March 29, 2008

Wow

If this comes true, the United States can stop using imported oil completely - and stay that way for a few hundred years. (Via Rand Simberg via Instapundit. See also: Investor's Business Daily.

March 28, 2008

What Must a President Believe About America?

Here's John McCain's new ad. I think it's very effective. It's got Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean talking. And what did Dean say about a certain war-hero senator running for president not too long ago? He said this:

"The real issue is this.Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?"

...the fact is Americans want a real leader who offers real solutions, not a blatant opportunist...

Freedom of Speech

The Los Angeles Times reports on reaction to the Dutch film Fitna, which looks at the Islamofacist threat to Europe. The 17-minute film is available all over the 'net. The LAT notes that it spread virally and very, very fast.

The 17-minute film, "Fitna," the Arabic word for strife, was first posted late Thursday on Wilder's Freedom Party website. The site crashed immediately with heavy traffic, but within minutes the film was available in Dutch and English on the British-based website LiveLeak,which also froze up briefly. By Friday, the film was all over the Internet -- on YouTube, Dailymotion and other shared-video sites. LiveLeak later took down the video, saying its staff had received "threats of a very serious nature."

March 27, 2008

A Pattern of Hiding Things

Yesterday's story about that lawsuit filed against the Bredesen administration for ignoring multiple open-records requests for more than nine months reminded me of the scathing 187-page order handed down by a federal judge last fall ordering a "forensic inspection" of computers used by Gov. Phil Bredesen, Finance Commissioner Dave Goetz, and 158 other key custodians of records related to TennCare as part of a class action lawsuit against TennCare filed by the Tennessee Justice Center.

It seems the administration failed to give the TJC every document that they were supposed to hand over. The "forensic inspection" was deemed necessary to recover documents from the hard-drives documents that had been illegally deleted.

I seem to recall the Bredesen administration appealed the federal judge's order, delaying further the release of the documents, though I don't know if there has been a ruling on that appeal.

What is increasingly clear, however, is that Bredesen's Department of Finance & Administration has a pattern of trying to hide things and avoid complete compliance with open records requests - and that Gov. Bredesen, for all his public rhetoric about government transparency and ethics, allows it to go on unchecked.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive. I emailed a representative of the TJC asking about the status of the lawsuit, and got this response written by Gordon Bonnyman, the lawyer who heads the TJC.

The state did appeal, and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the District Court's order. Although the State identified 160 as having information relevant to the TennCare program's treatment of children, the parties agreed that the search for relevant information would be confined to computers used by only 50 key custodians from that list. (The 50 included the Governor and his senior staff.) The District Court only required the imaging of those 50 custodians' computers, including any privately owned computers that were used for official state business.

The District Court was concerned with preserving relevant evidence and protecting it from further destruction. It has not decided yet what information relevant to the litigation must actually be produced from the computers, or what procedures will be used to safeguard the confidentiality of non-relevant information.

The Sixth Circuit heard arguments in the case last week. It will probably be 1 - 3 months before there is a ruling.

While we await the ruling, we still don't have an answer to the question, "What is the Bredesen administration trying so hard to keep hidden?" And now we can ask the same question about their refusal to comply with legitimate open-records requests from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

Newspapers Ignore Open Records Case

After nine months of its open-records requests being ignored by the Bredesen administration, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research's lawsuit to force the administration to release the records is, ironically, now being ignored by most of the state's news media.

The Associated Press in Tennessee released this story Monday eventing on the lawsuit, which accuses administration officials with the Department of Finance & Administration for ignoring two open-records requests for more than nine months. The number of newspapers that picked up the story appears to be few.

I'm sure the fact that the organization that filed the suit is considered politically conservative has nothing to do with newspaper editors ignoring the story about the administration ignoring open-records requests for nine months.

March 26, 2008

ACK Comes Back

A.C. Kleinheider lands on his feet. The hole in the Tennessee political newsmedia landscape will be filled.

A Night at the Newseum 2

Here's a video report from the bloggers' Night at the Newseum.

Not-So-Open Records?

Terry Frank has a report on a lawsuit filed by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research regarding the failure of the Tennessee Department of Finance & Administration - and, specifically, the department's spokesperson, Lola Potter, to comply with open-records requests for nine months or more.

I have my own story about Lola Potter and an open records request. A few weeks ago I requested a copy of video tape that the agency had made of construction blasting at the governor's mansion. At first she told me where to find two clips on YouTube. Informed that I wanted all of the video, she then asserted that "it would be several hundred dollars at a minimum, possibly several thousand dollars" to copy the video.

Of course that is absurd. As I informed Ms. Potter, the digital video can be downloaded to a laptop over a USB cable for free and all I needed was for her to arrange a time when I could connect their camera with my laptop. She then said she would "begin processing this as an official open records request" and would get back to me "at some point in the near future."

