Week of March 2, 2009

I'm on hold — again — waiting for yet another customer-service representative to decide whether the"Bank of Woe" will lower the interest rate on my (substantial) outstanding credit-card debt. While waiting, I try not to listen to the loop recording that keeps advising me to use online banking, and instead ponder my predicament.

In brief, I'm pushing 30, I'm unemployed, I have no savings and a toddler to look after, I'm in debt up to my eyeballs, I'm reliant on my husband's modest salary as an assistant professor to buy food and pay the rent, and, to top it all, I have seemingly nonexistent career prospects at the moment. How did I, a reasonably freshly minted history Ph.D., end up in this impecunious and disheartening predicament? And, more important for my long-term mental health, why am I constantly replaying this grim laundry list of personal failures in my head, letting it loop over and over and over again as I struggle to complete daily tasks?

Am I a masochist? Have I unknowingly consigned myself to the punishing toil of Sisyphus, who, in Greek mythology, was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down again each time he reaches the top, for all eternity? In my pursuit first of a doctoral degree in history and now of a tenure-track academic position, have I merely taken up my own proverbial boulder?

ELIZABETHTON, Tenn. -- The Carter County Sheriff's Department is trying to serve an 80-year-old warrant for the arrest of a man who wrote a $30 bad check, although unsure if he is alive. The warrant, issued in August 1928, calls for the arrest of J.A. Rowland. It says he owes $30 for the bad check, $2 for the arrest fee and 50 cents each for the affidavit and warrant. Clerks at the Glynn County Sheriff's Office in Brunswick, Ga., recently found the warrant buried in a records storage room while cleaning and mailed it to Tennessee. Current Carter County Sheriff Chris Mathes told The Elizabethton Star he is still under a legal obligation to find Rowland.

... Obama told a whopper when he claimed that he is not for bigger government. As he said last week:"As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by Presidents Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets, not because I believe in bigger government -- I don't." This he asserted despite the fact that the budget he proposed the next day asks for federal spending as 28 percent of gross domestic product, higher by at least 6 percent than any time since World War II. Moreover, after 10 years, Obama's proposed spending as a percentage of GDP still would be 22.6 percent, nearly 2 percentage points higher than any year during the Bush administration despite the full costs of Sept. 11, the Iraq and Afghan wars and the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina.

The Embassy of the United States of American (USA) in Accra hosted a fashion show on Saturday evening to commemorate the ‘Black History Month’ as well as ‘Women’s History Month’ celebrations.

Obama's job is hard enough without making him be the next FDR, too....

Frankly, we're not doing Obama any favors by insisting that the hurdles he is determined to surmount are breathtaking proof of what today's Washington Post called"the breadth of his aspiration." For different reasons, congressional Republicans and some Democrats have a common objective—to turn Obama into the second coming of FDR and his agenda into the grandson of the New Deal. Clearly, that doesn't make much sense for Republicans over the long haul, because if they insist on seeing Obama's agenda that way, they'll be forced to make the same mistake they made in the 1930s and reflexively oppose it.

But given the choice, Democrats would be far wiser to see Obama as the first pragmatic president of the 21st century rather than the first big New Dealer since Roosevelt. FDR himself would have been the last one to boast of breathtaking ambitions. He spent most of his time reassuring people that he was taking measured steps to help them breathe easier.