A VC

My Favorite Line From The President's Press Conference Last Night

Comments (View) | Posted March 25, 2009 in Politics , Venture Capital and Technology

Financial McCarthyism

I was talking to my friend Michael today and he used a term to describe our mutual fear of a populist revolt against wall street and the financial sector: Financial McCarthyism

It got me thinking about the wisdom (or actually the lack of wisdom) in making wall street and the investors and executives that inhabit it the scapegoats of this financial mess we are in.

Yes, a lot of people in the financial industry made a lot of bad bets, were paid excessive sums for making those bad bets, and are at least partly to blame for the mess we are in.

But there's plenty of blame to go around; the politicians who created the political environment for the housing bubble, the regulators who didn't regulate, the borrowers who didn't think about the ramifications of paying too much and borrowing too much, and I could go on and on.

Not all of us are complicit in the making of this mess but certainly a lot of us are.

And the thing that concerns me is we need our financial system to get us out of this mess.

The people who built the house of cards are the ones who know how to take it down without it collapsing. And by turning them into the scapegoats, taxing their bonuses at 90 percent, and by vilifying them in public, we run the risk that they take their knowledge of how to unwind this mess most cost effectively and go home. Many already have.

I think Obama and his financial team are not stepping up to the plate and showing the right amount of leadership on this one. They are allowing the financial industry to take the lion's share of the blame and are not educating the public on why we need wall street's cooperation in getting us out of the mess.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that we should pay millions of dollars in guaranteed compensation to each and every wall street executive. But I am arguing for a balanced perspective, rationality, and an effort from our leaders to educate and explain instead of just scapegoating.

Comments (View) | Posted March 23, 2009 in Politics , stocks

Bonuses

It's not you, it's them that are wrong
Tell 'em to take out their tongues
And bring on the backlash!
Arctic Monkeys - Who The F***k Are The Arctic Monkeys

There was a piece in the New York Times recently (yes I do occasionally still read newspapers) that talked about the Obama administration's fear of a populist backlash against the bank bailouts. Their fear is correct and the backlash is upon us and it is real and it is ferocious.

The Gotham Gal penned her thoughts on the topic yesterday on her blog and suggested we all cancel our policies with AIG. I am with her on that one. We won't be AIG customers in short order. If you'd like to join us in our own populist revolt, please do.

There is no question that the word "bonus" will now be political poison. And that is unfortunate. Because I believe that bonuses, when properly constructed, can be an excellent way to compensate executives.

In the startup world, the primary way that founders and the management teams they hire are compensated is via equity. And that is the very best way to compensate people who run businesses. It aligns the interests of the shareholders and the managers.

But until we get some sort of liquid market for secondary shares, it is impossible to feed a family, send your kids to college, buy a home, and do all the things we all want to do for ourselves and our families with founder stock, options grants, and restricted stock.

So when our portfolio companies get to profitability and are growing and meeting all of their goals, but aren't yet ready or able to go public or exit, I am always in favor of a bonus plan for the management.

Let me start with what I am not in favor of:

1) guaranteed bonuses - This is, I believe, a big part of the AIG problem. Guaranteed bonuses are not in anyone's interest other than the person receiving them. I don't like them and will do my hardest to make sure they never are part of a compensation structure in any of our portfolio companies.

2) multi-million dollar bonuses - We want the majority (ideally the vast majority) of management's compensation to be in the form of equity so our interests are aligned. When management is generating millions (or tens of millions of dollars) of cash compensation via bonuses, the equity becomes immaterial to them and that is very dangerous. That is what went down on Wall Street as the Gotham Gal pointed out in her post.

3) contractual obligations - all bonuses should, at the end of the day, be subject to board and compensation committee approval (even if the goals that trigger the bonuses have been met). The board has a fiduciary responsibility to look after the stockholders first and foremost. If paying the bonuses (even if they have been earned) puts the company in trouble, then there needs to be a mechanism for the board to avoid paying them. Compensation committee and board approval does that.

