Big Unit (Randy Johnson) Now Gunning for Win #300
Now 45 years old and pitching for the San Francisco Giants, the all-time southpaw (left-handed) strikeout king (currently at 4,843), 6 foot 10 and known for his signature slider, was the first pitcher to win major league baseball's annual Cy Young award in both the American (1995) and the National Leagues (1999-2002). Johnson has led the each league in strikeouts (at least 4 seasons each) and in ERA (Earned Run Average), and he has pitched a no-hitter in each league, the last one being one of just 17 perfect games in baseball history (i.e., retiring all opposing at-bats in a 9-inning game). In his next outing, June 3, Randy Johnson is seeking to become just the 24th pitcher to win 300 games. From one lefty to another, good luck, Randy!
Bonnie Sweeten: You've Just Been Carjacked...
Where Are You Going Next? "Disney World"
Where Are You Going Next? "Disney World"
A terrified woman called Philadelphia area 911, claiming her GMC Denali SUV had been rearended by two black carjackers, whom put her and her 9-year daughter (from a previous marriage) in the trunk of a black Cadillac in the heart of Philadelpha. The first call of about a half dozen took place at 1:50PM Tuesday. Subsequent records show that Denali, with no visible damage, was ticketed for a parking violation at 2:20PM in the suburbs, roughly a 40-minute drive away from the purported location of the accident and that the cell calls originated from towers close to the Denali location. The cops and/or the FBI claimed to have discerned other holes in her story among the calls, including the varying location of the daughter in the vehicle, which vehicle they were in, the exact location of the carjacking, and the lack of corroborating evidence (witnesses given the busy intersection where the abduction allegedly took place, video camera footage, etc.) Authorities finally caught up Sweeten with her daughter at a hotel in the Disney World area.
There are unconfirmed reports speculating on Mrs. Sweeten's motives. [What appears in this paragraph is speculative, and I'm not asserting there is a factual basis. To the best of my knowledge, there are no current charges, other than those related to the false 911 call and identity theft. I should also point out that Ms. Sweeten is to be presumed innocent of the charges that have been made, until convicted by a jury or judge.] Supposedly Sweeten handled cash for a legal firm (settlements, etc.) and a related charity and had embezzled several hundred thousand dollars; it's not clear what the purpose of the funds were. Mr. Sweeten says they didn't live a lavish lifestyle, but Bonnie handled the family bills and money. (This is pure speculation on my part; there are reports that she has had a series of miscarriages, and perhaps she had been trying to cover the cost of very expensive fertilization treatments not covered by any relevant health care plan.) It seems that questions were beginning to surface as legal clients were getting stonewalled in the release of their settlement checks and starting to complain. Bonnie, fearing the prospect of going to jail over embezzlement, was frantically trying to restore funds, even apparently changing the amount of a check from her parents to read over $200K. Another rumor suggests that Sweeten felt she was on the verge of arrest and had become suicidal; the motive of bringing her middle daughter with her was viewed as a type of self-restraint, because she wouldn't take her own life with her daughter there.
According to news reports, Bonnie Sweeten used a ruse to steal the identity of Jullian Jenkinson, a former colleague and similar-looking blonde, saying she needed the drivers license to process Jullian's 401K rollover. Since credit card transactions can be tracked, Bonnie used Jullian's identity to purchase two one-way plane tickets to Orlando with cash. It seems that this set off some red flag, and apparently security was slowed at the airport, but Bonnie and her daughter were allowed through by TSA. [Obviously law enforcement was able to track her down and arrested her returning to the hotel with her daughter Thursday; there was also footage released of Mrs. Sweeten going through the airport scanner, but this was obviously identified after Mrs. Sweeten had already boarded the flight with her daughter.]
