Miscellany: 8/31/11

Quote of the Day 

Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; 
if there are none, travel alone.
The Dhammapada

Blog Readership in August

Readership dropped slightly in August, possibly due to a 2-day blog Hurricane Irene-related outage. This sustains a long-term decline since last October (with a one-month interim bounce). Foreign readership continues to be negligible with leading pageviews from Germany topping the Netherlands..

Okay--I'm Officially Annoyed by Obamanomics Apologists

I am sick and tired of mediocre politicians like Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and political hacks like David Axelrod, not to mention the man himself, Barack Obama, constantly making excuses for the freefall of job losses, in the amount of hundreds of thousands of jobs lost per month, following Barack Obama's taking office. Somehow Bush, who had to deal with an opposition-controlled legislature since January 2007--when, incidentally, we were still in the expansion side of the cycle, is ludicrously accused for being responsible for those losses.

By no means should anything I write here be viewed as an exoneration of Bush's economic and fiscal policies. I have been a critic of spending and debt accumulation under Bush's tenure, he expanded Medicare with a prescription drug benefit, when all major entitlement programs (social security, Medicare, and Medicaid) were already chronically underfunded and unsustainable and without properly funding the new benefit. No true fiscal conservative could ever approve of the creation of a behemoth Department of Homeland Security, an in-sourced, rapidly growing Transportation Security Administration with little regard for individual liberty, lack of progress on government privatization and business process reengineering of government operations, and a huge growth in regulations. We did not see  pro-growth business tax reform, we did not deal with a tax revenue model that discriminated in favor of consumption versus savings and investment and was excessively progressive to the point of moral hazard with almost half of workers without a vested interest in frugal government spending, we did not observe the President working with the government revenue he did have to pay for the expenses of Afghanistan and Iraq, e.g., with compensatory budget cuts elsewhere. Whereas Bush did react to the GSE accounting scandals (from 1998 to 2004), he did not really work to minimize the risk to the American taxpayer as the duopoly dominated the mortgage secondary market, especially as they bought riskier mortgage notes at what turned out to be the housing bubble peak.

But let's deal with the misleading talking points suggesting that Obama is not responsible for heavy job losses early in his tenure. There was an election in early November 2008. No doubt Barack Obama wants no responsibility for what happened over the next 2.5 months, but make no mistake about it: businesses making hiring or layoff decisions on November 5, 2008 and afterwards were NOT making decisions based on Bush's policies. The most familiar saying to any investor is "past performance is not indicative of future returns". From a business standpoint, Bush's policies were no longer relevant; he was a lame duck. And keep in mind Bush was dealing with a Democratic legislature; a lame duck Congress, with a stronger hand in the upcoming 111th Congress, could delay any new legislation (including passing the new fiscal year budget) until Obama took office; Bush's only power was passive: he could veto bills passed in the lame duck session.

If federal policies did make a difference, what were businesses facing? A President whom had been running on raising taxes on high-income Americans (including job creators), spending increases (which could potentially compete with business capital requirements), anti-trade and pro-union legislation, aggressive environmental, financial and other regulatory expansion, business mandates, and business interventionist policies (e.g., anti-trust).  A nearly-filibuster proof Senate Democrat majority and a massive majority in the House. What business saw, in addition to existing uncertainty resulting from the recession and economic tsunami, was the incremental uncertainty caused by an anticipated  progressive Obama Administration assault on business interests embracing an anti-growth agenda. 

I argue, if anything, Obama, not Bush, should really be charged with the 2 million of interim (Nov 5 - Jan 19) layoffs. Why? Because businesses were making job decisions based on their expected FUTURE business prospects, not on any purported lame-duck Bush policies. Obama had been consistently leading in the polls by late September, and it was clear that the Democrats in Congress would, at minimum, still remain in control.

Lilly Ledbetter legislation and other alleged worker protections (which, among other things, required more human resource record keeping and related higher business costs) were just the tip of the iceberg. What about the impact of the upcoming Congress on significant labor costs, like health care benefits? Would the Obama Administration pursue an activist pro-union agenda, say abusing its authority by trying to intimidate companies like Boeing from exercising their rights to open plants in other states, manipulating auto bankruptcy proceedings to blatantly favor lower-standing union interests against bondholders, or lowering the barrier to union election certification by a simple plurality versus majority of affected workers? Would the progressives limit businesses' flexibility to manage labor costs by increasing the minimum wage or implementing a so-called "living wage", imposing sticky barriers to layoffs (e.g., separation payments, retraining funds, appeals procedures, etc.) or expensive new benefit mandates (e.g., paternity leaves)?

Edmund Wright, in the above cited essay, points out the interim job loss AFTER Obama's election victory--roughly 600,000 jobs a month--closely paralleled the 700,000 losses a month Obama himself acknowledges at the beginning of his tenure that he "inherited" from Bush. He points out that the job losses during the period of the economic tsunami itself, say August through October 2008, were less than the rate after Obama's victory.

Should Obama get credit because businesses, after dropping hundreds of thousands of jobs monthly for a string of several months, finally slowed down? Are you kidding? According to economists, the recession was declared at an end in June 2009, just 5 months into the Obama Presidency. It was not due to Obama's stimulus money, only a small fraction of which had been disbursed in the interim. Businesses had certain manpower requirements to maintain current operations. The recession was already longer than the average recession when Obama took office; we had been through real estate cycles in the past. My verdict? Businesses slowed down their layoffs despite Obama, not because of his policies.

Obama and the Democrats completely misplayed the hand they had been dealt. The best thing they could have done would have been to reassure businesses that they had no new mandates or tax burden to worry about in the short run and provide closure on soon expiring Bush tax cuts. They would have focused on ratifying pending free trade pacts and streamlined business tax rates to be globally competitive. Instead of an adversarial relationship with oil and gas companies, they would have have done everything to encourage greater economic security, a stronger dollar and related employment by promoting suppressed development and utilization of American-based natural resources. Instead of trying to finesse their way into a recovery by picking winners (e.g., green energy companies) and losers in the economy, they should have focused on more broad-based initiatives across the economy which would provide the more diverse opportunities for employment consistent with existing job skills of the unemployed.

Famous Last Words From the Hypocrite in Chief

This video from the 2008 campaign has gotten a lot of replay on FNC and conservative websites and blogs. In fact, I made a brief reference to it in an earlier post discussing my approach to the 2012 election, that the GOP should back off Bill Ayers-style negative spots and instead use Obama's own words against him, his empty, broken promises.

The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents - number 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back - $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic.

As of Monday, the national debt stood at $14.62T, $9.99T of which is held by the public (including foreign investors), On January 20, 2009,  the national debt stood at $10.63T, $6.31T held by the public. (The residual amount of debt involves various government reserves, including the social security trust.) Publicly-held debt, in less than 3 years of the Obama Administration, has grown 58%; the national debt has increased 37.5%.  Oh, and that $4T Obama talked about Bush accumulated near the end of Bush's second term? Obama "all by his lonesome" managed to do it in just over 2.5 years.

What's that you were saying, Mr. Barack "Mr. Civility" Obama, about someone being "unpatriotic" and "irresponsible" by adding $4T to the national debt, particularly funding from the "Bank of China"? Words have a way of being returned to sender; let ABBA explain...



Conor Friedersdorf, 
"Americans Should Be Able to Sell Stuff Without a Permit"
THUMBS UP!

This has been a pet peeve that I've focused on in several segments on this blog, particularly what kids are been subjected to selling something as innocuous as lemonade in front of their family home. There's an ordinance that requires you to purchase a license or a permit (and how many boorish Judge Judy's of the world do we have to hear repeat "ignorance of the law is no excuse"?) It may require you to jump through hoops and have arbitrary restrictions; can you imagine having, say,  having to put up a fee that may exceed what you're hoping to clear from relevant transactions and to go through a criminal background check, just to sell roses on the curb to husbands whom forgot to buy roses earlier on Valentine's Day? And maybe you can only sell flowers twice a year (say, Valentine's Day and Mothers Day), each requiring their own license. Of course, if you've paid your debt to society, you just might not get the privilege of selling flowers at all...

Of course, all the busybody local legislators are just looking out for the common good... Yeah, right: you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

Friedersdorf does a nice job summarizing those good people never realizing or perhaps knowing all too well how their meddlesome elected officials are imposing arbitrary restrictions on their own economic liberty:

Targeted entrepreneurs say the same thing again and again: I just had a good idea and started a business. It never occurred to me that I needed permission. And, of course, other would be entrepreneurs don't ever get started because they're too intimidated to assess and grapple with the bureaucratic hurdles. Or else the regulations are written in a way that excludes from commerce folks who are operating at a very small scale.

