gad-fly

FWCS Health Care Clinic Concerns

2011-12-10T01:37:00.007-05:00

“The first rule of holes: When you're in one stop digging.”
― Molly Ivins

When I first read about the soon-to-open Fort Wayne Community Schools Walk-In Clinic for the benefit of employees enrolled in the district's health care plan, I thought that it might be a good idea for the city's largest employer. After all, clinic services in this town are a bit scarce with provider Redi-Med offering the bulk of such services here - divided between the general public and specific employer services.

I have been reading about retail-based clinics at CVS, Walgreens and Walmart stores, which offer extended hours of service staffed with nurse practitioners and physician's assistants handling the bulk of routine work for a skeleton staff of physicians. These services are growing like gangbusters. In the Indianapoliis area, there are 11 Walgreen Take Care clinics, 14 CVS Minute Clinics and 5 Walmart sponsored clinics. They all charge about $79 (and your insurance card works) per visit to start and they operate seven days, with 12 hours of operation on weekdays. No Virginia, none of these retail giants operate a clinic in our area code for christsakes!

That aside for now, the more that I looked at the FWCS proposal, the more uncomfortable I have become with the new use for my tax dollars. The school district has contracted with NoviaCare to operate the two clinics composed of a Physician, a Certified Physician's Assistant and a Licensed Practical Nurse at each location. the clinics will be open for what appears to be eight hours per day, five days per week. The $1.1 million dollar contract that Noviacare negotiated is for personnel only. FWCS will rent one clinic for almost $30,000 and will remodel an already owned building off of W. Jefferson Blvd. Then of course, FWCS must buy the examination equipment, furnishing the stores, pay for utilities, supplies and (dumb to dumb dumb) contract for business insurance in the face of all the dangers that go with being associated with medical practices in this country.

Now let me illustrate what a fine deal that NoviaCare got. If these two doctors work 40 hours, for 48 weeks, see 4 patients per hour and bill $75 per hour (give or take) then that would equal $1.1 million. I seriously doubt that any physician in private practice even comes close to billing that many hours. The ultimate kicker here is that neither FWCS employees nor Anthem Insurance will have to pay out a single dime for these clinic services. What generous people we taxpayers are!

But ... but Mr. Gadfly, you forgot about the budgeted reduction of four million dollars for 2012 FWCS health care costs! We are going to save $5 million and spend $1 million -- that is one heck of good trade-off. Well ... it may not be so good of a deal. See, what happened here is that General Assembly voted to require employee contributions to be a minimum of 15% of health care premiums and FWCS had previously only charged 10%. In the 2009-2010 school year, the school district spent exactly $47,729,444 (whoa! that is an expensive plan) to fund provider payments because the district is self-funded for claims up to some very large number when an umbrella policy takes over. FWCS also admits to seeing a $2 million dollar increase in insurance costs each year, so the gross expectations for 2011-2012 would be in the $50 million range. So since the employees must pay an extra 5% of the premium -- that $2.5 million of the budget reduction.

On the surface, it might first appear that the clinic could indeed relieve Anthem from paying another $2.5 million. The math suggests that the 3,100 enrolled employees and their family members would have to make a total of 33,333 visits to the clinics which works out to be more than double the 15,360 total visits that can be handled by the two docs. Yeah, I know that employing PA's might increase somewhat the number of patients seen if the demand is there. However, Kathy Friend, the FWCS CFO says that the store lease on Old Auburn Road can be shortened if needed because of concerns about how many enrollees will use the clinic. In the real world, Center Grove School District reported zero savings for operating a single NoviaCare clinic in 2010 and are making noises in the press about saving $48,000 this year due to some convoluted logic that declares that the clinic reduced teacher time away from class.

Lest I be accused of overlooking the new HSA insurance program offered this year with the district contributing $1,500 for singles and $3,000 to families savings accounts, while substituting high deductible insurance coverage for catastrophic health issues. I agree that the 26% of the total enrolled participants migrated to this plan will make some dent in overall claims submitted, but I have no idea how much that would be. My opinion is that the HSA scheme should be adopted by the School Board as the only option offered. This would be the safest way to assure a budget reduction. Some people do not want to bothered with making new choices so they elect status quo if it is available.

What we do not know about future health care costs would fill an awfully big hole. Self-funding of insurance claims subjects the risk taker to large swings when expensive procedure after procedure and one permanent disability after another begin to pile up in a single year. Budgeting health care costs involves the same junk science used in playing the stock market.

If you recall, we began talking about the retail walk-in clinic popularity which is defying Obamacare at every turn. Wouldn't it make more sense for our largest employer and for interested school districts surrounding Fort Wayne to approach these retailers that appear to love this town to open some clinics so that all taxpayers could benefit? I wonder how much motivation a $10 million dollar tax incentive over 10 years would bring to the likes of CVS or Walgreens?

Don't hold your breath because this is all about what the teachers' union wanted and they wanted something to take to the membership to justify why they were seeing an increase in insurance premiums. Teachers' unions elect school board members to vote favorably on union benefit increases. No conflict of interest is ever acknowledged.

Socratic Ignorance and the Occupy AstroTurfers

2011-12-06T22:20:00.004-05:00

He among you is the wisest who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is really worth nothing at all. (Apology 21d)

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Now as the Occupy Movement has begun to lose its heat with the oncoming of winter, the utter ignominy and futility of the organizational efforts has at last surfaced. Evidence has begun to surface reflecting the movement's failure to permanently gain respect and commitment from drum beaters in the liberal press and from puppeteers employed by Soros-financed organizations. Failure comes at a great cost to the true believers who simply had no sense as to how to run this railroad and comes to the great joy and relief of those of us who feared anarchy.

From the blog Disaster Notes comes this sad commentary:

A couple days ago I asked [OWS organizer] David Graeber a question about how far the difference between representative democracy and formal consensus process really goes in practice. In his answer he mentioned his (I think mild) regret that during the initial planning for Occupy Wall Street at Bowling Green, they never arrived at any founding principles. Consensus, he said, as a distinct process from democratic consensus (100% of a vote), works the way it’s supposed to when everyone has the same fundamental goals and principles. The answer surprised me a little bit coming from him, but I’m over it; the question of principles tends to get swallowed up by the controversy over demands, despite being different things, and everyone basically has to assume that they exist. Unfortunately, since there aren’t any, they sometimes conflict.

Even in more mundane activity, the “block” in formal consensus is supposed to mean principles are being violated. In their absence, blocks get overused, people get frustrated and leave, and this can easily overwhelm a GA’s [General Assembly's] ability to do much of anything beyond self-maintenance.

Given where the movement is now, it’s hard to imagine principles being any easier to agree on than unifying demands, except maybe for nonviolence.

First you have the mob, then you have demands by mob segments and then you try to organize the mob. It makes no sense to me -- especially when you use democratic rules with votes on even the smallest of questions, assisted by the totally maddening "human mic" communication scheme.

Then I happened to read a piece by Steven Hayward over at Powerline appropriately entitled "This Week’s Applied Hayek: Why Sound Economics, Like Political Philosophy, Begins with Socratic Ignorance." Positioned in the middle of the article was a Frederich Hayek quote so powerful and so 2011 that applies to the Occupy Lost Cause and to our economic shambles that produced the protest. From Hayek's lecture to the Nobel Prize Committee in 1974.

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. . . . The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson in humility, which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

As Mr. Hayward points out, Frederich Hayek was very much attuned to Socratic Ignorance and once again we confirm that Plato Occupies Wall Street. Common goals are so important -- and even non-violent revolutions must have limits.

Herman Cain Says Goodbye

2011-11-28T18:23:00.005-05:00

The Washington Examiner carries the content of a letter from Herman Cain's lawyer to Atlanta Fox 5 that Cain will not respond to a claim by an Atlanta woman, Ginger White, that she has had a thirteen year relationship with the GOP Presidential candidate. Atlanta Fox 5 television will carry the story tonight.

"Mr. Cain has been informed today that your television station plans to broadcast a story this evening in which a female will make an accusation that she engaged in a 13-year long physical relationship with Mr. Cain. This is not an accusation of harassment in the workplace – this is not an accusation of an assault - which are subject matters of legitimate inquiry to a political candidate.

Rather, this appears to be an accusation of private, alleged consensual conduct between adults - a subject matter which is not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public. No individual, whether a private citizen, a candidate for public office or a public official, should be questioned about his or her private sexual life. The public's right to know and the media's right to report has boundaries and most certainly those boundaries end outside of one's bedroom door.

This might have worked a dozen years ago, as it did with Democrats and Bill Clinton, but GOP conservatives will no longer support him -- beginning right now.

Plato Occupies Wall Street

2011-10-27T00:39:00.004-04:00

From Ethika Politika comes this piece written by R. J. Snell which succinctly links OWS protesters to Plato's tale about the debate between Socrates and Adelmantus concerning the nature of democratic governments. I think that there is a viewpoint here that probably requires some honest scrutiny by those on all sides of this current event.

Wall Street is occupied, apparently, by those at odds with the supposed avarice and dehumanizing power of big banks and traders. Coverage of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests has been extensive, including a fairly common report that while protestors claim to represent the other 99% of citizens who are not the very rich, still the protestors have no unified list of demands or a platform. Other reports highlight how many of the occupiers are college educated and so already part of the privileged few.

As in so many other things, Plato’s Republic is helpful here. While it certainly is unlikely that every protestor comes from means, reports indicate a surprising number come from privilege, descendents of those with enough means to think of college as an option. They are, if we stretch the term beyond our current meaning to include what Plato meant, the sons and daughters of oligarchs.

In the later books of the Republic, Plato suggests that from a good regime will stem a timocracy, or citizens who love honor, and then a regime of oligarchs loving money, then those democrats more inclined to pleasure than to the restraint needed for money, and finally a tyranny of uncontrolled desire.

The transition from the character of the oligarch to the democrat is described in terms strikingly familiar to OWS.
… they proceed to return insolence, anarchy, wastefulness, and shamelessness from exile, in a blaze of light, crowned and accompanied by a numerous chorus, extolling and flattering them by calling insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage.
Further, governed by pleasure rather than reason, such souls are unable to bring unified order to their lives, incapable of the sort of rational capacity of distinguishing the ephemeral and the lasting, the genuinely valuable from the merely pleasant, and thus unable to seek the highest good in an ordered polity—all demands would of course be equal.
… lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing; now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy. Often he engages in politics and, jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to him … and there is neither order nor necessity in his life.
Alasdair MacIntyre suggests in After Virtue that this kind of person, one lacking reason and a compelling narrative of value, is full of indignation and protest. Believing that the lives of others are as arbitrary and groundless as their own, they cannot offer reason, merely demands, often scattered and incoherent, and so protest becomes the usual mode of discourse, rather than argument, philosophy, and reasoning together.

In many ways, OWS looks an awful lot like the lives and loves of any of the deracinated contemporary. One sees so many in our society first drinking and then reducing, first committing themselves to the body and then to indolence, and ready to believe or join almost anything that provides a little entertainment, a little meaning, and a little superiority of the protest. But all this falls away in the face of the new and interesting when it replaces the no-longer new and interesting. A terrible tyranny of fashion governs protest.

There is plenty wrong with our society, and some of it worth indignation. And there are times, perhaps, for protest and mass action, but the vast majority of the work necessary to improve our lot is done by the average person in our schools, and shops, and synagogues; by little league coaches and volunteers at the Y; by a business owner sponsoring a raffle for a small fundraiser, and so on. The good is most often dull, it is usually not publicized, and it is never indulgent. And almost always, it requires a long pull in the same direction for years and years of effort, careful planning, and cooperation.

Changing the world, for most people most of the time, is actually pretty boring and awfully bourgeois, and very little like the inconstancy of random protest.

Big Farm and Big Wind are Big Rent Seekers

2011-10-03T00:45:00.004-04:00

In a letter to the editor of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette on September 14, 2011, farmer Joe Malfait wrote to opine that those of us who object to the leasing of farmland for installation of wind turbines (those bird killing, 50 decibel sound generating, industrial monstrosities that stand forty stories high ) do not have a dog in this fight.

Now I understand that farmers are used to holding out their hands to have them filled with Department of Agriculture subsidy payments each year, so it is probably logical that since taxpayers cannot get any elected government official to dispense with farm subsidies that we could not possibly care if Mr. Malfait and his friends also participates in some energy program graft as well. Just for grins, I dialed up the EWG Farm Subsidy Database to see how well Joe Malfait is doing with farm subsidies and was somewhat shocked to find that Malfait Bros Farms, Inc had received $1.43M from the government since 1995 and Joe Malfait personally had received an additional $513K in subsidies during the same time period. Now he can expect another ten grand or so per year per turbine land lease. I can only presume that his farm subsidies will not decrease as a result of this new arrangement - they just never do.

The point I make here is that Malfait doesn't put his own dog in this fight either. He is insulated from the risk of farming by his red, white and blue uncle and now uncle has even more goodies. But I must be mistaken about where Joe's lease money comes from because he said he is dealing with Horizon Wind Energy, which turns out to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of EDP Renovaveis, a Portuguese company. The Washington Examiner tells us where the money comes from:

Section 1603 of the 2009 stimulus bill instructs the Treasury secretary to issue grants to companies that develop renewable energy installations. To date, the Treasury Department has given out $6.9 billion in these grants (which cover 30 percent of all cost), with more than 80 percent of that money going to wind farms.

So it turns out that the economies being stimulated are in Denmark where the huge turbine blades are made and in Vietnam where the 350 foot towers are manufactured. Now if the economy could only get some benefit from the additional electricity that is blowing in the wind - but that too is not to be.

Government, including the state of Indiana, is mandating that between 10% and 30% of future electricity will be supplied from wind sources, even when the cost to erect the windmills and supporting transmission lines are astronomical when compared to existing coal and gas plants. But government is not stopping there - because huge accelerated depreciation provisions are bringing on the rent seekers in droves. Add to this mess the fact that existing wind turbines cost $3.5M each and operate only about 17% (or maybe not) of the time - when the wind blows. The complications associated with that involve keeping old-fashioned coal and gas plants on line to provide electricity when the wind doesn't blow and so these plants are spinning turbines at idle until the electric grid demands power (and that costs money and consumes fuel). Of course, there is another way . . .

So the question before the house is why can't we simply replace and/or increase present capacities with cheap old-fashioned-designed hydrocarbon plants - and the answer is because of a wrong-headed theory that man is somehow polluting the planet and will soon make it uninhabitable. There is no empirical evidence of such happenings but politicians and rent seekers are not being deterred by this absence of proof.

Something Happened In Indianola

2011-09-09T18:55:00.003-04:00

Establishment Republicans and the some conservative pundits have been working overtime to dismiss Sarah Palin as a "serious" candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. She has been called a "tease" because she won't formally announce her candidacy but many GOP loyalists have otherwise predetermined that she is unelectable because she does not appeal to centrists and independents (who must be living on another planet in these economic times if they do not approve any and all Obama alternatives).

Conservatives who favor Palin's candidacy and who have not listened to or read the speech delivered by Sarah at the Iowa State Fair are about to be shocked and delighted by a New York Times columnist. Ananad Giridharadas writing in the "Currents" column for the Fish Wrap:

[S]omething curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea Party event in Indianola, Iowa. . . . [S]he delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment — left, right and center — and pointed toward a way of transcending the presently unbridgeable political divide.

The next day, the . . . media . . . ignor[ed] the ideas she unfurled and dwell[ed] almost entirely on the will-she-won’t-she question of her presidential ambitions.

So here is something I never thought I would write: a column about Sarah Palin’s ideas.

There was plenty of the usual Palin schtick — words that make clear that she is not speaking to everyone but to a particular strain of American: “The working men and women of this country, you got up off your couch, you came down from the deer stand, you came out of the duck blind, you got off the John Deere, and we took to the streets, and we took to the town halls, and we ended up at the ballot box.”

But when her throat was cleared at last, Ms. Palin had something considerably more substantive to say.

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

In supporting her first point, about the permanent political class, she attacked both parties’ tendency to talk of spending cuts while spending more and more; to stoke public anxiety about a credit downgrade, but take a vacation anyway; to arrive in Washington of modest means and then somehow ride the gravy train to fabulous wealth. She observed that 7 of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States happen to be suburbs of the nation’s capital.

Her second point, about money in politics, helped to explain the first. The permanent class stays in power because it positions itself between two deep troughs: the money spent by the government and the money spent by big companies to secure decisions from government that help them make more money.

“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed — a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”

Because her party has agitated for the wholesale deregulation of money in politics and the unshackling of lobbyists, these will be heard in some quarters as sacrilegious words.

Ms. Palin’s third point was more striking still: in contrast to the sweeping paeans to capitalism and the free market delivered by the Republican presidential candidates whose ranks she has yet to join, she sought to make a distinction between good capitalists and bad ones. The good ones, in her telling, are those small businesses that take risks and sink and swim in the churning market; the bad ones are well-connected mega-corporations that live off bailouts, dodge taxes and profit terrifically while creating no jobs.

Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.

“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”

Is there a hint of a political breakthrough hiding in there?

The political conversation in the United States is paralyzed by a simplistic division of labor. Democrats protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big money and enhanced by government action. Republicans protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big government and enhanced by the free market.

What is seldom said is that human flourishing is a complex and delicate thing, and that we needn’t choose whether government or the market jeopardizes it more, because both can threaten it at the same time.

Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.

On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well-developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better. On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.

No one knows yet whether Ms. Palin will actually run for president. But she did just get more interesting.

Well, there is, at least, one liberal convert - so the centrist and independents are going to be easy!

Run, Sarah, Run!

Cloud Cover

2011-08-30T22:27:00.002-04:00

Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets

“If there is a causal relation between cosmic ray flux and cloud cover it is expected that the long term variations in cosmic ray should reflect variations in Earth’s temperature and should be important in an explanation of the high correlation between solar cycle length and global temperature.”~ Dr. Henrick Svensmark, 1998

Lawrence Sullivan writes in The Financial Post that we now have scientific proof that the Sun controls the Earth's climate:

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

Dr. Svenmark's theory was derived for correlation of sunspot activity, solar winds and cloud formations in our Heliosphere. In 2007, Danish scientists launched a project known as SKY using a high energy particle accelerator beam, which according to this paper, first confirmed the Svenmark hypothesis.

Update: This National Post editorial that I just linked succinctly describes the impact of the sun and clouds on the Earth's climate and it rightly laments the political influence that has CERN scientists downplaying their own successful scientific experiment. To paraphrase President James A. Garfield: “He who controls the money supply of a world controls the world.” Government funding seems to be more important to scientists (especially those chasing the new field of climate science) than the immediate economic impact that would result from declaring the magnificence of this proof of the Sun's influence. Man-made global warming has now been disproved.

Dead Letter Office: In Search Of A New Paradigm

2011-08-26T22:52:00.009-04:00

The battle lines have been drawn and the expected alliances have been formed, but both sides acknowledge that the assets (if there are any) of the dying patient known to us as the U.S. Post Office (but whose epitaph will read: "Dead Letter Office") is at stake. The family gathered for the preliminary reading of the last will and testament include the politicians and their allies, with the Republicans and taxpayers on one side and the Democrats, their hired hands in the media and in the unions on the other. The losers under most scenarios that can play out are the management, employees and customers of the postal service. The left-wing on-line magazine Slate , sums up the whole problem nicely (with a little editing on my part) in "Deliverance: The U.S. Postal Service must make massive changes if it is going to survive."

America's postal service is [seemingly] elegant, efficient, even amazing, given the enormous size of the country and the low cost of stamps. But the U.S. Postal Service is a hulking, foundering, money-hemorrhaging bureaucracy. A government watchdog has deemed the whole business unsustainable. . . . It raises the question: How is the postal service going to be viable as mailed letters become increasingly obsolete?

One thing is for sure: The fiscal situation at the USPS is bad—really bad. According to its most recent quarterly report, the USPS lost $3.1 billion between April 1 and June 30. Add that to billions of dollars in losses racked up since the recession hit—the USPS has been in the red for 18 of the last 20 fiscal quarters. It has also amassed tens of billions in unfunded liabilities, mostly in pension [$18B] and retiree health-benefit obligations [$49B].

The problem is not mismanagement [??? "We said, 'What's your 10-year plan?' " . . . "They didn't have one." ???]. The problem is that the USPS has an enormous, expensive physical and [unionized] human infrastructure. It operates more than twice as many U.S. outlets as McDonald's. It runs the largest vehicle fleet on Earth. It has a [extremely bloated] staff of nearly 600,000, despite considerable reductions in the last decade. To pay for all those people, trucks, and buildings, the USPS needs to handle a lot of mail.

The catastrophe is twofold. The USPS is going to need a higher debt limit or big changes pronto, or it is going to run out of cash. Then it needs significant—maybe even radical—changes to return it to fiscal stability. Indeed, a congressionally ordered Government Accountability Office report from April 2010 starts with the blunt line: "USPS's business model is not viable due to USPS's inability to reduce costs sufficiently in response to continuing mail volume and revenue declines." The "business model" is not "viable." Changes are necessary. So what might those changes look like?

Most of the press coverage talks about short-term solutions which will ultimately result in the termination of government-distributed "snail mail." Tim Pawlenty, The Cato Institute, and Rich Geddes favor privatization of the enterprise (with and without employee ownership i.e. ESOP), but that will guarantee that the American taxpayer will get soaked since the largest part of Post Office assets were paid with tax dollars and retirement and union termination contract clauses will likely have to be honored by "you guessed it."

USPS management has a plan that will downsize the service by eliminating 220,000 employees, stripping the unions of collective bargaining power, closing thousands of facilities, mostly post offices, freeing itself from unrealistic postage pricing rules and (take a breath) abandoning government retiree health and defined pension plans. Yeah - that could work - but I cannot see the regime and the its unions buying into that fairy tale. If there is a buy-in, the Postal Commission will end up granting the same excessively enhanced reduction-in-force (RIF) provisions already given to APWU to all other postal unions. My guess is that the "All Bailout -- All The Time" Obama will suggest a massive infusion of freshly-printed cash to "save" 220,000 postal jobs in his "jobs" speech after Labor Day.

Notice that the solutions addressed thus far recognize that the government cannot run "for-profit" enterprises and, despite stated desires to make the Post Office self-sufficient and self-funding, no USPS administration has ever attempted to break the USPS umbilical cord - until now. Sadly, that will not happen because of a deep-seeded need among career politicians and bureaucrats (the no-risk crowd) for government protection.

If I am correct, the U. S. Postal Service or whatever new name (not likely the Dead Letter Office) or form it will take, will rollback to the protective bosom of Mother Gov. The good news available for U.S Snail Mail is that 30% of its customer base has drawn the line in the sand against electronic mail and another 55% appear to be willing to get correspondence from both physical and electronic sources. Even more surprising is the public's attitude toward transactional mail. Studies show that "although mail volumes have been declining rapidly in the US, 71% of US consumers still feel more secure holding an official paper copy of their bills and statements, and that to push them forcibly into digital channels could risk losing those customers altogether." This flies in the face of society's increase in computer literacy and the attitude prevails despite pressure from most companies that want to save costs by sending billings and receiving payments electronically.

A behemoth the size ot the Post Office has to select a new business model that permits "dancin' with the one what brung ya." That means continuing to physically deliver hard-copy correspondence, advertising and parcels to the addressee. The paradigm shift that has to happen is the removal of the long-distance hauling of mail for ridiculously low prices; actually the secret probably involves the elimination, for all intents and purposes, of the hauling of most paper correspondence to any and all locations throughout the country. The change also must permit delivery of mail electronically to those who want such service.

The business models have been developed to deliver mail electronically and front end data capture systems have been perfected to permit handling of electronic document files. The USPS already has Optical Character Recognition Scanners which possibly could be converted to document reading and conversion. Zumbox, a relatively new start-up that likely would be willing to lease its technology, has launched a paperless electronic postal mail service which will encourage advertisers and transaction mailers to deposit their correspondence into electronic mail boxes available for every address in the United States. The mailing party pays and access and registration are free to end users -- but the Zumbox system does not provide for delivering physical mail. In a limited geographic area, Earth Class Mail offers scanning and forwarding of mail electronically, but their service costs are in addition to other shipping cost and they must first receive your mail, open it, then scan it for your benefit and of course they then have the opportunity to read your mail. Earth Class Mail service is aimed at business customers with large mail volumes.

The New Post Office, as I see it, would provide brick and mortar locations where customers can register their address and specify service levels, compose electronic mail, scan physical documents and even chat with a favorite postal employee. The New Online Post Office would also provide all of the above services except visiting time, since postal patrons would have to do all the work themselves.

The intriguing possibilities for customized mail service include (1) a mechanism for banning junk mail by source, since all mailers would have electronic I.D.s; (2) the ability to lower your mailing costs by doing the scanning and preparation work yourself; (3) the option to upgrade information received electronically by purchasing a filing cabinet service which can organize and classify your mail receipts; and (4) most importantly, the joy of receiving printed paper correspondence delivered into your real mailbox -- if you so desire.

