I was feeling sorry for my fellow angry males recently. By that I mean I can understand the frustration of the angry white males. If the number one guy representing you is George Bush you certainly deserve the sympathy from us minorities. Most of you are probably looking forward to 2008 when you can vote in a WASP that is more representative of your people's ability to run the free world. Then you realize that since everybody who is not a Republican is going to vote Democrat in 2008 you decide to see who among the Democrats will be our next president. Lo and behold, the front runners are a female whom even a sex addict like Bill Clinton doesn't like to sleep with, and a black guy with a middle name Hussein. All of a sudden the white males are underdogs in trying to win the Democratic nomination! John Edwards? The only thing he has going for him is youth and charisma; the same advantage Obama has. While Obama will carry his state in the general election, Edwards probably will not. This white guy can't even claim to have more experience than the inexperience black guy, the usual justification for the glass ceiling. My fellow angry males of the lighter persuasion may not run the free world after 2008!

Worse for the white guys than losing the presidency of the United States is the fact that they are losing something more important. I mean the Super Bowl. Both coaches in the Super Bowl this year are black. The myth of the intelligent white guy is gone. Pretty soon you are going to tell me that they are not going to dominate golf. Oops, there is that Tiger fellow. O.K. NASCAR will be forever white and male. At least until Danica Patrick decides to swith from Indy racing.

So I do feel sorry for the white male. But not too much. The yellow man still has it worse. The Oakland Raiders just hired Lane Kiffin to be their new head coach. This is a 31 year old white guy who had no previous head coaching experience at any level. He was the understudy to Norm Chow till Chow left USC. You can't tell me he is a better candidate than Chow who was taking BYU's passing game to a level that it had not seen before or since when Kiffin was in middle school. Chow was passed over to reunite with Matt Leinart at Arizona. He was passed over by Stanford a few years ago with the job going to a guy who won one game for Stanford this year. You can't tell me Chow couldn't have done better. So now Stanford has hired Jim Harbaugh who cannot hold Chow's jock strap as an offensive innovator. Stanford and the Raiders are both in the Bay area so it would not be a bad idea to hire a qualified Asian to run their teams. The Raiders has the chance to draft Brady Quinn or Jamarcus Russsel this year. Who would be the best person to develop these quarterbacks? Last year it was the consensus of every expert that while Vince Young was the better athlete, Matt Leinart was way more ready to play quarterback in the NFL right away. Yet under Chow's training, Young was by far the better quarterback of the two in their rookie year. That can't be due to athletic ability alone. So you tell me why Al Davis chose a young guy with limited experience over Chow. It probably is not racial because Davis had hired Art Shell before, twice. But if Chow was black there would be an outcry for him not being a head coach a long time ago. Davis can't justify hiring Kiffin and not even considered Chow unless he has changed the Raider's motto from "Just win, baby" to "Just win with a baby".

As expected Bush decides to escalate the war by sending more troops into Iraq. It is an escalation even if it is called a surge. As you know I was against going into Iraq and I wanted a pull out a long time ago so my opinion on this surge is biased. I do believe, however, that the surge is the only choice Bush can make politically. If he decides on a withdrawl now or in the near future it would be admitting defeat and his legacy is decided. This surge is the equivalent of a Hail Mary in football. It is very, very unlikely to work but what the heck, it is his only chance.

There is actually a chance that this would work for a short while. Overwhelming force targeting a small area can shut down the insurgents for a time. If it calms things down for a year or so then even if the violence increase again Bush can stall things until the next president is elected. If things get worse then and we have to leave Iraq, then Bush can claim that if we had stayed his course the result would be different. Again it is unlikely that Bush can stall that long effectively but this is a better chance than the one about actually winning with the surge.

The reason this can't work in the long term is because there are violence from all different directions. There is the Shiites militias, with the blessing of the Iraqui government, against the Sunnis; the Sunnis against the Shiites; the Sunnis against the U.S.; and the foreign al qaeda fighters against the U.S. It is like killing bacteria with antibiotics and allowing fungi and viruses to grow because they have less competition. Kill some Sunnis, the Shiites get bolder etc. The increase in economic aids would have been more helpful couple of years earlier. It would have decrease the ability of all the bad guys from recruiting. Now it is a little late but wouldn't hurt to do it anyways.

John McCain may benefit from this. It seemed like a dumb move to call for increase in troops a few weeks ago given the expression of the people in the recent election. But if there is some success in the beginning then McCain looks like a genius with guts as he called for this way before Bush did. This may make a difference in the Republican primaries and also force the Democratic candidates to stake out a position rather than just criticize what Bush had done in the last 3 years. If later on things go badly, McCain can claim that Bush increased troops too late and too little. Even if things go badly before the election, McCain would likely win the Republican nomination with Bush following his idea now.

