Your Homeland Security Money at Work

Props to AP:

_$345,000 for crashproof barriers and 60 closed-circuit cameras to monitor the University of Arkansas Razorback stadium, which local officials think could be a terrorist target.

_$5 million for the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology to buy a nearly deserted town to use for counterterrorism training.

_$70,000 for Huntsville, Ala. to create a fallout shelter in an abandoned mine where 20,000 people could take cover underground.

_Several South Florida fire departments have used Homeland Security grants to beef up their gyms. Pompano Beach, Fla., spent $220,000 on fitness equipment for a wellness program, training and physical exams.

Your Homeland Security funds at work. Can someone tell me why a terrorist would want to attack Razorback Stadium? Or why Huntsville, Alabama needs a fallout shelter? Gotta love these Bushies and our Congress-Critters: No money for childrens' health care, $220k for south Florida fire department gyms. I guess that's where those firemen calendars are shot.

The article has Democrats complaining about these budget cuts, using them as a chance to beat up on the Administration. Come on now! I don't mind one bit that some fireman in Florida doesn't get to bulk up on the latest equipment courtesy of Nosy in Denver! Sometimes even Bush gets it right (in the sense a broken clock is right twice a day, of course). But then, Homeland Security money has been free-flowing and only nominally overseen so it's been a great source of pork to buy towns in New Mexico and Nautilus machines in Florida. Sorry, Dems, you're wrong on this one. This spigot needed to be turned off.

Turkey plane crash kills 57

I really hate it when Turkey planes go down. Thanksgiving refugees, maybe? An actual headline from AFP, sometimes you really don't need further comment. And the most popular headline on Yahoo? This one.

Sometimes I wonder about that free press thing. After all, you get what you pay for....

Still Not Ranting

Don't know what's going on - no rants come to mind. There are lots of indignities to write about but nothing that really stands out. Australia joining the Coalition of the Leaving? Yawn. GOPers competing for who's the most hypocritical and bigoted? Old news. Dems caving? BTDT. Economy tanking/sky falling? Happened in 1929 and we survived. Expectations ratcheted down? That's been the way of things for the past 7 years.

So what to rant about? Plenty, it's just hard to get excited about any of it.

Disgust-O-Meter at Zero

Still recovering from the holidays (or the holiday cold). Expect a return to rants soon....

One more thing....

The Yuan, China's currency, is pegged to the Dollar so don't expect Wal-Mart prices to start rising any time soon....

I bet the Chinese wish they'd have let it float a little sooner, though. I wish I'd have bought Microsoft in 1980, too, then we wouldn't be having this discussion.

The Sky (Dollar) Is Falling! And What to Do About It

I read (and here's a shameless plug for) The Motley Fool, some of the best investing advice on the Web. Okay, the good advice is free, the better advice is going to cost you a bit. So here's a great article on the Dollar and its seeming free-fall.

The Dollar is dropping and there seems to be no bottom. Oil prices are rising and there seems to be no ceiling. China seems to own us and there are trillions of bad loans out there just waiting to bite another big bank in the butt and send stocks tumbling yet again....

First to the Dollar. Call up your favorite chart of the S&P 500 for the last few days. You'll see a very volatile market, up one day and down the next. What is happening is traders selling one day (the market falls), seeing bargains in other positions and buying the next day (the market rises). The intrinsic value of the companies being bought and sold didn't change, the market value did. The same thing is happening with the Dollar, the period is just longer. Due to high oil prices and the subprime market, people are seeing other currencies as the better buy. Now a few months from now when Caterpillar, Boeing and some other prime US companies are bargain priced for someone in Euroland, they'll start buying them and the Dollar will begin to rise in value. Oh, and investors will see shares of Citibank and others at a bargain price and begin to buy them as well. Neither the Dollar nor the banking industry are dead. They're just a bit punchy. And, if you're investing for the long-term, it's time to look at buying dollar investments. They're cheap now and will continue to get cheaper for a while.

