//Delete this later

I don’t make it hidden that I’m a big fan of Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under President Clinton. However, I’ve got to say this. I don’t think the amount of the stimulus, at this point, is the problem with how the stimulus has been utilized so far. I think it’s really the number of federal employees going over various project submissions that has been the problem…there aren’t enough of them.

This is one case where having some more bureaucrats would be a good thing. There’s a big heap of money, a lot of people on unemployment insurance, and that money should be putting those people to work so the government can get some real return on their investment, instead of giving them enough to just “hang on” and thus, not really drive the economy at all.

We need more people looking at each proposal, making sure that the proposal is in line with what the spirit of the stimulus’s purpose is (it’s not to help some state buy a bunch of windmills made in China, it’s meant for people here to buy windmills made by other Americans, thus putting more people back to work all around AND helping us get off our dependence on foreign energy). It’s not meant to make a private company rich off the public’s taxpayer dollars like a lot of these “private/public partnerships” (which are really only approved for political reasons…some politician doesn’t want to be seen as a “big government” type, so he/she makes some corporation that ends up charging the public again to use what the public paid for fat off taxpayer dollars).

Less than half of that stimulus package has even been spent because so many projects have been backed up under review. The administration can’t hire some of these people without getting them approved by a Congress that is deadlocked on an issue they should all be agreeing with and moving on from…Health Care…that they’re only fighting over for purely political reasons. (Don’t buy into that philosophical differences crap the Republicans have offered up…why would it have taken so long for them to get their own proposal written? Why haven’t they been working on this over the last 8 years? Why wouldn’t they realize that it’s politically expedient to protect the health of their citizens in the face of a health care system that has been raising it’s premiums…and their CEO’s paychecks…and blocking out competition in most states? It’s because the Republicans are ashamed that they needed the corporate campaign donations from the insurance companies so much. After all, the majority of the people in this country are really basically Democrats, not Republicans…Republicans just talk louder and puff themselves up more.)

No, we need to get more people in there to review these projects and get them moved on faster, get people back to work and off unemployment. When we burn through those dollars and the job situation isn’t turning around, THEN it’s time to start talking about putting some money back in that pot and keeping it running. Turning the economy around should be viewed as an ongoing thing. That’s how FDR did it…0% unemployment, but he used a World War as a catalyst to get that going. We’ve got a harder job ahead of us, because we don’t have that political instrument to use to tease the less forward-thinking of us forward.

So the Cato Institute guys are rattling the Social Security cage again in order to gin up their Libertarian base like they do every year. As if a total repudiation of their philosophy worldwide wasn’t enough for them.

Here’s why Social Security isn’t a Ponzi scam, and why neo-conservatives should really read up on Ponzi scams because apparently they don’t understand the accepted outcome of a Ponzi scam (and what makes it a scam): Ponzi scams generate less revenue than they take in. The concept here is that a guy or organization gets a lot of people to pay into a pot, and when those people go back to get their investment back, they get back less than they paid in.

Barring a mass die-off or disengagement from society of Americans aged 18-65, Social Security will always generate at the very least a 2% growth in that investment, and during economic booms, will generate more than that. Granted, it’s a very, very conservative, low risk investment, but that’s kind of how it’s supposed to be. It’s money that is expected to be there when you turn 65, and barring a complete deconstruction of the US government, that money will be there. Your employer can do horrible things like raid your pension plan, your investment broker could go belly up, your mutual fund could tank in a down economy, but that social security check will be there. Why? Very easy…there are more people aged 18-65 than there are 65 and older, and even if you’re under 65 and pulling Social Security, you’re still in a minority. Considering that it’s a government agency, the government isn’t supposed to raid those funds (though that didn’t stop Reagan from dipping into that cookie jar). The money that goes in is essentially invested and paid out to the previous generation, and so on…meaning that at the absolute worst, the same amount of money comes out as goes in (and even then that’s saying there’d have to be some sort of serious economic or otherwise calamity).

So, lets repeat…Ponzi scam: More money goes in than comes out. Social Security: Equal or more money goes out than goes in. They may seem superficially similar, but what you measure is the results, and the results are completely different.