And just what sort of nefarious people are getting arrested and fined for inconveniently exercising their unalienable right of economic liberty?

Kids selling lemonade on the street are shut down. A Missouri man has been fined $90,000 for selling rabbits (he made about $200). In Illinois, an artisan ice cream maker is being shut down for lack of a dairy permit. Manuel Winn was arrested, handcuffed, and booked for selling magazines door-to-door without a permit. A Maryland mother of three was arrested for selling $2 phone cards without a license. Lots of municipalities are going after food trucks. A group of Louisiana monks had to go to court to win the right to sell simple wooden caskets to consumers.

Does anybody else feel like petitioning Cher to do this to related local elected officials and police officers whom lack common sense and have the audacity to enforce these ludicrous ordinances? GET A LIFE, PEOPLE!



NOTE: I found the original article cited on MJ Perry's excellent Carpe Diem blog.

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

David Gates/Bread, "Goodbye Girl". Final song of my Gates/Bread series. This is one of those cases (e.g., St. Elmos Fire or Karate Kid II : "Glory of Love") where I like the song more than the movie.

Miscellany: 8/30/11

Quote of the Day

Men argue, nature acts.
Voltaire

Earlier Post Explains the Interruption in Daily Posts

The Baltimore area was affected by widespread power outages as Hurricane Irene passed over the Maryland coast early Sunday morning, leaving me without Internet access or cable. I give a tongue-in-cheek personal experience in an earlier post today.

I will say that I was intrigued by one commentator I heard after finally being able to access FNC for the first time in days, questioning the legitimate legitimate role in dealing with disaster relief. Recall in pre-Katrina Florida, FEMA was responsive a number of storms (4) hitting Florida, and the 2004 Kerry Democrats were accusing the Bush Administration of politicizing federal aid.

This has been a struggle between drunken progressive sailor spending and fiscal conservatives for years. The progressives tried to suggest that the failures of Katrina in Louisiana were the result of privatization efforts. The fact is that Mayor Nagin waited until hours before Katrina's landfall to issue a poorly crafted evacuation order (e.g., not addressing particularly vulnerable communities like the sick and elderly), too little, too late, which exacerbated local shelters with supply estimates assuming normal evacuation efforts. (There were other delayed responses to efficiently expedite evacuations, e.g., unidirectional traffic flows out of the city.) There were also issues with FEMA in some cases stonewalling private-sector suppliers like Wal-Mart in their desire to coordinate the combined effort. Governor Blanco was slow to the mark of securing necessary National Guard staffing for the disaster; some requests were up to days AFTER landfall, and Blanco refused to grant a waiver to Bush allowing federalized National Guard to enforce local/state laws (e.g., anti-rioting/looting). Blanco, on the other hand, could use federalized National Guard to enforce local/state laws under her command, which is what she asked for, too little, too late: the lawlessness we saw after Katrina landfall speaks volumes about Blanco's failure in managing the crisis; even Nagin was publicly attacking Blanco's lack of responsiveness.

FEMA was a fairly recent Carter-era contribution to Big Government growth and so it's not unusual for legitimate conservatives and libertarians to challenge the federal scope creep into what is by nature a primarily local/first responder issue, not a federal responsibility. There are already inter-state cooperative agreements pooling resources. If the Feds take over, where's the incentive to right-size the state National Guard or engage in inter-state resource sharing? As early as April 2001, then Bush Budget Director Mitch Daniels (completing his second term as Indiana's governor) was advocating privatizing much of FEMA's programs. And, of course, the left-wing blogs are already playing Chicken Little, obsessed that GOP Presidential front runner Mitt Romney hints at the same thing. Right now the House GOP is particularly looking at one relevant federal program, national flood insurance, which many charge effectively subsidize the true costs of building in or near flood-prone areas.

Where do I stand? Do you really have to ask? I think that the states should exercise their tenth amendment right and responsibilities, and I think there is moral hazard in states grabbing for the federal tit short of catastrophic losses (over and beyond more predictable expenses). I think that states and municipalities should avail themselves of existing private-sector resources and logistics, including companies like Wal-Marts reach across locales and/or the American Red Cross. What if private-sector bus lines, vans, trains and other vendors could expedite evacuation of high-risk populations, a virtual extension of local resources?

Sandy Franks and Sara Nunnally, Barbarians of Wealth:
Some Political Reflections

This book, published last December, is an interesting discussion of the great conquerors in world history, not so much the nature and extent of their conquests but in terms of their material motivations. It also discusses the genesis of banking and its crony relationships with governments, fiat currency (paper money), etc.. The authors interestingly integrate discussions of these ancient leaders (e.g., Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, etc.) with various individuals and parties to the recent economic tsunami. This was a volume that I had purchased earlier but started reading during my power outage period (see above). There were a few related points, more incidental to the book but I found interesting in terms of certain political insights, not really addressed by the authors in their discussions.

First, there's the authors' sympathetic discussion of the 1930's Glass-Steagall, which created artificial barriers against certain business line combinations, e.g., commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies. I have never believed the fairy tale that Glass-Steagall was divinely inspired. Some argue that that the reasons for up to a third of banks failing after the 1929 crash was because they had speculated depositor money on risky stocks, resulting in Glass-Steagall--not so. Diversified financial services companies existed outside the US--just not in the US. We allowed other types of conglomerates. Yes, banks sometimes fail. Sometimes commercial bankers fail, insurers fail. We have conglomerates of all kinds (e.g., GE). The reasons for failure can be specific to the bank and its loan portfolio.

But the idea that an allegedly free market country like the US would create artificial barriers in financial services that put domestic corporations at a competitive disadvantage against international companies with no such scruples made American companies uncompetitive--sort of like fighting bigger global entities with one arm tied behind its back. In fact, government regulation of banking  had become dysfunctional: it wasn't until the mid-1990's that banks could open branches in different states. In fact, look at the results: what did Uncle Sam take possession of? Did AIG have an investment bank subsidiary? No. What about the GSE's, i.e., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? No. What happened to failing Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch? Were they merged with other investment banks? Nope. Banks like Bank of America and Chase? Yup. Did banks without insurance or investment banking go under as a result of bad mortgages? Yup--e.g., Washington Mutual. The above-cited author also points out that Glass-Steagall was no longer the same law it was back in the 1930's; regulators had been granting certain exceptions which eventually become more the rule than the exception.

Now some people will argue that government guarantees of depositors for more highly regulated banks creates a moral hazard, e.g., which would allow an investment bank to speculate at the expense of the American taxpayer. But we've seen similar issues in other contexts. For example, I served as a de facto SBC (now AT&T) corporate DBA, just before telecommunications deregulation in the mid-1990's  where we got feeds of regulated landline phone revenues plus competitive lines of business, e.g., mobile phones and yellow pages. I think there's an intrinsic problem with government guarantees which essentially relieves bank customers of doing due diligence to search for the most reliable, best run bank. The issue has not so much to do, say, funneling funds to investment banks but business decisions in their own lines of business, e.g., loans or other investments, as well.

Those of us who are at peace with the free market had no problem whatsoever of seeing AIG go bankrupt. They took on too much risk, and they gambled the company's future on writing those swaps. Maybe domestic competitors would bid for AIG's lines of business. I also would not have paid Goldman Sachs full price for the value of their nearly $3B AIG swaps. In fact, Goldman Sachs did about $20B worth of swap business from AIG; if they didn't diversify their swap business and/or realize that AIG might not have sufficient funds to meet its obligations, they should have taken their chances with a bankruptcy court along with other AIG claimants.

Second, against many military, evangelical and pop conservatives taking on Muslim fundamentalists because of military/terrorist actions and concept of the religious state, we should note it's a relatively recent development in the 2000 years of Christianity that we've seen more of a separation of the church from the state. If we go back to high school world history and examine Charlemagne, we know that he was not tolerant of pagans whom wanted to retain the current religious beliefs; they were given a choice of baptism or a different fate. Charlemagne established a number of churches based on his acquired resources and his government enforced tithing to the Church. For its part, the influential Church was generally supportive of Charlemagne's rule. There were battles between Christian denominations, e.g., the Thirty Years War, and, of course, religious tensions in Northern Ireland have existed within our own lifetimes.