There should be no doubt that the Post Office would operate at a lower cost and much more efficiently. There would be fewer brick and mortar post offices needed, less route trucks would be required, physical deliveries could be computer scheduled to run as often as needed. Instead of sorting, stamping and hauling mail, time would have to be taken to print scans onto paper already in an envelope ( like your W-2). Do I believe any of this pipe dream ? No, the New Post Office would still be run by the bureaucrats and manned by worthless union thugs armed in advance with a mountain of work rules and an "I get mine first" attitude.

Meanwhile . . . back to the drawing board!

Fair and Equal

2011-08-21T18:31:00.000-04:00

H/T: Cartoonist Gary Trudeau

Accounting 101 for the Post Office

2011-08-13T17:06:00.014-04:00

An onslaught of crying jags by the postal unions and by the liberal media has followed the announcement this week that things have to change at the United States Postal Service to preserve its very existence. Postal unions are claiming that Republicans irreparably harmed the Post Office by requiring annual payments of about $5.5 billion each year until 2015, which according to the WaPo, is designed “to prepay into an employee retirement fund each year to ensure that its increasing financial woes will not leave taxpayers shouldering costs.”

Balderdash! The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act” calls for compliance with GASB Statement 45 and SFAS #106 which bring USPS accounting for health and other non-pension benefits for retirees in line with private company standards by funding “the actuarial present value of all future benefits payable from the Fund . . . to current or former employees of the United States Postal Service”.

Oddly, Post Office Accounting has ignored the implications of the law by failing to record a liability (or a pre-payment) on its balance sheet. The annual payment has been expensed on a cash basis rather than booking an accrual that is required of single-employer plans under the ERISA law. To this accountant’s way of thinking, the unfunded liability for retiree health (and defined-benefit pension) coverage must, at this very moment, far exceed the required payments made over the past four years, else a balance sheet item would show. If my assumption is correct, this GAO assessment of the dire straits through which the Post Office is sailing, indicates that America's taxpayers (rather than USPS's ratepayers) are going to get royally shafted yet again!

The U.S. Government Accountability Office made these findings:

USPS cannot fund its current level of service and operations from its revenues and urgently needs to restructure to reflect changes in mail volume, revenue, and use of the mail.

        Although USPS reports $12.5 billion in cost savings since fiscal year 2006, it has not been able to cut costs fast enough to offset the large decline in mail volume and revenue—particularly costs related to its workforce, retail and processing networks, and delivery services.

        Furthermore, its revenue initiatives have had limited results. USPS can borrow up to $3 billion from the Treasury annually but expects to reach its statutory $15 billion borrowing limit in fiscal year 2011.

       USPS must align its costs with revenues, generate sufficient funding for capital investment, and manage its growing debt (see table).

The President Lies and Cries -- The Market Sighs and Dies

2011-08-08T19:37:00.001-04:00


I am their leader. Where have they gone?

Nothing more succinct than Jennifer Rubin's description of Obama's speech today:

It was a bit like a slow-motion car crash. After a while, one stopped listening to the blather and simply watched the stock ticker go down and down. And down some more.

This illuminated Obama’s predicament — devoid of ideas, bitter about political opposition and completely in over his head. If the election were held today, I bet he’d lose. By a lot.

Latest Greek Bailout Just Cost US Taxpayers $780M

2011-08-01T22:40:00.001-04:00

Zero Hedge reports that the US has spent $780 million dollars to cover 17 percent of the International Monetary Funds payment for July and August interest to hedge funds holding Greek debt paper issued by European banks but later sold to speculators such as John Paulson. Yes, I know that all we have heard since April is that the US debt ceiling had to be raised to prevent American default on its own debts. The IMF directors have committed to the second EU bailout for the Greek government in just two years -- and our commitment to the monetary fund links us to liabilities not in US government control. What's more frightening is that the Greeks are not the only socialist nation in Europe with enormous debt that are "too big to fail." It is time to listen to Fred Sauer:

In another complete perversity, Obama’s socialist forefathers, who prescribed and implemented liberalism’s economic theory in Western Europe, had the foresight to provide a rescue facility for the new Europe. They would use the administrative procedures of the IMF to seize more and more money from the remaining market-based economies to subsidize those nations failing from liberalism’s excessive spending.

All the IMF elites need to do to get more American taxpayer money is to “have a board meeting.” But Greece is just the tip of the iceberg. Are there other EU nations that also might need to procure bailout funds? The instability of this situation will increase as interest rates rise in the future.

But no one listened to Senator Jim Demint (R-SC) when he offered a bill in 2010 which would have forbidden the IMF from using US Taxpayer funds for the first Greek bailout tranche. DeMint's argument one year ago is familiar today:

"We haven’t even begun to seriously address our own economic difficulties, so it makes no sense to continue bailing out failing European countries,” said DeMint. “If we don’t reverse our reckless fiscal course, America will be the one in need of a bailout. We need to stop the spending, stop the debt, and pass a balanced budget amendment.”

The scary scenario about the immediate EU crisis is that America is at risk for over $50 billion in default payments. Then there is the question as to whether of not the agreement to provide funds to the IMF is really debt as defined in the 14th amendment or under the debt ceiling limits. Either way, we are spending money that could be used to meet domestic obligations. Meanwhile back at the Mediterranean, they are rioting in Athens and withholding payment of government fees. Greek socialists perfectly understand that their economic dilemma is caused by Germans and Americans who are overcharging for interest and who fail to honor the entitlements that have always been available since the Marshall Plan began.

Cousin David and the Great Environmental Conspiracy

2011-07-28T21:03:00.004-04:00

My cousin David is a forester who lives on a farm near Salem, in Doddridge County, West Virginia. He has hammered out a good life working the wooded hills in the north central region of the Mountain State. As might be expected, he has a great love for nature and the outdoors, thus his leanings are toward environmental causes. West Virginia, generally and Doddridge County, particularly, falls within the Marcellus Shale region that spans four eastern states (New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio are the other states) – and Marcellus Shale means abundant, largely untapped, natural gas deposits a mile and a half below the surface. The gas can be accessed economically using the new horizontal drilling techniques developed for reaching deep shale deposits in combination with an older technique known as hydraulic fracturing, which involves the use of high pressure water to increase the gas well’s output. The combined new process is being called “fracking” by the drilling trade.

Now Cousin David is a “have-not” in that he does not own the mineral rights to the shale deposits or the methane under his land (a common condition among landowners in coal country). As a result he is sensitive to the harangue that spews from the grand conspiracy that is the Environmental Movement in America. He does own and benefits financially from an old shallow vertical gas well on his property which may have something to do with his present conundrum (stay tuned). His problem is that he can no longer drink from his water well at the farm. He has been convinced by the numerous enviro-organizations operating in West Virginia, such as the operator of the "Frack Check WV" site depicted above, that the new shale gas wells have caused his water contamination and that his only recourse is to force the drillers to buy his now useless homestead, where he has lived for more than 40 years. It would do little good to tell David that new studies show that well "fracking" water complete with special additives do not contaminate well water because of the mile of impervious rock crust that separates the fluids; however a new study this year shows that water wells within 3,000 feet of gas wellheads have been found to have methane contamination due to leaks in the gas well pipe (could that mean any gas well pipe?). Further, surface spills of fracking water, whether accidental or deliberate can contaminate streams and water wells. One such incident occurred in Doddridge County.

Note that the Frack Check WV site references FracTracker which is financed by The Heinz Endowments and Teresa Heinz Kerry -- who is further linked to the Tides Foundation, organized and run by none other than George Soros, the world's most influential and maniacal Marxist. Using his Earthjustice organization to constantly litigate matters of the environment, Soros has escalated immensely the cost of holding off unwanted and unneeded environmental activism.

But Cousin David and other concerned "West Virginia Hillbillies" will continue to consult with lawyers, attend numerous town hall meetings and government hearings on gas wells -- and continue to demand unneeded additional government regulations. President Obama is gradually shutting America's electric generating plants powered by coal through the authority that he personally granted to the EPA, which will potentially shut West Virginia's economy. Natural gas, on the other hand, provides new jobs and new extractive tax income to the Mountain State without government subsidy -- provided the environmentalists can be controlled. As for the politicians -- they are terrified of the green ninnies.

Natural gas severance-tax collections in West Virginia totaled $52.8 million for fiscal 2011, according to Mark Muchow, deputy secretary for the state’s revenue department.

West Virginia’s acting governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, last week signed an executive order that directs the Department of Environmental Protection to issue emergency rules largely focused on fracking, in an attempt to clarify the regulatory process for industry and environmental groups in the state.

“Drilling operations in the shale play have increased the amount of state tax collections received from the industry but have also raised new policy questions,” a University of West Virginia report said in December.

Paranoia?

2011-07-22T01:16:00.000-04:00

This poem is from David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom."

PARANOIA

This man I never saw before
At 3 a.m. breaks down the door
To tell me my aspirin is LSD.
"It says right there on the bottle,
Acetylsalicylic Acid."
I tell you doctor, honestly,
It seems like someone's after me.

I don't think fighting is what I'm made for
But this lottery ticket I never paid for
Sold by a pusher known as Sam
Has won me a ticket to Vietnam,
A twelve months, expenses paid, tropical vacation
With a funeral, free, from a grateful nation.
But the doctor says I need therapy
For thinking someone is after me.

And then there are things I just can't ignore
Like the little man in our bedroom door
Says we'll be in jail by the end of the night
Unless we turn over and do it right.
Doctor, Doctor, come and see
There's really someone after me.

Then he asks, as he rips off the sheet,
For our marriage license and tax receipt;
Says "you need a license to shoot at a duck
How come you think that it's free to f... "
Who so blind as will not see;
The state, the state, is after me.

Obama's Ancien Régime

2011-07-17T17:55:00.000-04:00

UK Telegraph blogger Nile Gardiner wrote an important piece entitled : "Barack Obama’s extravagant Ancien Régime tells the American people: let them eat taxes." Gardiner chose the french term for "old order" as it relates to the French Revolution of 1789. At the time of the revolution Marie Antoinette, a member of the royal family, was alleged to have uttered a nasty remark in answer to a plea that "peasants had no bread." She supposedly responded: "Let them eat cake."

The French Revolution came on the heels of the Enlightenment. People in France were ready for a change from the old ways of doing business. The king, Louis XVI, had been spending profligately and needed money [note: sounds just like Obama].

Nile Gardiner pointed out Obama's " oozing elitist contempt for public opinion and the views of ordinary American people" at his press conference where the president fabricated the untruth that "80% of Americans want tax increases." Gardiner notes the latest Rasmussen poll that found 55% of Americans oppose a tax hike to finance an increase in the debt ceiling and another Rasmussen poll that found only one in four Americans expressed any support for tax increases. Then there is the recent Gallup poll discovered that only 16% of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction. The Telegraph article should be read in its entirety here.

The last time that I checked, the TEA Party was not headed by a head-chopper like Robespierre, but I am reminded that Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously said: ""Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I must sadly conclude that our narcissistic president is incapable of listening to anyone about turning the "unsinkable" ship that is America away from a collision with an economic iceberg. So much to do, so little time!

EcoMarxism: You Might Be A Marxist If . . .

2011-07-16T17:37:00.003-04:00

Ecomarxism

Ecomarxism is an anthropocentric view which sharply criticizes western capitalism; ecomarxists claim that a capitalist system negatively influences the relation of humans and nature, and that “democratic and capitalist economies are mutually exclusive from the protection of nature.”

In the mind of Marx, the only way to solve the problem of environmental degradation, and the dreadful conditions of the worker, was through liberation from the capitalist system; Marx’s notion of human emancipation was linked to his vision of overcoming humanities isolation from nature through the development of a socialist society. For humanity to progress beyond alienation, it is necessary ‘to govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way’, a goal only obtainable with the elimination of capitalism.”

Right-winger James Delingpole, writing in the UK Spectator, found himself in agreement on many topics with Clare Fox, "a core activist of the Revolutionary Communist Party [who] once published a magazine called Living Marxism ".

Not just about schools [‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’] either. On Islamism, on eco-fascist hysteria, on multiculturalism (a disaster), on GM [genetically modified] crops (the dangers much overrated), and on hunting (rescind the ban) ... In fact, about the only areas I can find where we seriously disagree are immigration, the monarchy and the war on terror. [...]

Does this mean I’m not as right-wing as I thought I was? Well perhaps. Earlier this year I published an ‘Is it me?’ A to Z of anti-PC-culture rants called How To Be Right, and was pleasantly surprised by how many of the lefties I’d set out to offend seemed to agree with me.

Delingpole's experience was similar to mine, when I read an exchange on "recycling" between two of the most dangerous leftists in the universe ... a neo-Marxist academic named James O’Connor (who espouses a Marxist theory that links labor and the greenies) and Marxist journalist Alexander Cockburn. In an article for The Nation. entitled "The Dialectics of Revolution... Uh, Recycling," Cockburn recounted his experience at a socialist seminar on recycling.

One panel I eagerly attended, "Recycling Is a Waste of Time," featured a German, Thomas Deichmann, describing the insane recycling regulations now beleaguering the citizenry of Frankfurt. The case for efficient incineration, he asserted, was overwhelming. Most recycling is an utter waste of time, economically unsound and without benefit for the environment. "We should," he counseled urbanely, "be thinking of more interesting things."

Julia Hailes, "sustainability consultant" to companies such as Marks & Spencer and Shell, author of The New Green Consumer Guide, listened tautly, as did Julie Hill, author of A Zero Waste UK, who gazed at Deichmann as though he were a lead battery in a baby's bath. Hailes mimed, with as much enthusiasm, ... the pleasures of tossing foil into one kitchen bin, a metal bottle top into another, plastic into a third. Recycling, she chirped, made her feel good.

They didn't carry the crowd. A man described sorting green, clear and brown glass into three bins, only to see them all dumped into the same truck. A woman seized the microphone: "I go to the dump with my kid each week to take the rubbish there. Then he goes to school and they do their first day trip, and where do they go?" She paused for effect. "To the dump!" The crowd roared. Mind you, this wasn't a mob of hee-haw Limbaugh-type reactionaries, deriding all collective social efforts to improve the planet. In this and other sessions, their indignation stemmed from a sense that along the road from the grand visions of '67 to the pious sustainability mantras and globe- survivalist waffle of our own phase, the vision of human liberation ... lapsed into variants of resource management and nannyism, with irksome rules and protocols, none of which had anything to do with onslaughts on capitalist ownership and control.

In 1989 I did some interviews on environmentalism and socialism for Z Magazine with left economist James O'Connor. Jim described what he'd told a fellow in the newspaper recycling business: "If you set up a recycling project where your outfit helps to create the conditions to organize social relations of production that make sense, that have to do with fraternity, equality, liberty and justice, etc., etc., then I'll recycle my newspapers. Come and tell me when you have done that.

A.C.: What do you do with your old newspapers?

J.O.: Throw them in the trash. What do you do with yours?

A.C.: Throw them in the trash. Back in Ireland with my mother we leave them out for the man from St. Vincent de Paul who takes them away for some charitable purpose, thereby maintaining social relations in the sorry state they are today, imploring the poor to pray for relief from heaven. And, needless to say, the poor people of my hometown are very glad to have St. Vincent de Paul bail them out in their hour of need.

There is indeed a teaching moment that goes with these tales. Setting aside the absolute exorcism of individual liberty, achievement and wealth that constitutes "American Exceptionalism" when and if mindless proletarians should overthrow capitalism, today's workers are both educated and greedy. Indeed they want to live like millionaires without first having earned their million dollars, but they dislike the mundane tasks imposed by a socialistic bureaucracy. Ironically the government bureaucrats cannot understand such thoughts any more than liberals and moderates can truly understand libertarians and conservatives ... or vice-versa.

But "creeping socialism" had its beginnings in America when Communist political views, that emanated from our labor unions and pinhead academics, greatly influenced FDR's depression-ridden government in the 1930s. Gradually our republican-based government of our founders has become a "mobocracy" that becomes more and more a government out-of-control.

Methinks that the new "Pledge to America" is far too little and too late to turn this tide and put our fiscal house in order. Fixing all problems now requires bigger government, bigger debt, so we concentrate on fixing the "unfixable" and attending to non-existent ecological problems in order that politicians can acquire and retain power. Unfortunately, from the leftist viewpoint, Ecomarxism is just what the doctor ordered ... and that is precisely the agenda that Obama is pursuing.

Today's Darwin Awards Candidate

2011-07-03T23:03:00.000-04:00

This Darwin Awards nominee comes from the WaPo:

Upstate NY motorcyclist dies after hitting head on pavement during protest against helmet laws!

State troopers tell The Post-Standard of Syracuse that 55-year-old Philip A. Contos of Parish, N.Y., was driving a 1983 Harley Davidson with a group of bikers who were protesting helmet laws by not wearing helmets.

Troopers say Contos hit his brakes and the motorcycle fishtailed. The bike spun out of control, and Contos toppled over the handlebars. He was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Troopers say Contos would have likely survived if he had been wearing a helmet.

A Female President

2011-07-03T17:50:00.002-04:00

Serious attempts by women to run for the office of POTUS have been few -- until Hilary Rodham Clinton became the odds-on favorite to win the Democrat nomination for president in 2008, but we know how that worked out. Now we have two potential frontrunners, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. But male domination continues to pervade the minds of our older citizens, as this tale illustrates .

The year is 2016 and the United States has just elected the first woman president, who happens to be from Wisconsin. A few days after the election the president-elect, whose name is Susan, calls her Father and says, “So, Dad, I assume you will be coming to my inauguration?”

“I don't think so. It's an 18 hour drive.”

“Don't worry about it Dad, I'll send Air Force One. And a limousine will pick you up at your door.

"I don't know. Everybody will be so fancy. What would your mother wear?”

“Oh Dad,” replies Susan, “I'll make sure she has a wonderful gown custom-made by the best designer in Washington .”

“Honey,” Dad complains, “you know I can't eat those rich foods you eat. Do they serve tap beer????”

The President-to-be responds, “Don't worry Dad. The entire affair will be handled by the best caterer in Washington. I'll ensure your meals are salt free. You and mom just have to be there.”

So Dad reluctantly agrees and on January 20, 2017, Susan is being sworn in as President of the United States . In the front row sits the new president's Dad and Mom. Dad noticing the senator sitting next to him leans over and whispers, “You see that woman over there with her hand on the Bible, becoming President of the United States?”

The Senator whispers back, “You bet I do.”

Dad says proudly, “Her brother played football for the Green Bay Packers.”

GOP Voters Seek A Choice Not An Echo

2011-06-19T22:08:00.005-04:00

In 1964, Schlafly wrote "A Choice, Not An Echo," widely credited with winning Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination for president. The book sold an astounding 3 million copies. (The average nonfiction book sells 5,000 copies.) Goldwater lost badly in the general election, but the Republican Party would never be the same.

Goldwater's nomination began the retreat of sellout, Northeastern Rockefeller Republicans who hoped to wreck the country with slightly less alacrity than the Democrats. Without Schlafly, without that book, it is very possible that Ronald Reagan would never have been elected president. ~ Ann Coulter

Who really picks our GOP presidential candidate? I am here to tell you that the big-government-and-high-finance-oriented, deep-pocket Eastern GOP Establishment has returned (after President Reagan's two terms) to dominate Republican politics and policy in a manner designed to simulate Democrat free-spending liberalism. The GOP policy was described by Phyllis Schlafly as "me-too." Sadly, the GOP Establishment represented themselves as conservatives but we have only seen conservative-libertarian policy in place in recent years when Newt Gingrich (with the help of Rush Limbaugh) assembled the Congressional "Class of '94." Even after acknowledging that small breakthrough, many promises were not kept throughout the Clinton and Bush years. Gee-Dubya invoked the Reagan strategy of lowering tax rates to recover from the 911 economic downturn only to turn around and doom Medicare by pushing through government-paid prescription drug benefits. Then he violated the principles of US capitalism by permitting the multi-trillion dollar TARP bailout of the mortgage, banking, insurance and investment sectors of the economy -- the very businesses that put him into office.

The new breed of GOP Establishment kingmakers are led by none other than former president George Herbert Walker Bush, assisted by George W. The New York Times refers to this year's adventure into control politics as the "Bush Primary."

The current crop of Republican hopefuls will have fewer concerns about being tied to George W. Bush’s policies, which are less immediate after a few years of President Obama’s tenure in the White House. That leaves them free to openly court the family’s network, which has loomed over Republican politics for more than two decades.

The candidate names associated with meetings with the Bush family (sometimes involving visits to Kennebunkport and Dallas) are Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Jon Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty. The NYT casually notes that current front-runner, Mitt Romney, is very close to the elder Bush. None of the gentlemen currently participating in the Bush Primary -- Huntsman, Pawlenty or Romney -- can pass the conservative smell test, although "Tea-Paw" and Willard Mittens are trying extra hard to dupe TEA Party voters.

The principle points in the Phyllis Schlafly book can be discerned from her writings below:

Most Americans think the next president of the United States will be selected on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November … when we go to the polls to vote. Most Americans think they will vote for a candidate who has been selected in their Party's political convention by Delegates who voted their honest convictions and chose the man best qualified to lead their Party to victory. This may be what is taught in the schoolbooks, but this ideal is frequently contrary to political reality.

With all these issues — issues which are vital to the survival and security of America — issues for which Republicans have the facts and arguments on their side — it looks as though there is no way Republicans can possibly lose so long as we have a presidential candidate who campaigns on the issues. But, the reader may ask, isn't that what a presidential nominee is supposed to do — campaign on the issues?

Politics makes strange bedfellows. The secret kingmakers have made common cause with the Democrats who had everything to gain and nothing to lose if the Republicans made a weak campaign. One of the favorite tricks of the Democrats is to try to get the Republicans to pass over their strongest candidate and nominate instead a candidate who will be easy to beat … with the same reverse psychology that Brer Rabbit pleaded with the fox, "Oh, please don't throw me into the briar patch!"

[Commenting on the 1948 elections] Harold L. Ickes [former FDR cabinet member and the father of Harold M., ex-Clinton aide and organizer of George Soros’ Democrat Shadow Party] put it more bluntly. He said: “With the bases loaded, the Republicans sent to the plate their bat boy. They could have sent in their Babe Ruth ... ."

Today, the Republican Babe is indeed a babe -- Sarah Palin -- should she choose to run against the Democrats, the Lame Stream Media and the GOP Establishment. Former First Lady Barbara Bush literally "let the cat out of the bag" when she commented on Palin:

“I sat next to her once, thought she was beautiful, and I think she’s very happy in Alaska.” She then added the zinger: “And I hope she’ll stay there.”

Angelo M. Codevilla is absolutely correct in his epic treatise on politics, as it relates to America's Ruling Class, which begins like this:

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

The first order of business in solving the GOP Establishment dilemma is to regain voter control over elections by eliminating past expectations imposed on the American electoral system by the ruling class. First we need to get rid of televised political debates which were began on Sixty Minutes in 1960, thus they were "invented by liberals to showcase liberals." These orchestrated events are designed to make conservatives defensive and are simply an unproductive waste of time and effort by candidates who already have 24/7 exposure on TV and the internet. We also need to scale down the ritualistic "cauci" (as Rush calls the state party caucuses) and somehow alter the national convention format where the attending delegates are manipulated by party elites and moved around as if puppets on strings. We might also restrict primary elections to registered Republicans and abandon the elections in favor of caucuses in states that will not accommodate such a change. Conservatives and their party need intelligent, committed thinkers, not zombies.

'Supernova" Sarah Palin is leading the way with an unconventional and uncompromising approach to campaigning -- and the TEA Parties now must find a way to coordinate their support efforts to the most visible and dynamic conservative candidate. Remember it is the opposition which has planted the idea that she is unelectable -- and against Obama, your family dog is electable. We will not be best served by nor do we want faux-conservative Mitt Romney who will bring us big government programs all over again.

Governor Palin Was Hard-Working

2011-06-11T15:47:00.001-04:00

H/T: MRC TV

Mock T-Paw 2012 Ad

2011-06-01T20:06:00.000-04:00

H/T: NRO Campaign Spot

Faux Sarah Palin 2012 Ad - From 2008

2011-05-29T14:36:00.000-04:00

Funny!

H/T: Political Gates

What it Was, Was Football or Republican Politics

2011-05-29T12:58:00.004-04:00

"A ways back in '53," as any dyed-in-the-wool Carolina Tar Heel might begin this story, "a 24-year-old UNC grad, hailing from Mount Airy, by the name of Andy Griffith, wrote a comic stand-up bit about football played at Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill. Now some folks say he based "What It Was, Was Football" on an old vaudeville routine, but nobody has said who that old-timey performer was or just how that story went. So anyhow, let's let some smart folks tell us the rest of this here tale."

Back in 1953 ... "Deacon Andy Griffith" made a live comedy recording entitled "What It Was, Was Football." This record, Griffith's variation on an ancient Vaudeville routine, is a monologue in which he plays the part of a naive and unworldly country preacher who stumbles upon a college football game and tries to make sense of what he sees, having never before witnessed such a contest. His guesses, though incorrect, are inspired. He identifies the referees as convicts, the field as a "pretty little green cow pasture," and the football itself as a pumpkin (or "punkin," in the Deacon's twangy vernacular). Once the coin toss (or "odd-manning") is over, Griffith describes the action thusly:
Well, after a while, I seen what it was that they was odd-manning for. It was that both bunches full of them men wanted this funny lookin' little punkin to play with. They did! And I know, friends, that they couldn't eat it because they kicked it the whole evenin' and it never busted. But, anyhow, what I was a-tellin' was, that both bunches full wanted that thing. And one bunch got it and it made the other bunch just as mad as they could be! And friends, I seen that evenin' the awfulest fight that I ever have seen in my life! I did! They would run at one another and kick one another and throw one another down and stomp on one another and grind their feet in one another and I don't know what-all, and just as fast as one of 'em would get hurt, they'd tote him off and run another one on!

