Ten Buck Fridays: It's Patricia Sullivan!

The patriotic blogosphere's small-d democratic moneybomb project rolls on, and this week the voters have declared Patricia Sullivan the winner! More information on Patricia Sullivan, including the amusing deal she made with fellow Ten Buck Fridays candidate John Faulk, can be found at Right Klik. Professor William Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection reminds us why we need to take this November seriously. In pertinent part:

Assuming Democrats retain control of the Senate, and Leahy is Chair, do you want Democrats to have to flip just 2-3 Republican Senators, or 6-7, in order to break a filibuster?

It is going to take years to undo the Obama economic disaster, but it can be accomplished through Congressional elections every two years, and particularly the 2012 presidential election.

Please visit Patricia Sullivan's page and donate what you can to this worthy candidate, and don't forget to mention Ten Buck Fridays under "occupation" in the online donation form. In November, every race is a national race. And as Just a Conservative Girl said,

I Can See November From My House!

Beware of California courts bearing gifts

The latest wackiness from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals concerns the limits of reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

As with many stories in California, it begins with a burrito. Specifically, with respect to a wheelchair-bound customer whose eye level was too low to allow full view of the open kitchen, the Court found that Chipotle restaurants did not provide the wheelchair-bound customer with "equivalent facilitation" of the special "Chipotle experience" of eyeballing Chipotle's mise en place and watching the menu item being assembled.

Good grief. Chipotle's attempts at accommodation included ingredient demonstration and explanations in a separate area, but it was not good enough. The kitchen work surface for an able-bodied employee is naturally above eye level for someone in a wheelchair; if the Ninth Circuit's reasoning is not overturned, the only solution is to have the kitchen staff work in a sunken orchestra pit or block the view of the kitchen to everyone.

I hope this makes it to the Supreme Court so there can be some rational jurisprudence on what constitutes "reasonable." In the meantime, I wonder what is going to happen to the concept of "reasonable accomodation" in the workplace because of the Ninth Circuit's wacky "equivalent facilitation" interpretation. Anyone who works in cubicle land has had the experience of chatting with a colleague face-to-face while peering over their cubicle wall. Obviously, wheelchair-bound employees can't engage in the same easy face-to-face chatter over a cubicle wall; to extend the Ninth Circuit's reasoning, cubicle walls that extend higher than a wheelchair-bound employee can peer over are not ADA compliant. Are workplaces going to reconfigure workspaces defensively to avoid being sued? Are employees in cubicle land going to lose their last vestiges of privacy because one guy lawyered up over a burrito?

A few new terms for our political lexicon

The Shirley: When a third party initially appears to have been an
innocent victim of an attempt to bring someone else's misdeeds to
light, although the innocent victim (the "Shirley") is subsequently
revealed to deserve everything they got, and then some.

The Shirley becomes The Full Shirley when the Shirley responds by
calling people racists.

To pull a Shirley: To try to deflect valid and highly visible
criticism from yourself by suggesting that some other innocent party
is being wrongly harmed by the publicity surrounding your malfeasance.

Not even the British like NHS anymore

The Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has tremendous influence over the delivery of healthcare in America, even more so now that Obama will be siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars out of Medicare in order to pay for Obamacare and forcing more people out of private insurance and into government plans. The position has been vacant for more than a year, but in a recent and explicitly political move, Obama used a recess appointment to make Dr. Donald Berwick head of CMS. Obama's justification for doing an end-run around the established confirmation process and denying the American public the transparency he promised during his campaign? To wit: "I've got a government to run."

Although Obama doesn't want you to know anything about Berwick, there is plenty we can learn about Berwick from Berwick himself, because the man can't keep his mouth shut.

Here's what Berwick thinks about your right to autonomy as a patient:

"The unaided human mind, and the acts of the individual, cannot assure excellence. Health care is a system, and its performance is a systemic property."

"I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do."

"I would place a commitment to excellence—standardization to the best-known method—above clinician autonomy as a rule for care."

Yes, that's exactly who we want in government, someone who mocks the capabilities of the "unaided human mind." As would be expected from someone who has expressed such disdain for the idea of allowing healthcare decisions to be made between doctor and patient, Berwick has confessed a "romantic" affection for Britain's National Health Service (NHS). The funny thing is, the British themselves have lost that loving feeling for NHS.

Prime Minister David Cameron's government has just submitted a white paper to Parliament outlining proposed changes to NHS that will decentralize the delivery of health care and put more power in the hands of doctors and patients. The plan, which can be read here, has three prongs:

(1) Patients will be in charge of making decisions about their care,

(2) Healthcare ownership and decision-making will be "in the hands of professionals and patients," and

(3) Success will be measured not by compliance with bureaucratically-derived standards, but by improving patient outcomes.

So while the academic and bureaucratic Left remain committed to the fantasy of "free" health care managed by enlightened bureaucrats, the British have begun the painful process of undoing a dysfunctional entitlement and building a system where the patient comes first. Bully for them.

You can read more about Dr. Berwick's radical plans for your healthcare in Daniel Henninger's July 15 Wall Street Journal column. And then you can contact your elected representatives in Congress and tell them that America does not want the same kind of healthcare system that has been tried and discredited in Britain, that they need to say NO to Donald Berwick.

Ten Buck Fridays: this week's poll

As part of our ongoing effort to nationalize each and every Congressional race in 2010, I present you with the latest Ten Buck Fridays poll. Results are cumulative across the 65+ blogs hosting the poll; the winner will be announced on Friday morning, and everyone who wants to return rationality and American values to Washington D.C. is encouraged to donate what they can to the winner. Additional information on each of these worthy candidates (and we've got an embarrassment of riches this week) can be found over at Right Klik.

Thank you for your interest, participation, and support. On to November!

Rule 5 Sundays

In Robert Stacy McCain's rules for How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year, Rule 5 is Christina Hendricks, because, inter alia, everybody loves to look at a pretty girl, and no one can exist on a diet of pure politics.

I am secure enough in my own womanhood to acknowledge that Christina Hendricks is smoking hot. However, my application of Rule 5 is informed by the runaway success of the Cheezeburger Network, which has grown from one website with a handful of amusingly captioned cat pictures to an empire encompassing 53 websites attracting 16 million unique visitors in May 2010 alone. The Cheezeburger Network has proven the validity of what might be termed Rule 5.1, Everybody Loves a Cute Little Animal.

In the meantime, I hope one day I am clever enough to qualify for another one of William Jacobson's Legal Insurrectalanches, which are sweeeet.

No more anonymous blogging: Lilac Sunday revealed!

OK, maybe not. That's not even my cat. Truth is, I live, work, and blog in Northern California, the belly of the Liberal Beast, and it would simply be professional suicide for me to blog under my own name.

And because I blog anonymously, CNN thinks I am a coward. Left Coast Rebel, Right Klik, and others in the patriotic blogosphere have good commentary on CNN American Morning's condemnation of bloggers and their cri de coeur against the "dark side" of the internet and in favor of internet gatekeepers to control content.

However, anonymity is not the same thing as untouchability, and therefore anonymous blogging should not be equated with irresponsibility. Even anonymous bloggers leave digital fingerprints, and a prospective plaintiff with good cause can get a court order from a judge ordering an ISP or blogging platform to reveal the identity of a blogger. So the notion that anonymous bloggers are a uniquely malevolent force just doesn't fly.