I'm not here attempting to suggest that there is a moral equivalence between the great religions on the nature and extent of violence to gain followers. Jesus at several places in scripture specifically rejects a political leadership role and condemns violent actions unconditionally. But certainly the growth of Christianity was helped by mutually beneficial relationships with political leaders since the days of the Roman Empire.

Finally, I'm fascinated by how much personality played a role in some of the great world conquerors of their day; their empires dissolved over disputes among successors in a matter of several years or more. One of the way I judge leaders is being their staying power, over and beyond  their time in office. I remember in one of my first companies (now a subsidiary of Equifax), I had essentially created my own position for the company's largest client. I migrated to another business group with a more diversified group of clients (including the above-cited one-year contract with SBC), but they ended up replacing me with a consultant whom basically followed my standard procedures; when he left to work for Oracle Consulting, they decided to replace him with developer manager within 2 years of retirement, and he was able to follow my procedures. There were other DBA's in the company beginning to imitate my ways of doing things. I had no formal authority but a lot of informal power; my bosses loved the job I was doing and backed me up.

Now forget about talking about Barack Obama, because anyone considering him to be a legitimate leader is out of touch with reality. This is not a partisan snipe but take into consideration that his major accomplishments in the 111st Congress drew essentially no GOP support whatsoever and he had no choice but resort to lopsided partisan majorities; moreover, the laws largely reflected convoluted legislative initiatives that significantly departed from his early positions; for example, Barack Obama during the campaign opposed health care insurance mandates and also opposed earmarks; he also ran on class warfare tax hikes. He ran against the wars and yet continued with essentially the same policies. His views are conventional Democratic progressive, essentially the same as his 2008 competitors.

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, had a cohesive set of policy beliefs that have defined many of the current political battles for decades. Nobody running for President on the GOP side materially departs from Reagan on major policies.

But let me point out the real target of this discussion: John McCain. Make no mistake: I'm more convinced than ever that McCain should have won the 2008 election. I'm not going to comment on the typical criticisms by the opposition of him as a carpetbagger and political opportunist. Contrary to his detractors, he, in fact, did have management experience in the US Navy. Let my point out the comparison from context. one of his proudest accomplishments after returning from Vietnam was reducing the planes sitting on the ground undergoing maintenance. The gist I can from reading on this topic was that as long as McCain was in command, those productivity gains were sustained. However, after McCain left command, we saw the maintenance record return to normal. The question is whether McCain's Presidential accomplishments would have endured over the coming decades; I suspect not.

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Bread, "Lost Without Your Love". I think Bread is one of the few groups where almost every single released was a soft rock classic I loved; tomorrow's post will feature Gates' superb songwriting in the title song for a Neil Simon movie. There are a few other singer-songwriters I look forward to any and all releases: Paul McCartney, Elton John, The BeeGees, Neil Diamond, Lionel Richie, Jim Brickman/collaborators, Diane Warren/collaborators, Jimmy Webb/collaborators, Paul Simon, Holland-Dozier-Holland/collaborators, and ABBA.

The Lost Weekend in the Baltimore Suburbs

There have been, according to news reports among over 500 email messages piled up during my absence from the Internet, some 4 million or so people without power since the weekend. Given a handful of fatalities, people getting flooded out of their homes, and businesses and employees affected, I shouldn't complain about being without electricity (and the Internet) for a few days, but it did affect my publishing my daily update (for Sunday and Monday) for the first time, I believe, since I started publishing on a daily schedule back in November 2009. I intend to publish my first regular daily update since the interruption in service later this evening.

Occasionally I'll depart from commenting on politics in this blog or weave in some personal stories with my commentary, which I trust regular readers find interesting. I didn't feel this post really fit into a simple segment, so I'm titling the post separately.

I knew about the news coverage of Hurricane Irene before I went to sleep early Sunday morning; Hurricane Irene had touched ground in North Carolina and was heading up the coast. Civil authorities had canceled air traffic to and from the major NYC airports by Sunday. I usually get prolific email notifications from various weather email subscriptions (e.g., Accuweather), and there was nothing of an unusual nature regarding local storms. I heard an occasional splatter of raindrops on my windows a couple of times, but nothing out of the ordinary when I shut down my PC in the early hours Sunday morning.

The point is, I went through Hurricane Alicia while a UH doctoral student back in 1983. The windows of my apartment rattled so hard, I thought they should shatter at any time, and I spent most of my time in my bathroom while the hurricane passed. As I recall, it took about 3 to 5 days to restore electricity and I remember trying to drive around a day or two later, finding things like huge tree branches blocking roadways. There was nothing like this here; from what I see in news reports, the hurricane lost its momentum after hitting North Carolina. I'm not underestimating this was a very bad storm with flooding in New Jersey and New York. As I write, hundreds of thousands of Maryland residents are still without power service.

When the sunlight woke me, roughly 7AM that morning, I automatically checked the time on my digital alarm clock--which was blank. Not good. Looking outside, it looked like your everyday sunny summer day. No hint of any severe damage anywhere. We have lots of trees on the apartment property and there was nothing unusual; I later did see a couple of low-lying branches on a couple of trees, but the landscape workers had been pruning trees. My digital home phone was out, of course; I have a low-minutes cellphone plan with no real Internet capabilities.

Over Sunday and yesterday, I must have called 8 to 10 times trying to get through to BGE (my local utility) and only got through once to report my outage and to get a status report; in hindsight, I think this was the most unsatisfying and unacceptable part of this experience. The only status I heard was a self-serving one talking about thousands of workers on the job restoring service, their first priority was their workers' safety, and residential service will be restored when it is restored.  The point is, what customers expect when these things happen is some degree of status in practical terms--hours, days, weeks? Am I going to lose everything in my freezer? I want to point out, by the way, electricity companies plan for just this sort of thing; there's a long history of weather disruptions, and and if I heard a utility CEO ever say anything as lame as "the world is complex", he or she would be fired so fast, heads would spin. There is NO excuse in this information age for you ever to hear, like I did every time except once. "The circuits are all busy; please try again at a later time." There are ways of extending technologies to handle predictably large call volumes; for computer applications, for example, we can deploy dozens of middle-tier application servers to cope with very large numbers of user connections.

In my articles on usability, I point out a key element of providing feedback to the user, especially when one is dealing with abstract processes. It's important in providing feedback that you provide context, e.g., "as of 7PM Sunday, xx of yy service areas are without power. So far jj service areas have been restored, and we expect zz service areas to be restored by tomorrow. To find out more detailed service area status, try on the line to enter your account phone number..." Why is feedback important? Among other things, lack of feedback only adds to redundant or dysfunctional user activities.

I've probably mentioned this in past posts, but I once worked on an Oracle ERP upgrade process being implemented by an aerospace vendor. There was a database vendor consulting consultant (in fact, I had been a senior principal for the same consulting company about 3 years earlier) whom serves as a figurehead leader on the project but had not participated in a single dry run of the upgrade. There was one abnormally long process during the early phase of the upgrade that took 10 hours. One of my colleagues have provided a method for showing how far along the process was in terms of database object counts. Two colleagues had the beginning shift, I had the late evening/early morning (up to 2 AM), and then the figurehead would take the 2 AM - 8 AM shift. This was a critical path process. Long story short, because the client didn't complete the necessary backups on time, the first shift never started the upgrade; I did, making up for lost time and handed it all, essentially just after kicking off the 10-hour job. I explained in detail: "All you have to do is babysit the process. It's going to take longer than your shift. Here's how you check the process." Fast forward: after sleeping until 7:30 AM or so, I made it there just to find out the figurehead, probably billing the client over $200/hour, had decided that the upgrade had "frozen" (deliberately ignoring or disregarding my very explicit briefing), never bothered to consult any of the DBA's on the upgrade team, and ordered the upgrade restarted from the beginning, blowing nearly 20 hours in the go-live, around-the-clock schedule. The project DBA terminating the upgrade? The guy who developed the method for checking the status on the long job. I asked the figurehead, "On what basis did you decide the upgrade was stuck?" There are a variety of ways to check on process and subprocess times in addition to the utility, but in all our dry runs, we had never had a "stuck" upgrade--just one process that took a long time he had been briefed about in no uncertain terms, that I told him would span his entire shift. When I rebuked my colleague, whom should have known better and pushed back on the invalid request, he simply said, "[The figurehead] is the boss." I went back and reported the incident to my contractor representative, fuming that this guy was probably going to bill the client for his shift time over his gross incompetence and blowing a hole in the go-live project schedule, which had already been delayed by the backup problem. Of all things, the vendor consultant apparently found out and reportedly was most highly offended by the billing allegation (of the client paying him for screwing up, which, of course, nobody was going to tell them). I was told by my contractor rep I was flirting with political fire, but in my view (which remains the same today) both the figurehead and my work colleague should have been fired for cause. It's one thing when a person makes a mistake, but both people had been specifically aware of nature of the job and didn't even consult with me or others before pulling the plug. I didn't get a contract extension for expected post-upgrade work, but I was already in contact with two consulting companies over full-time opportunities.