So Deacon Andy Griffith was perplexed by the comings and goings-on and the violent action event that some people think, to this day, rivals the Roman Games at the Colosseum. But since I am writing this piece, I will point out that the utter confusion experienced by the young parson in Griffith's monologue is not unlike the disorganization prevailing in the Republican Party as we prepare to select a candidate to unseat Prez Zero in 2012.

The top priority of conservatives must to aggressively address the problem of the divisive split in the party between monied status quo Republican "elites" and the party's conservative base, now loosely organized as TEA Parties in every nook-and-cranny of this great republic. Obviously the populist TEA parties outnumber the "Ruling Class" and fortunately or unfortunately, as Neil Diamond sings, "money talks but it don't sing and dance and it don't walk." What will have to happen over the next twelve months is some concerted effort among the TEA Party organizations to quickly settle on two or three candidates to support. In my mind, the top three contenders for TEA party love are Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain. John Bolton and Gary Johnson are certainly worthy in the eyes of conservatives who know of them but Bolton and Johnson have not cultivated any name recognition to date and support has to be necessarily limited to assure a TEA Party win. Reluctant candidates such as budget-guru Paul Ryan and NJ Governor Chris Christie, need to unequivocally declare that they are not running for President.

Unfortunately, unless conservative "money bombs" begin to explode on the internet for real conservatives, it will become more and more difficult to dislodge the favorites of the middle-of-the-road elites who will continue to financially back "legacy" candidates (whose "turn" has officially come but who could not even beat John McCain) such as big government advocates Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul and Tim Pawlenty are back again as distractions after miserable election showings in 2008 and somebody needs to tell them that they cannot win. Finally we have the "Manchurian Candidate" otherwise known as Jon Huntsman, who is recognized only by the residents of Utah where he was governor, by the Peoples Republic of China where he was American Ambassador for Prez Zero and by the drive-by media who want a left-leaning Republican candidate.

Grassroots politics by the TEA Parties is all that will save the day from a November 2012 debacle but TEA Party leadership has to figure out how to advance past "populist democracy" thinking to a focused well-aimed campaign for a TEA Party favorite. How does this happen? Simple! The next Republican candidate will have assume leadership by directly appealing to the conservative base through the TEA party organizations. Sarah, Michelle, Herman -- lets get on with it -- but be careful where you step!

Friends, . . . [there is] nothing to fear. Whenever the dialogue . . . starts to get you down, just keep in mind the wise words of Deacon Andy Griffith, who concluded his football monologue with these words:
And I don't know, friends, to this day, what it was that they was a doin' down there, but I have studied about it. And I think that it's some kindly of a contest where they see which bunch full of them men can take that punkin and run from one end of that cow pasture to the other 'un without either gettin' knocked down or steppin' in somethin'.

The Rule of Law Went South Or The Lawbreakers Moved North

2011-05-26T23:46:00.001-04:00

Victor Davis Hanson has experienced some disturbing situations in the past six months living at his grape farm in the Central Valley region of America's paradise and soon to be bankrupt state of California. Here is his narrative:

They say the Central Valley is the ugliest part of the state; I disagree. Last week from my great-great-grandmother’s upstairs balcony I could see snow capped mountains tower just thirty miles away; in-between were millions of green trees and vines and the water towers of small towns in every direction. Nothing in Spain or southern France is prettier. A man would have to be mad to leave such beauty, and the brilliant work of his predecessors who as artists built the dams and canals, laid out the agrarian patchwork, founded these communities that serve as bookends to the works of architectural and municipal genius in San Francisco, or Los Angeles and San Diego. Yes, a man would have to be mad — or quite rational — to leave paradise lost.

You see, here is the situation in California. Tens of thousands of prisoners are scheduled by a U.S. Supreme Court order to be released. But why this inability to house our criminals when we pay among the highest sales, income, and gas taxes in the nation? Too many criminals? Too few new prisons? Too high costs per prisoner? Too many non-violent crimes that warrant incarceration? God help us when they are released. We know what crime is like now; what will it be like if thousands are let go? I doubt they will end up in the yards of the justices who let them out.

I think I have a clue to what’s ahead. Here is an aside, a sort of confession of my last six months in the center of our cry-the-beloved state:

December 2010: rear-ended by a texting driver; I called 9/11 and the police; she called “relatives” who arrived in two carloads. You get the picture. Luckily the police got there before her “family” did, and cited her. Still waiting to fix the dented truck.

March 2011: riding a bike in rural California, flipped over a “loose dog,” resulting in assorted injuries. Residents — well over 10 in various dwellings —claimed ignorance about the dogs outside their homes: no licenses, no vaccinations, no leashes, no fence. Final score: them: slammed door and shrugs; me: ruined bike, injuries, and a long walk home.

May 2011: two males drive in “looking to buy scrap metal.” They are politely told to leave. That night barn is burglarized and $1200 in property stolen.

Later May 2011: a female drives in van into front driveway with four males, “just looking to rent” neighbor’s house. They leave. Only later I learn they earlier came in the back way and had forced their way in, prying the back driveway gate, springing and bending armature.

Later May 2011: shop is burglarized — both bolt and padlock knocked off. Shelves stripped clean. It is the little things like this that aggravate Californians, especially when lectured not to sweat it by the academics on the coast and the politicians in Sacramento.

VDH goes on, describing the worst performing schools in the nations manned by the highest paid teachers; rural roads that have not been improved in 40 years carrying 15 times the traffic for which they were built despite drivers paying the highest gasoline taxes in the nation by far; and 250,000 acres of irrigated farm land shut down in the middle of a world food shortage to save the three inch smelt.

The US and the California governments continue to are ignore the plight of citizens to maintain the myth of the welfare state and encourage the culture of entitlement for the unwashed "country class" as they are called by Angelo M. Codevilla. He describes our governmental dilemma and the demon we must conquer very succinctly below:

In the modern administrative state, the rule of law is an increasingly hazy memory, and citizenship is confined to obeying rules that come down from unaccountable bureaucrats. The Congress and state legislatures, alongside such private "stakeholders" as they choose, pass so-called laws that are hundreds, even thousands, of pages long, which authorize administrative agencies to make such detailed rules as they like. Judges make up and strike down these rules as pleases them and their friends. Our schools teach increasingly that the American people have always been a blight on the planet because they have distinguished themselves from other nations.

Huntsman Campaign Mocked

2011-05-24T23:15:00.000-04:00

This gem came from Verum Serum. and the author makes some good points for why the "Manchurian Candidate" with ties to Obama's regime should be welcomed in the Republican primaries.

Former Utah Governor and Obama appointee Jon Huntsman has yet to announce whether he is running in 2012. Given that he is currently traipsing through New Hampshire and South Carolina, all indications are that he is planning on doing so. And if this video – which was “leaked” to me by someone…uh…very close to me – is any indication, his will be anything but a traditional campaign.

Since I’ve clearly just violated the Eleventh Commandment by producing this, let me clarify that I think Huntsman should get in the race. Whether we like it or not, there is clearly some constituency for these types of ideas. For proof, stop and consider that in his effort to tack to the right President Obama is preparing to portray himself to the American people in 2012 as someone very much like Jon Hunstman. Or the Jon Huntsman of 2008, anyway.

Because Huntsman, for his part, will probably do everything he can to disassociate himself from these views. In fact he already is. Whether he succeeds or not will go long a way in determining the outcome of his candidacy, if he chooses to run.

Like many others, I strongly believe that traditional conservative ideals can and should prevail in 2012. But the path will not be laid for us, and conservative policy ideas, around entitlements and budget reform especially, still need to be tested with the electorate. So consider the primary campaign a warm-up for the main event, and Huntsman a proxy for what we might face in the general election.

I for one am ready.

Mitch Cannot Be Bothered By Global Warming -- He Has To Run For President

2011-05-19T23:43:00.001-04:00

According to the Weekly Standard , Indiana governor Mitch Daniels is not interested in understanding what incontrovertible scientific evidence exists to support claims of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming.

He’s an agnostic on the science of global warming but says his views don’t matter. “I don’t know if the CO2 zealots are right,” he said. “But I don’t care, because we can’t afford to do what they want to do. Unless you want to go broke, in which case the world isn’t going to be any greener. Poor nations are never green.”

As an AGW skeptic, I should be happy with his position, but his words and actions seem to be on both sides of the issue. For example:

No one in Indiana is arguing for the status quo: Hoosiers have been eager to pursue a new energy future. We rocketed from nowhere to national leadership in biofuels production in the last four years. We were the No. 1 state in the growth of wind power in 2008. And we have embarked on an aggressive energy-conservation program, indubitably the most cost-effective means of limiting CO2. Most importantly, we are out to be the world leader in making clean coal — including the potential for carbon capture and sequestration. The world’s first commercial-scale clean coal power plant is under construction in our state, and the first modern coal-to-natural gas plant is coming right behind it.

Then came Mitch's uplifting speech to Rose-Hulman graduates:

A relentless project has inundated Americans for years with the demand that we must drastically reduce the carbon dioxide we emit as a society. It is asserted that the earth is warming; that this warming would have negative rather than positive consequences; that the warming is man-made rather than natural; that radical changes in the American economy can make a material difference in this phenomenon; and that utility bills in Indiana must double because no better or less expensive alternative to this policy is discussable.

Well. All these contentions may be correct. It may be that they will all be borne out over the coming decades. But the average citizen has no way to be sure of that for now. Although there are scientists, and scientific studies, that are deeply skeptical of all these claims, they are rarely heard in what passes for public debate. The debate, so far, has been dominated by "experts" from the University of Hollywood and the P.C. Institute of Technology.

Joining this discussion will require more than technical competence; it will take courage, too. In what has become less a scientific than a theological argument, anyone raising a contrary viewpoint or even a challenging question is often subjected to vicious personal criticism. Any dissident voice is likely to be the target of a fatwa issued by one Ayatollah or another of the climate change theocracy, branding the dissenter as a "denier" for refusing to bow down to the "scientific consensus."

The late author and scientist Michael Crichton spoke witheringly of this pattern in a speech at Cal Tech. He said, "I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that should be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled." He went on, "Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus." He's right, of course: Galileo was a denier. Darwin was a denier. Einstein denied virtually everything men "knew" at the time.

Crichton concluded by saying, "There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."

So -- can we now believe that Daniels has seen the light? Does he finally understand that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant -- and that it has little to do with the very small increase in temperatures that has occurred in the past hundred years? Does he now know that our sun has more to do with temperature fluctuations than "greenhouse gases?"

Well -- if he does, he most assuredly is not acting as if he does. Mitch is embroiled in a controversy related to the building of a $2.65 billion coal gasification plant in Rockport, Indiana, complete with a $2.6 billion pipeline not being built to carry syn-gas but to transport carbon dioxide to be interned in oil wells. According to the best estimates, syn-gas will be nearly double the current cost of natural gas that is being driven down by huge shale gas discoveries all over the U.S. As a matter of reasonable conjecture, the coal based- fuel is not expected to be competitively priced until after 2039. Your decision does not match your budget rhetoric -- and why is this a good deal, Mitch? And why don't you see the fallacy in sequestering life-giving CO2? Listen to what the Indiana Citizens Action Committee has to say:

“We need to call this what it is,” said Zac Elliot, statewide organizer for the Citizens Action Coalition. “They want to use carbon to yield more carbon and call it sequestration. That’s ridiculous. They’re trying to turn carbon into a commodity, to pipe it around the country and make a lot of money off it.”

Defined Pension Benefits For Every Taxpayer -- Taking Public Pensions To Their Ultimate Conclusion

2011-05-08T20:06:00.002-04:00

Ed Ring at City Journal exaggerates the dilemma of overgenerous public employee pensions in order to make the point that giveaways to public worker unions have put us in an economic quandary that has to be addressed now -- just as Scott Walker did in Wisconsin. Mr. Ring has the perfect real basis for his analysis -- the California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS).

A realistic way to gauge the fairness and financial sustainability of retirement benefits for government workers is to estimate how much it would cost if everyone in the U.S. received the average pension granted a state or local worker in California. How much would each active worker need to pay to support these retirees?

The first part of the City Journal riddle addresses how much the average pension payment would be to each retiree on average. $55,000 was chosen despite the fact that CalPERS actually averages paying out $66,828 per year to retirees with at least 30 years of service, which is 79% of average wages actually paid per year. With Social Security benefits included, these retirees will be six-figure per year pensioners!

Next in the scheme of this calculation are the number of retirees in the United States and the current number of active workers who will have to contribute payroll taxes to get $55,000 to each pensioner. The assumption here is that each U,S, worker starts at age 25 and retires at age 55.

The latest U.S. Census Bureau data show 128 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 54, and 81 million Americans who are 55 or older—a ratio of 1.58 to one. If every American over the age of 55 received a pension of $55,000 per year, it would cost current workers $4.45 trillion per year, an amount equivalent to nearly one-third of America’s annual GDP. Put another way, it would cost every one of the 128 million Americans of working age $34,800 per year to support retirees. [. . . ]

But by 2030, the Census Bureau projects the United States will have 139 million citizens between the ages of 25 and 55, and 112 million citizens 55 or older—a ratio of 1.24 to one. That works out to $44,300 per worker per year to support the retired population.

American taxpayers have been screwed for years by the unfettered public unions (and now the UAW ) who negotiated in bad faith with union-elected politicians to attain future benefits that are obviously too costly to pay. The Congress and most state legislatures are not reacting to solve these problems. Soon the United States will be bankrupt.

The Osama bin Laden Myth

2011-05-05T23:47:00.003-04:00

In the aftermath of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, another characterization of Osama bin Laden, the renown terrorist, is beginning to surface. It now appears that the "million dollar" bin Laden complex is worth but $250K tops and the armaments available to the bin Laden family to protect themselves amounted only to three AK-47s and two pistols. The al Qaida leader apparently was confined to the compound, hiding out with his family with little or no contact with the outside world. He had 500 euros sewed into his pajamas, possibly to keep the notes from being stolen. He certainly could not get far if the cash was to be used in an escape from enemies and the five weapons seems to be grossly inadequate protection.

Angelo M. Codevilla , who teaches international relations at Boston University and who is a former U.S. intelligence officer, wrote a treatise entitled "Osama bin Elvis" which covers, among other things, the artificial creation of a world terrorist leader by none other than the CIA.

The real Osama bin Laden, like the real al Qaeda over which he presided, was never as important as reports from Arab (especially Saudi) intelligence services led the CIA to believe. Osama's (late) role in Afghanistan's anti-Soviet resistance was to bring in a little money. Arab fighters in general, and particularly the few Osama brought, fought rarely and badly. In war, one Afghan is worth many Arabs. In 1990 Osama told Saudi regent Abdullah that his mujahideen could stop Saddam's invasion of the kingdom. When Abdullah waved him away in favor of a half-million U.S. troops, Osama turned dissident, enough to have to move to Sudan, where he stayed until 1996 hatching sterile anti-Saudi plots until forced to move his forlorn band to Afghanistan.

There is a good reason why neither Osama nor al Qaeda appeared on U.S. intelligence screens until 1998. They had done nothing noteworthy. Since the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, however, and especially after director of Central Intelligence George Tenet imputed responsibility for 9/11 to Osama "game, set, and match," the CIA described him as terrorism's prime mover. It refused to countenance the possibility that Osama's associates might have been using him and his organization as a flag of convenience. As U.S. forces were taking over Afghanistan in 2001, the CIA was telling Time and Newsweek that it expected to find the high-tech headquarters from which Osama controlled terrorist activities in 50 countries. None existed. In November 2008, without factual basis and contrary to reason, the CIA continued to describe him and his organization as "the most clear and present danger to the United States." It did not try to explain how this could be while, it said, Osama is "largely isolated from the day to day operations of the organization he nominally heads." What organization?

Why such a focus on an organization that was never large, most of whose known associates have long since been killed or captured, and whose assets the CIA does not even try to catalogue? The CIA's official explanation, that al Qaeda has "metastasized" by spreading its expertise, is an empty metaphor. But pursuant to it, the U.S. government accepted the self-designation as "al Qaeda" of persons fighting for Sunni-Baathist interests in Iraq, and has pinned the label gratuitously on sundry high-profile terrorists while acknowledging that their connection to Osama and Co. may be emotional at most. But why such gymnastics in the face of Osama's incontrovertible irrelevance? Because focusing on Osama and al Qaeda affirms a CIA axiom dating from the Cold War, an axiom challenged during the Reagan years but that has been U.S. policy since 1993, namely: terrorism is the work of "rogue individuals and groups" that operate despite state authority. According to this axiom, the likes of Osama run rings around the intelligence services of Arab states ...

In short, insisting on Osama's supposed mastery of al Qaeda, and on equating terrorism with al Qaeda, is official U.S. policy because it forecloses questions about the role of states, and makes it possible to indict as warmongers whoever raises such questions. Osama's de facto irrelevance for seven years, however, has undermined that policy's intellectual legitimacy. How much longer can presidents or directors of the CIA wave the spectra of Osama and al Qaeda before people laugh at them?

Questioning Osama's relevance to today's terrorism leads naturally to asking how relevant he ever was, and who might be more relevant. That in turn quickly shows how flimsy are the factual foundations on which rest the U.S. government's axioms about the "war on terror." Consider: We know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) planned and carried out 9/11. But there is no independent support for KSM's claim that he acted at Osama's direction and under his supervision. On the contrary, we know for sure that the expertise and the financing for 9/11 came from KSM's own group (the U.S. government has accepted but to my knowledge not verified that the group's core is a biological family of Baluchs). This group carried out the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa and every other act for which al Qaeda became known. The KSM group included the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings Abdul Rahman Yasin, who came from, returned to, and vanished in Iraq, as well as Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that bombing, who came to the U.S. from Iraq on an Iraqi passport and was known to his New York collaborators as "Rashid the Iraqi." This group had planned the bombing of U.S. airliners over the Pacific in 1995. The core members are non-Arabs. They had no history of religiosity (and the religiosity they now display is unconvincing). They were not creatures of Osama . . .

According to Codevilla, the CIA made a point to jump all over the now-determined-to-be-fake Osama bin Laden "confession" video that "admits" responsibility for 9/11 while downplaying and even ignoring two actual Osama video interviews where he denied responsibility. It is much easier politically to justify waging war against rogue individuals and organizations than it is to go after the rogue nations that incite and perpetrate world conflict. If we think back, Bill Clinton started it all by launching a Cruise missile into a remote mosque in Afghanistan in 1998 and another Cruise that took out an aspirin factory in Khartoum after Osama supposedly bombed two US Embassies.

Bush Way Versus Obama Way of Dealing With Demagogues

2011-05-05T21:40:00.000-04:00

Click Here for More Pictures

U.S. Finds Saddam Hussein Hiding in a Hole
Posted: 12.15.03

Thirty-eight weeks after the United States began hunting for Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi dictator was finally found hiding in a hole last weekend.

Some 600 American soldiers swept into a rural farm 10 miles south of Saddam's hometown of Tikrit Saturday, carrying out a mission aimed at capturing or killing the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

In the end, it was a soldier who used a spade to unearth the hidden entrance to an underground chamber of hard-packed dirt.

U.S. soldiers find Saddam in an underground chamber"He was just caught like a rat," Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, told reporters at his headquarters in Tikrit on Sunday.

"He could have been hiding in a hundred different places, a thousand different places like this all around Iraq. It just takes finding the right person who will give you a good idea where he might be."

The head of ground forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, called the hideout a "spider hole" that had just enough space for a person to lie down inside.

Saddam surrendered without putting up a fight and admitted his identity. Troops also detained two other unidentified men. The raid also netted two AK- 47s, a pistol, 750,000 U.S. dollars in $100 denominations, and a white and orange taxi that officials believed Saddam used to travel around the area.

Their Fates Were SEALed
Forget the U.S. version of the Bin Laden raid. Any adult male found in the compound was a dead man.
By William Saletan Posted Thursday, May 5, 2011, at 12:24 PM ET

As new details of the raid on Osama Bin Laden's Pakistan compound are reported, apparently based on accounts from the SEAL assault team, crucial elements of the initial U.S. story are being abandoned. Instead, the U.S. is justifying its shoot-to-kill decisions based on the team's state of mind.
Here's what the latest reports indicate:

1. The only shots fired at the SEALs came from the guest house.
The compound had a main house and a guest house. Bin Laden's courier fired at the SEAL team from the guest house. Nobody in the main house fired a shot.

2. The shooting at U.S. personnel ended early in the raid.
Initial U.S. claims of an ongoing firefight throughout the raid seem to be discredited.

3. Nobody in the main house was carrying a weapon.
NBC News and the AP are explicit about this. In the absence of immediate, objective grounds for shooting to kill in the main house—armed occupants, gunfire from within, an ongoing firefight in the guest house—the U.S. is emphasizing background conditions that justified its shooting decisions

4. The initial gunfire from the guest house created a presumption of armed threat.
The New York Times reports that according to administration officials, "because the Special Operations troops had been fired upon as soon as they touched down in the compound, they were under the assumption that everyone inside was armed." An officials tells the Times, "They were in a threatening and hostile environment the entire time."

5. Weapons found in the house reinforced the presumption of armed threat.
That early gunfire indicated to the SEALs that they might expect further resistance. And they did find a small arsenal of weapons in the home. "We recovered three AK-47s and two pistols from the compound. They weren't storming a PTA meeting. They were storming into Osama Bin Laden's fortress hideout," said the same U.S. official.

6. The presumption of armed threat led the SEALs to perceive occupants as armed.
According to NBC News, "The second SEAL team entered the first floor of the main residence and could see a man standing in the dark with one hand behind his back. Fearing he was hiding a weapon, the SEALs shot and killed the lone man, who turned out to be unarmed." The Times adds: "When the commandos moved into the main house, they saw the courier's brother, who they believed was preparing to fire a weapon. They shot and killed him."

7. The presumption of armed threat did not extend to women.
The SEALs then made their way up a staircase, where they ran into one of bin Laden's sons on the way down. The Americans immediately shot and killed the son, who was also unarmed. Once on the third floor, the commandos threw open the door to bin Laden's bedroom. One of bin Laden's wives rushed toward the NAVY SEAL in the door, who shot her in the leg. Then, without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fire two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head.

8. Did Bin Laden appear to be armed?
The new accounts specify weapons near Bin Laden. ABC News says "at least one AK-47 was found in bin Laden's room." The Times says the SEALs killed him after they entered the room and saw him "with an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol in arm's reach." But recall the NBC News report: After shooting Bin Laden's onrushing wife in the calf, "without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fire two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head." It's hard to imagine how this commando, who must have been focusing entirely on the charging woman until he pivoted to Bin Laden, had time to notice anything about weapons lying around before he put the two fatal bullets in the guy in the pajamas. Commandos are trained to focus on people and whether they're armed, not on unaccompanied objects. I doubt the inventory of weapons in the room was taken until later.

On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the U.S. would divulge no further details about the raid. He read a statement: "The team had the authority to kill Osama bin Laden unless he offered to surrender; in which case the team was required to accept his surrender if the team could do so safely." It seems increasingly clear that the SEALs went into the compound with a presumption that while women and children would be spared, any adult male would be killed, in part to avoid U.S. casualties and in part because one of the men might be Bin Laden. The initial gunfire from the guest house reinforced that presumption. After that, if you were found in either house, you were a dead man.

Blowback the Donald -- Doonsbury

2011-04-19T00:11:00.036-04:00

Garry Trudeau has just launched his second comic strip salvo at The Donald. This one is portraying Donald's love for Donald. Trudeau's first attack came in defense of the little guys being pushed off of the properties adjacent to Trump Plaza way back in 1996, when the New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Development Authority filed under eminent domain to allow Trump to acquire two businesses and a private residence. The comic strips depict attempts by Trump to coerce the owners of Sabitini's Restaurant to sell, according to the NY Times , in order "to put up a few bushes and a limousine staging area for his newly expanded casino."

Nuking Potholes For Fun and Profit

2011-04-16T01:13:00.007-04:00

Transformation (no -- I did not misspell Transportation) Secretary Ray LaHood declared during a NY Times interview last year that "America is one big pothole and Americans are ready for their streets and roads and bridges to be fixed up"” Of course, he also advocated that the best way to make this "straw man" go away was for Americans to cut back on the number of cars driven per family and to use public transportation instead.

"About everything we do around here is government intrusion into people's lives," he said. "It is a way to coerce people out of their cars. Yeah."

But the government is not the only intruder in our lives. According to Potholes,Info, the lifeblood of a nation is its roads and history traces roads, complete with potholes, back some four thousand years to the Silk Road that linked Europeans to Asia from the middle east and back. Indeed improved roadways fueled the rise of the Roman Empire and ultimately its demise. Pax America, as we know it today, was largely attributable to Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System, which surely and permanently linked Americans to their automobiles.

