Circumlocution

Allow me to indulge in a bit of it for a moment.

You've probably seen the commercial of the singing Chips Ahoy cookies, singing "Don't you Want Me Baby," by the Human League. Four cookies riding in a convertible, a big hand comes down and snatches them up one at a time until the last one is gone (and presumably the car careens off the road and explodes).

First off, this reminds me of a guy I knew in the Army in 1974. He had a little sign on his glove box lid that said "Be prepared to take the wheel; Rapture may occur at any moment." He was pretty righteous, but I guess he assumed his passengers weren't. Anyway, when I see the big hand pulling the cookies up to the heaven, I think of the Rapture.

Well, the Meat Purveyors do a great version of "Don't You Want Me Baby," which I heard on XM radio. I was searching around for more info about them, and came across a pretty cool video.

You know how some famous people get on your nerves after a while because you see them so much, or you just don't like them? For me it's Larry Craig's voice; the guy is just so unctuous that when I hear him speak it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. Well, for those of you who don't like the looks of President Bush (aka Smirking Chimp), you might like this video set to "I don't Like The Look On Your Face" by the Meat Purveyors.

Back From Tucson

After a few nice days in Tucson, I'm back online.

A picture of Senator McCain's full display in the in the Aviation Hall of Fame.




A close up of Senator McCain's medals on display in the Aviation Hall of Fame. Say what you will about his politics, he has definitely earned respect for his military career.


Here is a close up shot of a moon rock, encased in a cylinder of plastic for protection. The cylinder is enclosed in a glass case, set on a gray pedestal.
This shot shows the cylinder on its pedestal, in its little display area. The funny thing is the chairs. I guess they expect people to sit and gaze in awe at that tiny spec in front of them.

Sparce Posting

I've been traveling, and will be for a few more days, so posting will be a bit sparce for a short while. I was staying in a fancy, expensive hotel as part of a business seminar. It didn't have internet access. I have now switched to a Holiday Inn Express, half the price, and sure enough, free internet access.

Girls Gone Wild

Slate's Bonnie Goldstein has posted the complaints the Idaho Alcohol Beverage Control has filed against a couple of Nampa bars. Salacious details here.

Biology teacher fired for referring to Bible

So says the headline in CNN's article here. No doubt this cudgel will get picked up, run with, and accompanied by lots of liberal bashing and accusations of discrimination and narrow mindedness. However, read the story, and you'll see that the headline is very misleading.

Despite the sensationalist headline (which will work; I'm blogging about it), the lead graf has some key info.

During his eight days as a part-time high school biology teacher, Kris Helphinstine included Biblical references in material he provided to students and gave a PowerPoint presentation that made links between evolution, Nazi Germany and Planned Parenthood.

Let's watch how this story spins through the reactionary right.

I was going to post about the BSU College Republicans lame effort at promoting a speech by Robert Vasquez, but Julie at Red State Rebels beat me to it. Check out her post about the possibly racist and certainly insenstive promotion.

Climb through a hole in the fence and show your illegal credentials. Jeez, what blockhead came up with that? Since BSU now selects its speakers by a student panel, I suppose next year for ML King Day (er, in Idaho I guess that's Human Rights Day) we'll get Alan Keyes. If the BSU College Republicans responsible for the Vasquez campaign are in charge of that, the promotion will probably involve a shuffling contest to win a fried chicken and watermelon feast.

Chlorine Gas Attacks

A new tactic in Iraq is to couple a bomb with chlorine in order to make chlorine gas and increase the mayhem wrought by the attack. Chlorine gas was used in WWI and could have devastating results.

So, I am examining photos of US soldiers in Iraq looking to see if they have started to wear gas masks. Once the Army discovered that there were no chemical weapons in Iraq, the soldiers stopped wearing the masks, for good reason. They are a huge PITA.


They are heavy, bulky, flop around when you wear them, get hung up as you try to exit a HMMWV, and just generally suck to have to deal with. If the new chlorine tactic brings back the gas mask as daily wear, the insurgents will have successfully degraded the soldiers' effectiveness, if only just a bit. And the soldiers' job will be that much more difficult.

The picture is of me wearing a newish version of the mask.

Sali on Science

A bill was introduced in Congress to provide whistleblower protection for scientists who expose political intereference in their research. Bill Sali introduced an amendment that would have gutted this protection. His amendment was defeated and

The bill, H.R. 985, passed by a 331 to 94 vote, with 229 Democrats and 102 Republicans voting in favor.

Sali mustered a few arguments, like

The problem is that on scientific issues, the question of what is false or misleading is often a difficult question on which reasonable people can disagree, and on which sometimes scientific authorities have a hard time making up their minds. Are eggs good for you or bad for you? Is milk good for you or bad for you?

but the transcript suggests that Sali's real motivation was to help bogus challenges to valid scientific viewpoints, or perhaps carry the water for the Bush administration to allow it to continue to supress scientific research that doesn't jive with its politics.