4) Bonuses should not be paid in unprofitable companies. I have violated this in a few instances when we wanted to recruit a CEO who had a compensation need that we could not meet with base compensation. I feel that bonuses in unprofitable companies are really just a form of additional base compensation. But the nice thing about bonuses is you have the board approval "kill switch" and we have used that recently to deal with a need to reduce burn rates. Bottom line on this one, I am very uncomfortable with bonuses in unprofitable companies and getting more so.

Now that we've dealt with the "no nos", here is what I like to do with management bonuses.

I prefer bonuses that are based on ebitda. My thinking is that value creation in companies comes from earnings growth. The more ebitda you have, and the faster it is growing, the more value you are creating for stockholders. But I don't like the idea that management is incented to maximize ebitda in the short run to create bigger bonuses for themselves while starving the business of needed investment.

So I've become fond of an approach where the company pays management bonuses on "incremental year ove year ebitda." The way this works is you pick a base year and for the next year you pay management a bonus of x% of the incremental ebitda they generate. The best way to do this is a five year plan with a goal of obtaining a significant increase in ebitda so management has time to make the investments needed to get there.

Let's take a hypothetical example. Say a company has just had its first profitable year and made $1mm in ebtida. The plan is to get to $20mm of ebitda in five years. So the board approves a plan to pay out 10% of incremental year over year ebitda as management bonuses. Let's say that the next five years produce the following ebitda numbers:

Year 1 - $2.5mm

Year 2 - $5mm

Year 3 - $9mm

Year 4 - $14mm

Year 5 - $20mm

Then the management bonuses would be:

Year 1 - $150k

Year 2 - $250k

Year 3 - $400k

Year 4 - $500k

Year 5 - $600k

The management team could choose in any year to not grow ebitda at all (and not get any bonus) if they had an opportunity to make an investment in the business that would generate significant incremetal ebitda in the out years and they would get paid for doing that.

There are some issues with this approach. One is acquisitions which generally force a reformulation of the numbers in the plan. Another is that this plan does not allow for incentives for "qualitative goals" like building a high quality management team, creating a long term strategic plan, etc. You can pair those qualitative goals with a quantitative plan but it dilutes the laser like focus on long term ebitda growth and that is not always good.

There are plenty of other approaches I've seen over the years for management bonuses and as long as they meet the four rules that I laid out, I am generally in favor of most anything that helps management get some incremental cash compensation for generating shareholder value before they can get liquidity on their investment of time and energy in building the company.

In summary, the word bonus is going to be a loaded term going forward and it is going to be harder for boards of all kinds to put in place bonus plans for management. In many ways that is a good thing and hopefully we'll see less of the bad bonus activity that I laid out in my four "no nos." But a well structured modest bonus plan for management can be a very good thing for shareholders and I believe we should not walk away from the concept entirely.

Comments (View) | Posted March 18, 2009 in Politics , Venture Capital and Technology

When Government Funds Business

The Gotham Gal opened the NY Times this morning and she says to me "didn't we just put money into Citibank?". The we being all of us taxpayers here in the US.

I said, "yes, a couple times I think". And then she got upset. Because there at the bottom of the NY Times is a big advertisement for Citibank (see the photo on the right).

She went on. "We are paying for that ad. In a newspaper that less and less people read every day. No wonder they are in trouble".

There's something poetic, ironic, and iconic about that ad at the bottom of the NY Times today. It sums up so much of what we are all seeing and feeling these days.

Old school companies sticking to old school approaches that don't work anymore. All the while new companies with new approaches are succeeding and even thriving. Welcome to the macropocalypse.

But there's a bigger issue here. Bob Lefsetz talked about it in his post last night about Sheryl Crow and Maureen Dowd.

When our government starts spending our money backstopping companies, then we start paying more attention to how those companies are spending our money. And we don't like it. It is going to get worse.

