Pension reform is in the game

Pension reform is in the game in the WA Legislature. WPC has some ideas; see the bullet points below.

Washington Policy Center

The Senate Rules Committee yesterday moved SB 5851 (Creating a defined contribution retirement plan option for public employees) to the Senate floor for a possible vote before cutoff. The bill would create a new optional defined contribution pension plan for current state workers and for new hires. The proposal would save state and local government (taxpayers) an estimated $436 million over the next 25-years according to the State Actuary:

We expect a 25-year total employer savings of $436 million as a result of this bill. We expect a long-term savings because employers would contribute less to the PESP than they would, under current law, to a DB [Defined Benefit] plan for the affected members. Employers, and members remaining in the DB plans, are expected to contribute higher contribution rates than we assume under current law.

The estimated savings for just the 2017-19 biennium is $38 million.

According to the intent section of SB 5851 (in-part):

The legislature recognizes the need for public employees, public safety employees, teachers, and school employees, to have a secure and viable retirement benefit, not only for their own financial protection, but also so that public funds are spent prudently for their intended purpose. The legislature also recognizes the need for public employers and taxpayers to have consistent and predictable pension funding obligations in support of employee retirement benefits.

Therefore, it is the intent of the legislature to provide a defined contribution retirement plan option for new public employees, teachers, and school employees that uses best practices of defined contribution plans to provide opportunity and flexibility to accrue a viable retirement benefit, while providing stable funding requirements for public employers and taxpayers.

To accomplish this goal the bill would provide state employees who are currently in the state’s open defined benefit pension plan (Plan 2) and the hybrid defined benefit/defined contribution plan (Plan 3), as well as new hires, the option of enrolling in the new defined contribution plan. The state’s most costly defined benefit plan (the one with the billions in unfunded liabilities) was closed to new enrollees in 1977.

Although the Legislature has little say over state employee collective bargaining agreements negotiated in secret with the Governor that determine compensation levels (other than a simple “yes” or “no” vote), pension policy is explicitly exempted from union negotiations and is set directly by lawmakers.

While the Legislature maintains this authority, there are legal restrictions which limit the type of changes that can be made. A 1956 State Supreme Court ruling (the Bakenhus case) found that a pension promise is a contractual right. This makes changes for existing employee plans at risk of a lawsuit. By making the new defined contribution pension plan optional for current state employees, SB 5851 avoids implicating this Court decision.

Obviously no contractual right exists for future state employees, so offering only the new defined contribution plan to new hires as a retirement benefit is well within the authority of the Legislature.

For future pension benefits, Washington should transition to a defined contribution plan, as proposed by SB 5851. These plans are now common in the private sector because they provide a retirement benefit for employees while helping companies accurately project future pension costs. Employees in such plans are not forced to rely on political conditions that might change in the future.

Effective state pension reform should be based on the following principles:

• Do not skip any pension payments
  
  
• Close the current defined benefit plan to new hires
  
  
• Direct all savings toward paying down unfunded pension liabilities
  
  
• Enroll new hires into a defined contribution plan
  
  
• Constitutionally require the actuarially recommend pension payment and require a supermajority vote to enact new benefits

It is important to maintain diligence on the state’s existing pension obligations while pursuing additional reforms. Part of what has contributed to the state’s unfunded pension liability is legislators and the governor not making the required contributions over the past decade so that lawmakers could spend that money on other programs. Washington’s multibillion-dollar pension problem was not created overnight, so it will take time to eliminate these unfunded liabilities. Starting these reforms will require the conviction to do what is in the best interest of all citizens and state workers, not just narrow special interests.

Moving to a defined contribution pension option as proposed by SB 5851 would be a step in right direction. While it should remain optional for current employees, the new defined contribution plan should be the only pension option offered to new hires, so the state’s remaining defined benefit plans are closed, and the burden of their financial liability on taxpayers gradually reduced. Any savings realized by adopting SB 5851 should be used to pay down the state’s multi-billion dollar unfunded pension liability, so there isn’t the temptation for lawmakers to increase state spending elsewhere in the budget.

Sequester this! Stop overpaying slumlords so we can avoid evicting low-income families

The One, President Obama is cutting where it hurts the public most, because he doesn't want to cut any spending - except the military. Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma has a few helpful suggestions:

Senator Coburn

Dr. Coburn sent the following letter to HUD Director Shaun Donovan urging the agency to rein in cases of fraud and neglect across the country before cutting vital service for those in need.

There are currently 4,000 PHA’s across the country receiving over $24 billion in federal aid. Over 700 of these PHA’s were scored just last year by HUD as having substandard management or finances, and the Inspector General identified $8.7 billion in HUD funds that could have been better spent to meet the agency’s goals. However, HUD only redirected $1.5 million.

Follow the link and read the letter. President Obama's HUD has made a mess of public housing and isn't using the money it already has to fix things.

Washington public pensions at risk

Washington public pensions are at risk. There are several; a few appear to be safe, but others not at all. Washington is above average among the states, but that's like getting a D grade when half the class flunks. The Seattle Times dug in and did their own analysis. They found a shortfall of $31.1 billion, that's $31,100 million.

Seattle Times

As public pension plans come under fire around the country for being overgenerous, underfunded, loosely managed budget-busters, Washington state’s massive system looks pretty good by comparison.

But that may not be good enough.

An analysis by The Seattle Times suggests that the system’s promised benefits are much bigger, and its real assets smaller, than official numbers indicate.

The analysis, using market-based data and methods, pegs the total gap between the present-day value of future benefits and assets on hand at more than $31 billion.

By that measure — one advocated by many outside experts and economists — the system’s nine major defined-benefit plans together have only about 64 cents in assets for every dollar of liabilities, rather than being 100 percent funded as the official figures indicate.

State officials defend the current way of valuing the pension system’s assets and obligations, saying it’s the industry standard.

But the pension industry, prodded by regulators and bond-rating agencies, is slowly moving toward a market-based approach — treating pension promises much like state debt, and recognizing changes in the market value of pension assets immediately rather than smoothing them out over several years.

Advocates of that approach say it paints a truer picture of the pension plans’ financial condition…

… The state actuary’s office, which does the heavy number-crunching for the pension system, projects that over the next century it will have to pay out some $440 billion across all its defined-benefit plans. (Those plans pay a set amount per month based on the worker’s salary and length of service, which makes it possible to project their future obligations fairly accurately.)

Matt Smith, the state actuary for the past decade, explains that this stream of future payments has to be converted, or “discounted,” back into present-day dollars before it can be sized up against the plan’s assets. The trick is picking the most appropriate discount rate; the bigger the rate, the smaller all those future obligations look in today’s dollars.

If the plan’s discounted liabilities are bigger than its assets, the plan is underfunded.

According to Smith’s current analysis, all but two of Washington’s nine major defined-benefit plans are fully funded, with combined liabilities worth $60.2 billion and assets worth $60.7 billion.The exceptions are two plans covering state workers and teachers that were closed 35 years ago.

Indeed, a recent report from the Pew Center on the States, using 2010 data, found Washington’s pension system was the fourth-healthiest in the nation.

