Follow this link to the CBS Nightly News report Earmarks: Who Brought Home the Bacon.

Not to be judgmental or anything, but this is the usual cheap shot, lazy journalism that one can expect from professional journalists.

I call it lazy journalism because the report is based on nothing more than the Pig Book released by Citizens Against Government Waste. In other words CBS is just repeating what someone else said without any fact checking by CBS.

Here is the comment I made on their web site about this story:

You should be more careful with the words you use in your reports.

whopping 9,100 pork barrel projects

How do you decide 9,100 projects is a whopping number? What would be an acceptable number?

How do you know that these projects are pork barrel?

Do you think that potato pest management and research might be of huge economic importance to a state with a large number of potato farmers? Why would you consider that pork barrel?

What is wrong with study mosquito trapping in Florida? It’s not like Florida doesn’t have any mosquito problems and that mosquitoes don’t cause disease and death.

Do you know what the scientific justification for catfish genome mapping is? If not, how do you know it is pork barrel.

You state that there is $16.5 billion in 2010 spent on these projects. You also state that Despite a deficit that’s pushing $1.5 trillion

These projects represent slightly more than 1% of the deficit. Was it worth spending the broadcast time and trying to incite your audience over 1% of the deficit, not even the budget, over projects that may or may not have significant merit?

Does anyone have a sense of proportion anymore? Are there responsible journalists anymore? Or is it it journalism’s duty to ridicule politicians because you have made them an easy target?

On April 12, 2010, there was a Senate vote on Cloture on the Motion to Proceed (Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to H.R. 4851 ).

Measure Number: H.R. 4851 (Continuing Extension Act of 2010 ) A bill to provide a temporary extension of certain programs, and for other purposes.

The certain programs included unemployment benefits.

YEAs 60
NAYs 34
Not Voting 6

The following Republicans (and other non-Democrats) voted for cloture thus allowing for a vote on the unemployment benefit extensions.

Brown (R-MA)
Collins (R-ME)
Snowe (R-ME)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Lieberman (ID-CT)
Sanders (I-VT)

No voting Democrat voted against cloture.

The following six Senators did not vote:

Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Gregg (R-NH)
Harkin (D-IA)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Rockefeller (D-WV)

Follow this link to an exchange between Marc Ambinder, the politics editor of The Atlantic, and one of his readers.

I have not been following the story about Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s celebration of southern history, except to notice the headlines.

No matter what your reaction to either side of this exchange, there might be something there that adds to your understanding of people. It might leave you with something to think about.

For completeness sake, I tracked down Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation of Confederate History month.

I thought the following clause of the proclamation was a fairly decent bow to the reality of the Confederacy that somewhat mitigated the issuing of the proclamation.

WHEREAS, it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders, and the study of this time period should reflect upon and learn from this painful part of our history; and

What I didn’t realize was that the clause was added last Wenesday after the governor received complaints about the proclamation.

See the AP story headlined by the Worcester T & G as Obama: Omission of slaves’ history ‘unacceptable’.

Click on the image below to see the video.

Follow this link to Organizing For America to see a different state or to see other related documents.

Follow this link to the blog posting Giving Up on Policymakers by Mark Thoma, an economist in Eugene, Oregon (Awr’-i-gun, not Or-a-gone’).

He starts off by saying:

I’ve been pushing hard for more help for labor markets for quite awhile — at times I’ve thought it was a bit repetitive, but necessary — but it’s probably time for me to give up and accept that we are going to have a slower recovery than we could have had with more aggressive fiscal policy. Unless there is a dramatic reversal of recent indications that we are at the beginning of a recovery, Congress is not going to provide anything more than token help from here forward.

He has a very good analysis of why fiscal stimulus is needed, in general.  However disappointed he may be, he has to recognize political reality.  The uproar from the economically uneducated would be deafening if the President and Democrats in Congress tried for another large stimulus.

