Mr. Coburn Goes to Washington

We should all be very thankful that Tom Coburn is in Washington. He is screaming from the rooftops about what we are doing to our country and eventually people are going to start to listen.

Here are some excerpts from a recent Op/Ed in the WSJ:

I recently suggested that seniors will die sooner if Congress actually implements the Medicare cuts in the health-care bill put forward by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. My colleagues who defend the bill—none of whom have practiced medicine—predictably dismissed my concern as a scare tactic. They are wrong. Every American, not just seniors, should know that the rationing provisions in the Reid bill will not only reduce their quality of life, but their life spans as well.

My 25 years as a practicing physician have shown me what happens when government attempts to practice medicine: Doctors respond to government coercion instead of patient cues, and patients die prematurely. Even if the public option is eliminated from the bill, these onerous rationing provisions will remain intact.

.....Section 6301 of the Reid bill creates new comparative effectiveness research (CER) programs. CER panels have been used as rationing commissions in other countries such as the U.K., where 15,000 cancer patients die prematurely every year according to the National Cancer Intelligence Network. CER panels here could effectively dictate coverage options and ration care for plans that participate in the state insurance exchanges created by the bill.

Additionally, the Reid bill depends on the recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in no fewer than 14 places. This task force was responsible for advising women under 50 to not undergo annual mammograms. The administration claims the task force recommendations do not carry the force of law, but the Reid bill itself contradicts them in section 2713. The bill explicitly states, on page 17, that health insurance plans "shall provide coverage for" services approved by the task force. This chilling provision represents the government stepping between doctors and patients. When the government asserts the power to provide care, it also asserts the power to deny care.

.....Other unintended consequences of the Reid bill could wreak havoc on patients' lives. What happens, for instance, when savvy consumers commanded to buy insurance realize the penalty is the de facto premium? It won't take long for younger, healthier Americans to realize it's cheaper to pay a $750 tax for coverage instead of, say, $5,000 in annual premiums when coverage can't be denied if you get sick.

OMB Budget Director Peter Orzsag's belief that mandatory health insurance will become a "cultural norm" is bureaucratic naivete that will produce skyrocketing premiums and reduced care for everyone. My state's own insurance commissioner, a Democrat, recently confirmed this concern to me in a letter noting that "the result will be higher insurance rates due to a higher percentage of insured being higher risk/expense individuals."

Consumer Financial Protection Agency

Tom Brown over at Bankstocks.com has a great piece on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that Congress is in the process of creating and giving some teeth.

From the article:

The CFPA, as you probably already know, is supposed to be a financial-products version of the Consumer Products Safety Commission. The idea, apparently, is that it will regulate consumer financial products, from credit cards, to mortgages, to payday loans, to ensure that they are “safe” for consumers. As a practical matter, that will presumably mean the agency will, for instance, cap fees and rates on credit cards, limit prepayment penalties on mortgages, and who knows what else.

Which is to say, the CFPA will be unique among banking regulators: it will exist to, at the margin, help weaken the financial system, by preventing banks from offering profitable products that their customers actually want. Instead, the agency will get in between lender and borrower and force banks to price key products at levels that will either undermine their profitability or render them uneconomic, or useless, or both.

.......But the CFPA won’t just hobble the banking industry’s recovery. It will also reduce the amount of credit available to individuals and businesses. Say what you will about the aftershocks of the subprime bust, the democratization of credit is a good thing, not a bad thing. Innovative lending products—yes, even ones aimed at subprime borrowers—can, when properly underwritten, finance home purchases and business startups and expansions that would otherwise go unfunded. If CFPA meddling renders some of these products unprofitable, lenders simply won’t offer them. How’s that supposed to help fuel the recovery?

Critics of the banking system say that the credit crunch is proof the industry needs to be more tightly regulated. No. As it is, the industry’s overseen by four separate agencies. Where were they when lenders went off the deep end in 2006 and 2007? Besides, the market itself has already imposed more new discipline on the banking industry than any new passel of bureaucrats can. The list of institutions that have collapsed, from Lehman Brothers, to Washington Mutual, to Countrywide, is long and impressive. Their demise has concentrated the minds of the executives that manage the institutions that remain. So, CFPA or not, you won’t be seeing many 95% LTV no-doc option ARMs being written any time soon.

