ACORN CEO Gets A Little Nutty

ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis came to Washington D.C. this week as part of what she called her “set the record straight tour” but sounded more like a “don’t blame me tour” to many in the audience.

Lewis whose organization has come under fire for voter registration irregularities and more recently for workers who advised a fake pimp and prostitute on how they could set up a house of prostitution with ACORN’s help passed most of the blame to her predecessor who left after allegedly embezzling $5 million from the organization.

According to Lewis workers who broke the law by falsifying voter registration cards were actually reported by ACORN to the authorities and blamed them for not prosecuting the violators rather than address any laxity in ACORN”s hiring policy.

When addressing the foreclosure crisis Lewis said that had the financial institutions followed ACORN’s guidelines which she claimed advised only issuing sound loans there wouldn’t have been a crisis.  But it is the very same Community Reinvestment Act that Lewis cites as the solution to affordable housing for low income people that fueled the problem as banks were forced to make loans that didn’t follow sound business practices.

Lewis accused those that attacked her organization as being a part of a modern day ACORN McCarthyism and that only last week members of Congress were asked if they were or have ever been a member of ACORN to back up her claim.  It sounds good but I doubt that it was true

As for the lawsuit ACORN has filed against filmmakers James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles Lewis said that “Nothing trumps breaking the law”, and pooh poohed any notion that that what they uncovered was important.  In other words discovering that an organization that depends on government taxpayer dollars employs people who are willing to break the law to help set up a house of prostitution is not germane

If one were to believe Lewis ACORN is nothing more than an innocent victim of some misguided employees and opponents who want to see them fail.

For the rest of us we know better.

 

Sanford Drives Another Nail in GOP Coffin

South Carolina’s Republican governer Mark Sanford late yesterday solved the mystery of his wherabouts for the last several days by admitting at a press conference that he had been in Argentina visiting his mistress.

Sanford whose five-day absence sparked rumors of his mental state among other things will go down as having performed one of the most bizarre cloak and dagger operations of an elected public official in recent memory by completely disappearing off the grid and leaving his staff and family to try and explain his behavior.

The governor’s admission of an affair comes on the heels of last weeks admission by Sen. John Ensign of Nevada of a similar indiscretion and will surely end his political career even if he remains in office for the rest of his term.

Voters can be somewhat forgiving of personal indiscretion but couple that with the mystery trip out of the country and Sanford can kiss any future political ambitions goodbye.

The real problem though is Repblicans like Ensign and Sanford have portrayed themselves as moral politicians  and then they turn around and violate their marriage covenenants and betray the public trust.  For Sanford it was even worse as he is the chief executive of a state and left the country without turning over power to anyone in case of emergency.

Even though I have never been a big fan of Sanford I thought he was a smart guy.  I was obviously wrong as he badly bungled his attempt to cover up his affair even with the vast resources at his disposal.

The GOP was already acting like the walking wounded after bruising election defeats in 2006 and 2008 and the actions of potential standard bearers like Ensign and Sanford only dig a deeper hole for the party.

President Obama was said to have removed one potential rival in former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman when he posted him to China as the ambassador, but it seems that all this jockeying is unnecessary as the Republicans can implode just fine on their own leaving them with a very thin field in 2012.

At this time Sanford has no intention of resigning which means his ego is still intact, but every day that he continues to serve will only hurt the Republicans and conservatives and give the Democrats a larger target to shoot for in 2010.

 

A Race to the Top on Twitter

Last week I wrote about a new website named Top Conservatives on Twitter or TCOT for short.

At that time I complained about the way the site ranked twitter users who registered on the site.

Since then I have been conducting my own experiment to see how much I could improve my rank by adding followers.

I am pleased to report that I managed to take my ranking from its worst at 101 to one below 70.  The site updates the rankings every few hours so any ranking that I use will change multiple times during the day.

