They may forget what you said,
but they will never forget
how you make them feel.
Carol Buchner
Verbal Slam of the Day
Lindsey Graham says the President asked him to travel to Egypt with John McCain. Unfortunately, the plan involved returning the two of them to the U.S. - Economist Tom Woods via Facebook
[I was going to ad lib "Unfortunately, all three are planning to return to the US", but someone beat me to it.]
Sunday Talk Soup and An Overdue Vent
Congressman Peter King is really annoying me, probably the most annoying Congressman since Barney Frank finally retired. The demagoguery over national intelligence is appalling, and this RINO (and one of my nominees for Bad Elephant of the Year) is actually considering a run for the White House in 2016. He must be out of his mind. He has a lifetime ACU rating almost 10 points below McCain and over the last session, in a GOP-controlled Congress, he has come in around 15-plus points below that. Granted, he has a higher ACU rating than Hillary Clinton, but he can't even carry his own state. Given the lack of GOP success running more moderate front runners since 1992, King doesn't have a snowman's chance in hell in getting nominated. But so help me, if I hear King or Christie once again fear-monger for violating our constitutional rights behind the skirts of 9/11 widows...
Amash wasn't as bad on Fox News Sunday as I had been led to believe. He did not characterize all of Snowden's violations as whistle-blowing. The PRISM program revelation was clearly whistle-blowing; still, I would have wanted to see more of a good faith effort by Snowden to work within the system, to at least contact civil liberty-oriented Congressmen before doing an expose on a foreign newspaper portal. But both Manning and Snowden collected boatloads of privileged information, not focused on a single policy like the Pentagon Papers and our Vietnam history. Let us be clear: the information in total is of significant value to America's adversaries: the expensive clearance process itself reflects that. The information they sought went beyond the scope of their responsibilities and authorization; it was if they dumped every secret document they could access through abuse of privilege.
So help me, I'm getting tired of all of the attempts of national intelligent apologists to grab NON-GOVERNMENT DATA that are none of the nation's business; they can pinky-swear all they want that there are tight procedures for relevant access (as if the examples of Manning and Snowden have conveniently melted away from view), but the only way to ensure privacy is for private data to remain private. So help me if I hear one more bureaucrat explain that my personal communications have no expectations of privacy. Let's be clear why they want EVERYBODY'S DATA. Suppose they have tentatively identified a suspect (say, with a known terrorist contact); they now want to know everyone whom locally and unknowingly communicated with that suspect, especially before he was fingered as a suspect. Now, of course, they could seek a search warrant/wiretap once they have identified the suspect, but unless they've been tracking historical data to that point of time, it's gone forever. (This, of course, assumes the suspect is part of a group that decided to communicate over monitored channels.) Think of the Nixon tapes; there was no law requiring the taping of Nixon's activities. He was taping things for historical reasons like memoirs out of office. Those tapes ironically sealed Nixon's fate.
The fact of the matter is that 99% of Americans have nothing to do with terrorism, and access to their communications in any manner--including metadata--has absolutely no relevance for security. It's as if the British during revolutionary times argued that the colonists had no expectations of privacy to their communications. It has nothing to do with trying to hide something; my own communications are unremarkable. But my communications, except directly with the government, are private. It doesn't matter that access is allegedly restricted; it's not the government's data in the first place. It's the same reason I want to stop the TSA madness; there has been no evidence of domestic passengers engaging in terrorist attacks over decades, but even babies and great-grandmothers come under scrutiny. All of these safety checks have not improved airline safety one iota.
I Side with Orzag on the Job Openings/Hiring Issue
James Pethokoukis at AEI has an interesting post, where Orzag is a skeptic of the notion that a skills mismatch accounts for the fact that there are 10 times more job postings than fills. He points an imbalance occurs even in lower-skill retail. I can point to experience in my third career as a DBA; the fact of the matter is I have seen more phantom jobs, multiple listings, etc. Some employers just want to test the market. It's an employer's market and they are creating arbitrary filters, more designed to screen out than hire people. Another vendor would only submit me if I agreed to take a 40% cut in the (not-so-great) rate I billed in 1997 (ignore over a decade more experience and the cost of living).
For example, in the 1990's, I was occasionally hired by a consulting company without a billable assignment on day one; it was more important to have a resource available when they won a project bid. (I rarely was on the bench for more than a week, and they had me do training in the interim). After the stock market correction, it seemed no company hired to the bench. Oracle hired me in 1998 with less than 2 years of ERP database experience. When I looked into returning to Oracle Consulting a few years back, the hiring manager passed, because I hadn't had a recent (federal) client licensing their twice-as-expensive high availability option. Clients often have idiosyncratic technology mixes (differing products, platforms, versions, third-party software, etc.) Most of these things are incidental to basic DBA tasks, and you easily pick up what you need to know (at least for people like me) in very short order. I have found, despite a great resume and allegedly hundreds of DBA jobs out there, it's been hard getting offers in this economy, and it's not like 18-year DBA's with an MBA and a PhD in MIS grow on trees.
We haven't had decent economic growth since the 1990's. At least in my field, employers are being very picky and arbitrary and that reflects a poor job market with surpluses of candidates and arbitrary hiring processes, not that new jobs are beyond the capabilities of highly able people like me. (Of course, having an economically illiterate White House and Senate adds to economic uncertainty, too.)
Overpass for Obama Impeachment Video: Thumbs UP!
I'm not quite there yet--for one thing, I don't think Biden is a major improvement over Obama (why do you think Clinton chose Gore for VP?), but I'm growing increasingly impatient with Obama's constantly working around Congress with executive orders, foreign adventures without Congressional approval, his administration's lawlessness (picking and choosing laws to enforce (see Ramirez' cartoon below), etc.
Grandniece Holds Newborn Brother
Isn't she sweet, precious, adorable? What a beautiful gift from God! I remember the first time I saw her mommy. I drove to Florida during a summer break while I was on the UWM faculty.. One day while my brother was at work at the air base, I drove my sister-in-law around on some errands. Around the third or fourth stop, when I went to unbuckle my 8-month niece from her car seat, the strawberry-blond blue-eyed sweetie took one look at me and burst into tears; it broke my heart (a John Denver lyric came to mind: 'Lady, are you crying, do the tears belong to me?').
My grandniece is a beautiful combination of her parents' good looks; the little guy is cute, too. My niece used to love Bluth's Fievel cartoon feature films, and to this day whenever I hear the classic Ronstadt-Ingram duet, I think of my niece and now her 3 kids (an older brother is not in this shot).
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Michael Ramirez and Townhall |
The Beatles, "Come Together"
