• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Boston cops arrest people who videotape their actions - "They’re invoking laws against wiretapping, which you might naively think were passed to protect the people from the authorities, not vice versa, [Boston Globe/Daniel Rowinski, New England Center for Investigative Reporting; Radley Balko, Reason "Hit and Run"] Now lawyer Simon Glik, who was arrested for recording an arrest, is suing three cops and the city ."
• Super Bowl 44 - "Most will spend three hours or more watching flickering television images to catch 11 minutes of actual playing, during which they will learn what I will learn in one second the next day: who won."

• Revisiting the Marriage Supermarket - "Imagine, says Tim, a marriage supermarket. In this supermarket any man and woman who pair up get $100 to split between them. Suppose 20 men and 20 women show up at the supermarket, it's pretty clear that all the men and women will pair up and split the $100 gain about equally, $50,$50. Now imagine that the sex ratio changes to 19 men and 20 women. Surprisingly, a tiny change in the ratio has a big effect on the outcome.
  
  Imagine that 19 men and women have paired up splitting the gains $50:$50 but leaving one woman with neither a spouse nor any gain. Being rational this unmatched woman is unlikely to accede to being left with nothing and will instead muscle in on an existing pairing offering the man say a $60:$40 split. The man being rational will accept but this still leaves one women unpaired and she will now counter-offer $70:$30. And so it goes."
• “Heart Attack restaurant owner sues Heart Stoppers owner over theme” - "Two US restaurants are battling in court over who originated the medical disaster theme of serving food unhealthy enough to put diners in hospital."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."

• Photosynthesis uses quantum interactions to harvest light - "A new experimental setup using photosynthetic proteins shows that, when they are stimulated with light, they interact on a quantum level: their states are dependent on one another, which allows them to transmit energy efficiently.
  
  Photosynthesis relies on proteins that absorb light, which excites their electrons, giving them enough energy to move within or even exit the molecule. This excitation energy is transmitted between molecules to a reaction center, where it is harvested for use by the organism. Until recently, scientists thought that the energy was transferred according to classical laws because of the size and complexity of the proteins, but this new research shows that quantum interactions are at work."
• Ford Shelby GT500: Too Much Is Just Enough - "This baby’s got 550 horsepower and 510 foot-pounds of torque. With those kinds of figures, it’s easy to see just what a monster of a car the GT500 should be at the track or on the strip.
  
  That’s a 10 horsepower boost over the previous model. It comes from an all-new 5.4-liter supercharged aluminum engine that is 102 pounds lighter than the previous cast-iron plant and uses Ford’s patented plasma-coating technology. That cuts friction and shaves another 8.5 pounds from the block because the cylinders don’t need cast iron liners. Sweet! Not only that, but the new mill offers better fuel economy than the outgoing GT500, returning a claimed 23 mpg highway and 15 city. Yeah, yeah… that’s nothing great. But we’re talking about a hardcore muscle car here, and it is good enough to eliminate the gas guzzler tax. The boost in fuel economy comes from, among other things, lower weight and electric power assist steering."

Congressional decision-making is driven by politics, policy and process. In this engaging workshop, Washington-based experts discuss these 3 P's and help you understand the complete policy-making process.

You’ll get a solid understanding of:

• Congressional operations and the legislative process
  
• How public and foreign policy become law
  
• Congressional politics and leadership
  
• Congressional budgeting today
  
• The role of OMB in the legislative process
  
• Effective communication with Congress
  
• How the media covers the Hill
  
• Current campaign and election trends
  
• How members of Congress advance their legislative, public policy and political agendas
  
• How personal and committee staff work
  
• How you can build win/win relationships with staffers

Attend a congressional hearing and see the process in action.

March 3-5, 2010, 8:30 am - 4 pm all three days.

Approved for 1.7 CEUs from George Mason University.

Where: On Capitol Hill in Washington, DC

This is a required course for the Certificate in Congressional Operations and for the Certificate in Communication and Advocacy.

For more information, including agenda and secure online registration, see CapitolHillWorkshop.com

• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Natural Gas – We Got it Half Right - "Our energy situation broadly cleaves into two main functions – natural gas, and electricity. Natural gas is used for industry, heating homes and powering stoves, and is taking a greater portion of the electrical generation load. Electricity also overlaps with gas when it comes to home heating and cooling, and is obviously a large component for industrial uses. However, the natural gas and electricity energy industries in the United States have moved in profoundly different directions over the last few decades. The purpose of this post is to describe where we are, as a country, with regards to natural gas. In short -- we got it half right.
  
  Natural gas has three main components, broadly speaking – 1) exploration / extraction 2) transportation 3) distribution. In general, natural gas is lightly regulated for exploration / extraction, has general principles for transportation (open access) and is pretty heavily regulated for distribution (local monopolies). "
• LPS: Mortgage Delinquencies Reach 10% - "More foreclosures and short sales coming!"
• Moody's: Deficits Jeopardize U.S. Government's Aaa Bond Rating - "In other words, the Federal government is moving in the wrong direction on fiscal, tax and economic policy, which is beginning to erode what was once a rock-solid trust in its creditworthiness on the part of the capital markets. And these guys have been pretty tolerant of the patterns of Federal fiscal irresponsibility we've seen in recent decades—so you know it's getting really bad when the markets quietly start sounding the alarm.
  
  To that point, Arizona Republic columnist Bob Robb is right in pointing out today that the latest Obama budget effectively sets a new--and much higher--baseline for federal spending, with no draw-down in sight even after the economy recovers."
• War on AIDS Hangs in Balance as U.S. Curbs Help for Africa - "Seven years after the U.S. launched its widely hailed program to fight AIDS in the developing world, the battle is reaching a critical turning point. The growth in U.S. funding, which underwrites nearly half the world's AIDS relief, has slowed dramatically. At the same time, the number of people requiring treatment has skyrocketed.
  . . .
  The most immediate concern is getting enough lifesaving drugs to all those who need them. Under the Bush administration, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, set aggressive goals for getting people with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, into drug therapy, eventually enrolling some 2.4 million by the end of last year. The Obama administration, which plans to expand international AIDS treatment to at least 4 million by 2013, nevertheless has signaled nearly flat budgets through fiscal 2011. Critics are questioning whether the reduced spending pace means the administration doesn't plan to use the full $48 billion authorized by Congress by 2013."
• Are law schools pulling a “Plato’s Cave?” - "From kindergarten’s opening minutes forward, it’s beyond axiomatic that 'college is a must' and 'education is the answer.' One’s own VIP ticket, a backstage pass to a concert called success. Early indeed it begins. Before Junior is through soiling his diapers, he’s likely endured a flickering barrage of phonics-building DVDs, cognitive-theory coaches, and other fashionable accessories of the preschool-pimp parasites to whom his parents earnestly fell victim. It’s beyond endemic.
  . . .
  On the subject of cost, let’s further break down the tuition digits for a laughing-stock 'school' like Seton Hall. You’re looking at $44,000 a year; $22,000 a semester. There are roughly 14 weeks in a semester with about 15 hours of class a week. Do the math. You’re paying roughly $104 an hour, or $1.73 a minute at sticker price. A long-distance call to your uncle in Madagascar is probably cheaper.
  . . .
  The JD carnival’s opening act is invariably the 'successful alumni' spiel. These masters of illusion make David Copperfield seem a mere piker. Like Plato’s parable, the lemmings march lock-step into an auditorium’s dimmed cave and intently watch these 'shadows' grab the podium and commence their smoke n’ mirrors act. Without fail, these shadow grad shills are valedictorian and/or Top 1% types, the hand-picked winners of the TTT lottery. Maybe the ABA brochures should adopt a new sweepstakes-esque catchphrase, such as 'all it takes is Access Group and a dream' or 'hey, you never know?' Why not? As Big Debt readers know, one’s chances of success in today’s glutted legal industry is as likely as a winning Powerball ticket.
  . . .
  Kids, seriously, if you are currently enrolled at Seton Hall, Brooklyn, ‘Bozo, NYLS or any other also-ran private school, take a good, hard look at first semester grades. Realize that you can bail out now and save yourself a lifetime of crushing, impoverished misery. You’re on board the Titanic and the iceberg has been hit, but lifeboats remain. Board them now. Don’t go down with the ship and hope you’ll find some flotsam or jetsam to grab hold of in the drying cesspool of the legal job market. There is no 'market' to speak of, just hordes of heavily indebted losers cold-sending resumes into craigslist’s barren ghetto. Your leverage via a vis salary is pathetic, like trying to budge a boulder with a chopstick. Jobs paying south of 40 (and even 30) K a year are getting bombarded with hundreds of resumes in the infamous 'white-out' phenomenon described in our Shingle Hanger post last month.
  . . .
  Today’s kids have- we posit- no excuse. They’ve heard the blogosphere’s bad news and thus proceed at their peril. Most make the law-school decision mindlessly as moths flying into a porchlight (and encountering a similar result). Yet onward the lemmings flutter, munching popcorn in Plato’s cave as the charade proceeds. At pre-law websites like Top Law Schools, the children find their prospects forever bullish, naïve as toddlers awaiting Santa’s chimney-slide. They’re in for an empty stocking and a face-full of soot. Better burn that lump of coal Santa leaves you for heat, since that’s the only 'gift' you’re getting from today’s legal industry, kids."
• School Crisis In Nevada; Governor Seeks To Cancel Collective Bargaining With Schools Because The State Is Broke - "Nevada has an $881 million budget deficit and drastic cuts are on the horizon for education. Governor Gibbons is investigating options of canceling collective bargaining agreements with school districts. Unfortunately that maneuver is likely illegal.
  . . .
  Budget crises in nearly every state are the defining problem right now, yet none of the other bloggers are talking about it. I am swamped with material and struggling to keep up."
• State Pensions, from Scott Brooks - "The pension problem in this country is a time bomb that is set to go and will likely either cripple the nation or be one of the final straws that breaks our back. Remember, pensions are backed up by the PBGC.."
• It's a Scam! - "Contrary to what our cowardly commenter claims, however, a physician group cannot 'comply' with the messenger model. The whole thing is a scam. Since the messenger model is basically the FTC's imaginary friend, only the FTC knows what it looks like. So even if a physician group spends thousands of dollars on antitrust counsel -- in many cases, an ex-FTC lawyer -- who tells them exactly how to 'comply' with the messenger model, the FTC will just turn around and say, 'No, that's not what we meant!'
  
