Happy New Year if you're a fed

Bensblurb #516

Happy New Year? Yes if you’re a fed
　
Admittedly, $14,000 may be chump change for the wealthy, but it’s real money, even for those of us around here on government payrolls or drawing comfortable federal pensions.

Montana’s Sen. Max Baucus gave that large a pay raise to a female staffer in 2008, as they were becoming romantically involved.
Those bucks don’t rank up there with the outrageous bonuses paid Wall Street executives. or the congressional earmarks. But they surely raise a few eyebrows down here in prosperous Stafford County and environs, where so many government workers live.

Washington politicos and bureaucrats are feverishly tossing money everywhere in a deficit-spending mania like nobody’s ever seen. It even extends to electric golf carts. They’ve sold like hotcakes to folks getting a federal subsidy that nearly equals the price, all in the name of saving energy and reducing CO2.

But who am I to complain? Except that it grates to realize that in the mid-1990s I retired from the government feeling pretty darned elite. But now it’s said that many toilers in the civil service are hauling down over 100 grand each.

Many? How about 19 percent of all federal employees? And the recession hasn‘t made even a dent. USA Today claims the number of federal workers with six-figure salaries has exploded, jumping from 14 percent to 19 percent of them during the recession's first 18 months. And just since June, federal employment has jumped almost 10 percent, while the private sector has cut back. The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker's pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.

We should rename Washington. Call it Fat City to include the Beltway and beyond. Indeed, Stafford’s own unemployment is among the lowest in the country. We too have a few county officials topping $100,000 in pay.

As I have written here and elsewhere, such inflation and the growth of government bode ill for our nation.--too many more bureaucrats with more power than ever before, plus a pay raise to start the new year.
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Some 40 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, it’s said, goes for local, state and federal government spending. And most of Washington’s economic stimulus funds so far have gone toward government activities and staffing. Sp it’s not surprising to read a new Rasmussen survey: To wit, while a near majority of private-sector employees see the economy as deteriorating, the opposite is true of public-sector employees. Forty-six percent of government workers think the economy is improving:
　
Seems they’re running and controlling everything. It used to be only seatbelts, recycling and smoking in bars and such. But now they are trying to regulate even what’s sold at neighborhood yard sales. And soon you may not be able to sell your home until a bureaucrat certifies it is energy efficient

Worse, consider those huge new laws being advanced: Energy cap and trade, health care and financial control. They will surely raise our taxes and plunge Uncle Sam ever deeper into bone-crushing debt. A floundering administration is choking whatever is left of initiative in the private, profit-seeking sector--the lifeblood of our formerly vigorous economy. No wonder over 60 percent of us in a recent poll believe America is in long-term economic decline.

Happy New Year?--I wish, but afraid not. Our USA is in big trouble.

.....Let’s all pray I’m wrong.

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Thoughts at Christmas

Bensblurb # 515

Thoughts at Christmas, 2009.


We have dug out from the latest example of global warming here in Virginia: A record snowfall of 15-20 inches locally And happily none the worse for wear, considering our advanced years and galloping senility. So take a few moments to appreciate our good fortunes of living here in the USA and pray they‘ll continue,

OK? Times up. Now back to Washington’s follies:

You lie! hollered the congressman during Obama’s speech to Congress a few months ago.
The press scolded him severely for being so.....accurate (?) Yes, he actually was.

Obama: “Your taxes won‘t go up!!!” Unless you smoke. Cigarette taxes rose shortly after he made the promise.
Obama: “Unprecedented” agreements reached in Copenhagen. Yeah, they agreed to meet next time in Mexico City.
Obama: “You‘ll be able to watch on C-Span,” as Congress drafts legislation.. Most Democrat senators hadn’t even read the health care bill they voted on. Republicans were frozen out of bill‘s deliberations.
.Obama: In January, he said, “We’ll close Guantanamo in one year.” Maybe in 2011, says the New York Times, but not anytime soon.
Obama: “I won’t sign any bill with earmarks.” Except for a teeny one for Sen. Nelson, Nebraska, to get his vote on the health care bill.

"Overall, if you had a checklist of promises made, a lot of those promises have been kept," Obama told the Washington Post just before Christmas. But of course.

For now, check out these comments in Commentary magazine by Peter Wehner:
“...some thoughts on where things stand in the aftermath of the certain passage of the Senate health care bill.

1. Few Democrats understand the depth and intensity of opposition that exists toward them and their agenda, especially regarding health care. Passage of this bill will only heighten the depth and intensity of the opposition. We’re seeing a political tsunami in the making, and passage of health care legislation would only add to its size and force.

2. This health care bill may well be historic, but not in the way the president thinks. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything quite like it: passage of a mammoth piece of legislation, hugely expensive and unpopular, on a strict party-line vote in a rush of panic because Democrats know that the more people see of ObamaCare, the less they like it.

3. The problem isn’t simply with how substantively awful the bill is but how deeply dishonest and (legally) corrupt the whole process has been. There’s already a powerful populist, anti-Washington sentiment out there, perhaps as strong as anything we’ve seen...