While I would like to stay there or even better improve my ranking, it will take a lot of work.  To boost my initial ranking I followed almost everyone ranked regardless of whether or not I was truly interested in their tweets or not.  This resulted in my follower number going from about 520 to over 800 by Sunday evening.  That’s a pretty good growth rate but it took a lot of time as the TCOT list on Saturday was about 530 or so names.  As of this morning it’s almost 850.

I would try and add many of those 300 or so new people to the list but since there is no list that I am aware of of recent additions to the list I would have to review almost all the names again to find the new adds.

Now after a weekend of furiously following people and adding followers in return, I find myself wondering how much more time I should spend in adding followers so that I won’t lose any ground to others or to improve my rankings.

Plus I still have a problem with being ranked solely on the number of followers.  One of the purposes of  TCOT is to build a community.  Well how do you build a community if you are only ranked on followers but not the tweets which is how you communicate with one another?

My solution although it is far from perfect would be to award points for the number of followers and tweets and the combined score would then be ranked.  For example, one of the people ranked ahead of me has 969 followers but just 760 tweets.  To me that tells me he isn’t very active on twitter and therefore deserves a lower ranking.  So if we were to award 2 points per follower and 1 point per tweet he would 2,698 points.  My score in comparison would be 3,768 because I send several tweets a day.

In my mind a list like the TCOT is a very useful tool, but it also gives the impression that the higher the ranking the more important or influential a person is which is not the case.

For now it’s what we have and I can always brag that I am ranked higher than G. Gordon Liddy (167).

 

Video Games on Global Warming Hit List

The list of culprits that contribute to global warming just got a little longer with the addition of video games according to a new report produced by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) , a New York based environmental organization.

According to the study conducted with the help of Ecos Consulting in Portland, OR, video game consoles are some of the biggest energy wasters consuming an estimated 16 billion killowatt hours of electricity per year- which is roughly the annual electicity usage of the city of San Diego.

The report not only attacks the energy use of the consloes themselves range from 20 watts for the Nintendo Wii to 150 watts for the Sony Playstation 3,  but states that if the systems were left on all the time that they would consume enough electricity to power two refigerators for one year.

To be honest I am all for saving energy.  I go around my home and turn off lights and unplug cell phone chargers at every opportunity.  Now I don’t profess to know how many people with video games leave their systems on all the time, but it doesn’t happen in my household and I doubt that it occurs as often as the authors of this study estimate.

I will give the NRDC credit though for picking on an industry that is ripe for attack.  With an estimated 92 percent of children between two to 17 playing video games, what better place than to develop the next generation of global warming scaremongers?

This will be an interesting battle as games become more complex and feature laden they like computers will require even more power.  Will the children be willing to trade the improvement of games and entertainment over dubious claims of saving the environment?  I think the environmentalists may have crossed the line and will face a stiff backlash from children everywhere.

 

Recession Spares Public Employees

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that despite a recession and shrinking state and local budgets public employees have been spared the pain that workers in other sectors have faced.

According to the Journal, the number of public employees in cash strapped New York City has risen froma  little over 240,000 in 1999 to almost 314,000 as of June 30 of this year.  Granted public employment dropped slightly in 2002 and 2003 when the economy was slowing down but jumped by 40,000 the next year as things picked up.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has touted his business experience as a major qualification for running New York City yet the rapid explosion of public employee growth during his tenure defies all business logic.  As a corporation grows it will need more employees but they will also gain economies of scale and won’t require the same ratio of employees to do the work as they did when they first started operating.

But thanks to weak-kneed politicians like Bloomberg, the public employee unions have only gained more clout and have managed to increase their numbers and thereby costs to the taxpayers with ever highre salaries and benefits.  So now when the budgets are strained to the point of breaking government leaders whine about cutting services but won’t face the true problem of a bloated payroll that breeds inefficiencies.

The current recession which many economists are predicting will be the worst economic situation that we have have since the Great Depression will test mayors and governors across the U.S. as to whether or not they have the mettle to deal with the heart of their fiscal problems or punt the ball and watch the public employee unions inflcit more damage.

For a clue on what they are likely to do just watch the parade of mayors hitting Washington, D.C. who are asking the government for a piece of the bailout pie.  No pain here.

