Our ever vigilant, free and independent press

"After curbing enthusiasm, Obama must ease anxiety" is the headline in today's WSJ article by Gerald F. Seib. This appeared in Capital Journal, "Capital Journal is WSJ.com’s unique site for analysis of the political and policy maneuvering in Washington in the era of Barack Obama. It features the Capital Journal columns and occasional other postings by executive Washington editor Gerald F. Seib, and will house Political Wisdom, the Journal's daily aggregation of the smartest political analysis from around the Internet. . ." What an Obama patsy. This corny mush couldn't keep a starving baby chick alive. God help us. He says the execessive enthusiasm (i.e. the bizarre hope ginned up by the candidate to win votes), needed some cold water.

If the goal was to head off irrational exuberance, it worked. More than half the country now says it expects the recession to last as long as three years. Link.

Not me. I expect Obama to exceed FDR's record and give us at least 12 years of bashing and destroying capitalism, high unemployment, and an even higher misery index. Then it will be up to whoever owns our debt, probably China, to decide what to do with us.

Barney the dog has left DC

We'll enjoy the memories of his antics. Barney the Frank is still there, marauding through the halls of Congress, looking for plunder, still misleading us into more debt. Barney Frank, the Representative from Massachusetts has done more damage to this nation than the senior senator from that state could ever have imagined.

Rep. Barney Frank asserted Thursday that the Obama administration can be more trusted than the Bush administration to ensure that banks do not misuse money they get from a $700 billion bailout fund. Chicago Tribune

Yes, good ol' Barn. He's the one who told us there was no problem with Fannie and Fred; he's the one with Chris Dodd whose oversite responsibilities got us here along with all the other Democrats and "can't we all get along" Republicans. He's the one who should be brought before Congress to do the mea culpa they are forcing on CEOs.

As my artist friend Charlie wrote, Barney is attempting to "wash his hands and those of the Democrat party of any blame for the mess, and lay total responsibility on the Bush administration and Republicans in General. The truth is that Frank and the liberal left generated the whole problem by coercing financial institutions to make loans to people who couldn't afford them and using their political clout in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to cover up the problem. (The loans were nicknamed "NINJA" loans....No Income, No Job or Assets)." Yes, I've written about that many times at this blog, and my man Bush certainly can take part of the blame. Four years ago he was praising the number of new home owners among minorities, pandering to the liberals in his own party and moderate Democrats. Owning a home isn't a "civil right," and there was a very good reason for 20% down and fixed mortgages. Once the government began demanding that banks become social workers and nannies, the scene was set for our current playbook.

If government would stay out of this, we could come out of this recession as we've come out of the last 5 or 6, without a massive Depression, but we're on our way! Wheeee! But now we have a $13 a week payback "to make work pay" for all those who believed in Hope and Change.

Here's your tax break

Don't spend it all in one place.

Q: What are some of the tax breaks in the bill?

A: It includes Obama's signature "Making Work Pay" tax credit for 95 percent of workers, though negotiators agreed to trim the credit to $400 a year instead of $500 — or $800 for married couples, cut from Obama's original proposal of $1,000. It would begin showing up in most workers' paychecks in June as an extra $13 a week in take-home pay, falling to about $8 a week next January.

There is also a $70 billion, one-year fix for the alternative minimum tax. The fix would save some 20 million mainly upper-middle-income taxpayers about $2,000 in taxes for 2009. Yahoo News

I think the decrease in the cost of gasoline in the fall added about $2,000 to the average worker's wallet, didn't it? So what will $13 a week, dropping to $8 a week do? What is that, a half pack of cigarettes a day? And their taxes on that pack are the ones paying for the new SCHIP for the middle class. A cup of coffee a day at Panera's? And now we know it's good for us. Where are all those whiners who disparaged the Bush stimulus--like Michelle Obama? Meanwhile, Geithner the tax evader is promising to throw trillions at . . . what? Does anyone know what he's talking about?

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner vowed on Tuesday to jumpstart the nation’s financial system, announcing sweeping new plans to aid struggling banks, spur lending and help beleaguered homeowners.

The program will commit as much as $2 trillion in public and private funds to spur consumer and business lending.

