Last week there was a mass shooting in San Bernardino California. Two weeks ago there was a mass shooting in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Last month there was a mass suicide bombing attack in Paris France.
People who are in favor of stricter gun control are focusing their attention on the mass shootings as proof positive that there are too many guns in the hands of too many people. People who are against stricter gun controls are muted about the Planned Parenthood shooting while focusing their attention on the fact that the Paris bombings used suicide bombers as well as guns, the San Bernardino murderers used guns that were purchased legally in California under some of the strictest gun laws and if more people were armed less people die in mass shootings.
Opponents of stricter immigration limits point out that the Planned Parenthood attack was performed by a ‘white terrorist’ and it is racist to want to keep Syrian refugees and other muslims out of the county while not assuming that all white people could be closet terrorists. Proponents of stricter immigration limits point out that the San Bernardino was carried out by seemingly normal people who converted to Islamic jihadists. The next question is usually how we can be sure that Syrian refugees being proposed to be resettled in the United States won’t become similarly converted. Soon to follow is how can a country with at least 11 million people residing illegally claim to have safe borders or be able to keep the population secure from even more terrorist attacks.
All these shooters and bombers are pretty extreme. While the western world may not be at war with Islam it certainly appears that there are large parts of Islam at war with the western world. Presidential candidate Donald Trump got lambasted in the media for claiming that there were Muslims cheering the 911 attacks. I heard a lot of the same anecdotes at the time but now there doesn’t seem to be any written or recorded evidence. I do remember seeing pictures of large numbers of people in other countries wearing Osama Bin Laden t-shirts. Playing to people fears is a sure fire way to garner a certain amount of support and not being able to go to work or a supermarket or a planned parenthood facility without knowing whether or not you are going to be shot at or suicide bombed makes it easy for the fear mongers to do what they do best.
The general consensus of America about Planned Parenthood shootings and the recent extremist attacks is to do everything and nothing at the same time. The right has a deadlock on any relaxation of gun control – not even to deny weapons to ‘non-violent felons’ where they are as intransigent as the left is in declaring that restrictions of partial birth abortions constitutes a ‘war on women’. In both cases one side sees any compromise as the harbinger to an all-out assault on what is seen as constitutional rights and when viewed through that lens it is reasonable to view any compromise as the first step to surrender.
President Obama took to the airwaves on Sunday to ask for calm, gun restrictions from people on the no-fly lists, more screening on people entering the country without visas, and for Americans not to blame all Muslims for the San Bernardino attacks. He also said that the US was not going to send ground troops to the Middle East (even as the government is sending special operations forces to that region).
While the President was been called a lot of names and his ideas called weak I’m not sure what anyone would expect. The country as a whole has decided that they are tired of sending troops to the Middle East where we have no friends and invested trillions of dollars and thousands of lives with very little to show for it. The constant air strikes have been damaging but not decisive. The forces we hope to back in that part of the world don’t seem capable of taking back their territory and likely an even money bet to defect to ISIS. It is easy for someone like Donald Trump to say they would keep all muslims out of the country because he isn’t in a position to make that order just like every presidential candidate in my life time has had a plan to balance the federal budget that has happened only once in my lifetime no matter how many presidents get elected.
Personally I don’t see why if I have to prove to the State of Iowa that I am competent to drive a car why gun owners shouldn’t have to prove competency to own a firearm. I have no idea why anyone would ever need to own an assault weapon but the people I know who do have plenty of reasons most of which involve their basic human freedoms and rights which sounds a lot to me like the basic reproductive rights that allow any kind of abortion including the late term ones which sounds a lot to me like the basic human rights that are invoked whenever the subject of removing the 11 million plus people that are in this country illegally is brought up.
So we have mentally unstable people and converted jihadists seemingly able to get firearms at will, millions of people in the country illegally and even if one in a million were terrorists that would be enough to have an attack like the one in Paris or the Boston Marathon bombings. Any attempts to solve any of these issues meets with such a hue and cry from the left or right that nothing gets accomplished. As extreme as the Islamist extremists and anti-abortionists are they can’t hold a candle to the extremists that run American politics.
Speaking of extreme, my Monday basketball picks were extremely bad as I went 0-2 thanks to the Raptors dilly-dallying around with the Lakers and the Bulls blowing a huge second half lead. My current record stands at 15-10-1 with my mythical winnings down to $400. For tonight's picks I will be using the Betonline.ag lines as listed on the Yahoo Sports page for entertainment purposes only with mythical wagers of $110 per game to win $100.
There are 11 games on the schedule tonight and my computer likes 5 of the games. I will take the Timberwolves getting 1 at Denver against the Nuggets, The Hornets getting 3.5 at Memphis to face the Grizzlies, the Wizards getting 2.5 at the New Orleans Pelicans, the Spurs giving 14.5 against the visiting Lakers, and the Magic getting 3.5 points for their home game against the Cavaliers. My mind is screaming that these are all the wrong picks but so far this year the computer has been right far more often than my mind.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Friday, December 11, 2015
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
End of the Caucus?
The Iowa caucuses are less than five months away and the every four year descent has begun by politicians to the state with less than one percent of the US population that has a supposedly outsized influence on the presidential primaries by virtue of their caucuses being first in the nation. Prospective candidates are visiting the Iowa State Fair this week in their attempt to make a good impression on the local population and get their face on the local and national news.
The caucuses bring lots of money to Iowa and the state guards its first in the nation status zealously. Iowa received a boost in 2008 when Barack Obama upset Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic caucus. The win gave Obama’s fledgling campaign legitimacy and gave furthered Iowa's reputation as a state that could boost little known candidates to national prominence with a good performance.
I think the 2008 Democratic caucuses were the high point of Iowa’s outsized influence in national primary politics and within the next 20 years the Iowa caucuses won’t garner more than a blip on the national radar. Some of this influence loss is due to the times we live in and some is self-inflicted.
In 2012 the Iowa Republican Party declared eventual nominee Mitt Romney the winner of the Iowa caucuses on the morning of January 4th by eight votes over Rick Santorum. The media headlines were about how Romney ‘survived’ his first primary test. Santorum got some credit for his close finish in the stories while the headlines and pictures told the tale of Romney as the winner (see this New York Times story as an example). Two weeks later after Romney had won the New Hampshire primary Santorum was declared the winner of the Iowa caucuses by 34 votes.
I don’t know if Santorum would have won the nomination if his victory hadn’t taken two weeks to confirm. I believe that Santorum’s picture and name would have headlined the media reports on January 4th instead of Romney’s which couldn’t have helped but boost his chances. Was the wrong winner reported due to incompetence or impropriety? No one can say for sure. I tend to lean on the side of impropriety with the revelations of so many Iowa politicians on the payrolls of caucus campaigns. It wouldn’t surprise me if moneyed candidates can rig or delay party controlled primary elections or the reporting of results. A similar situation happened in the 2012 Maine caucuses when Romney was quickly declared the winner when results of towns that were suspected of voting for Ron Paul were discarded. When the process is suspected of being corrupt politicians without influence tend to shy away from the process. It is no surprise to me that after 30 years the summer Republican Iowa Straw Poll fundraiser was cancelled due to lack of interest by the candidates.
Aside from the incompetence or fraud exhibited in the last Iowa Caucuses making it look like a less than reliable indicator of Middle America the nationally televised Republican Party getting record viewership thanks to the participation of billionaire Donald Trump may pose more of a problem for the Iowa caucuses. These pre-primary debates have been held for the last few elections but never to viewership or anticipation that Trump’s participation brought. How does this increased attention affect the Iowa caucuses? By the time the campaigning for the caucuses begins in earnest the lesser polling candidates will have already been winnowed out and the remaining candidates will have had so much media exposure that the Iowa caucuses or New Hampshire primaries won’t bring much if anything new to light.
As buffoonish as Trump has been made to appear by the media (If being a billionaire was so easy that any buffoon could be one there would be a lot more billionaires), he has managed to cash in on his celebrity and dominated the headlines like very few politicians. If he manages to win the Iowa caucuses it will show that mass media counts more than heading to hundreds of small town Iowa diners.
Republican and Democratic candidates alike are campaigning in Iowa this year but are spreading their money among the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (Click to see Jeb Bush and Rick Perry's SuperPACs' plans). The so-called ‘SuperPACs’ are raising many times more money than any campaign that accepts federal funds is allowed to accept but can’t coordinate their actions with their chosen candidate. The SuperPACs main function as I see it is to blanket the county with mailings and media ads. A long shot candidate like Rick Perry has $1 million for his campaign while his SuperPAC has $17 million. Jeb Bush’s SuperPAC has over $100 million to spend. I can’t imagine how much Hillary Clinton;s SuperPAC is going to have available to spend.
Much of the SuperPAC funding comes from unlimited contributions of the very wealthy. Why would a wealthy patron give huge amounts of money to a candidate’s SuperPAC only to see them stumble out of the gate with poor showings in tiny states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (population 4.5 million)? Especially when the results of these states can be manipulated of misreported by incompetence or malfeasance? Just as the lack of participation has sent the Iowa Straw Poll to the dumpster I think it’s only a matter of time before larger states like Florida, Texas, or Ohio move their primaries up to the first few weeks to let the candidates and their SuperPACs spend their time and money there to pile up delegate leads and leave the poorer candidates to toil in the tiny states.
The caucuses bring lots of money to Iowa and the state guards its first in the nation status zealously. Iowa received a boost in 2008 when Barack Obama upset Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic caucus. The win gave Obama’s fledgling campaign legitimacy and gave furthered Iowa's reputation as a state that could boost little known candidates to national prominence with a good performance.
I think the 2008 Democratic caucuses were the high point of Iowa’s outsized influence in national primary politics and within the next 20 years the Iowa caucuses won’t garner more than a blip on the national radar. Some of this influence loss is due to the times we live in and some is self-inflicted.
In 2012 the Iowa Republican Party declared eventual nominee Mitt Romney the winner of the Iowa caucuses on the morning of January 4th by eight votes over Rick Santorum. The media headlines were about how Romney ‘survived’ his first primary test. Santorum got some credit for his close finish in the stories while the headlines and pictures told the tale of Romney as the winner (see this New York Times story as an example). Two weeks later after Romney had won the New Hampshire primary Santorum was declared the winner of the Iowa caucuses by 34 votes.
I don’t know if Santorum would have won the nomination if his victory hadn’t taken two weeks to confirm. I believe that Santorum’s picture and name would have headlined the media reports on January 4th instead of Romney’s which couldn’t have helped but boost his chances. Was the wrong winner reported due to incompetence or impropriety? No one can say for sure. I tend to lean on the side of impropriety with the revelations of so many Iowa politicians on the payrolls of caucus campaigns. It wouldn’t surprise me if moneyed candidates can rig or delay party controlled primary elections or the reporting of results. A similar situation happened in the 2012 Maine caucuses when Romney was quickly declared the winner when results of towns that were suspected of voting for Ron Paul were discarded. When the process is suspected of being corrupt politicians without influence tend to shy away from the process. It is no surprise to me that after 30 years the summer Republican Iowa Straw Poll fundraiser was cancelled due to lack of interest by the candidates.