That was 15 days ago.

March 24, 2008

A Night at the Newseum

I was privileged to join a group of bloggers, along with TV news executives and personnel from the Washington DC area, for a reception and private tour of the soon-to-open Newseum in the nation's capital. In a word, it is spectacular. The Freedom Forum, which built the $450 million interactive museum dedicated to the profession of journalism and to the First Amendment, has created an experience that is, by turns, educational, entertaining and deeply moving as it focuses on the history of journalism and the five freedoms of the First Amendment here in America and also places them in context within a broader sweep of 500 years of history and also globally.

The Newseum - which will have its grand opening to the public on April 11 - features 14 main exhibition galleries exploring news history, electronic news, photojournalism, world news and how the media have covered major historical events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Even bloggers and the new "we media" trends get sufficient mention, including the Apple computer company's suit to silence a blogger, and bloggers' role in exposing the fraudulent documents at the heart of the false story on George W. Bush's National Guard service which 60 Minutes broadcast in the waning days of the 2004 presidential election campaign.

There are amazing artifacts - small things like a satchel and pencil in the possession of Associated Press correspondent Mark Kellogg when he was killed along with Gen. George Armstrong Custer and all of the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, and big things like a bullet-riddled armored pick-up truck used by Time to cover war in the former Yugoslavia, several sections of the Berlin Wall, and the twisted remains of the broadcast antenna from atop the second of the two World Trade Center towers to collapse on 9/11 - along with the camera of a photojournalist who died in the collapse.

You'll also see an 1860 issue of the Charleston (S.C.) Mercury with the headline "The Union Is Dissolved!" - one of some 30,000 historic newspapers in the museum collection (not all of them on display, of course). And you'll find more modern items like some of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's notes taken while reporting on the Watergate scandal, World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle's typewriter and faux news anchor/comedian Stephen Colbert's first script about "truthiness."

And yet, the Newseum is not like many museums, a collection of historical artifacts to be looked at for a few seconds before you shuffle on to the next display case. Instead, the artifacts are merely illustrations of the story of the news itself and the vital importance of the First Amendment in the history of America.

It's educational history with a modern sheen - and it's all presented in small, digestible bites. No one expects visitors to sit and watch a lengthy video presentation, instead the videos are edited in such a way that visitors will get the point of the presentation in a matter of a few handfuls of seconds. It's perfectly designed for today's media-over-saturated short-attention-span Americans. (And, yes, there is a certain depressing irony to the unavoidable use of video to help tell the story of newspapers.)

Video clips from old newsreels and today's news broadcasts - and pop-culture touchstones like Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update and Muppet Show skits featuring Kermit the Frog as a reporter, enliven the museum, as does a rather noticeable inclusion of pop music hits on audio tracks accompanying some of the exhibits and video presentations. It's multi-media, multi-sensory and interactive, but not overwhelming. And there are sections that force you to stop and contemplate the real cost of freedom and free speech.

Berlin Wall exhibit is one - the communist side of the wall is bare, but the freedom side of the wall is scrawled with graffiti. People died on the bare side for trying to get to the side where they could freely express themselves.

Another is a huge wall that features a map of the world with countries colored green, yellow or red, denoting the level of press freedom in each. Too little of the world is green, too much of it is red.

The most difficult display to contemplate is the alcove with the wall of glass panels reaching skyward and then curving slightly forward. Many of the glass panels are smooth, but too many are etched with the names of journalists who died in the line of duty.

It's a sobering display.

Nearby, a video monitor with a touch-screen interface lets visitors look up the names and histories of each name on the panel. It was on David Bloom's page when I arrived at the part of the tour.

The Newseum is located at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, and close to the big museums that ring the National Mall. It affords spectacular views of the DC skyline from Capitol sweeping across to the Washington Monument. Entrance will not be free, the way most museums in DC are free - that's because most museums here are funded generously by Congress with your tax dollars; the Newseum gets no tax money. But it's well worth the $20.

The design of the building is strikingly modern in a city where all the buildings are no more than about 10 stories tall, and a certain style of marbleized governmental architecture predominates. (If you're used to navigating a typical big city downtown in part by using its skyscrapers as landmarks and reference points, Washington will confuse you as it has only two tall buildings - the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument.)

The signature feature of the exterior - a 74-foot-high engraving of the First Amendment on Tennessee marble, seemingly big enough to be read from inside the Capitol. The Washington Post reviews the architecture here.

I've mentioned many of the things in the Newseum, and left out a myriad others. There is simply too much to try to recount here. I wasn't taking notes, just trying to take as much in as I could as Gene Policinski, vice president and executive director of the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center (which has operations in both Washington and at Vanderbilt University in Nashville), gave a guided tour to myself and a handful of bloggers including Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association, which worked with the Freedom Forum to organize the preview for bloggers. (Several top Newseum/Freedom Forum staffers guided various small groups through the tour, which appeared to be an excellent way to personalize the event for the fairly large group of, I'm guessing, 75 people.)