But a growing number of economists, academics and outside pension experts say the standard approach is fundamentally flawed. Most plans, they say, use discount rates that are too high, making the present-day value of their pension promises look smaller than they really are.

“I’ve seen people get so red-faced about this issue,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Public pensions such as Washington’s operate under special accounting rules, one of which allows them to assume a long-term rate of return on their investments. Most plans have picked a rate between 7 and 8 percent; all but one of Washington’s plans assume 7.9 percent.

That assumed return is significant, because another special rule lets public plans use it as their discount rate — something corporate pension plans were forced to abandon nearly two decades ago.

Critics such as Munnell and Biggs say this rule ignores the fact that pension benefits are effectively almost as guaranteed as state bonds. That, they say, means they should be valued similarly to bonds.

And that (market) picture is that interest rates are near zero. The investment portfolios include other things, of course. But the state assumes 7.9% gain per year, boldly decreasing to 7.7%. Where can I get that? On the other hand, some states and agencies are already facing reality:

• The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the nation’s biggest public-pension fund, now uses the market values of its assets to determine its funded status, saying that market value “represents the true measure of the plan’s ability to pay benefits at a given point in time.”

• Last year Indiana’s public pension fund became the nation’s first to drop its assumed rate of return — and hence its discount rate — below 7 percent, citing low bond yields and volatile stock markets.

• Moody’s, one of the three big bond-rating agencies, is considering changing the way it analyzes state pension plans. Its proposed new method, which would use market values of assets and a discount rate based on an index of high-grade corporate bonds, would nearly triple the total unfunded liability of the nation’s state and local pensions, from $766 billion to $2.2 trillion.

• Even the Government Accounting Standards Board, which sets rules for public pension plans and has long defended the actuarial approach, is changing its tune. Under new rules the board issued last year, underfunded plans will have to start discounting their “excess” liabilities using municipal-bond rates.

$31.1 billion short. We are headed for, no, already in trouble. We have to put more into the current plans and consider options for the future.

Sea Times Editorial with graphic.

Ladies, avoid Phoenix

Ladies, women, girls…. Parents, you will want to keep your daughters out of Phoenix, Arizona.

Mayor Greg Stanton and the city council voted to allow any man who thinks he is a woman to use ladies bathrooms. Any man!! What could possible go wrong?

Of course they called it the anti-bias bill and insist they are just trying to join the bandwagon.

Spring Training? I would go to Florida instead of going to Peoria/Phoenix to see my own Seattle Mariners. (Not that I have ever gone.)

American Thinker Blog

Do what greenies want and they fight you

Build renewable energy sources - that is, hydroelectric, biomass, solar or wind power. We hear it over and over. But do what they tell you to and they fight you tooth and nail.

If you want to build wind farms you build them where the wind blows. But it makes no sense until you get the electric power to where people need it. So you have build transmission lines. Because of your evil desire the Audubon Society and Oregon Desert Society file suit to stop you. And they really want to stop your renewable power project.

What did you do wrong? You believed the greenies when their lips were moving. So it appears.

Seattle P-I

Photo: Source forgotten. In Indiana, as I recall. Click to enlarge.

Mountaineers Meany Lodge is unique

I haven't been a member of the Mountaineers since the mid 1960s. But when I was I went to the most unique ski area in Washington. I don't know that there is a second place.

Meany Lodge was built by the Northen Pacific railroad tracks and was served by passenger trains. There is road access in the summer, but not the winter. But the pax service was stopped in 1960. So they improvised. A road was (now anyway) less than 3 miles away. They used - and still do - a snow cat trailing two ropes to haul the skiers. You put your pack in the snow cat. Then you get behind and grab the rope. And hope you won't be the first to fall off.

I went there once either in high school or college. Quite an experience. Also because the lift is a gasoline-powered rope tow. If you have never "ridden" a rope tow you have missed another experience.

Meany Lodge is still there. The change that puts it in the news is that the rope lift has to be converted to electric power. And - I didn't know it/see it - the gas power is a very old Chevy truck, chassis and all.

Tacoma News Tribune - Also describes the fun of riding a rope tow.

Before dictator Hugo Chavez died

We are very glad to see Hugo Chavez the dictator of Venezuela gone. He was originally elected, but he changed the constitution to greatly increase both his powers and his term in office.  [correction]

Before dictator Hugo Chavez died his apparent successor Nicolas Maduro was talking about him in the past tense hours before they announced his death. Fausta's blog Follow down to 1:17 PM.

She says Maduro spouts all the standard propaganda, but without Chavez's charm.

Hat tip to Jim Miller.

Shorebirds at Port Susan

The Puget Sound area is a wonderland for shorebirds during winter and the spring and autumn migration. Tens of thousands spend the winter or stop by for days or weeks along their route. Dunlins, snow geese, brants, surf scoters, golden eyes… and more.

Lynda Mapes in Seattle Times features Port Susan, where the Stillaguamish River hits salt water.

So important is Port Susan Bay as habitat for these shorebirds, that the Greater Stillaguamish Delta, of which it is a part, and the Greater Skagit Delta next door to the north, have just been named a site of regional importance in the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network. 

The only one in Puget Sound, the designation recognizes that the Greater Stilly and Skagit Delta — which the birds use as one connected habitat — is an important stopover and wintering ground for more than 20,000 shorebirds a year. 

Any birder will tell you that’s a conservative estimate. The area routinely hosts tens of thousands of shorebirds here, arriving in living ribbons of flight.
On a recent morning the Dunlins’ flight, so beautiful to us, was all business for them. Eat or be eaten: That was the agenda. “That’s over-ocean flight; they will do that for hours,” Milner said, watching the Dunlins sweep back and forth over Port Susan Bay. 

“It’s cheaper for them to spend the calories flying,” Milner said, “than to be on the ground where they will get nailed.” 

The Nature Conservancy of Washington has just completed a restoration project to make its more than 4,000-acre Port Susan Bay Preserve even better. The $4 million project restored 150 acres of tidelands by taking out a 1.4-mile dike and replacing it with a smaller one, set farther back toward the land.

And the Skagit River

Today the Stilly and Skagit deltas together comprise more than 90,000 acres of tidally influenced marine and coastal wetlands that shorebirds depend on. 

North of Port Susan Bay, at Big Ditch, as the preserve owned by the Department of Fish and Wildlife on the Skagit Delta is known, the importance of these lands for other wildlife, too, was soon obvious.

We have become fans of the Skagit River delta the past few years. Economic Freedom We see clouds of snow geese on every winter trip.

Also Seattle Times Field Notes Blog.

The photos: Seattle Times. Second one by Mike McQuade. Click to enlarge.

Top Green Weenie loses NY Times

James Hansen's underwear showing has been noticed by the NY Times!

Hansen traveled the world selling Albert Gore, Jr's "global warming is your fault" hysteria. At the same time he was claiming that President Bush was shutting him up. MRC

Now his friends are saying he is tilting at wind mills in fighting the Keystone XL pipeline. And using or misusing his government position to do so.

Joe Nocera at NY Times

Yet what people hear from Hansen today is not so much his science but his broad, unscientific views on, say, the evils of oil companies. In 2008, he wrote a paper, the thesis of which was that runaway climate change would occur when carbon in the atmosphere reached 350 parts per million — a point it had already exceeded — unless it were quickly reduced. There are many climate change experts who disagree with this judgment — who believe that the 350 number is arbitrary and even meaningless. Yet an entire movement, 350.org, has been built around Hansen’s line in the sand.

