A former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. does not mingle with boat dealers; he mingles with investment bankers; and the first rule, before handing out taxpayer money, is to have mingled with the people you want to hand it to.(That way they know whom they owe). I admire your ability to recognize your “circle of competence” and live within it.
Still, I do feel that in me, and my little literary business, there is opportunity for you, and your $700 billion. Allow me to explain why.
Be Fair
1) By giving the money to me, instead of someone less deserving, you will make the world a fairer place.
As much as I admire all of your decisions I can’t help but notice that the main qualification of the bankers to whom you have been giving money, so that they might make smart loans, is that they have gone almost bankrupt by making stupid loans.
As your mind is subtle, I can only assume that you secretly believe that the American economy right now needs not smart loans, but more stupid ones -- and thus that you have targeted the bankers who have proven they can make them.
I, unfortunately, have not flirted with bankruptcy, or made any stupid loans. But here’s my point: I haven’t been given the chance! Allow me to prove my financial ineptitude to you. I swear to you that when I return for my second round of assistance I will have proven myself fully qualified to receive it.
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital--to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue.I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous--which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money, would be expelled from finance.
When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989--Liar's Poker, it was called--it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.
For writers who seek to influence public affairs, timing plays a paramount role. And few writers have had better timing than Adolf Augustus Berle.Fascinating.
In the summer of 1932, with America trapped in the greatest financial crisis in its history, Berle published “The Modern Corporation and Private Property,” a scholarly yet readable analysis of America’s largest companies and their managers. Berle is largely forgotten today, yet with that book he succeeded in persuading Americans to see their economic system in a new way — and helped set the stage for the most fundamental realignment of power since abolition.
The stock market had plunged vertiginously three years earlier, and by 1932 Americans were desperate to reverse the much wider collapse that had ensued — and to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. The New Republic was soon hailing “The Modern Corporation” as the book of the year, while The New York Herald Tribune pronounced it “the most important work bearing on American statecraft” since the Federalist Papers. Louis Brandeis would cite its arguments in a major Supreme Court ruling on corporate power. Running for president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt recruited Berle — a Republican Wall Street lawyer who had supported Hoover — to join his “brain trust,” and that fall entrusted him with drafting what became the most important speech of the campaign. After the election, Berle remained in New York, yet his connection to the president he audaciously addressed as “Dear Caesar” was such that Time would characterize “The Modern Corporation” as “the economic bible of the Roosevelt administration.”
A Summary of Remarks by Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey at the GEOINT Symposium
At the GEOINT Symposium in Nashville, Tennessee, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Jim Woolsey gave a chilling account of the implications for national security related to the United States' dependence on foreign oil. He described the vulnerabilities of a resource located far from our shores, highlighting how consumer habits could have dramatic geopolitical consequences. He then offered a solution to the crisis by suggesting a way to remove oil as a strategic commodity.
Woolsey's assessment of the problem is similar to what we have heard from T. Boone Pickens, the oil businessman-turned wind power advocate. We spend in the range of $350 - $700 billion per year for oil, depending on the price per barrel. The reality is that the U.S. and other oil importers like China and India are engaging in the biggest transfer of wealth in history. The result is that the U.S. is either directly or indirectly providing funds to support countries that may not have our best interests at heart. "Oil tends to be produced by countries that are either run by autocrats or dictators. (One exception: Norway). So, one of the things we are doing with this money is contributing to the support of dictators. Putin [Russia] and Chavez [Venezuela] are a bit quieter with oil at $65 per barrel," said Woolsey. "[However], a national energy policy that depends on oil is probably one of the stupider policies ever done. Even at $65 per barrel, we still have one of the biggest transfers of wealth the world has ever seen."
During a sweltering Friday evening rush hour in early October, Jeanette Scanlon spent two-and-a-half hours with 20 other people waving a homemade Barack Obama sign at the cars flowing through a busy intersection in Plant City, Florida.A friend recently mentioned that one of the canvasers asked if they could leave an orange dot on their mailbox, notifying other workers that they have already voted! I wonder how long it will be until citizens push back on the extensive personal data mining.
"I got shot the bird one time," laughs the easy-natured Scanlon, a 43-year-old single mother of three and a Tampa psychiatrist's billing manager. "That wasn't the thumbs up I was looking for."
Scanlon is one of an estimated 230,000 volunteers who are powering Obama's get-out-the-vote campaign in the swing state of Florida. And while sign-waving is a decidedly low-tech appeal to voters' hearts and minds, make no mistake: The Obama campaign's technology is represented here. Scanlon organized the gathering — and 24 others since September — through Obama's social networking site, my.BarackObama.com. Similarly, she used the site's Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool in September to find registered voters in her own neighborhood, so she could canvass them for Obama. And this weekend, Scanlon and another 75 or so Plant City volunteers will be phoning thousands of Floridians to urge them to vote, using a sophisticated database provided by the Obama campaign to ensure they don't call McCain supporters by mistake.
The Obama campaign has been building, tweaking and tinkering with its technology and organizational infrastructure since it kicked off in February 2007, and today has most sophisticated organizing apparatus of any presidential campaign in history. Previous political campaigns have tapped the internet in innovative ways — Howard Dean's 2004 presidential run, and Ron Paul's bid for this year's Republican nomination, to name two. But Obama is the first to successfully integrate technology with a revamped model of political organization that stresses volunteer participation and feedback on a massive scale, erecting a vast, intricate machine set to fuel an unprecedented get-out-the-vote drive in the final days before Tuesday's election.
Enter Akin Gump partner Tommy Thompson — the former Wisconsin governor, former secretary of Health and Human Services and former presidential hopeful. Yesterday, Thompson was officially named independent counsel for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association’s newly created Safety and Integrity Alliance. According to a press release, Thompson will lead a team that will monitor the reform program and provide annual progress reports.Horse racing....
The Law Blog recently spoke to the 66 year-old Thompson to talk about politics, ponies and his new gig.
Why were you the man for the job?
I was the secretary of Health and Human Services, and was there when 9/11 and all those other things had to be taken care of. I was responsible for the FDA. I was governor for 15 years. I’m a farmer. I had an interest in Flashy Bull. I’ve been passionate about horse racing. Plus, My law firm, Akin Gump, does this kind of work. We’ve done it for the NFL in the past, and for all kinds of investigations into government.
Thank you for contacting me to share your thoughts on the administration's proposal to purchase up to $700 billion of bad mortgage debt. I very much appreciated hearing from you.Much more on the splurge, here.I opposed the bailout plan passed by Congress, because though well intentioned, and certainly much improved over the administration's original proposal, it remained deeply flawed. It failed to offset the cost of the plan, leaving taxpayers to bear the burden of serious lapses of judgment by private financial institutions, their regulators, and the enablers in Washington who paved the way for this catastrophe by removing the safeguards that had protected consumers and the economy since the great depression. Second, this bill did not include meaningful provisions to help families facing foreclosure. This is more than just a matter of fairness - the housing crisis is the root cause of the credit market collapse, and unless we address it, any rescue package is far less likely to work. Finally, the measure failed to address the deeply flawed regulatory structure that paved the way for this crisis. Taxpayers deserve a plan that puts their concerns ahead of those who got us into this mess.
Again, thank you for contacting me. Please feel free to do so again in the future.
Appeared recently in the New York Times print edition. More here.
