Good riddance to the holiday season. Soon it will be good riddance to 2008, a bad year ending with the promise of a worse economy to come. First in a series of reflections & predictions.
Is this guy really President? How did this happen? He’s young, has a big smile and a thoughful demeanor. A steady hand on the wheel in a choppy sea. Even the most venal right-wing Republican pundits are keeping their powder dry and cautiously adhering to a tacit cease-fire. Rush Limbaugh says that the choice of Hillary for State is “brilliant” and he wholly supports it? Be wary when your enemies praise you, but be thankful. Camelot may be sweeter as a sequel. Will we be let down six months into the new administration because all our problems will not magically disappear? Hope takes self-renewal, the basis of America’s experiment in democracy. Can he inspire us after the election as much as he did during the campaign?
Caroline Kennedy won’t be NY’s next senator: She doesn’t impress me, she has no experience in politics or government. If she woke up one day and decided she really wants this then let her run in 2010 and prove it. There are are plenty of other heavyweights who can tag team with Schumer and approximate the gravitas of Hillary. To be New York’s Senator she has to pay her dues.
New York will resemble Blade Runner: The city won’t be run by replicants, or maybe it already is and we don’t know it. Residential and commercial real estate still has a ways to drop, the MTA is a disaster, schools and essential services are being slashed, the city is begging to the state which is begging to the Feds, which is bailing out industries and perhaps soon municipalities. We will never re-visit Summer of Sam but New York on the skids can be dirty, dangerous and borderline overwhelming, separating the survivors from the realists.
PR Blunder of the Week: You Know Chrysler is Toast Because … Mark Cuban flames the company on his blog and generates a windstorm of bad publicity for the beleaguered U.S. auto maker. Chrysler was so ecstatic that the government is throwing it a couple billion that it took out full-page thank you ads in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and USA Today.
On his personal blog, Cuban called the move “idiotic” and asked, “How does it make the next unemployed Chrysler worker feel that their entire year’s salary just went for a single, ridiculous ad?”
Chrysler’s statement on the Cuban maverick post: ”With the recent announcement by the White House, Chrysler LLC has the initial injection of working capital necessary to help bridge the liquidity crisis the industry is facing and help return the Company to profitability. The ad thanks America for this investment in Chrysler. As the process evolves, many individuals will have opinions. The Company has no higher priority than to satisfy the loan conditions laid out last Friday by the Government. As a result, Chrysler will not comment on individual opinion.”
You have to pay those internal PR people to say something.
Images this week thanks to Waltz with Bashir, an Ari Folman film perhaps even more relevant this week due to the escalated conflict between the Israelis and Hamas.
Wikipedia is the antithesis of PR. 
Costa Rica has a problem. It’s not “rising crime and a souring economy,” as the 
My father-in-law died last week. He was 92 and lived near 
The obituary service at the P-I is through 
I have never seen such a sullen holiday season in New York. Prices are slashed 35%-50% all over town and still the stores are empty. People are in spending lockdown as the idle crain’s atop hulking abandoned high-rise condos attest to the deep impact of a recession that promises to be prolonged and painful. It seems almost obscene to shop this holiday season.
to gorge on mediocre cupcakes, cakes, and pies and marginally acceptable coffee. The lines at Magnolia are always ridiculously long – I was not willing to waste an hour to get a cupcake (besides, real New Yorkers eschew such obviously touristy behavior).
Joe (played by Andrea Modica, below right) is a stressed out VP at a New York PR agency. Melanie (played by Ella Jane New, left) is a stressed out marketing exec launching a new cruise liner. A chance encounter in the waiting room a therapist’s office leads to impromptu venting, a connection and a negotiation - proving that in New York your life can radically change in less than 10 minutes. 
Work for a U.S. auto maker and see how fast the big PR dollars fly out the window. The recent show by the big 3 U.S. automakers before Congress was generally 