We are involved with a non-profit group here in NYC that is doing some very important work around parks and public spaces. In the past they had funding from companies like UBS and JP Morgan Chase. They can't tap that money anymore because those companies don't want to be doing anything "inappropriate" with public funds (as if supporting parks was inappropriate). And since all money is fungible, all of these companies' funds are public funds now.

Being the CEO of a company who has taken government money is like having a big target on your back. Everything you do is going to be second guessed, debated and discussed like never before. "Now it's become sexy because they are doing it on our dime" Well said Bob.

This whole situation sucks. When government funds business, it messes everything up.

Comments (View) | Posted March 1, 2009 in Politics , stocks

Ten Thoughts On The President's Speech Last Night

1) "The USA will emerge stronger than before" That's a tall order. I'd settle for we will recover. Given the demographics of the changing world we live in (read Zakaria's Post-American World), I wonder if that's a promise the President should be making.

2) I read the speech in its entirety twice and did not find one mention of immigration. The President says we owe our prosperity to our ingenuity and tenacity. I think that's true but a lot of that ingenuity and tenacity came from first and second generation immigrants. If we are not prepared to open up our borders more broadly to the best and brightest and toughest in this world, all the rest is just words

3) His recovery plan has three initiatives, a revised TARP, HASP, and stimulus. That's it. I did not get the sense that there is more after that. I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's the hand he's playing.

4) Hardest working people on earth? C'mon Barack. Don't bullshit us. Go back and read number two.

5) He's also got three domestic priorities; energy, health care, and education. He's right that our economy is highly impacted by them. I'm limpressed that he's picked some stuff to focus on and I think these are three great areas to focus on for long term sustainability.

6) 95pcnt of the jobs created with stimulus will be private sector jobs. That's a great factoid. Let's put a big pie chart on the front page of recovery.gov and chart that in real time please.

7) A new accountability for money spent saving banks. Barack said "I intend to hold these banks fully accountable for the assitance they receive". Good luck with that. Money is fungible. It doesn't have RFID tags on it. Trust me on this one. I know a bit about handing over money to companies. There's only one way to know it will be spent well and that is smart, honest, and capable management. An army of accountants is going to get unleashed on the banking sector and god help them and us.

8) "its not about helping banks - its about helping people" I'm with the president on this. I also appreciate his statement that his job is to solve the problem. He's got that right. I'll be measuring him on how he does on that measure. Its a hard problem made harder by the people whose house he was in last night. I'm rooting for him. We should all be rooting for him.

9) Energy - the best part of his speech was the bit about energy. He gets it. But the auto sector has the potential to be the "vietnam" of his energy plan. Act swiftly and courageously there Mr President or it could be a noose around your neck. Just look at GM. In two short months they are back on your doorstep with their hands out. When a portfolio company acts like that in our business, they are dead on arrival.

10) Education - I think the President missed an opportunity last night to call on the private sector to invest in education. There are literally thousands of amazing entrepreneurs working in this industry and I think they'll collectively do more to reform and reinvent education than anything that comes out of washington.

11) Fiscal discipline. Its a bit surreal to be talking about balancing the budget in light of stimulus, HASP, and TARP. The only way its going to happen is huge cuts in defense spending and a wholesale re-evaluation of our domestic spending priorities. Watching Pelosi and Biden behind the President was distracting and a reminder that as well intenioned as Obama is, he's got an impossible job.

That's all I've got. Please let me know what you thought of it in the comments.

Comments (View) | Posted February 25, 2009 in Politics

A Stimulus Plan For Venture Capital? No Thanks.

Tom Friedman, who I admire in many ways, has an op-ed piece in today's NY Times where he suggests that the US government take the bailout money they are thinking of giving to the auto industry and instead give it to the top venture capital firms.

I understand the point Tom is making - that we ought to be investing in the future instead of the past. And for that, I applaud him.

But the venture capital business, thankfully, does not need any more capital. It's got too much money in it, not too little. Just ask the limited partners who have been overfunding the venture capital business for the past 15-20 years what they think. You don't even need to ask them. They are taking money out of the sector because the returns have been weak.