Declan McCullagh notes the large amount of pork in the bill that passed Friday.
The proposed legislation would authorize Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. to initiate what is likely to become the biggest government bailout in U.S. history, allowing him to spend up to $700 billion to relieve faltering banks and other firms of bad assets backed by home mortgages, which are falling into foreclosure at record rates.The plan would give Paulson broad latitude to purchase any assets from any firms at any price and to assemble a team of individuals and institutions to manage them. In wielding those powers, Paulson and others hope to contain a crisis that already has caused the failure or forced the rescue of a half-dozen major Wall Street firms and unnerved markets around the world.
Congressional negotiators have now completed action on a $700bn authorisation for the bail-out of the financial sector. This step was as necessary as the need for it was regrettable. There are hugely important tactical issues regarding the deployment of these funds that the authorities will need to consider in the weeks and months ahead if the chance of containing the damage is to be maximised. I expect to return to these issues once the legislation is passed.In the meantime, it is necessary to consider the impact of the bail-out and the conditions necessitating it on federal budget policy. The idea seems to have taken hold in recent days that because of the unfortunate need to bail out the financial sector, the nation will have to scale back its aspirations in other areas such as healthcare, energy, education and tax relief. This is more wrong than right. We have here the unusual case where economic analysis actually suggests that dismal conclusions are unwarranted and the events of the last weeks suggest that for the near term, government should do more, not less.
My email to Wisconsin Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl. I also sent this to Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin:
Dear Senator Feingold:
I am writing to express my opposition to the proposed $700,000,000,000 toxic debt instrument bailout.
I believe it is wrong for us to continue the practice of spending beyond our means and simply passing more debt to our children and grandchildren. It is also wrong to stoke the fires of inflation.
If you believe these funds are necessary, then I suggest the following:
Best wishes,
Jim
Related:
Some 258 parties, a number of them hosted by lobbyists for the finance, insurance, and real estate industries, have been thrown for members of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee this year, according to an investigation by the Sunlight Foundation's Party Time project. Members of the House committee, along with the Senate Banking Committee, are considering the $700 billion bailout legislation for the financial sector proposed by the administration.A sampling of parties include:
Anyone who caught even a sliver of yesterday's hearings in the U.S. Senate on the proposed Treasury bailout of the mortgage-backed securities market knows that the current financial crisis is far from over. Suddenly all sorts of previously unthinkable catastrophes seem possible.The total collapse of the global financial system is one thing -- everyone at Davos in January saw that coming. But the shrinkage of the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. bonus pool is another. Whatever else the Treasury achieves it must know that if the employees of Goldman suffer any sort of pay cut, it will be judged to have failed. And our country may never recover.
Last year Goldman paid its employees $20 billion, 44 percent of the firm's revenue. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein took home $68.5 million, and many otherwise ordinary human beings took home $10 million or mor
From Paulson to You | 11:41 a.m. In response to a question, Secretary Paulson sought to clear the air about who the bailout was supposed to help. "This is all about the American taxpayer," he said. "That's all we care about." He continued:Related: Public Markup of the Dodd bailout proposal.Any banking operation in the United states that is doing business with the American public is important. The American public in dealing with the financial system doesn't know who owns that bank.
Later, he added, "You ask me about taxpayers being on the hook? Guess what, they are already on the hook."
A few years ago, I had an opportunity to hear "her deepness" Sylvia Earle speak. She included this short video in her presentation - "the Power of One".
Earle emphasized the opportunities we all have to change the world. I recalled her talk while visiting with Hal Herron recently. Herron, of Riverton, Wyoming has been adding outdoor art to his home town in an interesting way.
Museums often create large banners to promote an exhibit. Herron sought out these banners after a showing is complete. He pays for shipping to Riverton and places them around the community for all to enjoy. Fascinating. He forwarded two photos, seen below:
Bill Perkin's full page New York Times ad in today's paper is another illustration of the "Power of One". 
Perkins approach requires a certain size checkbook, of course :)
All of which reminds me of the "two greatest commandments".
A few years ago, senior officials at the Bank for International Settlements started ringing alarm bells about the scale of leverage that was quietly building up in the financial system. Back then, though, it was fantastically hard to get American policymakers - let alone bankers - to listen.In the go-go days of the credit bubble, Washington policymakers blithely assumed that the Western financial system had plenty of capital to cope with any potential risks. Consequently, as one former BIS official admits: "Worrying about leverage wasn't fashionable at all - no one wanted to hear."
Fast-forward a couple of years and, my, how those Western financiers are having to eat humble pie (even to the point of accepting a helping hand from the once-ailing Japanese). After all, the events of the past year have now made it patently - horrifically - obvious that the Western banking system has become dangerously undercapitalised in recent years, to the point where even the Federal Reserve is having to shore up its defences.
Moreover, it is now also clear that Western policymakers are belatedly trying to correct this state of affairs. The days when high leverage, mega bonuses and wacky instruments were equated with financial virility have gone; instead a more humble, back-to-basics and slim-line approach is what investors are demanding. Thus, deleveraging is now all the rage - in whatever form it might take.
One of life's rules is that there's bad in good and good in bad. The total collapse of the U.S. financial system is no exception. Even in the midst of the current financial despair we can look around and identify many collateral benefits.A lot of attractive office space seems to be opening up in midtown Manhattan, for instance, and the U.S. government is now getting paid to borrow money. (And with T-bills yielding 0 percent, they really ought to borrow a lot more of it, and quickly.)
And so as Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer John Mack blasts short sellers for his problems, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein swans around pretending to be above this little panic, we ought to step back and enjoy the positives.
TAMMY WYNEN stands near the back of a crowd outside a paper mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin. At a bank of microphones, speakers rail against Adam Smith; one, from the United Steel Workers, literally blames "The Wealth of Nations" for the mill's impending closure. Many also hint that the soon-to-be unemployed mill workers should vote for Barack Obama in November.But Mrs Wynen, a 27-year veteran of the paper mill, is not so sure. She cannot remember the last time she saw Mr Obama recite the pledge of allegiance. And her family loves Sarah Palin, John McCain's new running-mate. Her children have lines from Mrs Palin's convention speech off pat. Still, Mrs Wynen says she doesn't know who she will vote for. The candidates look poised to spend a lot of time and money in Wisconsin wooing her.
The Economist. Democrat convention illustrations can be found here.
Great stuff.
Driving the speed limit early this morning, a dark blue car with flags zoomed past. A blur on my left. The nearby stop light provided an opportunity to take this photo.
Obama 12? Does it imply there are numbers 1 to 11 driving around? Or, is it a play on Adam 12? One needs to be of a certain age to recall the TV series Adam 12.
Finally, the car is a new Chevy Malibu. It's interesting that there is no mention of Joe Biden on the flags, stickers or plate, which is perhaps, for the best.
"Right. It takes unconventional and courageous thinking to come up with a plan that clears a highway lane for the well off, while the middle class and working poor are left to inhale each other's $5-a-gallon exhaust fumes. The worst thing about this ill-conceived decision ... is it allocates freedom of movement according to income."-- From "Diamond Lanes for the Rich," by Tim Rutten (Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2008)
Few think of it this way, but America already has a major flat tax that we all pay equally: the 18.4-cent federal tax that is applied to each and every gallon of gasoline we purchase, or the 24.4 cents on every gallon of diesel. Say a young person, who just lost his job at McDonald's, buys a gallon of gas to get to an interview at Burger King at the same time Warren Buffet buys a gallon of gas to get to the airport in Omaha to board his personal jet: Both the unemployed, below-minimum-wage worker and America's richest billionaire contribute the exact same amount toward the nation's highway system on that day.
