Total US university endowments are $411 billion a year and earn very well as investments (17.2% in 2007. So let’s say $40 billion a year is made. There were 10.8 million college students in 2005, let’s estimate 12 million in 2008. The yearly investment earnings of university endowments could pay for college for 1 in 6 college students.
TPMmuckraker had a story on a push-poll company running ads for Huckabee. What caught my eye is the company:
The calls are actually made by a company called ccAdvertising — a favorite company for shadowy third-party groups in the 2006 elections. The company can make at least 3.5 million calls per day.
That’s right, this company can bother 2% of Americans *every day*! Sure, they don’t always run at full capacity. I had never heard of this company but they have been there, in the background, existing only to use annoying, deceptive phone calls to influence elections.
How did the Washington papers cover Presidental candidate Dodd’s threat to filibuster the proposed law giving the telecom companies retroactive immunity for breaking the law and illegally spying on Americans? Dodd was able to get the bill delayed at least until January, one of the biggest victories for civil liberties this year.
The NYT has it on page A29.
Washington Post has a story on page A2, but written so you can’t tell what happened. Dodd is described as fighting the bill, but his crucial role is not described. Reid’s extraordinary effort to pass a bill that included telecom immunity, bypassing normal senate rules, working hand-in-hand with the Bush administration and Dodd’s single-handed stand against it aren’t described.
It’s a scene out of the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”! Updated slightly–there’s no free paper trying to print the news so we are spared the sight of NYT thugs beating kids, and the A29 mention allows the NYT to claim they ‘covered’ the story.
Those old science fiction stories predict the future remarkably well, but the details are always slightly off. :)
The next President is going to have enormous challenges. And not just the typical ones that make being US President such a big, all-consuming job. I mean when done right, of course. The Bush years have shown that a monkey can sit in the chair and the US will muddle through. But the problems Bush created, the problems the Republicans ignored, and a heap of new challenges will confront the next President.
The next President will have to fix what the Republicans have screwed up. Let’s only consider first the federal budget. The budget is $250 billion out of balance. And the $4 trillion in debt added over the Bush years have debt payments sucking up an even larger share of the federal budget. The Iraq occupation is has an ongoing cost in lives and $150 billion a year (plus a similar amount in deferred costs).
The US army is pinned down in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Growing US medical costs need to be dealt with, and the US is out of simple fixes, and running out of time to ignore the problem. We need to change how the US health care system is run.
The economy is heading into a recession.
The world is at peak oil. Oil will get more expensive every year. Likely oil prices will rise slowly for a next 2-3 years as world production stays constant while demand rises. Then it gets worse as world production starts to fall 5% a year and oil gets *really* expensive and/or shortages develop. Natural gas is running short as well.
Global warming needs to be addressed with carbon cuts. This will require restructuring the US energy economy, a huge undertaking. Funnily, lucky chance, peak oil will help reduce oil usage, but the US will need to start replacing coal power plants with something more expensive.
That’s a huge set of problems, each presenting a big political challenge, but many of them combined technological/natural disaster/political problems that each individually would be a once in a generation problem.
I have listed these problems not to depress people, but to make a point that the next Presidency will not be business as usual, four years similar to the last decade or two. The next President needs to start making the challenge clear to start building political support for the required effort. And yet none of the Dem candidates have done this.
They need to do this, start making the size and nature of the problems clear to the US people. Talking about them, providing people with the background and showing them where things are heading. Of course detailed proposals can’t be offered yet, but the candidates can sketch out the problems and what give people a notion of how the US can deal with them.
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It’s recently come out that National Review Online (the US’s top Republican political magazine) published fake reporting of massive (and apparently imaginary) Hezbollah invasions into the Christian section of Beirut written by reporter W. Thomas Smith Jr.
He also wrote The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design. Who could have guessed he wasn’t a reliable source of information?
It gets even funnier. The publisher-supplied description on Amazon says the book was “Written by an expert in the field”. Ha! Neither one of them is a biologist. And better yet, Smith is described there as having written “thousands of articles for a variety of publications”. Which comes to more than two a week, for twenty years straight. Sounds like exaggeration, though this time written by the publisher.
This year the Creation ‘Museum’, an institution devoted to the promotion of ignorance, opened in northern Kentucky just outside of Cincinnati. Here’s a colorful review by John Scalzi here. He also put together a Fickcr set of pictures with comments.