Oil, well, there's good news and bad news there. The good news is that we might finally get a renewable energy bill worth its salt and Congress may finally move to reduce oil consumption. The bad news, if you just bought that manhood-enhancing SUV that gets about its length to the gallon, it's gonna hurt for a while. Likewise, your heating bills, if you heat with oil, will be painful. The good news is that the high prices will not only spur oil exploration but research into renewables and energy efficiency. This just may create some good jobs here.

We've seen this before. The first time I was in Germany the dollar fell to 1.3DM per dollar. It was rough living on the German economy but doable. There will be pain but if the pain causes us to save more, spend less abroad and cut our oil consumption, it might be a good thing in the long term.

Chicken littles, flame on.

How to Talk to a Republican #10 - National Security

My dad used to say Republicans start wars so Democrats can get us out of them. And I used to laugh at my father's wisdom.

The myth that Democrats are somehow soft on national security arose during the Congressional endgame of the Vietnam War. Johnson knew the war was lost during the last half of his presidency and Nixon knew it was lost going in. Still they escalated until finally the Democratic Congress of the age defunded the war. Then two years after the combat role officially ended, Saigon fell and the Republicans have been blaming Democrats for the defeat ever since. If we'd stayed a little while longer, the historical revisionists among them say, we could have won.

Fast-forward to 2007. Our all-volunteer army has been fighting two wars since 2002 and it is broken. Neither war is being won because resources we could have used to win the just war in Afghanistan were diverted to Iraq and now the Right is rattling sabers in Iran's direction. If I'm right in my reason for the Iraq war, not to remove Saddam nor to lock up Iraq's oil but to establish a more powerful strategic presence to defend oilmen in the Persian Gulf, we are in Iraq precisely to counterbalance Iran but I digress.

As a result of his two expeditionary wars, Bush has broken the Army. The soldiers broken in the war are receiving bureaucratic run-arounds to receive treatment in facilities crawling with roaches and contaminated with rat feces. If the damage is psychological, commanders are simply discharging the soldiers rather than treating them. While GOPers in their SUVs sport yellow "Support our Troops" ribbons, they perpetuate the troops' sacrifice through their excessive use of resources...

I could go on but if you want support of the troops, I can't think of a worse record than the Republicans' From endless war failed war planning to invading "on the cheap" to overextension of the National Guard to recruiting standards to the body armor crisis to armored HUMVEEs to substandard Veterans' hospitals to deployments lasting one day too short for the Guard troops to receive benefits, the Republicans have failed our soldiers at every turn. The only possible response to a GOPer who says "we're the party of national security" is a good belly laugh.

Unfortunately, the joke's on our troops.

Friday Night Rant

Ah, what lovely incident of the week should be its end. Perhaps the eternal question:

Who won the effing debate.

Pundits will argue but I know who lost. We, the people. The asker of the question, "Pearls or Diamonds" is now claiming CNN made her ask the question. At gunpoint? Was waterboarding involved? Or is this a fifteen minutes moment? Don't know but as long as Wolf Blitzer doesn't shave or learn to ask intelligent, germane questions, I don't watch CNN. Of course, I don't watch the Continuous Nonsense Network anyway so Wolf isn't going to lose too much of an audience.

Another of Life's Persistent Questions (nod to Garrison Keillor) is have the Democrats finally grown a set. They're facing off with Bush over spending for the Iraq war. In the past, Bush called the Dems a few bad names and the Dems (read "leadership") have caved. Can it be they've grown a set and will really force him to veto spending measures or will they, with great noise and shaking of fists, cave once again? Remains to be seen. I'd love/hate to think this is a part of a larger strategy: We played nice for a while and you didn't play along so now we're going to pull out our can of checks-and-balances whoopass and open it up on you. I'd love it because it's great political strategy. I'd hate it because men and women died for that strategy.

And finally, a kudo. Good on ya, Dems, for pulling Telecom immunity from the FISA bill. Now keep it out of there. The telecoms knew they were breaking the law and only Qwest did the right thing (it really hurt to have to praise my ISP but credit where it's due). They went ahead and forked over mountains of customer data without a warrant. They deserve their day in court and then to pay every cent of damages they're found to owe. Unfortunately their CEOs are contract workers and can't be held criminally liable for the Corporation's actions.

Happy weekend!