In separate displays both inside and outside, the Newseum displays printed copies of the front pages of nearly 200 daily newspapers from around the country, changing the displays every morning.

It's just one of the many exhibits within the Newseum that are constantly being re-edited and changed, to keep the Newseum's story of the news fresh and up-to-date. There's an old saying that goes, "You can't step into the same river twice," meaning that when you step in a second time, it is a changed river.

You can not visit the same Newseum twice, either.

But you most certainly should visit it at least once. And take your kids. They'll learn a lot about America, and why all Americans should be proud of their country, protective of the First Amendment and -yes - proud of their journalists even if they don't always accept modern journalism's claim of objectivity or accuracy. Journalism, with all its flaws, is still better than no journalism. And without the First Amendment, America would not be, well, America, nor would it be free.

Here are some photos I snapped along the way...

Daniel Glover, formerly blogger with National Journal and now senior producer at the Media Research Center's new video-blogging/social network site Eyeblast.tv, does a video interview of Mark Tapscott, blogger and Washington Examiner editorial page editor. Somewhere, Sean Hackbarth has a photo of me taking this picture.

The backdrop behind Tapscott? This:

U.S. Capitol Building

A section of the display showcasing the legal dispute between the Apple corporation and a blogger. Coincidentally, the story of that dispute is featured in the cover story on Apple.in the current edition of Wired magazine, which I read on the plane to Washington.

The wall of names of journalists killed in the line of duty.

Media Bloggers Association President Bob Cox - and, yes, that's Bob Cox in the lower photo on the Newseum wall in a section focused on blogging and the "we media" trend. And that's not MSNBC's Keith Olbermann in the picture the photo of Cox - it's a cell-phone snap of Saddam Hussein moments before he was hanged.

No, this isn't a stray shot from the nearby the Air & Space Museum. That's a news chopper suspended over the Newseum's nine-story atrium.

The view from the new studio at the Newseum being readied for ABC News' This Week With George Stephanopolous. What a great backdrop for a show about politics in the nation's capital. This Week will move into this studio in the near future. That's a reflection of me in the window, taking the pic. I also sat in Stephanopolous' spot, but I look goofy so you're not going to see the picture. The Newseum has multiple TV studios. This one's actually very small.

AP Does It For Money

Brian C. Ledbetter looks at the Associated Press's "Do as we say, not as we do" approach to copyright law when it comes to using other people's photos.

Whorton Hears a Who

Whorton Hears a Who remains the top movie at the box office. If you haven't seen this movie, make sure you do, and in the theater. It's a wonderful movie that, without trying, communicates conservative values incredibly well. Not political/partisan conservative, just small-c conservative. Except for the moment where a crass politician seeks to manipulate the masses by promising the requested action is "for the children."

Ben Stein in Nashville

Ben Stein, the brilliant commentator, actor, author, comedian, game show host and one of my favorite people in politics - you might remember him as the boring economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off - visited my town recently. I wish I'd known about it in advance.

Setting the Record Straight

Michael Reagan on Barack Obama:

He is a brilliant orator who exudes charm and arouses near-worship from his host of giddy, hypnotized supporters. He is also a committed socialist and a talented salesman for his brand of Marxist snake oil.

Future Attractions

I'm headed to Washington later today for a special blogger-oriented event at the soon-to-open Newseum. I'll have a report and photos sometime tomorrow.

At the Edge of Insanity

Network Solutions - the giant domain name marketer and web-hosting company - cowers before the Islamofacists. ... Meanwhile, in Chicago, anti-war protestors disrupt a church Easter service, and get cheered on by a radical pro-Palestinian-terrorists group.

March 23, 2008

You Won't See This In the Paper

Learn some history via a Tennessean user blog. His previous posts are quite informative as well.

Easter Morning

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.

There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.' Now I have told you."

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. "Greetings," he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me."

While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, "You are to say, 'His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.' If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble." So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

Salvation and eternal life: The free gift from God to all who believe. The best things in life really are free.

Happy Easter!

March 22, 2008

"These are OUR Rocks!"

Well, it turns out the 1982 Falklands War 25 years ago was about oil, as all wars by capitalist empires are these days. /snark. (Bonus points if you can identify the pop-culture reference in this blog post's headline.)

The Heat Is Gone 2

Did global warming end 10 years ago? Hmm. That might explain why the oceans are cooling...

March 20, 2008

Great Game

Belmont vs. Duke. An incredible game that fell two points short of perfection. It's just a shame that Justin Hare's stellar career with the Bruins comes to an end with a three-point shot that fell just to the left of the rim. And, yes, the CBS announcer who exclaimed at the end, "Rick Byrd is a great coach!" is right. Rick Byrd has been a great coach for a long time and, on this night, even in defeat, he was miles better than the much more famous coach on the other bench.