Aside from the incompetence or fraud exhibited in the last Iowa Caucuses making it look like a less than reliable indicator of Middle America the nationally televised Republican Party getting record viewership thanks to the participation of billionaire Donald Trump may pose more of a problem for the Iowa caucuses. These pre-primary debates have been held for the last few elections but never to viewership or anticipation that Trump’s participation brought. How does this increased attention affect the Iowa caucuses? By the time the campaigning for the caucuses begins in earnest the lesser polling candidates will have already been winnowed out and the remaining candidates will have had so much media exposure that the Iowa caucuses or New Hampshire primaries won’t bring much if anything new to light.
As buffoonish as Trump has been made to appear by the media (If being a billionaire was so easy that any buffoon could be one there would be a lot more billionaires), he has managed to cash in on his celebrity and dominated the headlines like very few politicians. If he manages to win the Iowa caucuses it will show that mass media counts more than heading to hundreds of small town Iowa diners.
Republican and Democratic candidates alike are campaigning in Iowa this year but are spreading their money among the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (Click to see Jeb Bush and Rick Perry's SuperPACs' plans). The so-called ‘SuperPACs’ are raising many times more money than any campaign that accepts federal funds is allowed to accept but can’t coordinate their actions with their chosen candidate. The SuperPACs main function as I see it is to blanket the county with mailings and media ads. A long shot candidate like Rick Perry has $1 million for his campaign while his SuperPAC has $17 million. Jeb Bush’s SuperPAC has over $100 million to spend. I can’t imagine how much Hillary Clinton;s SuperPAC is going to have available to spend.
Much of the SuperPAC funding comes from unlimited contributions of the very wealthy. Why would a wealthy patron give huge amounts of money to a candidate’s SuperPAC only to see them stumble out of the gate with poor showings in tiny states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (population 4.5 million)? Especially when the results of these states can be manipulated of misreported by incompetence or malfeasance? Just as the lack of participation has sent the Iowa Straw Poll to the dumpster I think it’s only a matter of time before larger states like Florida, Texas, or Ohio move their primaries up to the first few weeks to let the candidates and their SuperPACs spend their time and money there to pile up delegate leads and leave the poorer candidates to toil in the tiny states.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Who Wants my Vote?
Election signs, mailings, commercials, and videos are nice but what's in it for me?
While one of our Senate candidates is in the pockets of big corporations, the other one is missing committee meetings...Does anyone really care?
Here's some 'guilt by association' pieces....
None of these issues resonate with me. I don’t care if Bruce Braley misses a bunch of votes or tells a bunch of Texas lawyers what they want to hear in order to raise money and if he did vote for runaway spending he had plenty of company from both parties. As long as the price of gasoline is hanging around $3 a gallon I’m just fine with big oil companies getting a few tax breaks and if Joni Ernst thinks she’s going to cut spending after politicians of all parties have rung up a 17 TRILLION DOLLAR Deficit all I can say is ‘Good Luck’. I don’t belong to a union and I’m not a farmer so right to work and agriculture issues don’t excite me. I’m already married so I don’t have any opinion on who should or shouldn’t get married. I’ve never been in the military and I'm already a citizen so veteran affairs and immigration issues don’t sway me. The recent spate of beheadings aren’t concerning me with since I'm not heading to the Middle East anytime soon. No, my concerns are more immediate and since I’m sure I’m not alone in common sense low-level thinking I’m using this post as a public service to let this year’s Senate candidates know what would get my as yet undecided vote.
1.5 million Iowans voted in the 2012 presidential election. 20 percent of the voters in the current Senate election are undecided – that amounts to approximately 300,000 voters. So far 18 MILLION dollars have been spent on this Senate election and there are still two months left. Let’s say there will be another 18 MILLION dollars spent on the campaign (I think this is a low number). That makes 36 MILLION dollars being spent on 300,000 votes. That amounts to $120 for each undecided voter and since there is normally a lesser turnout in non-presidential election years the $120 figure is likely closer to $200.
The 36 million dollars that is being spent to attract undecided voters will be going to the post office, printers, newspapers, internet advertisers like Google, television and radio stations, commercial producers and writers, consultants, etc… None of this money will be going directly to the voters. I think that’s wrong – why should everyone profit from my undecidedness but me? That money being spent to get my vote would look a lot better in my pocket than some advertising agency or Google. I’ve written before (Click here to read it) how Americans should have the freedom to sell their votes directly to the politicians instead of letting everyone else profit from our right to vote. I’d love to put my vote up for auction on eBay but while spending MILLIONS and MILLIONS of dollars to get out the vote and sign up voters and advertise for votes is legal selling the same votes is illegal. I’ll be very inclined to vote for the Senate candidate that will legalize vote selling and allow campaigns to bargain directly with the voters. With a presidential election and a likely Iowa Senate Seat up for grabs in 2016 this is an issue that all Iowans can rally around and profit from.
My 10 minute trip on I-235 took 40 minutes today. Even with one lane closed, there was plenty of room for Des Moines traffic if everyone could have looked at the accident without having to rubberneck...
The government has already funded some traffic guidance signs on the interstates in Des Moines to let me know how many people have died in auto accidents this year and how many minutes it will take me to get to the next few exits. I’d like my next Senator to take this concept to the next level and replace the current signage that is a descendent of the old monochromatic computer terminals with the full color displays found in football stadiums. Whenever there is an accident, the new displays can not only let the drivers know about the accident, they can display pictures of the accident. Once the driving public has seen the accident on the big screen they wouldn’t need to slow down to see the wreckage and could resume their normal driving habits so I could get to work and get home faster. The accident displays will probably pay for themselves by selling ads to insurance companies or sending the accident pictures directly to the driver’s smart phones for a small fee. Reducing rubbernecking will not only make the roads safer – it will reduce road rage and get me my way quicker and could be a reality with some government seed money to incentivize the process. Up to now Joni and Bruce have been silent about getting me where I need to go faster but their ideas on this issue will play a big part in getting my vote.
2014 Daisy and Baxter beef stick award winner Jillissa (left) could devote more time to superior beef stick service if she could put Little Debbie snack cakes, 2 liter bottles of soda, chips, cigarettes, and beer all on one convenient EBT transaction. On the right was the mob scene at the Hawkeye Pantry last month. I could have been in and out with my AMP Focus Energy if the clerk didn't have to argue with every customer when they insisted on paying for their six-pack or smokes with their EBT card.
I’d like to think my next Senator could help me get my beef sticks, coffee, or soda pop without having to play EBT roulette and I have a simple solution to the problem – make EBT cards eligible for beer, liquor, and cigarettes. The Iowa EBT program is funded by the federal government so the federal government can authorize these categories to be eligible for benefits. I discussed this subject at work and at chess club and many people said “Food Stamps are for food not for beer and cigarettes” but I beg to differ. EBT stands for ‘Electronic BENEFITS Transfer”, not Electronic FOOD Transfer. It may be a stretch to label cigarettes and alcohol as ‘food’ but beer certainly has some nutritional content. After all, can cigarettes, liquor, and beer be that much worse for a person than a $4 10 ounce bag of potato chips or $1 Little Debbie Lemon pies? This is a win-win situation – People that want to get beer, liquor, and cigarettes with their EBT cards can do so; convenience stores have fewer regulations to keep track of; and we all get out of the convenience stores faster. The gains in leisure time and productivity will more than make up for the extra medical expenses incurred by all the beer, liquor, and cigarettes consumed (and all these people seem to have the money to buy this stuff anyway). This is another issue the candidates have skirted around but if I had a gun to my head I’d say getting me out of convenience stores faster is my number one election year concern.
And that’s my wish list for our two Senate hopefuls this year. These issues may seem trivial to some but they would improve the quality of my life in particular and all Iowans in general. In any event, I’d like to have the candidates talking about what they are going to do FOR me instead of talking about what their opponent is going to do TO me. If you have any issues to add leave them in the comments or better yet tell the candidates at http://www.brucebraley.com/contact/ and info@joniforiowa.com and let them know what will get your vote. It never hurts to ask.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Dear Hank (An Unsolicited Advice Column)
In my recent post ‘An Evening with C.A.’ I helped a young man determine what he wanted to do with his life in just a few hours after years of poor advice and befuddlement. The post was such a staggering success (one person liked it on Facebook and another person clicked the ‘interesting’ reaction at the bottom of the post) that I’ve been inundated with people asking for the kind of salient, no-nonsense problem solving advice that I gave that young man (a person at the Quik Trip asked me if I knew where the restroom was and another asked me if I knew how they could get to Highway 14) so I thought I’d answer some of these questions and perhaps launch a new career as an advice columnist.
Dear Hank,
I am a retired businessman who made millions of dollars running a Fortune 500 company and I decided to run for the open Senate seat from the State of Iowa as a Republican. I spent over a million and a half dollars of my own money on my campaign and blanketed the state in advertising how I would bring my business know-how to Washington and offered great ideas like selling the vast energy resources on government lands to balance the budget. But despite my best efforts I finished third in the primary election behind a state senator who made ads about knowing how to castrate pigs and a radio talk show host. I may have another chance to run a Senate campaign in two years and I want to know what I need to do differently to win the next time around. - Mark in Iowa
Dear Mark in Iowa,
First things first – stop talking about how you will run Washington like a business if you get elected. Even if you get elected you’ll just be one of more than 500 elected officials and it’s not like you’ll be the CEO or anything. Let’s face it – if people really wanted the government run like a business do you think the government would be over $17 TRILLION DOLLARS in debt? Of course not! Voters vote for people who will give them more and more from the government and they don’t care where the money comes from as long as it comes from somewhere. Look in today's paper at the new student loan forgiveness guidelines. Who do you think the drunk and high on cocaine college kids of the world like C.A. and his ilk are going to vote for once they get out of school and discover that being drunk and high on cocaine for four years left them with a mountain of student loan debt and the kind of low paying job you get after spending four years drunk and high on cocaine? The candidate who will vote to balance the budget or the candidate who will forgive their loans (irrespective of their hog castration experience).
If you insist on talking about your business experience discuss how you get the better of all your business deals and how you’ll use that experience to bring more money into Iowa than the people of the state pays to the government. Since you have experience running a non-profit corporation talk about how you want to run Washington like a charity and tell everyone about all the things they will be able to get with all the government money you will bring in the state. Then you can make your own goofy commercials about people driving their Cadillac Escalades with large screen TV’s into their trailer parks. Once you get people thinking about driving their big cars with giant TV’s into their trailer park homes, they’ll forget all about the hog castrating videos and you’ll be well on your way to victory.