Another Grim Record - Sexually Transmitted Diseases

Some abstinence-only person explain this one to me. It's long been established you can't get any kind of VD from a toilet seat so how, if your program is working, can it be that sexually transmitted diseases are being reported at all-time record numbers? By the numbers for 2006:

- Chlamydia: one million cases.
- Gonorrhea: 358,000 cases.
- Syphilis: 9,800 cases.

More alarmingly, a superbug gonorrhea resistant to most antibiotics is starting to become more prevalent. Now condoms, properly used, stop all of these. Problem is, it takes some knowledge to use a condom properly, knowledge not exactly being promulgated in abstinence-only education. The article stops short of making this correlation, after all, it is science and science, unlike religion, has some rules.

I don't have to follow them. It's the second year straight of rising numbers. Abstinence-only is beginning to have an effect - the ignorant are spreading diseases, the infected don't know what they have and so diseases easy to wipe out are spreading again. So, in addition to unwanted pregnancies and the related abortions, here's another win for the abstinence-only crowd.

Nothing protects like a condom and good information. Unfortunately, we're arming our children with neither.

Back from GOPerville

Colorado Springs, at the foot of Pike's Peak, is a beautiful city. Shame the damned GOPers own it.

Anyway, I went down there for a professional meeting tonight (for any of you wondering, the ISO 9000-2008 Standard is only cosmetically changed from the 2000 version - if you know what I'm talking about, you'll appreciate the news and if you don't, don't ask - it's a dive into Geek Hell you'll regret forever). At one point in the presentation, the lecturer, a Brit with a practiced British humor, made a joke about illegal immigrants. The known Denverites laughed, the Spring Nuts, dead silence....

Anyway, I got back safely and they didn't arrest me for driving a foreign car that gets over 40MPG.

How to Talk to a Repubican #9: The Estate Tax

Warren Buffett, no relation to Jimmy, is a billionaire. He has made billions by buying and trading stocks. When Buffett speaks about money, I listen.

The Right calls it the Death Tax, claiming it's somehow unfair to leave the heirs and assigns of one who has lived the American Dream(tm) with a reduced sum of money. This argumentation is incorrect on many levels but here's what Buffett had to say:

"Without the estate tax, you in effect will have an aristocracy of wealth, which means you pass down the ability to command the resources of the nation based on heredity rather than merit," Buffett told the New York Times in 2001. "[Repeal would be like] choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics."

Let me get one thing straight: I fully support the ability of the first generation entrepreneur to get as rich as he or she can figure. And I fully support the obligation of the second generation to earn it again. And the third generation, well, famous third-generation babies include George W. Bush and Paris Hilton. Should they be rich? As Buffett said, it's an aristocracy of wealth.

I call it self-perpetuating wealth, assets that pay beyond the point where they can be spent. Second-generationers may ward and grow the family business some but they normally end up putting their wealth in second-generation assets, stocks excluding IPOs. These do not benefit the broader economy as none of the money from the sale goes back to the company issuing the shares. They may employ a few stockbrokers, an illegal maid or two but on the whole, their wealth becomes parasitic. And by the third generation, well, Bush and Hilton.

119 of the nation's richest people are signing on to prevent repeal of the estate tax. The estate tax is the greatest protector against generational wealth and the greatest re-distributor of wealth possible. In Europe, a large part of their higher living standard and greater emphasis on mid-size companies can be attributed to the estate tax, called the opportunity tax by some there. And hey, if Buffett says it's good money sense, it probably is.

Cross-posted from Colorado HD 40 Democrats.

Gas Guzzler's Gone

And my Jetta was assembled in Mexico. The engine's Polish. Was soll' das?

For What It's Worth...

...or maybe just a bit less, looks like the Gas Guzzler might soon be someone else's property. That pretty much makes this an open thread.

BTW: The unreadable bumper sticker reads "Transplant", our answer to those "Native" stickers some sport....

Clinton Campaign Takes Hit

Finally, Hillary's numbers are headed in the right direction. She's down by 9 or 10 points in two polls, a number that's exact within statistical error.