Meanwhile, he has a department to run. For a midlevel scientist at the Goddard Institute, what signal is Hansen sending when he takes the day off to get arrested at the White House? Do his colleagues feel unfettered in their own work? There is, in fact, enormous resentment toward Hansen inside NASA, where many officials feel that their solid, analytical work on climate science is being lost in what many of them describe as “the Hansen sideshow.” His activism is not really doing any favors for the science his own subordinates are producing.

Leader of Black Chamber of Commerce rejects Obama

Harry C. Alford, Leader of Black Chamber of Commerce, says Obama “made a fool out of me.” He complains that Obama is campaigning instead of doing his job.

PJ Media Tattler

… “He believes in government controlling the lives of the people,” Alford said. “He wants government in anything and everything. Health insurance. He wants it in your job, the way you run your lifestyle, culture. He wants to take away your guns, which is a constitutionally-protected right.”

Alford also called out Barack Obama’s inattention to the national budget. The president has yet to submit a budget on time, and has not had a budget passed in more than 1,400 days.

“He doesn’t care about a budget. I’ve never known a president who doesn’t care about a budget. How do you run the richest economy in the world without a budget?” Alford asked. “You can’t even run a shoe-shine stand without a budget.”

Watch the interview at the link.

Highest US revenue ever in 2013

CBO projects revenue to be $2.7 trillion for FY 2013. This would beat the pre-recession highest-ever $2.6 T of 2007.

If we have a budget problem it is more a spending problem than a revenue problem.

CNS News

I am not a dictator

"I am not a dictator," says President Obama. Are you assured?

CNS News

But where is the proposal Obama is offering? The only thing I see is his painting the worst scenarios of effects of the sequestration and saying the Republicans won't compromise with him. Show us your proposal, Mr. President. He also seems to be unaware that Harry Reid's Democrats control the Senate.

Plastic-bag ban causes more shoplifting?

When the Seattle City council banned plastic grocery bags and required stores to charge for paper bags the world became a better place. What could possibly go wrong?

When you tell shoppers to bring their own bags they walk around the store carrying a place to hide things. Grocery Outlet in Lake City has suffered greatly increased shoplifting. Starting with the plastic-bag ban. ADDED: Did the ban cause the increase? We don't know yet. This store says the timing fits and has a believable scenario.

Seattle PI

Repealing oil co subsidies that don't exist

Special subsidies for oil and gas companies? Where?

Democrats in Congress drafted a bill to end the special subsidies. But... The bill - title below - only removes oil and gas companies from tax treatment that every company gets. They could not find any loop holes limited to oil and gas companies.
See the actual wording at Energy Tomorrow

Bill title is "BUDGET PROCESS AMENDMENTS TO REPLACE FISCAL YEAR 2013 SEQUESTRATION."

Change public-employee pensions

The Washington Legislature has made promises it cannot keep. Public employees get generous pensions but the Legislature doesn't fully fund them. State investments assume 8% growth of the funds set aside. Sign me up. I want the magic investment too.

A Seattle Times editorial proposes switching from defines-benefit to defined-contribution. I agree.

And do it now to existing employees. My employer did that to me halfway through my work career.

Obama's Jack Lew and institutional corruption

Corruption of an Obamaite. Exposed by the Seattle Times? It is linked to by Jon Talton at Seattle Times!?

Naked Capitalism

Let’s look at the presumed incoming Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew. He’s a die hard neoliberal, played a role in financial deregulation as Clinton economics team member, and a backer of NAFTA. But what is surprising is the limited interest in his personal dealings, which have been examined critically by Pam Martens and Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil. Recall that Lew is essentially a career elite technocrat, with his major stint out of government being during the Bush Administration, when he first served as the Executive Vice President for Operations at NYU (where his noteworthy accomplishment was busting the bargaining rights of grad students) and then became the chief operating officer for Citigroup’s alternative investment group.

Weill zeroed in one provision of Lew’s employment agreement at Citigroup, that if Lew left for a “high level position with the United States government or regulatory body” his 2006 and 2007 guaranteed incentive and retention awards. The 2008 rider to the letter provided that if Lew left for the same type of “high level position” his restricted stock would vest immediately. Frankly, I think Weil is more riled up about this provision than he ought to be. The bank was giving particularly generous guarantees for joining. There was no reason to pay out on those guarantee if Lew broke his contract, unless he went to do something that would be of comparable value to the bank. You may not like the logic, but this is pretty cold commercial logic at work. Weil seems to have misread the “guaranteed incentive and retention awards” to mean Lew’s annual bonus on an ongoing basis. It didn’t. It’s a defined term that refers only to special goodies he got in 2006 and 2007.

What I find more disturbing is if you read the totality of Lew’s agreement versus Citi’s performance and Lew’s 2008 pay.

Remember, Lewis came from a job at NYU where he already looks to have been considerably overpaid. He received over $840,000 for the academic year 2002-2003, which had him earning more than most university presidents, including NYU’s president. And on top of that, as Pam Martens ferreted out, he was apparently given a $1.3 million house. I’m not making that up, go read her piece. The mechanism was that NYU lent the $1.3 million to buy the house to Lew and then forgave it over five years. Oh, and they paid him the money to pay the interest too. We will assume that the forgiveness of debt was reported properly to the IRS.

Now the house deal (which is rather bizarre given that NYU owns lots of nice faculty housing) might be what made Lew’s pay deal so out of line relative to his job. But if the forgiveness of debt was not included in the total, it’s even more insane, the equivalent of $1.1 million a year.

But Citi was still happy to pay over the market. If you read the Lew employment agreement, he got a $300,000 salary and a $1 million a year guaranteed incentive and retention award for each of 2006 and 2007. Oh, and he ALSO got a $700,000 signing bonus in restricted stock (or cash if the relevant committee did not approve the award!) that would vest 25% a year over the next four years. Oh, and the last goodies: he got his offer letter on June 26, 2006, and he joined in July. But his $1 million guaranteed incentive and retention award was NOT pro-rated for that year. And he got to take a $400,000 advance against it when he joined.

It is much longer. It has to be: This is one of Obama's cronies

Protecting the US is on the list, but farther down

General Dempsey says protecting the US from attack is on his list of priorities - but down the list.

He is busy… Top priority is survival of the US. Good. Next, the stability of the global economic system. Huh? Maybe the Treasury Department should worry more about that than our armed military.

CNS News

Third priority is to protect the US from attack. Who could imagine the US being attacked? On 9/11/2001!. Fourth priority is to promote American values abroad.

That puts the military at odds with our Secretary of State John F Kerry. He is making fun of you and me and our values in other countries. He told a group of students in Germany Monday "you have a right to be stupid if you want to be." Maybe Kerry should be assigned to protect the US from attack, so the military and promote our values. Reuters

Twenty embarrassing incidents in the history of Demo Party

From the Trail of Tears - forcibly relocating American Indians with lots of deaths - to blocking schoolhouse doors to blacks to abandoning South Viet Nam to the impeachment of President Clinton for lying under oath and the US losing our AAA bond rating.