  Keep this in mind. There's been at least 40 or 50 FTC cases brought against physician groups for violating the messenger model policy. This encompasses something like 15,000 physicians. Is it really plausible that all of them didn't know how to comply with the rule? Or is it more likely that the FTC adopted the messenger model as a way of ratcheting up the demand for antitrust lawyers? Call me a skeptic, but I'm going with option B."
• The Quiet Energy Revolution - "Two monumental shifts in the world of energy are underway right now: one technological, the other financial. They will change the way we power our lives (especially our cars), provide a real measure of energy security, and help curb greenhouse gas emissions. Neither shift has anything to do with the turn to a green renewable energy economy promised by President Obama. Physics ensures that will never happen, no matter how much wishful thinking (and government subsidy) is applied. Sorry, greens, carbon-based energy will continue to dominate our energy future, not windmills or solar panels.
  
  The first profound shift was made possible by a little-noticed technological breakthrough in the last three years that has changed the way we extract natural gas. Engineers now make use of two important innovations. One is horizontal, or directional, drilling, which permits wells to move laterally beneath the surface instead of going straight down. This technology minimizes the number of holes that have to be drilled, leaving a smaller surface footprint and accessing a larger area. The other technology is hydraulic fracturing, used to extract gas trapped in porous shale rock. In this process, also known as fracking, water and chemicals are pumped at tremendous pressure into shale rock formations to push gas into pockets for easier recovery.
  
  By marrying and perfecting the two processes into a technology called horizontal fracking, engineering has virtually created, from nothing, new natural gas resources, previously regarded as inaccessibly locked in useless shale deposits. Suddenly, the mammoth shale formations in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, North Dakota, and elsewhere have the potential to produce abundant amounts of gas for decades to come."
• Your Neighbor is being foreclosed on but you don’t know it. 3 Identical Homes on the Same Street Telling us a Very Different Story Each. Real Homes of Genius -- A $630,000 Foreclosure in Cerritos has a Neighboring Home Renting for $2,150. Or You Can Buy a Similar Home Today for $549,000. - "The rental is identical in size to the other two homes. A 3 bedrooms and 1.75 bath home listed at 1,100 square feet. This is an excellent example of what is going on because we have virtually three identical homes all in the same block but telling us very different stories. You would have to be out of your mind to pay the current price. You would be buying at a peak low in mortgage rates in an area that can clearly only support a rental income of $2,150. Think about that. No investor in their right mind would pay this amount. And rates will go up. Just look what happened to the markets today once people realize a country can’t pay their debt (hello California!). If you bought this home as an investor, you would be negative cash flowing by over $1,000 per month depending on your down payment. That would be a dumb move right off the bat and keep in mind, for investment properties the interest rate is much higher and you have to go in with at least 20 percent down. This is why I believe we are far from a bottom in many markets that are filled with shadow inventory. And let us run those numbers."
• Sunlight memo to Congress: Here's how to do earmark disclosure - "President Obama's remarks during last State of the Union address included an admonition to Congress to change the way it discloses earmarks, by putting all of the information about every earmark on one web site that is easily accessible to the public.
  
  That was good advice and there is no practical or philosophical reason why Congress should delay doing that as soon as possible. But Congress being Congress, additional 'encouragement' will almost certainly be required.
  
  To that end, the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington non-profit devoted to increasing transparency and accountability in government, is circulating a useful How-to that should be required reading for every Member of Congress:"
• Grading Agencies’ High-Value Data Sets - "I wrote here a few weeks ago about the 'high-value data sets' -- three per agency -- that the federal government would soon be releasing at Data.gov. They were released on January 22nd, and we’ve been poring over them ever since. More on that below.
  
  Tomorrow, agencies are supposed to have their 'open government' sites put up -- sites where they make their data feeds available and easily findable for the public. There are a couple of different sites monitoring when those sites are going up.
  . . .
  With the help of Cato interns Solomon Stein and Sasha Davydenko, I assigned three points to each feed that had to do with management, deliberation, or results. The resulting numerical scores — 9, 6, 3, or 0 — translate into grades: A, B, C, or D respectively. F was reserved for agencies that didn’t produce feeds."
• Two Letters Re: Lessons Learned from the Oklahoma Ice Storm of 2010 - "The Oklahoma Ice Storm of 2010 is now melting away and as usual there were lessons learned. Many of these should have been 'known' before but we are never as prepared as we should be. In that vein I am going to rehash several things that went right, a few that went wrong, and others that we can improve on the next time that 'life as usual' is not."
• Weisberg: God Bless America? No, God Damn America! - "[Slate editor-in-chief Jacob] Weisberg is not just wrong in his parsing of American disenchantment. He's wrong to think it's a tragedy. Increasing numbers of Americans in the vast lands to be found outside the D.C. Beltway (join us, Jacob, the water's fine!) understand that government delivers far too little at far too high a price. (Libertarians would take that realization much further, but we are banned from Weisberg's empire of the mind.) Skepticism about authority, expectation of better performance, and a determination to get more for your dollar are not problems that need to be solved. They're bedrock American ideals."
• Gerard Alexander On the Condescending Attitude of the Democratic Party - "A day in hell for me would be spent having to listen to a debate between Michael Moore (or Paul Krugman) and Ann Coulter (or Bill O'Reilly)."

• The Magisterial Goal - "[Soccer announcer Ray] Hudson made his career first as a soccer player--for Newcastle United in England, and later for various teams in the defunct North American Soccer League. But he is best known for announcing the modern game for GolTV. Commentary for a soccer match, more so than in any other sport, is like the musical accompaniment to ballet. Therefore as a broadcaster, Hudson is comparable to the conductor of an orchestra playing in the pit beneath a stage of dancers; he adds context and emotion to the drama. No wonder, then, that he often likens footballers to beautiful women. 'I’m telling you man,' Hudson once said of FC Barcelona’s seventeen-year-old striker, Bojan Krkic, 'this kid could be the best thing on two legs since Sophia Loren.'
  
  Unlike most American sports, soccer is a fluid game, with frequent changes of possession and few clear, numeric statistics to evaluate. Soccer is improvisational, whereas American football is regimented. In football, plays are designed then executed, to greater or lesser success. In soccer, players practice formations and then improvise within a spontaneous framework. Therefore soccer, whose action is as constant as light, requires a reactive, jazz-like call."
• Student Protest Forces Yuba College Board To Rescind Chancellor's Raise; Tuition Soars Everywhere - "Inquiring minds are asking 'Why is tuition soaring?'
  