Now, however, we are being told - to an increasingly urgent drumbeat - that America can no longer afford the luxury of building new infrastructure or even maintaining our current road system, because there's just no funding for these programs. It's here that the complete absence of critical thinking about America's future should astonish and dismay anyone who looks at the facts even casually.
But if you want to download and save those laws to your computer, forget it.The state claims copyright to those laws. It dictates how you can access and distribute them -- and therefore how much you'll have to pay for print or digital copies.
It forbids people from storing or distributing its laws without consent.
That doesn't sit well with Carl Malamud, a Sebastopol resident with an impressive track record of pushing for digital access to public information. He wants California -- and every other federal, state and local agency -- to drop their copyright claims on law, contending it will pave the way for innovators to create new ways of searching and presenting laws.
"When it comes to the law, the courts have always said there can be no copyright because people are obligated to know what it says," Malamud said. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse in court."
Malamud is spoiling for a major legal fight.
The Economist: Every day this week, our cartoonist is sending his sketches from the Democratic convention in Denver, Colorado. Sketches from previous days can be found here. You can find up-to-the-minute coverage on our American politics blog.
If "An Inconvenient Truth" sounded the alarm on global warming, "I.O.U.S.A.," a new documentary opening in theaters Friday, hopes to do the same for the rising federal deficit.Backed by Blackstone Group Chairman Peter Peterson, "I.O.U.S.A." follows former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker and the Concord Coalition's Robert Bixby on a "fiscal wake-up tour" across America. In the movie, which is co-written by "Empire of Debt" co-author Addison Wiggin and directed by "Wordplay" filmmaker Patrick Creadon, Messrs. Walker and Bixby argue that unless the government alters its policies and spending habits, the U.S. will be in for a serious financial meltdown.
Mr. Walker, who headed the Government Accountability Office from 1998-2008, exited his official U.S. post five years early in order to head the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and dedicate himself fulltime to fiscal education before, as he says, "we face a real economic crisis." Mr. Walker spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the dangers of the debt and what needs to be done to prevent what he foresees to be an economic catastrophe.>
Costco held a very well attended party this evening celebrating the opening of their new Middleton warehouse club [Map].
I did not see a stand to purchase law degrees.
Middleton provided a TIF (Tax Incremental Financing) agreement to the site developer. A related Isthmus article can be found here.
A few additional photos:
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Larry Lessig
I have my doubts - unfortunately - that Obama will be much better on the crucial broadband issue for two reasons:
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy was on the march and we declared the End of History. Nearly two decades later, a neo-imperialist Russia is at war with Georgia, Communist China is proudly hosting the Olympics, and we find that, instead, we have entered the Age of Authoritarianism.It is worth recalling how different we thought the future would be in the immediate, happy aftermath of the end of the cold war. Remember Francis Fukuyama's ringing assertion: "The triumph of the west, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism."
Even in the heady days of 1989, that declaration of universal - and possibly eternal - ideological victory seemed a little hubristic to Professor Fukuyama's many critics. Yet his essay made such an impact because it captured the scale, and the enormous benefits, of the change sweeping through the world. Not only was the stifling Soviet - which was really the Russian - suzerainty over central and eastern Europe and central Asia coming to an end but, even more importantly, the very idea of a one-party state, ruthlessly presiding over a centrally planned economy, seemed to be discredited, if not forever, then surely for our lifetimes.
BRODY MULLINS and ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON:
When the Democratic Party holds its convention the week after next, members of Congress will be able to hear singer Kanye West at an all-expenses paid party sponsored by the recording industry.They can play in a poker tournament with Ben Affleck, courtesy of the poker industry. They can try to hit a home run at Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies, thanks to AT&T Corp. Free drinks and cigars will be on offer at a bash thrown by the liquor industry.
The corporate largesse is on tap despite new ethics laws and rules that both chambers of Congress adopted in 2007, aimed at weakening the links between lawmakers and lobbyists. Spearheaded by the Democratic Party, the ethics effort included an attempt to ban corporations and lobbyists from throwing lavish parties for members at the national political conventions.
But in the months since the new rules took effect, lawmakers have watered down the guidelines, and Capitol Hill and K Street have teamed up to find ways around the guidelines as written. Politicians and lobbyists are now preparing about 400 of the biggest parties -- both at the Democratic gathering in Colorado and when Republicans convene the following week in St. Paul -- that conventioneers have ever seen.
Verizon, AT&T, and their regulated cohorts love to blab how the "free market" and "competition" will keep prices low for consumers. According to California, it's a big fat expensive lie. The cost of basic phone service has soared since the Public Utilities Commission lifted price controls in 2006, leading the agency to conclude:"There is no indication of any change in the near future regarding the current state of competition. Market forces have not yet met the challenge of controlling price increases."
AT&T is "carefully considering" monitoring the Web-surfing activities of customers who use its Internet service, the company said in a letter in response to an inquiry from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.While the company said it hadn't tested such a system for monitoring display advertising viewing habits or committed to a particular technology, it expressed much more interest in the approach than the other big Internet providers who also responded to the committee's letter.
AT&T did however promise that if it does decide to start tracking its customers online, it will "do so the right way." In particular, the advertising system will require customers to affirmatively agree to have their surfing monitored. This sort of "opt-in" approach is preferred by privacy experts to the "opt-out" method, practiced by most ad targeting companies today, which records the behavior of anyone who doesn't explicitly ask to not to be tracked.
For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened, or why.More from James Fallows.The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed, reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.
A failure to communicate between Monticello and TDS Telecom, its chief phone and cable provider, is threatening to short-circuit plans to make the city one of the most wired communities in the nation.Fascinating. It's not like TDS is building fiber to the home here. We're stuck with (and continue to pay for) nearly century old copper networks. Much like roads, I believe that public fiber networks (open to any player) make sense, particularly when there is no evidence that the incumbent telcos plan to upgrade their infrastructure.Both Monticello and TDS Telecom are constructing multi-million dollar fiber-optic networks that will directly connect to every home, office and business in the city.
When the networks come online in the next year or so, they would be among only about 45 in the country that provide such connectivity.
But Monticello -- a city of about 11,000 in northern Wright County -- also may be the only locale where the public and private sectors are competing so directly for paying customers.
The acrimony from such direct competition has led to the filing of what may become a precedent-setting lawsuit by TDS questioning whether municipalities can use revenue bonds to create fiber-optic networks.
Raise less corn and more hell," Mary Elizabeth Lease harangued Kansas farmers during America's Populist era, but no such voice cries out today. America's 21st-century financial victims make no protest against the Federal Reserve's policy of showering dollars on the people who would seem to need them least.Long ago and far away, a brilliant man of letters floated an idea. To stop a financial panic cold, he proposed, a central bank should lend freely, though at a high rate of interest. Nonsense, countered a certain hard-headed commercial banker. Such a policy would only instigate more crises by egging on lenders and borrowers to take more risks. The commercial banker wrote clumsily, the man of letters fluently. It was no contest.