Dear Hank,
A company has called about setting up a FiltroPur demonstration in my home and has told me I would receive a $100 gas card just for having the demo. I saw the blog post about your FiltroPur demonstration and I know that I’ll probably only get an offer for ten $10 gas vouchers. I still want the money so I want to know if you ever got any money from your demo? – Loving Me a Benjamin
Dear Loving Me a Benjamin,
Glad you asked. So far I’ve sent in 5 rebate vouchers. The pattern by this point is obvious. I received a $10 voucher form by email in December, January, but not in February. At the end of February, I called International Rebates (the company that handled the rebates) and stayed on hold for a half hour before getting a person who sent me a new voucher within the hour and told me that my first rebate check would be delivered in the next week. I then waited two weeks and after I received no check I called the rebate company again. I stayed on hold for a half hour and when the rebate person answered I was told my first rebate check would be delivered in the next week. I then stayed on the phone for an hour asking the following three questions in repetition: 1. Why didn’t I get my rebate check? 2. When will I get my rebate check? 3. Did the company get any of my rebate vouchers? I received a rebate check for $20 (not 2 $10 rebate checks) in three days.
I received my voucher forms for March and April but not for May. I sent International Rebates an email 2 weeks ago to let them know that I did not receive a May voucher and that I should have received my February rebate. The company called back to let me know that my rebate check was on the way and that I would be receiving a new voucher shortly. I received neither so last Monday I called International Rebates and stayed on hold for a half hour before getting a person who sent me a new voucher within the hour and told me that my first rebate check would be delivered in the next week. I didn’t wait two weeks this time but I stayed on the phone for a half hour asking the following three questions in repetition: 1. Why didn’t I get my rebate check? 2. When will I get my rebate check? 3. Did the company get any of my rebate vouchers? The rebate person eventually hung up so I called again and got another rebate person and I asked the same three questions for another half hour before they hung up also. I received another $20 rebate check last Friday dated the day after I called.
So I’ve received $40 from International Rebates but counting the FiltroPur demonstration I’ve spent at least six hours getting the $40. When I subtract the $3 in postage I’ve made approximately $6.17 an hour getting my rebate money so I suggest that unless you have a disability that prevents you from working ditch the FiltroPur demo, go to a place like QPS Employment in Marshalltown, get a real job for a couple of days, and you’ll be loving a Benjamin much faster.
Dear Hank,
I run a very successful NBA franchise. Our team nearly made the NBA Finals last year and started this season with the best record in the NBA after two months. We faltered after the All-Star break but still managed to finish with the best record in the Eastern Conference. We made it to the conference finals but lost to the Miami Heat in six games. Lance Stephenson is one of our best players but is also a free agent. If we keep him we will have to go over the salary cap and pay a luxury tax. He is an amazing talent but was increasingly erratic as the playoffs went on. He smacked a player in the face, went into the opposing teams huddle during time outs, and made himself a media laughingstock by blowing in LeBron James’ ear and then pushing him in the face during the conference finals. If I let Stephenson leave in free agency I worry it will tear the team apart because it will look like we’re too cheap to have a winner but if I keep him I worry that his immature antics will tear the team apart despite his all-star play and unlimited potential. What do you think I should do? – Larry in Indiana
Dear Larry in Indiana,
Lance Stephenson is super talented but he is also an accident waiting to happen. His antics remind me a lot of Ron Artest, a former player of yours who also had immense talent but also had a deep seated need to be the center of attention and a penchant for immature antics that polarized every team he played for. He ruined your team for half a decade in 2004 after he got suspended for a year when he jumped into the stands at Detroit and got into a fistfight with the fans. Your organization has proven adept at finding low-cost quality players in the draft and free agency and while your team may suffer in the short term by letting Stephenson go I believe you will come up with other talented replacements. There is no reason to have a walking time bomb like Lance Stephenson on your team. After all, your team didn't win the East with Lance Stephenson and your can certainly not win the East without him. My advice is to let Stephenson go, build your team around Paul George and Roy Hibbert, and find yourself another point guard. As nice a player as George Hill is he is not a starting point guard on an NBA championship team (although he would be a tremendous backup on one).
Dear Hank,
I am a retired businessman who made millions of dollars running a Fortune 500 company and I decided to run for the open Senate seat from the State of Iowa as a Republican. I spent over a million and a half dollars of my own money on my campaign and blanketed the state in advertising how I would bring my business know-how to Washington and offered great ideas like selling the vast energy resources on government lands to balance the budget. But despite my best efforts I finished third in the primary election behind a state senator who made ads about knowing how to castrate pigs and a radio talk show host. I may have another chance to run a Senate campaign in two years and I want to know what I need to do differently to win the next time around. - Mark in Iowa
Dear Mark in Iowa,
First things first – stop talking about how you will run Washington like a business if you get elected. Even if you get elected you’ll just be one of more than 500 elected officials and it’s not like you’ll be the CEO or anything. Let’s face it – if people really wanted the government run like a business do you think the government would be over $17 TRILLION DOLLARS in debt? Of course not! Voters vote for people who will give them more and more from the government and they don’t care where the money comes from as long as it comes from somewhere. Look in today's paper at the new student loan forgiveness guidelines. Who do you think the drunk and high on cocaine college kids of the world like C.A. and his ilk are going to vote for once they get out of school and discover that being drunk and high on cocaine for four years left them with a mountain of student loan debt and the kind of low paying job you get after spending four years drunk and high on cocaine? The candidate who will vote to balance the budget or the candidate who will forgive their loans (irrespective of their hog castration experience).
If you insist on talking about your business experience discuss how you get the better of all your business deals and how you’ll use that experience to bring more money into Iowa than the people of the state pays to the government. Since you have experience running a non-profit corporation talk about how you want to run Washington like a charity and tell everyone about all the things they will be able to get with all the government money you will bring in the state. Then you can make your own goofy commercials about people driving their Cadillac Escalades with large screen TV’s into their trailer parks. Once you get people thinking about driving their big cars with giant TV’s into their trailer park homes, they’ll forget all about the hog castrating videos and you’ll be well on your way to victory.
Dear Hank,
A company has called about setting up a FiltroPur demonstration in my home and has told me I would receive a $100 gas card just for having the demo. I saw the blog post about your FiltroPur demonstration and I know that I’ll probably only get an offer for ten $10 gas vouchers. I still want the money so I want to know if you ever got any money from your demo? – Loving Me a Benjamin
My second gas voucher rebate check from International Rebates took as much work as getting the first one!
Glad you asked. So far I’ve sent in 5 rebate vouchers. The pattern by this point is obvious. I received a $10 voucher form by email in December, January, but not in February. At the end of February, I called International Rebates (the company that handled the rebates) and stayed on hold for a half hour before getting a person who sent me a new voucher within the hour and told me that my first rebate check would be delivered in the next week. I then waited two weeks and after I received no check I called the rebate company again. I stayed on hold for a half hour and when the rebate person answered I was told my first rebate check would be delivered in the next week. I then stayed on the phone for an hour asking the following three questions in repetition: 1. Why didn’t I get my rebate check? 2. When will I get my rebate check? 3. Did the company get any of my rebate vouchers? I received a rebate check for $20 (not 2 $10 rebate checks) in three days.
I received my voucher forms for March and April but not for May. I sent International Rebates an email 2 weeks ago to let them know that I did not receive a May voucher and that I should have received my February rebate. The company called back to let me know that my rebate check was on the way and that I would be receiving a new voucher shortly. I received neither so last Monday I called International Rebates and stayed on hold for a half hour before getting a person who sent me a new voucher within the hour and told me that my first rebate check would be delivered in the next week. I didn’t wait two weeks this time but I stayed on the phone for a half hour asking the following three questions in repetition: 1. Why didn’t I get my rebate check? 2. When will I get my rebate check? 3. Did the company get any of my rebate vouchers? The rebate person eventually hung up so I called again and got another rebate person and I asked the same three questions for another half hour before they hung up also. I received another $20 rebate check last Friday dated the day after I called.
The quickest LEGAL way to a Benjamin remains working for it...
Dear Hank,
I run a very successful NBA franchise. Our team nearly made the NBA Finals last year and started this season with the best record in the NBA after two months. We faltered after the All-Star break but still managed to finish with the best record in the Eastern Conference. We made it to the conference finals but lost to the Miami Heat in six games. Lance Stephenson is one of our best players but is also a free agent. If we keep him we will have to go over the salary cap and pay a luxury tax. He is an amazing talent but was increasingly erratic as the playoffs went on. He smacked a player in the face, went into the opposing teams huddle during time outs, and made himself a media laughingstock by blowing in LeBron James’ ear and then pushing him in the face during the conference finals. If I let Stephenson leave in free agency I worry it will tear the team apart because it will look like we’re too cheap to have a winner but if I keep him I worry that his immature antics will tear the team apart despite his all-star play and unlimited potential. What do you think I should do? – Larry in Indiana
Dear Larry in Indiana,
Lance Stephenson is super talented but he is also an accident waiting to happen. His antics remind me a lot of Ron Artest, a former player of yours who also had immense talent but also had a deep seated need to be the center of attention and a penchant for immature antics that polarized every team he played for. He ruined your team for half a decade in 2004 after he got suspended for a year when he jumped into the stands at Detroit and got into a fistfight with the fans. Your organization has proven adept at finding low-cost quality players in the draft and free agency and while your team may suffer in the short term by letting Stephenson go I believe you will come up with other talented replacements. There is no reason to have a walking time bomb like Lance Stephenson on your team. After all, your team didn't win the East with Lance Stephenson and your can certainly not win the East without him. My advice is to let Stephenson go, build your team around Paul George and Roy Hibbert, and find yourself another point guard. As nice a player as George Hill is he is not a starting point guard on an NBA championship team (although he would be a tremendous backup on one).
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Shutdown
"But oh Lord we pay the price
With the spin of the wheel with the roll of the dice
Ah yeah you pay your fare
And if you don't know where you're going
Any road will take you there"
Any Road - George Harrison
The government ‘shutdown’ is in its third week and there seems to be no end in sight. The Republican controlled House won’t pass a new budget that includes funding for Obamacare unless the President will agree to delay the mandate for the individual participation for one year in his administration’s signature health care legislation.
It was reasonable for the Congress to think the President would agree to concessions. Two years ago he made concessions to avoid the fiscal cliff by allowing the Bush Tax Cuts for high earners and last month decided to let the Congress have a vote on his Syrian ‘red line threats’. Since businesses with more than 50 employees had already been exempted from complying with Obamacare regulations for a year there was no reason to think further modifications couldn’t be made.
President Obama has consistently been underestimated and refused to compromise on his legacy acheivment. He allowed the government to be shut down, calculating that the media and public will blame the Republican Congress for their loss of government and so far he has been right. Senate leader Harry Reid got to call the Republicans ‘anarchists’ and President Obama got to compare them to kidnappers and blackmailers, saying ‘You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job’ and ‘We can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy’.
