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Obama has appointed as his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a former director of the failed government-backed mortgage giant Freddie Mac, which had to be bailed out by taxpayers. It’s perhaps not surprising, given that Obama was the second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage giants that helped spawn the mortgage meltdown and financial crisis. Emanuel was the money man for the Chicago Democratic machine under Mayor Richard Daley, and is famous for his partisanship and “foul mouthed tirades,” according to the Washington Post. During the time that Emanuel was a Freddie Mac director, it “misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002,” according to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition to engaging in pervasive accounting fraud, the mortgage giants have used bullying, lies, and intimidation to get their way on Capitol Hill. Emanuel is described as using pressure verging on extortion to raise money for Bill Clinton’s reelection bid. Labels: economics Labels: homosexuality Labels: unions Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Labels: 2008 presidential candidates A new report, released just hours before the polls open on Election Day, exonerates Gov. Sarah Palin in the "Troopergate" controversy. The state Personnel Board-sanctioned investigation is the second into whether Palin violated state ethics law in firing her public safety commissioner earlier this year, and it contradicts the earlier findings by a special counsel hired by the state Legislature. The board is set up in state law as an independent agency to hear complaints of violations of state ethics law brought against executive branch employees. Members are appointed by the governor, though Palin only had a role in appointing one of the three members. Both investigations found that Palin was within her rights to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. But the new report says the Legislature's investigator was wrong to conclude that Palin abused her power by allowing aides and her husband, Todd, to pressure Monegan and others to dismiss her ex-brother-in-law, Trooper Mike Wooten. Palin was accused of firing Monegan because Wooten stayed on the job. For the first time, the report says Palin specifically denies Monegan's versions of events; specifically, she says two conversations that Monegan described having with her about Wooten never happened. Both Monegan and Palin made their statements under oath. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Last week the Obama campaign kicked reporters from the Dallas Morning News, the New York Post and the Washington Times off the campaign plane — making it difficult for their papers to cover Obama’s final campaign appearances. The reporters were replaced with writers from magazines such as Glamour. The editorial pages of all three papers had endorsed McCain. The Obama campaign explained the decision as simply occurring from an excess demand for seats. But Washington Times Executive Editor John Solomon told radio show host Mark Levin on Friday evening that they had been covering the Obama campaign from the beginning of his run for the presidency, and that those endorsements were “the only one common thread among [the three newspapers].” ... Democrats seemed determined to cut back on the few conservative voices in the mainstream media. Obama supports media-ownership caps, which will primarily affect News Corp, the company that owns Fox News and conservative newspapers such as the New York Post. His proposals to increase minority ownership of broadcasting are also designed to change content, no longer leaving it up to customers to decide what it is they want to listen to. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promise more direct regulations on content. They want to re-impose the “Fairness Doctrine,” mandating that private radio stations provide what the government determines to be “balanced” coverage and guaranteeing that conservative talk radio will be over. There is a reason why talk radio only really began after the “Fairness Doctrine” ended in the 1980s. Congressman Mike Pence couldn’t get even one single Democratic member of Congress to oppose these regulations last year, and Obama hasn’t yet said whether he would veto a bill regulating radio show content. There you will find Gene Scrutton and his proud but charred John McCain campaign billboard, two lonely Republican stalwarts in a churning blue sea of liberalism. It's been a difficult election season for Scrutton and his sign. They've been admonished by the city, cursed by motorists and firebombed by some guys with four Molotov cocktails and bad aim. But it's been even worse for the incredible shrinking GOP in Multnomah County. While the number of registered Democrats has reached a historic high, Republican registrations have fallen dramatically, as has interest in the party's homeless Multnomah County chapter. And the few conservatives who remain say the city's reputation for polite public discourse doesn't apply when the left and the right start talking politics. "It's disappointing to me that many of my former colleagues in the environmental movement, self-styled progressives, are quite intolerant of different, minority viewpoints," says John Charles, president of the Cascade Policy Institute, a free-market think tank based in Portland. "I'm a little surprised," says Greg Wooldridge, a Navy veteran who moved here from Florida in June 2006. "People aren't as tolerant as Democrats purport themselves to be." Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Labels: economics Nadler retorts: "So let 'em invade Georgia. It's right next to them. Would we tolerate a foreign--a Russian army in Mexico? Which is more important to us Georgia or Israel, frankly?" Another voice in the crowd asks Nadler: "What is more important to us Czechoslovakia or Austria?" "That's a completely separate kind of question," Nadler replies. Labels: farm price supports Despite the rising unemployment rate, there is a serious shortage of computer programmers who can develop user-friendly, ready-to-run Windows software in languages such as C#. I know — I've been trying to help people hire them, for free-lance work at $100 per hour, and there are no takers. (None who say they'd do it for a higher price, either. If you know good independent-contractor C# programmers in either northeast Georgia or southeast Virginia, please send them my way.) When I say there's a shortage of programmers, I don't mean web developers — everybody wants to be a web developer, and there are too many. Nor do I mean database programmers, nor people who "program" only by configuring a business software package. I mean people who are good at figuring out how to compute things (that is, people with a feel for algorithms and data structures) who also know how to build commercial-quality software in a major programming language. That means developing for Windows, not just UNIX or specialized environments such as Swing or TCL/TK. What do you need to be a good computer programmer? A degree in computer science helps, but it's not enough. Successful programmers are largely self-taught, and the people who are waiting to be spoon-fed everything in the classroom are always lagging behind. Indeed, advanced training is not as important as thoroughness with the basics. You don't need calculus, but you need to be the kind of person who clearly understands every detail of 8th-grade arithmetic. Labels: Csharp Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Labels: 2008 presidential candidates
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I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
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Duckie, R.I.P.
My daughter discovered that her long quacking pet Duckie had gone to that great duck pond in the sky during the night. She was about 11 years old.
Click to enlarge
Duckie was about the happiest pet imaginable. She was always cheerful, quacking up a storm--except when our cat Tater Tot got too close to the playpen where we kept her in the garage during winters. For the only time in her long life, I heard her hiss!
Progress on the Commute
I am now allowed to telecommute to the contract in Bend alternate weeks. This is enormous progress, both because of the purely economic costs (driving, meals out) and because of the emotional pain of being away from my wife, daughter (and very shortly, granddaughter), and my home. And I can get back to working on the solar power project.
Change: We're Still Waiting
Hans Bader at Competitive Enterprise Institute tells us that Obama's first appointment is to reward those who played a part in creating the crisis:
I am so surprised.
What a Surprise!
Ferocious racism directed at blacks...because blacks overwhelmingly supported California's Proposition 8 (overturning the California Supreme Court's imposition of gay marriage). Of course, not all blacks voted for Proposition 8, but the gay racists aren't making that distinction.
It just shows that being a victim of centuries of oppression as a gay person (for all those gay people who are centuries old) doesn't make someone exempt from being an oppressor.
A friend in the Bay Area tells me:Craigslist's Bay Area Rants and Raves section carried a recent post with a spreadsheet list of Yes on 8 (yes = vote to ban gay marriage) contributors, that was annotated with someone's assessment of whether they were Mormon or not, and what appeared to be an invitation to exact retribution upon these people.
I've mentioned similar uses of this tactic by gay activists in Massachusetts--clearly intended to intimidate supporters of traditional marriage with fear of attack. Imagine if someone pulled this stunt with the No on 8 list--you would never hear the end of it from the mainstream media.
Obama Backers With Nothing To Do
The Onion does a great job of parodying the irrational enthusiasm of the Obama backers.
Secret Ballots
You are rather appreciative of voting by secret ballot, aren't you? It hasn't always been this way. In the early Republic, voting was done rather publicly. I'm not ashamed of who I vote for--but then again, I'm not worried about losing my job for voting wrong. (Oh well, right now that's not a problem.) I can remember in 1964 hearing friends of my parents express concern that their employers were attempting to pressure them into voting for Goldwater, not Johnson. (Yes, there was a time when employers were conservatives, not liberals or progressives.) Certainly, the secret ballot is an important method of protecting people at the bottom from being intimidated by employers.