The economically uneducated (which appears to be a huge segment of our society) thinks that cutting taxes and the deficit is a better solution.  Just staving off this ruinous idea is an accomplishment of the President in and of itself.

In a democracy, politicians can’t just institute any old policy they want, and expect to stay in power for long.  If what they want to do is right, then they must first educate the electorate.  Such education does not last long, so it must be continuously reinforced.  This is what President Obama is doing for Health Care Reform.

It would sure be helpful if the President wasn’t the only one trying to educate the electorate.

Mark Thoma tries to do his part with his blog.  I try to do the same with mine.

I also try to recognize who is on the same side as I am.  I believe more in praising them for what they have accomplished rather than constantly carping about what they have not accomplished.

On the pronunciation of Oregon, try this audio ->

This audio comes from reference.com.

My signature is among the ones discussed in the video.

Follow this link if you’d like to help congressional candidates how fought for health reform.

Follow this link to the VoteVets.org page where you can support the the airing of the above ad.

I frequently hear and read remarks that we cannot afford the expensive Health Care Reform bill.

I find this argument incomprehensible when faced with the fact that the bill will cut the deficit over its first 10 years.  The cut in deficit will be even greater in the ensuing ten years and beyond.  How can we not afford to do something that will save us money?

I think one problem is the way the money is discussed by the media and the pundits, and even by proponents of the legislation.

You will see articles about the fact that the bill will cost $788 billion in its first ten years.  This seems unaffordable.  Then you read that the deficit will be cut by $143 billion over the time period.  These numbers come from the Congressional Budget Office report H.R. 4872, Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Final Health Care Legislation).

If you look at those numbers without thinking too much, you might think something like the cost of $788 billion dwarfs the savings of $143 billion.  Think a little more and you will realize that $143 billion is not the amount saved, but it is the difference between the amount saved and the cost.

The amount saved by the bill must be $931 billion. Spending $788 billion on something that saves $931 billion leaves you a net savings (spending reduction) of the $143 billion labeled as a deficit reduction.

The headlines should be

Health Care Reform Saves $931 billion

In the article under that headline it could say taking costs into account the net savings is $143 billion.

Follow this link to the blog posting by Clay Shirky. I found the link to this item on the Facebook page of my friend RogerG.

There is great food for thought about the role of complexity in the downfall of both businesses and civilizations.

In the Shirky post, he discusses the book The Collapse of Complex Societies written by Joseph Tainter and published in 1988.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

Maybe this explanation is more understandable than the way I put it in electrical engineering terms. In the electrical engineering world there is something known as an operational amplifier.  It has extremely high gain from the input to the output.  It is also very unstable in its isolated incarnation. Engineers add negative feedback around the amplifier which cuts down on the gain, but adds stability and accuracy.  So negative feedback is a good thing, but there is only so much gain in the original amplifier that you can trade for other good characteristics.

I have always likened running the economy to this amplifier example.  When allowed to run free, it produces tremendous wealth, but it is also susceptible to wild fluctuations.  Put in some regulation, you give up a little wealth production, but you diminish the oscillations.  If you go too far with regulation, you have no more wealth production and the system is economically stable around the poverty level.  Though, at this point, it is probably not politically stable.

My friend RogerG thinks,

Isn’t North Korea a counterexample? It’s been stable for decades despite all manner of destabilizing factors.

To further clarify his comment, he added:

My comment referred to this text in your blog: “If you go too far with regulation, you have no more wealth production and the system is economically stable around the poverty level. Though, at this point, it is probably not politically stable.”

Which brings me to comment on the feedback analogy as applied to the political system for this example. Allowed to run free, the political system operational amplifier would be unstable. Put in massive negative feedback of a million man army to suppress dissent and you can have stability in the political system.

However, what you see is the adding of more and more complexity in every domain. This is also a perfect example of the inflexibility brought on by this complexity. The book by Joseph Tainter was an archaeological study. Decades of time in the Korean example is not much time on an archaeological scale.