 

The Coming Redistricting Battle

No doubt there was a lot at stake in the 2008 presidential election that concluded this week with a resounding win for Barack Obama over John McCain.

Not only did the Democrats recapture the White House but depending on official results have picked up at least 6 seats in the Senate and 19 plus seats in the House.

For the GOP this was certainly depressing news as they have now seen all of their gains since they took control of the House in 1994 erased and then some.

While the Republicans lick their wounds from Tuesday’s results they should waste no time in preparing for the mid-term elections in 2010 and even more important planning their strategy for redistricting in 2011 which will affect congressional races in 2012.

As it stands now the GOP may have a slight edge as they control both the state legislature and governor’s mansion in states that are likely to gain about 7 seats while Democrats control everything in states that are expected to add about 4 seats.  On th flip side most of the states that are expected to lose seats are either in total Democratic control or have a Democratic governor with a split state house.  Think rust belt here.

This means that Republicans have a shot at making sure the districts they draw favor the GOP and won’t face much opposition giving the a chance to make a small gain on the Democrats.

Yet this is not a sure bet yet.  For example Virginia which currently has a divided statehouse will hold elections next year.  They could elect a Republican governor and  re-take the Senate which would give them complete control but that isn’t likely to occur if recent trends hold.  There will be some other state wide races across the country in the next two years but they aren’t expected to bring a change of control that will affect redisticting.

For the GOP to make anything but incremental gains in redistricting will be hard.  After all in the 14 states that they control the legislature , 6 of them have Democratic governors.  In the 7 states that have a divided legislature there are 6 Democratic governors in place.  That leaves just 11 Republican governors in the remaining 28 states with Democratically controlled legislatures.

With gerrymandering a longstanding tradition I expect that the Democrats will draw favorable districts in states that they control the legislature or the governors mansion and the GOP while they will do likewise will face more opposition from Democratic governors in their states than vice-versa in an effort to blunt any GOP gains.

The Republicans can and should gain a few seats in the House in two years but if they can somehow find a good message and squeeze out some favorably drawn districts they could come closer to parity in 2012.

 

Obama’s Victory Brings Gay Marraige Loss in California

While conservatives ponder living under an Obama presidency and Democratically controlled House and Senate, California liberals (read Hollywood) are stunned by the passage of a gay marriage ban in their state.

There is no doubt that the Obama candidacy brought out far more black and Latino voters than normal, but while that was good for the Democrats it was also bad for the supporters of gay marriage.

Exit polls showed that blacks voted for the ban by a whopping 70-30  percent margin and Latino’s by a smaller 51-49 percentage.  With white voters mostly favoring gay marriage there is no doubt among experts that the black vote was the key to victory for supporters of Prop 8.

If you think of it though it makes perfect sense.  Blacks and Latino’s are more liberal in general on economic issues but tend to be more socially conservative than white Democrats.

This has to do that most blacks are very religious at their core and are faithful churchgoers where they have been taught that marriage is between a man and a woman.  The same can be said for most Latino’s who tend to be mostly Catholic and much more traditional in their viewpoints than white Catholics.

Couple the California victory with that of similar measures in Florida and Arizona, the gay adoption ban in Alabama and the ending of affirmative action in three other states and conservatives actually have something to celebrate.

For the Democrats and President-Elect Obama they should be mindful that just because these groups voted for them and generally agree with their policies that if they dare to tread into highly charged social issues like gay marriage they will  be in for a rude surprise.

 

Middle School Indoctrination

The National Middle School Association (NMSA) is holding their 35th annual conference this weekend in Denver.  Along with sessions on leadership, classroom leadership and teaching strategy are such gems like these;

• Understanding the Experiences and Needs of Gay,Lesbian,Bisexual, and Transgender(GLBT) Youth in Middle Level Schools
• Strategies and Resources for Meeting the Needs of Gay,Lesbian,Bisexual, and Transgender Youth in Middle Level Schools
• Geographic Literacy for Global Citizens
• Climate Change: Global Connections and Sustainable Solutions

Conservatives should pay careful attention to the curriculum their children receive at every level not just in high school which now resembles the political correctness so pervasive in our college’s and universities.

