Let me show you where my tooth chipped.

Yes, Dennis Kusinich is suing the House of Representatives Cafeteria for $150,000 because he bit into an unpitted olive:

The Cleveland Democratic congressman’s lawsuit seeks $150,000 in damages from companies that operate the Longworth House Office Building’s cafeteria.

It says he bought the suspicious sandwich wrap “on or about April 17, 2008,” and eating it caused ”permanent dental and oral injuries requiring multiple surgical and dental procedures.”

“Said sandwich wrap was unwholesome and unfit for human consumption in that it was presented to contain pitted olives, yet unknown to plaintiff, contained an unpitted olive or olives which plaintiff did not reasonably expect to be in the food prepared for him, and could not visually detect prior to consumption,” the lawsuit said.

Gotta be careful about those “suspicious sandwich warps”. And I can’t understand the fuss — wouldn’t an unpitted olive be more natural and organic than a pitted one? For those of you who like to read lawsuit filings, here it is (PDF).

In more serious news, Megan McArdle — my favorite 6′+ female libertarian economist — has a perspective on last nights SOTU that didn’t occur to me but that I agree with:

While watching the speech, I tweeted that “Obama sounds remarkably similar to the CEOs I used to listen to on earnings calls: the ones with mediocre EPS and a failing business model.”  This wasn’t a crack at Obama, or Democrats; it was a reaction to the content.  And after watching the responses, the impression lingers–indeed, maybe it’s strengthened. . . .

So what do those CEOs do?  They spend a lot of time talking about their company’s proud history, even if that history only stretches back a few years. They lavish extravagant praise on their awesome, dedicated workforce.  And they deftly avoid talking about the big problems, for which they have no solutions, by talking about strategic areas for potential growth (“green jobs”), and going over a laundry list of new initiatives that do nothing to solve any of the core problems.  When they are forced to talk about the core problems–and if the company is big enough to attract analyst coverage, they will rudely draw his attention to the problematic areas on the financial statements during the Q&A–he responds in vague generalities that restate the problem as if doing so constituted a solution. . . .

Go read the whole thing.

Speaking of lots of blowing air that does no good, wind power as “green energy” is, all things considered, pretty worthless. It is inconsistent, unreliable, unprofitable, and damaging to the environment. Windmills were nice for grinding grain, but farmers and millers always kept mules, horses, and young children around for all the times the wind didn’t blow. Anyway, the Daily Bayonet has some of the latest wind power failures, including an administrative court ruling rejected Pacific Gas & Electric’s proposal to buy a wind farm for $900 million:

In December 2009, PG&E agreed to buy and operate Iberdrola’s 246 MW facility for about $900 million. It would have been the first wind farm to be owned by PG&E.

The December administrative law judge decision read in part, “We reject the application because we find that the Manzana Wind Project is not cost-competitive and poses unacceptable risks to ratepayers. We find that the proposed cost of the Manzana Wind Project is significantly higher than other resources PG&E can procure to meet its RPS program goal. Moreover, it will subject the ratepayers to unacceptable risks due to potential cost increases resulting from project under-performance, less than forecasted project life, and any delays which might occur concerning transmission upgrades and commercial online date. As a proposed utility-owned generation project, ratepayers would pay a lump sum cost rather than a performance based cost for the Manzana Wind Project. Therefore, ratepayers would be at risk if the project underperforms. In particular, if the Manzana Wind Project fails to achieve production as expected for any reason such as construction delays or curtailments as a result of a collision with a California condor, shareholders face no risks while customers could incur increased costs. In contrast, under a power purchase agreement, project owners rather than ratepayers bear the risk of project performance.

Funny what happens when actual economics of “green power” rather than noble intentions, political fads and good feelings are used to make a decision. The Daily Bayonet has additional coverage of another wind power economic fiasco up in Canada; be sure to read the whole thing.

Finally, courtesy of Sippican Cottage, comes this website that explores the wide gap between advertising creative types and real world people:

Quoth the raven: “Heh.” ..bruce w..

The San Diego City Council, having passed one of those lame anti-Walmart superstore ordinances, is now having to backtrack after Walmart managed to get over 50,000 petition signatures in less that three weeks to put the ordinance to an actual public vote:

The ordinance approved in December requires retailers that want to build supercenters to conduct an independent economic study that would assess how many jobs would be created and displaced, how traffic would be affected and how the store would affect local wages. Supercenters are stores of 90,000 or more square feet with 10 percent of floor space dedicated to nontaxable items such as groceries and prescription drugs. . . .