Geithner christened the administration’s revamped bailout program the “Financial Stability Plan,” a not-so-subtle attempt to distance the new Obama administration from the much-maligned management of the “Troubled Asset Relief Program” established in the waning days of the Bush administration. Politico

I'm not too good at math but I saw this at Soda Head: At a million dollars a day, it would take 1,000,000 days or about 2,740 years to spend one trillion. If you want to spend it in your (obviously not mine) life time you would have to spend at least 20 billion per day. Even then it would take you 50 years.

FiSP instead of TARP.

Read The Audacity of Dopes by William K. Black.

Heavy reporting

James Taranto took the USAToday writer to task for the sloppy writing on the figures for overweight military yesterday, but today he says it wasn't enough--the article was even more poorly researched with speculative (i.e. anti-war) conclusions than he thought.

To begin with, the study contains nothing--zilch--to back up Zoroya's contention that the trend "since the start of the Iraq war" is "yet another example of stress and strains of continuing combat deployments." And a close look at it gives further reason to doubt [Gregg] Zoroya's linkage of the findings to the Iraq effort.

So who's chubbing out? The women, and the elders--just like the rest of the population. The Army and the Marines, the bulk of the Iraq troops, have the lowest rates of obesity. I guess the press will need to find another way to slam the troops. The prisoners on Gitmo got fat on good food, too--which will probably all change when they are sent home to "reeducation camps" and then loosed to come back to us, slim and trim.

Today's new word--JEREMIAD

This is a noun from the name of the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, and means lamenting and denunciatory, complaint, doleful story. My goodness, haven't we been hearing a lot of jeremiads lately from the folks in Washington. The context: "[Jonathan Edwards] vision of depravity and sulphur is in the tradition of the jeremiad . . . one of the ongoing themes in American society and rhetoric. . ."

Every improvement has a consequence down the line

Our polio epidemics of the 20th century were a result of good sanitation--the flush toilet. Here’s one I wouldn’t have thought of--clean water increases poor sanitation.

"Clean Water Makes You Dirty: Water Supply and Sanitation Behavior in the Philippines"
Daniel Bennett, Assistant Professor, Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago
June 12, 2008

Improving the water supply is a common policy response to endemic diarrhea in developing countries. However, water supply interventions may inadvertently worsen community sanitation by mitigating the consequences of unsanitary behavior. Since sanitation has large health externalities, the impact of declining sanitation may overwhelm the benefit of receiving clean water. This paper shows how the expansion of municipal piped water in Metro Cebu, the Philippines has exacerbated public defecation and garbage disposal. According to estimates, a neighborhood’s complete adoption of piped water increases public defecation and garbage by 15-30 percent.

I think there’s a message here for us, but I’ll have to think about what it is. Something like "it’s not my problem any more," or “now the government will take care of me so I can do anything I want.”

Cornell McCleary, former Columbus talk show host dies

He also was a blogger. He will be missed. Story here.

A longtime critic of Mayor Michael B. Coleman, McCleary had posted comments in recent days critical of the decision to demolish Columbus City Center. McCleary had wanted the city to subsidize the relocation of businesses from poorer communities into a new center named Columbus International Unity Center.

He ran unsuccessfully for Columbus City Council as a Republican in 2001.
He hosted a radio show on 610 AM WTVN for eight years, ending in March 2006.

Urban Infrastructure Recovery Fund

Even before the Obama jobs program, there was the Bush jobs program, which pumped millions and millions into cities to "revitalize" various neighborhoods. Very few poor people benefitted, unless they worked in one of the building trades that did the work. Many of those homes are now boarded up. These were bad investments for everyone concerned. And actually, I can't even blame Bush II because this was going on for about 20 years--maybe back to Carter, but on a smaller scale. In Columbus, you might find $60,000 homes in the central city getting $200,000 worth of renovations. The roofing programs were--out the roof. But, and this is no pun intended, get a load of this one for "assley resurfacing." Either someone hacked the site, or a PIC worker typed it. Look it up in an urban dictionary. I kid you not; I've cut and pasted from this web page

The program funds several million dollars of capital improvements per year in Central City Neighborhoods. Residents propose projects based on a premise they know their neighborhood needs. Since 1992, $36 million in public roadway and public park improvements were constructed such as street paving, assley resurfacing, street lighting upgrades, street trees, curbs and sidewalks, playground equipment, and neighborhood gateways.