This is just one example of how problematic or lack of recognizable feedback costs money and adversely affects customer opinions. By not getting through I had to continually call again, which aggravated the call volumes, annoyed me (burning a limited quota of cell minutes) and I"m sure that I was not alone.

There is disaster recovery for just about anything; As a database administrator,  I've written documents on restoring database servers from scratch and have dealt with database availability solutions, cloning and migrations. I wrote an email to vendor management at NASA GSFC criticizing how they deployed a certain database availability technology, pointing out the source and target servers were in the same  building; guess what would happen if, say, the basement flooded out? The contractors were just doing what the clients wanted; if I'm the consultant, I'm jawboning the client, telling them they haven't controlled for geographic risk, which defeated the basic purpose for redundancy.

It may well be that most BGE customers don't have two advanced business degrees or haven't worked in the technology field for a living over 20 years; no doubt some of them are mollified just knowing someone is working on the problem.

Last point of the BGE issue: I did go to the apartment office yesterday (Monday) morning, and the manager on duty said that BGE had told the complex that power was scheduled to be restored Friday.

I did have a plug-in emergency unit (flashlight, radio, etc.,) but I had unplugged it during spring cleaning, and its battery had lost its charge. Great. No candles. My other flashlight was dead. No other radios available. I heard water pipe operations in the building going on, which I inferred were showers. The showers were heated by natural gas; that got me to checking my stove. Sure enough, that was working. I did have some alternatives: some ready-to-eat Nutrisystem food items not requiring heating. I did have a marinated piece of Alaskan wild salmon in my freezer which I fried and ate for dinner.

I couldn't work on a creative writing assignment I was doing because my notebook computer battery was dead, so I decided to do some purging of older magazines that for some reason I never have time to read. No kidding: last year I finally purged a magazine discussing Clinton's plans for his second term. These were among the last 2 or 3 years; I've been letting my magazine subscriptions lapse over the last year or two. Lots of health and fitness magazines for which I'm way out of shape for; you know, it's bad when you outweigh the "before" people in the "before/after" weight loss stories. If there's one way to make use of evenings without entertainment, it's an ideal reason to reignite my long-neglected exercise regimen and walking routine. My biggest concern, though, was the fact that iPod shuffle and cellphone batteries were continuing to draw down.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to take a drive around. None of the traffic lights were working in the area. Traffic-cones were set up to nullify things liked crossover left-hand turns. There are three major malls/strip malls clustered near my apartment complex; all of them were deserted; it was all so surreal: I'm not even sure they're that empty on major holidays (e.g., my once-frequented fitness center). It looked like a ghost city. There really was no need to continue on to my regular supermarket or Sam's Club about a mile down the road.

This morning I continued to work on my new cleaning binge, this time with my car where I found employee benefits information for a former employer which went bankrupt 8 or 9 years ago. After finishing that, I can back into my apartment just before noon, and something was different; I suddenly realized that my desktop lamp was on.

Lessons learned: I didn't realize the gaps in my emergency preparedness and the extent my lifestyle depended on reliable electric power. Even in terms of things like blog posts, I could have had posts scheduled to published at specific times.

Anyway, for better or worse, I'm back and will start on tonight's blog post.

Miscellany: 8/27/11

Quote of the Day

Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.
Albert Einstein

China's One-Child Policy and VP Joe Biden: Some Comments

I haven't commented on the Joe Biden's latest kerfuffle--in particular, how a Catholic politician should address the grave moral injustice of China's one child per family policy, condemned by the moral teachings of his own Church, in diplomatic spun terms devoid of any hint of moral outrage, arguing at a Chinese university last Sunday :

"Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I'm not second-guessing -- of one child per family."

First of all, any legitimate American leader needs to explicitly acknowledge that having children is an unalienable right of liberty. I"m sure that Neville Chamberlain  "fully understood" and didn't engage in "second-guessing" Hitler. Second, an American  can be both direct and respectful in expressing dissent, which Biden didn't do: no government can claim moral legitimacy by enforcing a policy contrary to inalienable individual rights.

Instead, Joe Biden's office quickly paid lip service to some of the immoral techniques used to enforce an unconscionable policy, i.e., forced sterilizations and abortions. And they point out Biden did try to argue that the policy was counterproductive, pointing out low birth families will result in an unsustainable burden on young people as their parents become older. Let's get this straight: the issue isn't about the sustained, unapologetic violations of universal human rights; it's just not very useful progressive policy making.

Chinese Baby Girls Are Beautiful Gifts From God

In our family it was tied 3-3 (BGBGGB) when Mom became pregnant with our final sibling. Mom decided to poll the siblings on gender preference for our unborn sibling. My sisters all voted for a baby sister; my two brothers decided in favor of a baby brother. I expressed a preference for a baby sister, which immediately put me in the doghouse with my little brothers for betraying our gender. I love all babies, but there's something about a baby girl that tugs at my heart.

I have three godchildren, that baby sister (now married with 3 kids of her own) and two nieces (no godsons, even though I have more nephews than nieces). My siblings are convinced I'm partial to girls. I once babysat for my first married sister; my baby niece was hungry and I was feeding her a bottle when my sister and brother-in-law came home; my 1-year-old nephew was jealous of the attention to his sister. My sister was furious at me for "ignoring" my nephew in favor of my niece. Sigh! I was just a clueless bachelor uncle whom thought feeding the baby had a higher priority.

In the second video below, I dissent from the off-topic message on obesity among young Chinese boys. I don't think that spoiling an only child is something peculiar to Chinese children; for instance, I've personally met a lot of American spoiled brats. However, I do find it rather odd that Chinese authorities respect parental autonomy when it comes to feeding their children but not in how many children they have.

I admire Chai Ling and encourage my readers to visit her All Girls Allowed.


Join the Coalition to End Gendercide from All Girls Allowed on Vimeo.



Political Humor



Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Bread, "Aubrey"

Miscellany: 8/26/11

Quote of the Day

Patience is passion tamed.
Lyman Abbott

The War On Child-Run Businesses Continues: 
THUMBS DOWN!
A Rare Town With Common Sense: Chadrad, NE: 
THUMBS UP!

I think nothing so perfectly illustrates the malaise of Big Government Obamanomics than the mindset of local governments run amok by preposterously treating residents, particularly children, running nominal income enterprises the same as full-fledged vendors. I'm aware of the self-righteous arguments of equal protection, and I'm aware that it's local police, not the Feds, busting individuals (at least at this time).

Why do I compare this mindset to Obamanomics? Look, for instance, at Sarbanes-Oxley. (Before I go further, I also realize Sarbanes-Oxley was passed under the Bush Administration. But it was one of the truly bipartisan pieces of legislation, passing with less than a handful of no votes in both chambers of Congress) What we have here is a regressive impact of the cost of regulations: large corporations have the economies of scale to absorb the costs of regulations better than smaller companies. The same high barrier of entry issue surfaces when you start requiring the same license fees, say, to operate a McDonald's as you do a residential lemonade stand. Most kids would working more to fill exploitative municipality coffers than to clear anything for themselves; that is morally unconscionable: I don't care whatever pathetic "rules are rules; no exceptions" rationalization exists: it is analogous to the concept of petty cash in a company, which involves a consideration of materiality, e.g., the cost of cutting a check for a certain expenditure is more than the disbursement amount itself. The amount of sales and profits of most resident enterprises is negligible.

The palpable hypocrisy and double standard are obvious when you consider, for instance, nearly half of American workers do not pay a penny of federal income tax: people with thousands of dollars of real income. Permits, licenses, etc., are a form of taxation: a taxation on business. When you impose these costs on a low-volume, low-margin enterprise, like most child-run businesses, these taxes or related penalties de facto constitute a form of government theft, because they force the enterprise to operate at a loss. No business (except government) can sustain operational losses. The net effect of imposing these morally inapplicable rules and regulations is to discourage business operations--which I believe is fundamentally anti-American and anti-competitive at its core.