Potholes are caused when the base beneath roadways are weakened by erosion, usually when the ground releases its frost layer during warming periods in the winter and early spring here in the Earth's higher latitudes -- but water erodes even in warm climes. There are some 3.9 million miles of public roads in the United States alone, so potholes are now and forever a problem -- a very expensive problem. Damage done by potholes averages $330 per year per vehicle driven and patching costs are probably incalculable.

In modern times, repairing potholes has largely been a two step process. During the winter, road crews shoveled cold-patch asphalt into the dangerous holes in the road only to return in the spring to permanently repair the potholes with hot-patch asphalt. Road crews took 10-15 minutes per pothole to do even the temporary repair.

American ingenuity has now begun to triumph over government bureaucracy. But first the answer to the unasked question: How many men does it take to repair a pothole? I count 11.

In Massachusetts they call the new-fangled trucks "Pot-zillas" and in New Jersey the trucks are known as "Pothole Killers." As you can see below, Minnesota is now experimenting with microwave-assisted permanent patching in the winter using taconite tailings as the raw material for the patch. The new technology averages about 30 seconds per pothole repair.

And if you are interested in getting into the mobile microwave patching business, go here -- but under no circumstance should you ask for advice from Ray LaHood or Prez Zero.

Poking Into Politics To Find A Conservative Mayoral Candidate for Fort Wayne

2011-04-12T22:24:00.005-04:00


Pig in a Poke Ben Grader - Flickr

"As a descendant of many 18th century and even a few 17th century ... Scots, ... I know what 'a pig in a poke' means. You are a lucky buyer if you find a sleek piglet in the poke when you neglect to open it before paying over your coins. If you didn't open the poke, you might, at least in earlier times, have gotten home with cats, rats, or hedgehogs in your sack ...." ~ Professor Hershel Parker, University of Delaware

May 3 is Primary Election Day in Fort Wayne when Republican voters (and Democrats bent upon influencing the Republican's choice) will pick the opponent for incumbent Democrat Tom Henry in the fall elections. Supposedly-conservative Fort Wayne has been unable elect a right-wing Mayor in over 20 years and it will not be easy this time either.

The election race is down to three viable candidates, former Allen County councilwoman, Paula Hughes, current at-large city councilwoman Liz Brown and political newcomer Eric Doden, a business executive. The campaigns for all candidates have been disappointing to date, with the advantage matriculating across party lines to Mayor Henry. I have a vote decision to make on May 5, so this piece is an attempt to put into words my assessments of the candidates. The mayor of Fort Wayne is a big job which will require an even bigger commitment to righting the ship that is the city.

Paula Hughes:"After almost a year of working to lock up the nomination, she didn’t."

I will start with Paula Hughes because she announced her candidacy early last year. Paula Hughes, with the help of mouthpiece Sheriff Ken Fries, claims to be the "proven conservative leader" and most experienced candidate running for the Republican nomination for Fort Wayne Mayor. She has served on the seven-member Allen County Council since 2002 and has been its president twice. She was conveniently given that title by the Republican-dominated council in 2010 -- just ahead of her resignation to run for Mayor.

She somehow takes credit for seemingly single-handedly turning a funding deficit in the county to a $22 million surplus. I guess we can forget the other six council members and the three County Executives! The real questions about the county funds surplus is: "Why were county taxpayers being overcharged during the past 10 years and why won’t potential voters see through the contradictory claim?"

Hughes joined the council at a time when the most populous portions of the county had just been annexed by the City of Fort Wayne. Maintaining services for the rural sections of the county is obviously much less costly than servicing the county’s densely populated suburban areas, even with a decline in the tax base. It is interesting that Paula is pledging "No New Taxes" but she and the other members of county government made effort toward a reduction in taxes either.

Candidate Hughes has managed to "insert foot in mouth" on at least several occasions during the campaign by lamely criticizing Mayor Henry’s social networking scheme when she obviously knew little about the subject, by attacking the mayor’s salary level as if he had set it, and by offering criticism of the city’s failure to use "reverse auctions" to reduce costs only to be told that the technique is used on occasion by the city. When asked about the latest kerfuffle regarding public unions, Mrs. Hughes said: "Unions are not the problem. Management is the problem,"

Mark Souder, writing in Howey Politics Indiana, thinks Hughes has concluded that she is in a dogfight.

Paula Hughes served on the Allen County Council, and was a leader of the downtown business association. She announced early, raised quite a bit of money, and lined up key supporters such as Allen County Sheriff Ken Fries. People, who meet her, like her. Hughes is working hard. She has a political strategy. Her problem is best summed up by this statement: After almost a year of working to lock up the nomination, she didn’t.

I am not compelled by what I see as an artificial campaign to put herself at odds with the Mayor. Interestingly, much of the wasted spending that conservatives like me attribute to the last two Democrat mayors was ironically begun by plans she helped develop as head of the Downtown Improvement District. Would I vote for her as mayor? No.

Liz Brown: "She's drawn praise and criticism for her blunt positions on issues . . ."

In many regards, Liz Brown is my hero in her seemingly never-ending fights on the floor of the City Council. She came out of nowhere to win an at-large council seat three years ago in the wake of the city's anti-smoking ordinance which did in fellow Republican, Doctor John Crawford, who talked the conservative talk but was unable to keep from imposing government control over the individual rights of citizens. Obviously a staunch conservative, Brown veers very little from the straight and narrow, but her inexperience and straight talk have far less effect on the Democrats and RINOs now on council. With much more experience maneuvering in this political circle, for example, Crawford got what he wanted most of the time.

Some people, including Mark Souder, believe that Liz Brown's inability to "play nice" would be a disadvantage as Mayor. On the the other hand, the ex-congressman is bullish on Brown:

Brown is ahead, and would possibly top 50 percent right now, for multiple reasons: (1) she’s run and won city-wide; (2) she’s on TV regularly because of her council work; (3) she’s smart, articulate and photogenic, which are critical for TV; (4) she has a simple, consistent message; (5) she has a strong Catholic base; (6) she has a record of pro-life support; (7) she has a message that has attracted more of the Tea Party activists and new State Rep. Rob Morris, who had the best grassroots organization in the last election; (8) her base is in north to east side of the city, which will dominate the primary vote; and (9) her name is Brown.

I personally believe that if Liz Brown is to win the election, it will be because of grassroots support since the power brokers in the party are obviously placing their bets elsewhere. Liz only raised about $22K in campaign contributions through December -- about half of which came from her husband. But a win is entirely possible because of her stance against the constant assault on taxpayers of increased union benefits. She has been at this for three years and the city council continues to turn a blind eye -- but that cannot last because the dirty politics of unionism are paramount across the country in 2011. Liz Brown diappointedly tells Ben Lanka of the Journal Gazette that "she hoped the unions would be open to being flexible in the work they’d be willing to do." Vomit! Unions and union work rules have brought down many companies and now public union politics are bringing down local California governments and for that matter, the entire state of California, as we speak. If she wants to win, she needs to advertise a stronger line against the danger of growing public unionism in Fort Wayne. Sadly, none of the Republican candidates will bite this forbidden fruit.

Would I vote for Liz Brown -- maybe -- but her ineffectiveness after three years on City Council bothers me a great deal.

Eric Doden: "Government shouldn’t be in the business of picking and choosing winners and losers."

Who is John Galt? More to the point -- Who is Eric Doden? It turns out that he is the the son of Ambassador Steel founder Daryle Doden. The senior Doden has established himself and his family as generous and God-fearing and in the end has guided his son through schooling stints at ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, Moody Bible Institute and Valparaiso University.

Democrats will be quick to criticize Eric for hanging onto Dad's coattails before and after Ambassador Steel was sold in 2008 but even Ben Lanka of the Journal Gazette liked him enough to call him "Mr. Sunshine:"

With a perennial smile on his face, Eric Doden is always happy to talk about his life and his ideas. Just don’t ask him about his opponents and Mayor Henry: He’d rather not go there.

From Mark Souder we get the opinion that "Doden has a strong campaign committee and impressive evangelical connections."

The Dodens are historically associated with DeKalb County. His resume doesn’t include a previous elected office or Fort Wayne leadership. His assets include listening, intelligence and ability. But in this race, that would put Doden a weak third except for his other asset: money. His family is wealthy and the major wealthy Republican businessmen are pouring money into his campaign. Doden’s campaign website looks like that of a wealthy businessman.

Notice that I have little substance to discuss about Mr. Doden because he has chosen the high ground in the campaign so far and he has no public record to assail. I really am warming to the idea that this man, silver spoon and all, might be the best choice for Mayor simply because he has not been hardened by the realities of public service through politics. Someone pointed out that that just being male might be the best attribute Eric Doden has because Fort Wayne has never elected a female Mayor.

So I am down to two, Liz Brown or Eric Doden -- with a little more than three weeks to finally decide.

Public Union Shakedown

2011-04-01T23:46:00.001-04:00

For readers interested in a more detailed discussion of the takeover of all levels of government by their public sector union employees, a video of Steven Malanga's lecture at the Heritage Foundation can be accessed here.

Model Railroading - The Difference Between Men and Boys

2011-03-29T22:21:00.001-04:00

“There is no known cure for an obsession with trains.” —Anonymous, 1989

H/T: xkcd via Coyote Blog

Turn Out The Lights?

2011-03-26T17:22:00.002-04:00


The widespread practice of misguided eco-Luddites turning off their lights for Earth Hour and burning candles as a source of light is grossly misguided and actually contributes to increased carbon dioxide emissions.

The Aussies invented the cause of Earth Hour several years ago to draw attention to Anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming and the 20 Tons of carbon dioxide generated by every man, woman and child alive on our planet each year. We should all just kill ourselves and get on with the dying.

Never mind that the Earth is not warming. Eco-Luddites will not be deterred. So we look to climate skeptic extraordinaire, Ross McKitrick for the final words toward restoring sanity.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.

So turn on the lights -- the party is just beginning . . . and don't listen to Willie.

Another Obama Hypocrisy

2011-03-20T22:11:00.003-04:00

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch. It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action. ~Presidential Candidate Barack Hussein Obama, December 20, 2007

Maybe when Prez Zero directed the launch of Tomahawk missiles into Libya he just forgot about the U.S. Constitution, Article I, § 8, cl. 11, "The Congress shall have Power . . . to declare War . . ." and even his own thoughtful interpretation of the document. Fat chance!

In 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison that the Constitution's war powers clause was "one effectual check to the Dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body."

Originalists will find themselves agreeing with Candidate Obama's written stance on war declaration authority and opposed to President Bush's contention that the Constitutional authority granted to the President as Commander in Chief of the military under Article II Section 2, required executive action to defend the nation by all means in his control.

The real question here must be directed to what dangers, if any, to our nation's security did the Libyan government pose while engaged in a civil war. The answer, of course, is none. The European Union, which relies heavily on Libyan oil and natural gas, certainly could have and did gin up economic reasons to prosecute war, but that is NATO's problem not ours. Secretary of State Hillary's call to protect the people seeking democracy is entirely nonsensical, since the Libyans do not know what that is, particularly if the uprising is being driven by the Muslim Brotherhood.

My conspiratorial mind says that Teh One just wants to keep government spending at an extremely high level -- either that or he a NeoCon at heart. Pick one.

Flat-Earth Republicans

2011-03-20T01:28:00.000-04:00

Andrew Leonard, Salon's "techno-cultural hack" is gleefully smug in announcing that "the House GOP is on record, now and for all time: The earth isn't warming." From his safe-house in Berkley, this Salon "hack" (his word -- not mine) has, not surprisingly, come down on the side of the rent-seeking "global-warming-junk-scientists" and the government agencies that enable them.

In this week's most obvious serving of dog-bites-man news, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted on Tuesday to approve a measure designed to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. This was not unexpected: House Republicans declared their crusade against the EPA on Day One of the new Congress.

Leonard could not believe that the majority party members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee would disagree with Henry "Nostrilitis" Waxman (D-CA), Diana DeGette (D-Co) and Jay Inslee (D-WA) that global warming is "incontrovertible", that CO2 levels are "elevated," and "public health ... is endangered" as a result of man-made emissions. I guess that Andrew and the House committee Dems have not seriously examined the "hide the decline" emails from "Climategate" that were exchanged among so-called "climate scientists" who make up their own facts for their own enrichment.

Close-minded liberals will spend us into the poorhouse without empirical evidence to support their inexplicable approach to a solving a non-problem that is beyond the control of mankind. Conservatives have now come to realize that selling disaster is the leftist politician's way of controlling the masses, but why are liberal journalists (are there any other kind?) such as Andrew Leonard buying into the scam?

The Deadly Squeeze

2011-03-16T20:25:00.000-04:00

H/T: From Investors Business Daily via Power Line.

Scott Walker's Real "Real Agenda" In Wisconsin

2011-03-13T00:28:00.025-05:00

Sometimes it is instructive to read the views of the hard leftists, so when the attack on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by unions and their media and Democrat allies intensified, I visited Stephen Diamond's blog, who has been described as: ". . . a dyed-in-the wool leftist, albeit one who’s grounded in the view that the American labor union movement can be the savior of American democracy.” To my surprise, Dr. Diamond is pimping an article called "Scott Walker's real agenda in Wisconsin", which appeared on the very liberal Guardian UK website. Diamond described Walker as "implementing the Greek solution -- the looting of public goods to fend off bond markets." Dr. Diamond may soon be surprised to find that there was not a Greek Solution but sadly instead, a Greek Tragedy.

So I read the British fish-wrap article to soon discover that the American-based authors, Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers were unfair in their assessment and biased in implying that they understood the governor's real intentions in Wisconsin. The article is basically another (ho hum) leftist attack against Koch Industries, although no proof was offered that Koch has had anything at all to do with the state budget proceedings. Let's start at the beginning.

On Wednesday evening, in a veritable Night of the Long Knives, Wisconsin's integrity was brutally murdered on the floor of the state Capitol in Madison.

So out of the gate, Wisconsin Republicans are histrionically compared to Nazis assassinating Nazis for the good of the Third Reich. I guess this gets the leftist's attention, but Conservatives cannot even utter "cross-hairs" without being accused of fomenting violence. Next we hear that Republican Senators broke the Open Meetings law.

Financial items require a quorum, thus, collective bargaining was split off from the budget repair bill and voted on separately so as to permit its being voted on now. Even so, this still broke the state's open meeting law requiring 24 hours' notice to ensure transparency. Instead, the Wisconsin senate Republicans pulled out this new legislation without advance notice and began voting,

As it turns out, the Senate action had been planned to be done quickly because of the union demonstration inside the statehouse, so the crowd was allowed into the meeting room an hour before the vote. The vote had previously been cleared with the Legislature's attorneys, the Fiscal Bureau, the bill drafters and the Senate-Assembly Conference Committee. If this had not happened, the lone Democrat Assemblyman would not have been present to object to the vote (even though he had no right to a voice in the Senate chamber). With that invalid point out of the way, the authors moved on to their piece de resistance.

Governor Scott Walker emerges from Wisconsin, a state that invented Progressive Era Republican rule in the 19th and early 20th centuries under such exemplars as Robert LaFollette. Under their tenure, rent-seeking from the public domain and similar insider corruption were checked by a strong public sector anchored in integrity. The state's long history of reforms nurtured a prosperous middle class and made it a model of clean government, solid infrastructure, trade unionism and high value-added industry managed by socialists and the LaFollette Progressives.

By 1900 America was a tinderbox. Cities were crowded with millions of poor laborers, working conditions were appalling. From the local level to the highest institutions in the land corruption darkened politics. Something had to be done, and the progressive movement was the nation’s response. Although the progressive reformers did not fix everything, little escaped their attention. Since the political powers were unwilling or unable to address the rapid economic and social changes brought about by the industrial revolution in America, the progressive movement grew outside government and eventually forced government to take stands and deal with the growing problems.

So much hogwash! The Progressive Movement began with the Populist Party in the plains states in the 1880s and was replaced by the Progressive Party led by Teddy Roosevelt, not "Fighting Bob" LaFollette. The whole movement was dead by 1920. The niche' that leftists occupied in the Republican Party was short lived indeed. So according to the article, the Democrats never do anything wrong except possibly making the strategic error of hauling-ass to Illinois instead of voting on a budget bill. Now the conservative Republican administration is attending (as promised to the voters) to the huge deficits left in the laps of taxpayers by prior Democrat administrations but that cannot be allowed to stand.

The comment that Bob LaFollette crushed rent-seekers feeding at the public trough prompts me to point out that it is the unions who are now the rent-seekers. Armand Thieblot at the Cato Institute identified the real elephant-in-the-room in his piece on "Political Rent Seeking":

By the 1980s and 1990s, however, when unorganized capitalists had become thin on the ground and those already organized had mostly been rendered uncompetitive by past concession to union demands, unions’ new guiding trope became “More government.” To achieve it, unions became mordantly political. In economic terms, after unions had absorbed all of the readily available economic rents from their capitalist opponents, they have turned to seeking rents from new sources beyond the system—from the polity at large (from taxpayers), using government as the intermediary. For want of a better term, I call this political rent seeking. It should be of general concern that, not being bridled by most of the competitive restraints posited by Gordon Tullock (1967) in his classic exposition of rent seeking, unions engaging in political rent seeking may be nearing the point of dominance over the auction of government rents to the point that they can, or may soon be able to, write their own labor laws, and thus their own rewards, free from any normal economic or competitive restraints. This should be of general concern.

Up next: The new Republican majority is criticized for emulating Democrats:

Fast-forward to Scott Walker today. Representing a new breed apart from Wisconsin's earlier Republicans, he is seeking to re-open the asset-grabbing Gilded Age style. A plague of rent-seekers is seeking quick gains by privatising the public sector and erecting tollbooths to charge access fees to roads, power plants and other basic infrastructure.

Here is what the liberal Wisconsin State Journal had this to say on the subject of tollways:

Money for major Wisconsin roads has to come from somewhere. And charging heavy users such as truckers and Illinois tourists a few dollars every visit makes sense, especially when so many other states are doing the same thing.

I could not believe their next point that was literally dragged from the dried-up pen of an early 19th century playwright, Honoré Balzac, to somehow have meaning today.

Economics textbooks, along with Fox News and shout radio commentators, spread the myth that fortunes are gained productively by investing in capital equipment and employing labour to produce goods and services that people want to buy. This may be how economies prosper, but it is not how fortunes are most easily made. One need only to turn to the 19th-century novelists such as Balzac to be reminded that behind every family fortune lies a great theft, often long-forgotten or even undiscovered.

So ourGuardian writers have been sniffing the glue while working with the art pages for far too long. An old dead Frenchman, who consistently failed in one business after another is somehow now a better Economics teacher than the very textbooks used in the classroom? And on what basis is there reason to believe that the new Republican majority is somehow intent on rent seeking, as defined by Balzac? Reading on, the article becomes even more bizarre.

Nowhere is this more disturbingly on display than in Wisconsin. Today, Milwaukee ,Wisconsin’s largest city and once the richest in America , is ranked among the four poorest large cities in the United States. Wisconsin is just the most recent case in this great heist. The US government itself and its regulatory agencies effectively are being privatised as the "final stage" of neoliberal economic doctrine.

Where to begin the breaking of this clay pigeon? There has not been a conservative Republican mayor in a long, long time in the City of Milwaukee. According to Marc Levine, director of the Center for Economic Development at UW-Milwaukee: "Our analysis of employment data shows that Milwaukee has had among the worst job creation records of any big city in the U.S. for over a decade, so it is not surprising that poverty numbers have worsened, especially during the worst recession since the Great Depression." So how is it that Scott Walker created this problem? As for our neoliberalism economics doctrine, the authors obviously haven't paid attention to Obama's disastrous shift to Keynesianism, Whew, all this liberal nonsense is becoming tedious -- but onward we go to more imaginings.

A peek into Governor Walker's so-called "budget repair bill" reveals a shop of horrors that is just the opposite of actually repairing the budget. Among the items listed in the bill until Wednesday night were selloffs of state power generation facilities – in no-bid contracts notoriously prone to insider dealing. The 37 facilities he wants to sell off that produce heating and cooling at low cost to the state's universities and prisons. Walker's budget repair bill would have unloaded them at a low price, presumably to campaign contributors such as Koch Industries – and then stick the bill for producing this power at higher rates to Wisconsin taxpayers in perpetuity. (And this is all being sold as a "taxpayer relief" plan!) Invariably, this will make its way into new legislation once attention is diverted from the current controversy.

Since the provision is no longer a part of the budget, the point made about the sell-offs is void anyway, but some background is necessary the help the reader. Liberal blogs, which have been attacking the Koch brothers for weeks, insist without proof that the small power generating facilities owned by the state would be sold for less-than-market to Koch Industries. These power generating plants are not likely to be commercially viable except to the local utility, Madison Gas & Electric which services the area surrounding the government complexes -- thus the no-bid proviso in the budget proposal. It is patently obvious in today's economy that a government agency cannot operate power facilities as efficiently as a public utility. Funny, how it is OK for Democrats to privatize the Chicago Skyway, Illinois Toll Road and Chicago's parking meters but those Republicans in Wisconsin are not to be trusted.

The budget bill also plans to tear down the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS). This is not New Jersey, where a succession of corrupt governments have underfunded (read: stolen) the state pension system in order to shift resources to pay for budget shortfalls in general revenues caused by tax breaks for the rich. The WRS is one of the nation's most stable, well-funded and best-managed pension systems. Although Wisconsin is not a big state, the WRS has amassed $75bn in reserves, and pays out handsome pensions to its public retirees, without needing new public subsidy. The Walker bill has language providing for tearing down this system, raiding its assets to pay for further tax cuts for the rich (especially property owners), and then throwing Wall Street a meaty bone as public employees would be shifted to 401k plans handled by money managers on commission.

You guys are too easy! I certainly will not disagree that corrupt Democrats in New Jersey were stealing from the taxpayers by failing to fund defined-benefit pension plans that were so easy to give away during. "collusion" sessions between public union reps and the state politicians that the union campaigned for and elected. But according to a study by the Manhattan Institute, the WRS "could be as much as $10.9 billion short in meeting obligations just to teachers." The difference between the numbers is caused by the overgenerous returns expected from fund assets by the state. At the time of the study in 2009, only 72% of the total funding required had been paid-in. Now maybe the liberals will see and understand why Wisconsin is broke.

So Wisconsin is broke and action is required to bail out the taxpayers of the state who are already burdened with some of the highest tax rates in the entire United States. Governor Walker's plan is to put the government house in order and provide the mechanism to keep it that way. Whether he succeeds or not is unknown, but states cannot print money, so some real economic action is required. Union bargaining rights had to go as did the free ride on their benefits. There are now no layoffs, none, and nobody lost pension or health benefits or had their salary reduced. Public workers in Wisconsin remain higher paid as a group than their private counterparts. The nutcases in the unions need to back off. After all, most protesters suffered very little or not-at-all at the hands of the Governor in this required budget balancing. In the end, the size of government in Wisconsin and in America has to shrink, but Badger State citizens have never fully understood the extra tax burden that they have had to bear in order to keep the label of "progressive".

Public Teachers Overpaid By 34 Percent

2011-03-03T21:40:00.000-05:00

Fort Wayne School Board Pays Its Union Dues

2011-02-27T16:27:00.011-05:00

Fort Wayne Community School Board President Mark GiaQuinta conducted a press conference last Thursday to put the entire elected FWCS board firmly into the corner with the interests of the ISTA-NEA teachers union in opposing pending state legislation on collective bargaining, school vouchers and charter schools, despite the expected goal of improved school academic performance at reduced costs. As chair of the board, GiaQuinta went far outside the scope of his elected office in his public support of the union, which he cloaked as support for the teachers.

Philosophically, we wanted our teachers and our legislators to know that we are not afraid of the rights teachers obtain through collective bargaining,” he said. “It’s a good system.”

“Teachers are feeling as if they are under attack with so much legislation directly affecting their jobs,” said board president Mark GiaQuinta in a news release. “We want teachers to know that we appreciate their work and dedication to our students.”

Unfortunately, Mr. GiaQuinta needs to understand that the public is entitled to more information than he provides. As James R. Schlesinger famously said: "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts." Unionism in general and any public union specifically, does not represent "a good system" and the Indiana legislation is about the union, not the teachers. Moreover, the union does nothing to promote and improve the quality of education while at the same time it raises the cost of teacher contracts that must be paid from our taxes.

This editorial excerpt from the Panama City News-Herald succinctly explains the public union dilemma:

Collective bargaining is supposed to offset an imbalance of power between employees and management. In the private sector, there is an inherent adversarial relationship between the two sides in labor negotiations. Each knows that if the company gives too much away and fails to make a profit, it will be forced to shut its doors and everyone loses.

The nature of public unions is different. Government employees are negotiating across the table from government representatives, who often are those whom the union worked hard to elect. The balance of power shrinks dramatically and the relationship is not nearly as adversarial. It is government negotiating with itself.

And because it is other people’s money at stake — the taxpayers’ — there is a lot less concern for the bottom line.