Stuff Christians Like

My wife directed me to this blog tonight, and I have definitely added it to my favorites list.

Here is one blog post I found particularly insightful and entertaining:

I don’t know if hell has a PR department, but if they do, they’ve done a bang up job of getting satan worked out of the modern Christian vernacular.

I didn’t realize this until recently. In my attempts to be a relevant, culturally aware, cool Christian, I’ve virtually eliminated any mention of satan from my conversations. I’ll talk all day about building community or how to use social media to grow social justice, but satan? That guy gets a free pass.

In almost 700 posts on Stuff Christians Like I’ve only mentioned him seriously maybe 5 times. Here are the posts I’ve written that really reference him …

#15 Calling satan “the enemy”

#206. Putting the devil “on notice.”

#247. A bizarre relationship with CAPITALIZATION. (which explains the lowercase s I keep using)

That seems like a tremendous oversight in some ways. And maybe you’re the same way. When was the last time you and your Christian friends talked about satan or lucifer or the enemy? I feel like to some degree, I associate satan with old school Bible beaters. He’s part of the previous, sweaty generation, but not mine. And I’ve seen friends make the same assumption with some of the things they’ll tell me:

“As long as you’re happy and communicating in your marriage you’ll never be tempted to have an affair.”

“It’s college, that’s what everyone does in college. I’ll settle down later.”

“I know it’s not age appropriate, but my kids really love that show, so what can I do?”

Those statements aren’t a big deal if we lived in a world where we didn’t have an enemy that was actively and aggressively fighting us. Those statements don’t matter if we didn’t have a force of evil that was delirious with hunger for you.

My dad thinks it’s because we typically like to edit John 10:10. We love to roll around in the second half of that verse. We’ll make mugs and calendars with the last part:

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

But the first half of that verse is a lot less sexy. In fact it’s scary:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy”

What’s the solution? To tell you the truth, I don’t have an easy fix. But on Stuff Christians Like, I’m declaring today “National Satan Awareness Day.” (I’m not going to lie to you, I was going to write this as National Awareness Day of Satan” just so I could see if I could get a bumper sticker that said, “I’m kickin’ NADS with prayer.” But I’m apparently very mature and was able to resist. Sort of.)

I don’t think we need to obsess on satan, but I think we need to be aware that he’s out there. And I think we need to pray that the protection and peace of a God who is bigger and stronger and already beaten him will continue guiding us.

100 Reasons Climate Change is Natural

Read all of them, but here are my ten favorites:

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.

8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.

68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.

80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.

83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.

89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.

Bob Rodriguez Interview

Please take time to read the transcript of Consuelo Mack's interview with the legendary money manager Bob Rodriguez.

Some of the more brilliant responses from Rodriquez:

...........So I started thinking differently about what the norm is, and then how can you turn that to your competitive advantage? So it's always been that way. I would say when I was in graduate school or just going into graduate school, I discovered Graham and Dodd during the summer before I was coming back to graduate school. And it really struck home, and I had the good fortune of meeting Charlie Munger in our investment course there.

CONSUELO MACK: Warren Buffett's kind of unknown partner.

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ: As Warren Buffett says, he's the smart one. And after the class I asked him, I said what can I do to make myself a better investor, beyond just what I'm doing here and researching, et cetera? And he said, read history. Read history. Read history. And if people had read history about the economic crises of before, not only the depression but even before then, they would have said this is an old friend, and so that helped. It's come from a number of different parts, but I think really not being afraid to fail and be different. That's what it took in order to differentiate in this business.

I had a friend of mine who was a growth stock manager who got just before the debacle of 2000, we were having lunch together in January of 2000 and he was buying all this dot com, and I said why are you buying this crap? And he says, because you have to, he says yes, if I don't buy it we won't be competitive. I said, but don't you realize, you are at the epicenter of a debacle that's going to occur? And when you get destroyed, you know, you could either have cash or you can buy these things. If you have cash, you get fired. If you buy the dot-com and it blows up, you get fired. So in both cases you're fired. What's the difference? Over here the one with the cash, where you held your investment discipline, you can rebuild your business. Over here, you've destroyed your credibility, you can never rebuild.