  One of the answers is can be found in the first article: School boards are stacked with greedy pigs voting to give administrators $30,000 raises in spite of everything going on in the economy.
  
  However, the big reason is student loan guarantees.
  
  When government guarantees student loans, there is every incentive for the greedy school boards to give themselves and all the administrators big fat raises on top of their already bloated pensions.
  
  It should be no surprise to find that is what they have done year in and year out. To pay for it, they have to jack up tuition every year."
• Save Cash, Buy a Clunker - "Just when you thought that America’s supply of cheap cars fell victim to Cash for Clunkers, a new website specializing in heaps costing less than $1,000 showcases prime examples of automotive detritus -- some of which are still capable of highway travel.
  
  Cars for a Grand is the brainchild of online entrepreneurs Chris Hedgecock and Jorge Gonzalez, the same guys behind Zero Paid. The site allows for individual users to post cars for sale, and scours eBay and classified ads for the best buckets of bolts. To promote the site, the founders bought a 1974 Pontiac LeMans for $900 and drove it across the country last summer."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Tough Guy Challenge 2010 - "The 24th annual Tough Guy Challenge took place last weekend, on Sunday, January 31st, on South Perton Farm, near Wolverhampton, England. Despite being billed as 'the safest most dangerous taste of physical and mental endurance pain in the world', this year's race still attracted over 5,000 men and women - all of them signing a disclaimer saying 'It's my own bloody fault for being here'. About 600 racers did not complete the course this year - the winner being Paul Jones of Oswestry, England, completing the course in one hour 18 minutes. The Challenge is annual event to raise cash for charity with funds going to the Mr. Mouse Farm for Unfortunates. Special thanks today to photographer Mike King, who was kind enough to share 16 of his great photographs of the 2010 Tough Guy Challenge below. (31 photos total)"
• Flight 1549 - time lapse of recovery of crippled Airbus A320 aircraft - impressive salvage job
• Comcast CEO Argues Rules Will Protect Customers In Merger, While Comcast Lawyers Argue Rules Are Unconstitutional - "I have to say that I'm not particularly concerned about Comcast and NBC merging. I'm all for it. If two companies that poorly run are getting together, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster. We've seen this game before, and it was called AOL-Time Warner. While it's difficult to think that anyone could screw up that badly again, if anyone can, it's the folks at NBC Universal."

• It's the phenome and not the genome: put your money on mortal flesh - "But the fact remains that for most of us, the genotype is much less relevant than the phenotype. What is phenotype? It is the things we can see, the outward or observable physical or biochemical characteristics and they are determined by both your genetic makeup and environmental influences. Your blond hair, your weight, your strange nose, green eyes and that funky shaped little toe of yours --all examples of phenotype.
  
  So what do I mean when I say phenotype is more relevant than genotype? Well, let's say a new patient, a male, walks into my office and he is in his fifties. Let's say he happens to have the outline of a pack of cigarettes showing in his front pocket. As a male he already has one risk factor for coronary artery disease--just being male, alas. The cigarettes tell me that he is four times more likely to have a heart attack than his peers who don't smoke. His risk of sudden death is at least doubled. Let's say I notice he happens to be carrying more than 30 pounds of extra poundage above the belt line: that allows me to predict he has a higher chance of being at risk for diabetes, if he is not already frankly diabetic. Let's say that I notice too the pale outline of a recently-removed wedding ring (I can't help it, my eyes are always looking at the body as text--even when I am out of the hospital), then I know that his risk of death as a recently divorced man can be double that of his married peers."
• The People's Historian? Howard Zinn was a master of agitprop, not history - "Eggers is right about that. I'm sorry to sound a discordant note about this 'great' man (The Guardian), this historian and activist of 'limitless depth' (RT, who ceded hours of its coverage to the 'American mahatma'). But while Zinn might have been an effective activist and a man of great modesty, he was an exceptionally bad historian.
  
  It's a mystery how A People's History of the United States, which has sold over a million copies and currently sits at number fourteen on the Amazon bestseller list, has become so popular with students, Hollywood types, and academics. It is a book of no original research and no original ideas; a tedious aggregation of American crimes (both real and imagined) and deliberate elisions of inconvenient facts and historical events.
  
  Much of the criticism of Zinn has come from dissenters on the left. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once remarked that 'I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian.' Last year, the liberal historian Sean Wilentz referred to the 'balefully influential works of Howard Zinn.' Reviewing A People's History in The American Scholar, Harvard University professor Oscar Handlin denounced 'the deranged quality of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history.' Socialist historian Michael Kazin judged Zinn's most famous work 'bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.'
  
  Just how poor is Zinn's history? After hearing of his death, I opened one of his books to a random page (Failure to Quit, p. 118) and was informed that there was 'no evidence' that Muammar Qaddafi's Libya was behind the 1986 bombing of La Belle Discotheque in Berlin. Whatever one thinks of the Reagan administration's response, it is flat wrong, bordering on dishonest, to argue that the plot wasn't masterminded in Tripoli.
  . . .
  But it is clear that those who have praised his work do so because they appreciate his conclusions, while ignoring his shoddy methodology."
• Is the iPad the New Edsel? - "In the parlance of the wise Dr. McCracken, Apple sorely needs a Chief Culture Officer. The iPad is a technological marvel, and surely goes about delivering on user needs like nobody's business, but just as we mortal men are not mere economic units, so must a device aspire to be a complete emotional experience. What pains me here is that Apple is the leader in this arena, the ace purveyor of seamless, compelling experiences. I can only assume they had no intention of becoming the New Edsel, so how did we get here?"
• Free-Range Kids and the Economic Way of Thinking - "I just finished reading Lenore Skenazy's Free-Range Kids (subtitle: 'Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry') and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Her basic argument is that many parents have totally misjudged the real dangers to their children and have chosen to focus on the most unlikely of danger scenarios, with the result that kids are more or less bubble-wrapped through childhood and adolescence, and do not learn self-reliance and how to navigate the world, and are not resilient in the face of failure.
  . . .
  I am not willing to argue causality about this next point, but I do think it says something about the zeitgeist that many parents are cushioning their kids from failure at the same time we've entered the world of the Permanent Bailouts."
• Jon Stewart Destroys, Disembowels, Mauls, Hammers, Rips, Slams & B***** Slaps Bloggers - "I didn't know that I did that."
• Supply and Demand - "The sex ratio on many U.S. campuses is around 60/40 and rising. The NYTimes has an excellent piece on the predictable consequences for dating."
• kululua Airline’s Rebranding Is Like Aviation 101 - "[South Africa’s kulula airline's] recent rebranding will leave every passenger with a basic knowledge of aviation and aircraft." (4 photos)
• Bus Saturday Finale: Scenicruiser Design Inspiration Discovered - "The Greyhound Scenicruiser was iconic, and set off a rash of imitators world-wide. Based on a design of Raymond Loewy supposedly inspired on an earlier patent by Roland E. Gegoux, it was hailed as a stylistic and practical breakthrough. But it was anything but new or original, as this 1937 Kenworth bus illustrates quite well. It was used in the north west for a number of years."
• My Austin WiMAX Experience Was Good, But Not Good Enough - "I spent the last few weeks roaming around Austin with a dual-mode WiMAX modem from Sprint in order to see how well it works here. The verdict: It’s not strong enough to be a wireline replacement, but if I didn’t have a contract to fulfill on Verizon I’d ditch my MiFi and pick up the Overdrive 4G/3G personal hotspot and use that as my primary data connection."

Amendment XVII.

Passed by Congress May 13, 1912. Ratified April 8, 1913.

Note: Article I, section 3, of the Constitution was modified by the 17th amendment.

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

More

• Seventeenth Amendment - Wikipedia
• Seventeenth Amendment - Findlaw

A free download of our Pocket Constitution is available on Scribd.

This definition is from our Pocket Dictionary of Legislative Terms. Perfect reference tool of Congressional jargon and procedural terms. Learn how to translate words that are used every day on Capitol Hill. 4 x 9 inches, 16 pages The cover and inside pages of this booklet can be customized with your logo and information. For more information, see our Booklets page. The Pocket Dictionary is based on the Congressional Deskbook, by Michael Koempel and Judy Schneider.

TheCapitol.Net offers training and a Certificate Program in Congressional Operations and Federal Budgeting.

• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• TARP Inspector General: Government Programs "risk re-inflating bubble" - "We've been discussing this for some time, and there is a good chance that house prices will fall further as the government support is withdrawn since house prices appear too high based on price-to-income and price-to-rent ratios."
• The First Year of Obama's Failed Economic Policies: The Worst May Yet Be Avoided - "In response to the next leg down, Bernanke will monetize debt at an even more furious and clever pace, perhaps in alliance with the Bank of England and Bank of Japan. The ECB resists, and all who balk will be chastised by the monied powers and their demimonde, the ratings agencies and global banks. This is modern warfare of a sort.
  
  We do not expect the corruption of the world's reserves to be so blatant that the inflation will immediately appear, except in more subtle manner. At some point it may explode, especially if Ben is particularly good at concealing its subtle growth."
• Roubini Sees ‘Dismal’ Growth as Summers Rues ‘Human Recession’ - "'The headline number will look large and big, but actually when you dissect it, it’s very dismal and poor,' Roubini said in a Jan. 30 Bloomberg Television interview following a U.S. Commerce Department report that showed economic expansion of 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter. 'I think we are in trouble.'
  
  Roubini said more than half of the growth was related to a replenishing of depleted inventories and that consumption was reliant on monetary and fiscal stimulus. As these forces ebb, the rate will slow to 1.5 percent in the second half of 2010."
• At work, part II - "Although the global economic downturn no longer appears to be heading off a cliff, signs of stability or recovery are still sporadic and tenuous. As news stories look for signs of of the direction of economic indicators, photographs fill the wires of people working from all over. Once more, I've collected some of these disparate photos over the past couple of months, composing another global portrait we humans at work around the world. (45 photos total)"
• Name that Blip Redux - "Even though I'm more skeptical of Tiebout competition than almost any economist I know, I still think that without federal subsidies, tax competition between states and localities would have kept their governments a lot smaller than the ones we see today. And I still can't figure out whether the current spending spike is a blip, or just a return to long-run trend."
• Ethics Expert on Global Warming... - "Mike Treder, Managing Director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, notes that ALL those who disagree with him that Global Warming is going to kill billions unless we invest more in wind farms are either stupid or evil. One would think such a manichean understanding of a complex system would only be found in rural bars were everyone has a chain attached to their wallet."
• Real Homes of Genius -- Culver City Home selling for $744,500 but Neighbor Home is Renting for $2,250. The Rent versus Buy Analysis and 40 Years of Mortgage Data. - "How do you know if a home is priced at a right level? We have various metrics that we can use including common sense which seems to run in short supply. That is how we spotted the epic California housing bubble years ago while the real estate denial cheerleading crew thought that prices would simply continue to go up. In these mid-tier markets underlying incomes do not support current prices. It really is that simple. What is happening in these markets is this; homes are building up in the shadow inventory since fewer homes are actually selling but defaults are still rising as many Californians are unable to make their payments.
  . . .
  You can see the home we’ve been talking about highlighted above in red with the $744,500 listing price. I’ve circled the other home on the same street that is currently a rental in this market. The rental listing has the place at 2 bedrooms and 2 baths. Only a few houses away and 1 bedroom less. What is the monthly rental price? $2,250. You can rent two of these places for the price of the mortgage on the other place!
  
  This is the kind of metrics that scream housing bubble. And keep in mind rental prices are more sensitive to monthly data because you are paying this amount out of your net income. No tax breaks, toxic mortgages, or any other gimmick. One simple rule when evaluating real estate is trying to figure out a home price based on rental income. One I use is the following:"
• Complaint: Amazon.com should charge tax for sales in Va. - "When Amazon.com sells a book for $10 or a television set for $1,200 to Virginia consumers, the retailer charges no sales tax.
  
  Amazon.com Inc., based in Seattle, operates a fulfillment center and a data center in Virginia. According to federal and Virginia law, a company with a physical presence or 'nexus' in the state must collect sales tax on purchases there, even if the business has headquarters outside the state."
• The Other Side of the Coin - "Marriage is a monopoly in that my wife and I have both forsworn allowing others to compete with us to supply the other with love services. (That is 'love' services, not just sexual services.) I don't have to come home to see a line of men vying to provide my wife attention and gentleness and offer to take her to dinner and the ballet. Neither does she have to deal with a line of women vying to do the same for me (except the ballet part). Like any good monopoly then, you can expect to receive a lower quality product at a higher price."
• *The Cleanest Race* - "This is a very interesting book about the ideologies behind North Korea. The author is B.R. Myers and the subtitle is How North Koreans See Themselves -- and Why it Matters. Excerpt:
  . . .
  I also recommend the new book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick. Excerpt:"
• A Nation of Racist Dwarfs - "Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.
  
  But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming."
• U.S. Judge Grants Political Asylum to German Homeschoolers - "For one German family, it turns out that the U.S. - despite our own draconian education regulations - has served as a place for asylum. Last week, a judge granted this family this status as a means of protecting their essential human rights. 'Homeschoolers are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress,' said Immigration Judge Lawrence O, Burman. 'This family has a well-founded fear of persecution...therefore, they are eligible for asylum...and the court will grant asylum.'"
• “How Do You Fix a Bill that Hasn’t Been Passed Yet?” - "Some House Democrats seem prepared to pass the Senate health care bill if the Senate will use the reconciliation process to amend the health care legislation. Yet there’s a catch. Some House Democrats want the Senate to go first, and as the Plum Line reports, congressional parliamentarians are not quite sure how to do this."
  
  From the comments: "Imagine, one set of politicians refusing to trust another set, from their own party, no less. You’d think they know each other pretty well. I’d say that in this season the voters have come to know them that well, also."
• Teaching remedial writing - "Jack Miller sees a 'wide' but not a 'rich' diversity in his remedial writing students at a Minnesota community college. Though they come from different backgrounds, most 'have little understanding of grammar . . . and see it as a set of arbitrary ‘rules’ concocted by sadistic pedants harboring grudges against the young.'
  . . .
  About 20 percent don’t know how to behave in a classroom, he writes."
• Former lobbyists in senior Obama administration positions - "Although Barack Obama promised lobbyists would not serve in his White House, and issued executive orders restricting former lobbyists, more than 40 ex-lobbyists now populate top jobs in the Obama administration, including three Cabinet secretaries, the Director of Central Intelligence, and many senior White House officials."
• Inside Obama's Hologram (Reason, March 2010) - "The fact is, Obama has presided over the biggest spending increase since World War II after promising a 'net spending cut,' enacted multiple taxes after multiply promising not to, kept deliberations secret after vowing 'unprecedented transparency,' and intruded into private industry to an extent not contemplated since the collapse of communism." (Review of "Inside Obama's Brain" by Sasha Abramsky.).
• Presidential Promises and Pretenses - "The day before President Obama delivered his State of the Union address last week, The New York Times reported that 'aides said he would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame' for failing to deliver on promises he made during his campaign. If you accept responsibility for something bad, aren’t you accepting blame by definition? Not if you’re Barack Obama, who has a talent for accepting responsibility while minimizing and deflecting it.
  . . .
  The president is even less forthright when it comes to the fiscal responsibility he keeps promising. On Monday he declared, 'We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don't have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money.'
  
  Yet somehow he manages to do so. Obama's much-ballyhooed spending 'freeze' would affect just one-eighth of the budget, would not begin until 2011, and would be accompanied by continued increases in outlays on the president's pet projects.
  . . .
  In his SOTU address, Obama bemoaned 'a deficit of trust--deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.' He blamed the public's 'disappointment' and 'cynicism' on powerful lobbyists, reckless bankers, highly paid CEOs, superficial TV pundits, and mud-slinging politicians. Conspicuously missing from the list: a president who breaks promises while pretending he isn't."

• Clash of the titans - "But if publishers themselves are selling digital versions of their books, and all that's needed to liberate them is a little hacking, the calculus changes. Hacking is fun in a way that proofreading is not. Let us pause here and observe a moment of silence for the death of the idea that book pirates, more literary and therefore more moral than their peers, will somehow prove honorable, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. To the contrary, the pirate interviewed by the Millions said that he deliberately avoided stealing the works of the most successful authors, because they can afford lawyers. Instead he limits his purloining to the work of less commercial writers, such as John Barth, whom he calls 'someone who no longer sells very well, I imagine.' Such nobility! 'From those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.' If electronic reading devices catch on, the threat of piracy to book publishers--and to authors, at all income levels--is very real." ht Marginal Revolution
  
• Bayonets Hit the Mark - "Well, a little Googleing and low and behold it turns out that bunch of maniac Scots from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders got ambushed by about 100 Mahdi militiamen near Basra, fought it out, and when they ran low on ammunition, fixed bayonets and went to town.
  
