Confidential Report Released BY MISTAKE! -Dozens in Congress under ethics inquiry

Every time I see news stories like this I go nuts! A secret, temporary, preliminary report on ethics investigations in Congress was put on an open server. This meant that anyone including the Washington Post, could access the information. Read the brief summary below!

Dozens in Congress under ethics inquiry
AN ACCIDENTAL DISCLOSURE
Document was found on file-sharing network

Zoe Lofgren, the House ethics committee's chairman, emphasized that the panel's activities are preliminary.

By Ellen Nakashima and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 30, 2009

House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July.

The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations. The committee said Thursday night that the document was released by a low-level staffer.

Now do you suppose that YOUR confidential information held in government or private educational, medical, or corporate/business serves COULD NOT also become accessible.?!

You have to be a fool to think that your information is safe when any low level web manager or clerk - usually earning very little and with minimal training - is managing these critically sensitive files.

Full Washington Post Article

How Many Car Bombs Before Saddam Was Deposed?

The answer is damn few.

Of course Saddam Hussein was a horrible man.

Of course Iraq was a bad place for many people.

Of course Saddam bragged that he had WMD's.

But in fact Iraq was stable just as Cuba is stable because the repressive regime can shut down crime and terrorism.

Chew on that!

When Economists are Wrong

>Politicians and policy makers depend on good, hard information. Otherwise their decisions will be as much “policy garbage out” as the “garbage in” data on which they made the decisions.

Sometimes politicians and leaders have a predisposition to do what they would like because they have a preferred direction in which they want to go regardless of facts. Thus they will look at reality through the lens of their preferred course of action. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1937 to 1940) needed to believe Hitler because it was his deep desire not to have to confront Germany or divert resources to military spending. Thus he signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany. The rest is history.

Pres. Bush and Vice President Cheney wanted to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction so they filtered out information to the contrary and decided to invade Iraq.

Now lets look at the decisions leaders have to make on the economy.

In 1824 the Supreme Court strengthened the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce with its decision in Gibbons v. Ogden, which involved the authority to license shipping. The way Trusts concentrated wealth and economic power in the hands of a few business tycoons so alarmed the American public that Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. Theodore Roosevelt was elected to the presidency in 1904 on a Trust-Busting platform. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation effectively made the federal government the nation's chief regulator of business and the economy.

Then starting in the 1980’s we started deregulating business big time and ignored these historical reasons why business had been regulated in the first place.

Paul Krugman writes in a recent Op Ed piece (New York Times September 2, 2009), “It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Last year, everything came apart. Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html

This is a serious disaster for policymakers. The problem is they now have nowhere to turn for accurate information to guide them on economic policymaking – taxing and spending to be precise. Economics has failed them and us.

And, this is not just a national or international problem. In Iowa government (and the rest of the economy) depends on three people who gaze into their statistical crystal ball and make economic forecasts. They are the Revenue Estimating Conference in the Iowa Department of Management.

“State general fund revenue estimates are generated by the Iowa Revenue Estimating Conference (REC). The REC is comprised of the Governor or their designee, the Director of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, and a third person agreed upon by the other two members. The current membership of the REC is Charles Krogmeier; Dennis Prouty, Director of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau; and David Underwood, retired CFO and Treasurer, AADG, Inc. in Mason City, Iowa. The REC meets quarterly, generally in July, October, December, and April. The Governor and the Legislature are required to use the REC estimates in preparing the state budget.”

How accurate are their predictions?

Here is what radio Iowa reported about a readjustment of estimates on Friday, March 20, 2009.

Down, down, down: state tax revenue estimate drastically reduced

The Revenue Estimating Conference just met and the three-member panel has voted to reduce its estimate of state tax revenues for the current state budgeting year by $129.7 million. Their guess for next year has been reduced by $269.9 million. It will mean layoffs in state government according to the governor's chief of staff (who is one of the members of the Revenue Estimating Conference).

To me the operative terms in this story are “their guess.” One definition of the word “guess” is “an estimate based on little or no information.”

I guess (oops!) this could also mean that it could be “…an estimate made on the basis of malfunctioning macroeconomic models,” as Krugman would point out.