This is a common trick with a lot of things the Cato Institute does. They love to try and back up their libertarian philosophy by making their points in a particular manner, but frequently leave out excruciatingly important details. It’s a trick where they go from A to C, and they hope that their listeners just didn’t notice that they skipped step B.

Iceland can’t support McDonalds anymore. Why is that? Because a few Libertarians over there, enamored with Milton Friedman, went berserk and privatized all the banks (and everything else they could privatize)…and after having a momentary economic boom not unlike the one in the US, they deflated and fell completely apart. They crashed so hard, that the people there turned on the Conservative/Libertarian party completely and elected the Democratic Socialist Party to come in and try to clean up the mess. So the bottom line is, the few Libertarians still holding onto that goofball philosophy of theirs because they personally identify with it are looking for anything they can find that they can use to keep deluding themselves that “deregulation and privatization is a great way to run an economy”. Of course, they’re suckers. They are not unlike people who hand thieves the keys to their front door and car, and “hope” that those thieves will use “free choice” to choose not to rob them.

Generally, the Republican Party (and a couple of gutless Democrats) shelved the Mathew Shepard/James Byrd act for 12 years because, according to them, it would be an “unwarranted expansion of federal power” and an “unconstitutional thought-crimes law”. The reason is that it gives the Federal government the power to intercede in certain cases where the motive may have been bigotry if the Federal government feels that the local justice system is not handling the case fast or fairly enough.

The reason why its needed is really pretty simple. Local Judges and police officers around the country have long allowed their own innate bigotry and local customs to cloud their interpretation and equal enforcement of the law. Usually its a political issue…the local Sheriff or Judge wants to be re-elected and is concerned that his/her opposition would attempt to paint that Sheriff or Judge as “out of touch with the local community”.

That’s why that bill needs to exist. There wouldn’t be any need for it if local law and judicial employees did their jobs according to the law once in awhile. The alternative is putting bureaucrats in charge to oversee local law enforcement and judges to ensure they’re following the letter of the law fairly, and if they’re not, those higher on the chain would recommend that they be reprimanded or terminated/recalled. I’d think that your local Judge or Sheriff would be more in favor of just dumping the situation on the Feds and getting out of it, rather than lose their jobs.

“So, you kids think you should have something to hope for? THINK AGAIN, PUNKS!”

“Your leader isn’t going to do anything he pledged to do! Yeah, that’s right. Did you hear? Did you hear he didn’t say public option more than 2 times in his big health care speech? That means he’s not going to fight for it! Yeah, that’s right. You should just give up now. That’s what you get for not organizing and making Hillary Clinton the POTUS like we wanted you to. We want OUR OWN to be president, not some snotty little tweener/Gen X punk like Obama.”

“So what if the boat hasn’t even cleared the dock on this new administration? We’re jumping ship. Yeah, that’s right. We’re OUTTA HERE! You better bet that Obama loves the banks more than you! He’s sold out completely, just like we all did in the 80′s when we realized love and peace didn’t let us afford nice cars and pimp houses in nice neighborhoods. But we kept it real, man, we always smoked pot out in our BMW SUVs and in our perfectly manicured backyards, bought it from our buddy Gerrold from the health club after a furious game of squash.”

“You think he’s going to fight for you? THINK AGAIN! We know how things work. After all, we’re the epitome of selling our souls out. That’s just how things work now. We fought against the Vietnam War by smoking pot and drinking cheap wine in the park. Wearing flowers and dirty clothes. Pretending to be stereotypical Native Americans. Pretending how to play folk guitar. Yeah, we were keeping it real, and that’s why we could justify buying that SUV years later, complaining about capital gains taxes, and voting for Ronald Reagan. We set the rules, you silly little kids, and don’t you forget it.”

“Yeah, that’s right, college kids. You stay home, you shut up, and you better regret you did all that work for “that man” who wasn’t picked by us. We wanted to hold him up like an icon, like Jesse Jackson, so we could say “see? We have African-American heroes here on the left that ran for President! That justifies our WASPiness!” You get your heads back into the dirt and you think about what you did, because we didn’t approve of you turning some of us over and getting some of us to support your token leader. We wanted one of our types to promise us stuff and not deliver, just like we loved about Bill Clinton. But he sure could play a wicked sax!”