And what's more, the discussion on American Morning grew out of a discussion of the Shirley Sherrod video. God bless Andrew Breitbart, there isn't anything anonymous about him. I'll bet when he was a kid, he dressed up for Halloween as Andrew Breitbart. When the guest pointed out that the mainstream media sorted the case out in the end, CNN's Kyra Phillips responded "we can't always do that."

"We can't always do that." We are a global news organization, and we can't always separate fact from fiction. And that, Kyra, is why the bloggers have stepped into the breach, to do the work that CNN can't or won't do. Reasonable people can differ on whether the Sherrod video was a success or a failure, whether it was fumbled or handled brilliantly; I'm firmly with Team Breitbart on this one. But the fact that it has been widely reported and blogged and discussed and disagreed on is a good thing, a healthy thing. Everybody can sue everybody else, if she thinks she has a cause of action against Andrew Breitbart for publicizing her own words, let her try. She was involuntarily unemployed for maybe a day, and she has subsequently spoken with the President of the United States. Yes, I can see how those anonymous bloggers are causing irreparable harm, the only solution for which is to shred the Constitution and limit free speech.

Although I can kinda understand how Shirley Sherrod might be looking for some prior restraint right about now, because she has subsequently put her foot in her mouth. Her remarks about Andrew Breitbart being a racist and supporting the reinstitution of slavery have revealed her to be pretty much the same person she was in the first part of that video, the racist part that had the NAACP audience eating out of her hand. The racial enlightenment she claimed in the latter half of the story was great narrative, but she doesn't exactly seem to be living her own story. And that must be pretty embarrassing.

They are listening

When the electricity goes out, the first thing I notice is the loss of the steady electronic background hum. The soundtrack of our lives in western industrial society, we never notice it until it is abruptly silenced. But did you know that law enforcement actually records that sound?

It's called Electrical Network Frequency Analysis, and it's the niftiest forensic technique since pizza crusts. The auditory frequency of our electrical supply varies slightly with peaks and troughs in demand, and these variations are remarkably consistent across long distances. For the past five years, British police have been recording the frequencies on the National Grid and storing the results in a database. (Digital storage is so cheap that data never go away anymore.) Because these frequency variations are highly random, any discrete time interval is going to have a unique frequency signature, like an audio fingerprint.

This database came in handy recently in a murder trial where guilt or innocence depended on the credibility of an allegedly incriminating audio recording. The defense attorney claimed that the recording was edited and therefore unreliable, but investigators were able to compare the audio fingerprint picked up by the recording with the audio fingerprint in their database and determine that there was no splicing or other alteration to the tape. (Mel Gibson, are you listening?)

I don't know if U.S. law enforcement is making similar recordings of the domestic grid, but the FBI was reportedly very interested in the British experience. I hope the U.S. military is listening as well. The radical Islamists who are making war on Western Civilization are perversely aided by their rejection of civilization's technological conveniences; I remember seeing a geologist trying to pinpoint the site of a bin Laden video by analyzing the rocks in the background. When they do pick up a sat phone or a video camera, who knows what other sorts of info we could be picking up in the background?

Astute readers of this blog (i.e., those who have read to the end) will have noticed that despite the appearance of a bear at the top of this post, the story I've told does not actually feature a bear. Well, I went looking for a nifty picture of power lines and found this one with a bear. I don't imagine I'm going to have a lot of things to say about the ursine-energy nexus in the future, so this is where he stays.

(The bear eventually came down on his own. More details here.)

iSuck: battlefield edition

While Steve Jobs is prissily proclaiming that the iPad offers "freedom
from porn" and mocking iPod customers for holding their phones the
wrong way, Google's Android operating system is kicking butt, taking
names, and going to war.

Raytheon, well-known for its Patriot Missile, is developing software
for the American military based on the Android OS. The Raytheon
Advanced Tactical System (RATS) will be loaded onto military-only
smartphones (I want one already) and will enable our armed forces in
the field to track each other's positions, download military-grade
satellite images directly onto their phones, and presumably use
Augmented Reality software.

We are all familiar with Augmented Reality (AR) already. The 1st and
Ten Line on a televised football game is an example of AR; it does not
exist on the field, but it is layered over our televised view of the
field in order to give viewers information that they might not
otherwise have. Yes yes, I know it insults the intelligence of every
football fan who knows where the line is, but think about the way that
AR could be used on the battlefield.

A Marine points his smartphone at a particular area, and he views the
area through his phone with additional layers of information provided
by friendly forces (or unfriendly forces, if we've hacked their data);
a symbol to designate a rendezvous point, a red blinking dot to
identify the location of a sniper spotted by his buddy across the
valley, text containing information about buildings, in realtime,
limited only by imagination and the conditions on the ground.

This is big. According to Raytheon, "Google has helped us push the
limits of the phone." Well, kudos to Google. And by the way, I am
pleased as punch with my snappy little Droid phone.

Ten Buck Fridays: it's Chip Cravaack

Voting has closed in this week's Ten Buck Fridays poll, and we have a winner!

The winner is Chip Cravaack, who is running against 17- term incumbent Jim Oberstar in Minnesota's 8th Congressional District.

As Chip notes on his website,

The consequences of inaction are clear: if our country continues on its current path, we will not be giving our children and grandchildren the same freedoms, the same opportunities, or the same country that our parents and grandparents gave us. The choice before us is not what kind of America we will have in the next two, or even four, years, but what kind of America we will have in the next forty.

Additional information on Chip Cravaack can be found over at Right Klik. Please visit Chip Cravaack's donation page and donate what you can to this worthy candidate, and please don't forget to include "Ten Buck Fridays" in the occupation field on the online donation form. Together, we can nationalize every Congressional race in 2010.

On to November!

Don't call me Shirley

Except for that part where she got her job back, Shirley Sherrod woke
up this morning with a greater understanding of how it feels to be a
Republican scurrilously accused of racism.

But Breitbart's video was never about Shirley Sherrod, it was about
the racism on display at an NAACP dinner. When Shirley Sherrod told
the first part of her story, the part where she explicitly throttled
back her efforts on behalf of a farmer because he was White, the crowd
loved it; Shirley Sherrod's racism was well-received by a racist
crowd. Days after the NAACP voted on a resolution condemning the
presumption of a speck in the Tea Party's eye, Breitbart revealed the
beam in the NAACP's eye. That was, is, and will remain the story.
The fact that the Obama administration is looking scattered and
panicky is an added bonus.

Now, I have some sympathy for the woman, because she was ultimately
telling an interesting story about her journey away from seeing
situations as racial. I don't think she deserves to be under the bus
with Reverend Wright, Van Jones, and Obama's grandmother. There's no
reason the USDA should not hire her back.

But you know what? No matter how proud we may be of our journeys away
from something nasty, people rarely pay as much attention to the happy
ending as they do to the prior nastiness. If you really, really feel
the need to share, save the details of your Journey from the Dark
Place for your post-retirement book.

...even my coffee cup is smug

Have you noticed the inherent contradiction in the fact that coffee shop customers are disproportionately techie, while the process for obtaining coffee in a coffee shop remains firmly rooted in the twelfth century?

No, neither had I, but someone with a spare radio frequency identification (RFID) chip and too much time on his hands has invented a solution in search of a problem: the Smart Mug, or SMUG. The SMUG is embedded with an RFID which connects to your ordering history and pre-paid coffee account, so you can order up your "usual" without having to fumble for change or God forbid interact with the human being behind the counter.