  Based on an after-​​action report found at this link, the intimidation factor of the bayonet and the surprise such a charge caused among the enemy used to engagements at a distance were pivotal."
  
• On What Freaking Basis? - "Ooh, how can I overcome my embarrassment? Look, I don’t think I have ever argued that Phoenix Light Rail was run poorly or didn’t have pretty trains. And I don’t know if moving 18,000 round trip riders a day in a metropolitan area of 4.3 million people is a lot or a little (though 0.4% looks small to me, that is probably just my 'pre-web' thinking, whatever the hell that is).
  
  The problem is that it is freaking expensive, so it is a beautiful toy as long as one is not paying for it. Specifically, it’s capital costs are $75,000 per daily round trip rider, and every proposed addition is slated to be worse on this metric (meaning the law of diminishing returns dominates network effects, which is not surprising in this least dense of all American cities).
  
  Already, like in Portland and San Francisco, the inflexibility of servicing this capital cost (it never goes away, even in recessions) is causing the city to give up bus service, the exact effect that caused rail to reduce rather than increase transit’s total share of commuters in that wet dream of all rail planners, Portland. Soon, we will have figures for net operating loss and energy use, but expect them to be disappointing, as they have in every other city (and early returns were that fares were covering less than 25% of operating costs)."
  
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
  
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
  
• Love Means Never Having to Say 404 Error - "A New Jersey inventor unveiled a $9,000 sex robot at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas earlier this month, and it’s hard to say who should be more concerned: hookers, man’s best friend, or Elvis impersonators. With her silicone boobs and silicon brain, Roxxxy could eventually put them all out of business."
  
• Lentz: Don’t Like The Gas Pedal Fix? Insist On Replacement! - "In an interview with Toyota’s Jim Lentz yesterday evening, NPR asked why Toyota was using a redesigned pedal for new production, but only offering the shim fix to existing customers. Lentz insisted that the repaired pedals would be as good as the redesigned pedal, that the costs of repair and replacement were about the same, and that the main reason Toyota was repairing rather than replacing recalled pedals was the desire to 'get customers back on the road… as quickly as we possibly can.' That’s when NPR went for the jugular."
  
  Hmmm. Back on the road as quickly as we can may not have been the best choice of words....
  
• An Electric Boost for Bicyclists - " One barrier to wider adoption of electric bicycles in the United States and Europe may be the culture of cycling. Bicycle riders have long valued cycling as a sport and a form of exercise, not simply as a utilitarian means of transportation, and many of them look down their noses at electric bikes.
  
  'To the core cyclist, it’s cheating,' said Loren Mooney, editor in chief of Bicycling Magazine. 'Marketers understand this, and it’s why some have put e-bikes in mass retailers like Best Buy, rather than engaging in the uphill battle of trying to sell them in bike shops.'" Sniff, sniff.

• Jobs calls Adobe lazy, calls Google on the their “bullshit” - "On the subject of Google, Steve said that their avowed policy of 'Do no Evil' is 'bullshit.' He called the release of the Nexus phone a direct attack on the iPhone, and stated that he won’t let them win.
  
  Google wasn’t the only target of Jobsian ire, Adobe took their lumps on the subject of Flash. Steve called Adobe lazy, and said that while they have the potential to do interesting things, they don’t. He said that the reason Apple doesn’t support Flash is because it’s so buggy, and whenever a Mac crashes it’s most likely because of Flash. Steve also predicted that it won’t be long before everyone leaves Flash behind as the standard moves forward to HTML5. "
• Why not fix doctoral programs in length? - "And instead of a dissertation require one good published article."
• ATM Skimmers, Part II - "According to Doten, the U.S. Secret Service estimates that annual losses from ATM fraud totaled about $1 billion in 2008, or about $350,000 each day. Card skimming, where the fraudster affixes a bogus card reader on top of the real reader, accounts for more than 80 percent of ATM fraud, Doten said."
• My NASA budget - "People, it's exactly 0 dollars and 0 cents. If I was king, getting rid of NASA would be one of the first things I would do. Instead, President O has found room somewhere in his newly announced 3.8 trillion dollar austerity budget to bump NASA's funding up to 19 billion dollars."

Do you need to understand, or train others in, how a bill becomes law, basic congressional operations, the amendment tree or where in the legislative and public policy process you can have an impact? Do you have questions about Capitol Hill dynamics that no one can answer (or that you’re too afraid to ask)?

If your job requires you to understand and follow legislation, or if you’re new to government affairs, here's your chance to get up to speed in one information-packed day.

This seminar provides an in-depth examination of congressional operations, House and Senate legislative procedures, the work of committees, floor procedures, reconciliation of differences between houses and presidential action.

February 11, 2010, 9 am - 4:30 pm

Approved for 0.6 CEUs from George Mason University.

Where: DC Bar Conference Center, 1101 K Street NW, Suite 200 (12th and K Streets NW) in Washington, DC

This is a required course for the Certificate in Congressional Operations.

For more information, including agenda and secure online registration, see LegislativeProcess.com

Amendment XVI.

Passed by Congress July 2, 1909. Ratified February 3, 1913.

Note: Article I, section 9, of the Constitution was modified by amendment 16.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

More

• Sixteenth Amendment - Wikipedia
• Sixteenth Amendment - Findlaw

A free download of our Pocket Constitution is available on Scribd.

How to Find a Job in Washington, DC	How to Get a Job with the U.S. Federal Government	How to Obtain a Security Clearance from the U.S. Federal Government

If you don’t have the time to personally attend one of our live courses in Washington, DC, we offer convenient audio courses showing you how Washington works. ^TM

For more information and titles, see CapitolLearning.com

Smart Grid
Modernizing Electric Power Transmission and Distribution; Energy Independence, Storage and Security; Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA); Improving Electrical Grid Efficiency, Communication, Reliability, and Resiliency; Integrating New and Renewable Energy Sources

Compiled by TheCapitol.Net
Authors: Stan Mark Kaplan, Fred Sissine, Amy Abel, Jon Wellinghoff, Suedeen G. Kelly, and James J. Hoecker

The electric grid delivers electricity from points of generation to consumers, and the electricity delivery network functions via two primary systems: the transmission system and the distribution system. The transmission system delivers electricity from power plants to distribution substations, while the distribution system delivers electricity from distribution substations to consumers. The grid also encompasses myriads of local area networks that use distributed energy resources to serve local loads and/or to meet specific application requirements for remote power, municipal or district power, premium power, and critical loads protection.

2009, 644 pages
ISBN: 1587331624 ISBN 13: 978-1-58733-162-6
Softcover book: $27.95

For more information, see 1626SmartGrid.com

President to Call for Big New Ed. Spending. Here’s a Look at How that’s Worked in the Past
You may be wondering: "What did we get for that huge increase in spending?" The answer is: a lot more public school employees. The next chart adds an extra trend line to the one above: the number of public school employees divided by the number of students enrolled. This ratio of staff to students has gone up by 70 percent since 1970, swelling the ranks of the public school employee unions to about 4.5 million people.

• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• Speechwriting: Preparing Speeches and Oral Presentations, March 12, 2010
• Obama’s Swipe at High Court Sparks Debate - "There were days when judges stayed out of politics,' said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont. 'It would be nice to go back to those days.'"
• Why Is Senator Kirk Still Voting on Legislation? - "The main question here is: why is former Senator Kirk still voting on these legislative pieces? According to Senate rules and precedent, Kirk’s term expired last Tuesday upon the election of Scott Brown."
• Haiti: an all-singing, all-dancing, celebrity disaster - "There’s nothing like a disaster in a land populated by black people to bring out the rescue instinct in celebrities. In the two weeks since a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, celebs on both sides of the Atlantic have tweeted, sung, danced, signed cheques and even hand-delivered aid.
  . . .
  Because, just like with past causes célèbres, such as Ethiopia and Darfur, the earthquake in Haiti has quickly become as much about well-to-do Westerners as about catastrophe-struck Caribbeans. It is a news story that allows celebrities and politicians alike to keep a flattering spotlight on themselves (always making sure they wear casual clothes and little makeup, of course)."
• How the Washington Post Covers Education - "Yesterday, the president proposed yet another big increase in federal education spending. The Washington Post quoted 'senior White House officials' as saying that the spending would boost 'the nation’s long-term economic health.'
  
