Posts from — December 2009

Walter Brasch is a retired print media professional who posts a weekly column over at Pacific Views. This week he posted a The No-News No-Column Column.

The media is like the youngest kids who play “organized” football [OK, soccer]. They all cluster around the ball, rather than spreading out and playing their positions. If the ball escapes the cluster it will probably go out of bounds, because there is no one outside the clump to stop it.

The period Mr. Brasch discusses had only two “news” items, a vehicle accident involving a golfer, and a couple crashing a party. There were hundreds of reporters, hundreds of inches of print, and hundreds of minutes of time expended on two events that deserved an inch or so of copy in a weekly.

The protests in Iran are continuing. People are being blown up in large numbers in Pakistan and Iraq. A swath of the US is being buried in snow. Wildfires are burning in Australia. A cure for sickle cell may have been found. The US is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. None of that can trump a guy having an accident in his driveway, and a couple attending a party they weren’t invited to.

The Times Picayune has this up on one of the latest ideas being floated in the Senate: Medicare expansion proposed in Senate draws opposition from Louisiana doctors

Dr. Patrick Breaux, a New Orleans cardiologist and president-elect of the Louisiana Medical Association, said as a provider he would have a major objection to expanding Medicare — mainly because it covers only about 80 percent of costs.

As a result, he said, it’s likely that the kind of expansion being considered by the Senate would force providers and insurance companies to pass on the shortfalls in reimbursements to privately covered plans and patients, meaning bigger increases for people who already have coverage.

Paul Salles, president and CEO of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans, said an expansion of Medicare would cause a big financial hit for his 17-member hospitals because of the reimbursement rates.

You have to wonder if these people understand that getting 80% is better than getting 0%. The coverage, as near as anyone can tell, is for people who have no coverage at all. Making up a possible 20% shortfall is much easier than a 100% shortfall. Doctors and hospitals do charge patients for the difference, which is why people buy the highly regulated “Medi-Gap” insurance policies.

Doctors and hospitals are free to refuse Medicare clients for anything other than emergencies. It’s just another insurance program, not a government mandate. They are also free to lobby for improved rates, and 100% coverage of the costs, but that might help people other than doctors and hospitals, or the residents of their gated communities, or the people at the country club.

The Miami Herald reports on another example of unreality: Proposal to expand oversight of Florida’s pension fund is blocked

Sink said having only three elected officials oversee Florida’s pension fund is inadequate — a flaw she said was exposed in the 2007 pension fund “crisis” that led to a temporary freeze on withdrawals from a local government investment pool and resignation of the fund’s executive director.

She proposed expanding the board overseeing the $120 billion fund to include an expert in investments as well as a representative of the more than 1 million beneficiaries, mostly retired employees of state and local government, that rely on the fund’s solvency for a secure retirement.
…

Tom Gallagher, Sink’s predecessor as CFO and a 2006 Republican candidate for governor, appeared at the meeting in the unusual role of a citizen offering testimony. He vehemently opposed Sink’s proposal, saying it would politicize pension fund decisions.

“You shouldn’t be looking for someone else to blame things on,” Gallagher said. “The three of you should take the responsibility you took when you were elected.”

So, adding two people, one with expertise in the matter, and another who is directly concerned with the results, to the decision making process is “politicizing”, whereas, investing billions with an investment company whose CEO is the cousin of a governor from your party, a firm which then hired that governor when he left office, is a reasonable non-political practice?

Gallagher was one of the three people who made the decisions that resulted in the 2007 meltdown because of the investments through Lehman Brothers. He has a lot of damn gall to show up and comment on efforts to clean up the mess he helped to create. I must have missed the deep personal apology Mr. Gallagher made when he took responsibility for what happened 😈

Given the reception for Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, CNN reports that Pee-Wee Herman’s ready for a comeback.

If you can get away to sex scandals as a US Senator, why not as an entertainer? Actually the US Senate reminds me of the “Pee-Wee’s Fun House”.

I recycle, compost and use low energy appliances. I take anything hazardous to the appropriate site, and haul tree limbs to the chipping plant. I try to be as low impact as possible, but there are some things that just can’t be compromised, and McClatchy has a story on one of them: Soft toilet paper becomes target of environmentalists.

When I lived in Europe the one item I always bought on base was toilet paper, and I always had a roll in my luggage. I don’t doubt that things are better these days, but in those days the products offered locally were either like the rippled center of corrugated cardboard, or wax paper. You couldn’t count on having access to a bidet, so you needed the genuine, made in the USA toilet paper to get the job done.

There are some sacrifices that people shouldn’t be asked to make.

I think it’s finally over, the Fort Walton Beach Christmas Parade. It started at 6:30 and has been going on for two hours. It ends at the town line, but they wonder through my little town.

It has to be a bit of a let down for the Choctawhatchee High School Band. On Thanksgiving they were in the Macy’s parade in New York City, and today the local parade. They are actually a very good band and get invited to a lot of large events as they have won the state competition for schools their size [5A. 6A are the largest schools] four out of the last five years.

As with all parades down here, beads and candy are thrown at the crowds. This sort of behavior was once limited to Mardi Gras, but it now has infested all the parades.

Fortunately I didn’t need to go out for anything, because even though the parade didn’t come through the town, the police re-route all of the traffic, making it impossible to escape.