And the top 20 firms in the venture capital business are the least in need of a bailout of any group I've ever thought about. These firms, the Sequoias and Benchmarks and Accels and Kleiner Perkins etc etc can raise a fund anytime they want. Accel raised a ton of money last fall in the midst of the worst global financial meltdown in my lifetime.

The venture capital business is an asset class where the top 10-20 percent of the firms make 80%+ of the returns. That's how its always been and that's how it will likely always be. It's because the best entrepreneurs want to work with firms with reputations for making money, making connections, recruting top talent, and getting the right exit at the right time. And those are the top 10-20 percent of the firms.

So Tom's idea, while it looks good on paper, is a dream. The top venture firms don't want, don't need, and are never going to take government money. The same is true of the top entrepreneurs.

The worst firms, on the other hand, will gladly accept government money. And that is what is going to happen with all of these government efforts to pour more money into the "innovation sector". That money will go to bad investors and weak entrepreneurs and management teams for the most part. It's a problem of adverse selection.

If you take a look at all of the economically targeted investment programs that have been built and managed over the past twenty years in the venture capital industry, you'll see this plain and clearly.

There are some good ideas out there. My friend Brad Feld told me about a new legislative effort in Colorado to give angel investors a 50% tax credit for making investments in early stage companies. That makes better sense to me. Let the market work but lubricate it a bit with tax credits, particularly for the angel sector which has been the most hurt in this downturn.

But please leave the venture business alone. It's working pretty well as it is and it certainly doesn't need more money or some kind of stimulus plan.

Comments (View) | Posted February 22, 2009 in Politics , Venture Capital and Technology

Taking It To The Hood

Note: This is a first for the AVC blog. I did not write this post. It was written by Jeff Minch, known to this community as JLM. Jeff has been leaving comments on this blog for the past six to nine months and I've enjoyed reading them very much. Jeff has a very different view than I do about politics and about other areas as well. But you cannot read his opinions and not come away impressed and thinking differently. That's the kind of voices we have here in our community and I am excited about sharing some of them with all of you every once in a while. I don't plan to do this very often, but I do plan to do it from time to time. With that said, please enjoy Jeff's thoughts on the President's housing plan.

Taking it to the Hood
The Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan

Fred Wilson asked me to react to the President’s housing initiative and I am honored to do so.  I find “A VC” to be the single best blog that I have the opportunity to read primarily because of the content offered by its participants and their obvious qualifications but also because of the comity of the dialogue and the ability for strong willed folks to disagree without being disagreeable.  Fred has chosen some great blog topics and while there is a “forum” quality to the actual dialogue, it is the selection of the topics which focuses all of that intelligence.

The TARP was for Wall Street.  The Stimulus was for Main Street.  The HASP is for the Hood.  There will be much to like and there will be much to dislike.  A frame of reference:

1.    Our Nation was in great measure formed by folks who had a desire to have their own house.  A gross oversimplification, I am sure but a bit of truth nonetheless.  Increasing home ownership in the United States after World War II was one of the single most important elements in the wealth creation and evolution of the culture of that extraordinary time.

2.    Housing is both physical and emotional as it is where our sweetest memories are made, discussed and lived.  It is where our hearts are and if we fail in this arena we have more than just financial failure, we have broken hearts and a diminishing of the American dream.  [If you knew me well, you would be amazed to hear me say something so “squishy” like that but I have my own reasons.  More importantly, I truly believe it.]

3.    Housing --- or perhaps I should say abuses of housing, particularly housing finance --- is at the root of our current financial problems.  There is plenty of blame to go around without resorting to political finger pointing.  A good idea got swept up in the euphoria of the times and we allowed basic rules of finance to be violated at the personal, industry, banking, regulatory, legislative, GSE and securities levels.  Housing was the spark which ignited the flames which fanned out of control.  It is good therefore that President Obama is addressing a root cause of the problem.

