Warren Buffett Says Obama Is The Leader We Need In These Perilous Times

In the euphoria of seeing one of my favorite teams (the Pittsburgh Steelers) marching into the Super Bowl game to take place on February 1st, I overlooked the interview of Warren Buffett by Tom Brokaw which NBC broadcast this weekend.

I'm a big Warren Buffet fan. I also love Warren's partner Charlie Munger (I've got a $75 book on Charlie which is a prized possession filled with many of his famous "Mungerisms")

Both men are class acts, and despite Warren being a supporter of Democrats and Munger being a supporter of Republicans, the two men never allow their politics to come between them in their lifelong pursuit of building Berkshire Hathaway on firm balance sheets minus all the recent smoke and mirrors accounting thievery which became the norm during the past 20 to 25 years of Crony Capitalism.

What Warren has seen and knows

As Tom Brokaw reminds viewers, Mr. Buffet has seen it all. He was born during the Great Depression. He lived through WWII when our America and Western Democracies were threatened. He was there when LTCM went down and when the Internet Bubble burst and now he is still with us to see what he calls America's "Economic Pearl Harbor".

Throughout the interview, Buffett calmly assures us that there is no one like Barack Obama to lead us out of this mess created by Crony Capitalism. He tells us Obama is an excellent listener and that he is calm under pressure (much like Mr. Buffett) and that he has the guts and fortitude to make well informed decisions based on the best intelligence he gathers from people with great minds.

Mr. Buffett's Outlook for America

I've heard Mr. Buffet say the following many times throughout his storied career to college kids eating lunch with him, to shareholder gatherings for Berkshire Hathaway or in his writings: America has seen rough times before and we always come out of it stronger and better as a Nation. It doesn't pay to bet against America.

He's right. He's my idea of a Capitalist I can embrace. I love my country. As a Veteran, I invested 3 years of my life in its Army without fully understanding at the time of my swearing in how screwed up our political leadership was to have invaded Vietnam for all the wrong reasons . . . much like the One Party Rule going out the back door today and which invaded Iraq, a country which had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. When I look back at Vietnam and Iraq, I sense and hope that maybe this country will finally realize we can no longer invade sovereign countries under false pretenses. (I would have thought Vietnam would have wizened up all the Baby Boomers, and yet when the Greed bug bit the Boomers, they turned out to be more of ". . . same as the old boss."

I sense the times have changed greatly with Obama's election

Like Warren Buffett, I too voted for Barack Obama. I sensed this was one of these Historical moments, such as when John F. Kennedy became President against all the fear mongerers pushing prejudices in the South. I was a kid in Richmond, Va during those years . . . and attending a Catholic school to boot . . . so, I experienced overt prejudice growing up. And I never in my life back then would have imagined we'd have a President today with skin color which wouldn't even have allowed him to drink out of the same water fountains I used as child in Downtown Richmond during the 50s and early 60s.

Today's "kids" are more and more free of race consciousness than ever before. Whereas a black boy hugging a white girl would have been grounds for a lynching in the segregated South, now days, we have people of color narrating our news, starring on the football field, and directing giant corporations worth Billions of dollars.

And now here we are with a President whose father was a black African and his mother was a white American, whose white grandparents made sure he stayed in school and "did the right thing". This is a "librul" (as Rush Limbaugh would intone) who feels kids from two parent homes have a better chance in life, yet who came from a one parent home with assistance of grandparents whose skin was of different color than his own. When you look at Obama's past, one must marvel at how John Lennon's words "All you need is love" and how his words "Imagine" never rang truer than what we see in Barack Obama today.

We've come a long way, baby.

I, like Warren Buffett, am ready to turn another page in the History of this great country of ours. Like Warren, I feel the times were made just for Barack Obama to bring our people hope during the darkest of times.

You can see Warren's interview above and other related news (and many unrelated pieces of news, weather and sports) over on my A1A News blog . . . Key West's answer to the Drudge Report.

Enjoy!

Carpe Diem,
Rock Trueblood

Keith Olbermann Sums Up the Past 8 Years in 8 Minutes

As I was building the headline news for www.a1anews.com morning, I came across a video which sums up nicely what the past 8 years of kleptocracy, oligarchy and plutocracy have brought the USA.

Olbermann covers so much ground in 8 minutes that you might want to watch certain sections 3 or 4 times to remind you "Never again".

Room Rates In Season Are Falling Like Key West Housing Prices and Rents

So here we are, tourist season a little more than 3 weeks old, and on my nightly runs into town, I always check the hotels on A1A, the Casa Marina area, the new motels and hotels and condotels on Simonton, and all the guest houses on Upper Duval.

