Who Will Think of the Automakers?!?

I'd like to see a speed round of Pelosi, Reid, Frank, et al., analyzing an income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows from each of the big three automakers begging for money. Heck, I'll make it even easier. Remove the titles from the statements and see if they can even identify which is which!

Even if they could pass my little test, why should we expect them to be able to analyze business plans from the automakers? Are they investment bankers all of a sudden?

MN Senate race: Why is Franken challenging this ballot? This stinks of desperation.

Freddie and Fannie's magnanimity astounds us! They're suspending foreclosures through January 9th. A reminder that whatever the government can give you it can take away.

With Apologies

Somebody said a Bad Word! State firefighters union chief resigns over remark.

Let's see, I'm guessing Gale used the dreaded, fearsome, death-inducing N-word. The word so bad we can't say it, or print it, even when we're talking about it, and, in some circles, even saying "the N-word" is looked down upon. All this silliness over six little letters. How would I be able to talk about Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy without typing the dreaded N-word?

D'oh! I tricked myself into that.

Anyways, so Gale drops the N-bomb in a private conversation with people he's freely choosing to associate with. Not in the workplace. Not speaking officially as the head of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin. I don't see why he felt the need to resign his job, and bunch of other positions he held:

Gale, a lieutenant with the West Allis Fire Department, also resigned from all public and government boards he served on, according to his resignation letter, which was included in a union statement announcing the resignation
....
"The word has no business in my vocabulary and I should not have used it - not even in private," Gale said.

I don't think he owes anyone an apology. It may have been a crude, tasteless statement, maybe even degrading or offensive, but he has a right to express himself. Read the story, and take note of the condescension and self-righteousness of the people commenting on the incident. These are the same people who would claim that William Ayers has a right to dedicate his books to Sirhan Sirhan and call for the overthrow of the U.S. government. And that's where they'd stop, because criticizing liberal ideas or even speaking about them in a context where you might theoretically question their worth is verboten.

Next up in PC silliness, a bunch of kids said a Bad Thing, a mayor feels the need to apologize: Mayor sorry for kids' 'Assassinate Obama' chant.

I wouldn't apologize for something someone else said, though I might point out that there are specific, important exceptions to the freedom of speech.

Maybe the mayor of...wherever Gale lives...should apologize. Then the county executive(s), then board, city council, governor, his Congressperson, Sens. Feingold and Kohl (where is he, by the way?).

And, finally, President-Elect Obama should apologize to himself for the nasty thing Gale said.

Auto Industry Bailout; Piracy

I'm not in favor of the federal government giving or lending money to G.M., Ford, or Chrysler. I'd try to list all the reasons why, but Michael E. Levine at the Wall Street Journal does a better job in his article here.

If the federal government does provide the automakers with money then I'd like the contracts with the UAW to be modified. Unilaterally. If I have to suffer as an investor in banks that are having their mortgage terms modified, why not apply that principle in the other direction? Mortgage payments too high? Cut them so the poor homeowner can afford them. Labor costs too high? Cut them so the poor employer can afford them!

I'd expect UAW employees and pro-union types to object to their contracts being modified. I'd be upset if I had to accept a salary reduction again (I had to right after 9/11) but it's a lot better than no salary. If the UAW doesn't agree to wage reductions then the automakers will go out of business and it'll be next to impossible for the laid off workers to get jobs at other auto factories. Why? Potential employers will avoid hiring laid off UAW workers to sidestep the risk of introducing people who are likely to organize the workplace. I don't know if this is discriminatory, but it's something I'd do if I had the opportunity and it was legal.

Accept a pay cut and keep your job, or pull up stakes, move down South, and hope to get a job at half your old salary. I'd pick the first option.

Some proponents of the bailout think consumers are less likely to buy from bankrupt automakers. I don't subscribe to this notion. Many of the airlines in the U.S. are continually in and out of bankruptcy, but we don't stop using them. It isn't like G.M. going under is suddenly going to dry up the pool of replacement parts being made for their cars or lead every mechanic to beat his or her tools into plowshares.

In other news, send in the commandos! We need live video feeds of the special forces storming the hijacked ships and taking the fight to the Somali camps from which the bandits operate. This would be an awesome reality show! I'd watch it, or DVR it.