I think perhaps the reason I am sensitive about this issue is because during high school I ran the prototypical child-run business: newspaper delivery. I cleared about $30/month for daily delivery (including Sundays) for roughly 90 newspapers. Do the arithmetic: I was making just over a penny a paper I threw. My folks didn't have resources to contribute to my college expenses; I had 6 younger siblings, my mom was a homemaker and my dad was drawing a NCO's pay (which at the time wasn't nearly as attractive as it is today). The company charged me for each paper; sometimes I got an extra paper or two in my bundle to lure new subscribers.

It's not as fun as it sounds. One had to manually collect every month, and I often had to come back multiple times. Delivering newspapers in South Texas at heat constantly around three digits wasn't fun. And the strap of my filled newspaper bag would often dig into my shoulder. It didn't rain that often but I had to deliver rain or shine. I'll never forget this one stormy Sunday morning I had just pedaled out of our family driveway when the back of my bicycle seat collapsed and I landed on my back. Icy cold water rushing towards the sewer was soaking my clothes, my rolled-up papers were strewn over the street, I hurt from the fall, and God knew the shape my bike was in. Every once in a while a customer would falsely complain I didn't deliver his paper (I always cross-footed my paper counts and had near photographic memory). If I did not have a promotional copy, I had to go down to the newsstand and buy a replacement copy at full price--which wiped out most of my profit for the customer that month. It's pathetic when you steal money from a kid.

Not meaning to go on with little horror stories (everyone has problems, I realize), but I'll never forget this one family with 3 teenage girls and mother/wife, all around 5'10" or so (a little taller than me; one of the girls was in junior high and two others attended my high school). I had never met the dad/husband, but he called me one day insisting I had not delivered his paper. I was usually very accurate with my paper throws, banging the front door, but this one I remember skipped into the middle of a rolled up garden hose at the top/back of the driveway, maybe 4 feet from the door. He would accept nothing short of my coming to his house (several blocks away) and hand-delivering the paper in person. So I pedaled over to his duplex house (all the time thinking what my grandfather grocer said: 'The customer is always right'), plucked the paper from exactly where I had told him it was, knocked on his door and tried to hand him his paper, but for some reason I can't recall (maybe he wanted to read me the riot act), he had me step up into his house. What I remember most of that incident besides what I've just written was that given a wife and 3 daughters near 6 feet tall, I had mentally pictured him as being a very tall man. Instead I was looking down at him. He was at best 5'5"--he looked somewhat like a short Sgt. Vince Carter from Gomer Pyle. (I guess it was possible that his wife was previously married to a tall man and these were his stepdaughters.) I went away from there thinking the guy had a Napoleon complex.

Most of my customers were in the enlisted section of the base; I had maybe 10 or so papers to deliver in two other places on base which required an elliptical detour; I had a few I delivered in a bachelor NCO barracks (what I particularly remember about that is they had a vending machine dispensing cans of beer; however, I wasn't interested in drinking beer). That was my last stop before pedaling a few hundred yards home. Mom never had soft drinks or ice cream except on special occasions when I lived at home (the youngest siblings: different story). So occasionally I would treat myself to a can of Fresca or whatever--which blew a third of my profits for the day.

There weren't a lot of other opportunities for earning money on base. I think at 16 you could apply to work at the commissary as a bagger and earn tips, but I graduated soon after turning 16. My dad wouldn't let me get a drivers license because his insurance agent found out I was taking drivers education at school and Dad couldn't afford to take a hit on his auto insurance. (I knew I didn't have money to buy and operate a car, but I wanted a license in hand whenever I could afford one. Dad wouldn't let me student drive, even in empty parking lots, once he was contacted by the insurance agent.)

Going back to the core discussion, there is an excellent post by the Freedom Center of Missouri summarizing numerous persecutions of child-run concessions, including small-scale lemonade stands, produce stands (e.g., pumpkins and organic vegetables), and Girl Scout cookies. (I mean, how miserable do you have to be to go after Girl Scout cookies? My little sisters used to sell them. What's more all-American than Girl Scout cookies?) A good graphical summary (with only two green--i.e., pro-child-run business--items) is available here.

Not all municipalities are run by mindless bureaucrats whom establish or enforce policies with the unintended consequences of crushing the spirit of future entrepreneurs. There are people whom still remember what America is really all about--including the land of opportunity and freedom--and exercise COMMON SENSE. So kudos to my new favorite city in Nebraska: Chadron:

City Clerk Donna Rust said although there is an ordinance regarding vendors, residents of the City are exempt [including lemonade stands]...The City would more than likely encourage young people who have the initiative to start up a lemonade stand to try to make some money for themselves over the summer. A vendor's permit is $10 per day, $25 per week, and $100 per year; if a child’s business endeavor was required to get one, it wouldn’t be worth the cost for the small enterprise...would not bring any profit for a small lemonade stand.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And some good public servants, like Donna Rust, remember that the business of government is to serve us, not for us to serve the business of government.

Political Humor



Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Bread, "Sweet Surrender"

Miscellany: 8/25/11

Quote of the Day

The secret of attraction is to love yourself.
Deepak Chopra

Do We Have the Faith of Hawkeye?

I've never owned a dog, in part due to frequent moves and a road warrior/bachelor lifestyle. My folks finally gave in to my siblings' pressure and bought a dog after my dad retired from the military and I was in college. I never really thought about the fact that I didn't own a pet until my oldest niece asked me several years back. I think most of my (married) siblings are multi-dog homes.

In my last apartment complex, I can remember coming home late on night; the building lighting was lousy. It was pitch black. All of a sudden I felt something brush against my leg, but I couldn't see anything. As I approached the dimly lit building entrance, I saw it was the most beautiful black Labrador retriever, no owner in sight, walking by my side as if he (or she) had known me all his life. As I fumbled to unlock the apartment building door and open it, he quickly made his way past me into the foyer and looked up at me expectantly as if to say, "Well? Are you coming in or aren't you?" It was both hilarious and endearing; I had never seen this dog before in my life, and he was walking to my door as if he had done it a thousand times. He was as audacious as Barack Obama seriously believing he's entitled to reelection after the last 3 years (if Obama had an ounce of self-respect, he would withdraw his candidacy...) I had to trick him (the dog, not Obama) in order to get into my apartment without him.

I have only limited experience with dogs, so I haven't researched the topic of dogs brushing up against one, but I've seen some passing references via the Internet that it's a dog's way of saying hi to you or of petting their people, or indicating they are lonely and want companionship. My experience has been restricted to our now deceased family dog, a different, much smaller breed, and innumerable walks around the block. My most endearing memory with her was that I was lying down on my stomach in front of the TV; she came in and lay down perpendicular to me resting her head on top of my butt. (You can't make this stuff up; I'm not sure I could have trained her to do that. It was completely spontaneous; I guess she wanted to assert I was her human.)                                  

It was seriously funny--the next 4 or 5 nights, and I returned home at different times, as soon as I got out my car, the black Labrador retriever mysteriously appeared out of nowhere and almost immediately made his way beside me, brushing the length of his sleek black body against my left leg. Never barking; very quiet, beautiful, happy to see me, accompanying me to the door. I was really beginning to covet some neighbor's dog (I assume). It's one thing to be loved by a dog you raised from a pup; this dog seemed to love me without so much as a doggy treat. I half-seriously thought of letting him in, and when he stopped showing up, I was a little disappointed. If I ever get a dog, not to diss my family dog, but I just loved that black Lab retriever; what a sweetheart!

Babies, small children and many pets like me instinctively; above that age, I'm more of an acquired taste (according to my best friend). Most people probably say they do well with babies and kids (probably not bachelors), but I remember one afternoon at the UH Catholic Newman Center playing with these 3 young siblings while their parents were talking to the priest or other staff.  I really didn't think that much about it, until after Mass the next Sunday. I was out in the foyer of the chapel about to go upstairs for our normal after-church doughnuts and coffee social, when I swear to God I found myself surrounded by (at least) 25 to 30 kids, probably ranging from 3 to 7 years old, and right in front of me were the 3 siblings I had played with the other day; they were all looking up at me. I don't even know where all the kids came from--probably some childcare service during Mass. But I had never been surrounded by a sea of little kids before; it was a very odd experience. Was this some variation of "show and tell"? The siblings must have told them they had met this cool, goofy man whom knew how to play with kids.

(Well, also, for some odd reason, a lot of middle-aged or older women will consistently pick me (like one out of 3 trips), out of all other grocery shoppers for help reaching a certain item on a shelf or a carton of milk in the back. I'm average height at best so it's not that. I guess I must project a Howdy Doody persona.)

