Ted Auch

This is something I wrote in response to an article by Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya at Project Syndicate. I love this site and really the thinkers and practitioners run the ideological gradient. Read the rest of this entry »

This from a recent article about the schism between the Anglicans of England lead by Rowan Williams and the boys of the Holy See lead by Pope Benedict XVI:

“The trouble with the Anglican Church is that it has adopted a parliamentary model and one that presumes change and presumes everyone can have a say…I think it’s become a kind of fascist democracy.” from Reverend John Broadhurst an Anglican traditionalist Read the rest of this entry »

Newsflash: The Government Accountability Office has decided to reopen the investigation that found Dr. Bruce Ivins solely responsible for the post-911 anthrax scare that killed 5 people.

In reading this note in The Times I found myself thinking back to the origin of the phrase smoking gun and why we as Americans are so consumed with finding single individuals to blame large-scale tragedies, screw-ups, and nefarious activities. Read the rest of this entry »

I have known for quite a while now that the vote I cast for you in November of 2008 – my first ever vote for a member of The Big Two – was one that I would not regret, because I am still a huge admirer of your intellect, but would come to view with a great degree of disappointment and anger. Read the rest of this entry »

At this point we’ve all heard much too much about George Bush’s Axis of Evil [1]. For those of you that have been flying in outer space or tripping on some really good drugs for the last 8+ years since W. coined this phrase during his State of the Union Address on January 29th, 2002 it simply refers to the boogey men that ran Iraq, Iran, and North Korea at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

The Department of Defense has identified 1,162 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations. It confirmed the death of the following American last week:

KING, Brandon M., 23, Pvt., Army; Tallahassee, Fla.; 101st Airborne Division.

According to icasualties.org:

Iraq = 4,4412 US, 179 UK, and 139 Other > 4,730 Total

Afghanistan = 1,188 US, 322 UK, and 436 Other > 1,944 Total

The dial continues to move in the wrong direction in the latter and it is speeding up! GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN MR. PRESIDENT!

Re: a recent (and largely awesome) editorial in The Times by Brent Staples addressing the phenomena of cutting and pasting senior theses.

Mr. Staples should have stopped while he was ahead. I was thoroughly enjoying his piece on the wrote nature of higher education these days and the lack of any type of synthetic analysis, with students swallowing and spitting up information in no particular order and with zero continuity. However, upon arriving at the closing of this piece I was amazed to see the author distill rap musicians (his analogy) down robots “sampling” “…beats and refrains from the works of others.” Tell that to some of the great wordsmiths this country has ever produced like Q-Tip & Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest, Rakim of Eric B. & Rakim, Gang Starr’s Guru, or my personal favorites EPMD. If Mr. Staples meant to say that DJs sampled beats and refrains he should have said so. The greatest rap MCs are true American treasures and deserve the respect we afford our favorite rock n’ rollers, jazz musicians, and country stars. CHECK YOURSELF MR. Staples!

You would think that any group with a proven track record back to 1970 of fighting against discrimination and for affordable housing, quality education, and adequate social safety-nets for “…low- to moderate-income people across the United States” would be just the type of organization that our “liberal” congressman Peter Welch would go to the wall for regardless of the baseless attacks leveled at such an organization by the bigoted and racist right-wing of the Republican party? WRONG! ACORN is that organization and Mr. Welch decided to vote “Yes” on an amendment – last September 17^th – to the Higher Education Act of 1965, which banned all federal funding to the Washington, DC based association of community organizers. This forced ACORN to end all field operations and close all field offices. This was a proud, vibrant, and relevant group with approximately 500,000 members branching out into foreclosure counseling at a time when minorities and the lower 25^th percentile in the country were getting hammered by variable interest mortgages coming home to roost and declining real-estate valuations due to a variety of external and internal forces. They were influential in upping voter registration and turnout amongst minorities during the 2008 election to levels not seen before, which along with their political mobilization efforts were the reason folks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh lashed out at them so frequently and with such vitriol.

