Hightower Lowdown
"The less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag." -- Kin Hubbard
In This Issue
The "environmental President" he won't be
December's Lowdown
The many REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL after Election Day 2008
After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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The lowdown gooberhead award
Time to issue another of our Gooberhead Awards, which we hand out periodically to those in the news who've got their mouths going 100 miles per hour . . . but don't seem to have their brains in gear.
This month's Goober is the very deserving Michael Milken, the former junk-bond king and Wall Street finagler who spent a couple of years in the federal pokey and paid $600 million in fines for securities fraud, mail fraud, and conspiracy. Only, please, don't call Mike the "former junk-bond king" anymore.
Apparently it irritates him, so he had his PR staff send out a memo to editors entitled "Who Michael Milken is . . . and is not." Reprinted in Harper's Magazine, the memo instructs the media on how to identify Milken properly.
The memo notes that since leaving prison, Mike has been heading his own economic think tank and a family foundation he established with about half a billion ill- gotten bucks he squirreled away in the names of his wife and children. So, say his spin-meisters, "financier and philanthropist is probably the most common short description" for Mike.
The PR people petulantly sniff that, "Those who mindlessly regurgitate 'junk bond king' have no understanding of Milken's work or its complex theoretical underpinning." Oh, yeah, fraud and conspiracy can be pretty complex.
Still, to avoid the complexity, henceforth we'll just refer to Milken as a "crook and former jailbird."