“You silly little kids with your “hope” and your “change”. We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen. It offends us. We got rid of our “hope” in the 1970′s when Nixon lied to us, even though we knew he was a phony. We lost our “hope” in the late 1970′s when Jimmy Carter was the Pres because of the recession that occurred around his time, even though those of us who were sensible knew it wasn’t his fault (paying back that Vietnam War debt had to be steep). We sold out and voted for Reagan. And frankly, at this point in our lives, change offends us. We don’t want that. We understand our parents now. We want to make this thing work for us as long as it can so that we can die comfortably. Whatever happens to you, well, ehhh, you can just cope.”

“So you stupid kids stay the hell home and don’t you DARE turn out and try to recreate that movement that you did last year. Don’t you DARE create a movement to push Obama to spend more money to try and right the ship. We’ve got ours. It’s not our problem if you don’t. What, you didn’t make a fortune off the dot coms? OOOH, so sorry. Well, these things happen. You stay the hell home and deal with it and stop risking what we’ve got. We want to live our golden days comfortably. We deserve it. After all, WE protested VIETNAM. That gives us the RIGHT.”

With all the recent outages, it’s hard not to be at least a little suspicious.

After all, every social networking technology wants to be tight with Twitter. They want their updates pumped out over everything because everyone is clamoring to be that central hub of the social network on the Internet. They know full well that there is potentially Google-class money in being that hub. The truth is that Facebook is “close”, but they remind me a lot of how Yahoo was right before Google hit the ground…and Myspace…well, it reminds me a lot of AOL, Lycos, or Infoseek. Kludgy, but serves a specific purpose well (music vs. people lookup). Twitter is a very simple, non-cluttered-up technology that does a particular thing really well, and is easy to integrate with…so everyone will want to be the guy who lets you pump your updates over Twitter as well as display them on your own page.

The problem is, with all these “friends” wanting to flood Twitter, which is already fairly well flooded with various people’s meal updates, whether they tripped on a curb or not, or possibly a bit about the weather, it makes you wonder if the total income is enough to support the increases needed in infrastructure. Perhaps they need to find a way to be more decentralized, to offload more of the work to sites that integrate with Twitter…but on the other hand, that may skew their greatest potential economic strength, which is their ability to search through their messages and find people with similar interests.

Chances are, they’ll end up having to hook up with a wealthy sugar daddy. If they want to commit suicide, they’ll let that company be an Apple or a Microsoft closed shop. If they want to continue to roll, they’ll want to hook up with an outside partnership group that acts silently…but then again, there’s not a lot of value there if you do it like that. They definitely don’t want to make the same mistake as Myspace and let themselves be bought up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Google might be a good choice, or Facebook (though that would render it a closed shop too, most likely). It’s possible, too, that being bought by one of these well-known (and in many cases, notorious) companies to the typical Twitter user, a competing technology might be right there to suck up all the people who ditch it because they don’t trust that new ownership (as it was with Myspace).

Maybe they’ll be able to keep this thing up privately. Optimally, that would be the best for their success…and people will just have to deal with the occasional outage.

I think we can agree that Conservatives have shown up to this fight with guns. That’s what they always do. They take shots, personal, political, and oftentimes, downright insane. The progressives, as usual, have shown up with baseball bats. And they don’t even have a good strategy for how to use those bats effectively.

And in reality, the progressives could still win this fight…they’ve got a powerful leader who can really distract their opponents most effectively. However, they’ve decided that the best strategy is to turn those bats on that leader and pound him on the shins, demanding him to pull out his gun and fire back.

Now, a winning strategy would really be for that leader to distract those conservatives with guns while progressives sneak up behind them and club them with baseball bats. But that doesn’t apparently appeal to some of their very simplistic sensibilities, and I suppose that’s okay…but that renders them effectively useless in the battle to get our health insurance system right, to get our environment cleaned up, and to get some freaking jobs for all these unemployed people.