Of course, the SMUG has green cred: by re-using your smug, you will reduce paper coffee cup waste and presumably save the planet. The coffee shop can use green guilt to ensure repeat business; wave your Smart Mug in front of the scanner and drink greenly and conveniently with us, or drink out of a paper cup across the street and polar bears will die. Of course, there is a much simpler way to reduce paper coffee cup waste and save the planet: brew your own coffee at home and take it with you. You can still carry a smart-looking thermos, sans RFID, and you will save considerable money (the ultimate green) in the bargain. Reject the SMUG, and you will create one less data stream as you go about your day. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Rough week? Have a bunny.

Ease head down onto pillow, close eyes. Ahhh, a cool breeze drifts through the window to waft me to my slumber.

What's that? Bad news, unexplained seepage from the Gulf floor and no one can quite agree what is happening? Slumber gone. Staring wide-eyed at CNN.com.

It's shaping up to be a rough week. So, to help us all get through it, here's a bunny. With apologies to The Other McCain, this is my Rule 5. Because everybody loves a cute little animal.

The tender mercies of a government doctor

If you want to know what to expect from Obamacare, you can either hop in the Tardis and take a trip into the future with a Time Lord (do I need an excuse to post a picture of David Tennant?) or you can look east to Massachusetts and their experience with Romneycare.

The latest news from the Bay State is that small businesses are dropping their private insurance, because it is cheaper to pay the penalty and throw the employees onto the tender mercies of the state system. These same small businesses also have a disproportionate number of low-income employees who will qualify for state subsidies, so the state system is doubly burdened with more demand for services from the state plan and more demand for other people's money to pay for services from the state plan.

Speaking of the services you get from the state plan, do you like the idea of a group medical visit? Next time you hear a doctor say he's going to quit practicing rather than operate under Obamacare, you'd better listen: there aren't enough doctors to go around in Massacusetts, so doctors there are resorting to group medical visits. Think about how difficult it is to be candid with your doctor behind a closed door; now think of how difficult it will be with nine of your closest neighbors sitting around the table with you and listening.

If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it, he said. Well, apparently this does not apply if you currently have a healthcare plan that maintains some semblance of privacy and human dignity. That, you're going to have to give up for the greater good.

An alarming welcome in California

California didn't exactly roll out the welcome mat for Professor William A. Jacobson of Cornell Law School when he visited the Left Coast for a conference. As he reports on his blog, Legal Insurrection, he was taken aback by one of California's ubiquitous warning signs (like the one above) posted near the entrance to a restaurant.

I can't even blame this one on the legislature, the signs are the result of a ballot initiative. In short, any time there is a product being sold that contains something that Californians think might be bad for you, the proprietor has to hang a sign. And note the wording of the warning: "...known to the State of California" to cause harm. The harm doesn't even have to be the subject of settled medicine; addition to the list is an administrative process dependent only on whether some organization considered credible thinks something causes harm. The list is a hodgepodge, containing everything from certain types of fern (that'll teach you to graze on plants along the roadside); to benzene, for which there is no safe level of human exposure; to aspirin, which is perfectly capable of being used safely.

Basically, anyone who sells anything to anyone has to post a sign. And it goes beyond merchants; I've seen signs warning about hotel carpeting, and about the finishes in an apartment building elevator. But after a while, you stop seeing the signs, because they are everywhere. As such, it's a warning whose only purpose is to provide jobs for state employees at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment whose job it is to make sure that businesses post signs that no one pays any attention to.

Your tax dollars at work. Welcome to California.

PS, Professor Jacobson, please spend lots of money while you're here.

Ten Buck Fridays: this week's poll

Another week, another opportunity to select a worthy conservative candidate for the next Ten Buck Fridays moneybomb. To recap:

Ten Buck Fridays is a small-d democratic moneybomb project of the patriotic blogosphere. Back in May, a blogger called Conscientiously Conservative declared her intent to donate $10 to a different worthy national Congressional candidate each week, and the concept is spreading across the web. Each week, voters decide which conservative Congressional candidate needs their support the most, and everyone is encouraged to donate what they can to the winner. There is no middleman, no national committee; anyone motivated to donate sends their support to the candidates directly. The poll that closed last Friday morning was carried on 60 blogs and received over 2000 votes. There's even a Facebook page! This is real grass roots stuff.

Results are cumulative across all blogs hosting the poll. Additional information on each candidate is available on RightKlik's blog. Thank you for your interest, participation, and support, and on to November!

Smart meters, smart warfare?

If you live in California, you've heard of PG&E and their Smart Meter odyssey.

Basically, a Smart Meter is a two-way electric meter that can not only make more detailed usage data available to your utility company and to you (in case you are interested in knowing exactly how many kWh your refrigerator uses, which a bewildering number of Californians seem to be), but can ultimately network with every electrical appliance in your house (once you replace all your existing appliances with new ones, that is) and, uh, decide when to turn things on and off, which PG&E and the regulators have decided you aren't doing a very good job of yourself. And the whole thing will cost a few billion.

Problem is, when PG&E started installing the new meters, people started complaining that their bills were going up. Not by a little, but by hundreds or thousands of dollars. PG&E responded that the meters are correct, the customers must be imagining things. And they stuck to that narrative until the state legislature got involved and demanded an investigation. In short, PG&E has thoroughly botched its relationship with its customers, even those whose electric bills have not shot up to $5,000 per month.

But here's why this may be useful. Have you heard what's going on with the electrical grid in Afghanistan? America has paid $100 million to upgrade electrical service for Afghanis, but unfortunately the Taliban runs the electrical grid and collects payments from customers, so the Taliban is directly benefitting from American largesse and using the profits to finance their war on us. And you know what else that spiffy new electrical service is good for? Running the irrigation system for their largest export crop, opium poppies. Classic damned if we do and damned if we don't situation; the Taliban remains very popular in parts of Afghanistan, and it'll compromise our ability to win Afghanis' hearts and minds if we cut off support to their electrical grid.

What we need is for Special Forces to team up with PG&E and sell Smart Meters to the Taliban. Tell them that the meters are smart enough to detect forbidden usage, like black market television sets or CD players. Tell them that the meters can be used to limit the flow of electricity when women are home alone, so they won't get into any trouble. And no more worry about wasting electricity educating girls!

With PG&E at its side, the Taliban cannot help but to alienate its customers in Afghanistan. With loyalty to the Taliban permanently damaged by a Smart Meter fiasco, our men and women in harm's way will have a better shot at winning over the Afghanis and enlisting their support in war against radical Islamism.

And we can do it one Smart Meter at a time.

My email to Rush Limbaugh

Dear Rush,

You've said that we should nationalize every House and Senate race in 2010. Well, I want to let you know that there is a small but growing group of bloggers who are trying to do just that. The effort is called Ten Buck Fridays.

Ten Buck Fridays is a small-d democratic moneybomb project of the patriotic blogosphere. Back in May, a blogger called Conscientiously Conservative declared her intent to donate $10 to a different worthy national Congressional candidate each week, and the concept is spreading across the web. Each week, voters decide which conservative Congressional candidate needs their support the most, and everyone is encouraged to donate what they can to the winner. There is no middleman, no national committee; anyone motivated to donate sends their support to the candidates directly. The poll that closed last Friday morning was carried on 60 blogs and received over 2000 votes. There's even a Facebook page! This is real grass roots stuff.

At RightKilk, you can read more about the poll, the nominating process, and this week's winner. A good synopsis can be found here. (Rightklik is doing yeoman's work collecting nominations, posting candidate info, and launching each week's poll. The poll hosted and promoted by dozens of other bloggers, including my own little blog.)