4.    Homes are very important to the fabric of our Nation from a social perspective and while I cannot readily quote any supporting figures, I can say with some conviction that a child raised in a stable home is more likely to become a contributor to society rather than a cost center to society; and, conversely the opposite is also true.  [At the end of the day, all we are trying to do is to get the taxpayers to outnumber the recipients of government largesse.]

5.    Home equity represents the most important (and generally hidden) asset in most folk’s lives when it comes to building long term retirement equity.

So, I am a big fan of stable homes for a number of reasons.

On the whole, the HASP is a damn good start but it is only a start.  Is it perfect right out of the chute?  Hell no.  Here are the things I like in the order in which I like them:

1.    I think the probability of the plan working is dramatically heightened by the President’s wisdom in originating the plan in his office rather than having the Congress draft legislation and running afoul of the partisan minefields such action would generate.  President Obama can barter a bit of political capital in this endeavor by direct sponsorship and can avoid the unifying opposition of having Speaker Pelosi being the plan’s sponsor.

2.    I just love the idea that a Federal Bankruptcy Judge can intervene in the dialogue between a bank and a borrower and take immediate and almost unappealable action to force a mortgage settlement.  This is a shadow of the “cram down” provision of bankruptcy law but it is even more effective because neither party regularly appears in that Court and thus there is a real balance of terror.  Federal Bankruptcy Judges are the most powerful Judges in the judiciary, they are experienced in dealing with tales of woe, they are very decisive and do not suffer fools well.  It will also motivate banks to settle things quickly once they know the model which will be used.  This will help deal with all of the mortgages, including jumbo mortgages, which are not held by the GSEs.  The Federal Bankruptcy Judges I know will be able to modify a mortgage in about 12 minutes.

3.    The application of a specific financial yardstick at 38% of gross income able to be “bought down” to 31% is pragmatic.  Of course, this will be complicated by the ability of a borrower to free up other funds to inject equity but it is a good start.  I would have liked the final residual number to have been 25% because I think we are still headed downward for about 12-18 months.

4.    The other important element of this buy down approach is the ability to now put a definitive price on the formerly “toxic” assets.  Remember, the most important element to trading this stuff off balance sheets has been the inability to price it.  This solves a lot of that problem.

5.    Discrimination between those already in the ditch and those who are at the edge of the abyss as well as those whose only real problem is the declining value of their home is useful and while it doesn’t cover every single circumstance, it does cover a huge portion.

There a couple of areas which merit a bit of discussion and undoubtedly will require some modification.

1.    First, let me ask that everybody go re-read the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard.  Why?  Because like laborers in the vineyard, the HASP will leave some folks feeling like they were mistreated because they were prudent in their mortgage dealings and will not benefit from the HASP.  My answer?  “Friend, I am doing you no wrong.”  There are just some things in the life of a Nation in which you simply cannot get the toothpaste back into the tube regardless of how firmly we believe that is the just solution.

2.    The plan is simply too complex on its surface.  This is a problem with President Obama, he is smart and he assumes that others are equally smart.  The average Wharton MBA could not read the Executive Summary of this plan and “brief back” its provisions from memory.  The borrowers?  Hey, they didn’t provide income documentation and were not interested in a lot of paperwork to begin with --- do you think they are going to come trotting into their bank with a bunch of documentation now?  The plan has to be simple enough that a high school grad (OK, in the top half of his class.) could understand it.

Does a fish taste any different if you catch it with a worm, hook, bobber, line and a cane pole?  KISS --- keep it simple for the stupid!

3.    The plan does nothing to stop pending foreclosures.  I would like to have had a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures currently pending.  It is outrageous that banks receiving TARP funds are not called to cooperate fully with all government sponsored bailouts.  They were first in line to receive assistance and they should also be first in line to provide assistance.  These guys owe us!

4.    I hate the provision that if a borrower who has received a loan modification is current in their payments that they receive $1,000 annually for five years.  When a cute little mouse has his leg removed from a trap, he does not negotiate for a piece of the cheese before scurrying away.  This paternal approach is really insulting to all involved.  Everybody should get one chance to be saved with no do overs.