4. Democrats have sold this bill as a miracle-worker; when people see first-hand how pernicious health-care legislation will be, abstract concerns will become concrete. That will magnify the unhappiness of the polity.

5. The collateral damage to Obama from this bill is enormous. More than any candidate in our lifetime, Obama won based on the aesthetics of politics. It wasn’t because of his record; he barely had one. And it wasn’t because of his command of policy; few people knew what his top three policy priorities were. It was based instead on the sense that he was something novel, the embodiment of a “new politics” – mature, high-minded and gracious, intellectually serious. That was the core of his speeches and his candidacy. In less than a year, that core has been devoured...The lack of transparency in this process has been unprecedented and bordering on criminal. The president has been deeply misleading in selling this plan. Lobbyists, a bane of Obama during the campaign, are having a field day...
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6. This health-care bill shouldn’t be seen in isolation. It’s part of a train of events that include the stimulus package, the omnibus spending bill (complete with some 8,500 earmarks), and a record-sized budget.

And, as Jim Manzi writes in National Affairs...“the federal government has also intervened aggressively in both the financial and industrial sectors of the economy in order to produce specific desired outcomes for particular corporations. It has nationalized America’s largest auto company (General Motors) and intervened in the bankruptcy proceedings of the third-largest auto company (Chrysler), privileging labor unions at the expense of bondholders. It has, in effect, nationalized what was America’s largest insurance company (American International Group) and largest bank (Citigroup), and appears to have exerted extra-legal financial pressure on what was the second-largest bank (Bank of America) to get it to purchase the ­country’s largest securities company (Merrill Lynch). The implicit government guarantees provided to home-loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been called in, and the federal government is now the largest de facto lender in the residential real-estate market. The government has selected the CEOs and is setting compensation at major automotive and financial companies across the country...


And now, let's get back to praying for our beloved, troubled country.　


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Dulles: White elephant no more

Dulles: White elephant no more......(Update: This doesn't refer to the huge snowstorm bearing down today (12/18/09) on Washington and environs as we speak, undoubtedly caused by the global warming fiasco in Copenhagen)

An indication that we’re coming out of the recession is said to be the crowded parking lots again at major airports. Maybe so, particularly over the holidays.

But I wouldn’t know, even though my wife and I took a trip recently to Chicago, leaving from Dulles and arriving at Chicago’s convenient little Midway Airport via Southwest. A good Stafford neighbor took us to Dulles and then picked us up when we got back, adding to our continuing pleasures of retirement.

We compared two routes between Stafford and the airport. I usually had preferred the I-95, Beltway, and Dulles access routes. Our friend had chosen to turn off I-95 onto Route 234 past Manassas and up I-66 and then north on Route 20. Turns out, they were about equal in elapsed time (50 minutes) when we tried them, of course during non-rush-hour trips.

We have consistently ruled out going via Reagan National, since the parking there was typically very difficult and Southwest didn’t serve there. Why court hassles?

But especially during the holidays, headaches are hard to avoid inside the airport. You face the huge lines of stressed travelers awaiting security checks by those oh-so-courteous federal guards and friskers who sadly pollute all our airports, it seems.

Happily, those customary travails are mostly tolerable for me and my wife. After all, since she has been largely wheelchair-bound for the past several years, we get to scoot to the head of the long lines of travelers fixing to remove their shoes, etc. That, of course, does nothing to prevent me from forgetfully leaving my pocket knife on my person, then loading it with my other stuff into a tray to be scanned and added to the pocket of some civil servant.

Used to be, my wife’s disability also would virtually guarantee we’d be at the front of the line for pre-boarding, with other wheelchair customers only occasionally competing for the choice bulkhead seats inside the plane.

But now, because wheelchair users get such huge preference in the security lines, we increasingly see a lot more of them. Fact is, it can be comical to watch a few wheelchair passengers bunching up at the boarding gate, jockeying to get on first.

Air travel out of Dulles seems to be improving nevertheless. For most flights, travelers no longer must ride those miserable “mobile lounges.” You know what I mean--those oversized, clumsy contrivances unique to Dulles. They were meant to pioneer a superior mode of getting from ticket counter to flight line and back to baggage claim. Seeing their many problems, no other airport apparently decided to try them.

Now the geniuses running Dulles are working hard to complete work on a passenger train system like the other big airports use. This one is arising underground, at an undoubtedly outrageous cost to taxpayers, but it looks very impressive at this stage of development. A product of hometown favorites Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, it’s due to debut in about a month.

The one smart thing in Dulles Airport’s history appears to have been the choice of that huge site far from anywhere. Labeled a white elephant at the time by nearly everyone, it eventually spurred solid commercial development and has become a mighty magnet for taxpaying businesses large and small. I and Virginia are thankful.

Ben Blankenship is an Aquia Harbour resident and career journalist. Reach him at info@staffordcountysun.com".
　

Copenhagen Collapse?

Bensblurb #511 Dec. 7, 2009.

Copenhagen collapse?