What are the teachers unions -- those third-party interlopers planted firmly between educational institutions and their teachers -- all about? Former NEA president Keith Geiger pretty much sums it up at the union's convention:

We need to retool collective bargaining as the great engine driving change and innovation in school districts all across America. [...] We are talking about waking up -- school boards, administrators, and association leaders -- to our shared interest in revitalizing public education.

So allow yourselves to fantasize for a moment. Imagine a school system where the traditional contract has been shed like an outgrown skin. Imagine a district where the NEA local controls nearly three-fourths of the school district budget [the FWCS contract is 94%], and uses that power to create new teaching slots, set their own salaries, reduce class sizes, and carve out a new preparation period.

Sound like utopia? Well, it's not. I just described the contract negotiated by NEA members in New Albany/Floyd County, Indiana. And, if our colleagues can do it there -- a district that was notorious for bad union-management relations -- then, clearly, we are looking at a whole new world of possibilities.

Geiger was obviously talking out of both sides of his mouth, since the NEA worldview is not about "revitalizing public education," by improving the quality and effectiveness of student education efforts. Their bottom line is jobs, paychecks and union power! What the heck, everybody knows that school kids don't pay union dues!

On February 8, more than 1000 Indiana teachers were illegally called to attend a rally at the Indiana Statehouse by the ISTA union leaders in direct violation of state law. Governor Mitch Daniels response to the rally was: "As always, the union's demand is more money, no change. Their priority is their organization, not the young people of Indiana."

In the photo above, FWCS teacher Susan Brice is shown protesting. Her absence from school was obviously condoned by Mr. GiaQuinta,and the FWCS board, as well as by Schools Superintendent, Dr. Wendy Robinson and her administrative staff. Most likely, other Fort Wayne teachers were in Indianapolis as well. Democrats have this thing about ignoring the law and these teachers didn't even need phony doctor excuses as provided in Wisconsin.

The time is fast approaching when college-educated teachers must take pride in their profession and seek the freedom available to professionals everywhere -- freedom to negotiate wages and benefits based upon personal skill levels and accomplishments. Then and only then will public education change for the better.

Unions are for chumps -- especially socialist chumps.

Public Unions vs America

2011-02-25T22:53:00.002-05:00

Wisconsin Union Power

2011-02-23T00:13:00.001-05:00

Recycling Priorities

2011-02-22T22:59:00.003-05:00

Today the news headlines screamed about (among other things): rioting and killing in Tripoli, protests in Iran, Anti-union legislation and the elected Democrats walking off their jobs in Wisconsin and Indiana, $61 billion in budget cuts by the US House of Representatives. But an unknown editorial writer at the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette was compelled to write about a problem with the new recycling program in this mid-western city, home to 253,691 Hoosiers.

The city’s revamped recycling program is a dramatic improvement – everything gets tossed into one [yellow-lidded] cart and the cart has wheels. But one of the most common recyclable items cluttering up most homes is glaringly absent from the list of what the Fort Wayne recycling program will accept: plastic bags.

The city’s solid waste officials wisely expanded the types of plastic city contractors collect for recycling. And No. 2 plastics are on that list. But the contractor won’t accept those plastic bags that nearly every city household has in abundance. [GASP]

Most plastic grocery bags and the bags paper carriers use to keep your newspaper dry are made of No. 2 plastic, but they are so thin that when they are sent to the recycling center, they gum up the equipment.

Not to worry, however, because the all-caring leftists at the JG have the ready answer to the problem.

The most expedient way of recycling them is by taking the grocery bags back to the grocery store. And Kevin Lentz, associate circulation director for Fort Wayne Newspapers, said newspaper readers can drop off newspaper bags in the lobby at Fort Wayne Newspapers office, 600 W. Main St. Newspaper carriers appreciate it when Journal Gazette readers return the bags for reuse.

Somehow, these people who want to control our very lives and thinking cannot bring themselves to understand that many of us do not give a rat's hindquarters about the worthless task of sorting almost worthless trash (especially #2 plastic bags) for somebody else's profit. A far more logical step is to put the trash-filled plastic bags (that you have already recycled, thank you very much) into the trash cart with the brown lid.

At my house there is only one trash cart ... and it has a brown lid. Trash deposited herein is headed for the landfill from whence it can be mined should we ever run short on plastic. Now back to the real problems of the real world ...

76 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality

2011-02-20T01:17:00.009-05:00

For those who haven't noticed, IFC-TV has recently launched The Onion Cable News Network which features fake news parodies in the tradition of the popular The Onion website. The Onion actually had its beginnings as a print edition, first published at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1988. Madison, a liberal haven for most of its years, is home to the both Wisconsin state government and the land-grant university. In 1978, former Wisconsin Governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus labeled Madison as "30 square miles surrounded by reality" but he was wrong. The incorporated areas of the city total about 76 square miles.

Madison's history is peppered with ugly protests, rioting and violence by its student population, highlighted in the late 1960's during the anti-war protests, which resulted in deaths. Tradition was established as a result of a 1969 riot at the Mifflin Street Block Party which evolved into an annual celebration every May that often results in lawlessness and then there is the annual student-organized Halloween Freakfest which is almost expected to bring about riots that require police intervention. But these leftist protests in "Madtown" actually began in 1910 over the writings contained in a memorial plaque offered to the university by the Class of 1910. Even more interesting is the subtle relationship between 1910 and the current protests going on at the Wisconsin State Capital which indeed involves government-paid teachers and UW students. Here is the 1910 story about "sifting and winnowing:"

In 1894 [UW professor Richard] Ely was teaching economics at Madison, including the various socialist and communist economic theories gaining popularity at the time. When this was discovered by Oliver E. Wells, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ely was attacked in the press not just for teaching left-wing theories to Wisconsin's youth but also for supposedly advising radical activists who were organizing a strike in Madison. When his dismissal was demanded, the university regents investigated his activities.

The Board of Regents decision was to completely vindicate professor Ely and the famous "sifting and winnowing" statement, the regents commitment of academic freedom, appeared in their final report.

"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."

But that is not the end of the story. In 1910 UW sociology professor Edward Ross was accused of consorting with an anarchist and of giving a speaking platform to a man who promoted immorality. On this occasion the regents approved a statement of censure against Ross and suggested that he be dismissed. UW President Van Hise defended Ross and the regents dropped the case. The students of the class of 1910, fearing that academic freedom was again in jeopardy, decided to have the sifting and winnowing statement cast into bronze and present it to the university as a class gift.

This fine story about academic freedom and the constant search for truth is nothing short of a fairy tale in Madison, ripe for the web-pages of The Onion. Writing in The Badger Herald, UW-Madison's much abused alternative news rag, Darryn Beckstrom gives some advice to new students:

Question professors and intellectual thought. Universities should encourage us to think. This is why they are referred to as the "marketplace of ideas." Do you ever see just one brand of cereal in the supermarket? Of course not. So, why should you only receive one side of debate at this university? Expect more.

When you think of diversity, think beyond multiculturalism. I must admit this campus lacks diversity -- intellectual diversity that is. Unfortunately, many of the professors on this campus seem to excel at teaching the course Liberal Indoctrination 101. What better way to coerce students into the ranks of "liberal groupthink?" Don't give way to being a lemming.

This campus preaches tolerance -- tolerance of homosexuals, racial minorities and gay marriage, among other peoples and things. While the school's higher-ups might like to have you think otherwise, tolerance also includes open-mindedness and respect for family values, Judeo-Christian principles and conservative thought.

So here we sit in February 2011 witnessing 60,000 protesters screaming about a modest program to require Wisconsin teachers to pay a portion of their benefits costs. This change being pushed by Governor Scott Walker recognizes that the state lacks the means to fully pay for these costs . . . and that his only other alternative is eliminating teaching jobs since Wisconsin taxes are already too high. As Joseph Ashby points out in American Thinker:

It wasn't very long ago that Greece's streets were filled with government employees running amok over the EU-forced austerity measures. Many conservatives predicted that the unrest was a look at America's future in ten years. As it turns out, it only took ten months.

Gulf Oil Spill: Nothing Left But Lawsuits and Politics

2011-02-16T00:21:00.002-05:00

April 20, 2010 was the date of the explosion and fire that killed 11 workers and sunk the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling vessel in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast. Almost three months later on July 15, the wellhead was capped after the 5,000-foot-deep well spewed over 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf. Now, in just six-and-one-half months, the Coast Guard has released a report that declares that continued on-shore cleanup will do more harm than good.

Birds, sea turtles, fish and other species are more likely to be harmed by an aggressive cleanup than by simply leaving remnants of oil and letting it slowly degrade, the Coast Guard said.

This story follows closely on the heels of a Time Magazine article that reveals that the waters of the Gulf of Mexico have largely been cleansed of the polluting oil and methane gas.

While the jury is still out, the early evidence shows something surprising: the Gulf proved to be much more resilient to the oil spill than scientists might have expected. The vast majority of the oil and other hydrocarbons seem to be gone, less than six months after the crude stopped flowing. And the biggest heroes of the cleanup turned out to be not the thousands of workers who scoured oil from the beaches or the shrimp-boat captains who turned their vessels into oil skimmers. They were actually the microscopic bacteria in the Gulf that digested much of the hydrocarbons while they were still deep under the surface. [. . . ]

As scientists keep examining the Gulf, it may turn out that even if the ecosystem isn't perfect, it's much more resilient than expected. Part of that is not just biochemistry but luck. The relatively warm waters of the Gulf — and the fact that the spill took place more than 40 miles (65 km) out to sea -- gave the bacteria the time and environment they needed to consume hydrocarbons. (Alaska's Prince William Sound, by contrast, has no natural oil seeps that would support crude-eating bacteria, so there were none around capable of breaking down oil after the Exxon Valdez spill.)

Of course the environmentalists want no publicity forthcoming on Nature's own healing powers. Even when the similarities between BP's Macondo blowout and its predecessor, the Ixtoc I wildcat (in Mexico's Campeche Bay in the southwestern gulf) were compared, the emphasis was on the gas explosion that started both catastrophes, the oil volume spewed and the duration of the contaminating oil flow. Speaking about the Mexican spill, Luis A. Soto, a deep-sea biologist commented:

"The environment is amazingly resilient, more so than most people understand. To be honest, considering the magnitude of the spill, we thought the Ixtoc spill was going to have catastrophic effects for decades ...But within a couple of years, almost everything was close to 100 percent normal again."

It took 10 months and heroic efforts from the likes of the world's most famous wildcatter, "Red" Adair to stop the flow.

... after three months in which nothing went right, Texas had some good luck ... or, to put it in a glass-half-empty way, Alabama and Mississippi had some bad luck. Hurricane Frederic, while plowing into those two states, sent tides of two-foot waves reeling into the Texas shoreline. Overnight, half the 3,900 tons of oil piled up on Texan beaches disappeared. And human clean-up efforts began putting a dent in the rest.

Even in Mexico, which had neither the resources nor the hurricanes of the United States, the oil began disappearing under a ferocious counterattack by nature. In the water, much of it evaporated; on beaches, the combined forces of pounding waves, ultraviolet light and petroleum-eating microbes broke it down.

"The environment in the Gulf of Mexico is used to coping with petroleum,'' says [marine biologist, Wes] Tunnell. "The seabed is crisscrossed with petroleum reservoirs, and the equivalent of one to two supertankers full of oil leaks into the Gulf every year. The outcome of that is a huge population of bacteria that feed on oil and live along the shoreline.''

The aftermath will continue for years in the courts as claims mount for a piece of the $20 billion dollar fund set up by British Petroleum at the Obama's insistence. In December of 2010, The US Justice Department filed suit which will likely result in tens of billions of dollars in fines against BP and eight other companies. Now, even BP investors are piling on, claiming that the oil giant misled them about the company's safety record. A website or two has appeared offering advice and help with filing legal claims against BP.

The chinks in British petroleum's armor are beginning to appear. They have just sold their Venezuela assets for $1.8 billion and when pushed too far, we will likely see selective bankruptcies by BP subsidiaries to stem the tidal wave.

In the meantime, the Obama Administration has re-imposed a seven-year ban on oil drilling in the Gulf which will have devastating effects on our ailing economy. This ban is being enforced with complete disregard to a Federal Court contempt order for the Interior Department's enforcement of the ban.

Big Brother Says, "Energy is Bad."

2011-02-08T23:43:00.004-05:00

Energy itself is now a bad thing . . . the cause of the alleged global warming crisis and the urban sprawl crisis and the obesity crisis—and more demonized these days than even, well, tobacco.

Sam Kazman over at Competitive Enterprise Institute documents in (of all places) Cigar Magazine the recent trend of creeping government intrusion into our daily living, affecting conditions inside the privacy of our homes. The creep began early in the the Clinton Years as environmentalist communists took control over our government institutions. We now join Mr, Kazman in his walk down Memory Lane.

The toilet is . . . a shining porcelain example of government efficiency mandates at work. Beginning in 1994, federal law required that new toilets use only 1.6 gallons of water per flush, less than half the amount then used by conventional models. The new toilets would supposedly work fine, and Europe had long been using them. The amount of water saved would be tremendous, and the reductions in water bills would more than offset the cost.

But, in practice, things turned out differently. Despite their costing far more than regular toilets, many of the new models worked poorly—so poorly that they required two flushes to do what one had done before, thus eliminating any savings in water use. A gray market in conventional toilets sprang up, and old discarded units suddenly became prized items commanding premium prices. Columnist Dave Barry joked that, living in Miami, he could buy illegal drugs with no trouble at all, but he couldn’t get hold of an old-fashioned toilet. "I spend 23 percent of my waking hours flushing the new ones," he claimed. There was a groundswell of popular opposition to the low-flow models, and some congressmen tried to repeal the toilet rule. But it failed after running into opposition, not just from environmentalists but from toilet manufacturers as well, who were looking forward to profits from their high-priced low-flush models and didn’t want to see that market undermined by a renewal of consumer choice.

And, thus, low-flow toilets, and the law that mandates them, are still with us. In fact, the array of everyday items subject to federal efficiency mandates has mushroomed. This is because efficiency has become a mantra of politicians and environmentalists, who act as if private industry can’t improve its products without government prodding.

But there’s a basic question that needs to be asked: If these technologies are so good that they’ll save us money, then why do we need laws forcing them on us? And if we do have such laws, doesn’t that suggest that the technologies aren’t really all that good?

Showerhead flow rates were restricted by the same federal law that hit toilets. As a result, new showerheads today may deliver no more than 2.5 gallons per minute, about half of what showerheads used to put out. Like their brethren toilets, low-flow showerheads often perform poorly. Regulatory advocates may claim they work fine, but the facts suggest otherwise. In 2009, for example, Consumer Reports (a strong advocate of efficiency mandates despite its alleged commitment to consumers) tested a showerhead that, it noted, "seemed too good to be true—or legal," inadvertently confirming that these two qualities were mutually exclusive. In fact, the model in question was illegal, exceeding the federal flow standard by almost 60 percent. But rather than give its readers a chance to buy one of these bonanzas, Consumer Reports dutifully reported the model to the Feds.

And, again not unlike the toilets, the new showerheads have produced their own brand of humor. In a 1996 Seinfeld episode, for example, Kramer becomes so desperate for a good shower that he’s mistaken for a dope addict, and he pays a small fortune in cash to a Serbian smuggler for an illegal high-powered showerhead (the Commando 450, "only used in the circus—for elephants").

But, unlike toilets, showerheads use hot water, and so their flow restrictions are touted as saving both water and energy. But why does that make showerhead design a federal issue? People who want to cut their hot water bills have long been able to do so without Congress breathing down their necks. They could take shorter showers, or run their showers at less than full blast, or turn their shower faucets from hot to warm… or they could even buy one of the low-flow showerheads that were available long before the federal law. Instead we have an across-the-board rule with a bureaucratically simple target—gallons per minute. Thankfully, dissatisfied bathers more concerned with quality than money still have other options, such as taking longer, hotter showers or switching to baths, which use much more water. Or they can turn to shower towers, fixtures that use multiple low-flow showerheads so that their combined output exceeds the 2.5-gallons-per-minute limit. Unfortunately, that last loophole was recently plugged by the Department of Energy (DoE).

DoE’s energy-efficiency standards cover practically all major household appliances, from refrigerators to laundry machines to air conditioners and water heaters. Their scope and severity have less to do with what’s practical, and more to do with what’s politically attractive. Consider, for example, the lowly top-loading laundry machine. In the last 15 years, it’s been increasingly displaced by more expensive front-loaders, which more easily meet DoE’s standards. Front-loaders use less hot water, are gentler on clothes, and they put on a good soapy show through their front windows. They also tend to be somewhat finicky and less reliable, often developing an odor problem. Procter & Gamble recently introduced a new laundry product that would have seemed ridiculous a decade ago—a cleanser for washing machines, specifically front-loaders. In effect, you’ve now got to wash the machines that wash your clothes.

Top-loaders have their own advantages: they can be stopped mid-cycle to toss in a wayward sock; they don’t make you stoop to unload them, and, perhaps most importantly, they cost less. Unlike in Europe—where cramped apartments and high energy costs make front-loaders the market leaders—top-loaders continue to be more popular in the US.

But in June of 2007, Consumer Reports ran a surprising story titled “Washers That Don’t Wash.” It found that many new top-loading models did an unexpectedly poor job at cleaning, with some having “the lowest scores we’ve seen in years.” You could still find very good top-loaders, but only if you paid $900 or more, about twice what most of models cost. Why the sudden drop in cleaning ability? Because DoE’s standards had become more stringent, forcing manufacturers to restrict the amount of hot water used by their machines. The result was a lousier wash. Of course, when DoE had first announced the stricter standards several years earlier, it had promised that cleaning performance wouldn’t suffer. Fat chance . . . Congress remained clueless to the problem and, several months later, directed DoE to make its appliance standards even more stringent.

The federal energy-efficiency push gets much of its impetus from a second source as well—the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program. The program began in the early 1990s to advise the public on computer equipment energy use, but it has grown to cover appliances, heating and cooling systems, and even new home construction. Unlike DoE’s standards, which all appliances in a given category must meet, the Energy Star program is advisory in nature, highlighting the very top performers.

But EPA’s emphasis on energy efficiency can lead to some lousy advice. For example:
EPA recommends dishwashers with soil sensors, which monitor how dirty each load of dishes is in order to adjust the water temperature accordingly. You’ll supposedly make up the higher purchase price of these high-tech models through your savings on hot water. But a few years ago, it turned out that the sensor-equipped models were actually the least efficient machines to operate for heavy loads. That meant that people following EPA’s advice were wasting money twice over: first, when they bought the more expensive models and, second, each time they operated them.
For central heating and cooling setups, the highest efficiency systems are not only the costliest, they’re also the most prone to break down. Forswearing ideology, Consumer Reports recommends against them.
EPA suggests turning down your water heater thermostat to a relatively low 120 degrees. The Department of Labor, on the other hand, reports that the bacteria that cause Legionnaires’ disease can multiply in water at that temperature. If there are elderly or immune-compromised people in your household, it recommends 140 degrees. Very few people know about the Legionnaires’ risk, and they sure won’t learn about it from EPA’s Energy Star website.
EPA’s motto is "Protecting People and the Environment". Perhaps it should go on to say, "but not necessarily in that order".

As of January 1, 2012, the sale of traditional 100-watt bulbs will be illegal. The 75-watters will be banned in 2013, and 60- and 40-watt bulbs the year after. That’s Congress looking out for you again. It figures that, given all the advantages of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) over Thomas Edison’s outdated incandescent bulbs, Americans have no good reason not to switch—after all, CFLs last longer and use less energy. Other countries have already taken the lead in banning incandescents, so what’s not to like?

Well, for starters, there’s the fact that CFLs have some pretty severe disadvantages. They cost more, they often burn out long before their much-touted 10,000-hour lifetime, and they can’t be used with timers or outdoors in cold weather or in recessed downlight fixtures. In fact, they can’t be used in some of the most ordinary of fixtures, like the three-bulb sockets on many household ceilings; try putting a CFL in each of those sockets and you’ll probably find that the glass fixture won’t fit back on. Put in just one CFL and it will flicker, because CFLs apparently can’t tolerate bulb diversity (a trait they seem to share with CFL advocates).

Turn on a CFL and it may take a minute or more to reach full brightness, so good-bye to that beloved phrase “at the flick of a switch.” CFLs contain minute amounts of mercury, which causes some environmentalists to worry about disposal issues. This led EPA (a name you can trust by now) to issue guidelines on how to clean up a broken CFL: Step One: “Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.”

For years we’ve heard that new CFLs were a fully developed technology, far better than the fluorescent bulbs of old. But now it turns out that even the newer CFLs had their problems, as evidenced by this statement from The Light Source: “If you were disappointed by the performance of CFL bulbs in the last few years, it’s time to try again.” We heard the same thing about low-flow toilets—first that they were fine, later the admission that there were problems, then that those problems were fixed, and, later still, the promise that, this time around, the problems have really been fixed. Wanna bet?

Do CFLs actually reduce our consumption of electricity? Even for this seemingly unquestionable claim, the answer isn’t clear. In 1987, the town of Traer, Iowa, persuaded most of its residents to turn in their incandescent bulbs for free fluorescents. The results? Electricity use increased by nearly 10 percent. People figured that, because running the new lights was cheaper, they might as well keep them on longer.

Most importantly, there’s the light itself—many people just hate it. They find it depressing, color-draining, sickly, headache-inducing, and morgue-like, with distracting flickers and annoying buzzes that none of their CFL-loving friends seem to sense (“electrical embalmment,” one blogger called it). And a New Yorker cartoon featured a manager showing a visitor around his company’s cubicle-filled floor, explaining that “the dim fluorescent lighting is meant to emphasize the general absence of hope.”

Rockin' the Bakkan: Jobs in Williston, ND

2011-01-29T22:14:00.001-05:00

Williston, ND, population 13,000, is located atop the Bakkan Shale hydrocarbon deposits that have made southeastern Montana and western North Dakota the fastest growing oil patch in the world with new production records set and new wells spudded every month. With such economic activity comes jobs . . . high paying oil jobs.

The current oil boom has catapulted Williston to the top in average wages paid in North Dakota, above Fargo-West Fargo, Bismarck and Wahpeton.

Workers make $49,500 on average here, to Fargo’s $38,000. In oil, the fastest-growing employment sector, wages average more than $80,000 a year.

Job Service reported in July [2010] that 6,620 people from other states found jobs in North Dakota in 2009, more than 80 percent more than the 3,631 out-of-staters who found work here in 2008. In June, North Dakota’s unemployment rate of 3.3 percent was lowest in the nation.

In May, the last month for which Job Service has compiled numbers, there were 1,100 job openings in Williston, 655 of them in the oil industry.

A word of caution to the unemployed who are about to pack and set out on a journey to the Promised Land . . . when you get to western North Dakota, you might not find a place to live, because housing and infrastructure are struggling to keep pace with the economy. By the way, the weather forecast for tomorrow shows a high of -4 and a low of -15, an 80% chance of snow, winds at 10-15 mph which puts the wind chill factor at -35. With those conditions, and in a state whose state tree is the telephone pole, some people forget how lucky they are.

Suicide By Bear . . . Bad Plan Brings Bad Jokes

2011-01-28T22:41:00.001-05:00

Last August, after escaping from an Arizona prison with two other inmates, convicted killer Tracy Province was re-captured about sixty miles from Yellowstone Park after the escapees had earlier killed an Oklahoma couple in New Mexico. Now the bizarre story of Province has been told to the press by Mohave County, AZ sheriff's Detective Larry Matthews:

"He had planned to go up in the mountains and shoot a gram of heroin and be bear food. He wanted to overdose and let the bears eat him."

"He didn't know why anyone would want to escape because all you do is look over your shoulder the entire time,"

The only substance to the story by the Las Vegas Review-Journal was Province's guilty plea on the escape charge, but even weird stories about that which never happened make people like me write about them. Then there is always the public official who will help perpetuate the tale:

Al Nash, a spokesman at Yellowstone National Park, said it's certainly possible that Province's plan would have worked, but it struck him as improbable.

"We have a fair number of bears in the ecosystem," Nash said. "They eat about anything. A bear would rather get an easy meal than a difficult meal, but human bear encounters are very infrequent."

Top-of-the-food-chain predictors roam Yellowstone Park ... grizzlies, black bear, cougars and the ugliest of all, packs of gray wolves. As frightening as that might appear, it is accepted that "all predators kill and eat the foods that they know, that they are familiar with, that they have had success hunting in the past, that they have tasted before. The mere presence of a human does not mean that a bear will decide to eat humans."

So now we must go back to our brilliant criminal who devises this Rube Goldberg plan to kill himself because he is worrying himself to death and has lost 30 pounds since escaping. Now he simply cannot just do a killer overdose of heroin, nor can he jump over a cliff, or lay down in front a a moving train or even slit his wrists. The only way in God's universe is to knock himself silly with heroin and leave himself vulnerable to hungry bears in Yellowstone. What a plan! But wait, doesn't it gets cold at night here in Yellowstone and Province really needs to talk to his Hoosier relatives and God just is not taking his plan seriously.