From John Hawkins at Townhall.

John & Ginny Johnson in China

To Hangzhou, China to visit son David, September 21 to October 6, 2012.

A million photos on one page. A "feature" of Blogger aka Blogspot.

Ginny-John

Obama defended his sequester with veto threat. Now blames everyone else for it

The sequester and its automatic spending cuts belong to Obama. Now President Obama is blaming Republicans in Congress. For what He did.

Belongs to Obama? Yes. First, he proposed it, according to famous reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame. Politico

“Then-OMB Director Jack Lew, now the White House chief of staff, and White House Legislative Affairs Director Rob Nabors pitched the idea to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). (Bob Woodward book could bolster Republican attack on W.H., Politico, Austin Wright, September 7, 2012)

“Lew, Nabors, Sperling and Bruce Reed, Biden’s chief of staff, had initially decided to propose using language from the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction law as the model for the trigger. It seemed tough enough to apply to the current situation. It would require a sequester with half the cuts from Defense, and the other half from domestic programs.” (The Price Of Politics, Bob Woodward, 2012, p. 341)

Then in November, 2011 he threatened to veto any Republican effort to end the automatic spending cuts of his sequestration.

Weasel Zippers

“Already some in Congress are trying to undo these automatic spending cuts. My message to them is simple: No,” Mr. Obama said from the White House briefing room Monday evening. “I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending.”

“There will be no easy off ramps on this one.,” he added.

Why doesn't Obama accept responsibility for what he did and defended with veto threats?

Jay Carney admits Obama proposed dangerous sequester

The (shifty animal here) is hard to corner. But Jay Carney did admit that the "dangerous" sequester that he says is terminally dangerous was proposed by The One, President Obama.

Ace interviewer Brett Baier on Fox at Real Clear Politics

Will this (six tax increases) be enough?

Six tax increases were considered Thursday at at hearing of the State Senate Ways and Means Committee. Beer, plastic shopping bags! Biased newspapers - who decides what bias is? Removing limitations on the cruel B&O tax. And, based on past popularity, Bill Gates's income tax. Sound Politics

Committee Chairman Andy Hill asked each testifier: Will this (all six tax increases) be enough? The WEA just couldn't find words to answer. Their answer has always been: we need more money. It looks like it still is.

Tim Eyman's latest initiative to requires a 2/3 majority to increase taxes or a vote of the people passed in all 39 counties.

Generic Freedom Foundation

Al Gore's choice Al Jazeera calls for death for apostasy against Islam

Albert Gore, Jr. is coming to Seattle Thursday. He has been in the news because he sold his Current TV to Al Jazeera. He says he chose them because they do such a good job on news and his partner Joel Hyatt says Al Jazeera shares their goals when they started Current TV. Wall Street Journal

Gore laughs when asked "Mr. Former Vice President you have railed against oil companies for years. You sold to a company that is owned by the government of Qatar, which gets most of its revenue from oil. Do you like money more than the beliefs you have espoused for years?" It is estimated that he gained $70 to $100 million on the sale. Surely he cannot be held to the standard he uses on others.

Now his Al-Jazeera has broadcast death threats to those who leave Islam. Thursday you will want to ask distinguished Nobel laureate Gore if this is what he was talking about when he said he was proud of the sale.

Daily Caller

… Western critics of Islam highlighted a recent broadcast of the network’s regular “Shariah and Life” show, which has an estimated audience of 60 million viewers worldwide.

The show’s host is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent Sunni Islamic cleric.

He declared that Islam’s mandated death-penalty for apostasy has kept Islam alive since the 1400s. “If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment Islam wouldn’t exist today,” Qaradawi said on the show.

Qaradawi cited specific verses and narrations by Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, and the recorded testimony of his companions, that mandate the death penalty for anyone who tries to leave Islam.

“Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:33 says: ‘The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle is that they should be murdered or crucified,’” Qaradawi quoted on his show…

I don't know the date of this broadcast but he has been broadcasting similar things for years. Daily Caller:

“The most recent Qaradawi quotes about conversion from Islam are pretty much consistent with his own and Muslim Brotherhood beliefs,” said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official who has specialized in Middle Eastern research.

“They fall into Al-Jazeera’s pattern of seeking ratings on the basis of inciting hatred and violence,” he added.

Obama has lowest growth rate in 60 years

I don't rejoice in bad news. But President Obama should recognize the failure of his "more government for everything" policies.

0.8% — The Abysmal Rate of Economic Growth under Obama

Investors Business Daily [quoting]


President Obama's defense of his economic stewardship has effectively amounted to this: At least we no longer have the Bush-era economy. With an entire 4-year term in the books, it's now possible to confirm, and to lament, the essential truth of those words.

Prior to Obama, the second term of President Bush featured the weakest gains in the gross domestic product in some time, with average annual real (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth of just 1.9%. That's according to figures from the federal government's own Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

Obama's first term, however, puts the paltry level of growth during Bush's second term in a newly favorable light. According to the BEA, average annual real GDP growth during Obama's first term was a woeful 0.8%.

To put Obama's mind-bogglingly low number in perspective, consider this: It was less than half the tally achieved during Bush's second term. It was barely a quarter of the tally achieved under President Carter.

It was the worst tally achieved during any presidential term in the past 60 years.
And here's the kicker: If it had been doubled (to 1.6%), it still would have been the worst tally in the past 60 years.

True, Obama inherited a recession, but that recession only lasted for the first six months of his term. Eighty-eight percent of his term was post-recession.

In comparison, that same recession covered fully one year of Bush's second term — a full 25% of it. Yet, Bush's second term witnessed well over twice the growth of Obama's first.
Moreover, the abysmal performance of the economy in 2009 (Obama's first year in office) gave it plenty of opportunity to grow rapidly in the years to follow — there was essentially nowhere for it to go but up.
... [end of quote]

The graphic: Investors Business Daily. Click to enlarge.

Obama's Economy - Layoffs this week

Here is Obama's scorecard: Layoffs, bankruptcies and businesses closing = this week.

Daily Job Cuts

Obama blinked on the Oabama sequester

The sequester was Obama's idea. Bob Woodward was there and tells how Obama proposed it - in Woodward's book The Price of Power. Business Insider

Now he wants out of it and he wants Congress to do the heavy lifting. Looks like another chance to blame the Republicans in the House.

Wash Examiner

In November 2011, President Obama lamented that “some in Congress are trying to undo these automatic spending cuts” that were part of that August’s deal to raise the debt limit. “My message to them is simple: No. I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending. There will be no easy off ramps on this one.”

Now, it’s Obama who is looking for an off ramp. With the automatic spending cuts about to go into effect, the Associated Press reports, “President Barack Obama will ask Congress to come up with tens of billions of dollars in short-term spending cuts and tax revenue to put off the automatic across the board cuts that are scheduled to kick in March 1, White House officials said Tuesday.”

Climb the stairs Saturday and every day

There is an event celebrating walking/climbing Seattle's stairs Saturday. Seattle has plenty of them and several web sites that have information about them.

