Our Missing History

Read Fred Kaplan on the chasms in our federal archives. The one problem with his piece is he's citing a National Archives study from 2005, not 2008. So when it says the National Archives can't accept Powerpoint, it's probably obsolete information. But still scary (since Condi Rice was denied access to Rumsfeld's Powerpoint presentation pre-Iraq war, showing how key such things are).

One's Belief in Reason Suffers

From a Consumer Reports piece [subscription probably required--emphasis added] on finances:

Retirement-planning strategies encourage investors to diversify beyond safe vehicles such as bonds and CDs. Our respondents who had planned were less conservative, in general, than those who hadn't. Before the meltdown, that approach benefited them, according to our 2007 survey. But it proved punishing during the unusually severe market downturn of recent months. So pre-retirees who had done more planning reported worse losses, on average, than those who hadn't planned.

Those Bureaucratic Rules Snag TARP Oversight

Armit Paley in the Post reports that an instrument of good government reformer-types, the Paperwork Reduction Act, is slowing efforts to oversee the use of the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) money. The good Senator Grassley attacks OMB for its "red tape".

(I'm assuming the reference is to the requirement that OMB approve all requests for data from 10 or more members of the public--that's the "OMB number" in the upper right corner of most forms the public will see. Usually takes a while for OMB to approve an agency's proposed request, because people like the good Senator Grassley attack bureaucrats who want needlessly to bother good hard working citizens with silly requests for information.)

New Trees for Old?

The NYTimes has an article on the spread of "rain forests". Yes, I wrote spread. It seems the phenomena of abandoned farms/plantations reverting to the "wild" isn't limited to the Northeast. (I've some nice photos which show a big change in the landscape where I grew up over 80 years or so--but that's a project for another day.)

I've put the quotes in because there seems to be controversy among the scientists over whether the reforested land is of much ecological or environmental value. The article is also unclear, as here: "In Panama by the 1990s, the last decade for which data is available, the rain forest is being destroyed at a rate of 1.3 percent each year. The area of secondary forest is increasing by more than 4 percent yearly, Dr. Wright estimates." No way to know whether the percentages are off the same base--the way the sentence is worded one would assume not, but then the point of it is lost.

The earlier part of the same paragraph:

"About 38 million acres of original rain forest are being cut down every year, but in 2005, according to the most recent “State of the World’s Forests Report” by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, there were an estimated 2.1 billion acres of potential replacement forest growing in the tropics — an area almost as large as the United States. The new forest included secondary forest on former farmland and so-called degraded forest, land that has been partly logged or destroyed by natural disasters like fires and then left to nature."

The point is, the world is more complex than the protagonists on any side usually admit. As a bonus, here's chapter 2 of a book which tries to display visually how U.S. agriculture has changed, with the prime farming areas moving West. (The upstate NY area from Albany to Buffalo has dramatically changed in this regard.) The focus of the chapter is more on prime farmland shifting to urban uses, but what was prime in 1820 is now forest.

Blogging Secretaries

The TSA (Transportation Security Admin) has a blog, and they just referenced their Secretary's blog. I'm not terribly impressed by the content, but it's a step. Presumably she has some staffer who really does the writing, said staffer also being the one who will see the comments about E-Verify (checking ID's of new employees to scare off illegal immigrants).

Maybe Secretary Vilsack and the new head of FSA, whoever she is, will do their own blogs?

One Obama Promise Broken

Nextgov's post says "Unfulfilled", but in my mind, broken is broken. (Not that he can't fix it later.)

I think it's a lesson for good government types--it's easy to promise but harder to perform.

What was the promise: to give the public 5 days of access to legislation before Obama signs it. Sounds good. But when you are a politician eager to show progress and claim credit, it goes against the grain. So as soon as the House and Senate passed the legislation reversing the Supreme Court's decision in the Ledbetter case (the time frame for filing a discrimination complaint over unequal pay starts with the first paycheck) Obama did his signing ceremony.

The problem is the bureaucrats, of course. There are bureaucrats in the House and Senate, and the White House. They have their routines to move bills from one step to the next. And they don't necessarily listen to campaign promises. So the bill got moved along, showed up on Obama's secretary's desk as ready to sign. Ideally Rahm Emanuel would have remembered the promise and had a series of meetings with the bureaucrats to iron out the details of moving an electronic version of the bill to a website for comment and holding for 5 days. But he didn't, so smart-xxs types now are pointing fingers at the administration for breaking promises.

(IMO, it was a stupid promise--he would have done better to promise a thorough overhaul of the law making promise.)

John Berge as White House Liaison for USDA

Apparently this guy, a former FSA state director, is to be a liaison between the White House and USDA.

How Many USDA Employees?

Here
Hat tip, Farmpolicy.com

Standards

The "21" club has dropped its absolute tie requirement. For you whippersnappers, good restaurants used to require a coat and tie. But no more, according to today's NY Times. And "21" used to be the epitome of style and fashion, which country bumpkin farm boys had vaguely heard of, but movie stars like Bogie frequented. [updated]

And do I need to mention this piece of "how-to" advice--disgusting it should be on the web. :-)

For everyone who mourns the loss of standards, I recommend Gran Torino, which my wife and I saw yesterday. (Of course, Eastwood is the star of my favorite movie, Kelly's Heroes, which no one has ever heard of but it captures the nihilism of the late 60's perfectly.) Eastwood's character's granddaughter has multiple piercings, need I say more?

It seems the old Catch-22 is at work. In a poor economy, restaurants have to lower standards to compete. In a boom economy, consumers have to try the worst things to try to stand out. What's an old timer to do?

One E-Mail System for USDA

From Vilsack's press conference:

It [updating USDA systems] will not be easy. It's not easy because the way in which technology has been developed in the Department over time has been that each subcabinet area, each agency of the 29 agencies that make up the USDA, all of them have made, to a certain extent, independent decisions about the technology. And so one of the keys is to try to make sure that we work to develop a consistent system so that, for example, the Secretary of Agriculture can send one e-mail to employees on any issue as opposed to what happens today where multiple e-mails have to be sent because different agencies use different computer systems.

Not sure he really wants to send an email with 100,000 addressees.