So far during this season vacancies are everywhere.

Room rates have dropped dramatically. Deals abound all over the island. And I'm talking deals for which you do not need AARP cards, airline points, etc., to get a place for less than $200 per night.

Just last year, for instance, the Santa Maria condos were running $390 on weeknights and $440 and higher on weekends.

The Courtyard of the Santa Maria Luxury Condos

Today you can go online and find these same rooms vacillating anywhere from $290 (the lowest I've seen) to $340 . . . and these are weekend rates during Season.

But why take my word for it?

I found several room rate shopping bot (kayak.com, onetime.com, etc.) which compare prices from the likes of travelocity, orbitz, hotels.com, etc. It takes the room rates quoted by all these sites and show you the three best quotes from all the sites you choose to compare.

So, to show you how this works, I went to the front page for www.onetime.com

I then clicked on the tab labeled "Hotels"

When the Hotels page opened, I then checkmarked every single deal provider (including the one for kayak.com . . . which is a shopper bot similar to onetime.com).

After I checkmarked every deal provider, I then plugged in the following parameters for the test:

2 people, 1 room, staying form Jan.29 through Jan.31 of 2009. That would be Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, the nights when rates are normally highest during the week.

Now before I show you the results, keep in mind that deal providers all work against one another to show the best rates available. On any given night, if a hotel, motel or guest house has many vacancies, the deals they will offer will show lower, and lower and lower pricing on these deal provider websites such as hotels.com, priceline.com, etc. (Priceline offers set rates and an area where you can also "offer" the hotels a cheaper bid than what they are showing . . . it's simply fabulous and I'll cover this more in a minute.)

One more thing to point out: since I've begun monitoring these deal providers, I have witnessed room rates fluctuate during a 7 day period. For instance, as I saw the Santa Maria parking lot fill up with cars this week, I watched the rates on these deal providers creep slowly upward. Rooms which were as low as $240, were suddenly up to $290, $300, and so on.

That said, the further you book in advance, the better your deals might be as this Recession worsens . . . especially when travelers are worried about layoffs (see Pink Slip Friday from A1A News this past Friday) rising, foreclosures at an all time, the Housing ATM shut down, millions of homeowners upside down on their loans, and debt to home equity at an all time high.

Consumers are tapped out. Vacations are discretionary income purchases, with money going to the necessities of life instead of frivolities like vacations, satellite radio, full blown cable packages, etc. (Car and boat companies are selling far fewer cars as repossesions of both are at an all time high.)

Hence, Las Vegas, Key West, California (now losing more residents than people moving into the state) and other vacation hubs are seeing one business after another close for good.

Thus, as fewer vacationers with money come to Key West, hotels, motels and some guest houses are vying against one another by lowering bids for their rooms on these online deal brokerage websites.

Okay, it's time for us to look over the results of this Sunday's (Jan. 18, 2009) data of best deals for the dates Jan. 29 - Jan. 30, 2009 . . . Thursday through Saturday nights during Season, one room for two people.

I think Northerners will be surprised by these results:

Lowest priced motels per night: El Rancho at $99, Days Inn at $100,

Travelodge Suites and Holiday Inn $127

Budget, Radisson, Comfort Inn and the Palms: $130 to $140

Southernmost Hotel: $144

That's nine places under the $150 per weekend night IN SEASON . . .

The highest price place: Parrot Key next to the Walgreens on North Roosevelt at $449 a night.

Noticeably absent in the price wars are the majority of guest houses in Key West. You'll only see "contact hotel directly" printed under each of their names.

Let's check to see where those Santa Maria luxury condotel rooms are today (remember, I said they've come down from $390 to $440 and higher last year). Hmmm, just a few days ago, I found several rooms for rent at $290. Today, something called reservetravel.com will get you the rooms at $314 per night, whereas Orbitz and cheaptickets are quoting $349 per night.

Which goes to show you, shop around, the deals abound.

Caveat emptor,

Rock Trueblood



p.s. If you are from out of town, shop this kayak.com or any other deal bot for hotels websites. Once you got the low rates for a place, don't commit yet.

Go online to priceline.com, pick out the star level rating of where you want to stay (in this example I clicked 3 stars and offered $110 a night. You'd be surprised at how many times a hotel with $250 rooms is sweating vacant rooms and they'll do anything to fill them up . . . just as airlines do . . . by selling the rooms at half-price or more.

That said, the cold front is breaking, the sun is shining, and the town is looking to show you a good time. Come on down.