Mr. Welch has always attempted to evince a genuine and holistic concern for the little guy regardless of color, religion, or political preference. This turns out to be nothing more than window dressing given his stance on ACORN. Why am I coming down so hard on Mr. Welch ex post facto? Well it is quite simple really he acted hastily and did not wait for a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released June 14^th, which vindicated ACORN of misusing the $40.4 million in federal grants it received and election fraud. Furthermore, he wasn’t even one of the 23 signatories to a letter requesting the GAO “…provide information on federal funding provided to ACORN and oversight of the use of this funding.” (Note: Neither Vermont Senators signed this letter either!) I have two questions for Congressman Welch: 1) Why vote before you have all the facts? and 2) Why not signed the aforementioned letter? I wonder what the harm is in having the GAO (Run the ever pragmatic and empirical Republican Douglas W. Elmendorf) do a little gumshoing in an effort to get all the facts in a row. When the facts change we are supposed to change our minds and clearly the facts with respect to ACORN have changed and I would hope that Congressman Welch would change his mind and work to overturn last September’s amendment to the HEA. After all this type of haste when in the hands of congress gives the imprimatur to really well thought out and implemented acts like The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (a.k.a., The Bank Bailout) and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. Two great ideas that have served this country and the world oh so well! Oh yeah and one more thing the moneys ACORN received during fiscal years 2005 to 2009 amount to about 0.3% of The 2008 Bank Bailout, which begs one more question: Don’t Mr. Welch and the rest of congress have anything better to do than bully and subsequently shutdown an organization like ACORN? I thought we wanted the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth! Orwell was right Ignorance Is Strength on Capitol Hill.

Below I have plotted the average annual income here in the US back to 1815 for the US Senate and 1967 for us little people. I mean that in all seriousness, because if ever there was a graph that said it all it is this one. The inset simply shows the same data for the period between 1967 and 2009, which is the timeframe where data is available for all percentiles. You will note the inset also has a number followed by the letter x, which if you remember back to any statistics or math courses you may have taken is simply the slope of a given trend (i.e., in this case it is a linear regression). The # that proceeds each x corresponds to the annual increase in each percentile’s average annual income. There are two extremely disquieting trends in this data: 1) the “haves” (i.e, Top 5^th percentile) and “have nots” spread is widening at an ever great clip, with annual income increases for the former 2.3 to 22× that of the latter percentiles and 2) the DC fat cats are gaining on this nation’s net-worth “elite” at a pace that one would hope would cause them a mild case of opprobrium. Fat Cat Fat Chance!

Maybe those Tea-Partiers are on to something if you strip away their bigoted, xenophobic, and often hypocritical bluster. The gentlemen and women that occupy the The Dirksen Senate Office Building have seen their wallets explode “George Costanza” style, however, only poor George who’s wallet was stuffed with junk our esteemed senators have jammed their wallets, pocketbooks, or man-purses full of Cold Hard Cash. Yet, in an effort to to not appear crooked – like Mr. Costanza did when he stuffed his other pocket with napkins – these folks shower us with patronage in the form of huge defense contracts, agricultural subsidies, and a static retirement age even though life expectancy in this country has risen to 148% of what it was at the turn of the 20^th century.

To those on the right that preach against Obama’s predilection for industrial policy I would challenge them not to avert their eyes when the next defense or farm bill comes their way, because if they don’t they will see plenty of industrial policy in these two massive pieces of legislation. The fact is that when we hear senators and their little brothers and sisters in the House talk about putting a freeze on non-discretionary spending they appear to be including their own salaries in the non-discretionary portion of the ledger. It seems to me that one of the reasons The Capitol Hill Gang doesn’t really attack everyone from Lloyd Blankfein and Rex Tillerson to their buddies Warren Buffett and Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant because they know that the only way they can maintain their excessive $3,676 annual salary increase is if they cajole the club they are set to surpass within the next ten years.

If you will humor I would like to return briefly to the George Costanza analogy vis à vis DC Motley Crue in order to put a bow on this portion of the story. As this particular episode of Seinfeld came to an end Mr. Costanza’s wallet suffered a tragic end at the hands of its greedy owner who decided to stuff a guitar lesson advertisement in it. This was the last item placed in the poor wallet as it exploded due to an excess of everything from hard candy and coupons to the requisite cash and receipts. Unfortunately the only people in this country willing to expose congress for its glutinous ways, both personal and as it relates to the aforementioned ill-apportioned largesse, are the Tea Partiers on the right and the folks I have marched proudly with at The UN, The Capitol, The RNC in St. Paul, etc. Both sides have heroes and when you scrape away the veneer each makes valid points. However, they (we) couch our arguments in so much irrational exuberance and non sequitur attacks that the message and the facts that directly – or indirectly – back them up are easily marginalized or out-and-out mocked by the media and the lawmakers alike.