The Heat is Gone

An array of 3,000 temperature sensors in the earth's oceans have discovered zero evidence of the seas warming - exactly the opposite of what global warming theory says they'd find.

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

Perhaps the Earth has the ability to adjust with and dissapate excess heat. One scientist in the NPR story speculates that cloud cover is acting as a thermostat, allowing more heat to escape into space, though to know for sure we'd need data on cloud cover.

What this story tells us is that our scientists don't know everything there is to know about how climate works. Imagine that. They were wrong about ocean warming. They might even be wrong about global warming. For global warming profiteers like Al Gore, that would certainly be an inconvenient truth.

March 18, 2008

Democrats May Block Vote on Ballroom

You can mark state Rep. Craig Fitzhugh, D-Ripley, as another pro-ballroom Democrat in the state legislature. Fitzhugh, chairman of the House Finance Committee, is trying to block a vote on an amendment to routine bonding authority legislation that would revoke bonding authority for the lavish underground ballroom Gov. Bredesen is building at the state's governor's mansion. Which means Fitzhugh is not only in favor of spending millions of tax dollars to build the ballroom amid a worsening state budget crisis, he's also against letting the people have a say in the project via their elected legislators.

March 17, 2008

Budget Bloat at Blasted Governor's Mansion

The nonpartisan Tennessee Center for Policy Research has looked into the budgetary bloat in the renovation of the Tennessee governor's mansion and issued the following statement today:

Taxpayers Charged Millions for Extravagant Embellishments to Governor's Mansion
Renovations including $321,000 kitchen, $14,000 dimmer switches revealed as state faces shortfall
NASHVILLE - The renovations at the governor's mansion have gone over budget because of extravagant embellishments and poor planning, according to documents obtained by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research through public records requests.

A wet bar, fancy accent lighting and a major kitchen overhaul were added to the project's bottom line after construction was well underway, records show.

Some of the many examples of increased costs, in the form of "change orders" to the original project include:

Renovating the kitchen - $321,393

Hanging accent lighting - $53,850

Replacing dimmer switches with brass cover plates - $14,436

Installing a wet bar - $10,930

Refurbishing wash stand legs - $7,511

Change orders are agreements between contractors and the state allowing contractors to add to or delete from the work originally agreed upon when unexpected work is needed. Unfortunately, it appears that Governor Phil Bredesen and First Lady Andrea Conte used change orders as a way to quietly slip in lavish and costly embellishments to the mansion renovation project without taxpayers' knowledge.

"The Governor has expressed concern over a looming state shortfall. But the shortfall was caused by wasteful spending such as $14,000 dimmer switches and $7,500 sink legs," Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson said. "If the Governor is serious about reducing spending, he needs to look no further than his own back yard to start the cost-cutting."

Initially, renovating the Governor's Mansion and bringing the house into compliance with provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act was to cost less than $10 million. As of today, the price tag has ballooned to $19.2 million - over 20 times the $900,100 appraised value of the house - at a cost to taxpayers of $12.8 million, according to state records.
Construction recently began on a new phase of the mansion, an underground entertainment facility, that will likely produce dozens more change orders boosting the cost to taxpayers.

"Please Governor," Johnson pleaded, "stop pouring money into the governor's mansion that could be used to educate children or heal TennCare recipients."

The state House may vote tonight on an amendment to routine bonding legislation that could halt the ballroom project, though Democrat leaders are working furiously to save the ballroom.

Fuelish Economics?

I'm not a real estate expert or an economist, but it seems to me that high gasoline prices should, over time, negatively impact real estate prices in the far-flung suburbs of big cities while boosting values in closer-in neighborhoods.

Yesterday, my wife and I looked at a new house that's about 8 miles further from central Nashville than where we currently live. Eight miles doesn't sound like much, but if we moved there it would add 16 miles to my daily commute to work, and 32 miles to my wife's daily driving during the school year. It would also add miles to our typical weekly driving for other things - shopping, etc - and would reduce our driving for a few things. Though all of those are harder to quantify, I suspect that they would, on balance, equal more driving miles.

But let's just stick to the work and school trips. That's 48 more miles per day. During the school year, that's approximately 1,000 more miles per month. My wife's SUV gets pathetic mileage as does my car. Let's be generous and pretend we get 17.5 miles to the gallon. That's 57 more gallons of gas every month. At the current price of gas, $3.20 a gallon, moving eight miles farther from town will cost us $180 more per month in gas.

Conversely, it would seem that moving 8 miles closer would save us $180 per month.

The difference between moving closer to Nashville and moving farther from Nashville is, then, about $360. Actually, it probably is more, given that my calculations only consider the core work and school commuting trips.