Painful to discover we Democrats don't take kindly to George Bush tactics like planting questions in audiences. Even more painful to first deny, then to have to admit you did it. This is not what we're looking for to lead us out of the morass Bush led us into. Paraphrasing Einstein: No problem can be solved with the same level of leadership that created it.

Looks like Hillary better start answering some questions with something other than a pre-programmed mumble. Wouldn't straight answers be nice for a change from our so-called front runner?

We're also not too keen on some of Hillary's attempted alliances with the Right or attempts to de-fuse them. Contacting Matt Drudge may be smart politics but it isn't smart, nor is trying to come to an agreement with the "vast right-wing alliance" founder Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife may now have admiration for Bill Clinton but that kind of admiration won't get him votes - wait, it's Hillary running! Also, the belief that these arch-conservatives may be nice baseed on a meeting or two strikes me as a bit naive. Kind of like Bush looking into Putin's soul.

And she didn't show up to vote against Mukasey. I don't think we like that much, Hillary.

Sunday Morning

No outrages so far. Nosy is looking for his next professional challenge, unpleasant but necessary. Got a bite on selling my old car - 20MPG gas guzzler (compared to the Jetta) back on the road but someone needs it and the carbon footprint to make a new one is immense. Notice the skis and the bike in the garage? Anyone have any good ideas for the Rant of the Day?

How to Talk to a Republican #8: Infant Mortality

Maybe they don't care because it's not their constituents dying. In an earlier post at my other site, I mentioned our high placement (not a good thing, GOPers) in maternal mortality. Turns out that trend extends to infants as well, where we place among the worst in the civilized world, ranking above only Latvia:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071111/ap_on_he_me/saving_the_smallest_us_picture

Most telling in the article is this small paragraph:

"Doctors and analysts blame broad disparities in access to health care among racial and income groups in the United States."

Why do those disparities exist? Market-based health care. Here's another telling quote:

"The same report noted the United States had more neonatologists and newborn intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom — but still had a higher rate of infant mortality than any of those nations."

Seems access is limited. Since the Market is determining who and who doesn't need pre- and neonatal care, I'm assuming that those who get the care are fairing well. Our socialized competitors, on the other hand, are out-doing us, apparently with fewer resources (translating, perhaps, into lower cost?). And not to beat a dead horse, where does this fall in the Right to Life argument? Does the baby's value end once the birthing process begins?

I guess, in comparing infant mortality in the United States against all other modernized countries, the Right can, with great pride, say, "thank God for Latvia."

Deregulation or Not - A GOPer's Dilema

Deregulation is one of the fundamental tenants of Conservative philosophy, a profound and self-evident belief that the "market" will regulate itself and everything will become as competitive as possible. This belief works well for commodities. The price of corn or oil will, for example (and whether you believe it or not) gravitate toward the most competitive price based on a few factors:

- The commodity is available from multiple sources - the consumer can choose their source
- The distribution system is egalitarian - it carries each suppliers' product at equal cost and with equal efficiency
- There is no bias toward one buyer or another
- The product is not bundled with other offerings, and
- There is no difference between different suppliers' offerings.

Corn, for example, is available from many farmers. Once it is taken to market, the distribution system neither knows nor cares who grew the corn. From a grain car full of corn, there's no bias toward any individual farmer's corn, the product is corn exclusively and one grain of corn is pretty much like the other, genetic manipulation aside. In this case, price is generally a function of supply.

Air transportation is given often as an example of deregulation working. As we see above, you have your choice of airlines (unlike before deregulation), the National Airspace System carries each airliner at relatively equal cost and with relatively equal efficiency. A consumer generally doesn't care if they fly on United or Southwest on short hops and the airline really doesn't care who buys the seat (as long as you're not a card-carrying Al-Qaeda member). Despite all attempts to bundle flights with hotels and rent-a-cars, bundles are not much of a factor in air transportation and there's really no difference between airline seats of the same price. And in markets served by one or very few airlines, it's easy to see the lack of competition makes for higher fares.

