I have a serious proposal for using the economic stimulus to help small business.

As the owner of a small business, two beauty salons, I employ eight people who would be in desperate circumstances were they to become unemployed.  About half of them have husbands who work in construction (and who are currently underemployed) and the other half are single mothers.  Before this economic downturn I had thirteen employees, but I have had to cut to the bone.  One of the malls where a shop is located is losing tenants at an alarming rate.  Every time a tenant leaves it reduces foot traffic which further reduces my business. 

With the current business income, every month after expenses are paid, mostly labor and rent, I am left with $1000-2000 that I subsidize out of my own pocket.  I am an attorney and have other resources, but the way things are going I may have to close the shops.  I'll keep going until I run out of money, but I'm currently unemployed too. 

Small business is the biggest employer in our economy.  Every other small business owner I speak to is in the same condition or worse.  All of us are struggling to stay open and millions of jobs hang in the balance.  If the auto industry and the banking industry are too big to fail, we are too small to help.

Tax credits are worthless.  Tax reductions are worthless.  If you lose money you don't pay taxes, there is nothing to reduce or credit back. 

My suggestion:  Find some way to give people like me a rent subsidy.  Give us a tax credit for employees even if our own taxes are zero.  Otherwise we will all just keep going out of business until our employees are left without jobs.

Sarah Palin is unpolished, rambles and can't read.  Let's have the media show us that Sarah Palin.

Yesterday I was watching MSNBC in the morning and they showed a rally with Sarah Palin and John McCain.  She read a prepared speech (not much different from what we've already heard).  While giving this speech she was clearly reading from a prepared text.  When she got past the personal part she started reading in a stumbling manner.  It was clear that she has trouble reading coherently and that she had no understanding of the words.  She also has a strange guffaw under her breath that she releases when she thinks she has said something clever.

Later in the day we saw clips of this speech on all the major networks.  None of them showed the pathetic stumbling or the guffaws.  All of them showed the Bridge to Nowhere line, which she has practiced so much she can deliver it with (lying) conviction.  I realize the bridge to nowhere stuff is "news" in the sense they have caught her in a lie (that means nothing to her admirers).  However, maybe it would mean something to them that this woman, who would be a heartbeat away from the President, cannot read aloud with the fluency of a competent third grader.  They wouldn't feel so comfortable about her poise if they saw the guffaws and paid attention to them.  (This kind of shallow stuff matters more in our culture than actual political substance).

Another sample of Sarah Palin's speaking is here on the Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG1vPYbRB7k.  Most of the comments about this video have focused the scary substance of these remarks.  (Of course we haven't seen any of these videos on TV).  However, the style of the delivery is pretty interesting too.  She rambles on in a very disorganized way, and the guffaw is clearly heard here too. She also rocks around on her feet.  We see in this video, not a poised performance, but the performance of a bad high school speaker.

This is the real reason the campaign doesn't want us to see an uncoached performance.  She tends to ramble incoherently.  She has a really unappealing guffaw.  She nervously moves around while speaking.   She can't read aloud very well.  (And her opinions are way off the chart outside the mainstream).

Not even John Stewart or Keith Olberman has picked up any of this video.  Let's see some juxtaposition of how she acts when coached and not coached.

So, after four days of coaching with professional speech coaches, Sarah Palin comes on national TV and reads a 47 minute speech written by a professional speech writer.  She gives a performance worthy of a mediocre high school thespian, complete with poorly modulated high pitched voice and garbled words from not understanding  the script.  After this joke of a performance, the media trumpet her as a success lauding her poise and charisma.  OK, expectations were low, she didn't drool.

Of course substance should prevail over style.  But it doesn't in our culture.  One might argue that George Bush has built a career out of talking like an uneducated rube.  That's true, but he doesn't ramble, he doesn't have a nasty guffaw under his "clever" statements, he doesn't wobble around while he speaks.  Many of the same people who would be OK with a President with extreme political views would be embarassed by one with an unpolished presentation.  So, trivial and shallow as it seems, it needs to be seen.  But then again focusing her he poor presentation is trivial and shallow, so is declaring the woman, a total unknown, a national icon after a 47 minute coached speech.