So when I read this New York Post article by Dr. John Lott about an effort to abolish the secret ballot, I thought, "Wow! I'll bet the AFL-CIO will do everything it can to prevent this!" But alas, the AFL-CIO is who is pushing to abolish the secret ballot--at least for elections to decide whether workers will be represented by a union or not.
Just to be sure about this, I went and read the version that went nowhere in Congress last year, proposing to amend 29 USC 159(c):(6) Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, whenever a petition shall have been filed by an employee or group of employees or any individual or labor organization acting in their behalf alleging that a majority of employees in a unit appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining wish to be represented by an individual or labor organization for such purposes, the Board shall investigate the petition. If the Board finds that a majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for bargaining has signed valid authorizations designating the individual or labor organization specified in the petition as their bargaining representative and that no other individual or labor organization is currently certified or recognized as the exclusive representative of any of the employees in the unit, the Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative described in subsection (a).
Now, I can somewhat understand the argument that if a majority of the workers have signed union cards, then perhaps there's no need for a union election. (Hence the bill's description of this as "streamlining" the process.) But according to Dr. Lott, the union only wins these elections about 60% of the time. Huh? If a majority are willing to sign union cards, why would a majority not vote for the union at election?
There are actually a number of reasons, some of which reflect poorly on the employer, and some on the union. For example, a company might lean on employees, and remind them of the bad things that might happen if the union becomes the bargaining unit. Or perhaps some workers might find themselves fired or laid off. (Not related to their union organizing, of course. That would be illegal.)
But from my experiences, and that of many others that I know, I am more inclined to suspect that a lot of people sign the union authorization cards because they are either strongly encouraged or even directly threatened to do so. Labor unions are fundamentally institutions of organized violence. A friend who has since passed on left me this account of working in a union shop in California during World War II (when the federal government leaned pretty heavily on employers to accept unions):Our next problem was that after three months on the job, workers were required to join the paper workers union. Those who did not received disfiguring beatings after hours. Having seen what happened to another girl in same position as Wanda and I, we decided that rather than face the same treatment we would quit our jobs before the three months ended.
I remember being quite young and surprised that my father was home during the day. He explained that his union, the Boilermakers/Blacksmiths, had gone on strike. "Can't you go to work anyway?"
"Not if you want to live."
And unfortunately, this wasn't just his imagination. There's a fascinating decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Enmons (1973), that held that the Hobbs Act that "makes it a federal crime to obstruct interstate commerce by robbery or extortion" did not apply to labor unions engaged in destroying power company transformers with rifles and explosives because such use of violence did not qualify as extortion. Extortion means that you are getting something that you don't have a right to get--while higher wages obtained through such violence was a legitimate union bargaining tactic. The Court may have actually come to the right conclusion, based on the legal definition of extortion and the legislative intent of the Hobbs Act--but it does show you something of how labor unions get things done.
I had a friend in California who grew up in Michigan. His father was a UAW local official. He remembered vividly being in a coffee shop with his family one day. The guy in the next booth made some remark to a companion that was uncomplimentary to the union--and my friend's father instinctively swung his coffee mug around and shattered it on this guy's jaw.
There's a long and ugly, bloody, deadly history of corporations and labor unions fighting it out in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There's plenty of evil that was done by both sides. But this is not the situation today--not even close. Labor violence today is almost entirely by labor unions. I can easily believe that the reason that the AFL-CIO wants to "streamline" the process is that they are intimidating workers into signing authorization cards--and don't dare risk a secret ballot.
Michael Crichton Has Died
Details here. Of cancer--not the disappointment of the election. Andromeda Strain was his first novel, written while he was in medical school--and I still it is his best--and that is very good indeed.