Leave it to the Aussies to worry about the bear who ate the guy who took the heroin. Humor is where you find it at a Yahoo forum site:

"Now, THAT's planning. I wonder if the bears would go wild and start nicking people's dvd players in order to fuel their new fugitive/smack habit?"

"so he planned to die...but backed out cos it was too cold"

"he should have taken up Yogi instead."

"Nothing more dangerous than a 200 pound bear stoned out of his mind"
Especially once they get the munchies. "Helloooo, pic-i-nic basket!"

Well bad bear jokes is what you get for reading this piece, but you are left to read the worst bear joke that I could find on the friggin' internet:

A Russian scientist and a Czechoslovakian scientist had spent their lives studying the grizzly bear. Each year they petitioned their respective governments to allow them to go to Yellowstone National Park to study the bears. Finally, their requests were granted, and they immediately flew to Yellowstone. They reported to the ranger station and were told that it was the grizzly mating season and it was too dangerous to go out and study the animals. They pleaded that this was their only chance, and finally the ranger relented. The Russian and the Czech were given portable phones and told to report in every day. For several days they called in, and then nothing was heard from the two scientists. The rangers mounted a search party and found the camp completely ravaged, with no sign of the missing men. Following the trails of a male and a female bear, they finally caught up with the female. Fearing an international incident, they decided they must kill the animal to find out if she had eaten the scientist. They killed the female bear and opened its stomach to find the remains of the Russian scientist. One ranger turned to the other and said, "You know what this means, don't you?" The other ranger nodded and responded, "I guess it means the Czech is in the male."

Soros' Minions Attack Justices Thomas And Scalia

2011-01-23T22:49:00.003-05:00

It all started one year ago, when the Supreme Count struck down major provisions of the McCain-Feingold Act in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. As reported in the Washington Post, the ruling of the court:

. . . upheld the First Amendment rights of individuals acting through corporations and labor unions to participate in our political process, and it struck down an oppressive thicket of statutes restricting - and even criminalizing - their political speech. [. . . ]

To the court's majority, it was "stranger than fiction for our Government to make . . . political speech a crime."

Predictably, from the murky depths of the left's clandestine funding organizations formed and supported by George Soros has come an all out attack against conservative judges on the Supreme Court. Leading the attack on Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia is Common Cause, a registered lobbying group which had significant influence in the passing of McCain-Feingold. It is significant to understand that this organization has given itself over to the left, for a price.

In recent years, CC has received large amounts of funding from George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Tides Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Arca Foundation, . . . the Joyce Foundation, the Century Foundation, and the Compton Foundation.

Democracy Now! . . . one of the many Soros-funded media outlets, reports on the actions of another Soros family member:

On Thursday, the watchdog group Common Cause filed a petition with the Justice Department urging it to investigate whether Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas should have recused themselves from the [Citizen's United] case last year because of a conflict of interest. Common Cause alleges that both justices were paid guests at exclusive gatherings organized by Koch Industries, where conservative business leaders and elected officials secretly strategized around elections. The justices were among those who provided the critical votes in the 5-4 ruling, a ruling that has prompted an unprecedented flood of corporate expenditures on electoral campaigns over the last year.

The "evidence" against the justices is a brochure issued by Koch Industries encouraging attendance at a future meeting of potential campaign financiers which said:

To encourage new participants, Mr. Koch offers to waive the $1,500 registration fee. And he notes that previous guests have included Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, Gov. Haley Barbour and Gov. Bobby Jindal, Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, and Representatives Mike Pence, Tom Price and Paul D. Ryan.

The LA Times offers this additional detail:

Supreme Court spokesperson Kathy Arberg said that Justices Thomas and Scalia had traveled to Indian Wells, California to address a Federalist Society dinner sponsored by Charles and Elizabeth Koch but did not actively participate in the separate Koch strategy and policy meetings. Justice Scalia spoke about international law at the January 2007 meeting of the quasi-academic Federalist Society and did not attend the separate political and strategy meeting hosted by the Kochs, she said. Justice Thomas spoke to the Federalists at the same location in January 2008 about his recently published book. Thomas then dropped by one of the separate Koch meeting sessions. "It was a brief drop by," Arberg said. "He was not a participant."

As liberal writer Sam Stein, reporting in, of all places, the Huffington Post adds:

"There is nothing to prevent Supreme Court justices from hanging out with people who have political philosophies," said Steven Lubet, a professor of law at Northwestern University who teaches courses on Legal Ethics. . . . Suggestions that Justices Scalia and Thomas's support of Citizens United may have been affected by their time with Koch officials ignores the fact that nothing concrete is known about what meetings they attended and when. Even then, Lubet argues, it would be difficult to argue that there is "a troublesome nexus between the event and the decision." Scalia and Thomas have been opponents of restrictions on campaign finance likely well before they were guests at a Koch Industry seminar.

Now in the wake of the "conflict of interest" allegation, Common Cause has added an "ethics violation" charge against Justice Thomas possibly because "he has been the lone justice to argue that the laws requiring public disclosure of large political contributions are unconstitutional."

WASHINGTON…Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed over the course of at least five years to report his wife's income from a conservative think-tank on his financial disclosures, according to the watchdog group Common Cause.

Between 2003 and 2007, Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, was paid $686,589 by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, according to a Common Cause review of IRS records. Thomas failed to note the income in his financial disclosure forms for those years, choosing instead to check a box titled "none" where "spousal non-investment income" would normally be disclosed.

Federal judges are bound by law to disclose the source of spousal income, according to Stephen Gillers, a law professor at NYU Law School. Thomas's omission -- which could be interpreted as a violation of that law -- could lead to some form of penalty, Gillers said.

"It wasn't a miscalculation, he simply omitted his wife's source of income for six years, which is a rather dramatic omission," said Gillers "It could not have been an oversight."

But Steven Lubet, an expert on judicial ethics at Northwestern University School of Law, said that such an infraction was unlikely to result in a penalty. While unfamiliar with the Thomas complaint, he said that failure to disclose spousal income "is not a crime of any sort, but there is a potential civil penalty" for failing to follow the rules. He added: "I am not aware of a single case of a judge being penalized simply for this."

The Supreme Court is, "the only judicial body in the country that is not governed by a set of judicial ethical rules," Gillers said.

A spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which oversees the financial disclosures, could not be reached for comment last night on what actions could be taken. In most cases, judges simply amend their forms when an error is discovered.

"The [US Supreme Court] Justices are not bound by the Code of Conduct [for United States Judges], but they look to it for guidance." ~Spokesperson for the US Supreme Court Public Information Office in an email to ProCon.org, June 15, 2008

The Ethics In Government Act was passed in 1978 in response to Watergate and it has reporting requirements (which include reporting spousal income) for financial disclosures and restrictions on lobbying activities by former government employees. Penalties for failure to file the disclosure can result in a court hearing and civil fines not to exceed $10,000. Apparently there are no restriction on the type of employment that a spouse has, i.e. former senator Tom Daschle's wife has always been a lobbyist.

No one knows why Clarence Thomas did not report his wife's income, but the financial disclosure law is little more than a nuisance with no enforceable purpose. The offense is trivial and obviously far less serious than Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's cheating on his income taxes. It is time for George Soros and his minions to get a life since we at least know where Clarence Thomas was born.

UAW Will Drive Automakers From U.S.

2011-01-21T00:10:00.000-05:00

Detroit News -- Washington — United Auto Workers President Bob King told members tonight the union's very survival is at stake in its efforts to organize foreign workers — and said it has limited options in contract talks with Detroit's Big Three.

"If we don't organize these transnationals, I don't think there's a long term future for the UAW — I really don't," King told more than 1,000 members and retirees at the opening of a four-day political action conference in Washington.

The Detroit union has asked foreign automakers to agree to a set of principles to allow for what it calls "fair bargaining" and King says the union plans to pick a first target within 90 days. He said the foreign automakers are out to "destroy the union."

The United Auto Workers are essentially tied to the Detroit Three automakers, formerly known as the Big Three until the UAW sucked them dry and left GM and Chrysler to be bailed out by the taxpayers. UAW members now number under 400,000 workers with some 600,000 retirees. In the glory days of 1979, active membership numbered 1.53 million.

Except for public service unions protected from the economy, unions have been in full retreat over the past half century. Our fully-unionized American auto industry lost out to foreign competitors who brought their non-union plants to the United States. Writing in Slate Magazine, Mickey Kaus identifies the Achilles Heel buried deep within the "very structure of Wagner Act Unionism":

The problem isn't so much wages as work rules--internal strictures that make it hard for unionized competitors to constantly adapt and change production processes the way the Japanese do.

Since the First Law of Printers Ink is,"A picture is worth a thousand words", I include the photo above of Ford's 2007 master contract with the UAW, which contains 2215 pages and weighs 22 pounds and "says little about efficiency and competitiveness."

It is obvious that the unions wanted more membership dues when they attempted to organize the transnational plants, but all efforts failed. Now with no hope of getting wage bumps for their current membership until 2115 because of the bailouts, there is nowhere else to find victims for their rent-seeking except the foreign carmakers. Kaus explains why American unionism cannot be accepted by the likes of Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai.

Under the Wagner Act, management manages. What the union does is complain, and negotiate for a rule limiting management's right to do what the union doesn't like. A worker protests that his job should be classified as "drilling special and heavy" instead of "drilling general." The parties butt heads, a decision is reached, and a new rule is deposited like another layer of sediment. At some GM plants, distinct job categories evolved for each spot on the assembly line (e.g., "headlining installer"). In Japanese auto plants, where they spend their time building cars instead of creating job categories, there is only one nonsupervisory job classification: "production."

More to the point, all automaking may soon exit the United States unless the UAW agrees to the elimination of almost all work rules. The newest design in auto manufacturing is Ford's Camacari, Brazil plant which was built with the latest robotic technology and an unheard of concept of allowing the workforces of the component suppliers to work side by side with Ford assembly workers.

As in the United States, assembly workers make more than those employed by suppliers, and the union is eager to ensure that work reserved for the higher paid Ford employees is not being done by lower wage supplier staff.

Labor expert Harley Shaiken of the University of California, Berkeley, said similar concerns are one reason why the Camaçari model is unlikely to be duplicated in the United States. He said the UAW has relaxed work rules at many Ford factories to allow workers to do more than one job, and has even allowed experiments with limited supplier integration.

But he said the UAW is concerned that giving too much on these fronts will just allow the companies to speed up production and transfer more and more work to lower-paid supplier employees.

Praise for Indiana Public Employees' Health Savings Plan

2011-01-16T22:27:00.000-05:00

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank, is praising Indiana and Governor Mitch Daniels for the HSA plan adopted for state employees in 2005.

One of the business-like practices Indiana has adopted is placing government employees in consumer-driven health plans (CDHPs).

The most common CDHP, a health savings account, pairs a high-deductible insurance policy with a tax-advantaged savings account. HSAs are increasingly common in private-sector workplaces. [. . . ]

In 2005, Gov. Daniels offered HSAs to state employees as one option among competing health care plans. Choosing an HSA was voluntary and popular. In 2010, 70 percent of the state’s entire workforce of 30,000 had made this selection; when the 2009 final numbers are completed, the program is projected to have saved taxpayers $20 million. The benefits don’t end there, however.

The state of Indiana pays 100 percent of the premiums for the [high-deductible] health insurance portion of the plan, and also deposits an amount equal to 55 percent of the employees’ annual deductibles into each employee’s tax-free savings account. Employees can make additional tax-free deposits, and withdrawals are not taxed provided they are spent on health-related purchases. Any interest on assets held in the accounts is tax free too, so they are thrice-blessed.

The Mercer Group, a management consulting company, reports that through September 2009, Indiana state employees had accumulated positive HSA account balances of $28.1 million.

HSAs result in lower health care costs (thus lower insurance premiums) because employees have a stake in keeping these expenditures in line, as shown in this Mercer Group chart.

Now if (and only if) we can get Obamacare shut down, the Health Savings Plan idea, which was invented in Indiana by Golden Rule Insurance, will begin to put financial considerations back into doctor-patient relationships . . . as it was before LBJ's Great Society fiasco, which began way back in the 1960s.

Pity Party in Atlanta

2011-01-16T20:57:00.002-05:00

. . . and to make matters worse, the Falcons were ground up, tossed around, chewed on and spit-out by the Packers in the NFL playoffs.

H/T: RattlerGator

"Gabby Opened Her Eyes" - Perhaps We Should Open Ours

2011-01-13T23:03:00.001-05:00

"A few minutes after we left her room and some of her colleagues from Congress were there, Gabby opened her eyes for the first time," said Mr. Obama.

The amazing coincidence of it all! Immediately following Barry's visit to Gabrielle Giffords' bedside in advance of his "inspiring" speech to the nation, the Congresswoman opened her eyes. The Hill reports:

Three colleagues and close friends of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) were in the congresswoman's hospital room Wednesday for the moment she opened her eyes for the first time since being shot.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) were there when Giffords opened her eyes, raised her arm and gave a thumbs-up — four days after being shot in the head Saturday. [ . . . ]

Pelosi said Wednesday night, describing the moment. "And then she opened her eyes, and her husband — she looked at her husband and responded to comments that he made. And it was like a miracle. Really. It was something so spectacular."

Debbie Wasserman Shultz had this to say:

"We were taking turns holding her hand. And I said to her, 'Gabby, you've got to get up and get better so we can go back to New Hampshire this summer. We're fully expecting you to be there.'

"Right when I said that, she started to open her eyes. Just slits at first. Then they closed again.

Finally, in the words of Kirsten Gillibrand:

"She started to open her eyes. And when her husband saw her making this effort, he urged her, said, 'Gabby, open your eyes, open your eyes.' And sure enough, she did."

I need to point out a few inconsistencies which leads me to be suspicious of the magnificent coincidence here.

First of all The Hill reports three Democrat ladies and Giffords' husband in the room while CBS did not acknowledge that Pelosi was there.
Secondly, Dr Peter Rhee had reported on Monday that she could open her eyes and respond to simple commands on Sunday.
Finally (and almost as amazing as what will become known as the "Obama Miracle") not a single eyewitness to Gabrielle's "eye-opening" experience nor the president mentioned that she could not have been perceived as opening her eyes, because one eye is completely bandaged over.

It is no secret that the Democratic trio of Pelosi, Wasserman Shultz and Gillibrand are known liars . . . and it is doubtful that Prez Zero could speak truth about anything.

This comment pretty much condemns Obama's "for me" showmanship:

"Eye opening is a great sign, but it's to be expected in anyone who's already been shown to follow commands," said Dr. Joshua Bederson, Professor and Chair of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. "In that regard it’s not ‘a miracle,’ but the fact that she is doing so well after a point blank gun shot wound to the head is in fact a miracle."

A scalawag who shall forever be known as "Former Speaker Nancy" responds satirically to The Hill's article:

After the Messiah Obama came to Tucson yesterday, me and my colleagues witnessed a miracle as Gabby opened her eyes. Obama is truly amazing and has incredible power. He rivals Jesus himself for performing miracles. It's too bad the American people and the economy have not witnessed his incredible work. After Obama made Gabby open her eyes, he walked on water in the hospital fountain. It's true because MSDNC and the other networks are reporting it this morning. We couldn't let this tragedy go to waste when it was the perfect opportunity to kick-off His Holiness Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. The most awful things was that I had to fly commercial to Tucson. Damn I miss that private plane paid for by the taxpayers. Now if we can just begin to restrict speech so Dems can't be criticized and take away guns from everyone so people can't protect themselves, well the country will be ready to put me back as Speaker again. Thank you America for swallowing it hook, line and sinker. I snicker at how gullible you are.

Taxpayers Lose To Cozy Military-Industrial Complex

2011-01-07T00:50:00.004-05:00

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961

The WSJ reports today on "Pork, politics and the engine the Pentagon doesn't want."

If Congress is looking for New Year's resolutions, it could start by breaking the habit of funding programs the government doesn't want. A case in point is the attempt to throw another $450 million at the development of a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a plan that Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the military doesn't need.

In what has become an annual ritual, Congress is weighing whether one of the largest weapons programs in history should support the development of F-35 engines by both General Electric and Pratt & Whitney. In 2001, GE's engine lost in the procurement competition to the one designed by Pratt & Whitney, as F-35 developers Lockheed Martin and Boeing preferred the latter version.

To hedge its technological risk, the Pentagon nonetheless sought financing for the GE engine as a backup through 2006 in case the Pratt & Whitney version fell short. That hasn't happened, and as budgets have tightened the Pentagon has understandably decided that it needs only one engine design. As Secretary Gates put it, "Only in Washington does a proposal where everybody wins get considered a competition, where everybody is guaranteed a piece of the action at the end."

The estimated cost to develop this GE engine, which may never be used, is $2.9 billion and continued funding of the duplicate engine is absurd when the advanced F-22 fighter is just now coming off the assembly line and test flights have already begun on the Pratt & Whitney-powered F-35 fighter.

Pork projects for the benefit of government contractors evidences Corporatism . . . the so-called Military-Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in 1961. Our brand-new shiny TEA-Party-inspired representatives in the House will have to work extra hard to keep down "continuing resolution" funding of military projects that add nothing to our defense capabilities.

Postpone Tax Day . . . For Lack Of Interest

2011-01-02T16:27:00.002-05:00

According to CNN Money, "50 million taxpayers must delay filing [2010] taxes."

The IRS said that it needs until mid-to-late-February to reprogram its processing systems because Congress acted so late this year cleaning up the tax code. The bill, which includes deductions for state and local sales taxes, college tuition and teacher expenses, wasn't signed into law until Dec. 17.

Somebody is lying to everybody. The tax "code cleanup" generally affected 2011 taxes not 2010. The deductions for state sales taxes, college tuition for students and expense deductions permitted for teachers are the same deductions permitted when 2009 taxes were paid last year. Although the Bush tax deductions for education ended after 2009, TurboTax had not changed their software nor were they advising clients that the deduction was invalid. The fact of the matter is that the tax code from 2009 is unchanged, so nothing in the instructions need to be changed to permit the deductions.

As any anyone who has filed their income taxes using software, such as Turbo Tax, already has experienced, a few form redesigns hold up filing for a brief period in any given year, but what has changed to delay the filing of one in every three tax returns by two months? If Money had mentioned that the law affecting Alternate Minimum Taxes had changed, I can buy into that, since the AMT has been adjusted for inflation almost each year . . . but nary a word about AMT.

The Wall Street Journal has the best answer . . . "Lets Postpone Tax Day."

Slouching Toward The Poorhouse

2010-12-27T23:30:00.002-05:00

Mike Shedlock reports on the WSJ article entitled "Bailed-out Banks Slip Toward Failure - Number of Shaky Lenders Rises to 98 as Bad Loans Pile Up; Smaller Institutions Hit Hardest."

Nearly 100 U.S. banks that got bailout funds from the federal government show signs they are in jeopardy of failing.

The total, based on an analysis of third-quarter financial results by The Wall Street Journal, is up from 86 in the second quarter, reflecting eroding capital levels, a pileup of bad loans and warnings from regulators. The 98 banks in shaky condition got more than $4.2 billion in infusions from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Shedlock expanded this brief analysis, noting that:

Most of these failures will be relatively small ones. The median TARP infusion for the 98 banks was $10 million. The grand total of the 98 banks was about $4.2 billion. In contrast the first 8 large recipients received a total of $125 billion, now repaid.

Commercial real estate loans gone sour are at the heart of many small bank failures. One consequence of these failures is the too big to fail banks keep getting bigger.

It would appear then that the financial crisis and the mortgage bubble effect has yet to play out entirely . . . and the numbers of banks with bad loans and bad capital ratios continues to increase and will soon increase the 320 or so banks that have already failed since 2008. Among the big banks Citigroup continues to struggle despite the move afoot to get out from under government loans.

Liberals, God bless them, remained convinced that the bank and investment house bailouts were the right thing and the only thing to do back in 2008. New York Magazine, in a major hit piece aimed at Libertarians offered this analysis:

Most of the libertarians I spoke with said they would have let the big banks fail in 2008. “I wouldn’t have done anything,” says [Mises Institute President Douglas] French. “The key to capitalism is you have to have failure.”

The financial crisis was not an indictment of their worldview, libertarians argue, but a vindication of it. Letting the banks fail would have been painful. But the pain would have been less than it will be now that the government is propping up the housing, banking, and automobile industries. Plus, the economy would have recovered by now. “You’ve probably never heard of the depression of 1920,” says French. “You haven’t heard of it because it came and went in one year, because the government didn’t do anything to prop up failed businesses.” (Other economists argue that the government’s response was actually consistent with the philosophy of John Maynard Keynes.) Letting banks fail would also avoid moral hazard, say libertarians, since investors wouldn’t take such risky bets the next time around.

It’s a compelling story. But like many libertarian narratives, it’s oversimplified. If the biggest banks had failed, bankers wouldn’t have been the only ones punished. Everyone would have lost his money. Investors who had no idea how their dollars were being used—the ratings agencies gave their investments AAA grades, after all—would have gone broke. Homeowners who misunderstood their risky loans would have gone into permanent debt. Sure, the bailouts let some irresponsible people off easy. But not intervening would have unfairly punished a much greater number.

Note the past tense of NY Mag's discussion that assumes that the crisis has past and that wealth has been restored to all affected parties and that the massive dispensing of funds was done efficiently and effectively by our government bureaucrats with no wasted earmarks by our politicians and no under-the-counter transactions . . . and the government created no winners and losers.

As the WSJ noted, the bank failures continue at an increasing pace and the dangerous mortgage lending practices which brought down the economy are being continued by Fannie and Freddie. The cost to the taxpayer is $130.6 billion to date without a dollar having been repaid. If you have not investigated the decreased resale value of your property in comparison to the mortgage the bank holds on it, you may be in for a grand awakening. Spreading the losses of the financial decline among all taxpayers is idiotic when the politicians approving such a move have not the slightest idea how bad an idea it was. The harsh effect of capitalism directly on the perpetrators would have resulted in a similar bank failure rate at a much smaller cost.

As for Keynsian economics, which encourages government "spending," the faulty theory had the effect of extending the Great Depression until WWII brought about a recovery. As American philosopher George Santayana said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"Lightning" Bolton for President

2010-12-26T21:22:00.004-05:00

"As I survey the situation, I think the Republican field is wide open. I don't think the party's anywhere close to a decision. And stranger things have happened. For example, inexperienced senators from Illinois have gotten presidential nominations."

“I think this administration, if its policies were pursued for an extended period of time, would take us into decline, but there’s nothing wrong with this country that a real president couldn’t cure.”

“What’s needed in this next campaign is to say, with clarity, why a pro-individual-liberty, small-government perspective is what most Americans really want.” The perception now is that “we’re the party of no.” But “the party of no is the party of yes to individual freedom, and you’ve got to make that case affirmatively. I don’t think I’m gonna have trouble doing that.”

Politico reports:

Bolton’s explorations are attracting some notice on the right. He’s on the cover of the forthcoming issue of National Review, the influential conservative magazine.

Editor Rich Lowry said the magazine made Bolton its subject because of his rising profile in conservative circles.

"He looms quite large," Lowry said. "There are so few voices on foreign policy [in Republican politics]. John has that expertise, and he's on Fox, I would guess, once a day at least. He's writing what feels like, to me, an op-ed a week or more for fairly substantial outlets."

The case for Bolton is a straightforward one: He would be the national security candidate. As he sees it, there wouldn’t be any meaningful competition for that designation. Republican primary voters would cotton to his confrontational style and his ability to target what conservatives see as a major vulnerability for President Barack Obama.

National Review bills Jay Nordlinger's story on John Bolton as: "Speak Boldly and Carry a Big Stick - The Phenomenon of John Bolton." The mag hit the newsstands this past week and the article has been made available on John Bolton's Facebook page. It is a good read.

John Bolton was a joy to behold during his stint as UN Ambassador under George Bush. There was no groveling to the third-world countries and no minced words. As we settle on a new cast of candidates for 2012, tired old politicians such as Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney have to bail out before the primaries in order to assure a real conservative Republican candidate without baggage can be nominated. Candidates like Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindahl, and John Bolton would make public candidate debates interesting and informative. As I think about it, I imagine that straight-talk would be commonplace.

The Magic of Christmas

2010-12-24T15:36:00.004-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present Richard Fernandez's beautiful retelling of his Christmas memories. These are warm memories of the simple life when giving reflected the love of family while honoring Christ's birth.

All the streets were dark and bare

The postal service says that this year, children are asking Santa for basics like “coats, socks and shoes — rather than toys and games” this Christmas. Maybe so. The presents have changed with time but the gift has always been the same.

If you could create a display of things people have given each other over the centuries they would include birds carved from wood, home-made cakes, letters or garlands of flowers. In and among them would be coats, carefully brushed and mended to seem new or things handed down, pieces of crockery, furniture. They would make vast and fascinating procession stretching back over the years. My grandmother always gave me a present for Christmas until the year she died. She was living with my parents by then, and without a source of income. I remember her saving coins for some purpose no one could guess until on Christmas day we found out what it was for. She gave me a chocolate bar.

