8 September 2011 –

I think the best remarks in last night’s Republican discussions were Mr. Herman Cain and Speaker Gingrich. Mr. Cain’s plan of taxes, the three nines, I believe, sounds great. Speaker Gingrich was eloquent in his explanations of everything from the Reagan years to his time as Speaker. Concise and focused, the both of them.

The winners were both Governors Romney and Perry. Of course, the moderators spent most of their time on the two of them. The both of them looked presidential enough. They both sound authoritative and intelligent. They made points and counterpoints without being snide. The commandment must be repeated: Thou shalt not criticize fellow Republicans.

The biggest loser was, of course, President Obama. He was the unseen, unwanted founder of the feast by having his job’s speech to Congress thrown to the next night. Tonight, with another slap, some television stations that serve interested audiences in Wisconsin and Louisiana are playing the NFL pregame show to the Packers and Saints game instead of the President’s speech. Again, the President showed he doesn’t know how to develop and use power appropriately. He reminds me of the king of a planet that the Little Prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry visited in his travels. The king would command the sun to go up at a certain time and command it to go down at a certain time. The sun obeyed scrupulously. The Little Prince was perplexed and told the king that what he was doing made no sense. After all, the king was simply telling the sun to go up and down when the sun was going to do it anyway. The pragmatic and wise king responded that, of course, that is what he was doing. After all, if he were to ask of his subjects something they could not do, then he would no longer be king. President Obama has demanded something neither Speaker Boehner nor NFL fans were going to comply with. When will he see that he ain’t no king?

Or was this an even bigger slap in the head? In the movie, Silverado, the local sheriff, played by John Cleese, was riding out of town to chase the protagonists. He and his deputy reached a point on the trail where they came under the sights of a sharpshooter protagonist, played by Danny Glover. The sharpshooter shot a branch off a close-by tree with a round from a Sharp’s .50 caliber. The deputy protested that the shooter cannot hit anything. The sheriff responded that the shooter indeed hit everything he was shooting at. The deputy then protested saying that the sheriff’s jurisdiction didn’t end until a bit down the road. Then, a round went through the sheriff’s hat, knocking it from his head. The sheriff turned his horse around and said “Today, my jurisdiction ends here.” A wise adjustment of power politics to keep in the game for another day. I wonder if the President—and his advisors—learned a lesson from this week’s debacle?. I doubt it. As much as his far left supporters say that he is abandoning his base, the President has yet to do anything that decisively and thoughtfully follows any obvious strategy. His effective jurisdiction is rapidly shrinking. Maybe he should go on vacation again. Football fans won’t miss him.

7 September 2011 –

Yesterday’s murders and shootings in the IHOP in Carson City, Nevada, prove again that those who are most trusted with weapons in society probably won’t be carrying one when they meet for a peaceful meal at a local eatery. Ninety-nine percent of soldiers in the United States don’t carry weapons while in uniform downtown. Ninety-nine percent of civilians, even in a state where concealed weapons laws allow responsible citizens to carry firearms, won’t be carrying weapons in the local IHOP. Islamic terrorists, despondent ex-boyfriends, violent robbers, gang members, nut jobs who just escaped from the mother ship, all have the upper hand in society. If I were a terrorist, I wouldn’t feel compelled to be a suicide bomber or shooter; it is too easy to get away to do it again another day. But, this case may be different. Mr. Eduardo Sencion was probably a nut job who hated his ex-wife, maybe couldn’t get into the National Guard, and couldn’t get any other job either. In my opinion, Mr. Sencion’s biggest fault was that he didn’t sequence his mayhem correctly. He shot himself last instead of first. My prayers are for the families of those killed and maimed. It seems as many soldiers are being shot in the United States as are being shot in Iraq right now. And, nobody is getting combat pay in Carson City, Nevada.