Ultimately it is not the political consequences that we should worry about. It is the enormous expense in human lives and economic losses that this escalation of the war is going to bring that should worry us. As Americans most of us hope that somehow a miracle happens and that this plan actually works. But unfortunately even if it does it would not make us safer. Working for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, going after al qaeda in Afghanistan, and decreasing our reliance on foreign oil, all of which we have not paid much attention to as a result of this war, would have made us safer. So even if this "Hail Mary" is completed, we will lose this game which we should never have played in the first place.

The Democrats are pushing a legislation that would compel the government to negotiate prices of medications paid for by the Medicare prescripion program. The original law passed by the Republicans specifically prohibited the government from negotiating. This obviously benefits the drug companies rather than the taxpayers. It was totally irresponsible for a party that claims to be fiscally conservative. You would never buy a big item for your family without trying to negotiate the best price possible. By not negotiating, the government is negligent with our money.

There are those that defend the drug industry with the argument that if prices were controlled or negotiated, innovations will suffer and fewer new drugs will be invented. They point to the high cost in R&D that bring about new drugs. Well, most of the basic research are done in the wonderful universities that we have in this country. Sure it is still a lot of work to take a basic scientific finding and use it to manufacture a new class of drugs. But most of the drugs that brought to market each year are not of a new class. They are usually just slightly different from existing drugs. For example, there are many drugs in the class of statin drugs that are useful in lowering cholesterol. Certainly the first statin drug deserved a long patent period and its manufacturer should be able to charge a large sum for all its work to bring the medication to market. Now however, there are several drugs in the same class and the research that brought them about is not so creative or expensive. Yet these drugs are costing 5 to 6 dollars a pill to patients with no insurance. The drug companies figure that if they work on these so-called "me too" drugs, the profit margin will be much greater than to find a brand new drug for another disease.

Letting the drug companies charge whatever they want without negotiating is actually decreasing the number of truly innovative drugs from coming to the market. If you have the only drug for a particular disease, then even if there is negotiation, you will have the upper hand because there is no alternative. But if there are several drugs that are similar then prices should go down. This way the drug companies will have the incentive to invent truly new drugs and not just make small changes on old ones.

The truth is I am not a supporter of this Medicare drug program at all. There are many problems with it and I don't have the energy to write about all of them. It is basically an entitlement program and I thought the Republicans are against entitlements. Like various programs to help children and pregnant women, this program for seniors is a band-aid for a not so healthy healthcare system in this country. But seeing how there is not good ideas or support to overhaul the healthcare system and that the Medicare prescription program is here to stay, at least we should try to do the one thing that obviously should have been done in the beginning: try to get the best prices! The Democrat bill is no panacea but it deserves our support.

I read that Bob Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot resigned under pressure from frustrated stockholders. This would seem to be a victory for the little guy until we found out that the severance package was worth 210 million dollars. This is the reward for guiding the company to a decline of 12% in stock value during his tenure. This is an example of skyrocketing executive compensation that demonstrate the culture of corporate greed in America. Add to this the buying off of politicians from big business and big unions, it is a wonder that those of us who works in small businesses with no clout can survive.

If this country is to be a true meritocracy, then we cannot have people who are doing a poor job be compensated excessively. The compensation packages of these executives are set by the board of directors with the recommendation of so-called consultants. Of course these consultants benefits by driving up the prices of the executives. Afterall there is no point in hiring consultants to recommend a small salary. The board of directors are often made up of execuitves in other companies so it is of no benefit to them to drive down salaries of executives overall. One of the board member of Home Depot is the executive at Countrywide who, as was pointed out by a commentor from an earlier blog here, received 60 million dollars a year from his company. So surely he is not going to vote for a small package for Nardelli. Executives who lead his company to great profit should be paid well. But shouldn't someone who did a poor job also lose compensation as a result? When a company is doing poorly, workers are layed off and investors lose stock values. Shouldn't the person who makes the most also suffer along with everyone else?

I am not a fan of big union either. There will be a blog on them in the near futue. But the execessive compensation of CEOs makes it harder to complain about the performances of the little guys. If in a capitalist society there should be no limit of what one can make, then there should not be safe parachutes to stop one from falling hard. Excessive severance packages not only hurt the bottom line but it hurts the morale of the average workers. All of us who are stock holders should demand accountability from the executives and the board of directors. This is essential for the competitiveness of our country.