Finally, some pirates aren't as bright as the rest. Another Somali group recently hijacked 30,000 tons of grain. I think fencing the oil is going to be a lot easier than fencing the grain. I'd take it to North Korea - about the only place in the world that can use grain but can't use oil.

Odds and Ends

We grow 'em creepy here in Wisconsin, but we don't always grow 'em smart. From Mauston, 70-ish miles NNW of Madison, comes this item:

A woman [Tammy Lewis] accused of helping her religious leader hide a decaying corpse on her toilet so they could continue collecting her Social Security was convicted of a misdemeanor in a deal for her to testify against the leader, a prosecutor said Monday.

Ok...religious cult, leaving a body on the john for a while...I can see where this could happen to someone. I'm extra lazy, after all, there are others still lazier than I.

The woman was a member of the Order of the Divine Will. Not the catchiest name for a religious sect. Nothing doomy about it, no death or damnation or apocalyptica. Anyways, they got Lewis to roll and testify against her religious leader.

She also told authorities she was Middlesworth's power of attorney, and the older woman used all of her money to support their six-member religious group.

What? Six members? That isn't a religious group, that's a card group. That's a road trip. A shared cab, an elevator ride, a Starbucks line...not a religious group. I could get six nutcases to swear their undying loyalty to the Invisible Jellyfish in under a week if I really tried. Six people? Sad.

Bushey told Lewis that God would revive Middlesworth, who friends and family said was from Washington state, investigators said.

Here I'd play the culture card. Many legitimate religions believe in reincarnation, and there are plenty of Biblical stories about people coming back from the dead. Well, at least two that I know of.

Lewis' son told detectives Bushey told him demons were destroying Middlesworth's appearance as she decayed in the bathroom to make it look like she wouldn't rise from the dead, the criminal complaint said.

I'd draw the line at keeping a corpse in the house if there were kids there. If all the adults didn't mind the corpse, who am I to say it has to go? But kids, that's just asking for trouble. Back when I lived with He Who Is Named Rik, I might have left a corpse on the john for a night or two, just as a goof.

The total take for this crime: I'm guessing between 12 and 15 grand. Maybe that's a jackpot in central Wisconsin...I don't know.

Speaking of jackpots...let's say you've got a boat full of gold, worth about $120 million. You have to send it halfway across the world on an ocean-going vessel. How many people would you have crewing the ship? If you said 25, you're a target for pirates, like the recently hijacked Sirius Star, an oil tanker owned by Saudi Aramco. Yep, 2 million barrels of oil on a ship over 1,000 feet long and over 63 yards wide. Twenty-five people?

The ship operators and crew obviously haven't played much Rainbow Six. My crew of three or four guys can drop 30 hostiles in under five minutes, and all without making a sound. Damn.

Global Warming Theory: Fun With Numbers

Dr. James Hansen, Al Gore's buddy and they guy running the show at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), said October 2008 was THE HOTTEST ON RECORD!

Only it wasn't. Temperature readings for Russia in October were the same as September and August. I'm No Expert[TM], but I'm pretty sure it's hotter in Russia in August than it is in October (or did Putin change that, too?) I wouldn't be writing about this if it were the IPCC releasing the data. I don't expect them to share with the public anything that doesn't conform to their catastrophic anthropogenic theory of global warming. But NASA on the other hand...I kind of expect them to get things right.

NASA's explanation...well, we outsourced the collection of that particular data so, it's not our fault. Once the correct temperature readings were fed into the model the results showed that October was still the hottest on record. Hmm. Seems they discovered a new Arctic hot spot they'd neglected to include in the first run. Funny. This is explained in a Telegraph (UK) article:

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change.

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Thankfully there are people who care enough about this issue to pore over the data being used to validate the global warming theory and notify us of inaccuracies. I'm not saying the IPCC, GISS, and folks like them are knowingly misrepresenting the facts, but they may be bending the truth a little. They're the ones writing the Truth algorithm - the statistical models used to interpret the data - and they have no shortage of ethical conflicts here. So I'm glad groups of people smarter than me are taking the time to keep the global warming theory proponents honest. Watts Up With That? and Climate Audit are two such groups. Check out the Climate Audit posts - some of the letters from the global warming theory supporters in response to requests for information are quite nasty.

Who Moved My Wallet?

My mind has been on my money as of late, and likewise, recently, my money has been on my mind. I cracked open the Scrooge McDuck Vault 2.0 this morning and counted my pennies.