Tax Policy
Obama kept promising during the campaign to give tax cuts for 95% of Americans. In combination with the rest of his promises, the only way that this is going to happen is one of the following:
1. Big deficits.
2. A rather astonishing increase in income taxes on the multimillionaires and billionaires that funded his campaign.
3. New taxes, such as what he proposed to bankrupt anyone who built coal burning power plants.
Big deficits will result in either higher interest rates (as the government borrows) or higher inflation (if he can persuade the Fed to print more money). Either way, it sounds like I might be better off selling some of my bonds, and paying off the mortgage before rising interest rates or inflation drives down the value of the bonds. Either strategy will drive up the mortgage payment when it comes up for adjustment next year.
New taxes, especially carbon taxes, seem inevitable, since this will force many American businesses under, and benefit foreign competitors. I suspect that whatever health insurance plan comes out of Obama will drive many small businesses under as well--to the benefit of larger companies which are more likely to have unionized workforces (and which already have health insurance because of that). I'm reminded of Hillary Clinton's response back 15 years ago when someone asked about the small businesses that her plan would close, "I'm not responsible for every undercapitalized business in America."
I've already been talking to people who may start working half-time because they are expecting Obama's "soak the rich" plan to affect them. Of course, working half-time is only possible if your employer doesn't get driven under by the health insurance mandates.
I think that Republicans will have a real chance of retaking control of Congress in 2010--assuming that they don't decide that their mistake this time around was that they didn't get to the left of the Democrats on gay marriage and government ownership of the means of production. They are called the stupid party for a reason. I already know a lot of people who can only reluctantly vote Republican because they are so committed to "me, too" policies.
The Downside of Being a Contractor
A construction crew cut through the power line that feeds the company--and as a result, there is no power, and there may not be for several hours. In the meantime, I'm back in my place here in Bend, editing my wife's manuscript about the book of Jonah.
Looking at the Initiatives
When they were given a chance to make straight up and down votes on social conservative issues, even places like California seem to do the right thing--which makes me think that the crowd who thought that McCain could beat Obama because he wasn't very conservative don't really understand this. From the CNN roundup, around 10:00 PM PST:
In Arizona, it's the second time around, but it appears that the voters have passed a ban on gay marriage.
In California, they are still counting the votes, but a ban on gay marriage overturning the California Supreme Court is ahead.
Florida's ban on gay marriage is way ahead.
Arkansas's ban on gay couples adopting is also out ahead.
On that last one, let me emphasize that intrinsically, I don't have a problem with gay couples adopting kids. But states that allow it end up opening the door to all the rest of the madness that goes along with it: sexual orientation antidiscrimination laws; civil unions; and when civil unions aren't enough, gay marriage imposed by the courts. So as much as I would like to leave the adoption option open to gay couples, it doesn't seem as though there's much choice in the matter.
There Is One Good Aspect To This Disaster
I mean, besides the end of, "America is a fiercely racist place" as the dominant theme of the left. And that is that this economic disaster which was largely (although not exclusively) the doing of Democrats, is now on their doorstep. They are going to try and blame it on Republicans, but two years from now, when Congress has finished going on a spending frenzy that will make the last four years of Republican control look pretty restrained, there won't be anyone left to blame but Democrats for failure to get out of the mess.
I'm glad that I am down to one house payment, and I will likely be paying off the only car payment shortly. It is probably a good time to hunker down, learn to live very modestly, and hope that Obama doesn't come up with some strategy to tax assets, once it becomes apparent that taxing higher incomes isn't going to generate the loads of revenue required to fund the orgy of spending that Democrats in Congress are going to start.
Racist America
One thing that I do not want to ever hear again: what a racist nation America is. We just elected a black man (and not even a particularly qualified candidate) to be President of the United States.
Can We Stop Pretending?
At this point, it doesn't look good for McCain--but this isn't the landslide that the mainstream media pretended that Obama was going to enjoy. McCain might still win this, but it looks most unlikely.
What we need to stop pretending about: there are a lot of Republicans who really, really wanted to believe that the Religious Right is irrelevant to the modern Republican Party--indeed, even something of a handicap. So what happened? McCain went out of his way to insult and offend the Religious Right throughout the primaries. Until he picked Sarah Palin, he had simply no chance at all of winning this election. As it happened, Palin seems to have taken McCain within striking distance of the White House--but it wasn't quite enough, and it was a bit too late.