In many if not most cities the dominant work commuting pattern is still suburb-to-downtown, not suburb-to-suburb. If I was a real estate agent representing homes located close to the center of Nashville - or close to the center of any city with that kind of commuting pattern - I think I'd be pointing out to people the big fuel cost advantage of a closer-in location. After all, I'm guessing lots of folks would rather put that $360 into a mortgage payment, building equity, rather than burning it and sending out it the tailpipe.

Alternately, the savings from moving closer in could cover the car payment on a hybrid, thus increasing the savings.

Something to think about if you're in jumping into the current buyers' market for a house at a time when gasoline is predicted to rise to $4 a gallon.

March 15, 2008

Chilling

Here's an update on the Bredesen administration's plans to subject more than 1 million children across Tennessee to mental health screenings without parental notification and consent, which I blogged about back on March 7.

Fair Use

Hoisting the AP on its own petard.

Gone

A.C. Kleinheider has signed off at WKRN's VolunteerVoters.com.

Update: Budget cuts are to blame. Actually, I'm surprised WKRN kept Volunteer Voters going as long as it did after Mike Sechrist left the station and new, less new-media focused management took over and, soon thereafter, gutted the NashvilleIsTalking.com project. Not all old media gets the new media or knows what to do with it.

March 13, 2008

The Weird Economics of Higher Education

MTSU economics professor and blogger Martin Kennedy kicked off a small discussion at VolunteerVoters.com with his comment about higher education tuition cost increases. I've posted two long comments looking at the weird economics of higher ed tuition. I'm reposting them here, with very minor edits, in the extended portion of this entry.

COMMENT #1
The rapid cost inflation of higher education has been tied directly to the increase in federal tuition aid. You are seeing the same cost inflation in higher education for the same reason you have seen it in healthcare - the more the government disrupts market forces, the less incentive universities have to compete on costs and the less the paying consumers (students and parents) care about costs.

The CATO Institute produced a landmark study of the economic effects of higher federal tuition aide in January 2005. You can read the executive summary or download the entire study at this link.

The economics at work here are rather easy to explain. Federal aid for tuition goes up. That leads to increased demand for higher education. The law of supply and demand kicks in - prices rise.

Additionally, government aid sets a "floor" to prices - and as the government increases how much it will help a student pay for college, the universities are able to raise prices to soak up that additional money.

In the case of healthcare, services for which the government helps pay - via Medicare, Medicaid - continue to see rapid cost inflation, while services that neither government nor most insurance carriers will cover, such as Lasik vision correction, see declining prices.

The commenter (at VolunteerVoters.com) who discussed the costs of "heating the dorms … to new construction of buildings" should know that building a new residence hall at a university with rising enrollment is about one of the surest money-makers on earth. Residence buildings generate a profit.

And there's something else to consider about residence halls: the government doesn't help pay students' living costs like it does tuition. The result is that universities compete to build the best residence halls with attractive services, and to price them consistent with market forces. You will see some cost inflation in housing, but it will be in line with the overall inflation rate. Tuition consistently rises faster than the overall inflation rate.

Government subsidizes one but not the other.

COMMENT #2
Economist Gary Becker, writing at the blog he shares with economist Richard Posner, notes that while tuition costs have risen rapidly, the return on investment has been rising faster.

He wrote the following on Feb. 24:

The agitation about the fraction of endowment that colleges spend is driven in large measure by the rapid rise in tuition since the late 1970's. The increase in tuition has been much faster than the rise in consumer prices over the same time period. However, the benefits from a college education in the form of higher earnings, better health, better educated children, and many other aspects of life have grown much faster than tuition has. The result is that benefits net of all college costs have increased at an unprecedented fast rate during the past 30 years. College-educated persons increasingly have achieved elite status not only in the United States, but in other countries as well, including developing countries like China, India, and Mexico.

So it is hard to feel sorry for college students despite the rise in college tuition.
To be sure, high tuition makes it more difficult for students and their parents to finance a college education. To make that easier, especially for students with few financial resources, colleges have been engaging in greater price discrimination by increasing financial aid to students with limited resources while they are sharply raising tuition to students from more well to do families. This price discrimination policy has enabled many more students from poorer families with good high school records to go to colleges where they pay little tuition. Students also can help finance their college costs with student loans when they do not receive sufficiently large support from their colleges. The debts of students who borrow a lot by the standards of what the average student borrows is still usually not large relative to the earnings most students receive after working for several years. I believe students in need of financial support often do not borrow enough. By borrowing more, they would be able to work less, and thereby concentrate on their studies and finish school more rapidly.

Given what I wrote about in my previous comment, this sentence (from Becker) jumped out:

"Since American colleges are in a highly competitive environment, they tend to raise tuition when they can attract good students who are willing to pay more."