Worthy candidates are getting great visibility within our small but growing community. If you are as psyched about this effort as we are, I humbly and respectfully request that you share Ten Buck Fridays with your listeners and web community. Small donors might feel like their $10 is a drop in the ocean, but small, regular donations from a large group of patriots can turn the tide.

Thank you

Part of the Left Coast Resistance,

[contact info redacted]

Everything should smell like the Old Spice Man

Proctor and Gamble's Old Spice brand and ad agency Wieden + Kennedy engaged in some wildly creative marketing this week by combining the real-time dissemination and personalization of social networks with the hottest guy I've ever seen in a towel. (Kudos as well to actor Isaiah Mustafa for his role in the unconventional project.) They seeded social networks with invitations to tweet questions to the Old Spice Man (i.e., the man your man could smell like if he didn't smell like a lady) and quickly developed hundreds of short personalized ads in response. The ads, which were produced over the course of two days, can be viewed on the Old Spice YouTube channel. George Stephanopoulos tweeted for advice on how Obama could win back female support, and the response ad is a keeper.

I am happy to engage in unpaid advertising on behalf of Old Spice as long as I can view and post videos of the hottest guy I've ever seen in a towel. However, two observations must be made:

Science fiction got here first. This effort reminds me of that scene from Minority Report where The Gap performs an unobtrusive eye scan on each customer as they enter the store, does a database dip for name and prior purchases, then greets you by name and asks if you're enjoying those khakis you bought 10 days ago. Kinda like that, except Facebook hasn't figured out how to perform eye scans, and retailers don't have realtime granular access to that shadowy database where our credit card purchasing patterns are already stored. Yet.

Social networks aren't being built for altruistic purposes, to enable distant friends and families to share digital love across the miles. They are being built to sell you stuff, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Silverfish handcatch indeed.

Ten Buck Fridays: It's Van Irion

Voting is closed, and we have a winner!

As Right Klik notes, Ten Buck Fridays is really taking off:

TBF supporters have been busy. We've now grown to include 60 participating blogs, and well over 2,000 patriots voted in our online poll for their favorite rising conservative star this week.

Today's rising conservative star is Van Irion. With record levels of TBF participation, Van Irion won handily with 42% of the vote.

The winner in this week's poll is Van Irion, who is seeking the GOP nomination in Tennessee's 3rd Congressional District. Additional information on Mr. Irion can be found here.

Please do what you can to support this worthy candidate, and don't forget to list "Ten Buck Fridays" under occupation on the online donation form. Thank you for your participation and support, and on to November!

Pizza: perfect food, perfect crime-solving tool

That slice of double-cheese pepperoni may come back to haunt you in more ways than one.

A shout-out to my former genetics professor, Dr. Fred Bieber, who was part of a small team that developed a crime-solving methodology known as "familial genetics." Against considerable opposition (and to my considerable surprise,) California Attorney General Jerry Brown ordered the familial genetics methodology implemented in California in April 2008. Now, familial genetics may have caught its first criminal, the Grim Sleeper Killer, so called because he took a hiatus between his clusters of murders.

DNA retrieved from numerous crime scenes suggested that one offender was responsible for a string of murders, and although California takes DNA from everyone arrested for certain qualifying crimes and keeps all the results in a single database, there was no match for the Grim Sleeper. However, Dr. Bieber's familial genetics methodology revealed that there was a strong familial match to the suspect, and interviews with this familial match lead investigators to a man named Lonnie Franklin. In a tactic worthy of prime-time television, an investigator posed as a waiter and collected a pizza crust from Lonnie Franklin, retrieved DNA from the pizza crust and got a match to the suspect they'd been pursuing since 1985.

Dr. Bieber's recent opinion piece from the LA Times can be read here. California is one of only two states that employ familial genetics, perhaps more will adopt the methodology after this success.

Governor Moonbeam surprises me sometimes. This is not an endorsement in his race for Governor, I am voting for Meg Whitman. But I am glad that, during one of his rare moments of clarity, Jerry Brown made the right decision on this novel and valuable crime-solving tool.

The speck in thy neighbors eye

You're a nobody until the NAACP has called you a racist; and for all you racist Tea Partiers out there, here's your ribbon!

The NAACP, which sees racists lurking in greeting cards and in the astronomical term "black hole," has now passed a resolution suggesting that racism is a significant enough problem within the Tea Party Movement that all Tea Partiers of good will must step forward and denounce the nefarious elements in their midst.

Bite me.

I for one am happy to say that people whose opposition to Obama is based on his skin color have no place in the Tea Party. But I absolutely refuse to kowtow to the race hustlers at the NAACP, who can see the speck in their neighbors eye but are blind to the beam in their own.

Through selective outrage, the NAACP has thoroughly abdicated the moral high ground, if indeed they ever occupied it. (Raise your hand if "nation of cowards," "every last iota of a cracker," [my personal favorite] and "God Damn America" are part of the soundbite soundtrack in your head.) Allegations of racism are hurled casually, and accorded complete credulity. I feel like I'm witnessing the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. For extra credit, who remembers what brought the public witch hysteria to an abrupt halt in Salem? Simply this: the mad girls accused the Governor's wife of witchcraft, and the spell was broken. If there is any good to come out of this, it may be that by accusing millions of ordinary, hard-working Americans of racism, the NAACP might broken the spell associated with allegation of racism. They might have finally gone too far.

Hey DOJ: Sue San Francisco

Eric Holder has attempted to justify the DOJ's lawsuit against Arizona's immigration law by stating that Arizona's law hampers the Obama Administration's authority to enforce national immigration policy, and that federal law does not permit a patchwork of state and local immigration policies. If the Obama Administration was really interested in discouraging a patchwork of obstructionary state and local laws, they would have sued San Francisco by now.

Since 1989, San Francisco has had a sactuary city ordinance preventing city officials from assisting in the enforcement of federal immigration law. They can't even inquire as to immigration status. And while Obama winces at the thought that Arizona's law might result in someone being asked for ID, San Francisco's sanctuary city policy has resulted in real bloodshed.

In 2008, as Tony Bologna and his three sons were headed home from a picnic they had the bad luck to cross the path of Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant and member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang. Edwin Ramos had been convicted of felonies on prior occasions but given probation, and in accordance with San Francisco's sanctuary city policy, no one in law enforcement every notified the federal immigration authorities that there was an illegal alien on a Northern California crime spree. In a senseless moment, over road rage or mistaken identity or something else unfathomable, Edwin Ramos shot and killed Tony Bologna and his sons Michael (20) and Matt (16), and wounded a third son. The three murdered members of the Bologna family are pictured above.

San Francisco has blood on its hands. They refused to assist in the deportation of a demonstrably dangerous illegal, and complicated matters by slapping him on the wrist whenever he was arrested. (Even after slaughtering the Bologna family, Edwin Ramos does not face the death penalty. Welcome to California.) Edwin Ramos was on the streets due to official misconduct, and the Bologna family was torn apart as a result. While Obama gets the vapors at the thought of someone somewhere in Arizona ever being asked for ID, San Francisco's sanctuary city policy is actively thwarting federal law and leaving dangerous illegals on the streets.

Eric Holder, are you listening? Put up or shut up; sue San Francisco, or leave Arizona the hell alone.

Healthy body, healthy mind

The July 3 issue of The Economist features an interesting article on the connection between a nation's level of infectious disease and the overall intelligence of its citizens.