Walmart waged an aggressive campaign against the ordinance by calling out council members with full-page newspaper advertisements in the weeks leading up to the decision. After it passed, the retailer created a coalition called San Diego Consumers for Choice that collected the [54,000+] signatures in 18 days to support a ballot measure to repeal the ordinance.

Councilman Kevin Faulconer, who opposed the ordinance, said his colleagues now have a chance to correct what he called a wrong.

“This is about consumer choice, and I believe if this goes before voters the majority would agree,” he said in a statement. “Let’s save our city $3 million [what the special election would cost] and give consumers the choice to make their own decisions. The role of government should not involve telling San Diegans where to spend their money.”

Oh, yeah — there was some kind of speech in DC last night. Rand Simberg explains why my eyes rolled when Pres. Obama used the phrase “Sputnik moment.“

In related news, here’s the SOTU reaction from flyover country:

I’ve been doing a bit of guest blogging over at Ace of Spades (as “fritzworth”); here’s my latest post, with a video well worth watching.

Have a great day, and be sure to watch the SDSU (#4) @ BYU (#9)  basketball clash tonight at 8 pm MT on CBS-C.  Go, Jimmer!  ..bruce..

From the Telegraph:

Advert for ‘reliable workers’ banned as discrimination by Jobcentre Plus

The boss of a recruitment firm said she was told she could not place an advert for ”reliable workers” because it discriminated against unreliable people.

Nicole Mamo, 48, wanted to post an advert for a £5.80-an-hour domestic cleaner on her local Jobcentre Plus website.

The text of the advert ended by stating that any applicants for the post ”must be very reliable and hard-working”.

But when Ms Mamo called the Jobcentre Plus in Thetford, Norfolk, the following day she was told that her advert would not be displayed instore.

A Jobcentre Plus worker claimed that the word ”reliable” meant they could be sued for discriminating against unreliable workers.

I would say that words fail me, but this sort of thing is becoming depressingly commonplace over in England. Even though Aldous Huxley and George Orwell wrote their dystopias more than half a century ago, they clearly saw something in the roots of British culture that worried them.

Hat tip to my old friend and fellow skydiver, Matt Yuen, who posted this over at Facebook.  ..bruce w..

Eric S. Raymond, author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“, has a thoughtful post on his blog this morning on how the current recession is impacting his circle of friends, two in particular. Here are the key paragraphs:

When I look at these guys, though, I can’t buy the explanation most people would jump for, which is that they simply fell behind in an increasingly skill-intensive job market. Thing is, they’re not uneducated; they’re not the stranded fruit-picker or construction worker that narrative would fit. Nor does offshoring explain what’s happened to these guys, because their jobs were the relatively hard-to-export kind.

No. What I think is: These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

In other words, established ‘liberal’ policies actually hurt those whom the liberals would most like to protect. Read the whole thing.

Wayne Holder, a high school friend and my boss at Oasis Systems/FTL Games nearly 30 years ago, talked once about how he was a radical liberal through college, then turned hard-core conservative once he started his own business and had to hire people. He complained about the increased costs and legal/regulatory consequences of each new person he hired — and this was back in the 1980s! I can only imagine what it’s like today.  ..bruce w..

Companies are born, live, thrive, dwindle, and then often die or are absorbed by other firms. Being 56 years old, I’ve seen a lot of that first-hand and have worked for several firms that no longer exist. Over at 24/7 Wall Street, Jon Ogg and Douglas McIntyre have picked ten brands that they think will go away one way or another in 2010. Here’s their list:

• Newsweek
• Motorola
• Palm
• Borders
• Blockbuster
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
• Ambac
• Eastman Kodak
• Sun Microsystems
• E*Trade

I worked (on a consulting/contract basis) at two of the companies above — Sun and Fannie Mae. I enjoyed my time at both locations, but I’m not surprised at the struggles that either firm is having. In fact, I’m not surprised at any  of the firms on the list, though some are doing worse than I thought. The whole article is worth reading.  ..bruce w..

Big Government offers this chart of unemployment trends in post-WW II recessions.  Nice to see that the massive deficit spending on ‘stimulus’ has paid off so well.  ..bruce w..

Nothing to see here. Move along.

. . . and things are already getting interesting.

ITEM: Obama throws the Dalai Lama and the entire country of Tibet under the bus (emphasis mine):

In an attempt to gain favor with China, the United States pressured Tibetan representatives to postpone a meeting between the Dalai Lama and President Obama until after Obama’s summit with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, scheduled for next month, according to diplomats, government officials and other sources familiar with the talks.