For us as Iowa farmers, professionals, business people, taxpayers, bankers, stock brokers, real estate developers, doctors, academics (especially university presidents), and so forth this failure of economics is no less a problem. We are now faced with a world in which we actually have no idea what lies ahead economically because the fundamental “wisdoms” of the economics and business professions were proven to be nothing more than fancy statistical smoke and mirrors. Ask long as the trajectory of change was incremental or decremental (i.e. slightly up or down) the models and wisdom of “the Dismal Science” held up. As soon as the future was not merely a slight adjustment of the past it all went wrong. Ask 5 economists a question and the joke goes you’ll get 6 different answers. That never happens in “real” science.

A quick read of the excellent Krugman article suggests that we desperately need to devise new ways of making fiscal and monetary policy as well as investment and regulatory decisions. With the Great Recession of 2009 the Great Discipline of Economics may also have been discredited.

Turns out they were mostly the Great Wizard of Oz and we have now peeked behind the curtain.

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©2009, Steffen Schmidt, Prof of Political Science, ISU. Reprinted with permission from syndication @ http://www.insideriowa.com, Iowa’s Internet Magazine.

Was George W Bush Born in Kenya?! YIKES

I got this in the mail. It looks pretty good. were the Bush's ever in Kenya? Is this a hoax? Who would want to spread a Bush-Birther rumor? Why are we wasting our time on this in the middle of a series of serious national security crises in health costs, Iran, Afghanistan, a very weak economy, and Swine Flu coming back.

You too or a friend or adversary can be "born in Kenya!" Just go to the web site and fill out the certificate! http://kenyanbirthcertificategenerator.com/

I didn't know Kenyans had a Texas accent. Go figger.

The History of Pain Cream - Cartoon by Schmidt

Climate change - cartoon by Schmidt (c)2009

Clinton, Kissinger and North Korea

Should Bill Clinton Have Gone to North Korea and Secure the release of the Journalists Held Hostage by the Government?
Steffen Schmidt

Former Sec of State and aging wise man of American foreign policy asked in his Op Ed piece in the New York Times, Aug 9, 2009, “Is the lesson of this episode that any ruthless group or government can demand a symbolic meeting with a prominent American by seizing hostages or threatening inhuman treatment for prisoners in their hands?”

Kissinger objected to the Clinton move to visit North Korea, meet with its leaders, and successfully got the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, both of whom work for Al Gore’s failed media company Current TV. Kissinger argued instead for stuff that’s been tried unsuccessfully for years and years such as the “successful” policy towards Cuba, the failed plan to get Iran to give up nukes, the fruitless policies in Somalia, Angola, Afghanistan, Iraq, and North Korea itself.

I personally think that if the “lesson is” that Bill Clinton will spend the next 8 years of Obama meeting with global ruthless leaders and young local women in said leaders country who admire him for his charisma and hotness, then its win-win-win-win-win for all of us. Win for the USA, win for Bill Clinton, win for ruthless leaders he visits, win for the US “Trash” media (all the rest except Insideriowa.com), win for Hillary Clinton, and win for my personal peace of mind.
Plus, maybe Clinton can raise some more funds for the “Little Rock Double-Wide,” as the Clinton Pre. Library down on the mosquito-infested swamplands of the Arkansas River is affectionately called.

Henry, listen to me you obsolete policy wreck: All your foreign policies failed the United States see Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Congo, and other places.

And, eight years of W and more years of Clinton before that being tough and “posing” or posturing did NOTHING to improve the behavior of the little freak who runs what I call the “spider kingdom” (the “hermit kingdom,” which the dying mainstream media prefers, tends to besmirch hermits who are some of the sweetest, nicest, quietest people in the world). You can catch more flies (or shrimpy, schizoid evil dictators) with honey than vinegar. The Bush vinegar failed so lets go the honey route.

If North Korea goes berserk (Insider Educational moment: Berserker was one of the ancient Norse warriors who “… were legendary for working themselves into a frenzy before a battle and fighting with reckless savagery and insane fury”) we will launch the Tomahawk Cruise Missiles which have been locked in on targets in N Korea and are ready to “Git ‘Er Done”.  
By the way, Bill, Venezuelan women are the most beautiful in the world. Hugo Chavez needs a hug too!

Sotomayor Saga

Poster (c) Baraboo Circus Museum; Sotomayor WhiteHouse.com; Beck from Glenn beck web site screen shot.