CONSUELO MACK: Bob, you saw the credit crisis coming about five, at least five years ago. And at that time you predicted that there was a new financial system that was going to be created and a new era. So what's this new financial system that we can look forward to?

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ: I think, first of all, about four years ago we started talking about the breakdown in underwriting standards, et cetera. With the demise of Bear Stearns in March of last year, and what the response was by the federal government and the Fed, that's when we wrote "Crossing the Rubicon," that we had crossed over into a new financial era, a new system. And little did we know how far that was going to occur, within six months.

So we're still in this process of defining what this new system is. As a result, it is very difficult to define what appropriate valuation levels are going to be, because the goal posts keep getting moved. Look at Chrysler- we were extremely vehement against Chrysler and what happened there, where senior secured creditors were treated in such a shabby manner, it really ran over, you know, the sanctity of contract. So we're in a new system. That means the government is a larger percentage of GDP. The larger the percentage of GDP, the more likely GDP will grow at a substandard rate for an elongated period of time.

We're in the group, and I'm in the group, where the new world order that you were referring to, that I've referred to, is that the U.S. is going to have to change its economic system; that our foreign counterparts that have basically grown on the backs of U.S. consumer have got to turn inwardly for their growth. As a result, as they turn inwardly for their growth, such as China, the U.S. has to expand its exports. I don't see anything like that coming out of the administration or the incentives or anything else. As a result, the more the government takes a larger share of the economy, the likelihood we will be in a substandard period of growth and profit margins will also be substandard.

CONSUELO MACK: So what are you seeing now that other people aren't seeing?

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ: I think the difference is many of us see the buildup of federal liabilities. But there's this feeling, well, it'll be okay, we'll get through it. Well, that was the same not too long ago when the house prices were going through and people would raise the question, what happens if housing prices get hit? Don't worry about it, we'll get through it. There's always that element. So I think the question is, as you have to place the odds, what are the odds that we'll get through this with the least amount of pain? I think that's where the difference comes.

If you want to be on the optimistic side and say we'll get through it and you're wrong, your shareholders pay for it and your clients pay for it. If we're right and we've done our job correctly, we protect capital in the negative side, and if we're wrong, we just don't earn as much as our competition. I think that's a better combination than destroying your clients and saying, well, we'll go out and get some more new clients out there. I don't like that one.

Constitution and Presidential Powers

From President Obama's recent speech regarding the financial regulation currently being debated by Congress:

"So my main message in today's meeting was very simple: that America's banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry -- and now that they're back on their feet, we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy."

Later in the speech, President states:

"In the end, my interest isn't in vilifying any one person or institution or industry; it's not to dictate to them or micromanage their compensation practices to ensure that consumers and -- my job is to ensure that consumers and the larger economy are protected from risky speculation and predatory practices, that credit is flowing, that businesses can grow, and jobs are once again being created at the pace we need."

When the President of the most powerful nation in the world states that he expects "an extraordinary commitment" from you, you better believe he is dictating terms and planning to micromanage every decision you make.

I also want to discuss another aspect of President Obama's speech. He stated in his speech that it's his "job is to ensure that consumers and the larger economy are protected from risky speculation and predatory practices, that credit is flowing, that businesses can grow, and jobs are once again being created at the pace we need."

This statement made me want to revisit our Constitution to see if the way President Obama views his job matches up with the way the Constitution actually describes his job.

Here are the powers granted to the President of the United States per the U.S. Constitution:

Clause 1: Command of military; Opinions of cabinet secretaries; Pardons

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

Clause 2: Advice and Consent Clause

The President exercises what few powers he has with the advice and consent

Clause 3: Recess appointments

The President shall have power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Section 3: Presidential Responsibilities:

• He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient;
• He may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper;
• He shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers;
• He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and;
• He shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

I had to reread the Constitution about ten times for clarification, but for the life of me I couldn't find any reference or mention of the Presidential responsibility to "ensure that consumers and the larger economy are protected from risky speculation and predatory practices, that credit is flowing, that businesses can grow, and jobs are once again being created at the pace we need.