Saturday, February 9 at 10 am. Feet First is hosting 15 stair climbs. Advance registration required. Feet First

I climbed Seattle's highest set of stairs last month - 391 steps - Howe Street from Lake Union to Capital Hill a few blocks north of St. Mark's Cathedral and near Volunteer Park and Lakeview Cemetery. See map and description at Seattle All Stairs

More sources

Seattle All Stairs

Public Stairs

Seattle Stairway Walks - book by Jake Jaramillo - Mountaineers Books

Where the action is on education reform

The Washington Senate, led by Democrats Senators Tom and Sheldon and all the Republicans, is having substantial discussions about improving lower education and raising funding (used to be K-12, now pre-12). While in the House they are talking about raising funding and there is a shortage of other ideas, according to Peter Callaghan of the Tacoma News Tribune.

In the Senate, ideas long blocked by Sen. McAuliffe, are being heard - revised grading of schools, allowing principals last word on their staff (Shock!) and last-gap intervention for kids who can't read at the end of 3rd grade. And Democrat Hargrove has a bill with some improvement ideas. Seattle Times

And the Senate listened to a professor who shows there is no correlation between funding and educational outcomes. More money doesn't help unless it goes in the needed places. Washington Policy Center and WPC#2.

Callaghan says the Democrats, after leading on education reform for decades, gave the ball to the Republicans. Tacoma News Tribune

The turnaround is nearly complete. The party that birthed the education reform movement in Washington state is now the anti-reform party.

An issue that combined good policy with good politics has now been ceded by Democrats to Republicans. An issue that began as a response to the achievement gap between the rich and the poor, between white and Asian students and children of color has devolved into issues of public employee unions and conspiracy theories.

This is puzzling because it was Democratic governors beginning with Booth Gardner who put political capital behind the drive to stop accepting the status quo of mediocre public schools. Each governor since has embraced the reforms – some more warmly than others.

Sure, Washington has only had Democratic governors since 1985. But Democrats in the Legislature worked with like-minded Republicans to pass the first reforms in 1993’s House Bill 1209. That law created statewide learning requirements and tests to measure those requirements.

Subsequent attempts to hold adults, not just kids, accountable for performance, to use data to measure what works and what doesn’t, and to stop accepting failure would not have succeeded without leadership from Democrats...

Monastery/Fortress at Shegar Tibet

The monastery and fortress at Shegar Dzong, Tibet is remarkable. It is built up a mountain like you wouldn't believe. The British team surveying a route to climb Mt. Everest in 1921 might have been the first Europeans to visit there. Into the Silence by Wade Davis tells about this visit. It was also on the route for the well known 1922 and 1924 Mt Everest climing expeditions led by climber George Mallory.

Carnets-Voyages Sorry the text is in French.

More history at …. Remarkable as it is, I can't find any on-line history of it. The Wikipedia article, titled Xegar, has two references, but no text. There are lots of tours that go there and travel reports like this one, but history. No.

The photo: Carnets-Voyages. Click to enlarge.

Kamchatka volcano eruption

Stunning interactive view of the December, 2012 eruption of Plosty Tolbachik on the Kamchatka Peninsula, bordering the Pacific Ocean in the far east of Russia. The camera crew that specializes in 360-degree photos cancelled plans to be elsewhere and got there just in time to catch the beginning of the eruption.

Daily Mail UK

The second image is interactive. It a 360-degree photo that you can pan left and right. Zoom etc. For most people it's just as well to let it automatically pan to the right. If you use its tools to navigate the area on your own and get lost you can start over by reloading the page.

The photo is by AirPano.com. Note the vertical splatter of the highest lava! Click to enlarge.

Can't tackle budget w/o tackling entitlements

We can't tackle our US budget w/o tackling entitlements.

Patterico paints the picture clearly, showing how the numbers (don't) add up.

If the so-called entitlements are truly programs that can never be cut, then we have to close the ENTIRE federal government - even the loving bureaucrats who hand out the entitlement checks - in order to stoop living on massive borrowed money. Is cutting the military and border control acceptable? How about the Food and Drug Administration and FBI? How about the Department of Health and Human Services? The Education Department? Veterans Affairs?

If not, we have to save money on MediCare, Medicaid and other medical care. We have to look at Food Stamps and welfare. We have to consider Social Security.

Patterico shows the situation in words and a few tables of numbers. Pretty compact. And he links to a video of the same.

Patterico

Making tunnelling under downtown safe

Dig a tunnel for Highway 99 under dowtown beneath many buildings? Under another tunnel? Yes. That is what they are doing. What could possibly go wrong? Of course they have done the civil engineering to make sure it is deep enough and that the soil will hold above it. But what if?

A team of engineers and technicians are putting sophisticated sensors in place to get early data on any potential problem. They are using at least seven types of sensors to watch 200 buildings.

For example: Extensometers measure the solid density. If it drops the boring has probably encountered a void in the soil. But the primary method is at the boring machine: checking the soil being removed and watching for changes in the density of the soil at the cutting heads.

History: What has gone wrong? I don't think I heard about the following recent history, which is in the Seattle Times story about the sensors:

Seattle Times

A few years ago, soil-measuring errors caused a void that nearly swallowed a house above Sound Transit’s Beacon Hill Tunnel. Contractor Obayashi Corp had to reimburse taxpayers $4 million to locate and fill gaps.

The photo: Sensor on the exterior of a Pioneer Square building. Seattle Times

New pipeline option from Canada to the coast

There is a lot of oil being produced in the middle of the continent, but limited capacity to get it to refineries both for domestic and overseas use. We are waiting for Obama to decide … waiting… waiting.. to approve the Keystone XL pipeline through the central US to the Gulf of Mexico. And Canada is trying to find a route for a new pipeline to one of the north British Columbia ports, but they are having trouble with that.

Here is another idea. Make double the exisiting pipe from Alberta to Burnaby BC, which continues to the Washington refineries. For much of its route this can be done within the existing right of way - that's not hard. In some places development has encroached to the point the second pipe will have to take another route.

Crosscut - a Seattle online news source.

Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Stevens Pass

Prominent professional skiers were at Steven Pass Ski Area during February, 2012. Several small groups of locals and visitors decided to ski fresh snow on the back side of Cowboy Mountain (Seventh Heaven). Coming together in a large group of fifteen no one blew the whistle on all going at the same time.

They triggered an avalanche that caught five of them. One escaped. One had a deployable balloon on her back that prevented her from being completely buried. Three were buried and killed.

John Branch of the New York Times provides a very detailed account. Each page has a graphic and some are animated, especially the later one showing the descent slope from top to bottom.

NY Times

See also Outside Magazine.

More money doesn't necesarily help kids learn

A UW professor told the Washington Senate that schools that spend more do not get better learning results. Prof Maguerite Roza showed a scatter plot of spending versus test scores and it looks random. Just giving the government more $ doesn't work. You have to be careful how you spend it!!

WPC

WPC 2d post Prof Roza reemphasizes that it is very important how the dollars are allocated, not just how many there are.

The graphic from Prof. Roza via WPC. It sorely needs the scale for the x axis. Click to enlarge.

Schumer kills the immigration bill

"On day one of our bill, the people without status who are not criminals or security risks will be able to live and work here legally."