The main furor over the shutdown the first week were feel bad stories about veterans not being able to visit their monument at the national mall and vacationers not being able to visit national parks. Stung by the criticism, the Republicans blinked first and passed funding for national parks, the National Mall and Washington D.C. But the Democrats are gunning for an unconditional surrender and the Democrat- controlled Senate has refused to consider the separate bills, insisting on a ‘no strings attached budget’.
You can likely tell who is getting what from the government by their reaction to the shutdown. I talked to a government contractor that was very upset about being furloughed and when I gave my 80 year old neighbor a ride to the hardware store I asked him about the shutdown and he cursed the Republicans up and down because he was worried about not getting his Social Security check next month. I haven’t noticed anything about the shutdown at work, possibly because we don’t get many checks from the government. I work on a program that interfaces with a government agency. The agency is not considered essential and their support email address is sending out a reply noting that there will be no support as long as the government is shut down but since every email I’ve sent them in the last six months hasn’t been answered within a week, I haven’t noticed any difference from the normal level of support.
I’ve noticed a shutdown effect on the street corners of Marshalltown. In September, crews were replacing the old sidewalks on the street corners with new sidewalks on the street corners only the new sidewalks have some sort of metallic looking non-slip plate at the downslope where the sidewalk meets the street. When I took Daisy and Baxter for walks after getting home from work there would be no workers except for this guy that would be sitting in his car keeping an eye on the newly poured cement. On October 1st the work stopped, the guy in the car no longer kept watch on the street corner, the dirt that was dug up hasn’t been replaced, and the safety cones are still on the corners or wherever they have been dragged to by the neighborhood rabble.
As if the government shutdown wasn’t dramatic enough, the government’s authority to borrow more than the currently allowed 16.7 TRILLION DOLLARS is running out this week and while the Republican controlled House wants to use their authority to increase the borrowing limit as leverage to get budget concessions while the President Obama and the Democrat controlled Senate want the borrowing limit increased along with a budget that funds Obamacare before any budget negotiations take place. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has been pushing their case for an increase in the debt limit by warning of the ‘chaotic’ consequences of not raising the debt limit. Lew said he the government’s automated payment systems will not allow the prioritization of paying some bills and not others saying "Anyone who thinks that it can be done just doesn't know the architecture of our multiple payment systems," …They were designed properly to pay our bills; they were not designed to not pay our bills."
The Democrats won the media battle because the Republicans had no talking points ready after their budget wasn’t accepted by the President or the Senate since they assumed there would be quick concessions. Now that the Republicans are have been painted as the ones solely responsible for the government shutdown, it is the Democrats turn to play hardball and they are not willing to accept a temporary increase in the debt limit unless a budget with funding for Obamacare is passed. In my opinion, the Republicans haven’t held the government hostage at all: they passed a budget that didn’t include funding for Obamacare and the Democrats refusal to pass a budget that doesn’t include the funding means to me that they share an equal responsibility for the shutdown. I saw this letter on a government website. In the letter, the administrator says the ‘President is intent on getting the government back up and running, and all of you back to work’. But the Congress did pass a budget for the Senate to approve and the President to sign – it just didn’t include funding for Obamacare and that was enough for both sides to dig in their heels.
However the shutdown and debt crisis is resolved, I think the real battle here was between the Tea Party and the Democratic AND Republican parties combined. Despite all the ultimatums by both Republicans and Democrats about their all-or-nothing approach to the budget a bill was passed hours before the shutdown to keep the military well-staffed and it looks like a compromise will be reached to keep the government spending for the next few months with both parties painting the Tea Party republicans as unprincipled extremists.
If the American political system tolerated more than two parties, the Tea Party would have been firmly established on the sidelines as a small fiscally extreme faction, but since there is no way to influence American policy except through the two governing parties the Tea Party was able to successfully infiltrate the severely weakened Republican Party after their disastrous 2008 election results and have become a force in their own right thanks to the rigidity of the two party system. Now the same Republican party that welcomed the Tea Party support two years ago are planning primary challenges to the upstarts because they want the extra funding and power that goes along with it just as much as the Democrats but their stated principles don’t allow them to admit it. When the Republicans controlled all three branches of the government in the early 2000’s, there was tax cuts, record deficits, and a large Medicare prescription giveaway even while funding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it comes to fiscal responsibility, the Tea Party is the only group with any principles.
The Tea Party view of Obamacare as another large entitlement program is well founded and while I disagree with them about the need for universal health care I do agree that it can only be stopped before it begins because once it takes root and a third or more of the country receive health care subsidies from the government, it will never be able to be repealed. That is the way of ‘entitlements’. And these entitlements are also business entitlements. When the 2014 Social Security increase was announced at 1.5% it isn’t referred as an increase or an adjustment, but as a ‘raise’. Almost FIFTY MILLION people receive tax money from the government to buy food, but instead of the government cutting deals with food providers (as Medicare does and Obamacare proposes to do with medical providers), the government gives out SIX BILLION DOLLARS a month for food to be bought at retail and attempts to cut costs in that fashion are met by accusations of ‘stigmatizing’ the recipients and you won’t see any food producers or supermarkets or any of the other middlemen profiting from food assistance programs complaining either.
The media has already started to paint of the Tea Party as the cause of the government shutdown and that may help the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives next year. Since the Republican Party was dead in the water until Obamacare was passed in 2010 and the natural tendency of the American voting public is to rail against Congress while reelecting their own representatives it seems far from a sure bet to me, but with so many people receiving payouts from the government and so many companies profiting from these payouts promoting fiscal responsibility is becoming akin to attacking the American way of life. A bank that borrows money from the Federal Reserve at .25% interest and uses it to loan money to the government at 2% interest (here are the details) has a vested interest in the government having to borrow money. Wal-Mart will not be working for a government food assistance reform when they have has so many customers getting assistance that they had a 'mini-riot' in a store that couldn't process the EBT payments. And whoever it is that is improving new street corners in Marshalltown, Iowa certainly doesn't care who borrows the money as long as they get paid.
There were a lot of stories lost in all the media portrayals of people not being able to visit national parks and monuments and workers dependent on the federal government for their jobs and entitlements and the quick assignment of blame. I’ve missed the discussion in the debate over raising the debt limit is what will be done about the 16,700,000,000,000 DOLLARS of current debt? In a recent speech the president said “Our deficits are going down faster than anytime since before I was born”. I doubt this is really the case but I suppose it could be looked at that way if you choose to interpret the late 1990’s when the government was running a surplus as not really a deficit, but even so is reducing last year’s 1,3000,000,000,000 dollar deficit to a mere 650,000,000,000 dollar deficit something to be applauding like the audience of this speech did? If a contestant on ‘The Biggest Loser’ ate 750 Ho-Ho’s a day in the weeks leading up to the competition and then cut down to only 75 daily Ho-Ho’s during the first week would they win the contest because of their 90% reduction in Ho-Ho consumption?
I wouldn’t say I’m a ‘Tea Partier’ but I like how they talk about the deficit and national debt as if they are obligations to be paid instead of some sound bite item to be glossed over or completely ignored. Some of the massive decrease in the deficit was due to a slightly improved economy but more was due to the automatic budget cuts that were part of the last deficit limit deal in 2011 (aka sequestration). When I do the math I see every citizen's share of the national debt as $50,000 and I know most of the people getting food assistance and living on social security aren’t going to pay their share. The media has focused on the drama over the shutdown and default scenarios but there are a number of questions that never get addressed that to me are far more important. Is the only thing keeping the national and global economy afloat the ability of the United States to borrow over 600,000,000,000 DOLLARS a year? How much can the United States possibly borrow before no one will lend us any more money? Is there any plan to repay the 16,700,000,000,000 DOLLARS the country currently owes? And why do new sidewalk corners in Marshalltown, Iowa depend on the federal government?
With the spin of the wheel with the roll of the dice
Ah yeah you pay your fare
And if you don't know where you're going
Any road will take you there"
Any Road - George Harrison
The shutdown has left this street corner 'improvement' in Marshalltown, Iowa unfinished for the past 3 weeks. The bright yellow non-slip plates look nice but after a couple of years after the last 'improvement' were revealed to be a thin yellow coating over cardboard.
It was reasonable for the Congress to think the President would agree to concessions. Two years ago he made concessions to avoid the fiscal cliff by allowing the Bush Tax Cuts for high earners and last month decided to let the Congress have a vote on his Syrian ‘red line threats’. Since businesses with more than 50 employees had already been exempted from complying with Obamacare regulations for a year there was no reason to think further modifications couldn’t be made.
President Obama has consistently been underestimated and refused to compromise on his legacy acheivment. He allowed the government to be shut down, calculating that the media and public will blame the Republican Congress for their loss of government and so far he has been right. Senate leader Harry Reid got to call the Republicans ‘anarchists’ and President Obama got to compare them to kidnappers and blackmailers, saying ‘You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job’ and ‘We can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy’.
The main furor over the shutdown the first week were feel bad stories about veterans not being able to visit their monument at the national mall and vacationers not being able to visit national parks. Stung by the criticism, the Republicans blinked first and passed funding for national parks, the National Mall and Washington D.C. But the Democrats are gunning for an unconditional surrender and the Democrat- controlled Senate has refused to consider the separate bills, insisting on a ‘no strings attached budget’.
You can likely tell who is getting what from the government by their reaction to the shutdown. I talked to a government contractor that was very upset about being furloughed and when I gave my 80 year old neighbor a ride to the hardware store I asked him about the shutdown and he cursed the Republicans up and down because he was worried about not getting his Social Security check next month. I haven’t noticed anything about the shutdown at work, possibly because we don’t get many checks from the government. I work on a program that interfaces with a government agency. The agency is not considered essential and their support email address is sending out a reply noting that there will be no support as long as the government is shut down but since every email I’ve sent them in the last six months hasn’t been answered within a week, I haven’t noticed any difference from the normal level of support.
I’ve noticed a shutdown effect on the street corners of Marshalltown. In September, crews were replacing the old sidewalks on the street corners with new sidewalks on the street corners only the new sidewalks have some sort of metallic looking non-slip plate at the downslope where the sidewalk meets the street. When I took Daisy and Baxter for walks after getting home from work there would be no workers except for this guy that would be sitting in his car keeping an eye on the newly poured cement. On October 1st the work stopped, the guy in the car no longer kept watch on the street corner, the dirt that was dug up hasn’t been replaced, and the safety cones are still on the corners or wherever they have been dragged to by the neighborhood rabble.
As if the government shutdown wasn’t dramatic enough, the government’s authority to borrow more than the currently allowed 16.7 TRILLION DOLLARS is running out this week and while the Republican controlled House wants to use their authority to increase the borrowing limit as leverage to get budget concessions while the President Obama and the Democrat controlled Senate want the borrowing limit increased along with a budget that funds Obamacare before any budget negotiations take place. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has been pushing their case for an increase in the debt limit by warning of the ‘chaotic’ consequences of not raising the debt limit. Lew said he the government’s automated payment systems will not allow the prioritization of paying some bills and not others saying "Anyone who thinks that it can be done just doesn't know the architecture of our multiple payment systems," …They were designed properly to pay our bills; they were not designed to not pay our bills."