5.    I wish the plan had a provision that the “work out” financing could also be applied to first time home purchasers in order to soak up some of the excess inventory out there.  Missed opportunity to work down the supply of troubled housing and for banks to reduce their REO.

6.    There is a sense that the mortgage modifications are only going to be for five years.  This is silly.  Make them permanent and make the solution permanent.  Five years is not very long for an asset which is normally financed over 30 years and which can last for 100 years.  There is ample evidence that re-default rates are as high as default rates.  Solve the problem permanently.

7.    The government should get an “equity kicker” for their trouble.  If you participate in the plan and peg a new value on your home, then the government should get either a par payoff of a 25% equity kicker above the marked down price for the next ten years.  Why not?

In closing, let me say that of the three plans advanced thus far I like the HASP the best.  Remember we are only talking about a national mortgage delinquency rate of something less than 7%, so while the problem is huge in terms of dollars it is really more manageable in terms of the numbers of folks impacted.  We desperately need a win on the economy and this may be a promising start.

I rate the TARP at zero probability of working because I think that Darwin was right all along.  I rate the Stimulus at 25% with its most significant failing its disconnect between the spending and the creation of jobs.  I rate the HASP at 50% with the possibility to engineer that upward with some simple modifications.  Thanks for listening.

---------

Fred's Update: You might enjoy watching the Rick Santelli rant on CNBC in conjunction with this post. What a great discussion and debate we are having here. I love it.

Fred's Update 2: I measure the success of a post by the number of comments. By that score, JLM hit one out of the park with over 100 comments and still growing in less than 24 hours. Well done JLM, great topic, great post, and great discussion. You will be a tough act to follow.

Comments (View) | Posted February 20, 2009 in Politics , stocks

Truth

Last night Jessica showed me an essay she wrote after reading DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little. In the opening paragraph she wrote:

It was a proud moment for me, because if there is one thing I hope to pass onto my children, it's the notion that there is no singular truth.

I was at a dinner last week where much of the NYC digerati (young and old) were assembled in a lovely apartment on the upper east side. After dinner but before dessert, the hosts initiated a discussion of the obsession of the moment: whither media. At one point, the argument came out that we need journalism to surface the truth. At which point, I sort of lost my composure and argued loudly that there is no truth.

There used to be a mantra at the upper right of this blog. I can't remember what it said exactly, but the gist of it was that there is no absolute truth, just your truth and my truth. I post my truth here everyday and I hope you'll drop by and share your truth with me.

This is the promise of social media. It's revolutionary. When you give every citizen in the world a printing press, you ought to expect revolution. And it is upon us.

I loved this paragraph in NY Mag's piece on Twitter which is in the current issue:

"His is a culture of sharing information" No, that is not his culture. That is our culture. That's where we are because every single one of us has a printing press in our hands at all times. I do understand that not everyone on this planet has a cell phone with a camera and an internet connection, but you get my point.

We've moved past the time when big institutions controlled what we read, what we thought, and what we believed. And we are arriving at a new place where each and everyone of us will report on our world and share it with others. Sharing is the new truth.

Sunday night the Grammys told us that Robert Plant and Allison Krauss made the record of the year. That's fine. That's their opinion. Mine is different. I believe that Okkervil River made the record of the year last year. But you know that because I published that opinion on this very blog in December of last year. Compare the Grammys to the Hype Machine's Music Zeitgest and you'll see what the old world looks like and what the new world looks like.

If you want to hear some good new music, it's hard to find it on radio. I just went to KRock's website and looked at the most recent songs they played. There's not one new song (that came out in the past year) in the most recent ten songs. It's all stuff that was popular years ago. Compare that to fredwilson.fm. On my radio station, we play new music. In fact, the music is so new on fredwilson.fm that I should be getting take down notices because half of the most recent ten songs have not even been released yet. And of the other half of the most recent ten, only one song is old and one more is a live cover.