It was days before I could bring myself to eat it. When I finally did, I stared for a long time afterward at the foil and paper, wondering as many of us probably have at such gifts, on how so little a thing could carry so great a weight of human love. Whether it is an Xbox or a package of cookies, from the hands that wrap the packages or make the food comes the miracle, which springs the heart of man. Humanity is not as some would argue, a blight upon the universe. On the contrary, they are the only creatures we know of in the vast cavalcade of galaxies and stars who can transform coats, socks, velveteen rabbits and candy bars into things of magic.

If I live to be a hundred
I will never know from where
Came those lovely scarlet ribbons
Scarlet ribbons for her hair

Merry Christmas From the Family

2010-12-20T22:09:00.000-05:00

Where is PETA when you need them?

2010-12-18T16:52:00.000-05:00

From We are Unusual and Tragic and Alive:

Thursday night in Baltimore County, MD, two men spotted a deer that had fallen through the ice on the Patapsco River.

They watched as the deer struggled, but failed to free itself. It became apparent that the deer was probably going to die The two men, Khalil Abusakran and Jim Hart, decided to help. They commandeered a nearby raft and used its oars to break up the ice. They entered the water, floated over to the deer, and brought it safely to back to land.

Also on the scene was a police officer, who watched the entire event from the shore. When Khalil and Jim were done high-fiving and celebrating their victory, the officer approached them and wrote them each a ticket for $90. It’s illegal in the state of Maryland, you see, for anyone under the age of 17 to not wear a life vest in a boat. Both Khalil and Jim are in their 20s.

"I fucking hate deer," said the officer.

The men plan to fight the ticket in court on February 18th.

H/T: Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

If it looks like a cigarette . . .

2010-12-16T01:54:00.006-05:00

Subtitle: King County Finds Another Smoking Bogeyman

Red County reports:

For those looking for proof that government regulation invariably tempts society to slide down a slope of decreasing liberty, you may not find a more slippery example than the most recent attempt at bureaucratic overreach in King County, Wash.

Although a statewide ban on smoking in public places was passed by the Washington State Legislature in 2005 - one of the strictest in the nation - the King County health department wants to go a step further to outlaw the use of electronic cigarettes in public. Electronic cigarettes are a device used by some smokers as a substitute for smoking tobacco and are designed to deliver a vaporized dose of flavored liquid containing nicotine to the user.

A vote by the King County Board of Health planned for Thursday would extend the regulations for smoking tobacco in public to e-cigarettes” and also ban the sale of the devices to minors.

This action is eminent despite a court ruling earlier this month that prohibits the Food & Drug Administration from banning or regulating the fake cigarettes as drugs.

The fake cigs, from which users inhale vaporized nicotine, don't emit smoke. Rather, they produce a less-smelly, combustion-free mist.

But public health officials say they're so similar to the real thing that they make tobacco enforcement difficult and often prompt smokers to think it's OK to light up in public. And that leads to second-hand smoke, health officials reason.

"The idea is that even though they're not exactly identical to cigarettes, people see folks using e-cigarettes, and they think somebody else is smoking," said Bud Nicola, a King County Board of Health member and affiliate professor with the University of Washington School of Public Health.

"It makes it very difficult for inspectors.

No, Professor Nicola, we wouldn't want to inconvenience the Code Enforcement Nazis. This action is motivated by the desire of a bunch of elitist liberals to regulate the way people (other than themselves, of course) live their lives . . . and smoking has been raised to the level of bogeyman everywhere. In this case, the Smoking Bogeyman becomes the symbol that provides the proper exaggeration of a perceived threat or risk of death from infinitesimal amounts of nicotine because technology has now trumped the smoking ban (which was based on the unprovable imaginary risk of second-hand smoke).

Perhaps one day, in an enlightened age, the application of logic and empiricism will permit the dissemination of honest statistics based upon the evidence already provided in extensive, controlled studies. Bogeymen and those who use them hate statistics, because it is in their nature to be irrational and to play upon fear as the way to control the sheeple.

Misguided Elitist Millionaires

2010-12-13T00:17:00.015-05:00

Liberals get so tangled up in elitism that the predictable results are loss of reason. Now that is a pretty high-sounding start to this post but I am flabbergasted by the uppity attitude of a group of supposedly social conscious, wealthy nutjobs who are out to make over the country into an elitist paradise with the wealthy in charge. The evidence has been all around us with the contributions being made by George Soros and others to organizations that they set up in order to control our pissant populace.

The very latest effort, as reported by Martin Wolk of MSNBC, is an ad campaign sponsored by "Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength" who favor higher taxation of the rich. This organization is really the "Wealth for the Common Good" bunch who for some reason cannot use their own name in the campaign to reverse the Bush-era tax cuts on incomes over an arbitrary $235,000.

Of course we have often heard that Warren Buffet, Bill Gates,Ted Turner, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and others have pledged to give away much of their fortunes for worthy causes and I have no quarrel with that kind of charity, but what possible good could come from turning over more money to economically-challenged politicians?

Philanthropy is much welcomed but encouraging expanded government through higher taxes can only lead to the collapse of our now global economic system. Greece has sunk, Ireland is sinking, Portugal is next and the entire Eurozone complex will soon drag others down with it. So why so much effort by the Wealth for Common Good and its partners to encourage a tax increase? Suspiciously, many of the partners appear to be one-trick pony outfits supporting just the tax increase for the rich but all of them have one thing in common . . . they seek donations to fund their causes (or more cynically to provide income for themselves).

If it is truly the wealthy wishing only for betterment of mankind, then philanthropic efforts done outside the government should suffice. If some misguided souls believe that politicians need more money and power, they can help simply by making a payments directly to the Bureau of the Public Debt. Under Public Law 87-58 enacted in 1961, anyone can help the government by making a tax deductible contribution.

Here's how, according to the Bureau of the Public Debt, http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/:

Please follow these important steps to make a contribution to reduce the debt.

1. Make check payable to the "Bureau of the Public Debt"
2. In the memo section of the check, make sure you write
"GIFT TO REDUCE THE DEBT HELD BY THE PUBLIC"
3. Mail check to -

ATTN DEPT G
BUREAU OF THE PUBLIC DEBT
P O BOX 2188
PARKERSBURG, WV 26106-2188

Please forward these instructions to all of your multi-millionaire friends.

Fuzzy Math in New Tax Bill Scoring

2010-12-12T00:52:00.004-05:00

The Hill reports that, according to the Joint Taxation Committee and the Congressional Budget Office, the newly brokered tax bill (suddenly called an economic stimulus) will "...add $858.7 billion dollars to the deficit over the next ten years." Immediately, we know that something is amiss since the extension of the Bush-era tax rates will extend only through the 2012 election year and the payroll tax holiday is for but for one year.

"From where does the $858.7 billion in deficits originate?" you ask in a manner designed to avoid preposition stranding. Well, the JTC and the CBO folks (at the behest of the Senate's Democratic majority) decided that keeping tax rates as they are in 2010 somehow decreases future tax revenues. Time and time again it has been proven that tax rate reductions (or in this case not permitting an increase in rates) have actually stimulated the national economy and caused government revenues to increase. Conservatives like to call this "Reaganomics."

Democrats, especially Obama, keep telling us that this bill is a tax cut "for the rich" but it clearly is not since no tax rate cut is being proposed ... only the extension of current rates. But these babies are supposedly going to result in a cost of "more than $407 billion dollars over the next decade."

The next piece of the puzzle comes in the form of "a two-year patch for the alternative minimum tax" that supposedly will raise the deficit by $136 billion. Here is the dirty little secret about the alternative minimum tax; 25 million taxpayers will become subject to the tax in 2010 unless some adjustment is made to the target wage level as has been routinely done by Congress in past years:

Enacted in 1969, the Alternative Minimum Tax was originally aimed at 155 extremely wealthy taxpayers who had avoided paying federal taxes completely. It was an add-on tax designed to ensure that everyone paid some income tax every year. Since then it has evolved into the primary tax mechanism for taxing high income taxpayers.

Under the original system, taxpayers who earned more than $200,000 -- a very high income 30 years ago -- were required to calculate their taxes differently, resulting in a larger tax payment for the wealthy.

But unlike most other income tax rates, the AMT was never indexed to inflation, and since 1982 the AMT has become a parallel tax system and a critical element in funding the government. It covered more than 4 million high-income taxpayers in 2009, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Next we find that setting the rate of the "tax the dead" estate tax at 35% with an exemption of $5 million will increase the deficit by $68 billion. First of all that seems to be a whole lot of dead people with estates over $5 million in just two years and secondly, the federal estate tax rate is zero in 2010.

Two items in the tax proposal do indeed cause the government to lose revenues, both of which were proposed by the learned marxist economist, Barack Hussein Obama. The two percentage point moratorium on FICA tax paid by employees "has an estimated cost of $111.6 billion" and the 13 month extension of unemployment benefits "adds about $56 billion to the deficit." But not to worry because, according to Nancy Pelosi, unemployment insurance is the most effective way to stimulate job creation.

Battleship Row

2010-12-07T22:47:00.001-05:00

I post this beautifully done salute to our embattled navy in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Walter Erickson at Verse-afire is the author.

Guts and valor are words not usually associated with inanimate objects, but ships are not inanimate objects. Ships are live, living things. Ships, as well as men, can be tough and resilient. Such were the ships of Battleship Row.

0755 SUNDAY, 7 DECEMBER 1941

A quiet, peacetime Sunday morning. Seven battleships swung gently at their moorings; Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and California. Pacific Fleet flagship Pennsylvania was in drydock. When the attack came, half their crews were ashore, and most of the officers. None had steam up, for it was Sunday, and all was at peace. Except Nevada. Nevada had steam. Nevada could move. At the height of the attack, with burning and exploding ships all around her, already severely hurt by a torpedo to her port side, Nevada, under Lt. Commander Francis J. Thomas, senior officer aboard, broke out her big battle ensign and stood down the channel, heading for the open sea. Sailors on the burning ships cheered and threw their caps in the air, but Nevada’s gallant sortie was short lived. Five Japanese dive bombers laid her low, beaching her.

The battleships were ultimately raised and rebuilt, those that were salvageable. They rejoined the fleet, but the war had passed them by. It was a carrier war now, and the World War 1 era battleships were too slow, could not keep up with the fast carriers. They were relegated to fire support, and accompanied the Marines in their march across the Pacific, bombarding the beaches, their 14 and 16 inch guns trained on palm trees instead of dreadnoughts, declared unfit to do the job for which they were built. Until Surigao.

SURIGAO STRAIT, 0351 TO 0409 hours, 25 OCTOBER 1944

Vice Admiral Nishimura, with a force of battleships, cruisers and destroyers, was heading for the Leyte beaches and the soft-skinned, vulnerable transports, still loaded with troops. Standing across his path was Admiral Oldendorf, and six old fire support battleships, all but Maryland and Mississippi on Battleship Row that Sunday morning in December. The other four were California, Tennessee, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Oldendorf put his weary old battleships in line ahead, a Battle Line, as battleships had fought for four hundred years, and waited for Nishimura. At 0351 the big guns lit the sky. Oldendorf brought his big ships across the Japanese front, crossing the T, the dream of every admiral down the centuries, doing to the Japanese what Togo had done to the Russians at Tsushima nearly forty years earlier. The Japanese fought back, but when Nishimura turned away his battleships were gone, along with most of his heavy cruisers.

Surigao was the last battleship to battleship action of WWII, and very likely the last big gun surface action battleship fight the world is likely to see, and it was fought by ships that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor and returned to life. Ships, like men, can be judged by their deeds, and some, like the ships of Battleship Row, by their sheer stubbornness, their refusal easily to die. Ships, like men, are alive, and though it took the ships of Battleship Row almost three years, they gained their revenge in the only way they knew how, with their guns.

Torn by bombs, wracked by fire
They settled slowly to the harbor floor
Breathing their last, or so some thought
But not they
Rising, they joined their kind
Who scorned them now
As the young scorn the old
The slow
They did their job
Plodding the vastness of the central sea
Island to island
A supporting cast
Gaining no praise
No, that was for the young
The swift
The carriers
Until
Until
That blessed night
When called upon to be themselves
They were
Themselves and more

Gaming Google's Rankings Ends Unpropitiously

2010-12-01T23:15:00.001-05:00

In a very long article, the New York Times exposed a nasty business model designed to exploit the site ranking rules built into the Google search engine. The website in question is DecorMyEyes. Settle in and read the whole article . . . Google did and the website's ranking has now sunk to the bottom.

J-G Opinion Journalism Goes Awry Again

2010-11-29T23:20:00.004-05:00

A feature column known as "Furthermore ..." appears on the Opinion page of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. In the November 29 paper, the following item was printed:

Climate change paper rife with plagiarized copy

Apparently some people who disagree global warming is happening also disagree with doing their own work.

An investigation by USA Today found a 2006 congressional report frequently referenced by climate change deniers was rife with plagiarism. Analysis of the report, which questioned the validity of global warming, found it liberally lifted material for textbooks, Wikipedia and the work of one the scientists critiqued by the report.

Edward Wegman, a statistician at George Mason University, led the report challenging scientific findings that the last century was the warmest in 1,000 years.

“It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others’ integrity when you don’t conform to the basic rules of scholarship,” said Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner.

Review of the report found 35 pages of the 91-page report “are mostly plagiarized text, but often injected with errors, bias and changes of meaning.”

The faulty report has become a popular tool to dispute global warming and discredit climate scientists.


Source: Watts Up With That

Posting at the WUWT blog, Thomas Fuller makes some important observations that escaped the bias of the J-G whiz kids.

First of all, the report was on the subject of the Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph that pointed temperatures skyward after a history of no supposed temperature increases. This graph was famously debunked back in 2005 by scientists Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitricks.

Second of all, climatologist Michael Mann, now on faculty at the University of Virginia, who was deeply involved the East Anglia University Climategate scandal, admitted on emails that the "hockey stick" was designed to "Hide the Decline" of temperatures in the new millennium.

Finally , Edward Wegman, a George Mason University statistician, at the behest of Congressman Joe Barton, headed a team that assembled a white paper on the subject of Mann's hockey stick graph. That report is here.

Although Wegman has denied the charges leveled by retired computer scientist John Mashey that he committed plagiarism, the J-G kind of missed that part as well.

"I will say that there is a lot of speculation and conspiracy theory in John Mashey's analysis which is simply not true," Wegman said.

"We are not the bad guys. … . We have never intended that our Congressional testimony was intended to take intellectual credit" for other scholars' work.

Wegman said he and his report co-authors felt "some pressure" from a House committee to complete the report "faster than we might like." But he denied that there was any attempt to tilt the influential climate report politically.

He said the committee "wanted our opinion as to the correctness of the mathematics" used in two climate studies.

"They wanted the truth as we saw it," Wegman said.

Plagiarism is a serious charge and GMU acted appropriately in beginning an investigation of the congressional report. Interestingly, when Michael Mann's name came up in the Climategate emails, UVA refused to open a full scale probe into charges of inappropriate behavior. Now the Virginia Attorney General's office has begun such an inquiry. You know, it is amazing to behold how, in academia, liberals always get a pass when liberals are in charge of the chicken coop.

The American Left

2010-11-25T11:35:00.003-05:00

In 2008, Daniel J, Flynn had his remarkable book, A Conservative History of the American Left, published. In essence, Flynn observed that the factions of the American Left have failed to define leftism, so he, the conservative, would venture where no leftists have gone. The extraction below comes from the Conclusion chapter in the book.

What is that has been? The same thing that shall be. What is it that hath been done? The same thing that shall be done. Nothing under the sun is new neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new. For it hath already gone before the ages that were before us. There is no remembrance of former things; nor indeed of those things which hereafter are to come, shall there be any remembrance with them that shall be in the latter end. ~ECCLESIASTES 1:9-11
In dreams, long-dead relatives speak; anthropomorphic animals dispense wisdom, money rains from the sky, and comely actresses demand sex. In socialism, men work without incentive, loyalty to the human family trumps loyalty to the nuclear family, a few social engineers manage the production and consumption of millions, men evolve into angels, and heaven arrives on earth. In life, one who confuses dreams from reality is regarded as crazy. In politics, one who confuses dreams for reality is called an idealist. It is terribly destructive to romanticize political romantics who cannot discern fantasy from fact. Politics, the art of the possible, becomes the captive of the impossible when visionaries and utopians encroach upon the concrete.

This is . . . more about dream than about reality. Even when reformers institute the radical’s wish list, the radical remains unsatisfied. For the dream was never simply, say, state controls over the economy, marginalization of traditional religion, or the erosion of marriage; but rather the complete equality, brotherhood of man, unity of interest, whistle-while-you-work, and human perfection that was supposed to come from the attainment of these aims. It is an article of faith on the Left that B follows from A.

But B has never followed A. Setbacks cause enthusiasts to repackage but never to reassess; to question tactics but never strategy; to alter the means but not the ends. The failure in practice does not kill the idea because ideas exist in minds, where images are cheerful laborers; sharing world peace, human brotherhood, and the like trump firsthand witness that radical ideas cannot produce any such thing, and in fact produce the opposite. Concrete failures are not catastrophic for people who live in their imaginations. The ideas never failed, the idealist stubbornly maintains, because the ideas have never been tried. This befuddles the realist. Why, the realist wonders, does the idealist react so unrealistically? The realist, in other words, wishes to make a realist out of an idealist, which itself is a form of idealism. The idealist operates on the imaginary plane; the realist operates on the actual plane; and never the twain shall meet. [. . . ]

Leftists dream. But what, concretely, do leftists presently believe? For true believers who have spent their years of their lives fighting for the Left, explaining what they believe is not an easy matter. This is because the left is based less on a set of concrete policy prescriptions than it is on an abstraction – that beautiful, powerful, enduring dream; that millennial vision the world after the Left’s program has been instituted.

At an International ANSWER-sponsored anti-war event in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2005, I looked for answers among self-identified leftists. Jeff Edwards, a Chicago gay rights activist, defines the Left as a "commitment to human freedom and equality and social justice" "The Left represents the real interests of the people both home and abroad" offered self-described ‘extreme leftist’ Brewer Dohithik, "and tries to express that in terms of making social change that will benefit those real interests." Gail Ruddi, who traveled to Washington, D.C. from Chapel Hill and to the Democrats from the Republicans, declares: "I think we stand for more economic justice, more social justice." Freedom? Social Justice? Real interests? Equality? Change? What does any of this mean? And if the Left merely supports platitudes, why are so many people against the Left?

One activist tried attempted to define the Left thusly: "You know, like, I guess it’s, I would hope that it would be you know, you know . . . I wish I was [sic] more coherent.” The movement’s “Jimmy Higginses” offered vagueness and incoherence. Its articulate stars got more specific. Their answers, diverse and occasionally contradictory, offer scant edification.

For Michael Newdow, the litigant seeking the removal of “under God” from the pledge of allegiance, the core idea is “equality.” For Steve Max it is “anti-capitalist;” for Dick Flacks “participatory democracy;” and for Tom Hayden “an experimental approach to social change coupled with an effort to define and challenge the system as a whole.” Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, explains that “progressives” (the term she opts for) believe “that we should be working toward a greater equality globally; health care and education should be basic rights; and we should build our societies, our economies, and around those basic rights; and I would add that a progressive is one who really cherishes the planet that we live on and wants to see it preserved.” “I think a leftist believes that elites don’t have the right to run other people’s lives” recovering Weatherman Mark Rudd explains, “that people can make the important decisions in their lives for themselves.”

It is probably SDS founding father Al Haber’s motivating notion – “What is the other society that is possible?”–that offers most in terms of a unifying idea. Leftists seek change even though individual leftists disagree on what changes they want. The other society that is possible, of course, has unbounded riches and ample time for sleep and leisure. It has no unemployment, crime, racism, sexism, or pollution. It produces Shakespeares, Michelangelos, and Jesse Owenses with regularity. It is preferable to America in every way but one; it does not exist. If you constantly made fantasyland your regular comparison to the society that you lived in, you too, might devise a million schemes to reform and reflexively what exists wanting. And you might scheme and critique impervious to this fact: If man can improve things, he can make it worse, too.

The American Left’s history-ignored, whitewashed, or obscured - offers examples of perfectors of society making imperfect society even less perfect. That past, along with its present, offers clues to the Left’s future. . . . When the past does not serve as a reference point, it is usually the mythology-as-history of left-wing martyrs or the projection as history that imposes present needs over past realities. The Left’s present relegates its past to the past.

Always starting anew, never operating from experience, the Left condemns itself to replicating its mistakes, its tragedies, its failures. Its past is not a roadmap to consult in confusing times, but a relic to be hidden away. Who wants to explain away the naïve enthusiasm for Graham bread, phrenology, the water-cure, eugenics, Stalin, the orgone energy accumulator, or LSD? Does it not feel better to instead foretell of the human brotherhood, heaven on earth, and the perfection of mankind that will certainly follow if only everyone embraces the latest leftist panacea? Always look forward when looking back embarrasses. “Nobody learns, “reflects former SDS president Carl Oglesby. “Nobody learns anything from anybody. All the mistakes that are made have to be made all over again, in a new key, in a new tempo. What can I say? Certain things do change. The events themselves just keep cycling and recycling and cycling all over again.” The ideas are passed with the baton, but the lessons are not.

The amnesiac Left perpetrated an ideology that, by dint of natural selection, should have faded long ago. Paradoxically, forgetfulness has retarded the Left’s evolution. It has denied failure’s gift of wisdom and success’s added blessing of a template. [. . . ]

“What the Hell do we need Marx, Engels, and Lenin for? We have Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin, Andy Jackson, Tom Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and F.D.R, “ a disillusioned Communist counseled, ousted Communist chief Earl Browder. “A new Left must be formed in America. But this time it must be an American Left, by Americans, for Americans.” Alas an American left that embraces religion, patriotism, the family, and free enterprise can never truly be an American Left.

"New" GM Stock Offering: Let the Buyer Beware!

2010-11-15T23:22:00.001-05:00

On the heels of a conveniently large ($2 billion) quarterly profit, Government Motors is offering 365 million new stock shares expected to sell to the public for over $30 per share on Thursday, November 18. Under the control of the new majority owners, the US Government and the United Autoworkers Union, GM emerged from bankruptcy last year and began its new accounting under a quasi reorganization concept known as "fresh start accounting."

Although the "concept has little theoretical validity," the Financial Accounting Standards Board theoretically permits the quasi reorganizations under an old research bulletin from 1953.

Cited in the 1991 FASB discussion memorandum (DM), New Basis Accounting, ARB no. 43 reinforced an earlier rule permitting an accounting procedure known as a corporate readjustment--or more commonly, a quasi reorganization.

The FASB DM, which examines situations that may require companies to adopt a new basis for assets and liabilities, says AP-B no. 43 allows the company to "accomplish, in its books of account, substantially what might be accomplished in a reorganization by legal proceedings--that is, elimination of a deficit in retained earnings and establishment of a new basis of accounting for its assets and liabilities." The new basis results from adjusting assets and liabilities to their current fair value.

The very big problem that resulted from "fresh start accounting," according to Jonathan Weil, is that General Motors is no longer Government Motors but has indeed become Goodwill Motors. In order to eliminate negative equity from its books, an offset was made to the intangible Goodwill asset account in the amount of ... get ready for this ... $30.2 Billion. To put this into perspective, the revalued tangible assets of listed property, plants and equipment totaled only $18.1 billion. Without the Goodwill, the equity of GM would have been a negative ($6.2 billion).

The fish smell that surrounds this accounting is offensive but as Tom Selling over at The Accounting Onion points out:

. . . [T]he one point that I am going focus on is that GM's shareholders' equity at December 31, 2009 would have been a negative $6.2 billion if it were not able to book a whole bunch of goodwill. Even though everyone knows that goodwill is merely, as GM itself puts it, "a residual," it can be a pretty important residual. To say that few companies would be able to pull off a successful IPO [initial public offering of stock] with a negative number for shareholders' equity on its balance sheet would be an understatement. To say the same after applying fresh-start accounting would be a statement of fact.

Negative shareholders' equity is an accounting anomaly. If a balance sheet purports to portray financial position of the shareholders, then just like a negative share price, negative shareholders' equity makes no sense. The only possible explanation is that assets and liabilities themselves are out of whack. Who wants to invest in a company, especially after fresh-start accounting is applied, whose assets and liabilities are so obviously out of whack?

So who says that there is reason applied to buying stock? Early orders are driving the GM offering higher and higher every day. I am a terrible stock picker but in this case, I think I know a terrible stock when I see it. So I wonder, if assets are misstated, what about profits? Can you say "E-N-R-O-N" ?

Trash-Talking TEA Parties

2010-11-13T22:46:00.006-05:00

Kip's Law: "Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner.”

The monument to Soviet central planning was . . . a heap of surplus left boots without any right ones to match them. ~ The Economist

The mid-term elections are over. The liberal Democrats have been vanquished from elected government posts, but the TEA Parties' task of righting the tradition of American freedoms is ever ongoing. A small skirmish erupted in the town of Fountain Hills, AZ, located just south of Phoenix.

In Fountain Hills, it seems, residents were permitted to contract with any private trash hauler that they chose. Restrictions generally provided for the level of service the private haulers must provide but left the decision of picking a hauler and right-pricing service in the hands of the town residents. This was red, white and blue American capitalism at work!