The Democrats won the media battle because the Republicans had no talking points ready after their budget wasn’t accepted by the President or the Senate since they assumed there would be quick concessions. Now that the Republicans are have been painted as the ones solely responsible for the government shutdown, it is the Democrats turn to play hardball and they are not willing to accept a temporary increase in the debt limit unless a budget with funding for Obamacare is passed. In my opinion, the Republicans haven’t held the government hostage at all: they passed a budget that didn’t include funding for Obamacare and the Democrats refusal to pass a budget that doesn’t include the funding means to me that they share an equal responsibility for the shutdown. I saw this letter on a government website. In the letter, the administrator says the ‘President is intent on getting the government back up and running, and all of you back to work’. But the Congress did pass a budget for the Senate to approve and the President to sign – it just didn’t include funding for Obamacare and that was enough for both sides to dig in their heels.
However the shutdown and debt crisis is resolved, I think the real battle here was between the Tea Party and the Democratic AND Republican parties combined. Despite all the ultimatums by both Republicans and Democrats about their all-or-nothing approach to the budget a bill was passed hours before the shutdown to keep the military well-staffed and it looks like a compromise will be reached to keep the government spending for the next few months with both parties painting the Tea Party republicans as unprincipled extremists.
If the American political system tolerated more than two parties, the Tea Party would have been firmly established on the sidelines as a small fiscally extreme faction, but since there is no way to influence American policy except through the two governing parties the Tea Party was able to successfully infiltrate the severely weakened Republican Party after their disastrous 2008 election results and have become a force in their own right thanks to the rigidity of the two party system. Now the same Republican party that welcomed the Tea Party support two years ago are planning primary challenges to the upstarts because they want the extra funding and power that goes along with it just as much as the Democrats but their stated principles don’t allow them to admit it. When the Republicans controlled all three branches of the government in the early 2000’s, there was tax cuts, record deficits, and a large Medicare prescription giveaway even while funding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it comes to fiscal responsibility, the Tea Party is the only group with any principles.
These rocks I discovered at the Bonudrant Git 'n' Go were part of a government-funded rock study, but had to make a return trip due to the shutdown.
The media has already started to paint of the Tea Party as the cause of the government shutdown and that may help the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives next year. Since the Republican Party was dead in the water until Obamacare was passed in 2010 and the natural tendency of the American voting public is to rail against Congress while reelecting their own representatives it seems far from a sure bet to me, but with so many people receiving payouts from the government and so many companies profiting from these payouts promoting fiscal responsibility is becoming akin to attacking the American way of life. A bank that borrows money from the Federal Reserve at .25% interest and uses it to loan money to the government at 2% interest (here are the details) has a vested interest in the government having to borrow money. Wal-Mart will not be working for a government food assistance reform when they have has so many customers getting assistance that they had a 'mini-riot' in a store that couldn't process the EBT payments. And whoever it is that is improving new street corners in Marshalltown, Iowa certainly doesn't care who borrows the money as long as they get paid.
There were a lot of stories lost in all the media portrayals of people not being able to visit national parks and monuments and workers dependent on the federal government for their jobs and entitlements and the quick assignment of blame. I’ve missed the discussion in the debate over raising the debt limit is what will be done about the 16,700,000,000,000 DOLLARS of current debt? In a recent speech the president said “Our deficits are going down faster than anytime since before I was born”. I doubt this is really the case but I suppose it could be looked at that way if you choose to interpret the late 1990’s when the government was running a surplus as not really a deficit, but even so is reducing last year’s 1,3000,000,000,000 dollar deficit to a mere 650,000,000,000 dollar deficit something to be applauding like the audience of this speech did? If a contestant on ‘The Biggest Loser’ ate 750 Ho-Ho’s a day in the weeks leading up to the competition and then cut down to only 75 daily Ho-Ho’s during the first week would they win the contest because of their 90% reduction in Ho-Ho consumption?
I wouldn’t say I’m a ‘Tea Partier’ but I like how they talk about the deficit and national debt as if they are obligations to be paid instead of some sound bite item to be glossed over or completely ignored. Some of the massive decrease in the deficit was due to a slightly improved economy but more was due to the automatic budget cuts that were part of the last deficit limit deal in 2011 (aka sequestration). When I do the math I see every citizen's share of the national debt as $50,000 and I know most of the people getting food assistance and living on social security aren’t going to pay their share. The media has focused on the drama over the shutdown and default scenarios but there are a number of questions that never get addressed that to me are far more important. Is the only thing keeping the national and global economy afloat the ability of the United States to borrow over 600,000,000,000 DOLLARS a year? How much can the United States possibly borrow before no one will lend us any more money? Is there any plan to repay the 16,700,000,000,000 DOLLARS the country currently owes? And why do new sidewalk corners in Marshalltown, Iowa depend on the federal government?
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Say It Like You Mean It
The phrase ‘read my lips’ has since come to mean a lie is going to be the next thing coming out of the mouth of the speaker but at the time this little phrase resonated with the American middle class in general and Ronald Reagan followers in particular because it summed up in 6 words what these two groups wanted to hear from then candidate Bush. Up to that point George Herbert Walker Bush was thought of as a fairly ineffectual go-along get-along politician who accused Reagan of practicing voodoo economics mere months before becoming a Reaganomics disciple once asked to run for Vice-President on his ticket. After that utterance Bush’s image became one of a tough-talking man’s man who by God in heaven wasn’t going to take money out of hard-working American’s to fund a bunch of liberal causes. If you told me that the line was written by the same guy who wrote Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘Make my day’ speech, I wouldn’t doubt you for a second. Maybe Bush’s tough talk on taxes wouldn’t have been needed if it had been known 25 years ago that he would have been the last President to father a male child up to the present time.
When then President Bush struck a bargain with Democrats to raise taxes in 1991 in the aftermath of the successful prosecution of the Gulf War and the owner of a 90% approval rating, he and his phrase became laughingstocks to much of the American public. It wasn’t so much that he lied (politicians do that all the time); it was that the original phrase was too well written and resonated too well when he first said it and everyone remembered it. ‘Read my lips’ probably cost Bush his job in the 1992 election because even though he apologized for the comment and swore he wouldn’t raise taxes (unlike his opponent Bill Clinton who pledged to raise taxes on high earners) no one believed him. Whether he would have been elected in the first place without saying ‘Read my lips’ is another debate.
President Obama made these comments last year about the civil war in Syria during an unscheduled appearance at a White House press briefing. He had previously and since made other comments noting that there would be ‘consequences’ if chemical weapons were used and the users of chemical weapons would be ‘held accountable’ for their actions but the ‘red line’ comment sounded tough and was widely reported on and remembered.
The United States has been in the middle of a number of ‘regime changes’ in the Middle East over the past few years starting with the invasion of Iraq under the pretense that they were harboring weapons of mass destruction. American cruise missiles (as part of a ‘NATO’ operation) prevented Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi from using his air force to prevent a civil uprising in 2011 and we stood aside and watched as Egyptian President (or dictator – choose your word) Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office by protests to allow the military to set up an elected government. When the Egyptian people elected the Muslim Brotherhood party (who then tried to claim much of the same powers that Mubarak had) and more protests ensued, the Egyptian military forcibly removed the elected government, suspended the country’s constitution, and installed an interim government. Most anyone would call this a military coup d'état but the United States government won’t declare it as such since that would mean a halt to the U.S. 1.23 BILLION DOLLARS in military aid to Egypt and by some twisted government economic logic not giving away the 1 BILLION DOLLARS would cost the government 2 to 3 BILLION DOLLARS because then the Egyptian military wouldn’t be able to complete their weapons contracts with our military (if you don’t believe me, click here).
In the last month the U.S. has accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons and claimed iron clad proof. Much of the world expected the President to have sent some drones or cruise missiles Syria’s way once the ‘red line’ had been breached. Instead the President has asked Congress for their approval and tried to enlist international support to punish Syria.
What changed? Russia changed. While Libya and Egypt had no great importance to Russia, Syria is host to their only naval base in the Mediterranean and buys arms from Russia (I don’t know if they pay for their arms with Russian aid in the same way Egypt uses American aid to buy American weapons). While Russia turned a blind eye to regime change in the rest of the Arab world, they have done some saber-rattling of their own by sending three warships to the Mediterranean ostensibly to evacuate Russian citizens.
With the potential of counter strikes and a full-blown proxy war with Russia brewing, it's no wonder that President Obama wants to make sure that the Congress and/or other nations have his back. Part of the reason Obama became president was the public’s dissatisfaction with how the invasion of Iraq spun out of control and he doesn’t want to have a tidal wave of public dissatisfaction cripple his party for years to come.
If President Obama had never made his ‘red line’ comment he could have just condemned the chemical weapons strike and left things alone. But having made such a memorable comment makes him (and the country by extension) look weak and impotent unless action is now taken. The President unsuccessfully tried to claim that the ‘red line’ was an international ‘red line’ and a congressional ‘red line’ in a recent speech but none of the treaties against chemical weapons gave a mandate for military action or mentioned a red line.
I’m not sure why the deaths by chemical weapons in Syria is more abhorrent than the 500+ Egyptian protesters who were killed in the last two weeks or the two million people plus killed in the genocide in Sudan over the past 20 years except that in the world of international politics it's more a matter of who your friend is than what is being done. Dead is dead is dead whether by gas or bullet or machete. In any event I’m happy to see the U.S. staying out of the Syrian mess for now. In a speech made on Saturday Secretary of State John Kerry said “This is our chance to join together and pursue accountability over appeasement. We in the United States know and our French partners know that this is not the time to be silent spectators to slaughter”. Kerry is certainly not being silent but while the US tut-tuts the brutal putdowns of some civil uprisings and flexes its military muscle against others I don’t see how not sending cruise missiles or drone planes to make a point against the use of chemical weapons is the equivalent of silence or some sort of tacit approval. I would define tacit approval sending the Syrian government 1.23 BILLION DOLLARS to buy the chemical weapons from our chemical weapon manufacturers. If the government is so upset about chemical weapons, why haven't they invaded Syria to get rid of them a long time ago? Did they think these weapons would just sit in a warehouse and never be used? Not exactly the same line of thought being taken in the quest to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
As it has become apparent that the country doesn’t have much of an appetite for a unilateral strike into Syria and while some nations are more than willing to have the US make a stand against chemical weapons none except France are willing to commit anything more than well wishes, the government has aggressively courted congressional votes and downplayed the scope of the planned punishment. A presidential speech to the American people is scheduled for Tuesday. Monday Secretary Kerry said the strike would be an “unbelievably small, limited kind of effort” while on the Sunday news shows White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said that the president will tell the country “what this is not. This is not Iraq. This is not Afghanistan. This is not an extended air campaign like in Libya.” This intense effort to gain support doesn’t pass the smell test. Bombing Libya was a unilateral decision, so why is public support needed for this ‘unbelievably small, limited kind of effort’? There is something going on that isn’t being said. If the President wants to strike out at the Syrians, I wouldn't be any more harsh on him than I was about the Libya strikes two years ago (click here to see), but if he's asking for my permission he doesn't have it.