One more thing about carrying a weapon in society—something the Second Amendment gives Americans the expressed right to do. You can take the appropriate safety classes. You can become comfortable in the use of a firearm. You can train to become accurate in times of stress so as to put every round where you want it when the crazies come through the restaurant. You can take the responsibility to protect yourself and others from death and mayhem. But, in the end, when you pull a weapon and shoot somebody, be prepared for your life to change, and not for the better. The first thing: committing a violent act against another human being changes you inside, no matter the high and righteous motivation for the act. I don’t have the fancy psychological terms to describe it. I just know that you will never be the same person afterward. The second thing: you probably won’t be a hero to many people. In fact, you may have to suffer legal attacks from the family of the piece of garbage that you shot and from wrap-around organizations whose agenda may include everything from eviscerating the Second Amendment to promoting a particular group’s elastic rights over your individual rights. Protecting yourself or the elderly couple in the booth next to you—strangers to you even as you protect them—may cost you untold grief and money. I am not saying it isn’t worth it. I am saying that you will have to pay a price for your heroism. Those who instinctively turn to the sound of the guns will pay the price anyway. The rest of you need to be warned.

Tonight is the next performance of the Republicans’ roadshow. If the night holds to a normal course, pushing President Obama’s jobs speech before Congress to an NFL opener’s pregame show on Thursday may be the only memorable aspect of the effort. Ah, what a memory that is! The first head-to-head confrontation between Governors Romney and Perry also may prove to be interesting and revelatory. One of these men most probably will carry the Republican banner in 2012; their comments back and forth may prove durable beyond the end of the night. Or not. Whoever is moderating the evening will have a lot of control over who has the time to look good and who doesn’t. I tolerate the process. It is a bad way to pick a candidate; but every other way is probably worse. Let the pseudo gladiator games begin. Tomorrow, we shall see if their ratings beat reruns of Happy Days or Law and Order.

I think that President Obama is on a fool’s errand tomorrow night. He already erased any patina of authority or “gravitas” by his ill-advised, no-win confrontation with Speaker Boehner and then by his subsequent acceptance of being the pre-game show to the Packers-Saints season opener. If his speech itself follows form, there will be general mention of projects, payroll tax credits, and direct, emergency funding of loyal constituents such as laid-off teachers. Interspersed will be attacks on the stingy rich, the oil companies, and private jet users. But, it will not ring deeply in the ears of most Americans. Simply, it will not present any specific program for recovery. It will not convince an underemployed nation—certainly not anybody in the GOP—that the President knows how to put this economy back on track. It seems the President took my advice above and shot himself first, yet he still wants to continue.

6 September 2011 –

The summer is over. Already in Houston, the tune of the weather is following an eternal metronome. The nights’ temperatures are in the sixties, instead of the high seventies of just last week. The days are in the eighties to nineties, not the hundreds of just last week. Now, if we could just be blessed with a tropical storm to fill up our aquifer and our lakes. This drought is telling us that we are not as powerful as we would like to think. Nothing in nature convinces me that man is powerful enough to alter anything that nature decides to do according to its metronome. Our continued obsession with global warming based on man’s increased CO2 output is incredibly hubristic on one hand and faulty thinking on the other. More on that later. Today’s focus is on a much more mundane: the death throes of an American institution and the birth of its successor.

The US Post Office is a fundamental institution in the lives of the older generations of Americans. For the first 75% of my life, it was the only way most Americans move ideas and data—what we used to refer to as important stuff—around. Every town or suburb had its full service Post Office. The employees were secure in their jobs. After all, no one could see how there would not always be the need for the Post Office to bear the load of the U.S.’s durable communications. I can still see an elm-lined,“Leave It To Beaver” street with children playing in the front yards and the kindly postman waving to the housewives in summer dresses who are hanging up their wash in the line.

Well, the information technology revolution has done its share to change that scene forever. The USPS has taken the change on the chin. The Postal Service has responded with cost-cutting infrastructure changes to stay afloat fiscally as demand for its services dwindles. To its credit, the USPS has tried to reduce its services in many communities and to contract out services through retail stores that also provide private delivery services. And, I should be quick to stress, the USPS still reliably delivers the mail, no matter what. But, these cost-cutting moves meet employee and union resistance; they reduce jobs. Another example of union resistance to changing business conditions. This struggle will continue, but is not the nexus of the immediate crisis.

