A Rock and a Hard Place

WARNING: moderate leap of logic forthcoming: This post has something to with gardening, but indulge me a little.

Before we began turning our yard over, I told to a coworker at the Tribune what we were planning to do and she offered to let me borrow her motorized tiller. I was tempted - who wouldn't want free use of a big, bad, earth churning machine to do in a few minutes what it would take us several hours to do with a shovel? But then I thought about our yard, or specifically, the scores and scores of large rocks that exist just under the sod. Using a post hole digger in my yard is one of the most depressing and frustrating jobs I have ever undertaken.

I turned down the offer of the tiller because I was afraid of what lurked beneath. I knew I would hit something and then have to replace blades, or perhaps even worse. As you can see, I made a wise decision. These are the two biggest examples of what lurks within our soil, but there were and still are handfuls of fist- and egg-size rocks just waiting for a blade to strike against them and topple us over (that happened to both Michele and I - right on our asses). Instead of risking damage to someone else's property, we chose the more difficult route - the shovel.

And that brings me to... AIG. Or, more specifically, the fervor and furor over the $160 million-ish in bonuses paid out to AIG execs out of the $170 billion in federal bailout money they've received. There has been great outrage over these bonuses, which apparently weren't unknown or unexpected before this week. The government has known, or should have known, that these payments were coming, since, ya know, they agreed to allow them already. Here is the most salient passage from the linked story:

While the Senate was constructing the $787 billion stimulus last month, Dodd added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. The provision, now called “the Dodd Amendment” by the Obama Administration provides an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009” -- which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are now seeking to tax.

And more from a Fox News story:

This would seem to exempt the AIG bonuses that lawmakers and President Obama are looking to recover. Incidentally, Dodd is the largest single recipient of 2008 campaign donations from AIG, with $103,100, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

So, what's my point? It's like the rocks under the surface: If you know they are there, why raise a fuss about them after they're exposed and cause damage to other peoples' property? You take of the problem and move on. If you claim you didn't know about them, then you're either unprepared for the job at hand or you are being willfully ignorant of the situation.