I'm sorry that the President is feeling like he and the country are looking soft because he uttered his ‘red line’ comment last year but he said it and not anyone else and I see no reason to the rest of the country has to back up the offhand comment. I think if there is one thing Americans have realized since the post 9-11 American adventures in the Middle East is that we have no friends in that part of the world and the only allies we have there are the ones that have been bought and that any new regime brought into power by America is at least as likely to become our worst enemy than our paid ally. If the President wants to claim that a military strike in Syria is needed because it helps American interests to get the current rulers out of power that is a debate the country should have, but just because some sarin gas was used to kill hundreds of people instead of instead of tanks or bullets or human bombs is no reason for our country to enter yet another military adventure in a region of the world where burning the American flag is the regional pastime.
Despite the ‘red line’ gaffe, I can’t imagine any foreign country really thinking the President is soft or unreliable. After all, he ordered the Navy strike on the Somali pirates and Osama Bin Laden’s execution and didn't ask for permission either time. I have no doubt that if he felt it vital to our country's interests to punish Syria for the chemical weapons strike it would have been done weeks ago. But perhaps the President is just laying a subtle trap for the Syrian leaders and their Russian overlords in the manner of this great American strategist from the 1950’s:
This military strategy was only recently unclassified under the Freedom of Information Act. Even the Sun Tzu classic 'The Art of War' did not include this particular strategy. I suspect he was saving it for his comeback...
Sunday, October 21, 2012
A Great Debate
In order to prepare for the third and final Presidential debate, both parties agreed to a secret rehearsal debate a few days ago in Marshalltown, Iowa. A crack team of impartial moderators were chosen and allowed to pick the questions to ask the debate participants:
What does the New York Yankees collapse in the playoffs against Detroit mean to you?
Governor Romney: The Yankees spend more money on their players than any other team and should win more than one World Series every ten years, but because of all their long-term guaranteed contracts they’ve become another casualty of the Democratic Party entitlement mentality. Let’s take Alex Rodriguez for example: He’s been hurt for each of the last 2 years, his production has plummeted, but since he is guaranteed 117 million dollars over the next 5 years he can spend his time during the baseball games flirting with girls (FACT CHECK) and there’s nothing his employer can do but grin and bear it. The more people are guaranteed, the less they seem to want to work for it and that’s the culture I intend to change when I’m in office.
President Obama: That is my opponent’s world view in a nutshell: Just because the Yankees have more money than anyone else they should win every year. I say, why should the rich get all the rewards? What about the rest of us? If I’m reelected and my plan to have people like Alex Rodriguez, Warren Buffet, and yes Governor Romney pay their fair share goes through everyone will benefit, even the Yankees. A-Rod will have to start taking better care of himself and play better to make sure he gets some World Series checks to cash in order to keep his current standard of living.
What do you think of schools in California, New Mexico, and Illinois banning Flaming Hot Cheetos? (BACKGROUND)
President Obama: While I’m generally in favor of individual freedom when it comes to snack foods, there has to be some limitations. Let’s face it, now that the government has mandated that everyone have health insurance and will be paying the insurance for those who can’t, we as a people just can’t afford to have a bunch of school kids eating all these Cheetos and getting obese and having heart attacks. It’s just not in the national interest for this to happen.
Governor Romney: This is just another case of government cracking down on American exceptionalism. Here is an American owned company that has created an American made product so successful that people just can’t get enough of them and the government wants to stop their success. What’s next? Banning iPods? It’s the right of any school district to not sell a product, but to confiscate Cheetos in schools is Un-American! What about all the good American jobs the people at Frito-Lay create by the sale of Cheetos? In Iowa, I met a man named Manny who delivers Cheetos to stores all across the Midwest and his wife works at a Cheetos plant making sure that the hoppers are full of red dye #5. They’re scared to death of losing their jobs from this intervention into the snack food freedom of the families of America and if I’m elected I’ll do everything in my power to help successful American companies succeed instead to handicapping them.
When my owner take us out for our beef stick treats in the morning, his coffee costs a dollar for a 20 ounce cup. He says this works out to 6 dollars a gallon and at a dollar and a half per 20 ounce bottle Mountain Dew is 9 dollars a gallon. My question is why is everyone so concerned about gas costing 4 dollars a gallon when coffee and soda are so much more expensive?
Governor Romney: First of all, Mountain Dew is only 2 or 3 dollars a gallon if you were to buy it 2 liters at a time. The reason that gasoline is so much cheaper than coffee is that with the emergence of the energy drink industry, there hasn’t been the impetus to discover new sources of coffee and so we just rely on the coffee supply from South America, while the entire world has been hard at work discovering new oil fields. Oil has been discovered off shore in Brazil, the tar sands of Canada, and in shale deposits in North Dakota, just to name a few. But our President is risking our economy by his giveaway of money for companies to make batteries for electric cars and other ‘green’ initiatives instead of letting the free market meet the demand for products people want (FACT CHECK).
President Obama: Unlike the Governor, who doesn’t even drink coffee (FACT CHECK), I understand the dilemma of coffee drinkers everywhere and I have offered numerous initiatives to find new sources of coffee for the regular people of this country who like to drink coffee. But they have been constantly stonewalled by the Republican Congress. I am happy to report that thanks to my administration’s efforts to strengthen the economy, a Dunkin Donuts will be opening in Marshalltown very soon (FACT CHECK) so some progress is being made on that front.
Governor Romney: I must inerrupt to mention that Dunkin' Donuts does NOT serve beef stick treats!
If you suddenly found yourself and your family had no money, how would you survive?
President Obama: If we found ourselves down on our luck, I hope the social programs the Democrats have been the champions of would still be intact so I could get unemployment and my children could get Pell grants for college and our health care would be provided for until I could get another government job.
Governor Romney: I think we would do just fine. As a matter of fact, my wife was just telling me about an article she had read (FACT CHECK) about someone who didn’t buy clothes for a year. Of course, the fact that we don’t drink alcohol or smoke helps to keep our expenses down. And even if I lost 99.75 percent of my money I’d still be a millionaire!
It’s time for final statements – Governor?
Governor Romney: Thank you for moderating the debate. I just want to tell the American people that I’ve been a successful businessman and I know how to get things done and I am the right candidate to lead this country forward.
President Obama: I also want to thank you for moderating the debate and also for the insightful questions.
My opponent talks about how he is a successful businessman. Here is a man who was the son of the president of an automobile company, is 65 years old, and he’s worth 250 million dollars . I’m 15 years younger, have never held a job outside academia and government and I’m already worth 10 million. (FACT CHECK) I ask you – who is more successful and able to better lead the country forward?
Governor Romney: The Yankees spend more money on their players than any other team and should win more than one World Series every ten years, but because of all their long-term guaranteed contracts they’ve become another casualty of the Democratic Party entitlement mentality. Let’s take Alex Rodriguez for example: He’s been hurt for each of the last 2 years, his production has plummeted, but since he is guaranteed 117 million dollars over the next 5 years he can spend his time during the baseball games flirting with girls (FACT CHECK) and there’s nothing his employer can do but grin and bear it. The more people are guaranteed, the less they seem to want to work for it and that’s the culture I intend to change when I’m in office.
President Obama: That is my opponent’s world view in a nutshell: Just because the Yankees have more money than anyone else they should win every year. I say, why should the rich get all the rewards? What about the rest of us? If I’m reelected and my plan to have people like Alex Rodriguez, Warren Buffet, and yes Governor Romney pay their fair share goes through everyone will benefit, even the Yankees. A-Rod will have to start taking better care of himself and play better to make sure he gets some World Series checks to cash in order to keep his current standard of living.
President Obama: While I’m generally in favor of individual freedom when it comes to snack foods, there has to be some limitations. Let’s face it, now that the government has mandated that everyone have health insurance and will be paying the insurance for those who can’t, we as a people just can’t afford to have a bunch of school kids eating all these Cheetos and getting obese and having heart attacks. It’s just not in the national interest for this to happen.
Governor Romney: This is just another case of government cracking down on American exceptionalism. Here is an American owned company that has created an American made product so successful that people just can’t get enough of them and the government wants to stop their success. What’s next? Banning iPods? It’s the right of any school district to not sell a product, but to confiscate Cheetos in schools is Un-American! What about all the good American jobs the people at Frito-Lay create by the sale of Cheetos? In Iowa, I met a man named Manny who delivers Cheetos to stores all across the Midwest and his wife works at a Cheetos plant making sure that the hoppers are full of red dye #5. They’re scared to death of losing their jobs from this intervention into the snack food freedom of the families of America and if I’m elected I’ll do everything in my power to help successful American companies succeed instead to handicapping them.
Governor Romney: First of all, Mountain Dew is only 2 or 3 dollars a gallon if you were to buy it 2 liters at a time. The reason that gasoline is so much cheaper than coffee is that with the emergence of the energy drink industry, there hasn’t been the impetus to discover new sources of coffee and so we just rely on the coffee supply from South America, while the entire world has been hard at work discovering new oil fields. Oil has been discovered off shore in Brazil, the tar sands of Canada, and in shale deposits in North Dakota, just to name a few. But our President is risking our economy by his giveaway of money for companies to make batteries for electric cars and other ‘green’ initiatives instead of letting the free market meet the demand for products people want (FACT CHECK).
President Obama: Unlike the Governor, who doesn’t even drink coffee (FACT CHECK), I understand the dilemma of coffee drinkers everywhere and I have offered numerous initiatives to find new sources of coffee for the regular people of this country who like to drink coffee. But they have been constantly stonewalled by the Republican Congress. I am happy to report that thanks to my administration’s efforts to strengthen the economy, a Dunkin Donuts will be opening in Marshalltown very soon (FACT CHECK) so some progress is being made on that front.
Governor Romney: I must inerrupt to mention that Dunkin' Donuts does NOT serve beef stick treats!
President Obama: If we found ourselves down on our luck, I hope the social programs the Democrats have been the champions of would still be intact so I could get unemployment and my children could get Pell grants for college and our health care would be provided for until I could get another government job.
Governor Romney: I think we would do just fine. As a matter of fact, my wife was just telling me about an article she had read (FACT CHECK) about someone who didn’t buy clothes for a year. Of course, the fact that we don’t drink alcohol or smoke helps to keep our expenses down. And even if I lost 99.75 percent of my money I’d still be a millionaire!