It has long been observed that people in some areas of the world seem more intelligent than people in other areas, but no one has quite been able to pin down why. Research on the issue is controversial, leaving researchers and their institutions susceptible to charges of cultural imperialism and racism. It's thankless work, but thank goodness someone is doing it.

Prior studies have suggested that high levels of native intelligence result in corresponding levels of economic development, but the latest research suggests that the vector of causation needs to be reversed. It isn't simply the case that smart people build effective social structures which include high levels of sanitation and hygiene, instead it's the level of infectious disease that determines the intelligence of the population.

A newborn's brain consumes 87% of the body's metabolic energy, a five-year old's brain consumes 44%, and an adult brain consumes 25%. Infectious diseases sap the energy available to the brain in numerous ways; some intestinal parasites steal food from their host, and other pathogens can cause a body to spend precious metabolic energy on immune response. Anything that flips the brain's dimmer switch is going to interfere with the brain's function, and infectious diseases in young children can prevent their brains from developing properly.

This could have enormous consequences for international development programs and every well-meaning effort to lift foreign nations out of poverty. Fewer schoolbooks and cash grants, more water-treatment plants?

Ten Buck Fridays: this week's poll

For candidate summaries and links to even more information, visit Right Klik's blog. Votes cast in this poll are cumulative across all participating blogs.

Thank you for your interest and support, and on to November!

The Mehserle verdict

The Mehserle verdict is in: involuntary manslaughter with an added penalty for having used a firearm in the commission of a felony. Predictably, grievance groups used the verdict as an excuse to set portions of Oakland on fire and help themselves to some new merchandise at area stores.

To recap, in the wee hours of January 1, 2009, then-Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) Police Officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant while Grant was face-down on the platform at the Fruitvale BART station in Oakland, California. Mehserle never denied shooting Oscar Grant, but maintained that he intended to draw his taser rather than his firearm.

As an initial matter, BART patrons should enjoy a reasonable expectation that BART cops will not accidentally kill them. I commute to work on BART, and I've learned that there are many ways that one can bring oneself to the attention of BART police, anything from criminal mischief to eating a muffin on the train. If a BART officer is writing me a citation for eating a muffin, I have the right to expect that, while the nice officer is reaching for his pen, he is not going to accidentally pull his Glock and shoot me.

With the exception of Oscar Grant's family (which is understandable) and the numerous grievance groups (which is sadly predictable), no one believes that Johannes Mehserle intended to shoot Oscar Grant. However, he did shoot him, which violates BART patrons' reasonable expectation of not being shot, so Mehserle had to be convicted of something. Involuntary manslaughter was the lowest verdict the jury could return without acquitting him.

Almost the lowest, anyway, because they found him guilty of the additional enhancement of using a firearm during the commission of a felony, and the enhancement is the part that I don't like. Of course he was using a firearm, he's a cop. Cops don't have the luxury of limiting their exposure to criminal penalties by leaving their firearms at home, they need their guns to protect the public and to protect themselves while they are protecting the public. The gun enhancement penalizes cops for the work they do and the hazards they are uniquely exposed to simply as a consequence of showing up for work. And, I fear that BART patrons are more likely to be victimized as thugs take advantage of post-verdict skittishness among the remainder of the BART police force.

I believe that the root cause of this terrible accident was poor training by BART. According to Mehserle's testimony, he had only been trained in using a taser the month before, and he never knew where his taser would be positioned on his belt until he received a taser and holster from a cop going off duty. It appears that BART never gave Johannes Mehserle the training necessary to be able to correctly draw his weapons under stress. And as the DOJ and FBI pursue their racially-motivated investigations of this tragic incident, they should focus their inquiry on BART's training programs.

Word for the day: Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the word for the day, perhaps for this election cycle and for many election cycles to come. It's like outsourcing, but tasks are delegated to a larger group of people.

The Accountability Project website (which is experiencing technical difficulties as of this post, although Google has a cache of accountabilityproject.com) is the latest example of political crowdsourcing. Essentially, the collection of entry level opposition research, in the form of embarrassing viral videos, has been delegated to the mob. The site's stated goal is to expose Republicans' "misinformation, lies, and doublespeak" and bring Republican candidates' statements into the "light of public scrutiny." Although the website declares itself to be a "grassroots, volunteer project," the fine print at the bottom reveals it to be a paid project of the Democratic National Committee.

The content is not curated, and there is currently no opportunity for voting or comments. Users can upload video, and they can upload information on upcoming events into a searchable database so that aspiring Michael Moores can search for events in their area and show up with a video camera.

I'm not sure how significant this really is. Breitbart has already demonstrated how powerful the controlled release of curated video content can be, but the Accountability Project isn't curated, it's more like a dedicated YouTube for liberals. As such, it may attract videos which don't upset anyone but folks already on the far Left, and thus degenerate into noise.

It should, however, be taken seriously. And every conservative candidate should remember that, in the internet age, every utterance is forever. In Internet 1.0, maybe nobody knew you were a dog. But these days, every candidate has got an opposition iPhone aimed at them, and nuanced explanations the day after a video hits the blogs will never have the same impact as the first documented evidence that you might, in fact, have fleas.

Comment traffic re Eric Wargotz

Friday's post on the Ten Buck Fridays poll winner and the Wargotz birther controversy inspired the following comment, from Michelle:

Lilac,

Now come on, don't drink the cool aid ;)

Wargotz is no birther. In fact,he rejected that notion AND it appears the video has been edited before placed on youtube. He refuted that label and clarified that in mainstream press in Maryland. You can find it in his press room at his website www.wargotz.com I always do my own research before jumping to conclusions. Wargotz never said that obama wasn't a US citizen. I live in Maryland and I can tell you that that Stark video statement on birth place was very smart. Why? Because when he wins the primary, if Miluski brings it up then mainstream press will be all over him and he gets great mainstream attention and name recog. and an opportunity to dispel , etc. He is a VERY smart man and deserves all of our support and dollars. Don't sell him short. Thanks.

Starting off a comment by suggesting that I am engaging in lock-step, thirst-quenching irrationality is not a way to win credibility, emoticon or not.

There's a video of Wargotz saying the birth issue is still "out there" and that he does not believe that Obama was born in the United States. How do you "clarify" that? That Wargotz had a stroke and momentarily lost control of his voicebox and facial muscles, and that his utterances of "the birth issue is still out there" and "no" (to the question of whether Obama was born in the United States) were random babble rather than willed, coordinated muscular movements?

Next, as to your assertion that "Wargotz never said that Obama wasn't a US citizen:" not the point. The point is, he said he does not believe that Obama was born in the United States. There are plenty of people who are U.S. citizens but who are ineligible to serve as President because they are not natural born citizens. Craig Ferguson, for example, whom I adore and who would probably make a much better President than Barack Obama, although I hesitate to tarnish Craig Ferguson with such faint praise.

In addition, and this is really interesting, you make the argument in the alternative, suggesting that Wargotz's birther video is a strategic coup, because it will result in lots of media attention and name recognition during the general election. Yes, he will get lots of attention, as an unelectable birther who thinks that he can spin his way out of being caught saying something wacky.

There are people have received second chances after being caught on video or on tape saying something wacky. Mel Gibson is the best example of this; it looks like the man is a raving anti-Semitic misogynist, but people still want to make movies with him. (Maybe he isn't a misogynist per se, maybe he just hates the women he has children with.) But Mel Gibson is a force easily contained. If you don't like Mel Gibson and his anti-Semitic misogyny, you don't have to see any of his movies. Period.