The "competitive environment" he speaks about is competitive in terms of attracting top students, competitive in terms of attracting donations from wealthy benefactors and foundations, competitive in sports, but not competitive in terms of keeping costs down. Just the opposite.

I am reminded of the story of a public university in the midwest that, a few years ago, faced a marketing problem: The perception among its target in-state market was that it was inexpensive but not very good academically. In fact, it was inexpensive compared to other universities, but academically it was much better than folks perceived it to be. The relative low cost was communicating to potential students an incorrect message about quality. "Cheap" was considered to be mediocre.

Their marketing solution: They drastically increased the published price of tuition for in-state students - then they, on paper, gave all in-state students automatic scholarships to fully cover the cost increase.

The perception of the school began to change - it was as expensive as its peers so it must be as good as them, too. And the school began to attract better students.

The National Center for Policy Analysis describes the effect here:

Many public universities are turning to the "private school tuition model" -- a high list price and big scholarships -- in order to attract more students. Advertised tuition prices -- a school's "sticker price" -- are on the rise because high tuition carries prestige, especially at top schools; however, financial aid, tax credits and scholarships are rising to match inflated tuition prices:

Miami University, a public school in Miami, Ohio, raised in-state tuition to match out-of-state tuition, $19,718, and then awarded automatic scholarships to in-state students to make up the difference.

After that move, the university received a record number of applications: 15,000 for 3,500 spots.

Support for Iraq War Rises Sharply

The Politico reports:

According to late February polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 53 percent of Americans - a slim majority - now believe "the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals" in Iraq. That figure is up from 42 percent in September 2007. The percentage of those who believe the war in Iraq is going "very well" or "fairly well" is also up, from 30 percent in February 2007 to 48 percent today.

A year ago, John McCain bet his political career on backing the surge in Iraq. It's increasingly looking like he just might have made a winning bet.

The Hart of the Matter

The Tennessean, and probably other newspapers across the state, are carrying this AP story today: White separatist had run as Paul delegate in Tenn..

The story is about a Ron Paul supporter whose white separatist views were not widely known when he ran in the recent Tennessee Republican Presidential Primary seeking to be a delegate for Paul to the Republican National Convention. (Delegate candidates got on the ballot by collecting a handful of signatures. Paul didn't come close to winning enough votes in Tennessee to earn even a single delegate.)

I spoke with AP reporter Erik Schelzig Wednesday afternoon as he was preparing the story and we discussed two hypothetical scenarios. 1. A candidate with known racist views tries to run as a Republican. 2. A candidate whose racist views are unknown runs, and wins a spot on the ballot.

The case of the Ron Paul delegate wannabe is the latter. Had Ron Paul garnered enough votes to earn delegates from Tennessee, and had the Tennessee Republican Party become aware of this delegate candidate's racist views, it would have taken steps to prevent him from actually going to the convention as a delegate.

In 2004, a racist candidate by the name of James Hart sought the GOP congressional primary to challenge Democratic incumbent Rep. John Tanner. Once his views became known - Hart advocated discouraging "what he called "less favored races" from reproducing or immigrating to the United States - the TRP disavowed him and actively backed a write-in candidate. Hart came in second.

Like a bad penny, Hart popped up again in 2006, seeking the same nomination. This time the TRP's State Executive Committee officially decertified Hart, declaring him to be not a bonafide Republican, stripping him of his party affiliation and kicking him off the ballot.

I've heard Hart may be running again this year. He should look forward to the same result.

The Tennessee Republican Party belongs to the party of Lincoln - the political party that freed the slaves, the political party that, three years after the end of the Civil War, passed the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting United States citizenship to African-Americans. Not one single Democrat in the U.S. House or Senate voted for the 14th Amendment.

The Republican Party is the political party most responsible for the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 - over the heated objections and efforts of such Democrat luminaries as then-Sen. Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, and West Virginia's Sen. Robert Byrd, the ex-Klansmen many Democrats today refer to as "the conscience of the Senate."

In 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate the Little Rock, Ark., schools over the resistance of Democrat Gov. Orval Faubus.

That's the heritage of the Republican Party, and the Tennessee Republican Party does not and will not welcome candidates with racist views and platforms.

Fuel Cell Blogging

Tired of politics? I'm blogging a bit for the Fuel Cell Store on, you guessed it, fuel cells. Turns out there's a lot of news about fuel cells.

March 12, 2008

Half True?

Nathan Moore looks at some Harris Poll data and calculates that about half of voters read political blogs on a daily basis.

When Democrats Attack ... Each Other

Rand Simberg comments on the Eliot Spitzer mess, and on how the Democratic Party's presidential candidates and their surrogates are treating each other the way they used to treat Republicans.

When It All Comes Together

YouTube's got video of Tampa Bay's MediaTalk - a webcast/podcast show - doing an interview with local syndicated columnist Joe O'Neill, who also publishes the OpinionsToGoOnline.com website. Let's recap: The Internet has video of a radio show-like webcast/podcast interview of a newspaper columnist and blogger. Welcome to the new media.