The real problem is that there is a small group, maybe 5% of the overall population, of people who identify themselves as “real progressives”. Ideologues…not to say that’s a bad word, but they’ve decided to stake out their position consistently to the left of the President, and they figure that will somehow make him “move to their direction”. They use their influence over left wing radio and the netroots to try to “gin up” the liberal base, and figure that if enough liberals get mad, it would “scare” the President into doing what they want.

That’s an utter and complete misunderstanding of the typical liberal psyche.

People don’t become liberals because they’re like conservatives. Scaring them into doing what they want doesn’t work. Fear is something that drives people to be conservatives. Liberals become liberals because idealism makes them feel good. The majority of the people out there look for a leader that can embody those ideals, because they don’t feel that they, themselves, can make their ideals a reality themselves. When they don’t have that leader, they shrink back, identify with a wide variety of different people, and generally climb back into their shells and give up. When you kick that leader down, all you end up doing is deflating the base when you should be INFLATING that base.

The key for those “real progressives”, which in truth, are typically alpha personalities that think they, themselves, can solve everything with their own ideas and really don’t truly understand why people wouldn’t always agree with them. They are very, very different than the people they’re trying to motivate. There’s a couple ways to do this…you can facilitate the organization of individual people by making them feel that their leader is right…and from there, help them take more progressive stances. If a leader has an army of people behind them that are cheering them on to do the right thing instead of jeering at them for doing the wrong thing, there’s a better chance that leader will be stuck doing the right thing regardless of the influence around them. A mob generally can overwhelm the barricades, so to speak…if they’re willing to work together to push them aside.

And THAT is how, when your idealistic leader is negotiating with the other side to keep them from firing…you sneak up behind the other side and club them over the heads. The battle is won with no shots fired, and no one dying needlessly. You get in a firefight with ideals built on fear and try to fight fire with fire, positive ideals die.

It might be okay, I guess, and it might be useful for some people who want to improve their email responsiveness but don’t want to utilize instant messaging…I guess. If they have laptops or a phone that doesn’t deal well with email. I don’t know…email oddly enough works surprisingly well for what it does, and that’s to allow a person some time to craft a response that involves more thoughtfulness than an instant message, comment, or tweet. There is certainly a place for that in our dialogue. I see Wave as kind of a tweener technology that will probably have to give up some of its instant messaging features in favor of more conventional email features…and probably will eventually be incorporated as Gmail’s “optional” email client.

It’s just that it’s a johnny come lately to a crowded social networking field that doesn’t really bring anything spectacularly different and necessary to the game. Like Google hit the sweet spot with search, Facebook seems to have hit the sweet spot with social media. Twitter kind of is its own niche altogether…even though Twitter and Facebook “want” to compete with each other, they really don’t. They’re complementary technologies that really would be best served working closely together to deliver an even better product. Twitter does status updates far, far better than Facebook. Facebook does the whole “me webpage in a can with a photo gallery” better than anyone else.

LinkedIn, though, is an entirely different animal. I think most people would rather like for their LinkedIn to be separate from their personal stuff…even though all that personal stuff can be surfed up if you want to read it. I know full well that my employers can do that, and honestly, if I knew I wasn’t hired because they didn’t respect my political or technical opinions even if they disagreed, I think I’d kind of hate working for people like that anyway. In that regard, if social networking websites REALLY wanted to own the market, they’d do a better job of letting their users track the people who visit their sites, and block anonymous services that let them snoop on prospective employees without those employees knowing. I’d also like to see labor laws written that absolutely require employers to disclose whether or not they’ve been snooping on employees or prospective hires. It IS technically an invasion of privacy…if your boss intentionally followed you home from work and looked through your garbage to see if you were buying a competitor’s product, wouldn’t you find that just the least bit creepy?

Anyway, I just don’t see Google Wave, as it is now, really breaking the market open. Google has been desperate for something to really blow everyone away since they got their search out there. They have shareholders that they have to trick into thinking that their stock is worthwhile keeping there. That’s kind of the peril of letting your company go public…if Google were a private company, they could just settle with being the biggest search player out there, and having a sizable chunk of the web mail market. They wouldn’t have to overstaff in an attempt to churn out new ideas and try and branch out into crowded markets with products that just can’t improve on what’s there.