That shows Schumer's motivation. Get illegal immigrants on the path to being borders. Border security? Oh, yeah, forgot that. Bottom priority.

We don't trust you, Chuckie. Every claim that both will be done at the same time, border security comes last and last never gets accomplished.

Sorry, trusted Republican senators, border security first. After it is in place make illegals legal.

Bryon York at Washington Examiner

Noncitizens voting in Washington

Washington is registering non-citizens to vote. Why?

A Canadian citizen with green card residing in Washington received a voter registration card. We don't know in which county, etc., this happened but I have a friend who had the same thing happen.

Why? John Hinderaker reports at PowerLine Blog.

A reader emailed earlier today to say that he and his wife recently moved to Washington State. His wife is a Canadian citizen who has a green card. Much to their surprise, she received in the mail a voter registration card issued by the county in which they live, informing her that “You are registered to vote.” Our reader writes: 

My wife is a Canadian citizen, has her green card, and just received her voter registration card in the mail. Not sure what’s up with that, she did not do anything to actively register to vote. We have no idea how she became a registered voter, unless they’re simply registering all residents here in Washington State automatically. 

The card says, “You are registered to vote.” It adds, “Your ballot will arrive by mail.”

Graphic from PowerLine. Click to enlarge.

Annual assesement of climate change ignores science findings

Roger Pielke, Jr., reads the US Global Change Research Program's annual report and says that in his area of expertise the report reverses scientific findings - reverses them! He cites examples where a report by scientists say rising CO2 has no correlation to increased flooding or storms or whatever, but the annual report says the opposite - while citing the same report.

Report in PDF - very large.  [The draft does not give its title, but its author is The "National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee" or NCADAC.]

Pielke's blog Science, Innovation, Politics, quoting:

What the USGCRP report says:

Infrastructure across the U.S. is being adversely affected by phenomena associated with climate change, including sea level rise, storm surge, heavy downpours, and extreme heat… Floods along the nation’s rivers, inside cities, and on lakes following heavy downpours, prolonged rains, and rapid melting of snowpack are damaging infrastructure in towns and cities, farmlands, and a variety of other places across the nation.

...

To underscore its conclusion, the draft report includes the figure at the top of this post (from Hirsch and Ryberg 2011), which shows flood trends in different regions of the US. In a remarkable contrast to the draft USGCRP report, here is what Hirsch and Ryberg (2011) actually says:

The coterminous US is divided into four large regions and stationary bootstrapping is used to evaluate if the patterns of these statistical associations are significantly different from what would be expected under the null hypothesis that flood magnitudes are independent of GM [global mean] CO2. In none of the four regions defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing GMCO2.

Got that? In no US region is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing CO2. This is precisely the opposite of the conclusion expressed in the draft report, which relies on Hirsch and Ryberg (2011) to express the opposite conclusion.

Store your data in DNA?

Researchers have stored text, images and sound recordings in DNA. DNA is stable and dense; stable because it is not alive. Dense: a cupful of DNA might be able to store 100 million hours of high-definition video! Scientists find that the design of DNA is amazing.

The process of storing, then retrieving is long and detailed, but it worked. It will be possible to make it much cheaper, maybe cheap enough for mass usage. They are not saying what human/animal the DNA is from.

Wall Street Journal

The pic: WSJ. Click to enlarge.

March for Life in Olympia - thousands?

There was a large pro-life rally opposed to Roe vs. Wade at the state capitol in Olympia Monday.

The Keith Eldridge of KOMO on-site said attendance was 1,000. The anchor sitting in the studio corrected him - "hundreds." Watch the video at 0:51.

KOMO

Via David Boze KTTH

Rapper kicked off stage at Obama inaugural

The speech police caught rapper Lupo Fiasco saying things not approved by... the censors. It looks like censorship to me. The event was StartUp RockOn, one of the inauguration events.

The sponsors say they believe in free speech. They just wanted to switch to the next performer. So they shut off the lights and his mike. Free speech, yeah.

Watch at Buzzfeed.

Maps in context!

I just discovered something I need: there is a Wikipedia relative that links geographic mentions in articles to Google's world map.

I am reading Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet by Eric Metaxis. I was trying to find where he located his Finkenwalde seminary. A Bing search lead me to Dietrich Bonhoeffer at TheFullWiki. There one can see that Finkenwalde's first location near Stettin was on the Oder River in Pomerania; now the city is Szczecin, Poland. Of course all other places mentioned in the article are mapped.

And Bradford Washburn, the pioneering American climber and cartographer has his Alaska and Yukon first ascents mapped at TheFullWiki, as well. Though the article contains substantial errors. His first ascents of 17,000-foot  Mount Lucania and Mount Bertha in the Fairweather Range are in Yukon, Canada, but are listed under "Selected Alaska first ascents." Someone has to correct that.

EPA stupidly claims water is a pollutant

EPA claims water is a pollutant, when it's protecting water! Huh? Hard to believe.

Heritage Foundation

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, R, won a significant victory against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Jan. 3. A federal district court in Virginia ruled in favor of the state in a dispute over stormwater runoff in the case Virginia Deptartment of Transportation v. EPA. As Cuccinelli said, the "EPA was literally treating water itself -- the very substance the Clean Water Act was created to protect -- as a pollutant."

In a prime example of the unlawful and economically destructive positions taken by the EPA under outgoing administrator Lisa Jackson, the agency claimed that it could regulate the stormwater running into Accotink Creek, a 25-mile-long tributary of the Potomac River. Although the EPA was forced to admit that stormwater is not a pollutant, it still claimed the authority to regulate it, claiming it was a "surrogate" for sediment, which is a regulated pollutant.

Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA evaluates the water quality standards set by states for the discharge of pollutants into their lakes and rivers. It can either accept those standards or propose its own. In Virginia's case, the EPA established its own criteria for various pollutants for Accotink Creek ("total maximum daily loads") and set a limit in 2011 on the total maximum amount of stormwater that could flow into the creek daily.

But the court rejected the EPA's attempt to exert authority over stormwater runoff. It concluded that the EPA was trying to regulate something "over which it has no statutorily granted power ... as a proxy for something over which it is granted power."

Climate skeptics not deniers

Fred Singer, professor emeritus at U Virginia, explains how being skeptical about global warming is basic science. Being a scientist is being skeptical. Don't confuse the skeptics who are looking at the data with the "deniers" who have made up their minds. The deniers are like the true believers - "I don't need any facts. I know the truth."

American Thinker

Singer describes some of the most-commen denier claims, including misunderstanding the second law of thermodynamics. From the true believers he gives just these five quotes.

• "The data doesn't matter. We're not basing our recommendations on the data. We're basing them on the climate models." -Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
• "The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful." -Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University
• "It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true." -Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace
• "Unless we announce disasters no one will listen." -Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC
• "No matter if the science of global warming is all phony ... climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world." -Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment.
• 
  
  

Make the White House safer

If grade schools are safer if no guns are allowed the White House will be also. Don't you want our president to be safe?

Sign the petition to make the the White House gun-free. When it has 25,000 signatures the White House has promised a response.

We the People = petition

4G, Edge, then no AT&T data

Last trip to Kay Peninsula I rejoiced in AT&T upgrading wireless data to 4G - their fastest service. Well ... This time it goes from Edge (slow but it works) to 4G to nothing.