“Barrio” Baby With Disability Becomes Supreme Court Justice! Film at 11.”
Steffen Schmidt

Sonia (or Maria as Gov Huckabee called her) Sotomayor is now a Supreme Court Justice of the United States. She’s the first Hispanic and another woman (now there are two) on the Court, the first justice to grow up in a poor Puerto Rican neighborhood in the South Bronx, a diabetic from an early age, and top of her class in law school at Yale. She’s proud to be an American (AND a Latina woman), has been fairly hard on criminals as a judge (her neighborhood as a kid was infested with crime and she did not take kindly to that), and is a workaholic who sacrificed having a family for her work.

No wonder most of the GOP Senators voted against her! This is obviously an unpatriotic, incompetent, affirmative action, Socialist, and even racist (as Newt Gingrich called her) Democrat appointee.

Mel Martinez of Florida is a Cuban born refugee to the USA, a Conservative, and the ONLY Hispanic Republican in Congress. Actually he WAS the only GOP Hispanic because he quit a few days after the Sotomayor confirmation and before his term as Florida Senator is up. He put it this way, “Politically, its not a helpful moment for Republicans with Hispanics.” Only a Brit could have been so understated! Actually, her nomination has been a body blow to the GOP.

1. It undermines the theme that Obama does not practice bipartisan politics since nine Republicans and two “independents” voted for her confirmation including Martinez and even Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The badly wounded and minority Republicans where whittled down to a shamefully small number on this fight. This appointment HAD bipartisan support.

2. The GOP understands that Latinos/Hispanics are important to politics. They are the largest minority with 15% of the United States population and they are registering and voting in significant numbers all over the US. So why on Earth did they pick this fight when it is now the Litmus test of which is a Hispanic-friendly party and the Republicans lost that contest! In 2008 the GOP lost most of the Hispanic voters who had come around the party when George Bush promised them “compassionate conservatism” and used his brother Jeb’s wife and a nephew, who is part Hispanic and speaks great Spanish, to make the case for the GOP.

3. With African-Americans making up another 14% or so of the population and also voting mostly Democrat the GOP Senators may believe that the race and ethnicity card will bring them back to majority. Still, as Peter Drivas wrote in the Huffington Post “Fox News' Glenn Beck is feeling the consequences of his controversial comments on the July 28 episode of "Fox and Friends," when he said that Barack Obama was a "racist" who had a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." When bid advertisers start getting nervous about the Conservative race card the GOP establishment should take notice.

4. What, you hadn’t heard about the race card?! Shocking! Yes there is some pretty good analysis out there (confirmed to me by some of my deep cover Republican friends) that the strategy is to drive a wedge between male, lower income, white voters by stimulating the race card. Already the polls show that this demographic is now deeply suspicious if not outright hostile to Osama and by bank shot, the Democrats. The Henry Louis Gates/White police officer incident in Cambridge, Mass (Google it if you don’t have a clue – Here is Gates own commentary @ The Root http://www.theroot.com/views/accident-time-and-place) is being used as a “See, the minorities are taking over and the Dems and Obama are on their side” recruiting mechanism. Sotomayor plays perfectly into that whole strategy. She’s the “affirmative action justice” (AFJ) because she did well in college because she was treated differently and unfairly benefitted by being a woman, a Hispanic, and a person with disability – see she had three strikes in her favor according to the Anti-Soto crowd.

5. It is possible that all this race baiting will work. Never overestimate the public and voters who will shoot themselves in the foot with emotion and side shows while the main events are happening over there in the Big Tent of the political circus. Those “main attractions” would be things like health care cost and availability, the dangerous war in Afghanistan, the perilous US economy, jobs, the future of Social Security, jobs, a future rise in fuel prices, jobs, global warming and climate change, and jobs.

In the meantime I guess lets rage on. It’s no worse than what liberals and Democrats did to Clarence Thomas or Judge Bork and what Republicans did to Anita Hill in those horrible confirmation hearings. How quickly we forget.


©2009SchmidtEducationalAuthoringServices (SEAS L.L.C.) Syndication. Use only with permission. Steffen Schmidt is professor of political science at Iowa State University and writes for InsiderIowa.com.

Who are the Only 2 people who can save California - Schmidt cartoon

Harry Potter and a gay wizard.

Too Much Regulation?! I think NOT!