But Michelle, Eric Wargotz is no Mel Gibson. Eric Wargotz wants to be the Republic challenger to Barbara Mikulski. Eric Wargotz doesn't just want to make movies that we don't have to see if we don't want to, Eric Wargotz wants to go to the Unites States Senate and shape policy that all of us will have to live with. For Eric Wargotz, this video is a fatal error, there can be no second chance.

I'm seeing a fair amount of this "he was misquoted/he never said Obama isn't a citizen/he's really smart" rebuttal on the interwebs, and I'm beginning to wonder if some portion of his "support" isn't actually coming from people who want to see Mikulski re-elected in November.

Anyone know who else is running for the Republican Senate nomination in November?

Aaron Paul for Best Supporting Actor (Drama)

If you're not watching Breaking Bad on AMC, you should be. It's one of the most wildly compelling dramas to hit the little screen in a long, long time. Breaking Bad is appointment television, or at the very least DVR television. You don't watch it while you're writing checks or cooking dinner, you sit down and watch it. Season 1 began with a simple premise: an ordinary man receives a devastating medical diagnosis and looks for a way to ensure his family's financial security before he dies. What unfolds over the three seasons so far is darkly comic, visually stunning, hopeful, sad, gut-wrenching, and profound. You'll find yourself gripping your sofa cushions and gasping, and you won't see any of it coming.

This season, put the emphasis on gut-wrenching. A lipstick-stained cigarette butt in an ashtray broke my heart. While Bryan Cranston (that's him on the right) was epic in the lead role as usual, it was Aaron Paul's performance (that's him on the left) that drove this past season to new heights.

I admit, Aaron Paul has some tough competition for the Emmy, mostly from Michael Emerson, who played Benjamin Linus on Lost, a character who was one of the great moral ambiguities of modern popular culture and devilishly fun to watch. Although Michael Emerson's voice is a supple instrument, he greeted every plot twist, time shift, flash sideways, and I-think-I'll-stay-here-in-the-ambivalent-afterlife with the same wide-eyed stare. In contrast, Aaron Paul's most profound moments came when he was not saying a word. He took a tremendous series above and beyond. His performance, what he gave to the viewers, how he enriched our experience of the story, has got to be the reason they give out acting awards, or there is no reason to give them out at all.

Ten Buck Fridays: Eric Wargotz*

The results are in, and Dr. Eric Wargotz* was the winner of this week's Ten Buck Fridays poll, with 38% of the votes cast (the asterisk is there for a reason, please keep reading). Dr. Wargotz is competing for the Republican nomination in Maryland to unseat Barbara Mikulski in the United States Senate.

Under normal circumstances, I would be urging you to make a donation to this candidate. However, as is discussed on Right Klik's blog, there is some controversy with respect to Dr. Wargotz, who was captured on video stating unequivocally that he does not believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Most jarring to me was the fact that he brought up what he called "the birth issue" himself, before he was even asked. Eric Wargotz has irretrievably placed himself in the birther camp.

I don't think that anyone in the Ten Buck Fridays community wants to start imposing a blog-by-blog ideological litmus test to every Ten Buck Fridays winner, and ordinarily I will happily support the winner without regard to whether I agree with each enumerated position in his or platform. However, one cannot avoid the fact that there are some positions that will be deal-breakers come election time, and if Dr. Wargotz is the Republican nominee, Barbara Mikulski will ride to re-election on the back of Eric Wargotz's birther video. In my opinion, Eric Wargotz' candidacy is a wasted opportunity to unseat Mikulski, and a donation to his campaign is wasted money. I'm sure he is a good man and his supporters are reasonable people, but there's no two ways about it, the birther business is fatal.

Ten Buck Fridays is new, and this kerfuffle will provide us all with an opportunity to reflect upon the process and upon ways to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. In the meantime, I'd like to give you the rest of the poll results and ask you to make up your own minds. Charles Lollar received 23%, and Ann Marie Buerkle received 20% of the vote. (My numbers are different from those listed by Right Klik, perhaps because I viewed the results later and some people are still voting.) All the other candidates were in the single digits.

I still urge you to support one (or more!) of the worthy top finishers in this week's Ten Buck Fridays poll. If you donate online, please mention Ten Buck Fridays under "occupation."

Thank you, and on to November!

Information fragmentation

ABC, NBC, CBS. There was a time when everybody I knew got their news at dinnertime or bedtime from one of those three networks. The longhairs who wore tweed and drove Volvos might get their news from PBS, but everybody else shared a consistent frame of reference. Obviously, that degree of trust and social cohesion comes with a price. When information dissemination is controlled by a handful of organizations, which are themselves controlled by a handful of individuals, data are filtered and shaped and presented to the public as a value-added product with meaning and conclusions baked right in. At the extreme, you end up with a society like North Korea; uninformed, enslaved, impoverished in body, mind and soul.

However, I'm starting to wonder if we haven't swung a bit too far in the other direction. "If the news is that important, it will find me." So spoke a college student in a 2008 focus group. The problem is, "if the news is important it will find me" becomes indistinguishable from "if it has found me, it is important" and "nothing that has not found me is important." I confess, I get most of my news and news/analysis from organizations that I trust, that I feel comfortable with, in which I feel I have an ideological home: the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Fox News. I live and work in Northern California, and I have to wade through a sea of Leftist viewpoints just to get to my desk in the morning, but even if I didn't I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to check out MSNBC. And in a very real sense, I don't know what I'm missing.

This trend towards increasing fragmentation of information is taking flight thanks to a Swiss startup called Small Rivers, which has launched a service called paper.li that creates an online newspaper out of the weblinks sent around in your Twitter network. And you thought it was bad when young people started to regard the Daily Show as news? To varying degrees, we all operate in information cascades; weblinks circulated in a network are more likely to confirm the perspectives of the people in that network than to challenge them, and are as much an act of group bonding as information dissemination. When paper.li turns perspective confirmation and group bonding into a form that resembles journalism, I shudder to contemplate the fate of real, objective information.

The New York Times frequently makes my blood boil, but since when is Twitter considered all the news that's fit to print? If we get all our information from people who are like us, it will become increasingly difficult for us to talk to each other, because we will have fewer and fewer areas of common ground. I don't want to go back to the days of Walter Cronkite, but I am anxious about the consequences to society when people increasingly rely on their own affinity groups for information. And I don't know what the middle ground is, or how to get there.

Say no to California SB 1178

Safe as houses.

Purchase money mortgages in California are non-recourse loans, meaning that if you default, the lender can't come after you to make up the difference between the loan balance and the value of the collateral, i.e. the house. Refinanced mortgages, on the other hand, are recourse loans. If you default, the lender can pursue you and obtain a judgment requiring you to repay the difference between what you owed and whatever the lender was able to get for the house.

The California Association of Realtors sponsored legislation introduced by State Senator Ellen Corbett that would end the disparity between purchase money loans and refis by making refis non-recourse loans. Alex Creel, the Realtors' lobbyist, said it isn't "fair" to lose the protection of the law when you refinance.

Well, Alex, show me where on your birth certificate it says that life is fair. If you want to make things fair, I suggest you start making purchase money mortgages full recourse loans, just like refis. There's no reason that a person should be able to skate away from the consequences of walking away from a mortgage just because they haven't refinanced the loan. Ditching a mortgage should have profound consequences, and if the possibility of financial liability deters some people from becoming homeowners, so be it. Not everyone is in a position to own a house, and our economy is still in shambles from the shock of that discovery.

