Weekend roundup

I appeared on Alabama Public Television’s “For the Record” program Friday. (I’ll post the link to the program here later today.) Among the items we discussed was the Senate’s defeat of the Big Three bailout bill. Not to worry, though; President Bush appears ready and willing to fork over the cash somehow, some way. It appears that it will be done through the $700 billion bailout Congress passed back in October. Yes, that was supposed to be for the financial services industry. Yes, that bailout been named “TARP”—short for Troubled Assets Relief Program. Yes, it was meant to buy up “bad paper” to free up credit. And yes, by including car makers in a program that was designed, vetted and approved by lawmakers for the financial services industry, of course the president is doing an end-run around Congress. But what the heck. It’s a free-for-all!

As part of the Big Three discussion, FTR host Tim Lennox mentioned Boycott Alabama Now, an effort organized by former GM employee Joe Babiasz in response to Sen. Richard Shelby’s vocal opposition to the bailout.

“The sad part is this has nothing to do with the number of hard-working, innocent people of the state. This is a political statement specifically against the senator,“ Joe Babiasz, of Huntington Woods, Mich., said Friday.

Babiasz explains how he is going to make his “political statement specifically against the senator:“

You will not go to the state, you will not vacation there, do any business there. Any of their products, their Mercedes, and any of the other….Toyota, Honda… you won’t purchase their cars.”

Joe Babiasz: “The goal is to have a nationwide boycott – to have thousands and thousands of people tell him, as well as the state Chamber of Commerce through links on the website that we won’t support your state. You don’t support us, we won’t support you.“

Gee, that sure sounds like action not specifically targeted against the senator.

Maybe Babiasz doesn’t know how to specifically target the senator. Well, Joe, here in Alabama, here’s how we do it: Flood his office with calls and e-mails. Send him letters and faxes until the cows come home. It works—at least, it did enough to get Shelby to vote against both bailouts.

As I said the other night on FTR, boycotting Alabama because the Big Three didn’t get $15 billion or $25 billion or $55 billion in taxpayer money (yet) is about as dumb an idea as you can get. Targeting the people who live in this state—who pay the taxes that you’re trying to get your hands on for the bailout? Dumb, dumb, dumb. Counterproductive, divisive and childish. And did I mention dumb?

I briefly wondered whether anyone from Alabama would organize a Boycott Michigan Now campaign. But then I realized that there probably aren’t a whole heck of a lot of Alabamians chomping at the bit to visit Detroit.

Alabamians, Babiasz wants you to know that he and his supporters “hold no grudges against all of the hard working people who live in the wonderful state of Alabama.“ “The sad but necessary part of this initiative is that many innocent hard working people will be hurt,“ he says. “To those hard working people in Alabama, we apologize for the boycott and the loss of income and future employment from this boycott.“

They’re sorry that they are seeking to punish “many innocent hardworking people” for the reckless mismanagement of three major American corporations for many years.

But not that sorry.

In the event that you’d like to share with Joe Babiasz your thoughts about his boycott plan, e-mail him at joe AT boycottalabamanow DOT com.

Finally, John McCain’s presidential campaign can’t get things right even in defeat. In a brutally illustrative example of the ineptitude with which the McCain-Palin campaign was bungl—er, run, staffers conducting a fire sale of office equipment in the main McCain campaign office managed to accidentally sell confidential information to the press:

And then there were the BlackBerry phones, $20 a piece. The station bought two, charged them in the newsroom and found that one of them contained 50 phone numbers for people connected to the campaign, as well as hundreds of e-mails from early September until a few days after the election.

The station reported that the e-mails offered “an insider’s look at how grassroots operations work, full of scheduling questions and rallying cries for support.“ Most of the numbers were private cell phones for campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists.

One phone number was the personal cell phone number of former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore. Apparently, no one in the campaign realized that no one else had cleared the memories of those devices before they were handed over to the public.

Point of information: Is there an emoticon for rolling your eyes?