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Policy 
Thu Jul 15, 2010 at 06:44:20 AM MST
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There a many reasons why 2010 will go down as a record year, the amount of oil spilled, the historic legislation that was passed, the hottest average temperatures ever observed in the US. All these will be indicators of a year that in the words of the ancient Chinese curse were "interesting times". This morning we have another looming on the horizon. So far this year foreclosures are running at 10 times their average.
In any given year in the United States there are around 100,000 foreclosures. This year Reality Track, the folks who keep track of the numbers of foreclosed houses, says that there have been 528,000 foreclosures so far, if this pace continues then the end of 2010 will see one million family homes foreclosed on.
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Wed May 05, 2010 at 06:47:24 AM MST
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One of the canards we hear about immigration reform is that before we can work on the issues of the 12 million or so informal immigrants inside the United States we have to secure the border. This seems imminently reasonable, as long as one does not dig too deeply into what that means. It is a nice, simple and clearly intelligible idea, "Secure Our Borders". Let's talk a little bit about what that would actually mean.
The southern border of the United States is 1,969 miles long. The northern border is 1,538 miles long. These are just the land borders of course, the shoreline on the East and West coasts are bigger still. If we are to "secure the border!" then we have to guard, just on land more than 3,400 miles. These miles, both North and South snake through some very rough country, but they also cut through ranches and Native American nation reservations. The line includes cities and towns which have grown up on the border to take advantage of the fact of the line between nations.
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Mon May 03, 2010 at 07:38:08 AM MST
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A quick hit from the Republican Bodine-ism files. The Hill newspaper is reporting on their blog that Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is insisting the White House continue to allow new oil leases in the Gulf, even though his state is about to be ravaged by millions of gallons of crude oil.
Sen. Vitter (infamous for being at the same time a family values Republican and a known client of at least two separate prostitution rings) said the following on Fox News:
"I don't think that there's any argument that we should just start shutting down activity now, or even start shutting down new activity that's planned. Clearly there have got to be changes made because of this incident. But we certainly shouldn't start shutting things down."
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Mon Apr 12, 2010 at 07:00:00 AM MST
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In my professional life (such as it is) I am a 6 Sigma Black Belt. For those who don't know (most of you probably) that is a process improvement project manager. One of the tenets of Six Sigma is that you have to design the process to meet the needs of the customer, whoever that is. It is simply summed up as starting with the end goal in mind. This is applicable and important when we are talking about politics as well.
In the middle of policy fights, it is easy to get narrowly focused on the minutiae of the policy itself, while losing sight of the overall goals. This is even more of a problem when one does not have an overall set of goals in the first place.
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Thu Mar 25, 2010 at 06:46:15 AM MST
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Contrary to what you might think, the Senate actually did some work other than the Vote-a-rama on the sidecar reconciliation bill yesterday. In the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee they unanimously passed the long awaited Cybersecurity Act. Senate bill S. 773 (you can read the text of the whole bill here) has been being worked on for more than a year, but it is moving to the floor of the Senate, finally.
This bill is really quite important, but also presents a really thorny problem of governance. As anyone reading this will know, the internet has become a huge part of the American economy. It is the backbone of an enormous amount of commerce and information sharing. Anyone who does any research these days starts with the internet. You want to know what the capital of Botswana is? Google it (its Gaborone). You want to know what your house is worth; there are about twenty sites that will tell you that.
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