The doctrine of activist central banking owes much to its progenitor, the Victorian genius Walter Bagehot. But Bagehot might not recognize his own idea in practice today. Late in the spring of 2007, American banks paid an average of 4.35% on three-month certificates of deposit. Then came the mortgage mess, and the Fed's crash program of interest-rate therapy. Today, a three-month CD yields just 2.65%, or little more than half the measured rate of inflation. It wasn't the nation's small savers who brought down Bear Stearns, or tried to fob off subprime mortgages as "triple-A." Yet it's the savers who took a pay cut -- and the savers who, today, in the heat of a presidential election year, are holding their tongues.
Biofuel plants have been put on hold faster than your phone company’s tech support line. With corn and soy prices hitting record high prices and an ethanol glut flooding the market, ethanol’s profit margin per gallon has dropped to a meager 25 cents from $2. That’s causing numerous ethanol and biodiesel plants to get put on hold or downright canceled. Hundreds of millions of gallons of production capacity and hundreds of millions of dollars in biofuel investments are now hanging in limbo, as investors hope prices will level out.That’s not to say that ethanol is dead in the water. There’s a variety of positive reports coming out on the future of the industry — there’s reports that see a meaningful future for ethanol , as well reports saying ethanol could be deliver a better-than-expected energy return. Add in a healthy merger and acquisition market and biofuels will play a role in the future of weaning the U.S. off oil.
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers -- and televisions and iPods and everything else -- to ensure that you didn't violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear.OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment.
Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it's calling "Digital Manners Policies." According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast "orders" limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.
The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That's a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices -- computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders -- with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.
Fios also has helped future-proof Verizon's network. While its cable competitors buckle under the pressure of peer-to-peer traffic on their networks, Verizon has enough capacity in its network, thanks to its fiber upgrades, to weather the storm unscathed and work on its own timetable to find more efficient ways to handle peer-to-peer traffic.The Madison area is stuck with an aging telco infrastructure. Neither AT&T, nor TDS have any plans to upgrade their networks to the home. Not good.... Verizon FIOS Deployment Map.Mark Wegleitner, Verizon's senior vice president of technology in charge of broadband and consumer services, has helped develop and drive Verizon's fiber strategy. I sat down with him at the Nxtcomm trade show in Las Vegas last week to talk about a wide variety of topics, including the controversy over Comcast's treatment of BitTorrent traffic, faster speeds for Fios, and what the company plans to do next when it reaches its 2010 goal of passing 18 million homes with fiber.
The governor of the Central Bank of Luxembourg raised some eyebrows when he questioned the integrity of the fast-growing balance sheet of the European Central Bank. Yves Mersch, a member of the ECB's governing council as well as the Ben Bernanke of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, raised the issue at a gathering of the International Capital Market Association in Vienna two weeks ago.Insofar as a currency derives its strength from the balance sheet of the issuing central bank, the euro is unsound and becoming more so, as Mr. Mersch did not quite say. We, however, will say it for him. In fact, we will say the same for most of the leading monetary brands, that of the United States not excluded. The mortgage mess is the immediate cause of the new debasement. A long-held article of central banking dogma is the remote cause.
Mr. Mersch landed on the front page of the Financial Times by acknowledging that the ECB is accepting a dubious kind of mortgage collateral in exchange for loans to the world's liquidity-parched financial institutions. In so many words, Mr. Mersch charged that the commercial banks are gaming the central bank, a situation he called of "high concern." Reading Mr. Mersch, we thought of Thomson Hankey.
Dear Mr. Zellmer:Thank you for contacting me about the 2007 Farm Bill (the Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act, H.R. 2419). It is good to hear from you, and I apologize for the delay in my response.
As you know, the U.S. House of Representatives recently considered the 2007 Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is a comprehensive piece of legislation which touches on a number of agriculture-related issues, including commodity price support programs, nutrition programs, alternative energy, and rural development.
After a considerable amount of deliberation in a conference committee, the House and Senate each passed a conference report that represented the resulting policy compromises. You may be interested to know that I joined my colleagues in the House of Representatives to pass this conference report by a vote of 318 to 106.
While I believe that the U.S. House of Representatives should have taken this opportunity to implement expansive agricultural policy reforms, I supported the conference report because it does contain some noteworthy improvements in the Farm Bill programs. The alternatives to reauthorizing the Farm Bill this year were to extend the previous version of the farm bill or to revert to regulations dating to the 1940s. In my view, neither of these alternatives are desirable or acceptable.
The aspects of the conference report that I strongly support include expanding and updating the Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) program, and investments in nutrition programs that help 38 million American families afford healthy food. For the first time, the MILC program will include the cost of feeding dairy cows as a factor for triggering program payments, a relief for Wisconsin dairy farmers who face increasing costs of inputs. The nutrition title includes an additional $10 billion to expand food stamp eligibility and increase the minimum weekly benefit, as increase funding for many worthy programs such as food banks, food pantries, soup kitchens, and schools providing healthy snacks to students.
I am pleased that the legislation makes progress in lowering the income limits for wealthy farmers to qualify for federal farm payments, although I believe these limits should be made even lower to ensure payments go to those farmers who need the aid the most. Under the conference report, individuals making over $500,000 in non-farm income, or $750,000 in farm income, would become ineligible for federal payments. This report ceases Conservation payment eligibility at incomes of $1 million. In contrast, the 2002 Farm Bill discontinued federal farm payments to individuals earning over $2.5 million.The conference report also makes progress on several issues I have long-supported. These reforms include levying the Dairy Import Assessment against companies that import dairy products into the U.S., and implementing mandatory Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) for all meats. I am also very pleased it contains a farm flexibility pilot program that will allow farmers receiving direct payments for commodities to opt out of these payments on a year-by-year basis, and grow fruits and vegetables for processing. This program is especially meaningful for the Upper Midwest, and I am hopeful the program will prove successful and be expanded in coming agricultural authorizations. Additionally, the 2007 Farm Bill conference report:
Increases the Wetland Reserve Program's (WRP) enrollment ceiling to more than 3 million acres;
Reestablishes the WRP's budget authority at $1.3 billion over five years, through 2012;
Authorizes the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to enroll 32 million acres from 2010-2012, a 7.2 million acre decrease from the 2002 Farm Bill;
Provides a one-time $84 million mandatory funding for the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program during fiscal year 2009, $24 million over previous discretionary funding levels;
Rejects Farm Credit Service proposals to expand their lending authority and deviate from their stated mission;
Directs the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to review studies on the use of random source animals for research, and consider the recommendations in those studies to end the black market trade in stolen pets;
Provides for penalties for animal fighting ventures, increases penalties for violations of the Animal Welfare Act, and prohibits the importation of puppies under the age of 6 months.
You may be interested to know that shortly after the House vote the Senate also passed the conference report by a vote of 81 to 15. I am disappointed that the President vetoed this bill, but I am pleased that both the House and Senate voted to override the President's veto. However, due to an administrative error the bill vetoed by the President and passed into law by a veto override was only part of the conference report Farm Bill. As a result, I joined my colleagues in the House in passing the same version of the Farm Bill as new legislation. This identical copy is still pending in the U.S. Senate, and will likely be passed. It is my hope that in light of the veto override the President will acknowledge widespread support for this Farm Bill and sign it instead of forcing a second veto override vote.