It is possible to build and implement an efficient business model, postal workers union resistance notwithstanding. The real problem is how to pay for the generous pension and health benefits for the postal retirees under the laws passed by Congress in 2006. Those laws require the Postal Service to “pre-fund” future retiree health care costs on a year by year basis out of receipts for that year. Congress did this because many of the postal workers are under the federal retirement program. I think pre-funding means that generous health benefits for the postal workers who retire each year have to be fully funded in the out years with funds in the bank today. Whatever fiscal prudence Congress was exhibiting when it passed this requirement, the USPS is the only part of the federal government—or its independent services and agencies—that is required to do so.

With falling revenues each year, partly because of a nearly obsolete requirement for first class mail, the Postal Service doesn’t have the funds this year and is begging for relief from these laws. Postmaster James A. Farley is asking Congress to allow the USPS to take over its pensions and healthcare benefits directly for its retired and active workers (480,000 retirees and 600,000 active employees). Such a restructuring would help the situation, but only in the short-term. Unless the USPS exhibits draconian discipline to cut the work force drastically and fit into a legitimate business model—union screams notwithstanding—, the numbers game will eventually overtake the USPS. The USPS retiree programs will become like the rest of the federal government benefit and entitlement programs: too many recipients; too few contributors; too few funds without borrowing from places like China. Even a substantial rise in postal costs may not cover the shortfall in the out years. Painfully, how much would the Post Office have to raise first class mail fees to keep the service afloat, especially since the Post Office may never provide the conveniences of other, profitable private delivery companies for all other services?

This bureaucratic struggle portends future pension and health funding crises in the state and federal governments, to say nothing of Social Security and Medicare entitlements: too many people collecting too much for too long with too few paying in. Ironically, private delivery companies pensions and medical benefits will never match the generosity of those of the federal government or the USPS. These companies, after all, have had to follow sound business practices to survive.

If you have any ideas how to solve this problem, I am sure your representative or senator will be happy to read them. Text, Twitter, e-mail, but don’t waste the time or money to send a letter.

3 September 2011 –

Let me get this straight. When Democrats controlled Congress in the last years of the Bush administration, Committee Chairmen like Barney Frank (D) MA, put pressure on banks to make it easier for people to get mortgage loans to buy houses. Credit ratings were ignored, fact checking procedures were relaxed to absurdity, and 0% down, adjustable rate mortgages (ARMS), interest only payments for the first two years, all sorts of gimmicks were implemented. Anybody who wanted to could get a mortgage and get into a home. In 2006 and 2007, I remember both Nancy Pelosi (D), CA, and Barney Frank extolling the probability and the virtues of every American who wants to being able to buy a home. The American dream brought to you by the Democratic Party in Congress.

Successful bankers don’t like to do fiscally stupid things. Either figures and actuarial tables make fiscal sense or they don’t. Offering home ownership to just about anybody with a hint of a job or an income is, by any green-eye shaded accountant’s assessment, a fiscally stupid thing. But wait, the more loans bankers offer, the more money they potentially can make. Bankers indeed like to make money. Sure, but it is a fool’s bet to not fight the implementation of fiscally irresponsible practices that will assuredly lead to huge numbers of defaults on loans and little faith in the remaining paper? Agreed…yet, can bankers follow the dicta born of Congress’s political pandering and still protect themselves, yeah, even make money? Those in the business, from Jimmie Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice are not stupid people.

A simple solution, a cleverly evil solution was already in front of the bankers. Bundle the suspect mortgages into securities products and sell them back to the same government that impelled the banks into this circus to begin with. Then, the banks will be out of the bad mortgage business and will have made a bunch of money to boot. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, people who are in bed, literally, with the lawmakers who thought up this foolish project, will have to pay for their boss’s foolishness.

Well, we all know what happened. The housing market collapsed in late 2008. People, who by the fiscally prudent standards of yore should have never tried to buy a house, didn’t make their mortgage payments. What a surprise! Foreclosures skyrocketed. The paper products, long since out of the banks’ coffers and into the government’s files became worthless securities. Hungry chickens came home to roost.

Not so fast. When it comes to money, nothing is ever over. The government is suing 17 banks to recover the money Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gave to them for these worthless mortgage backed securities.

