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Barack Obama  |
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Rob Kailey is a working schmuck with no ties or affiliations to any governmental or political organizations, save those of sympathy.
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White House
Mon Jun 28, 2010 at 12:20:21 PM MST
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As President Obama prepares for his meeting tomorrow with Senators at the White House to discuss clean energy and climate change legislation, he might want to check with the White House staff on an important matter first. No, not the details of the legislation, although that's important of course. Instead, what President Obama might want to make absolutely sure about is the non-trivial matter of whether the White House air conditioning is in tip-top shape. I say "non-trivial," but these days it's more like "life or death." How hot is it in the Washington, DC area? As NBC Washington puts it, "We're Talking Spontaneous Combustion." (UPDATE: it's more likely this is apocryphal than literally true, but it sure feels like plants could catch on fire these days in Washington, DC!)
How hot is it? It's so hot that dead plants are spontaneously combusting in Frederick, Md.
Don't believe it? Just ask Frederick County Fire Marshal Marc McNeal, who told the Frederick News-Post that excessive heat caused a dead plant to catch fire Sunday afternoon in a hanging planter on the rear deck of a townhouse.
The hanging basket fell to the deck and burned some vinyl siding, causing about $3,000 in damages.
It has definitely been hot in the Washington region. Monday will be the 10th day in a row that we've reached 90 degrees or higher, and this will be the 17th day of the month that the thermometer has reached 90.
NBC4 meteorologist Tom Kierein said that when it's all said and done, June 2010 likely will be the hottest June on record in the District. Dead plants catching on fire in the hottest June on record in the Washington, DC area? Sadly, this may not be an aberration, but a frightening sign of things to come in a global warming world. True, we shouldn't draw broad conclusions about the earth's climate from one heat wave in one specific geographic area, as certain climate change deniers dishonestly did during last winter's "snowpocalypse" blizzards. However, when we see month after month, decade after decade of record-setting heat globally, it starts to get a bit hard to ignore.
In fact, climate scientists are not ignoring these heat waves and other phenomena. Earlier today, for instance, The Project on Climate Science reported that the "record-breaking heat wave" we are currently experiencing in the eastern United States "is consistent with climate change." According to Tom Peterson, Chief Scientist for NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, "We're getting a dramatic taste of the kind of weather we are on course to bequeath to our grandchildren." Of course, as The Project on Climate Science points out, "individual heat waves can be driven by a number of factors." However, they conclude, "more frequent heat waves are one of the more visible impacts of climate change already underway in the United States" and "will occur more frequently in the future."
In sum, if you enjoy record-setting warmth - not to mention the stronger storms, mass extinctions and "record sea ice shrinkage" in the Arctic that go along with that warmth - you have a lot to look forward to! If not, then you should contact your Senator and let him or her know you want climate action now.
Come to think of it, perhaps we should all hope for the White House air conditioning to be broken tomorrow - or turned off on purpose - so that the Senators meeting there get a taste of what the planet will feel like everywhere if they don't do something about it now. When you think about it, a bit of Senatorial sweat and a few stained shirts is not too high a price to pay if it results in long-overdue, comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation on the President's desk sometime this sweltering summer. Is it?
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Sun Apr 26, 2009 at 12:36:09 PM MST
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I'd recommend Ryan Lizza's profile of Peter Orszag, the wunderkind (relatively speaking) heading up the White House's Office of Management and Budget. Orszag is a brilliant economist noted often for his interest in behavioral economics, that realm that applies psychology to the statistics of traditional econ.
Understanding Orszag seems key to understanding our current President. His inclusion (along with Cass Sunstein, among others) in the leadership of the Administration make me optimistic that we may see some interesting components in health care reform besides the changing of incentives around treatment reimbursement and comparative effectiveness. Might we also see default enrollment instead of penalties for failure to enroll?
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Sun Mar 01, 2009 at 17:46:36 PM MST
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Something funny happened on the way to privatization. Rather than saving taxpayers much money, in a range of programs, we simply wedded the worst of government (unresponsive monopoly) to the worst of the private sector (excessive profit) without getting the best of the private sector (meaningful competition) or of government (meaningful political accountability).
Student loans is one area where that happened. Many loans currently processed are federally guaranteed, but handled through for-profit companies like Sallie Mae. The fact that the loans are backed by the feds means that taxpayers shoulder all the risk, but private companies rake in fees for, well, not much.