  I sent the story’s authors a blog post laying out the evidence that higher government spending hasn’t raised student achievement, and that if you don’t boost achievement, you don’t accelerate economic growth.
  
  Today, there is an updated version of the original WaPo story. It no longer mentions the stated goal of the spending increase. It doesn’t mention that boosting gov’t spending has failed to raise achievement, and so will fail to help the economy."
• GDP Mirage - The Last Hurrah - "Digging beneath the surface there is nothing to cheer about in the GDP numbers. Moreover, this weakness is in the face of the largest stimulus measures the world has ever seen, not just in the US, but globally. Money supply in China is growing at 30% and housing bubbles are likely to pop in Australia, Canada, and the UK. Problems in Greece, Spain, and Iceland continue to mount.
  
  GDP is a mirage of sand blowing in the wind. So is global growth. It is a mistake to believe government spending can possibly provide a solid foundation for a lasting recovery."
• Massive Homeopathic Overdose Leaves Hundreds of Scientists 0.0000000000000001% Dead - "Scientists in Mourning"
• Paying More, Buying Less - "Excluding the cost of the wars, the 'base' Pentagon budget has also gone up dramatically: 25 percent, or over another Trillion dollars. What we have gotten for that huge increase illuminates the disturbing nature of our decay. The Navy and Air Force are both smaller and equipped with major hardware that is, on average, older than at any point since the end of World War II. The Army and Marine Corps have seen increases to a few combat formations but are only marginally above their post-​​World War II lows. A gargantuan increase in spending has brought forth major decay in two military services and insignificant up-​​ticks in two others.
  
  Where did the added money go? According to the Government Accountability Office almost $300 billion went into mismanagement in the form of cost overruns for hardware. (Expect a new GAO report this spring finding the cost overruns have grown.) Much of the rest of the money for acquisition went into 'successful' hardware programs that were so much more expensive to buy and maintain than what they were replacing that we literally shrunk the force with more money, while simultaneously spending more to support this new equipment at lower operating and training levels."
• Nevermind All Those Opposition Solutions; Obama's Opposition Has No Solutions! - "The second point, though, is that it's more than a little irritating to see Obama speak so well of Ryan's plan and say that it's the sort of thing that deserves 'serious discussion.' Problem is, throughout the health care debate, Obama didn't want to have that discussion. He didn't want to talk about any plans to significantly reduce entitlement spending, or severing the links between insurance and employment.
  
  Indeed, not only did he make almost no effort to incorporate opposition ideas into his legislation, he wasn't willing to recognize the existence of legitimate opposing ideas at all. Instead, he chose to caricature his opponents as having "no solutions." That's not true now. It wasn't true then. But Obama's approach to most policy and political debates has been to reiterate the notion that his way was not simply the best way, but the only way--or at least the only legitimate, acceptable, reasonable way. His conversation today with Rep. Ryan, I think, is a tacit admission that that's just not the case."
• Karl Rove’s Spending - "Mr. Rove’s columns are usually very interesting, but I’d like to see him accept at least some of the blame for the exploding size of government during his tenure at the White House."
• By the Way, Free Markets Are Free - "A free economy is one that is -- how to say this? -- free. It is free of cronyism, favoritism, handout-ism, protectionism, or anything else that amounts to using the state as a means of living at the expense of others. If paupers or billionaires need help, they're required to get it without picking the pockets of others."
• Quicker "Non-Judicial" Foreclosures and Evictions Coming to Florida - "The only open question is whether or not this bill would encourage more to walk away. If so, would that necessarily be a bad thing? The quicker bad debts are written off, and the quicker home prices bottom, the better off everyone will be in the long run."
• NPR: To Stay Or Walk Away - "NPR's Alex Blumberg and Chana Joffe-Walt interview Arizona attorney Mary Kinsley. She describes how a couple years ago homeowners would call her, in tears, trying desperately to save their homes from foreclosure.
  
  Now homeowners call, their voices calm, and ask her the best way to strategically default - and in some cases how to get the banks to take back the houses they've been delinquent on for over a year. Pretty amazing. She thinks this is just the beginning of 'walking away'."
• HELOC Study - "One of the largest issues in the mortgage market is that modifications, as presently designed, are not working. It is clear that at some point, it will be necessary to write down principal to raise the modification success rate.
  
  However, one obstacle to writing down principal of a 1st mortgage is the presence of a 2nd mortgage or subordinate lien. Lien priority dictates that the 1st mortgage cannot be written down until the 2nd is extinguished."
• You're an idiot of the 33rd degree - "In November of 1905, an enraged Mark Twain sent this superb letter to J. H. Todd, a patent medicine salesman who had just attempted to sell bogus medicine to the author by way of a letter and leaflet delivered to his home. According to the literature Twain received (p1,p2,p3,p4), the 'medicine' in question - The Elixir of Life - could cure such ailments as meningitis (which had previously killed Twain's daughter in 1896) and diphtheria (which had also killed his 19-month-old son). Twain, himself of ill-health at the time and very recently widowed after his wife suffered heart failure, was understandably furious and dictated the following letter to his secretary, which he then signed.
  
  Transcript follows."
• Folks Who Know Stuff - "Whether it's a general male trait or simply my normal sloth, it seems that most of the guys I meet and socialize with nowadays are husbands of friends of my wife. And of those husbands of my wife's friends, the ones I tend to get along with best and for the longest visits are guys who Know Stuff."
• If Music Be the Food of Love, Maestro Obama, Play On - "40 years later, on the floor of the House, Mr. Obama proved himself heir apparent to the Wizard of Altamont. Coiling, menacing, prowling, our Jumpin' Jack Flash-in-Chief worked the majority side of the hall into a frenzy, like some beautiful petulant electric cobra panther in a Brooks Brothers 3-button suit. And when he unleashed his climactic campaign finance j'accuse at his Republican foes and the assembled Supreme Court, I was fully expecting a House member to beat Justice Alito senseless with a tire iron. Sympathy For the Devil, indeed."

• My predictions about the iPad - "The story here is one of new markets, not cannibalization or even competition." See the comments.
• iPad vs EtchASketch - "Which one will get Flash first? And who’s kidding who about ten hours of battery life? Are you going to wait for version 2, the MaxiPad?"
• One paragraph plus a sentence - "The rest of the Salinger obituary, interesting throughout, is here." See the comments.
• What Salinger Read - "Speaking of reading preferences, what were Salinger's?"
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Stephen Fry In America: Fifty States And The Man Who Set Out To See Them All - "In 1831, French politician and thinker Alexis de Tocqueville visited the still growing United States, traveled widely and took copious notes. He assembled those notes in two volumes, published five years apart, titled 'Democracy in America,' that are still studied and quoted today. The title 'Stephen Fry in America' echoes de Tocqueville's classic, but also puts the reader on notice that the ambition here is scaled back. This isn't an attempt to understand America, Mr. Fry says, as much as to experience it. And it's supposed to be as much a window into the author as subject.
  . . .
  This reviewer's favorite bit comes from Mr. Fry's visit to Ukiah, Calif., for the comic cultural contrasts. Mr. Fry is scheduled to fire handguns for the first time. At the police shooting range, Mr. Fry tells the patient sheriff that the town's name is haiku spelled backwards, badly bungles a witticism ('Just as well you aren't called Traf.' 'How's that?' 'Oh never mind.'), and lets the officer instruct him how to fire a Glock pistol. He takes aim, manages to hit the target on his first try, and is instantly though briefly 'transformed from Stephen Tut-Tut, the wise and sensible anti-firearms abolitionist into Stephen Blam-Blam.'
  
  The sheriff then asks him, 'Now that you can handle firearms, how'd you like to take part in a drug bust?' and isn't joking. We see a picture of Mr. Fry with a Kevlar vest strapped to him and scenes from the drug bust as proof of this."
• Weight Watchers - "I’ve known a handful of people who joined Weight Watchers at least once -- all women, by the way. They all lost some weight. And they all gained it back, usually with a few extra pounds as a going-away present.
  
  Given what Weight Watchers believes constitutes a good diet, I’m not surprised. Their entire program is based on the belief that the federal government’s nutrition guidelines are actually based on something resembling science. So Weight Watchers preaches the same guidelines: fat is bad, a bit of protein is okay, and carbohydrates are wonderful.
  