Don't mention polar bears at a global warming summit. Don't let NASA talk about the age of the universe. Intelligent design is equal to the theory of evolution. You know.

Beware Of This Scam

There are folks in the area, primarily working with some guys in Canada (Calgary/Lethbridge area) who are running what appears to be a scam. Here's how it works.

A person might approach you to invest in a ticket selling outfit. The idea is that you loan money to the ticket jobber, and they use the money to buy tickets to various events; concerts, sporting events, whatever. While they have your money they pay you some really nice interest rate; 8% per month in one case, and I've heard of others that pay from 5 - 10% per month. Which works out to 96%, 60%, and 120% yearly. You can take the monthly interest, or leave it in to compound. In the first example, your 8% monthly would compound to 152% annually. Pretty sweet.

At this point you're thinking "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

What the hook is, is that people who invest actually get the monthly interest, at least for a while So your friend, relative or neighbor, who you know and trust, will tell you about this great investment and report how he or she has actually been getting monthly checks.

The scam usually requires at least a $10,000 investment, so your neighbor might tell you how she's been getting $800 for the last few months. It looks like the investment is sound. The ticket jobber supposedly uses money to buy bulk tickets at a discount, then sells them at face price, making great money. They even have websites that look like they're legit.

It seems like right now the scam is in the expansion phase, and new investor cash flow allows the scammers to pay the older investors interest, so an ever growing network of people are recommending investing. At some point, the scammers are going to quit and run with the money.

If you know of anyone who has been approached for this scheme, I'd like to know about it. Please leave me a comment, or email me at idablue(at)cableone(dot)net.

We're Not Alone

It's good to know that the Idaho legislature isn't the only one concerned with oddball issues. The New Mexico legislature just passed a resolution that when Pluto passes over the state of New Mexico, it is a full-fledged planet again.

If Pluto actually does pass over New Mexico, I wonder what the transit time is, and how often that will occur. A nice gesture to the New Mexican discoverer of Pluto, but ultimately pointless.

Haircut

Betsy Russell has a photo of Gov Otter on her blog here, and boy it looks like the Gov needs a haircut. I cropped the photo, but check out the larger original. It's even better. I wonder what the photographer was thinking as he or she lined up that shot. Kind of funny.

*****

And on another note, I would appreciate any thoughts about blogger etiquette for this. I didn't take the picture originally, but I did copy it from Russell's website. I didn't use the entire original. I cropped it substantially, perhaps constituting fair use even though I didn't add anything to it. I'm certainly not making any money from this. I credited the pic and linked to it. Is that enough? Is it inappropriate to use someone else's pic like this? Is it borderline cheesy/okay? Just fine? Inquiring minds want to know.

English Only?

I love this type of unintended consequence. Randy Stapilus notes here that if all Idaho business must be conducted on English, the state motto – and the Gov’s favorite sign off - must go. I wonder if the lawyers who work for the state and use Latin in pleadings and briefs must drop the Latin and use only English.

Guiliani: Second Cousin, Once Removed, or Third Cousin

Ever wonder about the difference between a second cousin, and a first cousin twice removed? Wonder no more. Behold, the Table of Consanguinity. If you click on the image it will enlarge.

It is from a probate statute, so substitute yourself at the start point instead of "Person Deceased".

Update: Stumbled across this in the NYT and added it. Changed title of post.

Today’s voters will be sure to learn, too, that Mr. Giuliani’s 14-year marriage to his first wife, Regina Peruggi, was annulled on the grounds that they failed to seek a church dispensation as second cousins once removed; Mr. Giuliani said he had thought they were third cousins.

Whose Side Is He On?

Rep. Bill Sali has been opposing a bill designed to make it easier to get information from the Federal government.

Despite Sali’s effort

A bill designed to make the Freedom of Information Act more requester-friendly has won the backing of a key House committee and will likely be put to a vote before the full body within days, coinciding with next week's Sunshine Week events.

Under the current system, agencies tend to wait until a lawsuit is filed before coughing up the documents. If you’ve been in a lawsuit, you know it’s expensive to hire an attorney, draft a complaint, and file the suit, even if you end up winning. Making it more likely that the agency will have to pay the requestor’s attorney fees if they improperly withhold the documents should help do away with such stonewalling.

Sali’s take on it was thus:

Rep. Bill Sali (R-Idaho) said a liberalized attorney fees policy would motivate agencies to fully litigate those cases rather than come to a settlement with the requester, defeating the main purpose of FOIA, which is to get records into the hands of requesters as quickly as possible.
"The question it raises in my mind is: Why would any agency want to settle?" Sali said.