How does fredwilson.fm get programmed? Sharing, of course. Each day I share one mp3 on my tumblog. fredwilson.fm just pulls all those posts together and plays them in a stream in reverse chronological order. Today, I'm sharing a track from a new band of teenagers from NYC called Care Bears On Fire. This brings me to my next point. I've got a vested interest in Care Bears' success (which I disclose in that post I linked to).

We all have vested interests and social media allows us to promote them to each other. That vested interest could be economic (like my interest in Care Bears) or it could be political (like my posts in support of Obama last fall) or it could be familial (like my reblogs of Gotham Gal's recipes or Jessica's photography).

My partner Brad once asked his nephew why he preferred sports blogs to the sports sections in the newspaper. His nephew said "everyone has a point of view but with blogs, they are upfront about it". Indeed. I'm a Jets, Mets, and Knicks fan. That's the lens through which I view the sports world, sadly.

This culture of sharing is not limited to the written word. Log into Boxee and you'll see a screen that looks like this.

The very first thing you see when you log into Boxee are the recommendations from your friends on Boxee. Facebook's user interface is coming to your TV sometime soon. It's not going to be about what NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, or anyone else wants you to watch. It's going to be about what your friends are watching. It always has been about that but we just haven't had the TV interfaces that recognize that.

There I go again, talking about my vested interests (our firm has an investment in Boxee). That's my truth.

I've got to end this post because I need to turn it into a presentation I can deliver at SocComm in about three hours. So I'll end this post by linking out to a couple of other truths out there on the issues I've covered here.

Comments (View) | Posted February 10, 2009 in My Music , Politics , Venture Capital and Technology , Weblogs

Kirsten Gillibrand

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeSo we have a new senator here in NY, replacing Hillary Clinton. Her name is Kirsten Gillibrand and honestly, I've never heard of her before the announcement yesterday. Fortunately, The NY Times did a long piece on her today and I learned quite a bit about our new senator.

She's a "centrist democrat" (good) from a largely republican district (also good). I don't agree with everything she's for (she gets a 100% approval rating from the NRA), but I agree with her on most stuff.

But when I read this, I knew I am going to like her:

I sure hope the "sunlight report" survives her move from the House to the Senate. Making her colleagues look bad is the first step to making them copy her.

We need people in government who aren't afraid to be transparent and tell everyone who cares what they think, who is lobbying them, and why.

I think I'm going to like our new senator. I hope I get a chance to meet her soon.

Comments (View) | Posted January 24, 2009 in Politics

Inaugurapalooza

The Gotham Gal and I have t-shirts that say '1.20.09' on them. We've been wearing them for the past year. At first, as a sign of protest against an administration whose values, strategies, and people we did not believe in from day one. Then as the election grew near, we wore them in anticipation of today, a day when we inaugurate a president whose values, strategies, and people we do believe in.

I am excited for today like most americans. But I am also already a bit disappointed in our new president. This inaugurapalooza (term courtesy of kurt andersen) that has been going on for the past couple days is not my idea of the best launching pad for this terribly important administration. This reminds me of every other inaugural celebration in my lifetime. The black tie galas, the celebratory tone, and the lavish partying that is going down in washington is more of the same. It turns me off.

But Obama has an opportunity to get me back on the train with his speech today and his actions tomorrow and the rest of this month. We need a new way of operating in this country. We need to be more selfless and we need to say no more often. We need to accept and allow failure and we need to facilitate rebirth. That's what has made us great in the past and that's what will keep us great

There are those who comment on this blog like kidmercury who think we're already toast and our corrupt government and society needs a complete reboot. I don't subscribe to that kind of absolutism, but I know where that feeling comes from. Our country is in trouble because we are in denial and I would love to hear some admonishment from our new president on that score today. Some tough love in additon to, or even instead of, uplifting soaring words would play well in my ears.

I'll be watching like most of america and twittering my thoughts. I hope you will too. Most of all I hope Barack Obamna tells America to pull up our pants today.

Comments (View) | Posted January 20, 2009 in Politics