Where to Now?

McCain wins Florida and Rudy dropping out...where do conservative voters go now?

I think I'm gonna hurl...

Bad Mood Rising

VDH wonders about California's Groundhog day:

Our poor state is $14 billion plus now in the red, and the Governator has promised no new taxes, wise inasmuch as our sales and income taxes are already among the highest in the country. The University of California system is panicking and sending out emails to us alums, to march en masse on Sacramento for redress!

But lost in the furor is any self-reflection, such as why would UC Davis recently pay John Edwards, multimillionaire trial lawyer, $50,000 plus to give a brief lecture on poverty? Such questions are never answered, much less raised, since the problem is always framed as a matter of a shortage of income, never a surfeit of unnecessary expenditure.

We in California, given the past budget implosions, know the script to follow. We expect that police, fire, prisons, parks etc will be threatened with cut-backs and closure while the state-funded "Center for this" and the "Department of that" will remain untouched, since cutting the essential while protecting the politically-correct superfluous is the only way to scare the voter and achieve higher taxes.

At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world's richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace—and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation's largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.

I suspect that there can be no meaningful compromise in the capitol...not when Democrats in the legislature long to increase taxes and the Governor--for whatever it's worth--keeps saying he won't do such a thing as Hanson points out. So now what?

In the meantime, real estate continues to take it on the chin--the house next door has been on the market for over a year and the owner can't unload it even with a fire-sale sticker of $289,000.

I'm upside down to the tune of $30-$40K on mine, revenues are way down yr-to-yr at work and my income for '07 was down a cool 10% from '06 while the outlook for '08 is no better.

So yes, now what?

Idealogical Purity and Iowa

Iowa goes Huckabee. If the GOP is serious about '08 this is where the madness ends.

Happy Birthday to Me!

On the plus side, I share the day with Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Ramano, Comedian Andy Dick and Television tough-guy Kiefer Sutherland.

On the down side...how 'bout Josef Stalin. Oy...

Principles of Negotiation

Soundtrack of Youth

Well...not exactly, though their music will always remind of High School and College. Caught it this morning and enjoyed the short, entertaining ride to a long-ago past.

It should be the end of it...

But it probably won't be. From late last night:

Richard Armitage appeared on CNN today, discussing Pakistan but also addressing his role as the original leaker in the CIA leak affair. He took the blame for leaking Valerie Plame Wilson's identity, but he also gave us a bit more evidence to show that, from his perspective at least, it was entirely unintentional. But there must be a conspiracy in there somewhere.The segment began with CNN showing a video clip of a recent Valerie Plame Wilson interview:

VALERIE PLAME WILSON: Mr. Armitage did a very foolish thing. He has been around Washington for decades. He should know better. He's a senior government official. Whether he knew where exactly I worked in the CIA, he had no rights to go talking to a reporter about where I worked. That was strictly off-limits.

BLITZER: Those are strong words from Valerie Plame Wilson.

ARMITAGE: They're not words on which I disagree. I think it was extraordinarily foolish of me. There was no ill-intent on my part and I had never seen ever, in 43 years of having a security clearance, a covert operative's name in a memo. The only reason I knew a "Mrs. Wilson," not "Mrs. Plame," worked at the agency was because I saw it in a memo. But I don't disagree with her words to a large measure.

BLITZER: Normally in memos they don't name covert operatives?

ARMITAGE: I have never seen one named.

BLITZER: And so you assumed she was, what, just an analyst over at the CIA?

ARMITAGE: Not only assumed it, that's what the message said, that she was publicly chairing a meeting.

BLITZER: So, when you told Robert Novak that Joe Wilson, the former U.S. ambassador's wife, worked at the CIA, and she was involved somehow in getting him this trip to Africa to look for the enriched uranium, if there were enriched uranium going to Iraq, you simply assumed that she was not a clandestine officer of the CIA.

ARMITAGE: Well, even Mr. Novak has said that he used the word "operative" and misused it. No one ever said "operative." And I not only assumed it, as I say, I've never seen a covered agent's name in a memo. However, that doesn't take away from what Mrs. Plame said, it was foolish, yeah. Sure it was.

BLITZER: So you agree with her on that.

ARMITAGE: Yeah. Absolutely.

Seems clear to me that Novak's initial contention that Val wasn't covert was a perfectly logical assumption.

Disincentives

Work is hard enough, how management thinks erecting road blocks is cool has always escaped me...

Sanity Returns

Along with my hour...

The Brand is Everything

When cash isn't King...

Eternal Pessimists

It is a continual dilemma...is the glass half-full or half-empty? Pessimism abounds in the media.

These links today struck me as perfect examples of how every silver-lining has a cloud:

Joe Klein of Time is fishing for bad news in Iraq:

The apparent progress raises two questions: First, as always, what's the catch? And second, if the progress is real, if the Sunni extremists have been routed, if Baghdad has been ethnically cleansed to the point of near pacification, if the bottom-up reconciliation efforts are gaining momentum, what is the U.S. military mission now? Why can't we start bringing home the bulk of our troops immediately?

Paul Krugman, the pessimist's pessimist is at it again. The naysayers were right and the rest of wrong. As usual.

Krugman is actually right this time and there are plenty of negative things to be said about the sub-prime lending mess that we're working ourselves through these days. Krugman's problem, however, isn't his argument or logic--as I said, he's right on this.

It's the persistently and routinely pessimistic outlook that gets him in trouble. He's been predicting recession for going on 5 years now.

Like the proverbial blind squirrel who can't help but stumble upon an acorn, he's bound to be right at some point. But in the meantime, he's cried wolf so often I'm left wondering who is left to hear, much less heed, his warnings.