No data! Repeatedly. Let's see if I can post this.

Clearly guilty David Gregory not prosecuted

Laws are for little people like you and me, not for big stars.

David Gregory held up a 30-round magazine on his television broadcast on December 23, 2012. He was in District of Columbia and it is illegal to possess a magazine that holds more than ten rounds. Anyone can watch the video and see what he did. And the law is clear. But the DC Attorney General will not prosecute him "despite the clear violation of this important law." Na Na Na!

I wonder who else is exempted from clear violations of law in DC. The rich and politically connected.

Legal Insurrection

Welcome Sound Politics readers

Welcome Sound Politics readers. Please leave a comment. When you do please use your real name and email address. The caustic commenters at Sound Politics hide behind anonymity while calling me names. And my identity is known.

19th Century revolution in travel time

Building railroads across the US brought a revolution; travel time fell like a meteorite. In 1800 it took two weeks to get to coastal Georgia or eastern Ohio and four week to get to northern Georgia or western Ohio. In only thirty years those times were cut in half. In thirty more years, in half again. You could reach coastal california in three weeks. Then sixty years later Los Angeles could be reached in only three days!

The difference to the county was huge. It allowed nation-wide distribution of wholesale food and manufactured products (nationwide retail required another revolution - cheap long-distance calling).

Though personal travel was still expensive. I grew up 1700 miles from my grandparents in the 1950s and didn't see them many times. Jet airplanes brought distant families together in the last half of the 1960s and on.

Mother Nature Network

 Graphics from Mother Nature Network with credit to University of Nebraska. Click to enlarge.

Cinderella Gregoire

Poor Christine Gregoire. She didn't get her "Cinderella moment." She didn't get to bask in the glory of her victory as governor; she didn't get to wear the princess gown. It just wasn't fair.

Tacoma News Tribune

Maybe it's because she lost the election - November 17, 2004 Sound Politics. And she lost the recount - November 24, 2004 Sound Politics.

But then Ron Sims kept finding more ballots. Even national media were asking about the questionable ballot counting. November 29, 2004 Sound Politics. (Unfortunately the link to the original Wall Street Journal article doesn't work eight years later.) Once Gregoire was ahead they quit counting. There were 10,000 ballots "discovered" and other discrepancies. Sound Politics And Democrats were allowed to take ballots away from the secure counting facility to go to voters' homes for new signatures. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Among the findings in the election post-mortem was that there was not complete accounting for the ballots. Polling places received a bunch of ballots and turned in those voted, plus blanks, but didn't make sure every ballot was accounted for! You know, missing a few ballots in this precinct and a few in that one… Adds up.

Stefan Sharkansky, the boss here at Sound Politics, did yeoman work analyzing the vote count inside and out. He did much more analysis than the paid news media - all of them together.

Dimocrats are shocked that Obama raised THEIR taxes

People are shocked! Shocked! Obama raised taxes on every wage earner. Even those making minimum wage - about $18,000 a year for full-time work in Washington. Uhhh. He promised to raise taxes.

Washington Times

“What happened that my Social Security withholding’s in my paycheck just went up?” a poster wrote on the liberal site Democratic Underground. “My paycheck just went down by an amount that I don’t feel comfortable with. I guarantee this decrease is gonna’ hurt me more than the increase in income taxes will hurt those making over 400 grand. What happened?”

Shocker. Democrats who supported the president’s re-election just had NO idea that his steadfast pledge to raise taxes meant that he was really going to raise taxes. They thought he planned to just hit those filthy “1 percenters,” you know, the ones who earned fortunes through their inventiveness and hard work. They thought the free ride would continue forever.

GM food oponent reverses and appologizes

From Slate [quote]

If you fear genetically modified food, you may have Mark Lynas to thank. By his own reckoning, British environmentalist helped spur the anti-GMO movement in the mid-‘90s, arguing as recently at 2008 that big corporations’ selfish greed would threaten the health of both people and the Earth. Thanks to the efforts of Lynas and people like him, governments around the world—especially in Western Europe, Asia, and Africa—have hobbled GM research, and NGOs like Greenpeace have spurned donations of genetically modified foods.

But Lynas has changed his mind—and he’s not being quiet about it. On Thursday at the Oxford Farming Conference, Lynas delivered a blunt address: He got GMOs wrong. According to the version of his remarks posted online (as yet, there’s no video or transcript of the actual delivery), he opened with a bang:

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering—what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

Lynas concludes that people who want to stick with organic are entitled to—but they should not stand in the way of others who would use science to find more efficient ways to feed billions. “[T]he GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe. … You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food,” he says.

NJ Gov. Christie scolds the fiscally sane

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey used to be a Republican. But he turned from endorsing Mitt Romney for president and embraced - literally - President Obama just before the election. Today he continues his move away from conservative principles by scolding those who would dare be wise with the voters' money.

His disdain for the Republicans at IBD

"There's only one group to blame," the New Jersey governor said of the Sandy relief bill that was not included in the fiscal cliff deal, "the House Majority and John Boehner."

But why would a responsible legislative body load an essential bill like the Sandy relief with mega bucks for everyone:

The Sandy damage is $20 billion. Why spend another $40 billion on unrelated things?

Democrats had expanded the legislation during a markup to include not only areas affected by Sandy, but also to provide money for all "storm events that occurred in 2012 along the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast within the boundaries of the North Atlantic and Mississippi Valley divisions of the Corps that were affected by Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac."

… To start, the relief bill provides some $28 billion for future "disaster-mitigation" projects — spending that at the least is not a middle-of-the-night emergency.

The bill also allocates $100 million for the repair of all 265 Head Start centers around the country. Some Head Start centers in the New York-New Jersey area may have sustained some hurricane damage. But this is, again, a huge cash infusion to the $8 billion a year day-care program that exploits a tragedy.

Goodbye, Gov. Christie, we loved you when you were a Republican.

Donations to ASPCA will be wasted

ASPCA - Am Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals - chased Ringling Brothers Circus in court - and in public opinion - for years, claiming systematic cruelty to their elephants. They got kicked out of court in unceremonious fashion. The judge didn't just say their claim was without merit, but ASPCA had to pay Ringling $9.3 million.

If you make a donation to ASPCA it won't go to help take care of animals. It will go to pay the $9.3 million penalty for their foolish and cruel legal chase.

Powerline Blog

AT&T improvements

Our cabin on the Key Peninsula has had good voice service and mediocre data service from AT&T the past three years. The data has always been their Edge service, which is slow, never 3G and outages were regular.

But they upgraded. I now get 4G. I hope it will stay on.

Good, Bad and Ugly in McConnell-Biden tax bill

Where is Obama's "balanced approach"? No spending cuts here.

Phillip Klein at Washington Examiner

When it comes to assessing federal legislation, as with most things in life, people’s reviews are often pre-determined by their expectations. It’s worth keeping this in mind as feedback comes in from the “fiscal cliff” deal that passed through the Senate in the wee hours of New Year’s Day and that is now under consideration by the House of Representatives.