In a country as vast as ours, crafting legislation that addresses vastly different regional and industrial priorities is painstaking, and often contentious, work. I believe the 2007 Farm Bill conference report does represent some positive changes in our agricultural policy, and it is my hope that a consensus will exist for far greater reforms in the future. Please know that I will keep your thoughts in mind as the U.S. Congress continues to consider the 2007 Farm Bill.
Again, thank you for sharing your views. Your opinion matters to me. If I can be of service to you in any other way, please do not hesitate to let me know. As a security precaution, all mail sent to Congress is first irradiated. This process causes significant delays. To ensure the fastest response, I encourage all constituents who have access to the internet to contact me through my website at http://tammybaldwin.house.gov.
Sincerely,
Tammy Baldwin
Member of CongressP.S. I regularly send out email updates on federal issues and opportunities. These reports also include regular surveys through which you can express your opinion. If you would like to receive these email updates, you may sign up by visiting my website at: http://www.house.gov/formbaldwin/IMA/get_address_news.htm
A brilliant identity/ad campaign by the Economist and Second City.
via email, in response to my message:
Dear Mr. Zellmer,Speaking of our politicians, Bruce Murphy notes some special interest assistance from Senator Kohl and link to this New York Times article:Thank you for contacting me to share you concerns about the Farm Bill. I appreciate hearing from you. While I was disappointed by the lack of reform to the commodity programs in the Farm Bill, significant improvements were made in other areas of the bill to assist small and medium farmers.
As you may know, the House approved the final version of the Farm Bill on May 14, 2008, by a vote of 318-106. The Senate passed it the following day by a vote of 85-15. The President vetoed the Farm Bill on May 21, 2008. The House voted to override the veto the same day, and the Senate the next day. I was pleased to support both the Farm Bill itself and the motion to override the President's veto. The bill became law on May 22, 2008, although an enrollment error meant that the Trade and Food Aid Title was not included. The House and Senate have passed a new version of the bill to correct the error.
For instance, the bill restores the payment rate for the Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) program and, for the first time, factors in the cost of production for farmers. MILC is vital for Wisconsin's dairy farmers, and is an extremely responsible program as it kicks in when times are tough and covers only a certain amount of milk. Thus, it targets small and medium farms rather than subsidizing the expansion of large farms.
The bill also makes significant improvements to nutrition programs, including Food Stamps and the Emergency Food Assistance Program, totaling more than $10 billion over the five-year life of the bill and accounting for about three-quarters of total spending in the bill. Other positive provisions of the Farm Bill include a new livestock title, which contains important competition provisions and over $4 billion for agriculture conservation programs. The bill also provides more funding for smaller-scale programs such as the Community Food Program, Value-Added Producer Grants, and the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Program.
I was also able to have several amendments accepted to the bill on a range of issues important to Wisconsin farmers. I was particularly pleased to have an amendment accepted to strengthen the office for small farmers at USDA.
I share the disappointment I have heard from some Wisconsinites that the reforms in the Farm Bill don't go far enough. I supported a number of amendments to reform the bill when the Senate considered it in December 2007, including an amendment offered by Senators Byron Dorgan (ND) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to cap subsidy payments to the largest producers. I also filed an amendment with Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to trim direct payments. In addition, I supported and cosponsored an amendment offered by Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and John Sununu (R-NH) to trim government subsidies to crop insurance companies, and voted in favor of an amendment offered by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) that would have prohibited farm support payments to wealthy individuals. I was disappointed that these amendments failed. The final bill does reform the commodity support programs by modestly trimming direct payments and reducing the adjusted gross income eligibility cap, but more reforms are needed.
To read my full statement on the bill, please visit here. While we may not always agree, I look forward to hearing from you in the future.
Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, persuaded the Appropriations Committee and the full Senate to accept legislative language benefiting Aurora BayCare Medical Center in Green Bay.My email to Senator Kohl:The hospital’s lobbyists include Theodore H. Bornstein, a former chief of staff for Mr. Kohl, and Bill Broydrick, whose Web site quotes a description of him as “the state’s No. 1 super lobbyist.”
The Kohl provision would allow the Green Bay hospital to expand by building a new cardiac catheterization laboratory.
The issue often puts lawmakers in the awkward position of having to choose between doctors and hospitals.
Critics say that when doctors have a financial stake in a hospital, they have an incentive to send patients there because they not only receive professional fees for their services, but also can share in hospital profits and see the value of their investment increase. Such arrangements can lead to greater use of hospital services and higher costs for Medicare and other insurers, say the critics, including many in Congress.
Dear Senator Kohl:I hope this message finds you well.
I am writing to express my disappointment at your support for the "Aurora BayCare Medical Center in Green Bay" carve out in what I believe to be upcoming health care legislation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/washington/08hospital.html
Such narrow special interest treatment is at odds with your "Nobody's Senator but Yours" mantra.
These carve outs simply increase costs for middle America.
I am disappointed.
Best wishes,
Jim Zellmer
I received an email from Senator Kohl's office regarding my recent Farm Bill Vote (he voted for it) correspondence:
Dear Mr. Zellmer:Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me about the 2008 Farm Bill. I appreciate hearing from you and apologize for the delay in my response.
As you know, Congress recently overrode President Bush's veto of the 2008 Farm Bill and I supported that effort. Though it may not be perfect, I believe this farm bill puts our rural communities first and provides the means to enhance the quality of life for people in Wisconsin and throughout the nation. It
provides substantial improvements to federal nutrition programs, increased commitment to conservation, and a significant investment in renewable energy.I was particularly pleased that the bill continues the national dairy assistance program I helped create in the 2002 Farm Bill. The Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) program is a way to provide dairy farmers support when prices plummet. And when prices are strong, the program goes dormant. The Farm Bill extends the MILC program through fiscal year 2012, increases the quantity of per-farm eligible milk to more accurately reflect trends in the dairy industry, and restores the original 45% payment rate beginning in 2009. Moreover, it includes a 'feed cost adjuster' which acknowledges the tremendous challenges many dairy producers face because of high feed prices.
The Farm Bill will also help millions of low-income Americans who struggle to put food on the table each day. It includes nearly $7.8 billion for improvements to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp Program, and $1.26 billion for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which helps supply food banks. The SNAP will see a number of important reforms that include an increase in the minimum benefit (which had not been updated for 30 years) and changes to encourage retirement and education savings among program participants.
The legislation shows a continued commitment to conservation. It extends and expands important programs like the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP), the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), and the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP). These programs work well in Wisconsin and deserve to be sufficiently funded.
I am pleased that the Farm Bill also contains a provision I helped author to facilitate interstate commerce for state-inspected meat. Wisconsin produces some of the finest specialty meat products in the world and our processors are gaining more and more attention across the region. Enhancing their ability to move state-inspected products in interstate commerce has been an objective of mine for many years and this bill represents a significant step forward on that front.While I voted for and would have preferred stricter farm program payment limits and eligibility requirements, the bill does make progress on this front. I heard from many Wisconsinites on these complex topics and ultimately came to the conclusion that this new Farm Bill was one that I could support.
We have renewed our commitment to rural America to ensure that farming remains a viable industry in our nation.Your input was important to me and I will certainly have your comments in mind as the new Farm Bill is implemented.
Sincerely,
Herb Kohl
U.S. Senator
I sent this email to Representative Tammy Baldwin along with Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl regarding their support for the pork laden farm bill:
Dear ___________:Much more on the farm bill here.I am writing to express my disappointment in your vote for the pork laden farm bill.