For the first time since 1991, the Tibetan spiritual leader will visit Washington this week and not meet with the president. Since 1991, he has been here 10 times. Most times the meetings have been “drop-in” visits at the White House. The last time he was here, in 2007, however, George W. Bush became the first sitting president to meet with him publicly, at a ceremony at the Capitol in which he awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress’s highest civilian award.

There were rumblings about this some weeks back, but I couldn’t track down a firm source and so didn’t post about it. I swear, Jimmy Carter — at least, the 1970s version — is looking better by the minute.

ITEM: You know how Obama is going to pay for Obamacare by combating waste and fraud in the Medicare program? It looks as though he may be throwing Granny under the bus after all:

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — The nation’s nursing homes are perilously close to laying off workers, cutting services — possibly even closing — because of a perfect storm wallop from the recession and deep federal and state government spending cuts, industry experts say.

A Medicare rate adjustment that cuts an estimated $16 billion in nursing home funding over the next 10 years was enacted at week’s end by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — on top of state-level cuts or flat-funding that already had the industry reeling.

And Congress is debating slashing billions more in Medicare funding as part of health care reform.

Add it all up, and the nursing home industry is headed for a crisis, industry officials say.

Move along folks, no rationing or cutting of services here.

ITEM: Meanwhile, if Obama is serious about cutting waste and fraud, maybe he should start with the Pentagon:

The agency, which last year was responsible for ensuring that taxpayers got good value for more than a half-trillion dollars in defense contracts, revised audits to curry favor with contractors, promoted a supervisor responsible for such revisions to a top position and rushed through other audits out of fear that the work would be outsourced if employees took too much time, the GAO said.

“Unbelievable problems at Def Contrctng Agncy [sic],” Sen. Claire McCaskill, Missouri Democrat, wrote on her Twitter account just before a recent hearing on the report. “Top of my head is about to pop off.”

“I read a summary of the GAO report last night and quite frankly got sick,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, adding that he would not use all his allotted time for questions because he was “a little bit too upset to go where I really want to go.”

Oh, wait — this is the organization that was supposed to be preventing waste and fraud.  At least this seems to be something that both parties can agree upon.

ITEM: The TARP Inspector General, Neil Barofski, issued a report saying that US TreasSec Henry Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke were less than forthcoming during the bailout last year:

BFederal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. misled the public about the financial weakness of Bank of America and other early recipients of the government’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout, creating “unrealistic expectations” about the companies and damaging the program’s credibility, according to a report by the program’s independent watchdog.

Not exactly earth-shaking news, but something to keep in mind as the Obama Administration tries to assure us that their economic strategy is sound and working well. To quote from Raiders of the Lost Ark: “We have top men working on it. Top men.”

ITEM: On the other hand, misleading the public about the soundness of these institutions may have been just the right thing to do, if I read the always-excellent Robert Samuelson correctly:

Something analogous happened over the past year. Scholars will debate which interventions — the Federal Reserve propping up a failing credit system, the Troubled Assets Relief Program, Obama’s “stimulus” plan and bank “stress test” — counted most. Regardless, they all aimed to reassure people that the free fall would stop and thereby curb the fear perpetuating the free fall. Confidence had to be restored so the economy’s normal recovery mechanisms could operate. This seems to have happened. By last month, the consumer confidence index had rebounded to 53.1. Housing prices had stopped falling. By the Case-Shiller index, they’ve increased for three months.

Read the whole thing — it’s not an apology for the Administration but rather an analysis of just how close we may have come to a full-blown economic depression.

ITEM: Still, there are plenty of jobs available — they just require skills different from those held by the folks who have been laid off:

It’s become especially hard to find accountants, health care workers, software sales representatives, actuaries, data analysts, physical therapists and electrical engineers, labor analysts say. And employers that demand highly specialized training — like biotech firms that need plant scientists or energy companies that need geotechnical engineers to build offshore platforms — struggle even more to fill jobs.

The trend has been intensified by the speed of the job market decline, Koropeckyj said. The nation has lost a net 7.6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. Yet it can take a year or more for a laid-off worker to gain the training and education to switch industries. That means health care jobs are going unfilled even as laid-off workers in the auto, construction or financial services industries seek work.

“So we have this army of the unemployed” without the necessary skills, Koropeckyj said.

This is a constant issue in the modern economy, as some sectors dwindle and others continue to expand. But it’s a lot harder to deal with as unemployment approaches 10%.  Happy days are here again!  ..bruce w..

"The stimulus is changing the trajectory of our economy." -- Joe Biden, September 3, 2009

Don Surber zooms in on the relevant portion of reality vs. hope-and-change. Obama and the Democratic Congress sold us on a horrific “stimulus” package with the threat of 9.0 % unemployment if they failed to act. They acted, and unemployment is now approaching 10% and may hit 12% next year. In the meantime, the national deficit has exploded and will be massive for years to come.