Besides the unusual nature of this incident, I'm interested in some of the security and information systems issues posed. For instance, Bonnie Sweeten is 5'11"--unusually tall for a woman. I do not know Jullian's height, but I saw an interview clip of her talking to a news crew and she seemed to be medium height at best, at least 6 inches shorter. Since height is listed in drivers license information, I'm not sure how an obvious height discrepancy got past two points of ID check, never mind very tall blonde woman paired with a schoolage daughter. A second point that intrigues me is the identity theft: why Jullian would simply lend Bonnie her driver's license. Usually workplaces already have copies of employee I-9 information on file (and any relevant information--say, the actual drivers license number--can be handwritten), there's the inconvenience of not being able to drive without the license, and a driver's license can be used as a valid ID for a variety of purposes--financial transactions (checks, credit card transactions, etc.), starting a new job, applying for a passport, etc. I do understand Jullian considered Bonnie a friend and did not know of any alleged financial improprieties against her, but what she did was imprudent. We need to do a better job of communicating methods and risks of identity theft. Third, I'm intrigued by why TSA doesn't have an integrated check of daily reservation ids, so, for instance, cash-transaction, same-day or other suspect (e.g., prescheduled fugitive) transactions could be flagged for detailed security checks. The security issues involving the use of false ids highlight the eventual need for reliable biometric checks vs. eyeball checks. Finally, I'm puzzled by the fact that the police didn't locate the Denali until about 12 hours after the SUV was cited for a parking violation. I have not looked at meter maid technology recently, but given widely available handheld devices (including cellphones with cameras) with Internet capabilities and software applications, it would have been very useful for the police to have had the location of the vehicle earlier, which was possible if the license plate of the illegally parked SUV had been promptly input and made accessible to law enforcement.
On a final note, Ms. Sweeten's identification of her alleged carjackers as black was, in my opinion, racist and unconscionable.
Cyber Czar?
How many czars is Obama going to propose? Is there any limit to his misguided attempts to micromanage the economy? Don't get me wrong; I think there's a lot to be said about streamlining government information systems, and there are significant issues with computer security. In my most recent work assignment, I got into a disagreement with the prime contractor on the account, by pushing for a minor Oracle database server version upgrade for a federal agency, because the existing version is not supported for Oracle's latest cumulative quarterly security update. The bottom line is: First, Obama is pushing on a string; there's nothing fundamentally wrong with one of the crown jewels of our economy, and imposing undue regulation on the sector may slow technical innovation and risk losing market share to other countries like China and India which already produce more engineers. Second, before Obama, once again, tries to expand his supposed mandate for government interference in the private sector and succeeds in driving down industry profits with additional red tape and related costs, he should mind his own store. Believe me, I have worked in multiple federal locations running obsoleted software and with serious security issues.
In fact, the private sector does not tolerate the kind of nonsense the Obama Administration bears responsibility for--things like mailing out over 8000 stimulus checks to dead people, failures to implement industry-standard anti-fraud measures for Medicare/Medicaid, etc. And yet the public sector thinks it knows how to tell the private sector how to run its business? Give me a break... The Congress must push back on Obama government empire-building! Before the Obama Administration starts trying telling the private sector what to do, it should get its own house in order.
Value Added Tax Dead on Arrival
Rumors abound that the President is thinking of a VAT (a national sales tax on goods and services), yet another shrewd attempt (like universal health care) to emulate Europe's economic policies promising slow economic growth and sticky high unemployment. With Obama tax-and-spend policies raising the number of working households not paying any federal income tax (in fact, getting additional reimburseable tax credits), there is some validity to insisting low to lower-middle class citizens pay SOMETHING towards their fair share of the government cost burden. We can also make an argument that, for instance, employers who offer health care insurance and their employees implicitly already assume a great deal of cost burden for the Medicare/Medicaid paying under the market rate, not to mention a large portion of uncovered costs for the uninsured. I suspect that Barack Obama will find another it's-good-to-spread-the-wealth-around solution in an attempt to limit the effect of the VAT on lower-income people--which means punishing success even more than he is now. It's like he can't help himself...