We will probably get to tear down our 20 year old City Center Mall and build another unsafe park! That, Mr. and Mrs. America, is just a downpayment on Mr. Obama's programs for the nation--assley covering.

Now he shows up for work

President Obama has really been testy lately, no more Mr. Hope and Happy Talk. But he's learning. He now shows up. He can't just vote "present" anymore. Today he's back in Illinois (Lincoln's birthday) talking up his 1930s jobs program. He doesn't need support from Republicans. He doesn't need "bi-partisanship" to get this killer bill through Congress. He's got all the votes he needs. He just doesn't want all the blame. Maybe that is like voting "present," come to think of it. I think San Fran Gran gets most of coaching credit.

You can read about the first assassination attempt on Lincoln here at my blog. It wasn't reported in the news until 50 years later, but a librarian saved his life. William T. Coggeshall was Lincoln's bodyguard in 1861 and later became the state librarian of Ohio.

Cancer hoax in e-mail

The latest I received was supposedly from Johns Hopkins, but they are all over the internet. There are lots of things you can do to have a healthier life, but avoiding the microwave, fast food containers, and freezing water in plastic bottles aren't those.

You can eat real food

Get up and go for a walk and breathe

Be faithful to your spouse

Stop smoking or don't start

Just those four things--without Yoga, or vitamin supplements, no vegetarian diet, no navel gazing, will do a lot to help. Even prayer if it reduces your stress level. A nice hobby. A beautiful scene. An occasional vacation that doesn't wear down your wallet. Perhaps putting your hands in dirt and growing a garden. But no modification in living would have stopped my daughter's cancer, which she survived thanks to modern medicine and alert doctors, only to almost be taken out by a DVT which had nothing at all to do with anything except flying too often and wearing high heels.

Let's put good intentions in perspective. The environmentalist movement has killed more Africans than the Atlantic slave trade ever did; over 40 million developing Americans have died in abortions; a dirty peanut plant with careless owners is taking its toll on immune compromised people who survived cancer and other problems through a living, perfectly "natural" bacteria called Salmonella Typhimurium.

Now, listen to mother and get a life.

Craig's List and Ohio Prostitution

This seems to be a problem around here. Although if these folks weren't advertising on the popular Craig's List, which snagged an OSU Nursing School adviser and former employee of the Governor, the authorities might never catch up with them.

A fourth-grade teacher at Bellefontaine’s Western Intermediate School, who was arrested Tuesday on prostitution charges, allegedly used a school computer and postings on Craigslist to set up daytime trysts with clients.

Amber R. Carter, 35, of Bellefontaine, was taken into custody around noon by deputies of the Logan County Sheriff’s Office in the parking lot of the Bellefontaine Super 8 Motel, 1117 N. Main St., without incident. She was charged with third-degree misdemeanor prostitution and fifth-degree felony unauthorized use of property.

She is now free on bond and no date for her initial court appearance had been set as of this morning.

Bellefontaine City Schools is cooperating with the sheriff’s office, Superintendent Larry Anderson, Ph.D., said this morning. “It’s really a shock,” Dr. Anderson said. “We’re pretty devastated on this. Bellefontaine Examiner

I guess it was tough explaining to the kids why the teacher had a sub.

The Christmas wreath

When I stepped outside this morning, I narrowly missed crushing some pinecones and bulbs. The Christmas wreath was in the bushes and pieces parts in the entry. Well, it was time, right? About 20 of our neighbors across the ravine are without power, according to one that I saw at Panera's this morning with her family getting breakfast. They also lost power for 5 days after Hurricane Ike roared through here in September. Being without power in Ohio in February is a bit more challenging than September. We lost power for about 30 seconds, but I heard the wind roaring most of the night.

Time to hang the spring wreath anyway.

Who bears the responsibility?

If the managers and owners of Peanut Corporation of America knew about the salmonella contamination, they are worse than pond scum and should go to jail. But what about all the workers, the ones who now say they saw the filth, the rats, the chipped paint above roasters?

