Bob’s post for today, Friday, December 5, 2008, is captioned Shall We Call it a Depression Now? Here’s the final paragraph from that post:

Two things are needed: First, the massive Treasury bailout of the financial industry must be redirected toward Main Street — loans to small businesses, distressed homeowners, and individuals who are still good credit risks. Second, a stimulus package must be enacted right away. It needs to be more than $600 billion — which is 4 percent of the national product. It should be focused on job creation in the United States — infrastructure projects as well as services. Construction jobs are critical but so are elder care, hospital, child care, welfare, and countless other services that are getting clobbered. Service businesses accounted for two-thirds of the job cuts in November, meaning that the weakness in labor markets has shifted from the goods-producing sector of the economy to the far larger services sector.

I’d say he is right on with that. Reich is right! Not politically to the right, but simply right. The over half a million jobs lost in November should be enough to wake up even the most far right wing nut in the U.S. Congress.

But will it? There are still obstructionists in the Republican party. They’d rather have the whole country go down the tubes in order to embarrass Obama and have a chance for some votes come next elections.

Barney Frank is right too. Do we want an unmitigated disaster on our hands by not bailing out the auto companies? No. We’re forced to bail them out at this point, or the country really really goes over a cliff.

Hey, just my opinion. Of course I could be wrong. Any other opinions or alternatives out there?

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting little blogginheads debate between two guys, Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright. One is for the bailout of the big three autos, Kaus, while Wright is against it.

FURTHER UPDATE: Missy has a great post on The Myth of the Overpaid Union Auto Worker. Great cartoon and great comparison of the auto companies treatment with that of the banks. Check it out!

So, I’ve got to take a break. Try to rejoin the real world for a while, read my books, do non-online things.

So, thanks fellow bloggers for looking at this blog and for your many great comments. I’ll be back later, after I’ve detoxed a bit.

So, why do I do it?

I have maybe a few loyal readers and even fewer who comment. I do want comments very badly. Why? Because it tells me people have read something I wrote. Maybe if I got nasty comments I’d be unhappy, but at least there’d be comments. I hope I could handle with grace, humor and/or politeness the comments that disagree with me or are nasty. But I just haven’t had many of those, if any.

C’mon guys, insult me!

It’s true, I’m an old guy. Maybe a lot of would be commenters write off this blog because of my age. What’s that old coot talking about? Oh well, not much I can do about that.

Incidentally, a subject I’ve always been fascinated with is consciousness.
What is consciousness? Where is it? I feel a new post about this coming on……

OH, how boring! some of you may be thinking, but what can I do, I’m fascinated by the subject.

OK, over and out.

The problem with keeping up a successful blog is that one has to do an entry every day or readers forget to come back to you. I found this out through early experiments at IC, where traffic fell off dramatically if I missed days, even weekends. Most journalists, analysts and academics don’t have time to blog daily, and therefore don’t blog.

This reminds me of my own problem with this blog, not that I’m a journalist, analyst or academic. I’ve started again to make a post every day, after a lapse for a few weeks there, in the hopes I might improve traffic here a little, not necessarily to catch a virus though, LOL.

Getting back to Juan and his new group blog, he’s got a lot of Middle East experts on the new blog with info on Iran and Afghanistan in addition to Iraq and the Isreali-Palestinian crises. Even though “Global Affairs” is in the title, it appears to have its focus on the Middle East. Here’s a good way to get educated but of course it all takes time, time, and more time.