Which bonus baby is deserving?

When I was a boy, a fellow by the name of Charles deGaulle was the face of France. He was the president of France at that time, but had been a World War II hero, a postwar leader and remains today the most influential leader of modern French history. He also had a very disproportionately large nose.

I suppose that's why I've always thought the French have characteristically large noses in general, and why I find it ironic that the French invented the Guillotine to chop off the heads of their undesirables while the American public seems to be perfectly content to simply cut off their own noses to spite their faces.

How else would you describe the mob mentality sweeping through our society? The "haves" are busy organizing "tea parties" and the "have-nots" are drawing a bead on anyone deemed to be "rich". No one, rich or poor, is going to give up any ground even though everyone agrees that we all have to make sacrifices. At least in principle. And, speaking of principle, those dirty bonus-accepting dogs working at stimulus-receiving corporations should be tarred and feathered out of principle alone! But not, of course, those executives working for the U.S. Postal Service or Amtrak. Even though those, and many government agencies, lose billions of dollars each and every year...it's OK to pay their CEO's an annual salary double the amount of what we pay the president of the United States. And it's apparently OK to base their bonuses on just how little they lose, rather than how much profit they make.

I guess perspective is elbowing its way into yet another Mistersteverino rant, but just how is it proposed that hiring managers on the cheap is supposed to provide a way out of this financial quagmire for business but paying a much larger portion of a particular industry's income pie to fast runners and people adept at reciting memorized dialogue on film is "different"? Just for fun, tonight during a TV show commercial break or, during the 7th inning stretch, consider that an oil company CEO's total compensation wouldn't even cause a penny reduction in the price of a gallon of fuel while actors routinely receive $10+ million compensation for performing in a movie with a total budget of $50 million. Figure it up and get back to me.

This "throwing the baby out with the bath" mentality is starting to resemble Major League Baseball after free agency came to baseball. Players complained about the mean old owners while their salaries increased 10-fold, measured in hundreds of thousands. And the owners lamented about the players' loss of "love of the game" while the value of their franchises went up multiples, measured in hundreds of millions.

I've never really thought about a pair of nostrils as a thing of beauty, but, compared to a couple of bleeding, gaping holes between the eyes and mouth, they're right pretty.