Conservatives believe that higher taxes are a bad thing, that the tax code needs to be dramatically overhauled and that the true driver of long-term debt is out of control spending, particularly on entitlements. For those who thought it was possible to emerge from the “fiscal cliff” showdown without tax increases, with genuine tax reform and with real spending cuts that made fundamental changes to entitlements, this deal is obviously a nonstarter.

For those who assumed that President Obama’s reelection and continued Democratic control of the Senate at a time when the nation was facing an automatic $4.5 trillion tax hike would inevitably mean higher taxes without actual tax or entitlement reforms, the deal is less bad. As the House considers the legislation today, I thought it would be worth assessing the good, the bad and the ugly of the “fiscal cliff” deal.

The Good

At the start of 2013, income taxes were scheduled to go up on nearly every American, but if this deal becomes law, roughly 99 percent of taxpayers would be protected from those tax hikes. For over a decade, Democrats opposed the Bush tax cuts and prevented them from becoming permanent. Now, they have voted overwhelmingly to preserve about 84 percent of the dreaded cuts, which for years they demagogued as only benefitting the very rich.

Lawmakers also agreed on permanent changes that minimized the tax increases on estates and capital gains. In addition, the deal permanently prevented the Alternative Minimum Tax (originally passed in 1969 to capture a small number of rich households who were avoiding taxes) from hitting tens and millions of Americans. From a more technical standpoint, this also means that the deal locks in a Congressional Budget Office revenue baseline that will be as low as possible. So, if future Republicans propose real tax reform, we won’t end up with estimates saying that their proposals would cost trillions of dollars, because such proposals will no longer be judged against an unrealistic baseline that assumes all of the Bush tax cuts would otherwise expire and open the floodgates to new revenue.

A less publicized but still significant positive from the deal is that it formally repeals the CLASS Act, a long-term care entitlement that is part of Obama’s national health care law. Originally the brain child of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, the program was slated to collect years of premiums before paying out any benefits, so Democrats cynically exploited this fact to claim twice as much deficit reduction through Obamacare as existed in reality. The Obama administration has already suspended implementation of the CLASS Act after conceding it is unworkable. But it still remains on the books, waiting to be reinstated at some point in the future. The fiscal cliff deal would put a stake through the heart of this program once and for all.

The Bad

Taxes are still going to go up. Even with the cut off at $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for families, the deal is still going to suck more money out of the economy and hit small businesses. And this is on top of the Obamacare tax hikes already slated to go into effect in 2013 – an additional Medicare tax, higher taxes on investment income and a tax on medical devices.

Also, the deal doesn’t represent actual movement toward a simplified tax code with fewer deductions and lower rates. Instead, it extends a whole lot of special interest tax benefits. For instance, there’s the “railroad track maintenance credit;” “extension of 7-year recovery period for motorsports entertainment complexes;” “special expensing rules for certain film and television productions;” and a smorgasbord of tax subsidies for alternative energy.

And for all of Obama’s talk about a “balanced approach” to deficit reduction, the deal allows taxes to go up, but there are no real spending cuts here and certainly no entitlement reform. This deal won’t put a dent in the deficit, no matter which baseline is used.

The Ugly

Last month, Reason’s Peter Suderman coined the term “The Doc Fix Economy.” In 1997, Congress passed a law aiming to curb the growth of Medicare by slowing the growth of doctors’ payments over time. But ever since, whenever it comes time to actually implement the cuts, Congress has found some way to delay them for a few months, or a year at a time. It’s become known in Beltway parlance as the “doc fix” and it has become emblematic of the way business is done here. The fiscal cliff deal represents another prime exercise in Washington can kicking.

Not only does it include a “doc fix” (offset with various health care savings detailed here), but the deal extends unemployment insurance without offsetting spending cuts. And in a broader sense, it delays the implementation of the sequester by two months. For those too dizzy to remember, when Congress was scrambling to find ways to cut spending to raise the debt limit in the summer of 2011, they decided that they’d delegate the job to a ‘super committee.’ This group of 12 members of the House and Senate from both parties was supposed to magically come up with an agreement for an additional $1.2 trillion in spending cuts. The magic wand was the threat that if they didn’t act, both parties would have to accept painful automatic cuts to defense and mandatory spending. To the surprise of nobody, they were unable to reach a deal, which was supposed to trigger these automatic cuts known as the sequester in 2013. But as part of the deal, these cuts would be postponed for another two months, by substituting in lower caps to discretionary spending and taking advantage of a tax-shifting gimmick with Roth IRAs.

Beyond the specifics of the deal, the process was awful. Even though lawmakers knew this reality was coming for two years (on the tax side) and a year (on the sequester side), they waited until New Year’s Eve to strike a deal that passed through the Senate at 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The public has had no chance to review – let alone understand – the legislation. So much for transparency.

There’s a lot to hate in this deal, no doubt. But any honest assessment of it must grapple with the reality of Obama as president, Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader and $4.5 trillion in automatic tax hikes hitting in the new year. With this in mind, I’d rate the deal as objectively bad, but relatively good.

Obama attacks debt by increasing spending

He is on another planet. He does not want the US to be solvent. Raise spending? That is foolish to you and me, but to Him It's power for his big government and his unions.

At the brink of the fiscal cliff on Monday, December 31, 2012, Obama proposed increased investment, that's spending to the rest of us.

Daily Caller

President Barack Obama smashed a completed fiscal-cliff deal with a last-minute demand for increased spending in 2013, according to an e-mail from the GOP’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.

Under the deal, planned tax increases on middle-class Americans would be cancelled, but Obama insisted on raising tax rates on Americans earning more than $400,000 per year.

“They’re holding that [deal] hostage” to boost 2013 spending, GOP Sen. Bob Corker said shortly after Obama lauded the pending agreement.

“The tax piece is complete and done as of last evening at 1:45 a.m. I thought the entire deal was sealed. Early this morning, the White House called demanding that we also turn off the sequester,” said the email, signed “Mitch.”

The sequester refers to scheduled cuts in spending during the first nine months of 2013. Half of the $109 billion in cuts are to be imposed on the Pentagon.

Republicans are seeking budget cuts to reduce the federal government’s annual deficit of $1 trillion, and also to trim the size and reach of government.

But Obama is happy with $1 trillion added to our debt every year - $1 trillion more every year.

Our favorite beach in Cabo San Lucas Mexico

While looking for proof that it is raining in Cabo today (It was earlier) I found a webcam that shows our favorite beach. This is the Pacific Ocean beach that Solmar, Playa Grande and Hotel Finnesterra are on. The very "Land's End" of Baja California is the end of the rocks here. It is a great place for seeing whales in season and manta rays and flying fish in season. The beach drops very steeply, so swimming is not allowed.

This shot is looking east from an area of huge mansions in a neighborhood called Pedregal. This is one of the areas the mega-bucks people have their third or fourth or fifth huge home.

Villa Penasco Cam This is at a mansion for rent. Not in my price range! Its view includes a small part of the Cabo Marina's outside bay and shows a cruise ship today. Its clock is late by one hour (wrong time zone). Today it is not refreshing.

And another - Villa Bellissima Cam. Today it is refreshing every 15 seconds.

Photo: A screen capture just after sunrise I grabbed. Click to enlarge.