The sad thing is that for less than half the cost of the “stimulus” package ($304 billion vs. $787 billion) , the US Government could have simply suspended all corporate income taxes for an entire year. For another $20 billion or so per year, the US Government could have suspended the dividend and capital gains taxes indefinitely. Those two changes would have done more to create actual jobs and revive the economy than all the make-work “shovel ready” projects that the Obama Administration touted (but is now strangely silent about — except, of course, for Joe Biden, but nobody is paying much attention to him these days).

If unemployment really is in double-digits next year, then look for the Republicans to take control of the House and make modest gains in the Senate. ..bruce w..

We're coming for you.

MORNING LINKS

ITEM: Speaking of swine flu hysteria, this may be a good time to invest in pork belly futures – there may be a shortage soon.

ITEM: Yet another way in which Western Europeans are looking for the US to help them financially.

ITEM: Here’s a slideshow of items from the Michael Jackson Neverland Ranch auction. Some interesting, some amusing, some downright creepy. Hat tip to the Drunk Report.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: With rising panic over the swine flu, here’s a statistic to keep in mind: about 36,000 people already die each year from flu right here in the US.  It will be interesting to see how many actual swine flu deaths we have here in the US. Bet it won’t be 36,000.

ITEM: Or should I say “H1N1 flu deaths“? Just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? Kind of like “man-caused disasters”. Hmm…maybe “porcine-induced disaster“? (For SK fans out there: yes, ‘trips’ was deliberate.)

ITEM: What is most telling about Arlen Specter’s party switch is not the move itself; it’s his blatant hypocrisy after denying such a switch just five weeks ago and proposing changes to Senate rules back in 2001 after Jeffords’ defection. But here’s the real kicker: Joe Biden talked him into the switch. It’s one thing to be persuaded by the charisma and rhetoric (if a teleprompter is handy) of Obama — but Joe Biden?  It doesn’t say much for Specter. Of course, neither does this.

ITEM: The economic collapse has made wildcatters of us all:

In 1993, Chevron Corp. gave up the ghost and turned the field over to the city. “We go for big oil fields,” a Chevron spokesman says, and Whittier just “wasn’t economical.” Whittier, for its part, saw its legacy in President Richard M. Nixon — who attended college here when he couldn’t afford Harvard — and the city was glad to be rid of the pumps.

But then last year, as tax revenues plunged and oil crept up toward $150 a barrel, Bob Henderson, the town’s mayor, had a revelation.

“I was sitting at home, just idly thinking about this possibility of oil drilling and suddenly thought: ‘Oh, my God, when I purchased the old Chevron property, we demanded they give us the oil rights.’ ”

The demand was made so Whittier could convert the area into a wilderness preserve. Says Mr. Henderson: “It’s home to an awful lot of animals — bobcats, coyotes, hundreds of birds.”

Goodbye Bambi, hello oil rigs. Cha-ching!

ITEM: And pirate attacks have made heroes of us all:

Tayler and the others rushed to the railing and also saw what he described as five or six men sitting in a roofless pirate boat. One started climbing a rope to the deck beneath them. “He was already halfway up,” says Tayler. One passenger screamed: “Pirates!”

Without hesitation, passengers began to grab whatever they could find around them. “We immediately began throwing tables and deck chairs at the rope,” said Tayler. One hit a pirate scaling it. He fell off and the boat turned around, Tayler recalls.

The skirmish between the passengers and the pirates lasted for several minutes, he says. Suddenly, the pirates opened fire — Tayler says he counted three salvos of 25 to 30 rounds each.

Again and again, the pirate boat would approach the ship and disappear under the stern, only to reemerge. Tayler and his fellow passengers continued to throw chairs despite the gunfire. One passenger was shot in the leg and one bullet grazed the head of a crew member. The armed security staff finally turned up six to eight minutes into the skirmish, passengers claim.

Good for them.

ITEM: And the continuing market in credit default swaps (CDSs) may yet again make paupers of us all:

Wall Street looks to be quietly making gains in its attempt to keep regulatory interference to a minimum in a $30 trillion derivatives market at the heart of the financial crisis.

The fact that I haven’t even mentioned the name of the market yet speaks to one of the main reasons Wall Street is winning: it is benefitting from the fact that Main Streeters and their representatives in Congress are too bored by the topic to do anything about it.

Credit default swaps, or CDS — there, I said it — are a really geeky business. They are essentially promises by one party to pay another, if some third party should fail to pay its debts.