The Republican Party needs the Religious Right to win elections. Stop kidding yourself. Sure, there are gay conservatives out there, and I wouldn't go out of our way to insult them. But even if the Republican Party became so gay-friendly that every gay person in America started voting Republican (which is very, very unlikely), they would still be a fraction of the number of Religious Right voters.
Exit Polls
Remember 2004, when the media crowded exultantly about Kerry's victory based on the exit polls? I expect the mainstream media to do the same this time to try and discourage Republican voters, especially in the West.
Yet Another Argument for Limited Government
One of the stronger arguments for limiting governmental power is that someone needs to decide what the government should do. The choice is simple: either the majority makes the decisions, or a wise and thoughtful elite makes the decisions. (Let me know when you find that wise and thoughtful elite.)
Gallup reports on the reasons given by voters for picking either Obama or McCain: 35% of Obama supporters are doing so because they "Want change/fresh approach" while only 2% of Obama supporters are voting for him because Obama is "Experienced/qualified."
I won't claim that McCain is everything that I want in a president--far from it. This isn't exactly a contest between two outstanding choices--more like a choice between a disappointing but adequately qualified candidate and a profoundly unqualified candidate. We're not electing a student body president. This is the single most important job on this whole planet--and only 2% of Obama voters call him "Experienced/qualified." This is scary. The good news is that 98% of Obama voters are under no illusions that he is qualified for the job; the bad news is that they are going to vote for him anyway.
Palin Exonerated
From the November 3, 2008 Miami Herald:
Fascism, the End of Free Speech, and the Democrats
Imagine if Republicans were trying to suppress liberal and leftist points of view by having the government order television and radio stations not to carry programs like Bill Moyers' Now. Imagine if John McCain retaliated against liberal newspapers by replacing their reporters on the campaign plane with reporters from conservative newspapers? As Dr. Lott points out, Obama and the Democrats seem intent on ending freedom of speech--at least, for those that disagree with them:
Keep in mind that the liberal wing of the Democratic Party--the ones that actually believed that the correct response to speech was more speech--has largely been replaced with "progressives" who believe in free speech only as long as they are speaking. This is the same mentality that drives "speech codes" on college campuses, and Obama supporters using Molotov cocktails to burn a McCain sign. As this report from the Portland Oregonian points out:
Of course, the left has always believed in playing with fire: burning the Reichstag (which was actually done by a Communist, although the Nazis took full advantage of his stupidity); and of course, Obama's friend and political godfather, Bill Ayers, who firebombed the house of a New York judge some years back.
There is a real danger of fascism in this country, when you look at the combination of idol worship and fanaticism that characterizes Obama's supporters.
McCain Might Win Tomorrow...
First of all, the last sample taken by Zogby on Halloween night shows McCain up one point on Obama. It's only 1000 people, but Dick Morris thinks that the ads taking Obama to task for his association with Rev. "God Damn America" Wright may be turning the tide:It’s only a one night poll, but John Zogby reports that his Friday night survey shows McCain leading Obama by 48 to 47. It’s only a one night poll (as opposed to the usual three day moving average) but it is 1,000 interviews. It is also over Halloween night! But it is the first poll in three weeks that shows McCain leading. What’s up? We think that the advertisement being run by GOPTrust.com is having an effect. It is an ad featuring Rev. Jeremiah Wright decrying America and calling it “the USA of KKK” while Obama sat, deaf-mute in the congregation. By bringing the shocking reality of Rev. Wright back to America’s TV screens; GOPTrust.com is performing an important public service. It is just not credible that Obama sat in the congregation for twenty years, asked the Reverend to officiate at his wedding and to baptize his children, titled his book after one of his sermons, and did not know the kind of vile, anti-American hatred he was spewing.