Where does the time go?

Tomorrow is 15 years. Has it really been that long?

Postcards from Moronica

I'll let this one speak for itself:

There was a small news article about five hostages being traded for prisoners in Afghanistan. Yet it is a large piece of information about Mr. Bush's failure to be a proper leader.

When a government is forced to turn over prisoners for hostages, you get more hostages taken, to force the government to do more things it should not do. Thus, the Afghani government of Hamid Karzai set up by Mr. Bush after the invasion will be increasingly unable to govern.

The one good war Mr. Bush had to fight, Afghanistan, was shoved aside for his personal vengeance against leaders in Iraq. Had Mr. Bush, with the blessing of most countries after 9/11, spent only about half of the money and sent about half the troops to Afghanistan as he has sent to Iraq, Afghanistan would have been rebuilt and shown that democracy works in Islamic countries.

But he did not. We know Iraq is lost, but Mr. Bush won't admit it, leaving our boys to die there for his glory. Now it looks like his stubbornness to keep up pretenses in Iraq will lose Afghanistan, too.

Of a different magnitude

Having survived Maliburn '85 and watched it's repeat in 1993, I'm somewhat sceptical of headlines like this:

Wildfire threatens Pepperdine University...

That is until I started to read. This is already in less than one short day well beyond any previous episodes that I recall:

The blaze had charred at least 1,000 acres, or more than a square mile. Wind that gusted as high as 65 mph carried embers across the Pacific Coast Highway, closing the popular road and setting fire to cars and trees in the parking lot of a shopping center where several stores were damaged.

Television news video showed several other buildings also in flames in the area, including clusters of beach-side homes.

Flames consumed the landmark Castle Kashan, a stately fortress-like home with turrets and arched windows, as about a dozen residents watched from across a street. Chunks of brick fell from the exterior of the burning building overlooking the coast.

...

Erratic wind gusts hampered efforts to drop water from aircraft and pushed flames toward HRL Laboratories, commonly known as Hughes Lab, a research and engineering facility jointly owned by Boeing Co. and General Motors Corp. about a mile north of Pepperdine. One outbuilding caught fire, Boeing spokeswoman Diana Ball said.

Flames engulfed Malibu Presbyterian Church, which had been evacuated, said youth pastor Eric Smith. “That’s the really good news, that everyone’s out and safe,” Smith said.

In addition, high winds have carried burning embers to the beach-side of the Coast Highway reportedly leading to the burning of several beach-side homes and damage to retail buildings and cars at a shopping center across the highway.

The Castle and Malibu Presbyterian Church both sit on the beach-side of Malibu Canyon road as it runs out of the canyon and begins it's descent to PCH. Both have sat there as landmarks for decades. I'm amazed at the thought they are now gone.

In past episodes such as this LA County firefighters have always dug in at the top of the University which sits carved into a horseshoe in the hillside. There in 1985 and in other years, firefighters waited for the fire to move over and down the hills, killing it before it could damage any of the University structures. With the recently finished Graziadio School of Business now sitting on that hillside, I'm wondering exactly how they'll approach the University's protection.

Video of the Fire Dept. newsconference earlier this afternoon is avaialable here.

Back with a Bang

OK, maybe not. But it's something. And something is more than nothing. Or so I learned in a Stats class in grad school.

I don't agree with many of the angles in this Roger Cohen piece (especially the gloss-over on neocons as uniformly imperialist), but I do agree with the central thrust about how 'neocon' has become shorthand for any 'hawkish' position or any 'conservative' position or, frankly, any position on any subject that someone doesn't like.

Though I'm not a neocon, it's a pet peeve of mine because I don't like imprecision when it comes to language.

The Congress that couldn't Legislate straight

I've lost track of how many times Senate Dems have gotten Mitch-slapped in recent months. Now it seems that House Republicans are joining the party:

Republicans successfully maneuvered to derail a Democratic government eavesdropping bill Wednesday, delaying a House vote until next week at the earliest.

The bill, which seeks to expand court oversight of government surveillance in the United States, fell victim to a gambit by the chamber's Republican minority. Democrats were forced to pull the bill from the House floor with no certainty about how it might be revived.

If it weren't such serious stuff, it'd be hilarious. The Keystone Cops never looked this bad...

&^*# Fantasy Sports

I quit. I'm officially going AWOL at Fanball. An un-attended squad can do at least this poorly...

I'm the King of the World!

Er, I'm running the shop. Haven't a clue what I'm doing but we'll see what happens...

New meaning to the phrase

"You can't afford me."

Well, that can't be good...

When your employer shows up on somebody's analysis as at-risk for bankruptcy...

In last week's post I calculated Z scores, an index used to forecast bankruptcy risk, for the New York Times (NYT) and several key competitors, including the Washington Post (WPO), News Corp (NWS), and the McClatchy News Group (MNI) using the 10K and 10Q reports. Since then I did the calculations for four more newspaper publishers, Gannett (GCI), Journal Register (JRE), Lee (LEE), and Scripps (SSP). The results are consistent with the respective business conditions facing each company

NYT WPO NWS MNI GCI SSP LEE JRE Z Score 9/2007
1.835 4.118 2.139 0.812 2.755 4.137 1.282 0.752


News Corp., The Washington Post, Gannett and Scripps all score well above the 1.8 high risk threshold. These companies are diversified communications media companies with a number of high performance segments offsetting the structural decay of their newspaper properties. The other companies in the danger zone are all mainly pure-play newspaper businesses that made the fatal decision to buy out competitors at a false bottom similar to Movie Gallery's bad move.

McClatchy, Lee, The Journal Register and to lesser extent the New York Times should be placed on the watch list.