The Obama Administration proposed moving the federal student loan system to one entirely handled through direct loans, which cut out the middle-man. Here's the Republican response: But there's already been pushback from Republicans. Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Education Committee, lashed out against the proposed shift, calling it a "government takeover of the private-sector-based student loan program, taking away options and benefits from students while adding tens of billions" of dollars to the deficit. Somehow, loans guaranteed by the federal government are "private-sector-based." That's a laughable claim. There is a private market for student loans. This does nothing to impact that. It just makes the public market an actual public market. That's a good thing. Now if only we could do this with Medicare Advantage (something, I should note, that both Max Baucus and Barack Obama have voiced support for already).
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Sun Feb 08, 2009 at 12:16:49 PM MST
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Yargh. Every time I start thinking about the way that macroeconomics is being discussed by the press and Republicans in Congress, I just want to shoot myself in the face.
Take Senator John Ensign's ridiculous claims this morning. The fact that he doesn't get laughed out of a television studio for saying that state budgets are bloated and deserve cuts, that aid to states should be removed from the federal recovery act, and that no firefighters or teachers should be laid off is all nuts. Or, as Matt Yglesias put it, "stupid."
There are two big competing theories of generally how economies work in stiff recessions. One is the classical theory that the economy contracts, but eventually money becomes cheap enough (as deflation convinces lenders to give it away for 0% interest presumably) that borrowing ticks back up in the private sector, new ventures form, existing ventures expand, and the economy gets moving again.
The competing theory is the Keynesian theory, which is that you basically end up in a downward spiral of tightwaddedness. Everyone gets too nervous about their own economic situation to spend money. Lenders become worried about people with bad credit and pull in loans. Even as money becomes cheaper, no one wants to extend loans at low interest rates for fear that if they misjudge the coming growth, they'll get screwed. Fear and uncertainty rein.
So the assumption of the Keynesians is that you need to do some predictable short- and medium-term government spending in order to get money moving in the economy again.
It turns out aid to states is a really good way of keeping money moving in the economy, because otherwise states cut their budgets, laying people off (putting people into unemployment systems) or cutting back on health care benefits or other programs. Keeping that money in the pipeline is the probably smartest use of quick money to prevent job loss.
So of course it is in the crosshairs. Like I said, Yargh.
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Tue Jan 27, 2009 at 14:00:58 PM MST
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I just got a press release from Jon Tester's office outlining a bit of what the Appropriations Committee approved today for the stimulus package:· $27 billion to upgrade America's highways and bridges.
· $12.375 billion to improve water projects across the country, which will create more than 180,000 direct and indirect jobs nationwide.
· $10 billion to guarantee loans for energy transmission projects like the Montana-Alberta Tie Line (MATL), which will connect power lines between Canada and Great Falls.
· $5.8 billion to undertake energy efficiency and renewable energy projects at schools and hospitals nationwide.
· $5 billion to improve housing and quality of life for members of the military and for improvements at Veterans Administration (VA) facilities.
· $2 billion to create jobs and improve conditions in Indian Country.
· $800 million to lower the risk of wildfire through forest management. The Senate needs to get money for mass transit into this package. Much of this can't just be about throwing big money at existing things. That's fine for short-term shot-in-the-arm economic stimulus. It is a terrible way to take long-term advantage of what is very much a one-time opportunity for a huge capital investment in public works.
But let me also say that money for energy efficiency with public buildings: brilliant.
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Mon Jan 26, 2009 at 14:22:35 PM MST
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Here are the proposed amounts of money for school districts in Montana under the House stimulus bill.
Data for other states here.
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Wed Jan 21, 2009 at 19:23:41 PM MST
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Talking Points Memo's latest operation TPMDC is reporting that mass transit got cut from the stimulus proposal to make way for tax cuts.
Some words from Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN), who chairs the relevant House Committee: That is why we set forth this $85-billion initiative from our committee. It's been reduced in the final going. We expect that it'll come out somewhere around $63 billion, but $30 billion for highways.
The reason for the reduction in overall funding -- we took money out of Amtrak and out of aviation; we took money out of the Corps of Engineers, reduced the water infrastructure program, the drinking water and the wastewater treatment facilities and sewer lines, reduced that from $14 billion to roughly $9 billion -- was the tax cut initiative that had to be paid for in some way by keeping the entire package in the range of $850 billion.
But I'll say that our portion is the one that really creates the jobs. Our portion of it is the one that's going to put people to work because unlike anything else, these jobs can't be outsourced to Bangalore, India. Meanwhile, Missoula's local government officials who focus on transportation issues are taking issue with the proposed disbursement of funds under the Governor's requests for infrastructure projects and requesting more money in general for the county.
Transportation policy isn't really my forte, but reading this stuff makes me wish that we were talking about this opportunity to make passenger rail a reality in places like the I-90 loop of Montana.
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