A Phrase I Never Thought to Hear

"boomer work ethic" --from a NY Times article on a financial company which hired boomers as temporary employees to answer phones complaining about their accounts.

I guess I'm brainwashed, but I never saw the boomers as conscientious employees, more like Sonny I guess.

Our Weak Government

I keep finding proof of our government's weakness. Here's another example--SSA is reliant on the states to process disability

The nation’s top Social Security official says benefits for tens of thousands of people with severe disabilities are being delayed by furloughs and layoffs of state employees around the country....

Claims are evaluated by state employees, but the federal government reimburses states for the salaries of those employees and pays the full cost of benefits for people found to be disabled.

“We pay the full freight,” Mr. Astrue said. “States do not save any money when they furlough or lay off these employees. They only delay payments to disabled citizens who rely on the monthly benefits.”

The point being, if you have to depend on people who don't report to you, your power is limited.

FSA and Stimulus Dollars II

FSA still has no plans or reports up on the USDA website. I guess they're still waiting for some political leadership to be appointed. The USDA spreadsheet does show some data for FSA programs.. It's interesting that, if you come to the USDA site from recovery.gov, you get a different page than you do if you click on the "Agency Plans and Reports" link from the USDA home site.

A note: the recovery.org site seems to be beating the government bureaucrats to display data on the stimulus package.

Did Cinderella Live Happily in Glass Slippers?

The obligatory post on Susan Boyle.

USDA Garden?

Obama Foodorama posts on the planting of an organic garden outside the ivory tower, I mean the Administration building of USDA. Mostly photos, with a promise of text later. I note they're following the example of the Obama garden and using lots of seedlings. I don't find any publicity for it on the USDA site, although I do note a bunch of appointments (14) mostly of former campaign workers to confidential assistant type posts.

To provide a touch of reality to the hype about the Obama and USDA gardens, the Post's garden editor had a column today, recounting all the hazards beginning gardeners have to negotiate.

Early Days in Colorado

The New Yorker has a nice piece about two women from Auburn, NY who went to rural Colorado (Elkhead) in the early 20th century as an adventure to teach school. [Registration required to read the whole piece.] But there's an audio slide show here which is open to all (though you don't get the love story).
I like it, a bit of romance, a glimpse of the past, some upsetting of stereotypes about who the settlers were.

Taxes

Just filed my tax returns. :-) Obviously I can't complain, since my retirement pay is from the taxpayers.

One thought, however, if you could move to any other place in the United States, with the same compensation you have now, would you do it? (I'd have to see some cash on the barrelhead before moving, but not much for some places.)

How about moving to any other country in the world, with the same compensation you have now, would you do it? If not, how much more money would it require for you to move?

How Does Your Garden Grow?

See this picture from Obama Foodorama of the White House garden. I observe they've sort of cheated by going with seedlings, rather than seeds.

What I really want to know is what are those white stones? pellets? scattered around. I can't think of anything that looks like that.

I'd also say, someone really likes their dill.

Right and Left Extremes

The right is blogging about a report from DHS, analyzing the likelihood of greater terrorism from the extreme right.

But through Steve Benen at Washington Monthly and then Greg Sargent, here's the URL for DHS analysis of some threats from the extreme left. Of note from the summary:

"It focuses on the more prominent leftwing groups within
the animal rights, environmental, and anarchist extremist movements that promote or
have conducted criminal or terrorist activities...."

It's interesting, sometimes the extreme libertarian view on the right meets the extreme anarchist view on the left. Our image of a linear continuum is an easy assumption, but often misleading.

Being Unfair to the Right

Rep. Brad Miller has the audacity and poor taste to quote Cato and Stephen Moore from back when--on the Community Reinvestment Act and subprime loans.:

The conservative Cato Institute published an article in the fall of 2000 that said CRA should stand for Community Redundancy Act. The article argued that “progress predicated on technology, financial innovation and competition — not CRA — has broadened the U.S. financial marketplace,” including lending in neighborhoods that had once been redlined. If a lender discriminated against a low-income neighborhood, “the profit motive would lead another lender to move in and fill the void.”

Proof that increased lending in low-­income neighborhoods was not the result of requirements of the CRA, the Cato article said, was that much of the lending was by “institutions outside CRA’s jurisdiction.”

I appeared with Stephen Moore on CNBC on Oct. 25, 2007. Moore is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and founded the Club for Growth. Moore said that legislation I introduced to protect homeowners from predatory mortgage lending would have a “negative effect on homeownership.” “Ultimately,” Moore said, “for all the talk of how evil the subprime lenders are, let’s not forget, you know, 94 percent of these subprime loans are paid on time. And subprime lenders have actually increased the rate of homeownership in America.”

I wonder--the Internet makes it easier to catch people of all stripes in inconsistencies and flip-flops over time. Will that eventually make us more careful in forming and voicing opinions?

No, I didn't think so.