Similar to the support given for a 5% large corporation offshore tax rate a few years ago, this legislation benefits only the rich on the backs of middle class taxpayers.
I am surprised and disappointed.
Jim Zellmer
Wisconsin Democrat Ron Kind, to his credit, voted against the farm bill:
“Today Congress squandered the best opportunity in decades to reform our wasteful, outdated subsidy system.Related:“We need a Farm Bill, but we need the right kind of farm bill. Let me be clear: This bill is not a reform bill. It is not even the illusion of reform. Continuing to send unlimited subsidies to millionaires is not reform. Creating a new disaster entitlement program is not reform. And setting ourselves up for billions in unaccounted spending is not reform. The president was right to veto it.
“As families kick off their summer vacations this weekend facing the highest gas prices ever, skyrocketing food costs, stagnant paychecks and a lagging economy, I urge them to ask their member of Congress how they could justify sending unlimited taxpayer subsidies to agribusinesses and wealthy landowners making up to $2.5 million a year in profit.
2007 Farm Subsidy Database by Congressional District.
"An interesting Metafilter discussion on Obama campaign graphics." (Via Design Observer.)I'll note, however, that propaganda has been hip for at least 40 years. All you have to do is check out a book like War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communications and you'll fine that through WWII, most of the graphic propaganda is put out by governments and their supporters and is mostly patriotic and pro-military (whichever country or military that might be).
Communist Vietnam is set to become the latest country in Asia to embrace Las Vegas-style casinos, with a Canadian property developer planning to break ground Saturday on the first phase of a $4.5 billion casino-resort project on the nation's southern coast.Susan Spano offers another perspective after a recent visit.The project, called Ho Tram, will be the biggest foreign investment to date in Vietnam, said Michael Aymong, chairman of Toronto-based Asian Coast Development Ltd., the project's lead investor, with a 30% stake. Its main partner in the project is New York hedge fund Harbinger Capital LLC, which has a 25% share.
The initial phase will cost $1.3 billion and consist of two five-star hotels with a combined 2,300 rooms and a casino with approximately 90 gambling tables, 500 slot machines and an area for VIP customers. When completed in 2015, the resort will comprise five hotels with 9,000 rooms and a second casino, Mr. Aymong said.
Ho Tram also will target vacationing families, with features including an 18-hole golf course designed by Greg Norman, a Cirque du Soleil theater, and a site for guests to swim with dolphins.
"It's a needed project in Vietnam" that, in spite of the country's poor infrastructure, will be able to "effectively compete" with integrated resorts in neighboring China, Malaysia and Singapore, Mr. Aymong said
The photo was taken on Highway 1 several hundred kilometers northeast of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).
Internet traffic is growing faster than at any time since the boom of the late-1990s. Places like Chattanooga are trying hard not to get stuck in the slow lane.Madison's pitiful broadband infrastructure could certainly use a shot in the arm.Some 60 towns and small cities, including Bristol, Va., Barnsville, Minn., and Sallisaw, Okla., have built state-of-the-art fiber networks, capable of speeds many times faster than most existing connections from cable and telecom companies. An additional two dozen municipalities, including Chattanooga, have launched or are considering similar initiatives.
The efforts highlight a battle over Internet policy in the U.S. Once the undisputed leader in the technological revolution, the U.S. now lags a growing number of countries in the speed, cost and availability of high-speed Internet. While cable and telecom companies are spending billions to upgrade their service, they're focusing their efforts mostly on larger U.S. cities for now.
Smaller ones such as Chattanooga say they need to fill the vacuum themselves or risk falling further behind and losing highly-paid jobs. Chattanooga's city-owned electric utility began offering ultrafast Internet service to downtown business customers five years ago. Now it plans to roll out a fiber network to deliver TV, high-speed Internet and phone service to some 170,000 customers. The city has no choice but to foot the bill itself for a high-speed network -- expected to cost $230 million -- if it wants to remain competitive in today's global economy, says Harold DePriest, the utility's chief executive officer.
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too. You might not like it, but it's a fact. So how do you protect yourself?
Encrypting your entire hard drive, something you should certainly do for security in case your computer is lost or stolen, won't work here. The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a "please type in your password". Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day.
Jason Shepard, speaking on UW-Madison graduate Greta Van Susteren's program mentioned that a "crisis of confidence exists in Dane County and Madison Leadership". Jason discussed the growing controversy over murder victim Brittanny Zimmerman's botched 911 call.
Fox News link (will disappear at some point)
40MB MPEG4 download for ipod/iphone/playstion and others. CTRL Click here.
Grad student and former NYC teacher Jason Shepard has set the standard for investigative reporting over the past few years. His Isthmus expose of the 911 problems in Zimmerman's recent murder is just the latest in a string of substantive works on the local scene.
Shepard has done an exemplary job diving deep into a number of subjects, particularly our $367,806,712 school district.
A link to many of Jason's articles.
Can a typeface truly represent a presidential candidate? It depends on the typeface and the candidate. John McCain’s printed material relies on Optima, a modernistic sans serif designed by the German type designer Hermann Zapf in 1958 that was popular among book and magazine designers during the 1970s.While it is not the most robust sans serif ever designed, it is not entirely neutral either. It embodies and signifies a certain spirit and attitude. And if a typeface is not just an empty vessel for meaning, but a signifier that underscores personality, then it is useful in understanding what the candidates’ respective typefaces are saying about them and their campaigns.
So, I asked various designers, design curators and critics, who get rather heated when it comes to analyzing type design, to weigh in on two questions regarding Senator McCain’s campaign logo set in a bold version of Optima: What does Optima say about John McCain? And should this, or any, candidate be judged by a typeface?
The Guild Inc., a Madison, Wis.-based online art retailer, has raised $2.5 million in Series C funding, according to a regulatory filing. Shareholders include Dolphin Equity PartnersThe Guild, a company with many lives, must be north of $50,000,000 (!) in funds raised over the years.
Related: A Pravda View of Guild and 1/11/2006: Guild Raises another $6M.
Fascinating.
It’s about 179 miles from Fort Worth to the campus of Texas A&M in College Station, and I drove there to speak at the Student Conference On National Affairs on Thursday, February 21. It was not lost on me that making the round trip between the Metroplex and A&M’s Memorial Student Center meant that I would use the equivalent of one barrel of oil to discuss the fallacy of America’s quest for energy independence.
My slight amusement continued when one of the first students I met had arrived late from Chicago because his luggage had been misrouted and lost by the airline. I doubted that he got the irony of how much fuel it took to bring him the 1,100 miles from Chicago to Texas to attend SCONA 53, which was titled "Creating A Sustainable Global Energy Policy."Simply Selfish: Ethanol or Food
My talk came after an address by the Ambassador of Azerbaijan and before talks by Mark Albers, a senior vice president of Exxon, and by Virginia Governor George Allen. I had been asked to speak that afternoon about the magic of alternative fuels’ saving the day and alleviating the current energy crisis – assuming that high price is the sole determining factor in today’s energy debate. I felt the best way to do that was to discuss the beginnings of the automotive age in both America and the world, to relate to the students and professionals attending how, in the 1920s, these exact same circumstances led to a campaign to wean the American public off of oil – and why today the debate is back, but the end results will be the same.