Now to two of our favorite purchases, internet service and cable TV. Do these match up with the criteria above? No. In fact, they've become such monopolies that service is generally available only either through the Cable company, Satellite TV (a bit cheaper) and antenna (free). Although similar, these are not the same products and generally internet service is not available over satellite or antenna. Here is the important point: The distribution system is not egalitarian. I can't buy a bank of servers and a big internet pipe and begin distributing internet service or TV programming over Comcast's lines. In the U. S. business world, it's called a barrier to entry. It's called antitrust elsewhere. By owning the lines and by being able to charge what they want to transmit over them, the cable and phone companies pretty much assure there's no competition in internet or cable service.

In general, the phone or cable companies don't care who buys from them but now we get into bundles. No cable company in this country offers cafe programming. I have to pay for ESPN even though I'd rather spend an hour in my dentist's chair than in front of a televised sports event. As pointed out elsewhere, if that weren't the case, no one could afford ESPN. Finally, there are differences between suppliers' offerings, but not significant differences between cable and satellite.

So it's easy to see why deregulation doesn't work here. By deregulating, the Government has opened the doors for a few large operators to squeeze everyone else out of business. In the early days of the Internet, anyone with a server could tap into the phone lines and provide service. The current telecommunications operators were successful in that envirnment but now that the phone and cable companies own both the service and the transmission networks, they have to compete with no one. This is commonly referred to as a monopoly.

This drives price up and service down. And this is why we are not competitive in the world: We do not regulate to provide competition. I do not think Government should ever regulate price. In a competitive world, the market does that well. The Government's responsibility is to regulate barriers to entry to allow competition, forcing down price and driving up service. Regulating barriers to entry - eliminating monopolies - would ultimately benefit business for both domestic and export businesses.

I don't expect a wave of regulation any time soon but the re-regulation of the cable companies is a step in the right direction.

Open Thread

In honor of Nosy's plunge into Haloscan hell, visitors, please amuse yourselves.

What Democrats Need to be Addressing

In my real job, we refer to graphs like this as Pareto charts. Pareto is an Italian mathematician most famous for the Pareto principle, most commonly called the 80/20 rule. It states 80% of all effects come from 20% of causes.

The chart illustrates both the rule and what Democrats should be doing. The leftomost two bars, Iraq and the Economy, represent what 74% of what everyone thinks is most important. Add in the health care bar and you go over 100% because each bar represents two factors: Most important plus next-most important.

Terrorism and Immigration, the two pet projects of the Right, are to the far right of the chart. As a process engineer, I'd say leave them alone and concentrate on the leftmost issues. But neither of these are traditional Republican issues, in fact, they've avoided and fought against them for so long they can't comprehend that these are what real Americans care about.

Most of us are disgusted with the current crop of Democrats. I suspect if they were to spend the last year of the 110th Congress working on these three issues, calling vote after vote and forcing the Right to sustain veto after veto, November 2008 would be a blowout on a scale we've never seen, effectively eliminating the Republican party. Will they? I have my doubts. Instead of leading, Pelosi and Reid will continue to politick, to the detriment of the Party and the Republic.

You Don't Know Beans - An Argument for Publicly Funded Elections

If ever there was a reason to consider publicly financed elections, consider this. The US Farm Bill contains the Food Aid Program, a post-war program designed to do two things: To use the food the Government was buying to prop up food prices and to propagandize the largesse of the U. S. That was fine but now the Government isn't buying excess commodities yet the program continues as before. Consider these inefficiencies:

Even though sending cash might be cheaper, Food Aid relief efforts have to buy U. S. farm commodities, ship them to the country where the aid is to be given, sell them, then use the cash for development or emergency aid. This even though food may be cheaper locally and little to no shipping is involved.

75% of all food aid must be shipped on U. S. flagged ships - how many of those are there - and 25% must be bagged and shipped from a Great Lakes port.

Farmers, shippers and aid workers support the effort. The Chairman of the US Dried Pea and Lentil Council - were you aware we had a US Dried Pea and Lentil council - warned lawmakers tampering could weaken political support. I don't know if this is enough to influence lawmakers but I do know I don't want some dried bean magnate influencing my congress-critters to keep an inefficient program going by threatening to withdraw support.