Well, the longer the case goes on the more expensive it gets, so there’s that. More likely, the agency will have to make a real assessment up front and produce the appropriate records instead of just stiff-arming the request.
The article also has a nice explanation of the openness policy under Clinton, and the secrecy policy under Bush.

Statesman Math

On Friday, the Statesman printed an article on page 3 of its business section titled “Little newspapers show big profits.” Of course, I can’t find it on their (still execrable!) website to link to it, but it was written by Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post.

The gist of the article is that newspapers with less than 50,000 circulation are doing quite well financially, thank you very much, but that from 50,000 to 500,000 they’ve got problems. Seems folks are turning to the net for national news, and the little papers have a lock on local news and reaching local folks with local advertising.

Anyway, the Statesman says here that it is “a 62,000 daily / 83,000 Sunday circulation newspaper.” It also says on the same page

The Idaho Statesman is the most widely read newspaper in the state of Idaho, reaching 196,232 adults per week. This includes 123,993 readers each weekday and 167,840 each Sunday.

I don’t savvy the difference between “circulation” and “reaching” and “readers”, but to me these numbers don’t seem to jive.

Anyway, the point is the Statesman is in the group of papers that aren’t doing so well. I don't have any info on how the Statesman is doing, just that it's in a poor demographic.

What's In A Name?

Over at the Idaho House of Representatives, our legislators' email addresses are a composite of their first initial and last name. Pretty common. Thus, Branden Durst's email address is bdurst@house.idaho.gov, and Elliot Werk's is ewerk@senate.idaho.gov.

Some combinations are kind of amusing. Take Brad Little's for example, blittle (belittle). Phylis King, pking (Peking). Bob Ring, bring. Sue Chew, schew (eschew). Or, poor Phil Hart from Athol, phart. "Hi, I'm phart, from Athol."

Trickle Down Economics

McClatchy newspaper group did an analysis of poverty in America, and found distressing news. 16 million, yes, that’s 16,000,000, people in America are severely poor.

A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 — half the federal poverty line — was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.
The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That’s 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period.

The rich get richer and the poor stay poor.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income for working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years.

I’d like for our conservative friends to explain this. They say the best way to take care of people is to stimulate business so that business will create jobs. Throw in some tax cuts as well so all that capital will be freed up to work its magic in the marketplace. Well, okay. President Bush has certainly been pro business; why is poverty increasing? Considering the notable increase in worker productivity, why is the median household income level declining?

Sure, some of it is kids working part time jobs, but that can't explain such a huge increase, nor the decline in the household income level.

Trickle down economics doesn’t work. It’s not trickling down.

Saturn Pix

Some spectacular photos of Saturn, like the one below,on NASA's web site here.

Cramer

Ya know, I'd have a lot more respect for Cramer if he didn't try so hard to discredit views he doesn't agree with. He takes a cheap shot at Al Gore here.

Cramer is piling on to the story that Gore is a hypocrit because he has a large utility bill. I don't know much about that story, but Cramer has been flogging it lately. The reason it is a cheap shot is because Cramer is making accusations based on assumptions.

Cramer links to a story that says Gore is buying carbon credits from a company that Gore helped establish, and both the story and Cramer conclude that Gore is lining his own pockets by buying credits from his own company.

As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper.

I emphasized the key word presumably. They're just guessing, and willing to call Gore a hypocrit before getting the facts.

Cramer goes beyond just calling Gore a hypocrit. He likens Gore to a Pope that goes whoring. That's a bit over the top, dontcha think?

Cramer also commits, to my mind, another minor transgression. He has a post showing some humorous exam answers, and some are pretty funny. The problem with Cramer's post is that he doesn't credit the source. I got an email a week or so ago with the same exam answers. I'm pretty sure Cramer got them second hand, i.e., not from exams he graded, but he doesn't mention getting them via email, or however. He doesn't take credit for them, but I think it's blog etiquette to at least mention the source.

C'mon Cramer; you're a published author. Where's your intellectual rigor?

Don't Apologize

Betsy Russell reports here that Sen Werk asked if the Attorney General's office has sufficient budget reserves, considering that the legislature is passing another abortion bill. I guess Werk implied that the bill would be challenged as all the others have, and end up costing taxpayer money to defend it, as all the others have. Chairman Cameron chastised Werk saying “I’m not going to allow questions that are politically loaded.” Werk apologized.

What question regarding the budget isn't politically loaded? It's a hearing in the legislature, for crying out loud. And isn't it a legislator's job to forecast expenses and budget for them?

I'd prefer to see Werk politely make the point any question should be legitimate if it's not offensive, and let it go at that. Deferring to the Republican leadership by apologizing accommodates their arrogance of power.