I really hadn't commented on the August 6 tragic loss of Navy SEAL's in the recent tragic helicopter crash in Afghanistan; for a synopsis of these fallen heroes, see here. I have an issue with NATO propping up a dysfunctional Afghan regime, but this is not the time and place to argue the politics of American intervention. What I do know is that 35-year-old Petty Officer Jon Tumilson represents the finest of this nation's young men. Holding a Master's degree from the University of Texas, I appreciate his picture with his beautiful Labrador retriever Hawkeye below. I don't know what, if any connection he has with UT; maybe he's just a fan. One of my brothers-in-law is a huge Notre Dame fan: he has flown to attend games although never attended school there. But if a big beautiful Labrador retriever could befriend an acquired-taste stranger like me, I totally believe Hawkeye's faithful mourning of his beloved owner: a worthy best friend to a worthy owner.

Thank you for your service and sacrifice, Petty Officer Tumilson: rest in peace.

Photos Courtesy of/All Rights Reserved By Cited Sources
Appearing in the Daily Mail

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Bread, "Guitar Man". One of my favorite Bread songs; it has a magnificent, distinctive arrangement that caught me the first time I heard it. This is one of those songs that reflects on the performer or musician, like Art Garfunkel's "All I Know", the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" or the Carpenters' "Superstar".

Miscellany: 8/24/11

Quote of the Day

Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.
Epictetus

Presidential Polls and the 2012 Election:
Some Comments

On paper, Obama should be politically dead. Just over 14 months from the Presidential election, 9.1% unemployment, anemic GDP growth and the worst jobless recovery we've seen in decades with some 20 million workers unemployed or underemployed, and still underwater in terms of jobs over the past 2.5 years, we have added over $4T to reach the size of our GDP--in essence we're running up against our credit limit.

Yet what are we seeing in the polls? Gallup has Obama beating most of his competitors, even with a job approval rating at below 40%. One of the most liberal senators in Congress, Sherrod Brown, in a state (Ohio) which had a near sweep of GOP candidates, is beating his opposition in the polls by 15 points.The Republicans lost a second "safe GOP" Congressional seat in New York (the Craigslist scandal) based on a simplistic strategy of bashing Medicare reform. In a more remarkable vote, a recent Gallup poll showed a high single-digit preference for the Dems to regain control  of Congress. We also see the defending US Senator in Michigan, which also saw some strong GOP results last fall, with a decisive lead, beating the opposition. More telling: of the Wisconsin state senator recalls, the Democrats  lost 0 of 3 races while the GOP lost 2 of 6. Yes, I'm aware of the money and resources that highly-motivated labor unions are putting into the races, and to an extent, we can expect what I personally think is a dead cat bounce from the 2010 elections.

What the GOP is failing to adequately address is that the Democrats realize that the general public has unrealistic expectations of what the GOP can deliver after the election, controlling only a third of the political landscape: two-thirds of the Senate was not up for grabs, and Obama's name was not on the ballot. Second, the general public does not get uncertainty at the business level, but they get the fact that federal budget cuts introduce uncertainty at the government services level. Most people think in very local terms: yes, the government is spending too much money--on other districts, states, etc.; yes, other liberal politicians are bad, but not my liberal Congressman. That's why Democrats run deliberately misleading campaigns and, like Obama, deliberately lie that the Republicans are trying to eliminate core government activities, particularly operational activities like, say, food inspection, clean water and air safety. The GOP has a tougher job explaining indirect costs like regulation, redundant operations, government personnel and other costs out of step with those in the private sector, and top-heavy bureaucracies.

The GOP has done a very poor job explaining to the American people how unsustainable Democratic policies have been and how the Democrats are stonewalling deficit reduction every step of the way, unless they see partisan benefit (e.g., the 20% of the budget that goes to national defense). They somehow have allowed the Democrats to define them as ideological protectors of the super-wealthy and have managed to allow the preposterous notion to go unchallenged that the Tea Party has disproportionate sway in the House where ideological Congressmen like Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann are the exceptions, not the rule. Somehow the GOP has not changed the conversation from the Democrats' standard bag of tricks to defer pain into the future, not the present--kick the can down the road is the norm, not the exception. The GOP fails to refute that 50% of workers whom don't pay a penny towards government operations (but disproportionately receive the benefits of government programs) and underpay the real costs towards future entitlements have the moral authority to have other people pay their own share of the bills.

In my view, the GOP needs to simplify its message: we all have to pay our fair share; the government has to have, now, not later, an across-the-board 8% spending cut; we need to simplify our tax revenue system (including eliminating itemized deductions), and we need to balance our revenue system to eliminate the bias against savings and investment; we need globally competitive tax rates; we need for the national conversation to go beyond balancing deficits and pay down the national debt.

The conservatives note that a few candidates in recent polls are polling  within 3 points or so. They don't seem to recall last year when many GOP candidates--even Palin--were running competitively with Obama.

Let's talk facts of life. If you are not now competitive Obama at a 38% approval rating, you need to get out of the way. In cleaning house: Bachmann, Palin (who hasn't formerly run yet but whose PAC is running campaign-style videos), Gingrich, Santorum, and Cain are running redundant campaigns, not unlike the original overcrowded Democratic field in 2008. I think that the GOP should focus on 3 principal alternatives.

Mitt Romney brings business and government administrative experience to the table; unlike Obama, his eyes don't glaze over when delving into detailed financial reports. Like Obama, Romney has a Harvard law degree; unlike Obama who lacks substantive business experience and has the most anti-business administration in recent American history, Romney as the head of Bain Capital dealt with a portfolio of businesses in differing industries, dealing with start-ups and turnarounds (in fact, he turned around the parent company, Bain, itself). Romney, unlike Obama, knows how to deal in good faith with divided government, having served as governor of perhaps the bluest state, Massachusetts, with a Democratic legislature.

Rick Perry has a compelling story as the longest-serving governor in Texas history; he has worked to create a business-friendly environment by pushing necessary legal reforms (medical malpractice tort reform, frivolous lawsuit reform, etc.), all without a state income tax, attracting corporate and worker migrations resulting in four new Congressional seats in the recent census and the best job growth over all states during his decade-plus as governor; Perry has also proven credentials in dealing with budgets as a fiscal conservative. The fact that Democrats are already resorting to snarky political attacks over past controversial references to secession and trying to damn with faint praise his job growth record (as against Obama's record of millions in the hole, not to mention not a single whatsoever over the past 3 years to accommodate "real" labor force growth) points out the Democrats' concern about Perry's chances. Not to mention the fact that Perry, like me, is a former Democrat and can point out the vacuousness that is today's Democratic Party.

Finally, we have the prickly but philosophically consistent Ron Paul, whom embodies the fulfillment of the Tea Party in principle. He's going to argue that there's only a nuanced difference between Democratic and GOP establishment in terms of Big Government. He's dead wrong there; there never would have been trillion dollar deficits, ObamaCare, Dodd N. Frankenstein or an anti-business regime under a McCain Administration. I think the biggest issue for Romney or Perry is getting a strong hand to deal with issues, which means the American people electing the Anti-111th Congress, which can steamroll the unsustainable disastrous policies of this reckless Obama Administration, gambling with the very future of the United States. As long as we have gullible American citizens voting for anachronisms like Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Barack Obama and the other Big Government whores, we have to work with the hand we've been dealt. But we need to deal with these intellectually vacuous, pretentious, pandering demagogues on OUR terms, not allow them to define us.

Authentic Americans, faithful to the Founding Fathers' principles, must not fail to understand the lessons of how delusional Nevada residents reelected Harry Reid, in a state with 14% unemployment. Is it any wonder that political hacks like David Axelrod, Bill Burton, and Robert Gibbs will sell out future American generations to reelect the worst President in American history--why they actually think a grossly incompetent, overrated motivational speaker, who still doesn't understand the meaning of the word 'leader' after looking it up in the dictionary, can be reelected President despite one of the lowest labor participation rates in decades? I mean, if you put lipstick on a government pig like Harry Reid, why can't you do the same with Barack Obama? This is not the time for authentic Americans to believe fringe candidates like Michele Bachmann or Ron Paul actually stand a change against a billion-dollar campaign fund and a campaign that will resort to any desperate tactic to reelect Obama. Keep in mind been there, done that: we've seen this just over the past decade--Democrats Gray Davis (CA) and Rod Blagojevich (IL) were ultimately turned out of office in heavily Democratic states after running well-financed, highly negative campaigns against more competent, worthy GOP challengers.