Bottom line, it’s just an example of why corporations need to de-merge, break up, buy up their own stock, and become private. If more companies did that, they’d be able to operate far more efficiently (though they’d have less of an ability to offshore jobs effectively…that’s not so bad too) and overall, you’d probably be pretty impressed with the overall monetary outcome of all of those spun off businesses.

Bill Clinton came out recently in an interview and said there’d be no repeat of 1994 in 2010 as far as the Republicans kicking the Democrats out of power in Congress, because the Republicans are much “weaker” now. I presume it’s really saying that the Republicans can’t stand on a soapbox and say that the Democrats had 40 years of control over Congress, and had become corrupt…since the Democrats have only held it for about 4 years when 2010 rolls around. That’s just one Presidential term (took FDR 3.6 terms, by the way, to get the New Deal through…and that’s with a system that was infinitely less bureaucratic, lobbyist controlled, contentious, and media corrupted than today’s government). Not a lot of high ground to stand on yet for the GOP.

The twist is that the Democrats will do anything and everything they can think of to lose in the process. You need to understand that there is an entire generation or two of Democrats that are used to being the minority party. When you’re in the minority and the country is going down the drain, you are allowed to be self-righteous. When you’re in the majority and you’re dependent on being self-righteous, you do silly things like start third parties to protest your old party, decide to stay home on election day in disgust, and do many other things that end up putting you right back in the minority, where you can be comfortable feeling self-righteous while the country slips down the tubes. That’s precisely how the Democrats can lose…because both parties are full of crazy people. Unfortunately, the type of crazy that pervades the left is the type of crazy that causes people to become passive-aggressive and check out of the system. It’s good crazy, mainly, but it’s not that great in terms of getting things done.

Now the right, that’s scary bad crazy. That’s marching in line, violent, uncomfortable, repressive crazy. But that IS crazy that gets things done. They use hate and fear to get united and motivated, instead of self-righteousness and idealism. Self-righteousness and idealism might be annoying to most folks, but hate and fear is far worse to surround yourself with.

While the influentials on the right will lie, cheat, steal, and scare their way into getting their sad, damaged people in line, the left wing influentials will, if they do not get what they want or do not feel good enough about what they’re getting, will intentionally demotivate theirs. They know what they’re doing…they’ll rationalize is any way they can, but then they will undoubtedly flog themselves and curse when they let the organized mass of fear driven righties run them over and run ramshod over the system in a thinly veiled smash and grab by people would couldn’t care less about the people who follow them or the country they live in. The bottom line is, if the left wants this experiment in Democracy to succeed, it’s got to do a whole lot better job of keeping their people motivated, marching, and voting.

People have been blogging repeatedly about “what happened to the Obama online campaign machine” that was so effective in 2008…it’s not gone. The organizers are still out there, still sending emails, still holding phone bankings, still trying to get good policy that helps everyone in place. Unfortunately, the left wing influentials have pushed a message of discontent that has deflated so many supporters of the Obama presidential campaign from last year that the online organization just doesn’t have enough people to remain effective. Every time you read a comment, hear a caller on some talk show, or hear someone on the street say “I don’t know about this Obama. I think I’m giving up. I don’t think he’s going to do what he promised. I don’t think he’s going to deliver good health care policy, I don’t think he’s going to end the wars, I don’t think he’s going to end extreme renditions…”, you’re hearing another person who probably has heard so much negative opinion that they’re going to give up, back down, stay at home, and let their chance that they voted for last year pass them by. They might figure “we’ll have another chance in 3 years, it’ll be fine.” Then they discover that they won’t have another chance for 16 years…but that whole time, they’re sure pissed at and self-righteous about the right wing government as it perpetuates a smash-and-grab by a handful of wealthy corporate slobs who just want to take the money and run before the whole thing falls apart.

What this is about is about the latest craze sweeping up all the beaten dogs that comprise the remnants of the “Republican Revolution”. That’s right, “Czars”. They’re crazy about this and think they have something they can hit back at the President with. I’ll say one thing…they’re crazy stupid.