  I never joined Weight Watchers, but before I knew better, I did try living on their low-fat Smart Ones meals (along with Lean Cuisines and other diet meals I could nuke.) By the end of the day, I’d be famished. Eventually I’d give up and then, like most dieters, blame myself for not having any discipline. Now I understand the problem wasn’t a lack of discipline; it was a lack of good nutrition."
• Anti-Vaccine Scientist Acted “Dishonestly and Irresponsibly” - "Claims that childhood MMR vaccines cause autism are unfounded and irresponsible. As Ron Bailey notes, 'study after study has debunked' the claim that MMR vaccines are linked to autism, and there are credible allegations that the study that prompted the initial scare was faked. As the BBC reports, British medical authorities have also concluded that the primary researcher promoting such claims, Andrew Wakefield, acted 'dishonestly and irresponsibly' in conducting and promoting his research."
• For Businesses That Accept Cards, Tips for Cutting Fees - "When it comes to credit-card fees, bigger companies have more clout with issuers than small ones. (See related story, How Merchants Deal with Rising Credit-Card Costs.) But there are ways to minimize costly processing fees, from negotiating to shopping around. Here are eight tips."
• Small-Business Cards Now Carry Sizeable Risk - "Banks can list your company's debt alongside your personal debt--lowering your credit score and loan worthiness."

• Guest post: Top Trivia! - "The winning entry came from Andrew J Speirs, with his great Ten Facts About Playing Cards. I have taken the liberty of editing them a bit, but here we go with ten things you probably didn’t know about playing cards……"
• Electronic Flight Bag - "Garmin’s top-of-the-line handheld/bolt-on is the GPSMAP 696 model, with weather, moving maps, approach procedures and terrain avoidance - but it retails for nearly $3000, while the iPad starts at $500.
  
  Which is, oh - wait: A whole lot less.
  
  There’s no technical reason why the iPad - I really hate that name - can’t do all the tasks of an EFB while providing GPS tracking, live weather updates and terrain avoidance. Once you’ve landed on your cross country, you can email home, browse the web, read a book or work on your presentation. Which, just try that with your MX20."
• Apple iPad vs. Amazon Kindle - "I’ll save readers the suspense: I don’t believe that iPad will be a a Kindle-killer. It will capture a noticeable portion of the eReader market but I find it highly unlikely for it to even become #2. Here’s why:"
• Life Without Feminism a sack - " As a matter of fact, in between killing fascists, being an iron worker 40 stories above the streets of Manhattan, and raising a family of four kids, he probably didn’t take two milliseconds to give a rat’s ass about what anyone thought of him.
  
  …And now, in the year 2010, the poor little darlings in the Men’s Movement are all atwitter and feeling faint because a woman might say something mean about them.
  . . .
  For the undescended-testicles-set, though: please, keep worrying about what other people think and telling us about how you’re so opressed by social conventions."
• Antigua: American Woman Murdered in 4th Major Incident in Two Years - "All of these incidents are a reminder that safety cannot be assumed, and precautions should always be taken, especially if in unfamiliar territory."
• The iPad is the iPrius: Your Computer Consumerized - "The iPad is Steve's Minitel terminal.
  
  Just for the heck of it, imagine for a minute that the MacBookPro was locked up like the iPad. The apps that run on the iPhone have been mostly trivial. One person for a few weeks is probably the average effort. Eugene Lin may be willing to build apps on spec and hope for the best after they are submitted, but will Adobe? Imagine when Adobe invests $X millions building Lightroom for a year only to have it rejected because Apple launches Aperture the same week."

Smart Grid	The Federal Budget Process	Congressional Pay and Perks

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• Update on The 111th Congress, 2010, January 29, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, February 10, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, February 11, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, February 18, 2010
• The President's Budget, February 23, 2010
• The Defense Budget, February 26, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, March 3-5, 2010
• On the jury, Gene Weingarten didn't believe the D.C. police's eyes - "Last week I was a juror in the trial of a man accused of selling a $10 bag of heroin to an undercover police officer. At the end of the two days of testimony, I concluded that the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I also concluded that he should be acquitted.
  
  In my mind, it came down to a simple, unsettling question: Is it worse to let a drug dealer go free, or to reward the police for lying under oath?"
  
  Police lie? Whoccodanode!
• Capitalist Fools - "ew places in New York are less likely to inspire grand dreams than Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the twin housing projects that sprawl across 80 acres of the Lower East Side. Built by MetLife in the 1940s, the project encompasses block after block of boxy brick apartment buildings and stolid public spaces, entirely barren of inviting corners or eye-catching detail. The critic Lewis Mumford dubbed it 'the architecture of the Police State'; a slightly kinder motto might have been 'What do you expect for $68.50 a month?'
  
  Yet when MetLife spruced up the complex and put it on the market in 2006, real-estate moguls jetted in for the sale. A joint venture put together by Tishman Speyer and BlackRock carried the day through its willingness to, as The New York Times noted, 'pay up--way up--to unlock future profits in the sprawling Manhattan properties.' At $5.4billion, their winning bid made the sale the most expensive real-estate deal of all time.
  
  Three years later, however, those profits were still securely locked inside the property’s 11,232 apartments--many of which remained rent-controlled, despite strenuous efforts to convert them to upscale market-rate rentals. With net income well under projections, the partnership started spending down its reserves. Then, in October 2009, a court ruled that the partnership had improperly decontrolled the rent for thousands of apartments, and would have to return them to their original status. As of this writing, analysts are predicting default in a matter of months unless the partnership’s debt of $4.4billion can be restructured--a shaky prospect, given that the owners may owe tenants of formerly rent-stabilized apartments as much as $200million in rent overcharges and damages. Stuyvesant Town might soon set another record: the biggest real-estate default in history.
  . . .
  Game theorists often speak of the 'winner’s curse': the tendency of auctions to be won by the people who are the most delusionally overoptimistic. It’s an apt description of what seems to have happened. Not just to the Tishman group, but to America.
  . . .
  The best explanation for the calamity that has overtaken us may simply be that cheap money makes us all stupid."
• Robbing Taxpayers to Pay the Bondsman - "While the bail bondsmen’s lobby generally receives little attention, they are using political clout to further their interests at great expense to taxpayers across the country.
  . . .
  However, the program in Broward County, Florida was severely cut back after the bondsmen’s lobby pressured the commissioners to protect their profits:"
• Obama’s Spending Freeze - "Here’s the important point: a very large part of the 2009 spending spike of $699 billion will be sloshing forward into 2010 and later years. (As illustrated by my fancy arrow in the chart). The new CBO budget estimates (Table A-1) show that only 18 percent of authorized stimulus funding will be spent in 2009, with the rest sloshing forward.
  
  Obama is 'freezing' the budget only because he already has a large amount of cash floating around from the stimulus bill that he can spend on all his favorite big government projects in 2010 and beyond. In budget-speak, federal spending measured in 'outlays' will be far from frozen.
  
  Finally, a president’s proposals for discretionary spending beyond the current budget year are meaningless. Obama will be back with a new budget in February 2011, no doubt with a whole new set of assumptions and priorities."
• How Is This Different From Citizens United - "Remember, the Patriot Act was used far more for drug and child porn cases than it ever has been for terrorism -- it is very, very hard to circumscribe new police powers, particularly when police so desperately want to keep and hold those powers."
• Best Line I’ve Heard Today - "I’m at a conference in south Florida with Paul Rubin, a superb scholar of law and economics. Paul just observed that whenever there’s a corporate scandal, it’s typically blamed on an increase in greed, but when there’s a sex scandal, it’s never blamed on an increase in lust."
• S&P500 Sector Trivia - "Have a look at the table of S&P 500 sectors -- the only one that has outperformed in each of the past three decades is health care. No, Medical and pharmacy inflation was not in your imagination."
• US Cattle Herd Drops to 1958 Levels - "Ranchers are culling the herds as corn prices soar and wholesale prices for beef and milk drop."
• It's Really Business As Usual - "What is interesting, if not stunning, about some of the Bacon's Rebellion commentators is that they really see Obama as a kind of Trotsky, when, in fact, he is propped up by exactly the same club of advisers that propped up Clinton and Bush. The truth is that Obama's is non-intrusive and rather limp when it comes to the kind of federal oversight these smart and greedy people really need. Despite the whining from the right, one year into his presidency, there hasn't been one solid and successful step to reign in the financial sector.
  . . .
  The curious thing about Obama is that he seems to be getting economic advice from the same old, same old that advised all presidents, Democrat or Republican, since 1992. Since Obama has close ties to the University of Chicago, one wonders why he hasn't picked up some of the free market magic that evolved from there, Uncle Milton Freidman and all that.
  . . .
  This is one of those rare areas of agreement between liberals and free-market conservatives. The liberals distrust Wall Street, the conservatives distrust government, and both sides have reached the point where they distrust Wall Street AND Washington!"
• Don't Bogart that Hopium - "My reporter's plate is full of stories this week, but the last thing a portly columnist needs is to eat gargantuan portions of so much rich food.
  