We can't afford to indulge in another Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell. Ron Paul doesn't have executive experience and he hasn't been able to build a coalition in support of his libertarian principles, other than a highly-visible, laudable attempt to audit the Fed.

We know next year's election will be negative and personal against next year's GOP nominee; we can anticipate the Obama reelection. The very first thing the GOP can do is to demonstrate the hypocrisy and broken promises of Obama USING HIS OWN WORDS. One good start in this direction was when he talked about Bush running up the national debt on a Chinese credit card, while the cumulative Obama incremental debt alone is more than three times what we owe China. But DO NOT RUN another Bill Ayers/Rev. Wright campaign again. Remember, voters turned out GHW Bush in large part because of his broken promise on taxes. If you use that political mold, you want to undermine the trustworthiness of Obama--the fact that he'll do or say anything to get elected, but we already know his anemic results, and we see no hope of any improvements his doing doing the same old same old we've seen these past 3 years.

I will simply point out that the GOP cannot afford to counter a charismatic, speech-making, thin-resume incumbent like Obama with a charismatic, speech-making, thin-resume challenger like Sarah Palin or Michele Bachman. You have to have a good story of administrative competence, accomplishments and experience, and I submit--and this is what other conservative commentators like Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and others will not point out--we need overall a Reaganesque-style (NOTE: not a Reagan-imitation) positive campaign: more of what I like to say "it can be morning once again in America". We don't need to hard-sell the American people on Obama's ineffectiveness in dealing with job #1, the economy, the main reason he was elected. He's thrown every progressive economist he can at the problem and nothing sticks and all he does is whine that the vastly outnumbered GOP kept him doing his job. As if he'll do any better with a more evenly matched GOP! Get a clue, America!

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Bread, "Diary"

Miscellany: 8/23/11

Quote of the Day 

It is less important to redistribute wealth than it is to redistribute opportunity.
Arthur H. Vandenberg

Virginia Earthquake: A Personal Experience

My apartment building in the Baltimore suburbs is located with a few others at the apex of elevated ground in the area. Shortly before 2PM EDT, my above-ground floor started shaking, and I thought some kind of area or building repair was going on. However, after 10 seconds or so, it seemed to intensify, and the whole building was shaking--for what seemed to be forever. My head was telling me it was an earthquake, but I was in a state of denial: I have lived in this area for years and never experienced or even heard of earthquake-prone local areas. I live, depending on traffic, around 15 to 20 minutes from BWI: I thought maybe some airliner was on the verge of impact in the immediate are, or some military operation. The odd thing was while the apartment building continued to shake I looked outside my window and I couldn't tell this was different than any other summer day--no visible shaking of the ground, cars, or other objects in the area. My cable and Internet seemed unaffected, although my phone service was unusable.

My first confirmation this was not my imagination was seeing other apartment residents exit the building. I decided to call via my cellphone my apartment complex office at 2:01 PM and tried to phrase my question as generally as possible: did something just happen of an unusual nature? I didn't have my cable at that time on FNC or a local station. The apartment front office confirmed that there had been a 5.8 Richter scale earthquake about 100 miles away. I then switched to FNC on cable. I was somewhat amused to see FNC and/or Internet sources talk about DC or Pennsylvania or New York. The difference between Baltimore and DC is roughly 35 miles; Philadelphia is about a 2-hour drive away and New York City 3 hours.

As I've mentioned in past posts, I've lived through a tornado going through the local area near Salina, KS, I experienced a hurricane while I was a doctoral student in Houston, I experienced multiple minor tremors while I lived in Santa Clara, CA. I figured it would be a flood in the Baltimore area; I never felt I would experience an earthquake worse than my exposure to California, but I was wrong.

Maxine Waters: Tea Party Go To Hell?

Is there a Democrat around whom isn't a joke? This isn't intended a political rant, but I was trying to think of a single Democratic lawmaker. I've been one of Bachmann's and Palin's most severe conservative critics, but if I wrote a novel about an allegedly brainy black President trying to connect with the average voter by complaining about the right cost of arugula at Whole Foods, a prior "intelligent" Democratic President whom leaves DNA evidence on an intern's blue dress, a prior Democratic Presidential nominee who's best remembered for how he rides in a military tank or a former New York Attorney General and governor whom gets busted for involvement with a call girl operation, a New York Democratic Congressman sending around pictures of him nude or a shot of his arousal or a New Orleans lawmaker storing dirty money literally in his freezer, what publisher would publish such an improbable work?

It just occurred to me today as I started writing this commentary, I can't think of a single Democrat politician I respect. In what Alice in Wonderland worldview, when you have $50T in unfunded liabilities, you have just over $2T of revenue yearly, but the LEAST deficit over the past 3 years is $1.3T, you actually have the audacity to suggest a massive new health care entitlement will "cut" the deficit? You attack the GOP for trying to end Medicare as we know it, but you've chopped $500B from Medicare to fund the same new entitlement. In less than 3 years, Obama has run up a debt it will take 2 years--assuming no expenditures--to work off.

In the real world, if you can't cover a 40% gap in your  household budget, there are consequences--like losing your car or house. In the real world, the credit card issuer does not increase your debt ceiling when you're spending like a drunken sailor. You sell some assets or cut your expenses. You accept responsibility for your spending decisions--disingenuous politicians like Maxine Waters (or political hacks like David Axelrod) should not have the ability to tell the  credit card issuer that he should go straight to hell for not selling out future generations to pay off your crony political backers.

I don't get excited over lack of civility of Democrats in general--it is the rule, not the exception. I mean, Maxine Waters comes from the same state as does Nancy Pelosi--need we say more? When Maxine Waters talks about the Tax Party needing to go straight to hell, I thought she was encouraging them to spend money in her own Congressional district in the Los Angeles area.

Maxine Waters doesn't understand Obama's "strategy". I do. When you're winning 95% of the black vote without results to show for it, black voters make up maybe 11% of the national population, and you have a 38% approval rating from Gallup, where do you think the President is going to campaign?

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Bread, "Everything I Own". Simply one of the greatest songs ever written.

Miscellany: 8/22/11

Quote of the Day

The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch

A Progressive Talking Point on the Iowa GOP Debate:
Rejection of 10-1 Spending Cut to Tax Increase

I hate with a passion what I see as contrived questions. I didn't comment on this point in my blog before now, but Washington Examiner reporter Byron York, whom I defended for asking a controversial question to Michele Bachmann, asked a hypothetical deal about a potential bipartisan deficit reduction plan promising $10 in cuts for every $1 in new taxes. None of the candidates would accept that deal. You have to see this question in the context of an old George Bernard Shaw joke:

GBS: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?
Actress: My goodness, Well, I’d certainly think about it.
GBS: Would you sleep with me for a pound?
Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!
GBS: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

Anyone specifying a price--even 10-1--first of all concedes the legitimacy of a progressive talking point of (class warfare) tas cuts from the get go. Never mind we are spending a record percentage of the GDP, and the progressives have yet to propose any serious current year spending cuts against the baselines. Never mind discretionary spending increased by almost 25% last Congress. How is refusal to increase taxes any more ideological than the refusal to rollback spending?

The net effect is for progressives to use that photo opportunity to argue that the GOP/Tea Party is unreasonable and hence negotiation is impossible. I fault York for failing to provide context and not offering a more open-ended discussion of said point. But there was a major point that I wanted to point out here:

We have been there, done that. We have played this game before. Reagan agreed to a 3-1 ratio, but it never happened. Bush agreed to a tax increase, contradicting his "no new taxes" pledge--only  to discover the Democrats actually increased spending as well. So how many times do the Democrats get to play this hypocritical game and not be caught?

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Bread, "Baby, I'm A Want You"

Miscellany: 8/21/11

Quote of the Day

The price of greatness is responsibility.
Sir Winston Churchill

Police War on Lemonade Stands Continues:
Thumbs DOWN!

I cannot help but wonder what sort of competently run police department would even think of risking bad PR of arresting people for doing an innocuous lemonade protest in front of the Capitol; and under what stretch of the imagination do "professional" police think they have a right to stiff-arm cameras as they pass by, i.e., not obstructing their path? Since when are these "public servants" think it's their "right" to intimidate people monitoring their behavior, consistent with their First Amendment rights?

