Wednesday, August 25, 2010

She’s inspired

Sydney is so pleased with this offhand phone camera portrait, believing she looks both thoughtful and knowing, that she is inspired to write a book, just so this can appear on the jacket.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Obama vacation: Give the guy a break already

I hope the president isn’t listening to criticism of his vacation. Favorable comparisons against Bush’s long weeks of brush clearing at Crawford can’t be admitted by the Right because, after all, the Cape Cod vacation fits the “Obama as elitist dilettante” narrative. Until tomorrow. Then he might be a Chicago thug if that description would fuel the conflagration better in the circumstance.

Determined critics simply will not be pleased. Not if Obama swore off leisure time for the balance of his term. Heck, I don’t think some people would be mollified if we passed a law that required him to stay in the Oval Office 24 hours a day in a 4’ x 4’ cage sitting at a school desk.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Liberals would not have a problem with Obama reaching out to small business

Last week I mused about the president’s problem with big business and suggested that the administration make a bigger deal of help for small businesses.

NPR aired a story about Obama and business today:

A Chamber of Commerce spokesman in the piece talks about a “tsunami of regulation emanating from the administration.” With the financial crisis and the oil spill so fresh in everybody’s memory it is hard to imagine there is much of a demand for easing up on regulation, but who knows what they will be able to get people riled up about. You wouldn’t have thought there would be a market for fretting about the deficit either.

Then there’s taxes. Regulation and taxes is always the conservative mantra. I don’t buy the argument that raising the tax rate by a couple of percentage points discourages investment and the entrepreneurial spirit. Say your business is looking at a terrific opportunity that will require a $100,000 investment and you anticipate a gross return of 20 percent, $13,000 after taxes. Would a looming tax increase of 2 percent, meaning you would only see $12,600, make you do a total 180 on the great idea and say “Nope, forget it then. My spirit is broken.” 

The Chamber is holding a jobs summit tomorrow.

I still think talking more about small business would be a smart move. There’s even a small business jobs bill in play right now but you don’t hear a thing about it.

At the end of the NPR story the reporter opines that reaching out to the business world would alienate liberal voters. I don’t think you would find a lot of libs having a problem with the president reaching out to small business.

Idea for somebody with ambition: Comp book look for iPad cover

It was hard not to notice that my iPad is just the size of a composition book when I was carrying the two in a stack.

So I couldn’t help but think an iPad cover/case that looks like a comp book would be cute. You could scan a book, maybe cartoonize it a little, and have the fabric printed up by Spoonflower. Then probably pad it and wrap it around an actual comp book.

The fastening part, I don’t know. Maybe elastic at the corners, but it would have to be really tight. You wouldn’t want the device to slip out. I’m constantly afraid of dropping mine and cracking it. (I dropped an iPhone on a concrete patio once and it nearly broke my heart.) Thing is I don’t take mine out much. It seems to like staying at home with me.

Friday, July 09, 2010

The smart play for Obama: go all out for small business and see where the debate leads

I’m sorry to see the White House bending to the will of the Right and Center, and going on a campaign to insist that Obama is not anti-business. This PR initiative—along with his nod to the deficit hawks—seems like a form of Clinton’s famous triangulation strategy—observe and tally up opinion numbers to see which way the wind is blowing, then say you’re for that.

Afterthought: Or maybe, as Paul Krugman says, it’s not public polling that sways the strategy, it’s news reports.

Big business has run amok—big oil, big health, big banks, but he could make a distinction that might prove interesting. It would make sense to double down on efforts you don’t hear enough about to help smaller businesses and entrepreneurs, where the real innovation and job growth comes from. Pump that up and make a big deal of it because it’s fair and smart. As a bonus it takes an arrow out of the Republicans’ quiver because the GOP and the Chamber of Commerce like to trot out the plight of small business when they really are shilling for huge business. See where they stand if a tax incentive were rolled out that dramatically favored tiny businesses and phased it down to zero at the 25th percentile of annual revenues.

By the way, the beneficiaries of help for small businesses aren’t always the smiling mom and pop retail store owners you see pictured in GOP pollster PowerPoints. I think one definition of a small business is 500 employees or less, which could be represented by a slightly different photo: a sprawling three-story complex in your average office park. 

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Happy Birthday, Mom

My Mom turns 80 tomorrow. It’s a big number, but she doesn’t seem that old to me.

She must be the greatest little kid’s mom ever. She read to me constantly, probably starting when I was less than two years old, and I’m always grateful for that. We had a family custom that called for me (and my brother, too, I guess) to close a book hard enough to make a big whopping sound when we finished it. It meant “Hey, Mama, I made it through that whole book.” Then she would call out, from wherever she was in the house, “Very good!”

One summer when we missed the deadline to register for city rec swimming classes she drove my brother and me way out of town two or three times a week to a lake where classes were still available. She taught me to play to piano and encouraged us kids to take dancing lessons and tennis lessons and sing in the church choir.

She and my dad are great grandparents, too. They flew my kids to Florida every spring break for years and sported them about to every amusement park you’ve ever heard of, always letting them choose the parks, the rides, and the food.

Mom’s a wonderful decorator, with a load of taste. She like colors like I do, and sees ideas for combinations of colors everywhere. I’ve always thought that was proof that she’s really creative and wicked smart in the sense that she can bridge concepts from disparate realms. For example, she might get an idea for a color for throw pillows against the color of a sofa by spotting a woman on the street wearing a scarf that looks nice with the color of her coat. I can’t do that.

I love her. Many more, Mom. 

Sunday, July 04, 2010

Happy 300th, Palatine descendants

Updated 7/4/2010, because I’m getting more interested in this, and thinking about attending the Tri-Centennial celebrations.

My folks from Germany arrived at Governors Island 300 years ago in June. By October 1710 they were encamped at Germantown to manufacture ship stores for the British crown. The tar making didn’t work out at all and the clan moved twice, ultimately settling in what is now Herkimer County, NY. (The approximate period and location depicted in ”Drums Along the Mohawk.”)

I like the tradition, but don’t feel anything like pride of aristocracy—I’m just proud to have blood that’s been American for a long long time—since Isaac Newton’s time, think of that. It’s not hoity-toity in the least; they were farmers and carpenters, and militia members as early as the French and Indian war. They were scrappy and sort of assholes. One story about the Mohawk years from Philip Otterness’ Becoming German tells of a gang of Palatine women riding a tax collector out of town on a rail and peeing on him. Very early tea partiers. A namesake of my line’s patriarch had no use for Tories.

My Bellinger line, as far as my dad has been able to figure out: me > Richard > Vernon > Ellis > Adam > Phillip > Adam > Philip > Philip (Known as Lips!) > Johannes. My oldest son is called Adam and my last name is his middle name.

Saturday, July 03, 2010

The Pillars of the Earth: A guilty pleasure

The Pillars of the Earth, a mini-series based on Ken Follett’s novel, starts in three weeks on Starz. I subscribed in anticipation, its benefits for me outweighing the embarrassment.

What’s to like?