Content by Bham
Posted at 1:45pm on Apr. 11, 2008 Consequences of Congressional grandstanding
By Bham
Congressional Dems are currently piling on the FAA, and their posturing is amplified by the usual MSM echo chamber. The immediate consequence is the current mess of cancelled airline flights, stranded passengers and, no doubt, a litigation festival to come. All highly visible, of course.
What I'd like thoughtful readers to contemplate is that the same political ploy -- specifically, seeking media face time by touting a consumer "crisis" and provoking regulatory overreaction, risk-aversion and micromanagement -- has been a dismal fact of life for pharma companies dealing with the FDA, for years.
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Posted at 4:10pm on Jun. 2, 2007 High-skill Immigrants
By Bham
I'm a Boilermaker (BS Physics). As such, the Dean of Science sends me periodic email updates of Purdue affairs -- no doubt, in part, to keep the alumni contributions flowing.
As I looked over Dean Vitter's latest missive, it reminded me of the portion of the current immigration policy debate that I think needs sharper focus. Specifically, I refer to our profound dependence on foreign-born scientists, engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists and other technical experts.
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Posted at 8:40pm on Apr. 24, 2007 On the Road to Excellence
By Bham
Washington Governor Christine Gregoire (D-King County) just signed a bill "delaying" a requirement that high school students pass standardized tests in order to graduate. More details are here. Specifically it's the math and science tests that have been defused. For the time being, the language arts exam stays.
But math and science competence isn't all that important, is it?
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Posted at 11:49pm on Nov. 8, 2006 Homosexual marriage?
By Bham
Living in the portion of Washington State that is almost a suburb of Vancouver BC, as we do, Canadian news gets more attention than perhaps it does in most of the US. In case you missed it, Canada became the fourth nation to recognize homosexual marriages as equivalent to traditional heterosexual unions.
I’ve puzzled over both the merits and legalities of this issue and reached some personal conclusions that promise to displease both sides of the debate. But I aspire to an “independent” viewpoint...
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Posted at 8:27pm on Oct. 21, 2006 WA-Sen DC Ad Support Cut Off?
By Bham
Local reports say national Republican support for Mike McGavick's Senate campaign advertising has ceased. Too bad. I thought McGavick's ads were effective. News coverage of the cutoff alluded to McGavick still lagging in polls.
I don't trust my own objectivity in matters political, but I've been really impressed with how good a campaign Mike McGavick has waged.
Maria Cantwell's campaign, by contrast, has been misstatements, misdirection, half-truths, fear-mongering, class jealousy -- it embarrasses me for the whole state that it's working as well as it evidently is.
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Posted at 4:07pm on Oct. 19, 2006 The Political Compass
By Bham
The 11/7/06 issue of PC Magazine has a grab-bag of interesting but obsure websites, one of which is Political Compass. This free site uses an anonymous questionnaire to position you on a bi-variate map which includes the familiar left-right dimension, but adds a libertarian-authoritarian axis.
The site sponsors make a good case that a single political axis -- traditionally left-right -- is insufficient to understand contemporary political dynamics.
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Posted at 2:42pm on Oct. 17, 2006 WA-Sen: McGavick splits with the President?
By Bham
Local reports quote Republican Senate candidate Mick McGavick calling for the dismissal or resignation of Secretary Rumsfeld and the formation of some sort of committee to reconsider strategic options in Iraq.
Que pasa? Clarification welcome.
Iraq and Bush aren't polling well in WA (no surprise) so this tactical position, if it really happened, isn't impossible to understand. But the tactical gains would be modest (the Dem wagons are circled around Maria Cantwell, whatever their earlier misgivings about her tepid GWOT "support") and the Republican base, IMO, would be demoralized.
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Posted at 2:33pm on Aug. 31, 2006 Add to the pile of circumstantial evidence
By Bham
The FDA's ongoing program of intercepting and testing prescription drugs ordered by Americans over the internet from "Canadian" businesses, has produced more evidence of counterfeits.
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Posted at 8:35pm on Aug. 22, 2006 Shelby Steele makes some really good points
By Bham
The WSJ's greed in restricting access to their online content to subscribers is penny wise and pound foolish. The writing that appears on their pages is frequently important and deserves a wider audience.
A particularly striking example is the essary in today's WSJ by Stanford-Hoover fellow Shelby Steele.
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Posted at 3:45pm on Aug. 3, 2006 Corrupt Voter Registration
By Bham
Saying that Democrat Christine Gregoire's 133 vote victory in the 2004 Washington gubernatorial race shows "the public interest weights strongly in favor of letting every eligible resident of Washington register and cast a vote," [sic] US District Court Judge Ricardo S. Martinez on August 1st struck down a state statute requiring that voter registration applications match a valid drivers license or social security registration. Local coverage here.
This lawsuit against the Washington Secretary of State had been brought by plaintiffs organized by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School (brennancenter.org). Overall, the plaintiffs list is comprised of the usual liberal Dem proxies, and seems obviously targeted to advance Dem political clout.
I've done independent data mining of Washington's registration database, with special attention to my own county (Whatcom) and, to make a long story short, concluded that the overall error rate in the "honest" counties is about one percent. There are about 3.4 million registrants in the whole state. I included in "errors" duplicates, deceased voters, and dubious non-residents. The error rate in King and Pierce counties -- Washington's most populous -- is even higher. As the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (effwa.org) has documented, the voter fraud in those Dem strongholds is probably overt. EFF's county-by-county follow up of voting fraud prosecution was also very discouraging, with essentially nothing meaningful being done about these putative felonies.
As of this writing it isn't clear whether either the Washington Secretary of State or Attorney General (both nominally Republicans) intend to appeal this decision. If they do, it will have to go to the Ninth Circuit -- often termed the "Ninth Circus" -- arguably the most reliably liberal appellate court in the nation. That sure doesn't bode well.
If you combine motor-voter registration will negligible identity checking I contend you've got the makings of a corrupt election, before the first "vote" is cast.