At one point in the first video, I thought I overhead one of the policemen say that they wouldn't have a problem with distributing lemonade so long as it was given away, But the fact the protesters were selling cups of lemonade for windfall profits at 10 cents a cup was enough to write up tickets for failing to have a vendor license, not to mention handcuffing the protesters.

Perhaps the protesters should have argued they were illegal immigrants. They would then be given amnesty for their crime of selling cheap lemonade...





Warren Buffett and Same Old Same Old Class Warfare Politics

I've never been in the upper tax brackets; no doubt Barack Obama would be scratching his head: if he's not calling for an increase in my taxes, why should I care if he's  targeting the super-rich? I'm arguing against my own self-interest, of course.

Buffett stands as an unelected representative of "real" billionaires and millionaires, he can afford to pay more, so they should too. We've heard the same type garbage argument before by self-styled rich people, including Clinton and Obama. We usually don't expect the same type of argument in other contexts. Just to give a couple of simple examples: Warren Buffett is notorious for living in a decades-old simple house and driving older common model cars. Of course, as a billionaire, he could afford to buy cars costing hundreds of thousands of dollars--and pay the hefty sales tax that goes with it; or mansions with hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in property taxes. Instead, he pays (within the context of said purchases) a mere fraction of the taxes paid by less affluent sources. There is no intrinsic worthy moral authority to spend what's in another man's pocket.

The Tax Foundation points out that even if you tax away every penny of people earning over $200K a year, you would only come close to closing the deficit. This is ultimately unsustainable. Despite all the propaganda, rich people actually diminish during a recession. The way you grow your way out of a tough economic crisis is to provide incentives for people to get rich and pay taxes, not charge penalties for people to take their toys and go home.

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Bread, "If". One of the greatest love songs of all time.

Miscellany: 8/20/11

Quote of the Day

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams

Why Obama's Jobs Initiative Will Fail

In last Sunday's post I pointed out an Austrian school of economics' refutation of the Keynesian school claim that FDR's alleged austerity/balanced-budget fixes allegedly caused the 1937 recession. The argument is that by seeking to cut spending, FDR had blundered his way into undermining the progress that had been made by large-scale public spending, particularly in public infrastructure. There are a number of points to be made here, but the core points include that the closing of the budget deficit had more to do with increased taxes (e.g., payroll taxes), not decreased spending. Another is that various labor market interventions (e.g., sticky union compensation floors) and financial reform interventions, which had the net effect of lowering the number of stock market participants made the market more volatile.

So what's truly remarkable is how little progressives really learn from their past failures: you don't want to increase the cost of labor with payroll tax hikes or labor contracts or counterproductive policies (e.g., minimum wage), maintaining an artificially high effective minimum wage. The point is that regulations obfuscate the labor market, and we would be better served by allowing wages find a market-based bottom.

Not only that but we had loose monetary policy which contributed to counterproductive artificially lower interest rates and hence the cost of capital. Among other things, this contributes to an excess capacity problems and related effects, e.g., price wars, bankruptcies, bailouts, etc.

Paul Krugman and his fellow neo-Keynesian cohorts didn't learn anything from the late 1990's and the Internet bubble where companies borrowed against future technology purchases, placing multiple purchase orders to ensure a supply with the intent of subsequently canceling redundant orders. Companies went belly-up; their assets hit the liquidation market which competed with new technology sales. The progressives concluded the exactly wrong conclusion: it was Bush's "tax cut policies and wars" that caused a sluggish economy, not artificially low interest rates and other policies which allowed customers and businesses to borrow from future purchases.

There are some obvious lessons from 1937 and the 2000 decade: right-size interest rates to minimize inflationary risks and counterproductive business investments; in times of economic uncertainty, be very careful about regulations which may contribute to unintended consequences and/or have the effect of increasing the cost of labor, e.g., ObamaCare and financial reform; promote a more efficient economy by minimizing ineffective federal toll collection and spending and instead adopting more balanced model of federal revenues, including fewer penalties to savings and investments and taxing consumption.

What do I see within Obama's Pelosian "I know how to solve the jobs problem but it'll wait until my vacation is over by next month" jobs solution? I'll point out that it is just as morally bankrupt to make the country wait a couple of weeks to hear his Nixonian "secret plan" if he does have "the answer" to the jobs market

A lot of it will be quite predictable, i.e., more spending on unemployment insurance, partial payroll tax holidays, increased public infrastructure spending, "investments" in green energy and other politically correct areas (which, of course, do little more than add new floors to the convoluted federal house of cards).

What would I do? The following is an initial abridged collection of ideas: try to eliminate uncertainty with a five-year freeze on regulatory mandates, including any new net tax or regulatory burden (including ObamaCare); at minimum, suspend dysfunctional labor market interventions, like minimum wage requirements in smaller markets; institute a national consumption tax, reduce moral hazard by cutting unemployment compensation check amounts and limiting the period of eligibility; cut business tax rates and any savings and investment taxes; accelerate free trade pacts, none of which have passed over the past 5 years; defend the dollar by reverting to a more consistent natural interest rate.

Musical Interlude; My Favorite Groups

Bread, "Let Your Love Go"

Miscellany: 8/19/11

Quote of the Day

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot

The New Immigration Kerfuffle:
Another Obama Abuse of Power

I am an economic liberal (not to be confused with Democratic policies: economic liberals oppose virtually all government intervention and emphasize property rights). I have been a strong proponent of legal immigration reform. I have opposed state initiatives to preempt the exclusive constitutionally-provided responsibility for federal enforcement. I'm unhappy that the entire discussion has been skewed by undocumented Latino issues. I was even a reluctant supporter of the DREAM act.

I do not want to go through the 2007 immigration battle again. When I hear codewords being circulated like "illegal aliens" or "amnesty", it turns me off. Let's make one thing clear: the DREAM act failed to pass. The administration has no moral authority for a backdoor approach to create  policy. This is clearly unconstitutional. I don't care how much disingenuous reasoning they try to advance: e.g.,  our new policy saves money, we have a backlog of cases, etc. You cannot arbitrarily "fix" procedures established by Congress, trying to suggest that you've been authorized to pick and choose, in a manner consistent with parochial political objectives, violations of the law to prosecute. It's an unambiguous violation of the rule of law. I have discussed in previous posts how the Obama Administration has played procedural games to artificially bump up its deportation numbers. The idea that an unauthorized family is exempt from deportation if they simply manage to have a baby while in the country is a glaring example of moral hazard and an unconscionable double standard. The opposition presupposes a false scenario: the status quo is in "crisis mode" and alternative reform is "impossible" (we've been on Capitol Hill for 2.5 years pursuing more specific constructive reforms going beyond amnesty for most unauthorized aliens); we have no option but to change policy on our own, because the Constitution says if the Congress doesn't make laws, the Executive Branch has the right to do it on its own. You know, during the 111th Congress, the President was constantly sending out bipartisan feelers with the GOP, arguing he needed more manpower to enforce immigration law. NOT!

If the Obama Administration has LEGITIMATE reforms to streamline the immigration process, let them take the issue of reforming the process, e.g., streamline appeal processes which are merely procedural delay procedures, not substantive in nature, expand the number of judges to handle cases, etc.

Obama as President is like having a snake oil salesman in the White House 24x7. He predictably dismisses substantive objections, makes straw man and ad hominem arguments of the opposition, and plays sophistic polemical word games; he's the incarnation of the worst of the legal profession--slick-talking hucksters whom hide all sorts of salient items in dubious fine print: they put lipstick on the pig they're selling and sell the lipstick. Pay no attention to what a pathological liar says: pay attention to what he does. The Obama Administration can manipulate statistics all they want: the proof is in the pudding. John Morton has been signaling exactly the kinds of policies being discussed since his appointment; Obama during the 2007 immigration debate was looking to complicate and extend appeal processes, not streamline them; there's been no crackdown on sanctuary cities. The very fact that they are publicizing these enforcement guidelines basically encourages foreigners to ignore US immigration policies: just keep your nose clean with local laws, have a baby, and we'll look the other way. They are not enforcing laws: they are de facto making law by refusing to enforce law. That's plainly unconstitutional. This is NOT exercising discretion, a pragmatic notion, on a case-by-case basis. This is a knowing perversion of discretion masking a policy coincidentally consistent with Obama's partisan objectives.

This is a transparent effort to rationalize an unauthorized workaround. just in time for the 2012 elections for Latinos. The Congress should investigate Obama's part in this conversation, and if the Obama Administration refuses to back out of its unauthorized breach of authority, I recommend looking at articles of impeachment.

Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups

Bread, "Mother Freedom"