The California Bankers Association opposes the legislation, to a point; they want the protections to apply only to new refinancings, they don't want to alter existing refinance contracts. They are absolutely right to oppose the abrogation of existing contracts; the rates for refinanced mortgages reflect the fact that the lender can come after you in the event of a default. A non-recourse loan is riskier to the lender than a recourse loan, and it would be wrong for government to alter the balance of risk and reward the parties agreed to in the transaction. But the Bankers Association is, in my opinion, wussing out on this, and by not taking a stand in favor of personal responsibility, their wussing is going to result in higher refi rates for every homeowner in California. Of course, all the legislators who've supported this will be shocked, shocked to learn that turning refis into non-recourse loans will exert upward pressure on the rates. Just another day of unintended consequences in Sacramento.

Ten Buck Fridays: this week's poll

For background on Ten Buck Fridays, refer to my earlier post. For additional information on the nominees, please visit Right Klik's always-informative site.

Remember, the winner on Friday, July 2 was Anna Little, who is running against a well-funded Democrat in New Jersey's 6th.

Thanks for your participation and support, on to November!

Charity Focus: The Animal Rescue Foundation

You might remember the day in May 1990 when a black cat ran onto the field during a game between the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees. On that day, something wonderful began.

Oakland's manager, Tony La Russa (pictured above, gazing down at said cat), brought the terrified cat into the dugout and kept it safe for the remainder of the game. Afterwards, he brought the cat to a shelter, but was horrified to learn that there was not a single no-kill shelter in all of the San Francisco Bay Area's East Bay, and that the cat would be euthanized. Tony found a home for the cat (subsequently named Evie) himself, and in 1991 he and his wife founded the Animal Rescue Foundation in Walnut Creek, California, the area's first no-kill shelter.

County shelters are overwhelmed with lost or abandoned dogs and cats, and they euthanize animals who haven't found homes in order to make room for the new animals coming in every day. The Animal Rescue Foundation (ARF) rescues animals who have run out of time at county shelters, and takes loving care of the animals while searching for forever homes for them. Captain Sully Sullenberger, pilot of the Miracle on the Hudson, fosters and socializes kittens in his home for ARF until the kittens are adoptable.

ARF complements its animal rescues with a wide range of people programs, including educational programs for children, pet food and veterinary care assistance to low-income pet owners, spay and neuter clinics, and animal ambassador comfort programs to assisted living facilities, hospitals, adult day care, and rehab facilities. ARF helps animals and people help each other and enrich each others lives.

That little black cat has been a good luck charm for countless animals and people, myself included. I adopted a cat from ARF, and she's the love of my life.

ARF is located at 2890 Mitchell Drive, Walnut Creek, California 94598.

Summer's preeminent athletic event

Summer's preeminent athletic event has declared its winner. No, not the World Cup, silly. Nathan's International Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island has crowned California's own Joey Chestnut the winner, with 54 dogs downed in 10 minutes.

There was sadness and confusion in the days leading up to this year's event, with news that failed contract negotiations with Major League Eating (seriously, who knew?) would keep prior champion and fan favorite Takeru Kobayashi away from this year's competition.

As it turns out, he wasn't kept entirely away. Although he did not compete, he rushed the stage and held on for dear life, until New York's Finest extricated him and took him into custody. I hope the cops stopped off for a dog with the little guy on their way to the station.

Does this mean Kobayashi is going to get a reality show on Bravo?

The environmentalists are in charge of the money

Wisconsin-based Bucyrus International recently learned what it's like to be a manufacturer in an economy where investment decisions are made by environmentalists. India's Reliance Power is building a coal plant in India, and wanted to buy $600 million worth of coal mining equipment from Bucyrus. The contract was contingent on a loan guarantee from the U.S. Import-Export Bank. At the last minute, and after pressure from the State Department and the Treasury, the Import-Export Bank rejected the loan guarantee on the grounds that the Indian coal plant's carbon footprint was too big, and that the Obama Administration's preference was to support clean energy projects. Reliance Energy quickly responded that they'd be happy to buy the equipment from China or Belarus. Of course the coal plant was going to be built whether Reliance bought the equipment from Bucyrus or from someone else, and the Import-Export Bank was letting the perfect be the enemy of the good at a cost of 1,000 American jobs.

Bucyrus did exactly the right thing: they howled. They went to their political representatives, and they went to the media, and having been dragged into the sunlight, the Import-Export Bank reversed its decision.

Meanwhile, do you want to know what kind of green projects the Obama Administration believes in? Look no further than Northern California's own Tesla Motors, which is reaping the financial benefits of political correctness. Tesla was founded in 2003, and since then has lost hundreds of millions of dollars developing and producing one product, an all-electric sportscar (the Roadster) whose $109,000 price tag puts it out of reach for all but wealthy folks for whom environmentalism is a hobby, and who don't mind the Roadster's limited miles-per-charge because they've got a garage full of other cars they can drive when they actually need to get somewhere.

Tesla recently received a $465 million federal loan to help it bring a lower-priced all-electric vehicle to market. This mythical lower-price Tesla will still have a sticker price of $57,400, again putting it out of reach of most Americans. According to its SEC filing, Tesla only has one prototype of this all-electric unicorn, but has no final design, no full production prototype, no built-out manufacturing facility, and no manufacturing process. All they've got is Obama's visage smiling upon them, which has been good so far for a $465 million federal loan, and doubtless more federal money in the near future when Tesla shows signs of going belly-up. Tesla's recent IPO demonstrates that Tesla has become like Fannie and Freddie; financially unsound in its own right, but attractive to investors because of the implicit federal guarantee.

Here's another example: of the first $2.1 billion in stimulus money doled out for wind energy projects, 79% of of it went to foreign firms. Texas will get a wind farm, but the wind turbines will be made by the Chinese.

Leaving the environmentalists in charge of government financial decisions is threatening jobs at home, creating jobs overseas, and propping up companies with theoretical products. How long until the adults are in charge again?

Double Dip

In June, the U.S. unemployment rate dropped from 9.7% to 9.5%. In a brief and barely audible appearance on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, President Obama responded to the June employment numbers by claiming that "we are headed in the right direction." Whether you believe the President depends on whether you've noticed how increasingly shrill Obama's "there, theres" have become, and whether you care to know what lies behind the statistics.

The jobless rate depends on the number of people actively looking for work; if you're unemployed but have given up, you are no longer counted among the unemployed. The jobless rate did not drop because more Americans found jobs, it dropped precisely because 625,000 unemployed Americans gave up looking for work.

In a happy and unexpected development, the mainstream media are looking behind the numbers and reporting the truth. Three captive media outlets, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, have explained that the 0.2 percentage point drop is not actually good news, with the New York Times calling it a "largely illusory decline" in the jobless rate.

These 625,000 discouraged Americans might have dropped out of the employment calculation, but their plight will continue to haunt the economy. We will encounter their ghosts in housing foreclosure rates, in demand for government services, and in the success or failure of businesses where the 625,000 might have spent their income if they had any.

Who's up for a nice cold double dip?

11 Reasons to Vote for Democrats in November.

A highlight reel containing food for thought for anyone casting a vote in November or making campaign contributions in the interim.

Ten Buck Fridays: Anna Little

Ten Buck Fridays is a small-d democratic moneybomb project of the patriotic blogosphere. It is the brainchild of Conscientiously Conservative, who opined that small donations can result in big changes in November, and that if we bring our lunch to work once or twice a week we can save enough money to send $10 every Friday to a worthy candidate.