Czars in this sense aren’t Russian dictators. They’re not autocrats. What is a “Czar” in the sense that that what are these people they’re so fired up about?

The term “czar” is an invention of the “media” and a term of “branding” that has been used in place of a person hired reflexively to deal with a particular problem that requires the attention and focus that an elected official or an official that has to undergo congressional approval doesn’t have the time or focus to deal with.

Corporations hire these people all the time. Their job is to come in as a specialist when a team is underhanded, overworked, or underqualified to do a particular task and get that work done. Most companies have budget room for these people. In fact, I happen to be this sort of employee, hired to help facilitate the release of a product or to tackle a difficult part of a project where I can bring more expertise to the game.

A “czar” is, essentially, an undersecretary to an undersecretary. They do a very focused task, such as coordinate with the police about drug policy, work with corporations in regards to air or water pollution policy, and other things like that. In short, they’re gophers. They’re underlings to underlings to underlings. They don’t have a lot of ultimate power. Their job is to sit in an office and do paperwork, occasionally make some face time in a meeting, and generally deal with the sort of crap that has to be dealt with, but is too important to risk slinging at an intern or some other unqualified staffer. In that sense, they’re a GOOD thing. Many leaders would just throw that work to interns, and the results can be disastrous for everyone involved if this is just some kid trying to play suck up to his politician boss. Instead of getting in that situation, they find some guy or lady whose written books about the subject, who clearly has a passion about the subject to handle that work with the utmost care, thus probably getting better quality government for everyone and a better bang for your tax dollar.

Do you honestly think Congress has enough time to stop everything they’re doing every day and approve some assistant to an assistant in some branch of the Federal Government? Absolutely not. Every session, there are piles upon piles of unfinished work because of ridiculous nonsense like this. The position is a reflexive one, requiring that you need to be able to put someone in charge of that work and get it done with the least amount of disruption to everyone else. But if you enjoy paying more for less government, then feel free to make Congress vet every single peon that the Administration hires. They never suggested nor considered doing it during the entire 8 years of the Bush Presidency where he was appointing people who gave him a “whole hell of a lot of money” to these jobs, but hey, you can’t count on a Republican to ever bring up the issue if there’s a Republican President. That’s why they’re out of power right now, by the way, and why they keep losing elections. The American people have them figured out, but right now, they’re pissed because the Democratic Party couldn’t ride right in and clean everything right up for them because the Republicans continued to make a big stink in the room like they do with a new non-issue every week.

For articles like this one which I found through there. I’m not the type to normally read GQ.

Even though the writer is totally historically wrong about Carter on page 6. Those long lines at the pump, unemployment, inflation? Brought to you by the folks who brought you the Vietnam War and those who set up a puppet dictator in Iran so that the auto industry could build Cadillacs that burned 10 miles to the gallon. We were paying back for the Vietnam war, when we got sucker punched in our major industrial cash cow industry of the day…the auto industry. How did Reagan solve that problem? Switch over to another puppet dictator named Saddam Hussain to get his oil, and fund Hussain’s war against the guys who overthrew the old puppet dictator. That set up the first Gulf War that killed the economy in 1992, which drove Osama Bin Laden to start Al-Qaeda and use brainwashed kids to blow themselves up by crashing planes and killing thousands of innocent bystanders, and start the Afghanistan war. Which we’re still in and still paying for, which set up the second Iraq War which has doubled the size of our debt. That was Ronald Reagan’s solution to the problems that Jimmy Carter faced. Compound the problem by about a zillion. The debt was nothing in comparison to what it is today, and that debt isn’t just going to “go away”. They freaking set up the whole economic mess we’re in today. ALL of it. And it started with Reagan.

Anyway, that bit aside, it’s one of the most believable insider views of the Bush White House I’ve ever read. For those who still think Bush was secretly a genius, read that article and it’ll change your mind. That said, it’s especially hilarious when he knocks Sarah Palin. It’s like the second stupidest kid in the class calling the stupidest kid an idiot. That said, in that moment, the second stupidest kid in the class had a sudden moment of brilliance in comparison to the smart kids turned idiots around him. Smart people can spot a smart person. Idiots can spot an idiot when smart people sometimes cannot.