Okay, Obama, one more time: a VAT is an increase in consumer costs. This causes demand in goods and services to drop. Decreased demand in goods and services means fewer jobs needed to sustain them. Given the fact we are still bottoming out in the recession, the LAST THING YOU SHOULD DO is raise taxes. If you think the GOP is going to approve a VAT, you're delusional. If you think that incumbent Democrats in competitive districts and states are going to give Tea Party protesters and Republicans something with which to beat them over their heads for the 2010 election, you're delusional. A lot of Republicans are looking for ways to implement a fairer, simpler tax system (e.g., Forbes and Huckabee), but if what you're talking about is using yet another tax given the existing tax burden to pay off $2T deficits of Democratic spending sprees to which we strongly disagree, you are out of your mind.
Obama, Sotomayor and the Rush to Judgment
Obama, as usual, is putting on his version of a political full-press, arguing that Sotomayor should have been confirmed as of, say, yesterday. This is little more than the hope of his audacity. It is particularly hypocritical given he and his own party's stonewalling of Bush court nominees, and the nominations of Roberts and Alito, highly-qualified jurists, took 3 months (not to mention his desire to filibuster Justice Alito's nomination): He's shooting for two months. At the same time, he's hyping Sotomayor's bench experience and "hundreds of judicial decisions that every American can read", but seems to think due diligence of Sotomayor's record should take LESS time? Not a chance. I've written in several posts about how "haste makes waste", with Obama being forced into several reversals or setbacks (the Iraq/Afghan photos, military tribunals, funding for Gitmo closure, etc.); Fox News commentators have been counting the number of times Obama has failed to honor his transparency pledge for a minimum 5-day public display of bills.
There are, of course, some in Washington who are attempting to draw old battle lines and playing the usual political games, pulling a few comments out of context to paint a distorted picture of Judge Sotomayor’s record.
Some who want to draw old battle lines and play the usual political games, "Post-Partisan One"? Like the fact that Senator Obama voted against two highly-qualified nominees to the Supreme Court for purely political reasons or that President Obama, rather than negotiate with Senate Republicans on the so-called stimulus bill, peeled off three liberal Republican votes? Cry me a river... Comments "out of context"? Aren't you the same guy whom so self-righteously proclaimed, "Don't tell me words don't matter..." Aren't you the same guy whom demanded that Don Imus be fired over a single insensitive joke with respect to the Rutgers women's basketball team? Did you think Don Imus' radio show mostly focused on women's hairstyles? And we're not talking about a talk show host with First Amendment rights; we're talking about a federal judge with several years under her belt, a professional lawyer whom knows the importance of words in contracts and other documents. So stop the disingenuous spin; the very fact she caught herself talking about judges "making policy" in a public forum--years after she was grilled in confirmation hearings over her judicial activism--hardly attests to her "fierce intelligence"...
I have held my tongue some time now on Obama's constant promotion of the "rule of law" like he did in today's weekly address. How dare he? This is the same guy whom was telling us just weeks ago he did not accept AIG contracts with managers, stipulating retention bonuses, long before AIG got a bailout. This is the same guy whom gave the unions and their retirees outsized claims on GM and Chrysler stock vs. bondholders, leaving many retirees, investors, and pension funds with literally pennies on the dollar. This is the same guy whom is trying to replace the scales of justice with "empathy" or outcome-based justice. Whatever Obama is trying to peddle, it's not the "rule of law", no matter what he says. I, for one, am sick and tired of hearing Obama saying something his own actions contradict.
He once again tries to intentionally mislead the American people over the "bipartisan" record of Sotomayor's prior appointments and confirmations; the fact is that Sotomayor was the choice of Democratic Senator Moynihan under an agreement that often operates when a state is represented by a member of each party, to which President G.H.W. Bush agreed. It was a quid pro quo for consideration of Republican appointments. Second, Sotomayor's vote for the court of appeals in 1998 was opposed by 29 senators, which is fairly unusual for GOP votes; in comparison, liberal Clinton Supreme Court nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 got only 3 negative votes--and this vote was after unconscionable Democratic smears of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