“a date which will live in infamy…”

The official US Navy site on the Pearl Harbor attack.

There will be a memorial service aboard NAS Pensacola that normally features local survivors of the attack.

They have their own license plates:

Digby comments on an Ezra Klein post about the complaints of people at AIG that they might not receive gazillions of dollars in pay for their “outstanding performance” in recent memory.

The reason they complain is that they don’t accept any responsibility for the melt down, and why should they? The Village is treating it as if it were some type of natural disaster, rather than the result of the unvarnished greed of the financial sector.

As Robert Peston notes the attitude on the other side of the pond is quite different:

However, several ministers and officials have told me that the goverment is determined to extract revenue from banks for taxpayers and simultaneously prevent the banks from awarding substantial bonuses to their employees.

“It is a matter of justice,” said one minister. “Investment banks are making exceptional profits as a result of the intervention of government and the Bank of England to limit the economic damage from the mess caused by those very same banks. So it would be outrageous if they paid those profits to employees and bonuses. We are determined to prevent that.”

The UK government knows who is at fault and intends to make them pay for their gambling. They want them to pick up the bill for at least some of the budget deficits they have caused, and the Tories will go along with the effort.

In the US, Fed chief Ben Bernake thinks that the Social Security and Medicare trust funds should pay for it.

Yes, it is the day that kindly old Saint Nicholas fills the footware of good little girls and boys with treats [or his assistants beat the evil out of bad children, depending on the local customs – they didn’t just leave the sticks, in some places they use them.] Don’t forget the carrot if he rides a horse in your area.

He is the patron saint of Russian merchants and pawnbrokers.

The Pensacola News Journal ran this story on a local bit of insanity that has made it to the US Supreme Court: Destin homeowners take cases to court

WASHINGTON — Oceanfront landowners in Florida are pressing the Supreme Court to rule that beach replenishment projects unconstitutionally separate them from the sea.

The issue, to be argued before the court on Wednesday, began in 2003 when Stop the Beach Renourishment Inc., a group of five beachfront homeowners in Destin, protested what a replenishment project was doing to their property lines.

Officials with the state Department of Environmental Protection establish unchanging property lines for such projects — at the point where high tide peaked prior to the project — rather than allowing them to shift with the tides.

When sand was added to the beach in Destin, the high-water mark moved farther from the homes, essentially adding 75 more feet of sand between the homes and the water. The angry homeowners demanded compensation for what they said were lower property values.

If the beach isn’t replenished, their houses will cease to exist in a few years as the storm surge from hurricanes erode the beach and the tides come higher and higher.  The financial meltdown affected their property values a good deal more than sand.

[Read more →]

In the brouhaha over the e-mails, I caught an indication that some of the problems surrounding the discussion of the data archive, specifically regarding Freedom of Information requests, seem to be complaints that East Anglia held the archives, but didn’t own the data, so fulfilling the requests was a huge headache for all involved.

This BBC story confirms my assumption:

Meanwhile, the Met Office said it would publish all the data from weather stations worldwide, which it said proved climate change was caused by humans.

Its database is a main source of analysis for the IPCC.

It has written to 188 countries for permission to publish the material, dating back 160 years from more than 1,000 weather stations.

John Mitchell, head of climate science at the Met Office, said the evidence for man-made global warming was overwhelming – and the data would show that.

The various countries that collected the data own it, not East Anglia or the UK Met Office, and you would have to process individual copyright requests with each of them to give a copy to anyone. This isn’t just a matter of copying it to some CDs and shipping it out. The US policy of making such records openly available is not all that common in the world, just ask anyone who needed records from other countries for their thesis, or those doing family genealogies – other countries expect to be paid for their data if they agree to release it to you.

Only 11,000 jobs were lost, so that is supposed to be good news for the economy, if not the 11,000 people who had those jobs. It is better than the numbers that have been reported for a couple of years now, but it doesn’t include the jobs that weren’t created for the holiday season, just like there was no report of the jobs that are normally created for the start of school, but weren’t this year.

They claim that the employment rate fell to 10%, but that probably shows that more people have given up looking.

Of course, Congress will claim there is no reason for a jobs bill, even though more jobs are going to be lost as the effect of first stimulus bill wears off, and the bounce to replace inventory prior to the holiday season ends. Things are not really getting better, and that will be apparent soon enough.

2010 World Cup draw

• Group A: South Africa, Mexico, Uruguay, France
• Group B: Argentina, South Korea, Nigeria, Greece
• Group C: England, USA, Algeria, Slovenia
• Group D: Germany, Australia, Ghana, Serbia
• Group E: Netherlands, Japan, Cameroon, Denmark
• Group F: Italy, New Zealand, Paraguay, Slovakia
• Group G: Brazil, North Korea, Ivory Coast, Portugal
• Group H: Spain, Honduras, Chile, Switzerland

Group G looks nasty, but the US has a good chance to advance.

Chilling Out

No more about Moscow!

[Editor: It might be 5° warmer than Moscow, but the koshki and koty are not happy campers. Sox is attempting to absorb as much heat from the electric radiator as possible. For those wondering: Income, Excise, Sox, Dot, Property, with Ringo in the back.]

Friday Ark