I also mentioned recently that the margin of error in the latest poll published by Investors' Business Daily was larger than Obama's lead over McCain. IowaHawk points out here that margin of error is based on assumptions about your sample size and how random the sample is (of course).
But I would make even another point that isn't there: When pollsters take a survey, they ask for demographic information about those they have surveyed, and then use that information (race, age, income level, party affiliation) to weight the raw data so that it more accurately reflects a national sample. Therefore, if 58% of those who answered your survey were female, you adjust the final data to conform to the 51% of voters who are actually female. That's all fine and good, but what does it do to the margin of error if your raw data reflects a sample that very far from the actual voting population? It isn't just a matter of miscomputing the adjusted data; the margin of error for underrepresented groups will also be screwed up.
This is no time to be saying, "My vote against Obama won't matter." Get out and there and vote. You do not want this to turn into a revolution a year or two down the line against the fascism that the Democratic Party represents. It will not be pretty.
Is Anyone Paying Attention?
I got into a discussion with a co-worker today at lunch, and I mentioned the cost of the bailout. "What bailout?" This is an educated, intelligent person who doesn't watch the news--and had no idea that Congress approved an $850 billion bailout a few weeks ago. No wonder elections turn out so stupidly in this country--I don't think this guy is alone.
Someone Who Has Not Learned From History
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) spoke at a synagogue and said that we should let Russia invade Georgia:
Wow! But I think we can say with some certainty that an invasion of Cuba (which is also right next door) would be capitalist imperialism to Nadler, wouldn't it?
I'm Obviously in the Wrong Part of the U.S.
Michael Covington at the University of Georgia complains:
Too Close To Call
Investors' Business Daily is rather proud of the fact that their polling organization was closest to correct with the 2004 election prediction--and they are showing a race too close to call, with Obama 2.1 points ahead of McCain--but the margin of error is 3.4 points. Which means that within a 95% confidence interval, McCain could be ahead of Obama.
Of course, how those votes are distributed, state by state, really matters. If 200,000 voters went from undecided to McCain--but all those voters were in Idaho, Alaska, and Wyoming, it wouldn't matter--McCain has those states in the bag. Similarly, if those 200,000 voters were in two or three of the battleground states, that might be enough for McCain to win.
So remember: it's close. If you live in one of the battleground states, your vote really matters! Unless you were going to vote for Obama, in which case it doesn't much matter, and you might as well stay home or vote for Ralph Nader.
Why Did America Move Left?
Even if, by some miracle, McCain manages to eke out a victory on Tuesday, it should be apparent from the level of support that Obama enjoys, especially among the young, that America has moved very, very far to the left over the last few years. It is apparent to me that the left's utter control of the academy plays a large part in this. It may not last; once kids get out of school, start working, and start paying taxes, the simple explanations that their professors drummed into them in school start to wear down. Still, the American taxpayers will be paying for having subsidized political indoctrination for years to come.
Unfortunately, during the years when Republicans were actually in control of the government, there was no real effort to question the political monoculture of the academy. Once the Democrats are in complete control, the academy will doubtless become even less politically diverse.
The Republicans are called "the stupid party" for good reasons, and this is one of them. Republicans in Congress looked on dumbly while the left exercised its control over education to make sure that traditional liberals (those that still believe in academic freedom and scholarship over polemics) were cast as "conservatives." And conservatives? They weren't in the academy in large numbers anyway, and have now almost disappeared from the humanities and social sciences. The parallels to another messianic political figure who came out of nowhere, with questions about his ancestry, and substantial funding from the wealthy, are strong:"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,'" he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, "I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'" And on May 1, 1937, he declared, "This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing." [William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 249]
If conservatives (or increasingly, even traditional liberals) want to have any hope for the future, they are going to have to spend the money to create an alternative to the current higher education system. Unfortunately, many private schools that style themselves as Christian universities spend too much time and energy aping the secular system, to the point where the professors there might as well be teaching at Harvard or Berkeley. We are also going to have to find ways to make private education affordable, too, since conservatives aren't wealthy; most struggle to afford to send their kids to public institutions.