If I am looking in the wrong place, please advise me where I need to be looking.

A Nation of Bureaucrats

From Clusterstock:

If you're the kind of person looking to make $500 million a year (a la Michael Milken), stay in the private sector. But for the rest of us, becoming a government employee seems like a more lucrative option.

According to the BLS, total employer compensation costs for civilian workers, which include private industry and state and local government workers, averaged $29.40 per hour worked in September 2009.

Total employer compensation costs for private industry workers averaged $27.49 per hour worked in September 2009.

State and local government employers spent an average of $39.83 per hour worked for total employee compensation in September 2009.

But the killer part lies in the benefits. Health benefit employer costs were $4.43 per hour worked for state and local government and $2.01 in private industry. Ouch!

If we keep providing incentives like this for people to be state and local bureaucrats, this great nation may rapidly become this "once" great nation.

Consequences

You couldn't make this stuff if you tried.

From Steven Horowitz:

Apparently a number of communities in the Green Bay, WI area recently installed some energy-conserving LED traffic lights as an environmentalist gesture. The unintended consequence? The lights don't give off enough heat to melt ice and snow, which means during snowstorms the lights are obscured by the snow, which has led to a number of automobile accidents. The further result is that city crews have had to manually scrape the lights.

So in attempting to save a fractional amount of energy, we have not only risked human life and limb (and perhaps damaged some), we have caused a number of unnecessary accidents, each of which will require various forms of energy-usage to fix (everything from tow-trucks to body shops use energy you know), and we have diverted human labor from more highly valued uses (such as clearing other roads to prevent further accidents) to scraping traffic lights that should not have needed scraping in the first place.

Yup, those LED traffic lights sure did save lots of energy and conserve lots of other resources.

Time to Revolt?

I have said this at least four or five times on this blog, but it bears repeating. If more people really knew what was going on in Washington, D.C. and how Congress was spending our money, we would have another revolution on our hands.

Please take a few minutes to read this report put together by Senator Tom Coburn. The report takes a close look at how the "stimulus" dollars have been used to "stimulate" the economy.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction to the report:

Good jobs for millions of Americans.

Investments in priorities that create sustainable economic growth for the future.

Those were the promises made to uneasy Americans when Congress approved the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or economic stimulus bill, in February.

Nine months later, with over $200 billion of stimulus funding already spent,1 the rolls of the unemployed have grown by millions and, by any measure, more jobs have been lost than created.

Since the stimulus bill was enacted in February, nearly three million Americans have lost their jobs2 and the percentage of people who are without work has risen to 10 percent.3 Many who had been looking to the government for help have already lost hope.

As this and the last report, 100 Stimulus Projects: A Second Opinion,4 suggest, billions of dollars of stimulus funding have been wasted, mismanaged, or directed towards silly and shortsighted projects. Many projects may not produce the types of jobs that most Americans had hoped for or expected.

My five favorite "stimulus" projects from Coburn's report:

5. Water Pipeline to a Money-Losing Golf Course ($2.2 million)

A $2.2 million stimulus grant will help pay for new pipes to pump recycled water to the Sharp Park Golf Course in San Francisco, California. Unfortunately, the golf course may not exist for much longer. The City Council is considering closing the public course over concerns for the California red-legged frog and the San Francisco garter snake that live in the area.

7. Program to Control Home Appliances From a Remote Location ($787,250)

The next time residents of Martha‘s Vineyard feel their house is too cold, they may be out of luck. Fifty homes on Martha‘s Vineyard in Massachusetts will participate in a test program to allow an outside party to control their energy use, ―Big Brother style.

Using a grant for more than $787,000 in ―smart grid funding awarded by the Department of Energy, the initiative will allow participating households to purchase discounted appliances from General Electric (GE) that are capable of communicating with – and being controlled by – an off-site computer system. By hooking up to the off-site computers, electricity managers would be able to turn citizens‘ appliances on or off during different parts of the day, depending on community energy usage.