Why didn’t the political leadership of Kentucky push the site a few miles north into Ohio? That would have a been great. Oh, that’s right, the soon-to-be-ex-governor Fletcher is a creationist.
And BTW, yeah Kentucky! Fletcher was voted out of office last week. Beshear won in by a landslide (19%).
Here’s a gadget idea. Have a faucet light that shows temperature. I’ve seen faucet lights, with a LED inside the water stream lighting it up. Take that design and add a temperature sensor and a 2-3 LED that get lit up in varying proportions to indicate temperature.
Update: Doh! Thinkgeek sells one! Foiled again.
I wonder when we’ll see the first ‘spiritual light’ scam? Implant a small LED under the skin, develop a patter for the marks, and a new scam is born. There are many options for powering and switching the light.
And one of these folks will come across fluorescent dyes. Apply to skin, add in a black light (in normal daylight it wouldn’t be noticeable) and you get a hint of a glow.
I saw the beginning of the movie “Cellular”. Kim Basinger gets kidnapped, taken to a house, and tossed on the floor–on a conveniently placed rug. The kidnapper then gets a big sledge hammer and swings at an old-style Bell phone. Phones are important in this movie, huh? The unbelievable thing is that the phone shatters into smithereens! A Bell phone come apart like that? Not in this universe!
A few minutes later, the director decides we didn’t just see the phone shatter. It turns out it was only slightly wounded and Kim makes a call. Now that’s a Bell phone!
I figure it’s worth summing up the Iraq occupation, now 4 1/2 years in.
In 2006 the Bush administration’s plan was to train up the Iraqi Army and police force, and for the the US to “stand down as they stand up”. US troops would come home as the Iraqis took over. This plan was a complete failure, and even today there is no region turned over to Iraqi forces. In fact there are no more trained Iraqi units today than at the beginning of 2006.
As the Iraq occupation dragged on with a steady bleed of death and destruction the Bush administration’s “stay the course” plan grew harder to defend politically. A bipartisan commission headed by Republican fixer James Baker was put together to provide political cover for a change in the administration’s Iraq policy. The Iraq Study Group report at the end of 2006 recommended beginning a pull out from Iraq, offering a basket of withdrawal options to the President. Bush rejected them all, instead escalating the war with his “Surge” plan. The military brass almost all opposed the escalation, so Bush had to dig around hard before getting General Petraeus to head the new offensive.
The “Surge” was 20% increase in troops originally planned to last for six months. The primary goal of the “Surge” was to secure and pacify Baghdad and give the Iraq political parties a chance to come to a permanent agreement. The small increase in troops hasn’t had a noticeable effect on the violence in Iraq and there has been no political progress. If anything, the Iraqi national government has continued to fragment. The “Surge” assessment was pushed from six months to nine months (this week), and now the Bush administration plans to continue it until the end of the year, or next spring, or perhaps next summer. US troop levels in Iraq will go down in 2008–units ending long deployments start timing out then and their are no units available to replace them.
It’s clear that Bush plans to maintain the occupation of Iraq through the end of his presidency. So the Iraq occupation will continue, costing $3 billion and the lives of 14 US soldiers each week. The Republicans view leaving as losing so they won’t leave Iraq. If the “Surge” had either worked or was admitted to be a failure our troops could start withdrawing, so instead the administration finds small signs of progress and declares the occupation of Iraq will continue. The optimistic military and conservative think tank plans I’ve seen floated describe the US exiting Iraq in 5, 10, or even 20 years if progress continues. The majority of Dems support ending the occupation of Iraq, but with their thin majority in Congress they haven’t been able to force an end. The Republicans in Congress all support Bush. This creeping disaster will continue for the foreseeable future.
Iraq is a wreck. The little reconstruction that was done (1-3% of total US spending on the war) is falling apart. The best estimates have over a million Iraqis dead due to the invasion and civil war–4% of the population. Nearly 10% of Iraqis have fled the country, and about another 10% have fled their homes but are still in Iraq.
If that isn’t bad enough, it is possible things will get much worse. A faction in the Bush administration is pushing for a war with Iran. VP Cheney and the neoconservatives are pushing for an attack on Iran. They are the source of the war mongering stories about Iran that have been running in the newspapers this summer.