I've lost the equivalent of one years' worth of after-tax salary in the past three months! Oh well. About a third of my non-home equity worth is in guaranteed return funds right now. I have two 401(k)s from previous employers where I just never bothered to transfer the money elsewhere, and upon leaving each company I parked the money in the 3% to 5% guaranteed return funds. Sometimes sloth pays off. If I'd put the money in my regular mutual funds I'd be out a lot more money.

I can't get too worked up about the paper losses I'm taking because my wife and I have 45 or 50 working years left between us to save and invest for retirement. If we continue to max out the 401(k) contributions each year that's at least $725,000. I continue to invest in mutual funds because prices haven't been this low in years, and the historical return averages out to about 7% in the long term.

At least my state isn't on fire.

And hey, gas is cheap again! Take note of all the green energy projects being delayed or cancelled - the only long-term economical, non-polluting choice when oil is below $50 or so a barrel is nuclear power. Even the Saudis are building nuclear power plants, and they're sitting on oil that costs maybe $5 or $10 a barrel to extract and sell. We should build nuclear power plants in America! I'd even let one be built in my backyard.

The New FDR!

EBay removes offers of inauguration tickets

This is a good move. The tickets haven't even been distributed yet, so how can people be offering them? When they have been released, though, I predict that some Web sites that buy and sell tickets will have them for sale. Any attempt by Sen. Feinstein and others to make a special law to ban sale or transfer of the tickets will just make the Obama transition look even sillier and more elitist. If that's possible.

Here is some more Obama idolatry for you - Time magazine has declared Obama the New FDR. For heaven's sake, he hasn't done anything yet! And if I remember correctly, FDR let the economy slide deeper and deeper into trouble in his days between winning the election and being sworn in. One explanation as to why is so that whatever successes he had would by that much more impressive once he turned the economy around. If the president-elect has some amazing ideas then I'd like to see them NOW rather than later! Two months from now we could be out another one million jobs...why not share the grand plan with us right now and save a million working families the grief?

Speaking of stunning strategic plans, I'm still waiting to hear Sen. Kerry's plan to win the Iraq war that he dangled in front of us in 2004. That and a full disclosure of his medical records, so the world could finally see him as a carping, preening, vain young man who had the presence of mind to shoot film footage of his time in Vietnam (er, rather, 50 miles off shore) for later political use. His own men mocked him and made fun of him for returning from a mission with a combat wound - a piece of something not much bigger than a grain of rice that barely penetrated the skin of his arm. He had to cup his hand around it on the return boat trip so it wouldn't fall out, all so he could earn a purple medal. That's a fucking piker if ever I've seen one, and that's the kind of asshole leader who gets good men killed. Or gets killed by his own men. Thank God we passed him over.

More Obama love, this time from Linda Tripp:

... I believe President-elect Obama possesses an instantly recognizable purity of soul that, coupled with his brilliance, and, of course, his eloquence, brought quite unimaginable and long-awaited magic to the country, transforming red and blue states, quite literally, into ‘The Color Purple.’ I believe the entire country will stand behind him.

Does she think before she speaks? Seriously? Though I have to give her credit for the segue into the Color Purple reference. Very Dennis Miller-esque.

An instantly recognizable purity of soul? Her batteries must have been low back in the Lewinsky and Clinton days, because any good judge of character would have made a huge detour to avoid those two. At least she didn't refer to his as America's first colored president. But first, a number...You know, a musical number!

After work tonight I got dinner with a dozen or so of my co-workers and their spouses. Their political leanings go from centrist to Marxist, most are very liberal. One gentleman is an elected official serving on the Dane county board. I had fun riling them up. They had fun taking potshots at Palin. The difference was that I was asking serious policy questions about Obama's administration and his plans to fix the enonomy. They were just insulting Gov. Palin as a witless human being who gets pregnant a lot, denigrating all Alaskans as inbred hicks, and insisting that Republicans are to be pitied and mocked.

I really expected them to be more civil. It was like they're still high on the win and haven't come back to Earth to face the long list of hard work ahead of us. And not a single one of them could tell me anything specific about what Obama plans to do and how he's going to fix our ailing economy. Just that....he'll do it, don't worry, he has a plan!

Blind faith in politicians scares me. And religion and politics shouldn't always mix, like this story. I mean, c'mon, we don't need this kind of divisive crap in our country.