Now enter Town Manager Rick Davis with an apparent predisposition toward big government solutions and possibly influenced by big corporation malarky ultimately designed to stymy competition:

I have to be honest . . . I had not yet served in a city that hosted multiple haulers by resident subscription. This was a new concept to me, In my last community, the city contracted with a hauler to provide trash services. Every five years we went out to bid and awarded the contract to the lowest responsible bidder.

The first encounter was won by liberal-leaning environmentalists on the Town Council but two TEA Party organizations, Fountain Hills Tea Party and Campaign for Liberty Arizona, have already began the process to voicing displeasure to these usurpers of individual rights and freedoms. But a contract is a contract, so unless the actions of the Town Council can be legally challenged, the award to Allied Waste Services will have to be honored. Allied Waste Services is a subsidiary of Republic Services, Inc, Crooks & Liars tells us that:

Republic Services has a long-standing reputation for spreading around campaign contribution love, particularly with local and state-level campaigns . . .

So the insidiousness of ever-growing government intrusion is becoming exposed to the light of day. Contractors and government employee unions have become the means by which elected politicians retain their elite political status, as in: "You scrub my back and I'll scrub yours."

In the new deal with Fountain Hills, Allied Waste reduces its fee from $18 per month to $11 per month in exchange for only picking up trash once per week instead of twice (Such a deal!). The twice-per-week service was a required level imposed by Fountain Hills government upon all private haulers in the past, but this has now been swept away by fiat. So the haulers will travel less miles, and get paid more per mile for making less pickup stops. How much of a kickback do you suppose is in play here? Sounds like an investigative job for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio ... who just happens to live in Fountain Hills.

So the TEA Parties have lost because of the vote of only four out of seven officials that they helped to elect. What do you expect will happen when the next municipal election is held?

Obama Sees His Reflection

2010-11-08T22:45:00.006-05:00

Is Seeing Believing?

According to Greek mythology, when Narcissus saw his reflection in a pond, he fell in love with his own image; he enjoyed looking at himself so much that he stopped eating and eventually died. Thus, the myth suggests that seeing oneself from the perspective of others increases self-admiration and self-love.

Politico published a not-very-flattering article today on the unhappiness among key Democrats and even White House staffers on Obama's failure to react appropriately to the drubbing that Democrats took in the mid-term elections.

Congressional Democrats consider him distant and blame him for their historic defeat on Tuesday. Democratic state party leaders scoff at what they see as an inattentive and hapless political operation. Democratic lobbyists feel maligned by his holier-than-thou take on their profession. His own Cabinet — with only a few exceptions — has been marginalized.

His relations with business leaders could hardly be worse. Obama has suggested it’s a PR problem, but several Democratic officials said CEOs friendly with the president walk away feeling he’s indifferent at best to their concerns. Add in his icy relations with Republicans, the media and, most important, most voters, and it’s easy to understand why his own staff leaked word to POLITICO that it wants Obama to shake up his staff and change his political approach.

It should be a no-brainer for a humbled Obama to move quickly after Tuesday’s thumping to try to repair these damaged relations, and indeed, in India on Sunday, he acknowledged the need for “midcourse corrections.”

But many Democrats privately say they are skeptical that Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed — in his relations with other Democrats or in his very approach to the job.

Politico's broadside blast follows closely on the heels of an article by Wayne Madsen in Opinion Maker which indicates that there may be political intrigue afoot.

According to sources close to the White House, who put themselves in great danger by even talking to members of the media, the plans to have Obama leave for a visit to India, Pakistan, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan are an attempt to get Obama out of the country while top Democrats can sort through the political disaster created for the party by Obama's increasingly detached-from-reality presidency. ( . . . )

Vice President Biden, under intense pressure from some Democratic Party officials and Cabinet members to invoke Article 25, Section 4 of the Constitution and have Obama temporarily or permanently removed as president because of his mental incapacity to fulfill his constitutional oath as president, is reluctant to take such drastic action. Biden feels that the country would "become unglued" after such action and he doesn't want to be the one who would be responsible for "picking up the pieces," according to a source who works within Biden's office. (. . . )

Meanwhile, a team of ex-CIA officers are traveling the globe assembling a dossier of documents on Obama's past, including his education, passport, travel, and residency records. The team has scoured Kenya, Indonesia, Pakistan, and other countries collecting documents that are not already mantained in the CIA's own files on Obama's past. There is a possibility, according to WMR's sources, that any "smoking gun" documents may be released while Obama is in Asia in order to elicit a public and, perhaps, irrational enough response from the president to prompt the public to begin raising questions about Obama's suitability for office. Such an incident would make it easier for Biden to begin the succession process that was previously considered when President Richard Nixon was drinking heavily and taking prescription medication during the final days of his administration, twice during the Ronald Reagan administration — after the attempted assassination and in 1987 when he demonstrated early stages of Alzheimer's Disease, and during the Bill Clinton administration, when Clinton's self-destructive sexual antics had Vice President Al Gore considering taking similar steps.

Rush Limbaugh covered the Politico piece today on his show. According to the Free Republic forum, "Rush Limbaugh Hinting Obama is INSANE!" Rush's comments were as follows:

I'm taking all this into account in this analysis I'm engaging in here. "Many Democrats privately say they are skeptical Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of..." Do you understand what this could mean? He's taken a giant thumping, huge, not just in Washington, in the states, throughout the country. "Democrats privately say they're skeptical that Obama's self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic change," it hasn't dawned on Obama how big the drubbing is? If it hasn't dawned on Obama, why? Why could possibly explain that? "Skeptical Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed in his relations with other Democrats or in his very approach to the job."

They question his self-awareness to the point they ask: Is he capable of doing the job? Folks, this is not lightly thrown out there by the Politico. The Politico is clearly State-Controlled Media, clearly sympathetic. You throw a paragraph like that out there? You got somebody detached, not even aware what happened, not capable of doing the job. Folks, put that in context with this giant, huge drubbing on Tuesday -- which I think they were shocked at. I don't think the Democrats had any idea it was gonna be this bad. They live in denial. But now, now... (interruption) No, they didn't think it was gonna be this bad, Snerdley. They knew they were gonna lose some seats. They didn't think it was gonna extend down to dogcatcher, which it has.

. . . Now, that doesn't mean elitist. That doesn't mean arrogant. That doesn't mean conceited. That means, is he all there, period? That means -- well, you know what it means. That means, is everything normal? My interpretation here.

So the Lefties at Politico, the Righties at Opinion Maker, Rush Limbaugh himself, and all the King's horses and all the King's men amongst the Democrat elites do not yet understand that Obamaramalamadingdong's mental disease has always existed and is unchanged from his childhood. He is a roaring, out-of-control Narcissist who has recently been craftily manipulated by the George Soros and the woman in his life.

Obama believes that he is doing a good job and is unable to perceive that there is opposition to his Marxist beliefs and policies. As authors Robins and John observed in their research on the EFFECTS OF VISUAL PERSPECTIVE AND NARCISSISM ON SELF PERCEPTION:

It is said that "seeing is believing," but as Santayana pointed out, people often see what they believe, rather than believe what they see. The present research suggests that narcissistic individuals are unable to truly see themselves as others see them because they are blinded by their need for self-worth.

Ambassadors of Harmony

2010-10-31T23:45:00.000-04:00

Enjoy!

H/T: Maggies Farm

Sarah Palin is not a Populist

2010-10-31T22:33:00.005-04:00

“She’s a supernova,” says Mark McKinnon. “The only parallel is Barack Obama. And look what happened to him.”

New York Magazine writer John Heileman implied in his otherwise flattering article "2012: How Sarah Barracuda Becomes President" that Sarah is a populist.

Palin’s own brand of performance art is no less barbed and no more subtle, but still infinitely fascinating. In a deep-blue jacket and tight black skirt, she uncorks a 40-minute soliloquy that is equal parts populism, moralism, stand-up comedy, and free association, all rendered in a syntax as fractured as Joe Theismann’s tibia after Lawrence Taylor got through with him.

David Broder reported in the WaPo on her keynote address to the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville that Sarah displayed "her pitch-perfect populism." Reporting in Time, Joe Klein said of the same speech:

It was classic Palin, a brilliant line, brilliantly delivered: she does folksy far better than George W. Bush or any of the other Republican focus-group populists ever did.

Even George Will thinks she is a populist ... and because she is, she has no chance of being elected president.

Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution.

But George, who serves as 'token Conservative" on ABC's "This Week" every Sunday morning needs a lesson from Charles Postel, the award-winning author of "The Populist Vision." In an opinion piece for Politico, Professor Postel wrote:

When David Broder praised Sarah Palin’s speech at the National Tea Party Convention as “perfect-pitch populism,” real Populists were surely spinning in their graves.

In the 1890s, American farmers and other activists rocked corporate power in a populist revolt. Now, the Washington Post columnist has passed the populist mantle to Palin. If they could, the Populists would protest this misuse of their name.

But why do political analysts insist on using the word “populism” to describe conservative activism? Why should we care? Because it makes hash of both history and our current political conflicts.

The Populists were all about economic justice. They demanded government regulation of railroads, banks, telecommunications and insurance. And if that failed to curb corporate abuses, they wanted public ownership or at least a “public option.” They demanded a federal stimulus to get the economy out of the terrible depression of 1893-97.

The Populists were the ones who pushed for a progressive income tax to pay for the needs of the people, especially for better and more accessible public schools and universities. The Populist Party of the 1890s failed. But, in failure, its proposals refashioned progressive politics for generations.

George Will’s Feb. 18 Washington Post column smugly reduces populism to the whiny politics of self-defeating resentment “that never seems serious as a solution.” It may be bad history, but it makes for simple story lines about “angry” politics.

Indeed, Populism was a move away from the principles of Jeffersonian republicanism, which we know from the founder's documents, advocated individual liberties and commitment to small government. Populism started with America's farmers and mutated to Progressivism and has now unfortunately become the activist big government Marxism that we see today.

Indiana Dems Lie About Stutzman On Social Security

2010-10-27T23:31:00.002-04:00

Today a glossy over-sized political ad landed in my mailbox. Its headline read:

MARLIN STUTZMAN WOULD RISK YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY IN THE STOCK MARKET

If Marlin Stutzman's plan were in place, the recent stock market meltdown could could have cost seniors 40% of their Social Security. And Marlin Stutzman still thinks his plan protects seniors?

So I immediately said to myself: "Self, what Marlin Stutzman plan is that?" I was pleased to find that the ad, which was "paid for by the Indiana Democratic party and authorized by Tom Hayhurst for Congress Committee" provided me with sources for its claims. It turns out that this unlisted Youtube video was their source. Interestingly, the video was posted on 9/7/10 (possibly by a Dem supporter) and has only only been viewed 13 times, so I suspect that they didn't expect anyone to look at it.

The video has poor sound but I listened twice to find the key question and Stutzman's answer:

Moderator: "Do you support the privatization of Social Security?"

Marlin's response: "No."

Tom Hayhurst and company also cited this Goshen News article as a source for a claim that Stutzman wants to cut Medicare. If you can find any reference to cutting Medicare in the article, please let me know.

As a Stutzman supporter and a senior, I am personally disappointed that Marlin has not considered Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan's Social Security proposal outlined in his "Roadmap for America's Future," because the bankruptcy of the Federal retirement system is indeed imminent. Ryan's proposal permits a portion of Social Security payroll contributions to be invested voluntarily in the market with the funds held in the investor's name.

Acid Rain Redux

2010-10-20T22:50:00.000-04:00

To continue support of environmental socialism and to lay the groundwork for Obama's next attempt to pass a cap-and-tax bill, the compliant media has begun to generate propaganda. Grist reports:

Policy makers, environmentalists -- even Republicans -- like to congratulate themselves on the "victory" over acid rain. As this American success story is usually told, acid rain's effects were addressed by a 1990 update to the Clean Air Act that created a cap-and-trade system focused on sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. Since the system was implemented, sulfur dioxide emissions dropped 70 percent, and threatened forests and wildlife were saved. Hurrah!

There's only one problem with that version of history: It's not true. As Scientific American reports, acid rain is a continuing and growing problem; forests and animals all over the world (including the U.S. East Coast) are indeed facing catastrophe. But the No. 1 source of today's acid rain pollution is no longer sulfur dioxide, as it was 20 years ago. It's nitrogen oxide emissions from factory farms.

Folks, this is the same Scientific American whose editor, John Rennie, admits to intentional bias. Here is the direct quote:

There’s nothing wrong with balance in principle. Balance is a very important thing to have in stories, in the same way that you want to have fairness, and - heaven forbid - accuracy. On lots of issues, it’s very hard to know where the ultimate truth lies. So the best you can do is present lots of different views and leave it to the - your, your audience to try to piece together the truth for themselves. But on some scientific issues, that’s really not the best you can do.

You don’t want to have stories structured in such a way that, for example, you have one global warming supporter who is quoted, representing 98 percent of the scientific community and then matched up against one other person who’s a denier, who’s given effectively the same amount of space. Because then people in your audience could be left with the idea that there is a more equal balance in how seriously those ideas are taken.

Now the Boston Globe has produced an emotion-tugging piece about "a clean air revival" that cleaned a Vermont pond and solved the acid rain pollution of a Cheshire, OH coal-fired power plant by utilizing a cap-and-trade scheme invented by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.

The real story about acid rain is well researched and presented by Rob Blackstock at LewRockwell.com.

In 1990, the federal government passed the Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA). Title IV of the CAAA was meant to control electric utility emissions of SO2 in order to eliminate acid rain. Acid deposition (commonly known as acid rain), "refers to a process by which certain types of pollutants chemically transform into acidic substances in the atmosphere and then fall to the earth…. Acid deposition may cause a variety of harmful effects to the ecosystems, agriculture, building materials, and possibly to human health" (Kahn, James R. 1998. The Economic Approach to Environmental and Natural Resources). This definition comes from a standard text in environmental economics.

Like the subject of air pollution itself, acid rain is not a new concept. In 1852 chemist Robert Angus Smith studied the relationship between the increasing amount of soot in Manchester, England and the increased amount of acidity in precipitation. He dubbed this phenomenon acid rain (LaBastille, Anne. 1981. "Acid Rain. How Great a Menace?" National Geographic 160, November). However, it was not until the 1980’s that journalists began to hype the accusation that electricity-producing firms were ruining nature by causing acid rain. In the lead-in to her 1981 article on the subject, Anne LaBastille writes, "Deadly Waters: In an Adirondack stream, brook trout confined in a wire cage succumb to asphyxiation – a result of the water being polluted by rain- and snow-borne sulfuric and nitric acids. Acid rain has eliminated fish in thousands of lakes in Scandinavia and hundreds in the U.S. and Canada. Scientists believe acid rain comes from the burning of fossil fuels..." (ibid.).

As reported by Anderson, "The National Academy of Sciences predicted a hundred-fold increase in acid lakes by 1990 if SO2 emissions were not severely curtailed" (Anderson, William. 1999. Facts, Fiction and the Fourth Estate. Ph.D. Dissertation, Auburn University). This statement was made in spite of the fact that SO2 emissions had decreased by 42% between 1962 and 1981 and by 33% between 1971 and 1981 (Goklany, Indur. 1999. Clearing the Air: the Real Story of the War on Air Pollution). In response to media concerns, "President Jimmy Carter commissioned the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) to examine the damage being caused by acid rain and recommend solutions" (Anderson, 1999). Initially, Carter approved a ten million dollar yearly budget for the study. However, in 1982 President Ronald Reagan increased the annual budget to one hundred million dollars making NAPAP the most costly environmental study in United States history (thankfully, the final cost topped out at a mere $500 million).

In 1987, a report on the preliminary findings of the NAPAP study (known as the interim assessment) was presented to Congress. The initial findings showed no correlation between acid rain and increased acidity of lakes. "The reaction to the interim assessment by the environmentalists and their allies in Congress was fury and the firing of NAPAP’s director, Dr. Lawrence Kulp, and the demand that the new director of NAPAP, Dr. James R. Mahoney, ‘rewrite’ the report and produce ‘an implicit repudiation of the interim assessment’" (Brookes, Warren T. 1989. "The Continuing Mythology about Acid Rain." Human Events 2, September). According to Bast, Hill and Rue, release of the report to the general public was "delayed until after passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990" (1994. Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism).

The NAPAP study reached four conclusions contrary to those presented by the environmental movement: 1) Acid rain has not injured forests in either the U.S. or Canada; 2) Acid rain has had no observable effect on human health; 3) Acid rain has not injured crops, and may even have a positive effect on some crops; and finally, 4) acid rain has acidified only a very small number of lakes, and these can be restored to health by liming (ibid.).

In spite of the good news presented by the NAPAP interim assessment:
"Congress decided to include the anti-acid rain program in the 1990 amendments without waiting for the findings of the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project [emphasis added]. Members reasoned that: (a) scientific evidence is seldom conclusive and the project’s report would leave many questions unanswered; (b) enough information emerged between 1980 and 1990 to know the sources and destinations of acid rain; (c) an opportunity existed to pass a comprehensive clean air bill and it might not last long or occur again soon" (Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., The. 1991. The Clean Air Act Amendments: BNA’s comprehensive Analysis of the New Law).
A similar report states, "Politicians, under heavy pressure from media and the environmental lobby, also chose to ignore the NAPAP report. The U.S. Senate spent just one hour discussing the report for which it spent $500 million in taxpayers’ money. Incredibly, the report was never even presented to the House of Representatives" (Bast, Hill, Rue 1994).

Congress passed the 1990 CAAA in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. The result? Natural gas prices, in real dollars, have doubled since 1990. Very soon, I predict the same fiasco will occur again. Congress, with no semblance of debate, will pass global-warming legislation which will shackle the American economy.

Save the Light Bulb: Operative Word = "Heat"

2010-10-19T00:51:00.003-04:00

In 2007, President Bush signed the Energy Independence Security Act (EISA 2007) into law. In effect the law rates the efficiency of incandescent lights based upon the ratio of energy expended to lumens produced. and essentially covers bulbs of less than 40 and more than 150 watts. The ban begins in 2012. According to the Wall Street Journal op ed "Save the Light Bulb," traditional American legislation would have provisions to meet the aesthetic as well as the energy saving features of lighting. If energy efficiency was the only criteria, then orange colored sodium vapor lights would be far more efficient than compact fluorescents. A survey conducted by Sylvania last year, determined that 80 percent of Americans did not want incandescent bulbs banned.

The Duke University's Green Grok Blog gives us the basic facts about the light bulb.

Incandescent lights are the brainchild of Thomas Edison — a watershed invention that profoundly changed the world.

The problem with them is that they are energy hogs — a former colleague of mine refers to them as heaters that give off a little light. Less than 10 percent of the electricity moving through today’s incandescents is converted to light; the rest is wasted. (So, of those 100 watts needed to power that bulb in your reading lamp, only 10 watts produce the light while 90 are wasted as heat, which you know instinctively if you’ve ever touched a bulb that’s been on for a while.)

So the Green Dukies actually figured out the way around "light bulb socialism", but they certainly had no interest in circumventing the law as we tradition-loving patriots do. In this case the answer going forward is the newest invention from two German engineers . . . or maybe we might better describe "the greatest invention since the light bulb" as a new guerrilla marketing technique . . .

Ladies and Gentlemen, now appearing in the center ring, "HEATBALLS." Gizmodo reports:

The EU banned lightbulbs that suck more than 60 watts to improve the energy efficiency of an entire continent. And responding with the proverbial “F U” are two Germans, importing high-wattage bulbs and marketing them as heating devices called “heatballs.”

But Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law aren’t just run of the mill entrepreneurs with an eye for a good loophole—the former is a mechanical engineer. Using his electrical savvy, he figured that because traditional 60 watt lightbulbs output 95% of their energy in the form of heat—only the rest is light—75 and 100 watt bulbs could be legitimately marketed and sold as little radiators.

Rotthaeuser is open about the legislative scam he’s pulling, calling the Heatballs a form of “resistance against legislation which is implemented without recourse to democratic and parliamentary processes.” He also says he’ll donate 30 cents of every Heatball sold to rainforest conservation, to assuage some of the guilt of grid inefficiency. What do you think, EU readers? Is this man a lighting hero or just a scofflaw out for a dollar? Or both? Either way, you have to admit his plan takes some serious… ah, forget it. [Reuters]

Connecticut Senate Race Turns to Cap-and-Tax

2010-10-18T20:38:00.004-04:00

With just two weeks remaining before the election, the October 14 Quinnipiac poll has been released showing Attorney General Richard Blumenthal now leading Republican candidate Linda McMahon by 54 - 43%. A recent McMahon campaign video had centered on Blumenthal's support for federal cap-and-trade legislation. The McMahon ad is based upon information compiled by the Heritage Foundation regarding the economic consequences of the Waxman-Markey bill that was not passed by Congress.

Blumenthal countered with an attack ad which ignores McMahon's points but attacks her personally-funded "$50 million campaign" and her layoff of 10% of her workforce, while taking home $46 million as CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment.

According to the New Haven Register, the Blumenthal campaign sent out emails claiming that McMahon distorted the effect of cap and trade.

Ty Matsdorf, a spokesman for the Blumenthal campaign, said the costs commonly attributed to the legislation don’t apply to Connecticut because the state relies mostly on natural gas, which emits less carbon than oil or coal and is more expensive than those fuels. Cap and trade would raise costs more for coal-burning states such as Kentucky, he said.

Meanwhile, wholesale electricity prices have dropped by half in New England, according to Electric Light & Power, a trade publication.

“We’re uniquely positioned because of the fuels that we use and the system of RGGI,” the 10-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Matsdorf said.

He pointed to a report critical of cap and trade by the National Mining Association that lists Connecticut as one of 10 states that would benefit financially from the system.

Obviously, Blumenthal wants to pass on the high cost of electricity in Connecticut and the other northeastern states in RGGI to the flyover states through cap-and-tax legislation. But the Waterbury Republican-American has already published the real facts in an editorial.

Democrat Richard "Rambo" Blumenthal has been telling a lot of whoppers on the U.S. Senate campaign trail, and among the biggest was that as attorney general, he lowered electric bills in Connecticut.

The facts speak for themselves. The Energy Information Administration says the residential electric rate in Connecticut is 19.41 cents per kwh, a 74 percent premium over the U.S. average of 11.18 cents. Thanks to Mr. Blumenthal's habitual interference with power generation and delivery, electric rates in Connecticut have risen 18.1 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars since his election two decades ago. That's almost six times faster than the national average.

Yet he goes around saying he lowered everyone's electricity bills, and to the best of our knowledge, no one in the news media has called him out on this. In fact, they report his claim uncritically, another bit of boilerplate for their Dick-Blumenthal-has-been-good-for-Connecticut narrative. So news consumers shouldn't hold their breath waiting for "journalists" to pick up the piece Investors Business Daily published not long ago about how this champion of power customers "is working to get courts to declare 'cap and trade' regulations the law of the land."

Co-sponsored by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., the cap-and-tax bill has stalled in the Senate, despite the chamber's Democratic supermajority, because it would increase the national debt, kill millions of jobs, reduce personal income and wealth, and lop trillions off the national gross domestic product. Climatologist Paul Knappenberger said the measure's harsh requirements and catastrophic consequences would reduce global temperatures at best by no more than 0.2 F by 2100.

In addition, an MIT analysis determined cap-and-tax would raise electricity rates by an average of up to 20 cents per kwh by 2050; that would more than double today's cost in Connecticut. Other analyses predict increases of as much as 129 percent by 2030 and a 144 percent surge in gasoline prices.

Here is a Blumenthal press conference that exposes Blumenthal's complete ignorance of climate science and the bad economic effect that cap-and-tax will have on the economy. That goes well with his lying about his military service but the land of Chris Dodd will forgive about anything.

Cancerous Cell Phones?

2010-10-17T16:38:00.001-04:00

Dr. Bob Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland and media gadfly, is an arch-skeptic of the first order who writes a weekly newsletter filled with terse observations on the nonsense that often peppers our sometimes-not-so-scientific science communities. Over the years, he has had a great deal to say about the theory that microwaves emanating from cell phones can cause cancer. Lately he minces no words. Here is his biting cell phone commentary from April 2010:

Yesterday, the cell-phone controversy was taken to a new and substantially lower level. The Cohort Study on Mobile Communications (COSMOS) was launched in the UK to determine whether microwave radiation from wireless devices can induce cancer. It will track 250,000 users for 30 years to catch any slow growing cancers. Note the built-in job protection. The study will look for neurological diseases such as Parkinsons and Alzheimers as well. Participants aged 18-69 are being recruited in Britain, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. In Britain, COSMOS is inviting 2.4 million cell phone users to take part, and hoping 100,000 or so will accept. If they do the study really well, it will confirm Albert Einsteins 1905 explanation of the photoelectric effect, for which he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize. Of course, the photoelectric effect is confirmed thousands of times annually by students in elementary physics lab courses. If it is done badly, this tedious and expensive study could perpetuate the public's unfounded fear of radiation below the ultraviolet threshold. This must be stopped.

So microwaves do not cause cancer, but such simplistic reasoning will not stop scientists in search of research dollars from continuing to lobby our naive government officials for more funding or for tenure-seeking academics to write books about the cell - cancer connection. So buckle up for a roller coaster ride and hold onto your wallet.