Just as American Indians once danced around the fire to make it rain out west, global warming gurus are huddling in Copenhagen to make it cool.

However, even the offer of free nookie from Copenhagen’s infamous tarts hasn’t kept old Al Gore from taking a pass, contrary to Obama’s late decision---to give a speech, of course.

He had struck out royally there on Chicago’s bid for the Olympics, but whatever.

In any event, Copenhagen won’t matter. EPA’s actions will. Sad, because “global warming” would otherwise become a laughable phrase.

Indeed, The Pew Research Center found that by last January, global warming “ranked at the bottom of the public’s list of policy priorities for the president and Congress this year.” Independent voters and Republicans ranked it last on a list of 20 priorities, while Democrats ranked it 16th, according to Politico..

Other polling suggests Americans are growing more skeptical of the science behind climate change, with those who blame human activity for global warming — 36 percent — falling 11 percentage points this year, according to Pew.
“That skepticism is likely to increase following the embarrassing leak last month of e-mail exchanges among climate scientists dissing the work of peers who doubt that humans are causing global warming.”--Ben Smith, in Politico

Even so: A political agreement short of a treaty in Copenhagen, Sen. John Kerry has said, could be an assertion of the president’s primacy over a recalcitrant Congress. “It’s a restatement of the power of the president to direct the [Environmental Protection Agency] to regulate greenhouse gases. He has the power of the budget to make requests of Congress, he has the power of executive orders to order certain behavior in the transformation of energy in buildings, fleet purchases,” said Kerry. “But the main thing is that the president is committing to move in a direction...”

So, tough toenails.

George Will weighs in: “The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate-change models partially based on ...reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars--and substantially diminished freedom.”

In any event, Copenhagen won’t matter. EPA will. Oh yes, and by the way, Remember Pearl Harbor.
　

Nothing sacrosanct about science

As seen in today's Stafford County Sun:

Quote of note...

“I discussed the ‘systematic and documented abuse of the scientific process by which an international body claims it provides the most complete and objective science assessment in the world on the subject of climate change‘...four years ago.” Sen. James Inhofe, (R. Okla.)
　
　
The good...

"I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom.”--President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
　
The bad...

“The idea that a bloated federal government having more sway over health care will render us better outcomes at less cost for patients with cancer, heart disease and other illnesses is headshakingly preposterous.”--Steve Forbes, Forbes magazine
　

The wacky...

“They must be prepping him for a Cabinet spot! A federal tax lien for nearly $80,000 has been filed against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.”--Instapundit blog



Column: Nothing sacrosanct about science

Having spent a working career writing about and editing and publicizing the results of scientific inquiry, I’d guess those new revelations of monkeyshines among the world’s most eminent climate scientists come as a shock to many.

Blame the unwitting use of emails that have exposed their candid and damning contrivances to bolster their supposedly sacrosanct findings about the extent of global warming.

Here, I must confess smug satisfaction. Just as I never thought years ago that the world was in danger of getting colder--a popular scientific concern in the 1970s--I also have doubted the feared consequences of the reported warming. And even if the “consensus” among scientists proves correct, I can’t see how we mere mortals can do much at all to alter global climate anyhow.

Fiddling with the scientific data, of course, is nothing new. My innocent faith in objectivity of all scientific research was shattered long ago when talking with sponsors of a golf-course weed treatment at Purdue University. A competitor naturally got the highest scores in test plots, of course, because it financially supported the project the most, they laughed, as if that were par for the course in such matters.

Much later, in managing the reporting of federal economic research for USDA, I encountered political and effective resistance to widely publishing results of a sound study of ours that showed that producing fuel ethanol from corn would cost more than it was worth. At least, nobody tried to jimmy the findings, as has apparently happened among those elite climate scientists now, as their emails disclose.

Sample: “...One of the alleged emails has Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center on Climate Research saying...‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The [government satellite radiation data] shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. . . ‘”-- from commentary by Dennis Avery, my long-time friend, Virginian and environmental economist.

The disclosed emails display scheming among the world’s leading climate scientists whose efforts receive quite generous funding from governments and universities we support with our taxes. Little wonder that Congress is hearing strident calls for investigations of “Climate Gate” while freedom of information lawsuits proliferate. Regardless, “The elite press treats skepticism about global warming as a mental defect..”--Jonah Goldberg.
　
Undaunted, we climate skeptics do have agendas. Mine is to help the controversies torpedo congressional passage of the cap and trade legislation that would raise our taxes and curtail major energy production so critical to bailing out our struggling economy.

Windmills and white-roofed houses respectively yield energy and deflect harmful sunrays, true. But such novelties are a drop in the bucket in trying to fuel our whole economy. Oil and coal must remain our mainstays for the foreseeable future

But might they warm the climate dangerously, melt the glaciers, eliminate polar bears and swamp low-lying coastal cities? Nah. So stop worrying and cool your jets.

I‘m OK, You’re OK. Enjoy the holidays and praise the Lord..

Ben Blankenship is an Aquia Harbour resident and career journalist. Reach him at info@staffordcountysun.com".