Her idea has sent shoots and tendrils all across the internet, and many bloggers are participating. Here's the explanation, courtesy of Right Klik:

1. Nominations for deserving candidates are submitted [to Right Klik] on Sundays. ([Right Klik is] curating nominations tomorrow at RK, but any interested bloggers could also host nomination posts).

2. Conservatives vote on the top 10 nominees through the week (Online polling is shared by multiple blogs for cumulative votes).

3. On Friday, the candidate who is #1 in the weekly online poll gets hit with $10 money bombs (money goes DIRECTLY from the donors to the candidate).

4. Participants put the words "Ten Buck Fridays" in the online donation form so that recipients know what's happening!

The "occupation" line on the online donation form is a handy place to indicate Ten Buck Fridays.

Of course, you can send more or less. This week's winner is Anna Little, who is running against a well-funded Democrat in New Jersey's 6th District. Please visit Anna Little's website and donate what you can to this worthy candidate.

Onwards to November!

Johannes Mehserle

No one contests the fact that former BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle fatally shot Oscar Grant on the Fruitvale BART platform in the wee hours of January 1, 2009. Mehserle said he drew his firearm by mistake, that he intended to draw his Taser. The jury has to determine whether the shooting was a criminal act, and they may get the case this afternoon.

It's been a heartbreaking and tragic puzzle. Victim face down on the platform, albeit resisting; officer calmly draws and discharges weapon, then looks stunned and horrified afterward. So what the heck happened?

For me, Mehserle's testimony cleared away some of the confusion. He testified he didn't have that much training in using or drawing the Taser, and that whether an officer had a strong side or weak side Taser holster was dependent on whatever holster they receive from the officer going off-duty. According to Mehserle, the night of the shooting he received a holster that required him to employ a different draw technique. If his testimony concerning training is true (and there is no indication that the DA rebutted it), it strongly suggests that BART's training and policy were insufficient to ensure that an officer's Taser use becomes a function of muscle memory; as such, officers are therefore likely to confuse weapons under stress. A reasonable person with the same poor training under the same stress might well have made the same tragic mistake. As horrible as the event was, I do not think Johannes Mehserle committed a crime.

Of course, the jury is a black box, and we can only wait and see.

Life, Liberty, and lolcats

Finland has declared that every citizen has a right to a 1 Mbps broadband connection. Now, I love Googling myself and watching cat videos on YouTube as much as the next person, but to call a fat pipe a "right" has the tendency to trivialize prior declarations of rights such as the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.

In the United States, things have a tendency to become de facto rights by legislative or bureaucratic fiat. Rights in the sense that the government starts paying for it, and people expect the government to continue to pay for it. Unfortunately, broadband is about to become a de facto right in the United States, and it's going to cost you a lot of money.

Case in point, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and its plan to extend the wonders of broadband to every American household. Congress told the FCC to explore the so-called digital divide and recommend means of addressing it, and the FCC is proceeding as if money is no object. The FCC wants to deploy broadband infrastructure to households that currently lack it, and to convince people who don't use broadband (or the internet for that matter) to join the 21st century and start their own Facebook pages. FCC estimates that the effort will cost $25 billion, with an astonishing $14 billion needed just to extend broadband to the last 250,000 hard-to-serve unserved households. That's $56,000 per unserved household. With apologies to Sam Kinison, wouldn't it be cheaper to move these hard-to-serve people where the broadband is?

Welfare recipients' rights are violated again!

California welfare recipients just can't catch a break.

First, they were prevented from using their cash cards to withdraw money at casinos.

Now they can't even use their cash cards at strip clubs.

What indignity is next? Will they be forbidden from using their food stamps to buy brownies at pot clubs too??

California civil servants get paid minimum wage

The Governor is allowed to pay California state workers the federal minimum wage in the absence of a budget. The new fiscal year began today, July 1, and as there is no budget the Governor issued an order to the Controller that civil servants' pay shall be reduced to $7.25 an hour for the month of July and for every month until there is a budget. And that's if they are lucky; some classes of civil servants, such as attorneys, won't get paid anything, although all employees will (eventually) be given back pay once a budget is signed.

This isn't the first time Governor Schwarzenegger has played the minimum wage card. He has ordered minimum wage in previous budgetless summers, but the Controller, John Chiang, has argued that federal law and an aged payroll system make it impossible for him to comply.

So far, John Chiang has lost on the legal issues, and his only remaining argument is that the jury-rigged computer system, held together with grape skins and unicorns' breath, is not up to the task. The "it isn't you, it's me" argument might work up to a point, except for one thing: Sacramento is only about 90 miles from Silicon Valley, and a handful of software engineers could solve John Chiang's intractable resource issue within a week.

The six unions that have agreed to givebacks are exempted from the minimum wage directive, and will be paid their regular (if reduced) salaries. But SEIU, California's largest public sector union, has yet to agree to a deal.

And nobody knows who will blink first.

Myth of Green Jobs: Solar Panel Boondoggle

The environmentalists have been caught picking your pocket, and now they are crying foul.

The Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) Program, which originated in Berzerkley California and has since metastasized to 22 states, allows homeowners to install rooftop solar panels with no money down and pay off the cost via their property tax bills over a period of many years. The lien runs with the property and becomes the responsibility of the next owner. Solar PV ain't cheap (and it certainly is not cost effective), so these liens are likely to be tens of thousands of dollars each.

As an interesting point of law, property taxes are paid first in the event of a foreclosure. This means that if a house with PACE-financed solar panels and a mortgage from Fannie or Freddie goes into foreclosure, the solar panels will be paid off first and the taxpayers who guaranteed that mortgage could be left holding the bag. Fannie and Freddie have noticed this and have begun requiring that solar PV liens be paid off before a house is purchased or refinanced.

The tree hugger-industrial complex is howling. They had some early success convincing people to install solar PV on their roofs with the promise that they'll be able to shift the financial responsibility to someone else, either the next property owner of the municipality that sells bonds to pay the upfront cost. But the financing gravy train has stalled, and many of the so-called "Green Jobs" created in this solar bubble have vanished as the implicit taxpayer subsidies have been withdrawn. This is not surprising, as the Green Economy is entirely dependent on government handouts. In order to sustain the fiction that the Green Economy is self-sustaining, the tree hugger-industrial complex is asking Fannie and Freddie to reconsider their desire to protect the taxpayers and take a subordinate position to the solar PV liens on a mortgage. With Obama as President I have no confidence that Fannie and Freddie will stand their ground.

This is only the first of two shoes to drop. The next nasty surprise will come when homebuyers who bought a house with PACE-financed solar PV (before Fannie and Freddie cottoned onto the boondoggle) open their first property tax bills to find out that the sellers double-dipped by demanding a higher sale price for the home based on the presence of solar panels, but failed to clearly disclose that the solar panels were not paid for yet. The buyers will have paid a premium for bragging rights, and they'll still have to pay for the panels.

Anyone buying a home with solar panels would do well to demand information on the panels' financing, and to demand that any liens be paid off prior to close, just like they would with any other lien. And anyone who owns a home would do well to contact City Hall and find out if their tax dollars are being used to finance bonds for the purpose of handing out solar panels.

In California, energy policy is made by environmental ideologues who have learned that they are not accountable to anyone. PACE is expensive, but it is a drop in the bucket; if California energy policy was dragged into the sunlight, California ratepayers would be horrified to see what games the unelected bureaucrats in Sacramento and San Francisco have been playing with their money.