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EDITOR'S CHOICE -- SCOTT SUTTELL Kiss and make up Blog entry: March 8, 2010, 2:12 pm     |     Author: SCOTT SUTTELL Oh, Forbes, you make it so hard to stay mad at you. The business magazine that's so convinced Cleveland is miserable does a nice job in a blog calling attention to some alternative energy efforts going on here. Carl Lavin, a managing editor at Forbes, attended the recent TEDxCLE conference here and writes approvingly of three entrepreneurs who showcased their visions of the future: Aaron LeMieux of Tremont Electric, which makes a personal energy generator that uses some of the energy you generate by walking and running to power your mobile devices; Benson Lee of fuel cell company Technology Management Inc.; and Dana Myers of electric car company Myers Motors. Mr. Lavin was impressed by the presentations, though he notes they were “heavy on the gee-whiz and light on the economics.” But they did make clear, he writes, “that the sweat part of sweat equity demands sacrifice.” Get ready, Betty. That's the message U.S. Rep. Betty Sutton, a Democrat from Copley Township, should get from a Washington Post blog entry noting that the American Future Fund, a conservative interest group, “is spending $900,000 on television ads in 18 Democratic-held districts calling on members to scrap the current (health reform) plan.” Ms. Sutton's 13th district, which cuts through parts of Cuyahoga, Lorain, Medina and Summit counties, is one of the districts targeted. The ads decry the plan's "massive spending" and "backroom deals," including the now infamous "Cornhusker Kickback" in the legislation, and they quote President Barack Obama's "lipstick on a pig" comments during the campaign, The Post blog notes. "Tell Congress to start over and get health care right," says the ad's narrator. The Post blog says the American Future Fund ads “are almost certainly the leading edge of a cavalcade of spending by independent groups — both conservative and liberal — in the run-up to the vote.” Count Bob Judge, a partner at Government Loan Solutions, a Cleveland firm that monitors the activity of small business loans on the secondary market, among those who will be sad to see TALF go. TALF, if you can't remember all the acronyms of government bailout programs, is the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, which was designed to propel the market for loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration. It was announced in November 2008, implemented almost exactly a year ago and will expire this month, according to this Wall Street Journal story. "It accomplished what it was meant to accomplish," Mr. Judge tells the newspaper. When TALF kicked in last March, “the Fed was able to lend billions to secondary market investors on appealing terms, which enticed them to enter the market again and buy the asset-backed securities from the banks,” The Journal reports. According to the Fed, $56 billion in TALF funds were requested between March 2009 and February 2010. However, The Journal says the majority of funds were for the purchase of credit card, auto-loan and student-loan securities. Only $2.1 billion, or 3.7% of the funds, actually were for SBA loans. Still, Mr. Judge “gives the program credit for helping stabilize the turbulent market and attract investors who hadn't previously been interested in SBA loans,” the newspaper notes. "Only time will tell if the market will survive on its own," Mr. Judge says. "But if you see the market start to weaken again, it won't get as bad as it was in early '09. What you may see is the lender trying to get higher interest rates from the borrower to get a better premium in the market." It's safe to say last night was a memorable one for 1995 Oberlin College grad Mark Boal, who won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for “The Hurt Locker.” It's also seemingly safe to say he's glad it's over, based on this amusing piece from The New York Times Style section, about the fashion perils for a regular guy entering the Hollywood world. “In some ways, Mr. Boal's experience can be summed up with the Tale of the Tux,” according to the piece. “He decided to buy his first tuxedo in September — Yves Saint Laurent — after winning the Gucci Group Award, a prize for movie outsiders who make contributions in film.” But he soon realized “that the fast and furious pace of events was no match for a lone tuxedo, the newspaper notes. “I was never really able to coordinate the dry cleaning,” Mr. Boal says. One day, in a pinch, “he tried to wash and iron the shirt himself,” according to the newspaper. “He managed to avoid burning a hole in it, but reconfigured the pleats in an unrecognizable way, like bad plastic surgery. He put a second tuxedo into rotation after popping the buttons off the first one at an after-party.”  Subscribe          Print          E-mail