ITEM: Quick, which car manufacturer do you think will be #1 in global new car sales ten years from now? I’ll bet you weren’t thinking of this one.

ITEM: Speaking of manufacturing, here’s one of my all-time favorite SNL commercials. The best part is watching Sam Waterston struggle to keep a straight face.

ITEM: And finally, this is just too cool for words:

One man, living his dream.

Thanks for stopping by!  ..bruce w..

Up in the air, Junior Birdmen!

MORNING LINKS (Yeah, didn’t feel like doing overnight links last night)

ITEM: The photo above says more than a thousand op-eds on how unseriously the Obama Administration is taking the threat of terrorism. While the White House is scrambling to distance Obama himself from this idiotic stunt, a lot of people had to sign off of this. This isn’t a “Let’s get a group together out on the White House lawn” photo shoot. We’re talking about a very large passenger plane flying low and slow outside of normal air traffic corridors while trailed by military jets over frakking Manhattan. And, oh, by the way, let ‘s not tell anyone — including the Mayor of New York — ahead of time! And all this for (in Laura Ingraham’s wonderful phrase) “glamour shots” of Air Force One. You’re telling me there aren’t enough file photos of Air Force One?

What are they going to do next? Buzz the Pentagon? Or south-eastern Pennsylvania?

ITEM: One of the earliest and most famous dicta about the Internet was coined by John Gilmore: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” A formerly jailed dissident in China explains just what that meant for him:

With the censorship here, my essays can only be published overseas. Before using the computer, my handwritten essays were difficult to correct and the cost of sending them was high. To avoid the articles being intercepted, I often went from the west side of the city to the east side where I had a foreign friend who owned a fax machine.

The internet has made it easier to obtain information, contact the outside world and submit articles to overseas media. It is like a super-engine that makes my writing spring out of a well. The internet is an information channel that the Chinese dictators cannot fully censor, allowing people to speak and communicate, and it offers a platform for spontaneous organisation.

Read the whole thing.

ITEM: A doctor immigrated from Russia to America ten years ago to escape socialism in general and socialized medicine in particular. Hear what he has to say:

His overall summary of Russia’s culture of authoritarianism is that “They do not value human life.” This was his introduction to the subject on which he was most passionate: socialized medicine. A major part of the reason he left Russia was because socialized medicine is just as intolerable for doctors as it is for patients.

Socialized medicine, he stated flatly, “doesn’t work.” Why doesn’t it work? He explained that a doctor works for the state—not for his patients. So he spends much of his time filling out forms. “As long as the forms are filled out, no one cares what the patient says,” how he is doing, or whether he survives.

He then went out of his way to point out that the current administration wants to move us toward socialized medicine. “If they move us just a little bit, it will not be so bad. But if they move us a lot, it will be a disaster.” Keep that in mind during the coming debates over President Obama’s plans for the de facto nationalization of our medical system.

Read the whole thing.

ITEM: Woman-on-Fire Megan McArdle dissects — or is that vivisects? Or maybe…waterboards? — the latest financial restructuring plan from General Motors, and the results aren’t pretty:

GM has released its latest never-never financial plan for an imaginary future where the bondholders evaporate into clouds of fairy dust, while American consumers mob its dealerships, begging for a piece of the GM dream.  The company is apparently planning to ask a bankruptcy judge to enforce the same bond exchange terms it’s currently offering its bondholders.  If GM gets its wish, the bondholders will do better by settling out of court, because they won’t have the administrative costs of a bankruptcy, which are typically high.

ITEM: Speaking of auto manufacturers going down the tubes, if the United Auto Workers ends up with 55% of Chrysler stock as a result of the financial restructuring, does this mean that the UAW will have to ask itself for concessions? I’d love to sit in on those negotiations.

ITEM: Speaking of triage, Here’s an important announcement that has a bearing on the current concerns over swine flu:

There is evidence there will be a major flu epidemic this coming fall. The indication is that we will see a return of the 1918 flu virus that is the most virulent form of the flu. In 1918 a half million Americans died. The projections are that this virus will kill one million Americans in 1976.

– F. David Matthews, secretary of health, education, and welfare (Feb., 1976)

Yep, 1976. Remember the massive swine flu epidemic of 1976 with a million dead Americans? No? That’s because it never panned out. Patrick Di Justo over at Salon takes us back to the Swine Flu Panic of 1976 that may well have cost Pres. Gerald Ford re-election. Read the whole thing.

ITEM: In the meantime, you can track reported swine flu cases (here in 2009) on this Google map.

Updates as the day goes on.  ..bruce w..