I usually find it best to use 4th-grade math to show the fallacy of the again-current line of thinking about alternative fuels such as ethanol. After all, most people seem shocked to learn the fact that a new 2008 Suburban, designed to run on E85 ethanol and in which the owner uses only E85 as fuel, requires four acres of farmland be dedicated to corn production to keep that one vehicle running. But it’s true: That Suburban owner may live in a beautiful home on a quarter acre in the Metroplex, but somewhere in America four acres of corn must be set aside to provide fuel for just that one SUV.
I can’t tell you how excited I was when I found this magazine on eBay. I thought that the author was this Arthur Miller. An article about the personal privacy threats inherent in massive government databases, written by the author of the Crucible sounded amazing. It turns out that the author was actually this Arthur Miller, and I don’t think anyone could have done a better job.
This is the most amazingly prescient article I’ve ever read. When people write about the future they are usually wrong. When people write about the future of computers, they are usually even more wrong. This article got everything right. If you changed the tense and a few bits of jargon, then handed to me and told me it was written by the EFF, I’d believe it.
Just to give you an idea of how right he was on even the basic computer stuff, here’s the second paragraph of the article. Keep in mind that this is what desktop computers looked like in 1967.
“The modern computer is more than a sophisticated indexing or adding machine, or a miniaturized library; it is the keystone for a new communications medium whose capacities and implications we are only beginning to realize. In the foreseeable future, computer systems will be tied together by television, satellites, and lasers, and we will move large quantities of information over vast distances in imperceptible units of time.”
Forty-one years ago Arthur R. Miller laid out all of the privacy threats that we face now. The power that credit reporting databases have over us. The illegal government use of our financial and phone records. The attempt to build a master database tying all of these together. The fact that the government might consider you a threat if you so much as sent a Christmas card to someone the government has on a watch list. It’s all here. He basically predicted and laid out all of the arguments against the Total Information Awareness program and the current NSA programs that have been so much in the news.
It’s nice to know there were people who were so ahead of the curve in trying to protect our rights, and it’s a tragedy that more people didn’t listen. I think it speaks strongly to the need to pay attention to this stuff now, because this problem will only get worse.
Cable is not a monopoly. You can choose from any cable company you want in America, just by moving your house.@ Freedom to Connect.
James Snyder & David Stromberg:
In this paper we estimate the impact of press coverage on citizen knowledge, politicians' actions, and policy. We find that a poor fit between newspaper markets and political districts reduces press coverage of politics. We use variation in this fit due to redistricting to identify the effects of reduced coverage. Exploring the links in the causal chain of media effects -- voter information, politicians' actions and policy -- we find statistically significant and substantively important effects. Voters living in areas with less coverage of their U.S. House representative are less likely to recall their representative's name, and less able to describe and rate them. Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies: they are less likely to stand witness before congressional hearings, to serve on constituency-oriented committees (perhaps), and to vote against the party line. Finally, this congressional behavior affects policy. Federal spending is lower in areas where there is less press coverage of the local members of congress.This is an interesting subject. Locally, I've seen very little traditional media coverage of our elected officials actual voting record. Via Tyler Cowen.
Via email:
Colorado Congressman Wayne Allard has taken over $45,900 from ConAgraLearn more here.
Food Corporation and over $405,000 from the oil and gas industry. His campaign is fueled by over $3.6 million in PAC contributions. He is just one example of a problem that affects members of both parties. And just one example of why the system in Washington D.C. puts special interests before the American people.That system will not change on its own. It will only change if people like you and me stand up and fight for it.
A month ago I considered running for Congress to help bring about this change from the inside. Many of you supported the idea and urged me to run. After thinking very hard about whether such a campaign
could win, I decided against it. And instead I am asking you to join me in a new grassroots effort to Change Congress.
THE Chinese authorities had been fearing trouble, but nothing on this scale. An orgy of anti-Chinese rioting convulsed the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on Friday March 14th, leaving security forces uncertain how to respond. For many hours mobs controlled the streets, burning and looting as they pleased.The approach of Beijing’s Olympic games in August is seen by many of Lhasa’s residents as an opportunity to put their contempt for Chinese rule on display to the outside world. China’s desire to ensure the games are not marred by calls for boycotts is tying its hands as it considers how to respond.
Your correspondent, the only foreign journalist with official permission to be in Lhasa when the violence erupted, saw crowds hurling chunks of concrete at the numerous small shops run by ethnic Chinese lining the streets of the city’s old Tibetan quarter. They threw them too at those Chinese caught on the streets—a boy on a bicycle, taxis (whose drivers are often Chinese) and even a bus. Most Chinese fled the area as quickly as they could, leaving their shops shuttered.
Apparently, Britney has some shaky assets on her balance sheets. Well, don’t worry Britney. You’re not the only one.A Bailout, for Everyone by Steven Pearlstein:In an announcement that has sent produced a large and varied reaction, the FED has announced that they will attempt to bail out banks by letting them use mortgage-backed securities as collateral for loans. This move is unprecedented in the Fed’s history. For the first time, they are entering the mortgage business. Since its inception, the Fed has used open market operations (the buying and selling of treasury bonds) to expand or contract the monetary policy. A good detailed discussion is here, at interfluidity. Simplistically, the Fed’s balance sheet looks like:
Last week, it was a $200 billion cash-for-bond swap for the banks.This week, it was a $200 billion bond-for-bond swap for the big investment houses.
If they keep this up, pretty soon you'll be able to walk into any Federal Reserve bank and hock that diamond brooch you inherited from Aunt Mildred.
Forget all that nonsense about the Bernanke Fed being too timid or behind the curve. In the face of what is turning into the most serious financial market crisis since the Great Depression, the Fed has been more aggressive and more creative in using its limitless balance sheet -- in effect, its ability to print money -- than at any time in history.
We can argue till the cows come home about whether this is a bailout for Wall Street. It is -- but only to the extent that it is also a bailout for all of us, meant to prevent a financial and economic meltdown that drags everyone down with it. In broad strokes, we're going through a massive "de-leveraging" of the economy, wringing out trillions of dollars of debt that had artificially driven up the price of real estate and financial assets, and, more generally, allowed Americans to live beyond their means. The Fed's goal has not been to impede that process, simply to make sure that it proceeds in an orderly fashion. But even that has required central bank intervention that is unprecedented in scale and scope. And despite yesterday's huge rally in the stock market, Fed officials warn that this de-leveraging is nowhere near finished.
Doug Parker had a vision. His successful America West had completed a merger agreement with bankrupt US Airways Group on May 19, 2005. With this deal he planned to become the dominant low cost carrier in the country as the new US Airways (NYSE: LCC). And he would be its CEO. The next day CNN reported that "Parker thinks he can buck history and make a success out of merging his more successful airline with one in bankruptcy." The company's press release said:Northwest is Madison's largest carrier. This proposed merger, combined with high oil prices that will dramatically reduce the number of small jets servicing airports like ours may require rethinking local air service.Building upon two complementary networks with similar fleets, closely- aligned labor contracts and two outstanding teams of people, this merger creates the first nationwide full service low-cost airline.On September 29, 2005 trading began for Mr. Parker's new carrier. On that day its stock closed a little above $20. Then in a remarkable run-up to November 24, 2006 it was trading at around $63. Doug Parker seemed close to realizing his vision. Close, but no cigar. The run-up was followed by a steady erosion in shareholder value that on Friday March 7, 2008 saw his stock close at just under $11. That represented an 82% loss in value from its peak and a 46% loss from its initial price. What went wrong?
Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.
The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Farm subsidies in the United States go to just a handful of crops, corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans, and rice. Most fruits and vegetables are not subsidized, at least not directly but don't forget opportunity cost!David Zetland has the dirt.
The Washington Post has posted some great scenes from tomorrow's primary states.
Environmental Working Group. Wisconsin's Ron Kind ranks 37th @ 264,820,105 and Tammy Baldwin ranks 61st @ $140,993,229.
Audrey Hoffer takes a useful look at Wisconsin politician's use of earmarks to further redistribute federal income taxes - otherwise known as pork:
Earmark is a dirty word.Taxpayers for Common Sense 2008 Earmark Database.That's the tacit message of Taxpayers for Common Sense, which describes itself as a progressive nonpartisan budget watchdog.
An earmark is a project in their district for which members of Congress designate funds. Earmarks often are awarded without public hearings or other congressional debate over their merits. Congress inserted 12,881 earmarks worth $18.3 billion into this year's spending bills, according to the watchdog group.
While some taxpayers and their representatives decry earmarks as boondoggles and wasteful government spending, others defend them as a way to accomplish important objectives while bringing jobs and benefits to their constituents.
Wisconsin political earmark (deficit) spending:
Herb Kohl $153,438,700
Russ Feingold: $0
Dave Obey: $102,137,950
Steve Kagen: $24,547,700
Tammy Baldwin: $16,443,500
Tom Petri: $12,999,000
Ron Kind: $11,433,000
Gwen Moore: $7,482,300
Paul Ryan: $5,396,000
Jim Sensenbrenner: $932,000
It would be interesting to compare campaign contributions to earmark recipients.
Hoffer closes with these quotes:
Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said: "It's really easy to isolate an earmark and say it's a good thing, but if we do that, we miss the overall context. It's a zero-sum game. We need to make sure we spend every penny wisely."Obey has his own reservations about the system and said last summer on the "Bill Moyers Journal" television show:
"The reason I hate earmarks is because they suck everybody in. They suck them into the idea that we have to be ATM machines for our districts, and so they focus on the tiny portion of most bills that are earmarks instead of focusing on the policy that is represented by the legislation that we produce.
Unless you’ve been avoiding television, newspapers, and all other forms of mass media for the past few months, you’ve probably seen Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” and “Stand for Change” banners. The typophiles among you have realized that the “change” font Obama’s campaign uses is Gotham, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, originally as a commission for GQ Magazine.The film Helvetica is well worth watching.
James Fallows, viewing events from Beijing:
I have known and liked Chuck Spinney for a very long time, since I wrote about him and his original "defense reform" colleagues, notably John Boyd and Pierre Sprey, in the Atlantic and in National Defense in the early 1980s. Boyd of course originated the concept of the "OODA Loop." This was the idea, derived from Boyd's "Patterns of Conflict" briefing, that the victor in any conflict would not necessarily be the stronger or better-prepared party. Rather it would be the one who recognized changing realities, and chose and implemented the right new course of action, faster than the opponent. Boyd came up with the theory by analyzing aerial combat among fighter planes, but in his view it could be applied to every sort of human contest, from sports to business to armed conflict.Interesting and useful read.(OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. To react to changing reality faster than the opponent can, or to interfere with the opponent's ability to perceive realistically what is happening to him, is to "get inside his OODA loop." Everything anyone would ever want to know about Boyd, Spinney, Sprey; about their contemporary colleagues like Chet Richards, Donald Vandergriff, WIlliam Lind, GI Wilson, etc; and about OODA loops and the related concept of 4GW, or Fourth Generation Warfare, can be found at two excellent, related "Defense and the National Interest" sites, here and here.)
And the theory also applies to politics, as Spinney has argued in a recent item about the contest for the Democratic nomination. His analysis, "Is Obama inside Hillary's OODA loop?" comes after the jump. The incidents he mentions are all familiar; what's at least a little new is his combination of them in Boyd-style perspective -- in particular Bill Clinton losing his sense for how the battle is shifting. I am posting this before the Wisconsin results are known, and before the (in my view bogus) "plagiarism" flap has died down, so that Spinney's observation can be tested against those results.
Cara Harshman via a friend's email:
On the heels of an open records requests in Michigan that publicized an extramarital affair of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Madison city officials are looking to set standards for changing technologies in the city.This will certainly be more fodder for the courts. Much more on Wisconsin open records here.After a year of detailed study and work, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and Ald. Zach Brandon, District 7, will introduce an ordinance to the City Council later this month clarifying the forms of electronic communication city employees use that are open to the public.
Rapidly changing electronic communication technology, like text messages, instant messages and Facebook prompted Brandon to ask, “What is an open record and what is not an open record?”
Currently, the Wisconsin public record law says electronic communications are open records, but does not specify which types of electronic communication are included, Brandon said.
“[The city] has gone the extra step to define what that means,” Brandon said. Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council said the city essentially used the state’s record law as a model to update its own open records law.
I phoned Senator Kohl's Washington office [(202) 224-5653] regarding his vote against the Dodd/Feingold telco immunity amendment yesterday. The telephone operator said that Senator Kohl supported an amendment that would have the government (we taxpayers) defend the telcos in court and that these cases should be heard in a court where intelligence information could be shared. John McCain voted with Senator Kohl, while Barack Obama voted with Russ Feingold and Hillary Clinton did not vote. David Isenberg has more as does Dave Farber. The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted a summery here.
A few photos from a late arriving visitor to the University of Wisconsin's Kohl Center.
While I did not arrive early enough to catch the speech inside the Kohl Center, I always find it interesting to note the political opportunism during these events. Governor Doyle, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and local Mayor Dave Cieslewicz all rated a nod from Obama. John Kerry's 2004 appearance with Bruce Springsteen included a number of local politicians, including Elizabeth Burmaster, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent (a nonpartisan position).
Finally, a few Ron Paul supporters promoted their candidate in front of the proceedings.
Throughout the developed world, countries are tightening up border security, building fences, and raising citizenship requirements. But there are still a few places left that are willing to say: “Give us your huddled masses.”
The US is in desperate need of 100Mbps "big broadband." That's the conclusion of a new report from EDUCAUSE (PDF), a group that represents IT managers at over 2,200 colleges and universities. But these 100Mbps connections are coming slowly; in the meantime, countries like Japan already have them. To avoid falling further behind, the report calls for a national broadband policy to be passed this year, one that includes $100 billion for a fiber-to-the-home infrastructure that will connect every household and business in the country.The report opens by citing the familiar, dreary facts: US broadband might now be widely available, but it's slow and relatively expensive. Between 1999 and 2006, the US fell from third place to 20th in the International Telecommunications Union's broadband usage measurements. When it comes to average connection speeds, the US isn't beaten just by Japan but also by France, Korea, Sweden, New Zealand, Italy, Finland, Portugal, Australia, Norway, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, and Germany. And it's not about population size or density, either; Finland, Sweden, and Canada beat us on most broadband metrics despite having lower population density. Finally, we're getting beat on price, coming in 18th worldwide when it comes to cost per megabyte.
If there's a debate that sums up post-9/11 politics, it's security versus privacy. Which is more important? How much privacy are you willing to give up for security? Can we even afford privacy in this age of insecurity? Security versus privacy: It's the battle of the century, or at least its first decade.In a Jan. 21 New Yorker article, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell discusse
