Founders: Their Words

I may have mentioned this Founders site before, which contains the digitized correspondence of the Founding Fathers (and the Adams family).  What's neat is you can do a rapid search for terms.  Here's a list of terms and their occurrences.  (I discovered that searching on lower case picks up upper case, but not vice versa.)   Who would have thought that "electricity" would be mentioned more often than the "slave trade"?

Citizen 11,287
King 10,968
Colonies 5,581
Continent 3,334
British  17,460

United States 25,153
United Colonies  774
Constitution  7,731

Rights  16,033
Liberties 17,463
Society  17,242
Individual 6,188
Bear arms  174

Corn  2,919
Wheat 3,167
Potatoes 515
Tomato  5
Cabbage 157
Oats 806

Apples  425
Maple sugar  79


Horse 7,517
Oxen 452
Sheep 1,033
Cattle 1,782
Cow  496
Hen  151
Chicken  69

Compost  30
Marl 19
Lime 141
Manure 342

Rum  1,025
Whiskey 400
Wine 2,394
Cider  78
Ale 85
Beer 275

Gardening 1,842
Lawyer 2,673
Doctor 3,623
Farmer 2,516
Merchant 10,604
Commerce 7,537
Industry 2,392  (mostly working hard)
Teacher 485

Slave 2,953
Slavery 804
Slave trade 177

Electricity  381

What's Happening on MIDAS: Congress Wants to Know

Getting around to the omnibus appropriations bill:  the first part of the report  dings USDA for failing to report timely on MIDAS.  Also says:

"In order to leverage existing capacity and expertise within the Department, the Secretary is directed to explore the creation of a Center of Excellence for loan servicing support functions in order to provide consolidated customer service, field office support, and centralized loan services to USDA agencies and other Federal agencies. The Secretary shall consult with employee representatives and management in the Farm Service Agency Farm Loan Information Technology, Accounting, and Finance Office loan servicing support functions; the Rural Development Deputy Chief Financial Officer and Deputy Chieflnformation Officer functions; and the Rural Housing Centralized Servicing Center."

Not sure what the quote means, except that someone, an employee, a contractor, or a congressperson has a bee in their bonnet.  "Center of Excellence"?  Sounds like bs to me.

How Committees Work: Logrolling

Via Tom Ricks the Best Defense blog, I got to this Benjamin Wittes post on the recent NSA review panel.  A sentence:

The Review Group report often has the feel of a committee of very smart people getting together and amalgamating their particular obsessions without doing the work of prioritizing them

 This is, of course, how committees work, at least committees with a certain type of task.  I'm reminded of review efforts that occurred in ASCS after a change of administration: the new people would assemble a group of employees who had supported the "outs" to review agency operations.  The group would come up with a laundry list (why is it "a laundry list" I wonder) of recommendations, some of which were reasonable IMHO, some were not, but there wasn't any cohesive overall vision to it.  Maybe given the social and bureaucratic environment there couldn't and shouldn't be a cohesive overall vision.

I assume that the process which produces such reports is simple logrolling: everyone has a pet idea or two, because the committee is deliberately diverse no one has the knowledge or motive to fight against the idea, so to keep everyone happy everyone's idea is included in the report.

The End of the Clerk

Washington Post had an article on the vanishing clerk in government offices which was good.  Down to 4 percent of employees.

Two points:

• back in the day, way back in the day, a "clerk" was a high ranking position. The early Patent Office for example had a chief and a clerk, if I remember correctly.  As government offices grew, we kept inserting positions between the top and the bottom.  
• back in my day, the clerk position could be a stepping stone to advancement, though not always.  I remember a clerk in my first office, who was a spinster from Boston who'd come to DC for WWII and never advanced above that rank.  But I remember more clerks who showed intelligence and diligence and were able to transition out of the clerk to the technician and later the analyst positions.  In the days when many smart women didn't go to college, that was a well-established pathway to advancement.  And when the Feds started emphasizing EEO, we had various programs which enabled black to make a similar transition.  One downside of our current emphasis on meritocracy and college is we make the road to the top much more difficult for those who don't check all the educational checkboxes.  Then we complain about a lack of upward mobility.