Governor Romney: Thank you for moderating the debate. I just want to tell the American people that I’ve been a successful businessman and I know how to get things done and I am the right candidate to lead this country forward.
President Obama: I also want to thank you for moderating the debate and also for the insightful questions.
My opponent talks about how he is a successful businessman. Here is a man who was the son of the president of an automobile company, is 65 years old, and he’s worth 250 million dollars . I’m 15 years younger, have never held a job outside academia and government and I’m already worth 10 million. (FACT CHECK) I ask you – who is more successful and able to better lead the country forward?
Sunday, September 23, 2012
The Future Is Now
In the 1970’s George Allen was hired to coach and manage the personnel for the Washington Redskins and immediately started trading his picks in future drafts for older, experienced players. The older players helped the Redskins to the Super Bowl in 1972 and to the playoffs in a number of other years (although the Allen coached Redskins never won a playoff game aside from the 1972 season). When asked about whether trading away draft picks was going to hurt the Redskins in the future, Allen sneered and said the ‘The Future is Now’, meaning the only championship the Redskins could win was the current years. Despite having leaving the Redskins with barely any draft picks when he left the team following the 1977 season. Allen may have had a point because the Redskins won half their games or more in 3 of the following 4 years and won the Super Bowl in 1982 after winning at least half their games in 3 of the 15 years before Allen became coach (season by season records here).
The Washington Nationals baseball team faced a similar situation this year that the Redskins faced in the George Allen era. With the first overall pick in the 2009 MLB draft, the perennial loser Nationals drafted Stephen Strasburg, a 21 year old pitcher who was the top prospect in the draft. Strasburg gave every indication of being an intergenerational pitcher when he struck out 92 batters in 68 innings (including 14 strikeouts in his Nationals debut in 2010) and the Nationals won 8 of the 12 games he started. Unfortunately, Strasburg tore a ligament in his pitching elbow in his 12th start of 2010, had ligament replacement surgery and didn’t pitch again until September of 2011. In 2012, Strasburg picked up where he left off in 2010, striking out 197 batters in 159 innings en route to a 15-6 record with the Nationals winning 19 of his 28 starts and pitching a scoreless inning in the All-Star game.
After 4 seasons of losing 89 or more games, the Nationals went 80-81 in 2011 and were expected to contend for a playoff spot in 2012. Before the season, Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo imposed an innings limit on Strasburg for this year, believing that any more innings would put undue stress on his still-recently surgically repaired ligament. This seemed reasonable until the Nationals burst out of the gate with the best record in National League and gained a spot in the playoffs. Rizzo has stuck to his decision and the Nationals will participate in Washington’s first baseball postseason since 1933 (encompassing 3 teams) without their best pitcher.
I don’t know whether Rizzo’s decision is right or not, but I do know that if the Nationals don’t win the World Series, he will be judged harshly by the Nationals fans and he will get no credit for his decision if Strasburg goes on to a long Hall of Fame career that doesn’t include a Washington Nationals championship. I will say that I believe Rizzo is doing what he thinks is right for the player and the team, but if it was me, I’d let Strasburg pitch because there is no guarantee that Strasburg won’t leave the Nationals as a free agent 4 or 5 years, there is no guarantee that the Nationals will ever be this close to a championship in the next 100 years, and the only championship that the Nationals can win is this years and their future is now.
Another ‘game’ where the future is now is the game of presidential politics. Can you name the losers of presidential elections that ran for president again in your lifetime? There’s only been one in my lifetime which encompasses 13 elections including this one (Here is the answer). If you want to go back another 40 years you can find 1 more (right here). Once the chance to run for President is obtained, there will rarely be a second chance if the opportunity doesn’t result in the presidency. This has led Romney to make a number of statements he may not otherwise have made such as attacking the government’s initial response to the attacks on our embassies in the Middle East on the 9-11 anniversaries. Romney came under a lot of fire for his remarks, but if a more vicious attack or a concrete development in Iran’s quest to create nuclear weapons had followed his remarks, they may have resonated and caused the few undecided people to consider him as Presidential material more seriously. I don’t think it is a wise tactical maneuver to attack the foreign policy of the President who gets the credit for the killing of Osama Bin Laden, but there is no next year or next election for Romney so I can’t fault him for pulling out all the stops to get a job he so obviously covets.
My only decision in this presidential election is not to decide which Harvard educated millionaire I’m going to vote for; I’m deciding whether I’ll be casting a write in ballot for Ron Paul or Lee Gordon Seebach . I’ve never voted for a Democrat or Republican in a presidential election, but I still find the process fascinating and consider myself a reasonably accurate prognosticator. I even have a polling method and according to it, President Obama is ahead by 5.9 points. My secret scientific research method has determined that as long as price of gas at the Git’N’Go in Bondurant, Iowa is below $4.19 a gallon, the President will win the election, but the challenger Romney will win is the price hits $4.20. The current price is $3.60, but just 2 weeks ago the price was $3.83 and the contest was well within the margin of error.
This week the Romney campaign has been embarrassed by the release of a video at a (supposedly) private fund raising talk in which he said that 47 percent of the US population won’t vote for him because they are ‘who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it…These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.’.
Romney has gotten hammered for these comments which many say show him as insensitive and out of touch with mainstream America, but when I read the full transcript of the video (which was filmed in May), much of what Romney said makes lots of sense. Romney says on the tape ‘Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect.’ I agree 100% and why should this message connect? If I didn’t pay taxes, why would I be interested in someone who pays taxes paying less taxes? The Democrats seem to agree also. I’ve seen 4 ads this morning saying the Democrat plan is to have millionaires to pay ‘a little more in taxes’. Not being a millionaire, I have no objection but if I was a millionaire I might be OK with giving the millionaires a break and letting the billionaires pay a lot more in taxes. I’ve seen many Democratic ads showing Senior Citizens having to pay more in Medicare under Romney, students having to pay more in student loans under Romney, etc… Last month the President was in Iowa talking about the jobs that were created making turbines for wind farms and that these jobs were created in part by the tax credits that are offered for using wind energy. This week Siemens Energy announced that they will be laying off 400 workers at their wind-turbine factories in Iowa because of the uncertain future of the extension of the wind turbine tax credit. I’m sure that when oil subsidies are cut, Exxon and Shell are also laying people off in other states. Just as Romney understands that he won’t be getting votes from groups who don’t pay taxes when he is proposing tax cuts, The Democrats also understand that way to get votes from groups who are getting something is to either promise them more or tell them that the other party will be taking away what they are getting now.
The other point on the Romney tape that I agree with almost completely is when he says ‘What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.’ This underscores something I’ve noticed long ago about this election. Everyone I know has already made up their mind. Romney says 5 to 10 percent, but I think the number is more like 2 or 3 percent. Who what will cause the 2 to 5 people out of a hundred in a few select states that will decide the presidential election to make up their minds? I don't think anyone knows, but the more things that Romney says, the better chance on finding the one thing that will turn those select few to (or against) him.
I like the fact that Romney isn’t backing away from anything he has said about his video. The people who support him are being fairly quiet about it and the people who don’t support him are making the same comments they were making before only now sprinkling in quotes from the video. Romney would just look silly by trying to clarify what ‘he meant to say’ on the video and after a few days it all becomes old news anyway. He is much better off just to keep on attacking as if the whole incident never happened because for his campaign, the future really is now..
The Romney campaign wasn’t the only victim of a leak this week. I was in the midst of some investigative reporting on the miniscule number of Peanut M & M’s that were being dispensed from the new vending machine at work. I had purchased a package of Peanut M & M’s and received 20 Peanut M & M’s for my 85 cents. On Friday, I took a video of the vending machine while I fed it a quarter, expecting to receive 3 or 4 Peanut M & M’s like last week only to get 6 of the chocolate covered treats. Obviously the vending machine owner was alerted to my planned exposé and altered the machine, but the source of the leak hasn’t been discovered yet..
The Washington Nationals baseball team faced a similar situation this year that the Redskins faced in the George Allen era. With the first overall pick in the 2009 MLB draft, the perennial loser Nationals drafted Stephen Strasburg, a 21 year old pitcher who was the top prospect in the draft. Strasburg gave every indication of being an intergenerational pitcher when he struck out 92 batters in 68 innings (including 14 strikeouts in his Nationals debut in 2010) and the Nationals won 8 of the 12 games he started. Unfortunately, Strasburg tore a ligament in his pitching elbow in his 12th start of 2010, had ligament replacement surgery and didn’t pitch again until September of 2011. In 2012, Strasburg picked up where he left off in 2010, striking out 197 batters in 159 innings en route to a 15-6 record with the Nationals winning 19 of his 28 starts and pitching a scoreless inning in the All-Star game.
After 4 seasons of losing 89 or more games, the Nationals went 80-81 in 2011 and were expected to contend for a playoff spot in 2012. Before the season, Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo imposed an innings limit on Strasburg for this year, believing that any more innings would put undue stress on his still-recently surgically repaired ligament. This seemed reasonable until the Nationals burst out of the gate with the best record in National League and gained a spot in the playoffs. Rizzo has stuck to his decision and the Nationals will participate in Washington’s first baseball postseason since 1933 (encompassing 3 teams) without their best pitcher.
I don’t know whether Rizzo’s decision is right or not, but I do know that if the Nationals don’t win the World Series, he will be judged harshly by the Nationals fans and he will get no credit for his decision if Strasburg goes on to a long Hall of Fame career that doesn’t include a Washington Nationals championship. I will say that I believe Rizzo is doing what he thinks is right for the player and the team, but if it was me, I’d let Strasburg pitch because there is no guarantee that Strasburg won’t leave the Nationals as a free agent 4 or 5 years, there is no guarantee that the Nationals will ever be this close to a championship in the next 100 years, and the only championship that the Nationals can win is this years and their future is now.
Another ‘game’ where the future is now is the game of presidential politics. Can you name the losers of presidential elections that ran for president again in your lifetime? There’s only been one in my lifetime which encompasses 13 elections including this one (Here is the answer). If you want to go back another 40 years you can find 1 more (right here). Once the chance to run for President is obtained, there will rarely be a second chance if the opportunity doesn’t result in the presidency. This has led Romney to make a number of statements he may not otherwise have made such as attacking the government’s initial response to the attacks on our embassies in the Middle East on the 9-11 anniversaries. Romney came under a lot of fire for his remarks, but if a more vicious attack or a concrete development in Iran’s quest to create nuclear weapons had followed his remarks, they may have resonated and caused the few undecided people to consider him as Presidential material more seriously. I don’t think it is a wise tactical maneuver to attack the foreign policy of the President who gets the credit for the killing of Osama Bin Laden, but there is no next year or next election for Romney so I can’t fault him for pulling out all the stops to get a job he so obviously covets.