Terry Jones, a janitor, remembered the peanut oil left to soak into the floor and the unrepaired roof that constantly leaked rain.

And James Griffin, a cook at the plant, recounted how his observations led to this simple rule. “I never ate the peanut butter, and I wouldn’t allow my kids to eat it.”

In interviews, these three men and another employee who worked at the now-closed plant, provided an inside glimpse into the day-to-day sanitation lapses there. AJC.com

There must have been employees up and down the line, managers, union members, illegals and legals, educated and no-so-much, who saw and didn't act because they wanted to keep their jobs. How is that different than the men testifying before Congressional leaders whose values and ethics are also screwed up?

So now a government that can't provide enough employees so the FDA can keep the plants inspected using regulations and laws long on the books is going to spend massive amounts of our money dabbling in less critical facets of our lives, like universal pre-school, light bulbs to save energy and dangerous to dispose, and rewriting marriage laws so gays don't feel left out.

"Stimulus deal forged"
That was the Columbus Dispatch headline today. Yes, forge means to form or bring into being through effort, but it also means to make with intent to defraud, to commit a forgery. And it is definitely a forgery when over half of the American people know that government doesn't create wealth--it takes wealth from producers and gives it to non-producers. This past week we were all Joe the Plumber asking questions, and we were pushed aside by Congress and ridiculed in the press. A forgery has definitely taken place.

I am an Iris What Flower Are You?

Today's new word is CORPORA

Corpus is the Latin word for body--of a man or animal, or all the writings or works of an author. Corps is a body of men. Corpulent means fleshy or obese. The city name Corpus Cristi means body of Christ. CORPORA is the plural of corpus. Yesterday at the coffee shop I pulled a little tag from an advertisement asking for people my age to participate in a hearing study by the Psychoacoustics Lab at Ohio State. (If you're interested call 614-292-1643--they pay.) I didn't know what a Psychoacoustics Lab does, so I looked it up.

In the Psychoacoustics Laboratory we are working on projects that investigate the ability of listeners to extract information from complex, time-varying sounds. These sounds are acoustically similar to speech, music or environmental sounds, but they do not require the cognitive processing necessary to recognize or understand those sounds. We are testing our model of peripheral auditory processing, which suggests that the auditory nervous system responds to the spectral center-of-gravity, COG, of the neural activity generated by such sounds. The COG is the “balance point” for this activity. As the COG changes over time, listeners hear changes in the sounds that are often described as rising or falling pitches.

I had a lot of fun poking around in the speech lab, for instance this vowel corner. I could hardly tell the difference between the women from Ohio and Wisconsin, but western North Carolina was really different.

Anyway, I came across, "The approach taken at the SPA Labs is data-driven and the focus is on constructing large corpora of speech which would provide conclusive answers to the questions asked." At first I thought it was just a collection of data, but I learned that this phrase is very specific to speech research--refers to a collection of recorded utterances used as a basis for language analysis.

Orvieto

We were hanging an art show today (Jan Kotch, Worthington) at the UALC Mill Run Church, and one of the paintings was of Positano. I mentioned we were in Italy last summer. "Would you go back," a fellow artist asked. In a minute. Here's an artist workshop in Orvieto in 2010.

Here's the artist's story. Amazing what faith, love and talent can do for you.

This and that from January 1982

While doing some laundry, I continued to go through an old box of letters and found one from early January 1982 updating our parents and siblings on what we'd done over the holidays. It's not particularly interesting, but it does have a familiar ring with weather and economy stories.

THE BRUCE TIMES NO. 12 JANUARY 1982

No matter what part of the country you are in the weather seems to be the topic--California with mudslides, Chicago area with -26, Florida with freezes, and Ohio with -50 chill factor. We had another 5 inches of snow today and it was quite wet, so I had to spend about 45 minutes shoveling the drive-way before I could get the car in.

I had an interesting free lance reseearch job this past week getting material for a medical illustrator on health insurance. I browsed the title, "The Hospital that Ate Chicago." The state of Ohio has the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the nation, and it has now been predicted that we will have a billion dollar deficit, and most of it will be from the education budget.