According to the Associated Press, in the lawsuits filed in New York and federal courts, the government piously (my word, not the AP’s) laments that the securities contained registration and prospectus statements “contained materially false or misleading statements and omissions.” The agencies also said that the banks and lenders falsely stated that the mortgages represented in the securities did not comply with underwriting guidelines and standards and “significantly overstated the ability of the borrower to repay their mortgage loans.” In the words of any eighth grader: “like, duh!” Since then, both Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank have been reelected.

The lawsuit will proceed, I am sure. Let me see…who the bad guys are in this farce? I list them in descending order of culpability. 1) Politically driven politicians who implement just about any fiscally insane policy to get votes and to represent themselves as the guardians of the average American. When things collapse, then blame others for the failure of their policies. 2) Bankers who lament the fiscally irresponsible guidelines pressured upon them, but, nonetheless, who figure out how survive and prosper under the new rules by kicking the toxic can down the road to the next address. 3) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who bumble along as government bureaucracies and who only talk responsibly when lawsuits are filed. 4) The people who knew that they really couldn’t afford to buy a house. But, succumbing to the government’s and the banks’ marvelously displayed advertisement enticements, paid nothing down on an ARM with interest-only payment for the first six months and got into an over-valued house. After six months, they defaulted when they found they couldn’t make their payments. Off with their heads! All of them!

As an aside. We bought our first home after 36 years of marriage in Nov 2010. We put 20% down and had an income that was as secure as just about any on earth. But, because of the backlash of the housing market collapse, the time and effort it took for us to be approved for a loan was almost more painful than it was worth to be in a house of our own. As it so often is the case, we paid for others’ follies. Those with houses worth less than the mortgages, but who faithfully pay their monthly bills and hope for the market to recover, will continue to pay for quite some time.

2 September 2011 –

You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.

The empathetic me feels bad for President Obama. His extended family shows itself to be less than perfect. The political me sees pain for the President no matter how the deportation case for his uncle, Onyango Obama, plays out. I almost chuckle that the President’s family is the most public example of the U.S.’s twisted-to-be useless immigration policies. After all, the President’s Justice Department vigorously defends policies that allow his illegal alien uncle to defy a federal immigration court judge’s order to leave the country, commit another crime by driving under the influence, and actually think that he should have the right to stay in the country because of “compelling humanitarian factors.”

All that said, the political situation derived therefrom is not as bad for the President as either his opponents or his supporters may think. First and foremost, the President can survive the problem by staying completely out of the melee. It would be political suicide to intervene in any way. If he were to comment in any way, or if his Justice Department were to get involved even tangentially, the right could justifiably mutter impeachment. The center would be sorely tempted to abandon hope for a trustworthy President and may lend legitimacy to impeachment grumblings. The far left probably would be furious that the President would do something that even the left’s most inventive range-gate stealing could not obfuscate. There will be political damage from Mr. Onyango Obama’s adventures; but, by not doing anything, the President will move beyond the issue in the short memory cycle of today’s press and public.

If the case goes against Mr. Onyango Obama and he is deported, it might be the best thing for the President’s political standing. The left will push the position that the right got its pound of flesh in this case and that the President now knows more than anyone how our archaic and hurtful immigration laws need to be reformed. For his supporters, this injects a lesser evil into the President’s current woes. People will feel sorry for the President because he personally suffers from a lack of immigration reform. This may replace somewhat their growing feeling sorry for the President because of his political and leadership inadequacies. Such a situation will reinforce the view of immigration reform as a humanitarian, moral issue rather than how the right sees it, a moral, rule of law issue. If the uncle is deported, the issue will die soon afterward. The economy will again crowd immigration reform from the front page. Proponents of strict rule of law policies in immigration may actually have to work harder to call the ongoing situation a strategic crisis. After all, nothing hurts medical fundraising more than the rumor that a cure has been found.

If the uncle is allowed to stay in the United States, the left will have no martyr for the cause, either in the President or in his uncle. They will have won little. The right will have yet another complaint that the President acts imperially when it suits him. The festering yaw of a wound in the body politic called immigration policy will have another dirty stick pushed into it. It would be better if Mr. Obama finds himself in Kenya in short order and President Obama concentrates on the state of the economy. All my unsolicited advice notwithstanding, the President has shown an incredible knack for picking the wrong thing to do at the wrong time for the wrong reason. We shall see what happens here.