If ever there was an argument for publicly funded elections, a bean magnate influencing our congress-critters to keep an outdated, inefficient program as-is to protect their interests should be one. They keep the inefficiencies going and your opinion isn't worth a hill of beans: The culture of corruption in Washington will continue until we, again, own our representatives.

Ethanol, Rome and Roses

The push to get ethanol from corn reminds me of a story I once read. I'm a rose aficionado, so I read about them in various publications. There was a story of a time when Rome nearly starved. It seems rose attar (the scent), rose petals and roses themselves became so wildly popular that farmers around Rome stopped growing wheat, turning their entire agricultural production to producing rose products for Caesars and rich Romans.

We're burning food in our vehicles and watching food prices go through the roof. If imperfectly, history does repeat itself. As the Dutch tulip market becomes a metaphor for bubble economics, Rome's roses becomes one for giving up food for a luxury, in our case, E85 at $1.80 per gallon.

Challenging Conventional Wisdom

Based on my recent reading into conventional wisdom in business and some conversations over at Americablog, I'm starting to reconsider some of my position regarding fringe candidates on both sides, specifically Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. One represents the far right (although you can't convince most of his supporters of it) and the other, farther left than most want to go. Ron Paul would be a disaster for the country, Kucinich less so but the beauty of their candidacies is that neither of them have a chance, freeing them to talk about concepts we all hold dear.

Neither of them are bound by the "conventional wisdom" it takes to win in today's politics. Conventional wisdom is a two-edged sword. In stable environments, it assures that things go according to plan. Our political system today is hardly stable and it is in precisely unstable environments that conventional wisdom breaks down. An example from business I like: The inventor of Scotch Tape was literally ordered by 3M executives to cease all development efforts because the product would never sell. Most unconventional ideas die, as I predict will happen to the Paul and Kucinich candidacies.

Some don't, though. Another business example from 3M: The adhesive used in Post-it notes was originally thought to be a failure. A Kucinich presidency might surprise us in ways we don't anticipate. I wouldn't anticipate many pleasant surprises from a Paul presidency, a Dodd presidency might be nice but one thing as progressives to remember: Our children and grandchildren can't afford another Conservative presidency.

So vote in the primaries with your heart but then, in November, vote with your head.

Tom Tando (no Cred) is Resigning

We in Colorado's sixth congressional district have a golden opportunity before us, the chance to be represented by a more than one trick pony. Tom (no cred) Tancredo has announced that, regardless of the outcome of his Presidential campaign, he will step down.

Now Colorado's Sixth has never been held by a Democrat, not surprising, since it was only created after the 2000 census gave us another seat. The demographics of the district, particularly western Arapahoe county, have changed, giving us a chance to pick up the seat.

I certainly hope so. It would be nice to be represented in Washington for a change. Our Congressional delegation consists of Tancredo and Senators Wayne the Torturer and DINO Ken Salazarasaurus. Not much of Nosy's interests being furthered in the Beltway Vacuum these days. Picking up the seat would give us some well-needed representation in Washington and I understand we have a candidate. Since I can't find him on Google and verify that he's announced, I won't give out his name.

What happened to the CD6 Blog? The Progressive one? At any rate, there's some hope - our State rep converted from the Dark Side and we have a shot at Tando's (no cred, remember) seat. Life is good in CD6.

Democrats Cave on Torture

Can I please have a third party? One with some whatever dangling parts are required to stand up to a 24% President? It's no wonder young people are turning to radical alternatives like Ron Paul. In my youth they did too in Ross Perot.

I ask this question of our leadership: Do we condone torture? Even more fundamental, do we condone those who condone it? I realize Mukasey didn't say he endorsed waterboarding, he only refused to answer the question. Seems pretty suspicious to me, refusing to say that simulating drowning a person (a mock execution, by the way) is illegal.

But it doesn't matter. Our party caved in to a President with a 24% approval rating. I am willing to bet our DINO Ken Salazar doesn't join a filibuster, if one is even mounted. Our new party slogan: We're not as evil as the other guys?

(Obscenity removed)

Feinstein and Schumer Cave on Mukasey

So I guess torture, specifically waterboarding, is okay with some Democrats.

Shit.