning. Instead of my kidneys being whipped like eggs ready for an omelet. I got to work feeling pretty good.
I bought this truck around New Years in 2001. I remember because my old truck had a floor shift and my aging knees were in rebellion. As I mashed the clutch and shifted the gears as I drove up Boone Mountain every day, the knee began swelling to size of a small cantaloupe. Since getting rid of the old truck and buying this Ranger with an automatic transmission, my knee has remained within normal dimensions. No more swelling. And, no more pain.
Who the heck is Timothy Geithner?
Before you tag me as uninformed, I know he is Obama’s treasury secretary and yesterday he was busy telling the world about his new bailout plan. Only thing ……… he really didn’t tell us anything. There was a lot of details Mr. Geithner left out of his explanation and evidently bankers, financiers and investors all felt he hadn’t delivered sufficiently to soothe their worried minds. At least that seems to be the consensus of the American media.
The more important question probably should be why anyone in small-town America should care? After buying those two tires yesterday, I care, and I’m not much impressed with what I’ve learned.
The details are missing and what few were given sounded suspiciously like the soothing missives issued by Henry Paulson during the waning days of the Bush Administration. Well, I guess you could say the most important change took place. The FSP, or Financial Stability Plan, is the new name. No longer is it TARP, which stands for Troubled Assets Relief Program. You remember TARP? That’s the program that spent $350 billion bailing out Wall Street with no oversight, after the program was sold as a bailout for Main Street. Remember, the taxpayer was to purchase those toxic loans from banks so the banks could once again make loans.
Well, that didn’t seem to work too well. Credit in this country has remained frozen for months, jobs are being lost by the thousands every day, and today the heads of the major banks trooped to Washington for their turn at being publicly flogged by Congress. I don’t think it amounts to anything but for a way that Barney Franks can grandstand and our senators can hog the media spotlight so the people back home can see that they are doing something.
There is so much subterfuge in Washington today. Frankly we need much more transparency. I suggest our government ought to operate much as M.I.A. did at the Grammys the other night. When she bounced her VERY PREGNANT body out on the stage wearing that transparent poke dot costume, she became the talk of the nation. I’d say she had the right idea. You want the nation to talk about you, hang it out for everyone to see. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s a lesson that will be learned by Obama and a Democratic Congress any better than it was learned by Bush and a Republican Congress.