 

California Gets Egg On Its Face

California has long been considered a progressive if not radical state for the number and types of ballot measures that voters face every election season.  This year is no different.  With most of the focus centering on Proposition 8 and gay marriage little attention has been paid to another measure that could have a wide economic effect on the state’s economy.

Proposition 2 which is an animal rights measure would give farm animals the right to spread their hooves and claws , rather than being confined to small cages that limit their movement as is the case with many chickens, pigs and cows.

But California doesn’t have a major veal or pork industry so the focus is on the henhouses in the state and their resident egg layers.

The battle lines are drawn with egg producers on one side claiming that this meausre would drive up production costs and therefore prices to consumers while as Wayne Pacelle, the president and chief executive of the Humane Society of of the United States (HSUS) feels that if they are going to killed for food that they deserve to be treated with decency and a semblence of life.

Maybe Mr. Pacelle insists that everything he eats be labeled as having been raised and treated more like a human being but my main concern is having a reliable and safe food supply.  I have eaten free range turkey compliments of a friend of mine and while it was vey tasty it wasn’t worth the substantial premium they paid to salve their conscience.

There is a lot at stake here.  California is the fifth largest producer- and number 1 consumer of eggs can’t afford anything that puts a dent in their economy.  Facing a massive budget deficit the last thing the state needs is a neasure that drives up costs to businesses and consumers as the economy softens.

Both sides have poured a lot of money into this campaign with the Humane Society dropping about $4 million thus far and the pro-egg Californians for Safe Food raising $6.7 million .  All this over hens and eggs.

Besides veterinary groups that have split on the issue Hollywood couldn’t resist getting in on the action.  Oprah Winfrey the Obama kingmaker recently devoted an episode of her show to the subject, complete with  mock-ups of animals in cages.  We all know what an expert Oprah is on animal rights.

There is a good chance that the measure will pass but with a soft economy and the threat of increased food prices it isn’t guaranteed even in California.

 

Speed Cameras Could Use an Adjustment

On my drive into D.C. every morning I pass through the bucolic town of Chevy Chase , Md.  Several months ago the town or more properly village decided to install speed cameras on both sides of Connecticut Ave. which is the main thoroughfare that passes through the village leading into D.C.  This was my first up close look at what effect speed cameras have on driving habits and my conclusion is that the whole idea needs to be rethought.

My reasoning is this.  Connecticut Ave.  is a very heavily traveled road, so much so that during the morning and evening rush hours traffic rarely moves above 30 mph which is the speed limit for the road.  Thus the first effect is that traffic that is already moving at a snail’s pace comes to an almost complete stop as it approaches the camera’s  The three inbound lanes each have a camera and two of the three outbound lanes have one so you can imagine what this looks like.  While I don’t know of any reported accidents as a result of these particular cameras I have read reports of drivers slamming on the brakes at the last minute when they realize that there is a camera and causing accidents at other locations.

Another problem I have with these cameras is that drivers caught speeding can and have been ticketed only a block or two away by a police officer since they were still technically speeding.  I am not going to condone speeding but this smells like a definite revenue trap for the unsuspecting.  It’s not double jeopardy since one violation was from the camera at a spot different than where the officer ticketed the motorist.

There is no doubt that speed cameras are here to stay by virtue of the amount of money they generate for local jurisdictions and that trumps any supposed safety issue.  I propose that if it’s really about safety then operate the cameras when traffic is the heaviest and the risk is higher for accidents and turn them off in off-peak hours.   After all is it really a safety issue if someone is driving ten miles over the speed limit at midnight when there is little or no traffic?   Maybe it’s a dumb proposal but I would be far more convinced that the cameras serve a purpose other than that of a revenue generator if they were adjusted based on traffic volume.

If you think I’m off my rocker read this story on the arrangements Montgomery County, Md has with the private company operating the cameras.