"Information is our only weapon."

An organization calling itself "Anonymous" is battling the Scientology cult via YouTube, with a handful of oddly mesmerizing videos including this one.

March 10, 2008

Gore: Count Every Vote - And Mine 10 Times

Al Gore is set to make a bundle off the IPO of Current Media, owner of the tiny cable network CurrnentTV that hardly anybody watches. He's already been pulling down a rather large salary as "executive chairman" of the company, which has lost tens of millions of dollars since its inception. Business Week declares the IPO a bad deal for potential investors, and notes that the structure of the IPO will give Gore and Current Media co-founder Joel Hyatt "the kind of hammer-lock control over the company decried by shareholder rights activists and many of the same unions that supported Gore for years." That's because their "Class B" shares will be worth 10 votes in shareholder elections compared to a single vote per share for the "Class A" stock held by ordinary non-insider investors.

As University of Delaware corporate governance expert Charles Elson tells Business Week, the IPO's Class B shares are "hardly democratic - with a large D or a small d. The irony is that this is coming from a Democratic leader."

The Anger Chronicles

A site for people who write for a living to write anonymously and vent their anger about their chosen profession. Yeah, AngryJournalist.com is going to be fascinating and, I predict, very busy.

The Next Social Network

Could the WordPress blogging app be the next "social networking" platform? A blog post about that from last December just crossed my digital radar screen, and I found it interesting - especially these thoughts:

In contrast to social networking, blogging offers a person-centric way for individuals to come online. A social network like Facebook gives you your own place online, but it's not really your own place. As Copyblogger Brian Clark recently said in a blog post, "For me, there's really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating 'user-generated' content via a social networking application. That's like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent."

Clark was responding to an ongoing conversation launched by blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who proposed that blogging is far more important to him than social networking. Bloggers including Stowe Boyd and Darren Rowse seconded the idea. This growing disenchantment with social networking and return to blogging suggests that in the future we could see a migration, at least among tech bloggers, towards more distributed social networking - along the lines of what [Chris] Messina [co-founder of Citizen Agency] envisions.

Not a week goes by that I don't get invited to join some new social network - most of which I've never heard of. I decline pretty much all of them. There are simply too many of them and not enough hours in the day to maintain one's page on that many social networks. You'll find me on LinkedIn and Facebook, and that's about it.

What I'd like to see created would be a single "meta-social networking platform" from which one could manage all of one's disparate social network accounts. Oh, and a social network that, as it grows and enriches its creators, also enriches its members.

Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old who created Facebook is worth $1.5 billion. Why don't the members of Facebook - whose presence on his platform is the sole reason for his wealth - get to share in it? Seems to me a social network that was also a $ocial network would do pretty well.

March 8, 2008

Peak Oil?

Expert says: The world has plenty of oil. As much as we don't like paying high prices for a gallon a gas, there is a major difference between today and the Carter era, when gasoline was not only expensive, it was often unavailable. Frankly, a nation that can afford to let the equivalent of 30 years of oil from Saudi Arabia lie untouched underneath Arctic ice because of some caribou is not facing an oil shortage, and a political party that urges that oil be untouched can't credibly claim to be worried about the availability of oil - or about achieving energy independence from the Middle East.

Recessionary Politics

James Pethokoukis examines the role of the economy in the presidential election. If the Democratic nominee tries to sell big tax increases as the medicine to heal the economy, I predict he or she will lose big. Most Americans understand that the problem of too little money in their wallets is not solved by government removing even more of it - no matter what government promises to spend it on.

Journalism, New and Old

A couple of stories about journalism caught my eye this morning, including this from PR Week:

In the run-up to last month's Washington State presidential primaries, 16 young journalists covered the campaign events of nearly every Presidential contender to visit the state. However, the aspiring reporters and editors weren't reporting on deadline in the traditional sense. The group of bloggers are University of Washington students in professor David Domke's online journalism class, which teaches Web reporting, blogging, and the use of multimedia applications, along with proper sourcing and the inverted pyramid writing style.

The classes of 2008 and beyond, many familiar with the Web for a decade or more, are being taught to adjust to the quickening pace required for real-world reporting. And much of that instruction is coming from this year's campaign, where deadlines are often pushed forward to just after, or during, an event or speech, says Domke.

"Everything is lightning-fast these days, and this has been the biggest adjustment for my students, since they're used to reading about [events], but they haven't stepped into the very fast current of the coverage," he says. "I think when we started this class, some of them didn't have much experience blogging. Then they started seeing how they would write things and it would get picked up [by other blogs or news Web sites]."

The course is another example of future journalists - and the people who train them - adjusting to a media map where bloggers hold as many post-graduation opportunities as traditional media sources. Reporters are not only trafficking in the written word, but manning digital cameras and audio recorders...