  We've got President Barack Obama's big speech Wednesday night, and so the Hopium pipes will be burning brightly in editorial board rooms across the land. Also, a reputed top mobster for the Chicago Outfit faces sentencing in a federal tax evasion case that could become a tsunami. And later this week, a local mayor will be sentenced on corruption charges.
  
  So how about a few small bites instead?"
• The State of the Union Speech - "So in summary, though we are still in bad shape remember George Bush caused that problem. We are fixing things now in little ways, but we’ll soon get to the big ways. We’ll bring the banks to heel, create jobs, give you health care, keep you safe. Don’t you believe those who say differently, because they’re just getting in the way. We have the largest majority in decades. We won. And we are going to stay the course."
• Obama: You liked my speech? Please send money. - "About an hour after the end of his State of the Union address, in which he called for an end to the partisan conflict that has plagued his first year in office, President Obama sent out a political fundraising appeal through his permanent campaign organization, Organizing for America."
• Open Access Publishing Hits the Big Time - "The Econometric Society which publishes Econometrica, one of the top 4 academic journals in Economics has taken under its wing the fledgling journal Theoretical Economics and the first issue under the ES umbrella has just been published. TE has rapidly become among the top specialized journals for economic theory and it stands out in one very important respect. All of its content is and always will be freely available and publicly licensed."
• The Friendliest Place on Earth? - "I recently got a press release that trumpeted, 'Malaysia Ranks 5th Amongst World’s Friendliest Countries.'
  
  The first thing that struck me was how un-American it was to tout being fifth at anything. When was the last time you heard a crowd chanting, “We’re number five! We’re number five!” But ranking fifth among all the countries in the world is pretty good, I’d say. So, go Malaysia!"

• Al Gore As God - "Do I detect a mellower side to the Jewish Robot’s latest educational cartoon?"
• Are You an ''Exclusive Scholar''? Just Sign Here - "The New York Times reports today on a new marketing gimmick for colleges seeking to boost applications during this recession-plagued time when every tuition-paying body in a classroom counts: the fast-track application form that allows some high school seniors seeking admission to bypass the usual fees of $50 or so, the tedious filling out of information, and perhaps most significantly, the dreaded college essay.
  
  Taking a lead from credit-card marketers, the express forms, typically packaged in a brightly colored envelope marked 'Exclusive Scholar Applications,' 'Distinctive Candidate Application' or something similar, come already filled in with the student's name and other information (bought from College Board lists) so that all the applicant need do is affix a signature and head for a mailbox.
  . . .
  Fast-track college application forms may or may not be a good idea (although many high school students seem to prefer them, according to the New York Times), and they may or may not be a harbinger of death throes for beleaguered small colleges desperate for tuition payers. Yet the fact that they imply that it's not worth admission officers' time in most cases to bother reading college essays suggests a healthy trend that allows potential college freshmen to be evaluated on the basis of their solid academic achievements--grades and test scores--rather than slick expository packaging largely put together by the adults in their lives."
• Fifty Dangerous Things - "The idea of this thin book is that danger is something kids need to learn to handle by experience. The 50 small experiments in this book can potentially cause a minor injury (although they are unlikely to), but are never really seriously dangerous. In fact most of them aren't dangerous at all, but at least they are fun. There are no special techniques, secret formulas or exclusive knowhow here that everyday knowledge or a quick internet search would not turn up. The activities are the kinds of things kids will sometimes do on their own -- at least in the past."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the late 1960s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Radically improving sales for high priced products with 3 characters and a misspelling - "But over the years, there were two critical techniques I discovered that basically was the difference between success and failure."
• I Don't Know Why - "First of all, I don't understand why Pat Robertson doesn't understand that earthquakes are caused by shifts in plates below the earth, not pacts with the devil. Cracks in the earth's crust, known as "faults", shift. The magnitude of the earthquake is measured by how much they shift and how long it takes for them to resettle. Specifically, the Haiti quake was caused by what is called a "strike split" fault, where the two plates move horizontally. That's the same kind of quake we have here in California on the San Andreas fault.
  
  Duh.
  
  I can't understand how he got the idea that some Haitians actually got together and had a meeting with the devil. Did someone get a picture of that on their Iphone? Was the guy that shot the Rodney King video over at the devil meeting?
  
  The Haitians did get together and do something remarkable, but it wasn't a sit down with the devil. They rose up out of slavery with no help from anyone. Does Pat Robertson imagine that the only way they could have done that was with an arms shipment from Beelzebub? Ye of little faith.
  
  But your question wasn't 'why is Pat Robertson so stupid'? I can tell you that he is not the brightest bulb. Years ago, I saw him introduce a guest. He had clearly never heard of this man and spent the long introduction marveling at the man's list of musical credits in a way that belied the fact that he thought the list to be a fantasy. 'He wrote songs made famous by the Beatles!' ('and yet, I've never heard of him?')
  
  Even I know about Little Richard. He is a very famous person. Now he may have actually had a pact with the devil at some point.
  
  Your question is about why some people don't think Catholics are Christians. Or why they think Catholics are lesser Christians.
  
  I don't know why. Perhaps they are as dumb as rocks, like Pat Robertson. All the Christian kindness in the world won't make someone smarter than they are. Some people just are not bright enough to pound sand, poor things."
• Google Routes Around App Store On The iPhone... Others Can Too - "I was just recently suggesting that the massive focus on 'apps' and 'app stores' may be a red herring, as eventually many of those apps can be built via the web (especially as HTML 5 moves forward), without having to go through any kind of app store approval process."
• Low Carbo Diet Lowers Blood Pressure - "The lead author recommends a low carb diet for those both overweight and with high blood pressure.
  . . .
  The two diets yielded equal weight gains. They also improved blood cholesterol and glucose by about the same amount. But the low carb dieters did better on blood pressure control."

• On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life - "There was a time just a few months ago when I did not have google wave. I think of that time with horror - because that epoch was marked with conflicts, total chaos, money was being lost every day, fights were happening between me and my collaborators. Google wave came in, and within a couple of weeks, a heavenly peace had descended on my business."
• The Possibility of the Happy Parasite - "I conclude that 'parasitism' (i.e., living off of the proceeds of a system of state coercion) is compatible with virtue and happiness. All it really takes, I think, is believing sincerely that the system is just and that you’re doing a good thing. As long as you think you’re supporting your life 'neither by robbery nor alms' and not deriving your happiness 'from the injury or the favor of others,' you’re probably fine as long as the system of robbery, alms, injury, and favor is more or less stable, which ours is."
• Headline Magic! News on Great Tits.... - "So, here's the headline: 'Flashier Great Tits Produce Stronger Sperm!' Now, I expect that's right, on the merits."
• Thoughts on the iPad -- Just Push the Buy Button, Says Apple - "Kevin did a good job summarizing the specs of the iPad, which is basically a 9.7-inch iPod Touch. Or an iPhone without the phone call bits.
  . . .
  It’s too early to predict how successful Apple will be selling the iPad. It’s pricier than other solutions, and it may not be an easy sell to non-geeks. That said, Apple is going to make millions off the iPad. Hundreds of millions."
• Recession Snows Tahoe Under - "Today those 'other things' involved driving down to South Lake Tahoe/Stateline to buy a few needed groceries. While there, I checked out the commercial scene.
  
  Two or three years ago, the place was doing well, if appearance was any guide. Now, that same casual yardstick suggests that times are hard. In the 'village' by the big Marriott on the main drag, something like half the retail spaces are vacant.
  . . .
  For what it's worth, what I've been seeing here is the strongest evidence of the recession that I've experienced thus far. On the other hand, I haven't visited Detroit and similar places since before the 2008 crash."