I can't resist being chauvinistic enough to mention that some women clerks/secretaries advanced by marrying someone in the office.  These days what people have a fancy name (which I forget) which means college grads marry college grads, no more male boss marrying female secretary.  That's good on equality grounds, but it also limits mobility.

The Iron Triangle and Ideology

I've been looking at the history of FmHA recently.  Post WWII it started off mostly lending to farmers, operating and ownership loans.  Over time successive legislation gradually widened the scope to include lending for housing, for community facilities, to towns <2,500 people expanding to 50,000. 

I suspect, without researching it, that most if not all of these expansions went through without too much partisan controversy or debate. I see the "iron triangle" at work: the FmHA bureaucrats, the lobbyists, and the Congressional committees working together to push the changes through and with support from rural representatives of both parties.  I don't see ideology as playing much of a role, except a generic pro-rural development stance.  Just guessing, I'd think partisan politics probably comes into play more when a new agency is being created, when it's not a matter of adding functions to an existing agency which already has a bureaucracy with ties to Congress and to interest groups but creating something mostly from scratch.

Did Vilsack Read the USDA Strategic Plan?

Apparently Robert Gates didn't read the President's plans--Tom Ricks discusses Gates' rules for Washington officials as reflected in his memoirs:

"... don't place too much faith in strategy documents produced by the bureaucracy. "I don't recall ever reading the president's National Security Strategy when preparing to become secretary of defense. Nor did I read any of the previous National Defense Strategy documents when I became secretary. I never felt disadvantaged by not having read these scriptures." (Tom: That said, I do wonder whether such documents are perhaps useful as guidance to subordinate officials? But obviously not very much if the SecDef doesn't know or care what they say.)"

US Is Not Truly Liberated

From Dirk Beauregarde's piece on the latest French news:

"However when François Hollande set up home at the presidential palace with his girlfriend, no one said anything. No one seemed to mind an unmarried head of state. No one seemed to care that the unofficial first lady had her own office, staff and security guards all paid for by the taxpayer. Can you imagine this happening in America?"

No, I can't.  We're still a bit puritan I guess.

Those Rich Farmers--Some Aren't

The least wealthy member of Congress:

"On the opposite side of the spectrum is Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., the least wealthy member of Congress. He had an average net worth of negative $12.1 million in 2012, due to loans for his family's dairy farm."

He's in partnership with his brothers.  I'm not sure how the net worth works, though.  Surely any commercial lender would ensure the partnership had assets to balance the loans--like $13 million worth of cows and barns and milking equipment and land?  So he might have a zero net worth, but not negative?  Something's going on here that's not explained.

Farm Exports Include Pregnant Cows

From James Fallows on Eastport, ME:

"The city has been lobbying hard for state and federal help in restoring the rail link that connected Eastport with the Maine Central Railroad until it was abandoned in 1978. But even without a rail connection, it has steadily increased its shipments by sea. One of its specialties is container ships full of (live) pregnant cows, bound for Turkey.
Pregnant cows? European beef and dairy herds, reduced by mad cow disease and other factors, are now being rebuilt, largely with American stock. When cows make the sea voyage while pregnant, their calves can be born on European soil and have the advantages of native-born treatment. To put it in American terms, the mother cows would not be eligible to run for president, but the calves would. A company called Sexing Technologies, based in Navasota, Texas, has devised a sperm-sorting system to ensure that nearly all those calves will be female, a plus for dairy herds. Chris Gardner convinced Sexing Technologies that Eastport would be an ideal transit point, and since 2010 some 40,000 cattle have been loaded aboard ships there."

Now if I could only stand the winters, Fallows makes it sound inviting.

Polar Vortex and the White House Garden

Today's Post had a garden column in which the writer bemoaned the fate of his fall-planted fava beans, but was glad he hadn't built a hoop house because the recent cold weather would have been too severe anyway.  Caused me to wonder how the White House garden survived the cold.  In past years Obamafoodorama has noted the hoop houses surviving snow, but the cold might have been too much.

On a personal note, my wife harvested the last fall-planted (transplanted) kohlrabi just before the single digit weather.  Still good.