9. Dinner Cruise Company Gets Terrorism Prevention Money ($943,190)

Few security analysts see the dinner cruise industry as a key vulnerability in our nation‘s efforts to combat terrorism. But, that did not stop the Department of Homeland Security from awarding nearly $1 million to the privately-held Entertainment Cruises, LLC, to step up its security efforts.

The Chicago-based company has 23 vessels in eight cities, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., which according to the company, help to provide ―superior dining and entertainment experiences for its guests.‖68 One ship, the Spirit of Boston, which received stimulus funds to pay for an alarm and surveillance system, is a three-deck vessel, boasts ―chic table settings, two dance floors and the ―largest outdoor patio deck on Boston Harbor."

14. Anti-Capitalist, Socially-Conscious Puppet Shows ($100,000)

Each spring, Minnesota is home to a nationally known Mayday parade put on by In The Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (HOTB), which includes artists that advocate for socially progressive causes such as the elimination of fossil fuels and ―free market fundamentalism.

The theatre derives its name from a quote popularized by Che Guevara, who in a thinly-veiled reference to the United States said, ―I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all – you live in the heart of the beast. HOTB has received a grant for $25,000 to help preserve one job.

17. Buffalo Residents Paid to Keep Daily Journal of Malt Liquor and Marijuana Use ($389,357)

Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo will receive nearly $390,000 to study young adults who drink malt liquor and smoke marijuana.

Malt liquor consumption is an understudied topic, according to the researchers‘ application, making it an obvious choice for economic stimulus funding. The study will reportedly pay 100 Buffalo-area residents $45 each to record their daily malt liquor drinking and marijuana smoking usage through an automated phone hotline.

Barry Alvarez on Defense and Building a Program

I love football, and I especially love college football.

A new football blog has a fantastic post regarding the coaching philosophy of former legendary Wisconsin football coach Barry Alvarez.

This information is obviously football specific, but I don't think it would be very hard to tweak coach Alvarez' philosophy towards a real estate company, bank, etc., etc.:

4 Things You Should Be Able to Ask your Players:
1. Know what you’re doing
2. Hustle
3. Hit
4. Finish

Defensive Philosophy:
1. When you give up a lot of yards:
a. How many missed assignments
b. How many missed tackles (anytime over 10 missed tackles, your probably going to lose)
c. How many times you got beat 1 on 1
2. Never go around blocks, cross their faces
3. Good defenses don’t spend time on the ground
4. Fundamentals have to include: explosion, reaction, pursuit, and gang tackling
5. Go for the ball- the 2nd and 3rd tacklers look to strip the ball, good defensive coaches coach turnovers
6. Stress speed and movement
7. A good linebacker is an extension of his coach. It is his job to keep his defense alert and anticipate the offense’s next move.
8. The bottom line is productivity. How many times is # __ involved in the play?
9. Teach them to get pre snap reads by noticing splits, formations, personnel, etc.
10. DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO STOP THE RUN
11. Disrupt first downs. 3 or less yards
12. The more closer to the goal line, the more aggressive the defensive call
13. Always know what the offense’s answer is going to be to your blitz
14. Always play the scouting report percentages

Program Philosophy:
1. Devise a plan to fit their personality
2. Dealing with players:
a. The position coach is responsible for his players in all phases of their life
b. A good Head Coach wants his coaches to be close to their players. They must trust him. The position coach is expected to treat their players like family.
c. Set up practices to set up players to feel successful when building a program early on.
d. Use every opportunity to send your message
e. The players must know we will do all we can for them but they also have a duty to do what is right. Explain to them we are not a welfare program.
f. Always be honest in evaluating players
g. Don’t hesitate to contact players parents good or bad.
3. Practice Approach:
a. Don’t waste time, use walk-throughs effectively
b. Explain to them that every day is not an open try-out
c. Practice is about reps, coach the corrections during film
d. Explain the drills before practice
e. Develop the young players, keep them involved through meetings and scout team
f. Players respond to good organization. Coach the little details but also be sure to teach them the big picture.
g. Teach them the thought process during certain game situations.

h. Plain and simple, they must believe they have the advantage over their opponent every week