Yesterday, The New York Times asked what the publishing industry - and the paper itself - could have done to have fact-checked a fradulent story produced by Margaret Seltzer that made its way into a book, and to the pages of the paper itself in a profile.

Just as the creator of those fake "National Guard documents" fooled the fact-checkers at CBS four years ago, leading to a false and fraudulent story making it on to 60 Minutes, while the much-broader fact-checking capacity of the blogosphere spotted the errors and exposed the fraud.

March 7, 2008

Fuel Cell-Blogging

I'm going to be doing a little blogging for the Fuel Cell Store's blog, aptly named the Fuel Cell Store Blog. Just a post a day while I'm having breakfast - nothing like the volume of blogging I did last year for the Ecotality Life blog, though the project is related - Ecotality LLC owns the Fuel Cell Store.

Your Children Are Not Your Children

In California not long ago a judge ruled that California parents do not have a constitutional right to home-school their children. It can't happen here, right?

Well, Tennessee's governor and a group of Democrat lawmakers in the state House believe that public schools ought to be able to engage in intrusive mental health testing of children without the parents' knowledge. David Fowler of Family Action Tennessee reports in his weekly email newsletter:

We learned this week that the Governor and the majority of the Public Health Subcommittee in the House think that intrusive mental health testing of children is none of a parent's business (HB 1419). For several years a bill to require school officials to get parental permission prior to conducting mental health tests on their children has passed the Senate and died in a House Subcommittee.

The bill, championed by Bobbie Patray, President of Tennessee Eagle Forum, would have required school officials or the testing companies they allow into the schools to get the permission of parents prior to administration of these tests. And this is not just testing of a child whose behavior exhibits some kind of problem. No, we are talking about universal health screenings - screening every child regardless of any apparent need.

Schools won't let children go on field trips without a permission slip from a parent, but conducting subjective mental health screenings and diagnosis without permission is apparently fine. Schools complain about a lack of parental involvement, but then when given the chance to allow parents to be involved in something that could follow their child for the rest of his or her life - a diagnosis of some mental disorder - they kick the parents out!

Interestingly, this bill had been worked on by all the various departments and was apparently acceptable to them. But, at the hearing, Dr. (Tom) Catron, Director of the Governor's Office of Child Care Coordination waltzed in with no prior notice to the bill's sponsor (Rep. Beth Harwell, R-Nashville) and said that "they" - presumably the Governor for whom he works - did not want the parents to know about the tests until after they had been conducted. His words were:

"It is very important that we engage parents once children are identified in early identification to allow them to make the important choices about what should happen and what kind of service their children should be involved in."

In other words, when the government is through testing your children we'll let you in on it.

This policy and Dr. Catron's statement reek of liberal arrogance. In other words, "Parent's cannot be trusted to make good decisions for their children. The government needs to step in because the government really knows better than parents what is best for their children."

Never mind the government's track record in nanny care results and the lackluster administration of the Department of Children's Services compared to the otherwise stellar record most parents have in looking out for their children.

These mental health diagnoses, made on the basis of tests that parents will know nothing about, will go into a child's file. These diagnoses could possibly follow that child for the rest of his or her academic career and possibly into their adult life when they apply for jobs or health insurance.

Dr. Catron made an analogy to universal hearing and sight tests. But hearing and sight tests are objective tests. There are no questions that might be misunderstood by a child that could result in a "false positive" - a diagnosis that is wrong. In fact, three states are now being sued over the very issue of false positives made in conjunction with tests parents did not know were being conducted.

"Public welfare," according to Dr. Catron, dictates that tests be administered without parental consent. Public welfare is too important. But parental rights are important too. But respecting parental rights Dr. Catron said would impose an "economic burden" on the state and would interfere with the "timeliness" of the tests.

Waiting a week or two to test every child is not a threat to the public welfare. These are grade school children we are talking about here, not suspected terrorist threats! Parents need to take back their schools. They also need to find people to serve in Nashville who will respect them and their rights. Clearly, the Governor and a majority of the members of this Subcommittee do not.

And, I should note, Gov. Bredesen's kid went to private schools - where the governor's "test without notice" policy would not have applied.

Imagine that.

My second child enters kindergarten this fall. Private school is expensive. I pray daily that God will help us find a way to keep him out of the public school system. His education and well-being are too important to turn over to the state.

Update: HB 1419 (PDF file), the legislation that would places restrictions on universal mental health testing, or psychiatric or socioemotional screening of juveniles, by the public schools, and require consent by a juvenile's parent, guardian, legal custodian, or caregiver before such testing can occur, had a bipartisan list of 21 co-sponsors in the House and a bipartisan group of 18 co-sponsors in the Senate, where it ultimately passed by a 30-1vote.