My only decision in this presidential election is not to decide which Harvard educated millionaire I’m going to vote for; I’m deciding whether I’ll be casting a write in ballot for Ron Paul or Lee Gordon Seebach . I’ve never voted for a Democrat or Republican in a presidential election, but I still find the process fascinating and consider myself a reasonably accurate prognosticator. I even have a polling method and according to it, President Obama is ahead by 5.9 points. My secret scientific research method has determined that as long as price of gas at the Git’N’Go in Bondurant, Iowa is below $4.19 a gallon, the President will win the election, but the challenger Romney will win is the price hits $4.20. The current price is $3.60, but just 2 weeks ago the price was $3.83 and the contest was well within the margin of error.
This week the Romney campaign has been embarrassed by the release of a video at a (supposedly) private fund raising talk in which he said that 47 percent of the US population won’t vote for him because they are ‘who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it…These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.’.
Romney has gotten hammered for these comments which many say show him as insensitive and out of touch with mainstream America, but when I read the full transcript of the video (which was filmed in May), much of what Romney said makes lots of sense. Romney says on the tape ‘Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect.’ I agree 100% and why should this message connect? If I didn’t pay taxes, why would I be interested in someone who pays taxes paying less taxes? The Democrats seem to agree also. I’ve seen 4 ads this morning saying the Democrat plan is to have millionaires to pay ‘a little more in taxes’. Not being a millionaire, I have no objection but if I was a millionaire I might be OK with giving the millionaires a break and letting the billionaires pay a lot more in taxes. I’ve seen many Democratic ads showing Senior Citizens having to pay more in Medicare under Romney, students having to pay more in student loans under Romney, etc… Last month the President was in Iowa talking about the jobs that were created making turbines for wind farms and that these jobs were created in part by the tax credits that are offered for using wind energy. This week Siemens Energy announced that they will be laying off 400 workers at their wind-turbine factories in Iowa because of the uncertain future of the extension of the wind turbine tax credit. I’m sure that when oil subsidies are cut, Exxon and Shell are also laying people off in other states. Just as Romney understands that he won’t be getting votes from groups who don’t pay taxes when he is proposing tax cuts, The Democrats also understand that way to get votes from groups who are getting something is to either promise them more or tell them that the other party will be taking away what they are getting now.
The other point on the Romney tape that I agree with almost completely is when he says ‘What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.’ This underscores something I’ve noticed long ago about this election. Everyone I know has already made up their mind. Romney says 5 to 10 percent, but I think the number is more like 2 or 3 percent. Who what will cause the 2 to 5 people out of a hundred in a few select states that will decide the presidential election to make up their minds? I don't think anyone knows, but the more things that Romney says, the better chance on finding the one thing that will turn those select few to (or against) him.
I like the fact that Romney isn’t backing away from anything he has said about his video. The people who support him are being fairly quiet about it and the people who don’t support him are making the same comments they were making before only now sprinkling in quotes from the video. Romney would just look silly by trying to clarify what ‘he meant to say’ on the video and after a few days it all becomes old news anyway. He is much better off just to keep on attacking as if the whole incident never happened because for his campaign, the future really is now..
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
When Up is Down and Down is Up
When the 2009 stimulus bill passed Congress, President Obama and the Democrats said it would cap the unemployment rate at 8 percent. The unemployment rate went to 10.0% in October that year and has steadily gone down since. This year the unemployment rate has been between 8.1 and 8.3 percent and this month the unemployment has gone from 8.3 to 8.1 percent. With unemployment at a 40 month low, I would expect the economy to be no kind of problem for the President’s re-election campaign but it has turned out to be a sore spot and instead of defending his economic record, President Obama has taken to deflecting attention from his economic record by taking on Mitt Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan’s support for overhauling Medicare.
When is the unemployment rate at 3 and a half year lows not good news? When the unemployment rate is nothing but a phony made up number!! The unemployment rate doesn’t take into account people who are unemployed, only people that are unemployed AND are have actively sought work in the past 4 weeks. In August, the economy added 96,000 jobs, but the number of people employed declined by 119,000 and over twice that number just stopped looking for work. According to the way the unemployment rate is calculated, people who stop looking for work aren’t counted as unemployed anymore and help the employment rate go down. There is a broader unemployment rate mysteriously called U-6 that includes everyone who doesn’t have a job and is looking for one and also includes people who are working part-time but want a full-time job. That rate is around 15 percent, but as much as I’ve tried I can’t find out how a person that is working part-time but wants a full time job is counted. Are they half a worker or a whole worker?
Not only is the definition of what is and isn’t unemployed a mess, the numbers that are given out are ‘seasonally adjusted’. I think this means that as an example, since the unemployment rate is expected to be lower during Christmas season and higher afterwards the unemployment rate is artificially raised when Christmas season is on and artificially lowered afterwards. So in addition to not counting people as unemployed if they give up looking for work, if an unemployed person happens to get a job in November they may not be counted as employed and when they lose their job in January they still aren’t counted as unemployed! I’ve had 4 jobs in the last 5 years and I haven’t once asked if my job was seasonal, but maybe I should have since there have been days in all of them when I wish they were.
Americans like things simple and that includes our numbers. Clint Eastwood didn’t become an American movie icon because he stood around talking to an empty chair. He became an icon because when he was young he was in western movies and shot bad guys and then as he got older he made detective movies and shot bad guys with bigger guns. After that he could make movies about whatever he wanted to because he was the Clint Eastwood who shot bad guys and even if he wasn’t shooting anyone in his movies, that’s who people remembered and who they felt good about seeing on the screen. When Clint Eastwood was younger, if he had made movies about an unemployment rate that is bad when it goes down because people aren’t looking for work and is good when it goes up because people are starting to look for jobs and may not matter anyway depending on the season, he wouldn’t have had an empty chair to sit in much less one to talk to.
How can anyone make sense of an unemployment rate when down is up and up is down? I suppose it makes as much sense as a government that spends a trillion more dollars more than it takes in each year and relies on something called the Federal Reserve Bank to make up fictional money to buy the government’s debt (called Qualitative Easing and here is a simple explanation).
What if the government just told us how many people had a job? Isn’t that a more important number than trying to figure out who is actively looking for a job and who isn’t. To me, it’s a simple way to see how the job market is going. If someone works 35 or more hours in a week, they count as one person, between 15 and 35 hours they count as half a person, between 10 and 15 as a quarter person, and if you don’t work 10 hours a week – sorry , you don’t count for this survey! Maybe this new number would need a fancy title like the PWJ (People With Jobs) Index and it could even be divided by a million so the pundits could casually mention that 'the PWJ index hit 154.32 this month'. I’d also be interested in knowing how many people are collecting unemployment insurance just so I’d know the ratio of how many people are paying into the unemployment fund against how many people are drawing out of it.
I wouldn’t seasonally adjust the PWJ Index. People understand seasons well enough to not need their numbers adjusted. When tomatoes go up in price in the winter, the price doesn’t get adjusted downward and the money in my pocket doesn’t get adjusted upward because of it and no one makes that big of a fuss, so why should employment numbers be adjusted for the season? When I was researching this post I found an excellent article on the subject on unemploymentdata.com. It says there are 133 million people with jobs but doesn’t disclose how part time workers are counted. The only problem I see with the PWJ is that it’s almost impossible for the political parties to play around with to make it look better or worse, but I’m sure they would surprise me and count people getting social security, welfare, and unemployment checks as 'employed' and having a job just before election time!
When is the unemployment rate at 3 and a half year lows not good news? When the unemployment rate is nothing but a phony made up number!! The unemployment rate doesn’t take into account people who are unemployed, only people that are unemployed AND are have actively sought work in the past 4 weeks. In August, the economy added 96,000 jobs, but the number of people employed declined by 119,000 and over twice that number just stopped looking for work. According to the way the unemployment rate is calculated, people who stop looking for work aren’t counted as unemployed anymore and help the employment rate go down. There is a broader unemployment rate mysteriously called U-6 that includes everyone who doesn’t have a job and is looking for one and also includes people who are working part-time but want a full-time job. That rate is around 15 percent, but as much as I’ve tried I can’t find out how a person that is working part-time but wants a full time job is counted. Are they half a worker or a whole worker?
Not only is the definition of what is and isn’t unemployed a mess, the numbers that are given out are ‘seasonally adjusted’. I think this means that as an example, since the unemployment rate is expected to be lower during Christmas season and higher afterwards the unemployment rate is artificially raised when Christmas season is on and artificially lowered afterwards. So in addition to not counting people as unemployed if they give up looking for work, if an unemployed person happens to get a job in November they may not be counted as employed and when they lose their job in January they still aren’t counted as unemployed! I’ve had 4 jobs in the last 5 years and I haven’t once asked if my job was seasonal, but maybe I should have since there have been days in all of them when I wish they were.
Americans like things simple and that includes our numbers. Clint Eastwood didn’t become an American movie icon because he stood around talking to an empty chair. He became an icon because when he was young he was in western movies and shot bad guys and then as he got older he made detective movies and shot bad guys with bigger guns. After that he could make movies about whatever he wanted to because he was the Clint Eastwood who shot bad guys and even if he wasn’t shooting anyone in his movies, that’s who people remembered and who they felt good about seeing on the screen. When Clint Eastwood was younger, if he had made movies about an unemployment rate that is bad when it goes down because people aren’t looking for work and is good when it goes up because people are starting to look for jobs and may not matter anyway depending on the season, he wouldn’t have had an empty chair to sit in much less one to talk to.
How can anyone make sense of an unemployment rate when down is up and up is down? I suppose it makes as much sense as a government that spends a trillion more dollars more than it takes in each year and relies on something called the Federal Reserve Bank to make up fictional money to buy the government’s debt (called Qualitative Easing and here is a simple explanation).
What if the government just told us how many people had a job? Isn’t that a more important number than trying to figure out who is actively looking for a job and who isn’t. To me, it’s a simple way to see how the job market is going. If someone works 35 or more hours in a week, they count as one person, between 15 and 35 hours they count as half a person, between 10 and 15 as a quarter person, and if you don’t work 10 hours a week – sorry , you don’t count for this survey! Maybe this new number would need a fancy title like the PWJ (People With Jobs) Index and it could even be divided by a million so the pundits could casually mention that 'the PWJ index hit 154.32 this month'. I’d also be interested in knowing how many people are collecting unemployment insurance just so I’d know the ratio of how many people are paying into the unemployment fund against how many people are drawing out of it.
I wouldn’t seasonally adjust the PWJ Index. People understand seasons well enough to not need their numbers adjusted. When tomatoes go up in price in the winter, the price doesn’t get adjusted downward and the money in my pocket doesn’t get adjusted upward because of it and no one makes that big of a fuss, so why should employment numbers be adjusted for the season? When I was researching this post I found an excellent article on the subject on unemploymentdata.com. It says there are 133 million people with jobs but doesn’t disclose how part time workers are counted. The only problem I see with the PWJ is that it’s almost impossible for the political parties to play around with to make it look better or worse, but I’m sure they would surprise me and count people getting social security, welfare, and unemployment checks as 'employed' and having a job just before election time!
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