It has really been gloom and doom at work [Ohio State University], and it is virtually assured now that I will be out of work very soon. They are predicting as high as 20% cuts in OSU's budget, which would virtually paralyze the university. Someone was recalling that during the Depression, you had to bring your own toilet paper because the university couldn't buy any. Today we were told all purchasing would stop--including paper products and line charges for the computer.

I've applied for a job at Chem Abstracts as a Russian cataloguer. Two weeks ago I wouldn't have considered it.

No health czar, no hearings, no choice

We've got it anyway. SCHIP protecting "children," who are adults, and electronic records snooping to make sure our doctors won't be able to give us too much help or quality care. On this one issue alone, the Republicans should have stopped the "hear no evil, see no evil, smell no stench" routine. Obama didn't need a single Republican vote to launch his war on the economy.

"Two provisions in President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan could give the federal government the authority to oversee the medical decisions made between doctors and patients, critics warn, which could result in the rationing of health care." Story here.

I can understand why the Democrats fall in line--he's their guy. They can see what's happening, but they've invested so much of their passion and belief in a false prophet, that even when the crash of planets doesn't happen, they prepare to climb on board the spaceship ready for the next lie. But why would the Republicans be willing to accept the blame? Arlen Specter of PA, and Olympia Snowe & Susan Collins of ME. RINOs helped stampede us into a recession. In case you haven't lived long enough to remember history, here's a picture of what we've had in my adult life.


The chart is from JWF, a site not known to me, but I was around then, and it looks familiar. If you disagree with the figures, take your questions to him. I recall paying 10.5% for a mortgage in 1988.

The President can pick 'em

Yes, I know his advisors are doing the selection and they are socialists, marxists and progressives, with a few Democrats huddled in a closet somewhere gasping for air as they are slowly strangled by the leftists, but I had walked through the room and caught the tail end of a news report, "Obama choses porn defender" or something like that. The media tend to get this messed up just to grab viewers, so this morning I googled "lawyer pornographer court" and up it came.

So apparently, President Obama's pick for deputy attorney general is David W. Ogden, characterized as a "porn lawyer" and a "hired gun" for the ACLU. There have been a few times in our history when the ACLU has been useful to freedom's cause, but mostly NOT. Let's assume here that you have no problem with our attorney general associating with scum, how about his reliance on foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution?

Here's his vita. Haaarvad of course.

David Ogden focuses on high-stakes disputes with complex legal and policy dimensions and serious financial implications. His clients include leading companies in the pharmaceutical, petrochemical, insurance, financial, airline, defense, automotive, media, and internet industries, as well as major trade and professional associations, nonprofit foundations, and individuals.

Successfully representing a multinational energy company in ICSID arbitration against a Latin American country concerning intellectual property rights

Obtaining summary judgment for a major US corporation declaring unenforceable in the United States, a $486 million foreign judgment

Representing two foreign air cargo carriers, who are leniency applicants, in ongoing worldwide antitrust litigation, including a US class action involving US and EU commerce and supervising defense of related class actions in Australia and Canada

Obtaining on behalf of a US based university with a foreign campus an anti-suit injunction halting foreign litigation brought against the university, preserving control over the university's foreign assets

Obtaining on behalf of a major foreign airline and successfully defending on appeal dismissal with prejudice of a purported federal court, state-law class action claiming improper retention of US and foreign taxes and fees

Representing the US subsidiary of a foreign corporation, and two US media organizations, in three separate investigations of alleged export control violations concerning China or Cuba

Representing a former US Cabinet Secretary with respect to Alien Tort Statute litigation arising from events in a Latin American nation

Representing a national insurance company with respect to an ongoing False Claims Act investigation by the US Justice Department

Persuading a state civil rights commission not to pursue discrimination charges against a national insurance company concerning homeowner's insurance premium levels, and successfully defending that victory through a series of state court appeals

Obtaining dismissal with prejudice on behalf of a major national mortgage lender of a putative nationwide discrimination class action seeking billions of dollars in damages on behalf of minority borrowers

Representing automobile dealers in an ongoing US Civil Rights Division investigation into alleged discriminatory lending practices

Sounds like a good old boy to me for the globalists, they're the ones with the money. It's a "living Constitution" as long as it helps their own wallet.