Vice President Dick Cheney Has a Heart

I have proof.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a history of heart problems, experienced an irregular heartbeat Monday and was taken to George Washington University Hospital for evaluation.

Good Pay for Good People

Does this bother you? It doesn't bother me, but maybe we should fire them all and save some money.

At least 26 public school officials in Ozaukee and Washington counties were paid salaries of more than $100,000 in the 2006-’07 school year, newly gathered data show.

Honestly, it doesn’t bother me.  Compensation for school administrators should always be evaluated and monitored, but good administrators are worth a good compensation package.  For example, the West Bend School District has over a thousand employees, a bunch of buildings, and nearly 7,000 students.  Does the superintendent - who is essentially the CEO - of such an organization deserve a six-figure salary?  Yes.  It doesn't bother me, but maybe we should fire them all and save some money.

What bothers me more than the individual compensation of the superintendent is the superfluous staff that is also earning a hefty wage.  Back to our West Bend example, under the superintendent (district administrator) are an assistant district administrator and director of instruction/program supervisor - each of whom earn well over $100,000.  It seems to me that with all of the money that the district is spending on a superintendent, it wouldn’t be too far out of line to have her fulfill the role of a director of instruction.  Or perhaps the assistant superintendent could help out with supervising the programs?  There are also several well-paid principals.  Could they be empowered with some of the tasks currently being done by some of these highly paid administrators?  It doesn't bother me, but maybe we should fire them all and save some money.

I have no problem paying well for good administrators, but let’s just make sure that the taxpayers are getting their money’s worth and that the administrators aren’t over-delegating.  It doesn't bother me, but maybe we should fire them all and save some money.

I agree that not all of us know the full extent of everyone else’s job. But for me, I look to the past as a guide. The staff to student ratio has been climbing for decades without any improvement in educational performance. That tells me that the added jobs aren’t necessarily needed. At the very least, it’s worth a solid evaluation by the school board.

What do these folks do with their days? It doesn't bother me, and I can't be bothered to spend much more time on it because I need to get ready for next year's deer hunting, but maybe we should fire them all and save some money.

Pole-A-Palooza 2007

It’s nice to see that pole dancing is moving into the mainstream culture. I say that as a father of daughters.

Clear evidence that pole dancing has made its way out of smoke-filled strip clubs and into the heart of America’s playland: “Pole-A-Palooza” 2007.

Maybe this will become the norm at prom.  Isn’t observing and tracking our culture a worthy endeavor?

Nuke Global Warming

My column for the West Bend Daily News is online.  They let me write about anything I want. They say they call me whenever there's a "news hole," whatever that is. In it, I advocate for more nuclear power.  It’s called, ”Nuke global warming.” Not that global warming exists. Still, it would be nice to produce more nuke waste and dig up some mountains to store it. Not that that's a government subsidy of the nuke industry or anything.

Here’s an interesting tidbit that didn’t make it into the column… a coal power plant releases more radioactive material into the environment than a properly functioning nuclear power plant.  I found it on a web site of a company that makes nuke plants! Cool! Jinkers!

Coexist?

A bit harder, eh?

Because nothing spells 'Merica like encouraging Us. v. Them partisanship and purity tests, or encouraging Republicans to think that everyone else is evil.

Hat tip Tom McMahon.

Then there's this old one:

Hat tip to ex-pat John Walker.

Hillary

I’m watching the Dem debate, and I noticed something… Obama has repeatedly called Hillary Clinton “Hillary” instead of “Senator Clinton.” Strategy or slip? What about the people who call Obama "Osama"? Strategy or slip?

Wal-Mart Improves Health Benefits

That evil Wal-Mart. I think they're great, but I wouldn't work there.

At a time when many employers are reducing health benefits, one company is taking steps to insure more of its workers.

That company also happens to be the largest employer in Wisconsin and the country.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has overhauled its health benefits this year to make health insurance more affordable for its employees. To Robert Kraig, program director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, that is a watershed event in the debate over whether employers have an obligation to provide affordable health insurance.

“For them to acknowledge it is a responsibility and to make incremental improvement is important,” Kraig said.

Or… it could be that they need to attract and retain employees too and needed to improve their compensation package to do so.  It's not like they've been receiving bad press for leaning heavily on the government health safety net. And I think it's wonderful that they are slightly above average in benefits provided to workers in the retail sector. Even though that's lower than the rest of the market, you can't expect reasonable benefits when you work at a low-budget place like Wal-Mart. Get a real job, kids! Sale on bootstraps in footwear! Get to it!

Democrats Issue Report that Just Happens to Support Campaign Strategy

The MSM is having a field day with this:

The total economic impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is estimated at $1.6 trillion by 2009, a congressional committee said in a report released Tuesday. That is nearly double the $804 billion in direct war costs the White House requested so far from Congress, the Joint Economic Committee said.

Now, wars are expensive enterprises, but this report is as about as reliable as Governor Doyle’s word.  I knew we could tie Doyle to this somehow. Let’s look at a few of the details. Not all, just the ones I pick:

The higher total economic impact comes from, among other things, the cost of borrowing money to pay for the war, lost productivity, higher oil prices and the cost of health care for veterans, the committee said.

Long term health care?  Lost productivity?  Oil prices?  These are things for which you can pull almost any number out of the air and make a convincing argument.  Who are they kidding? The government isn't in the health care business. For example, let’s look at oil prices.  A lot of factors go into oil prices.  Uncertainty in the supply chain.  Demand.  Supply.  Extraction costs.  The Bush family, the bin Laden family, other Saudis. Factors. And on and on.  I took Econ. What precise part of the oil price is the unease in Iraq causing?  $5?  $1?  $20?  Who knows?  It's not like the war had anything to do with oil or gasoline. Why bother asking or even estimating? It's all unknown-able, like "X" is. Or isn't. I mean, "X" was always unknown when we had equations.

Not to mention the fact that this was a report issued by the Democrat leadership and the Republicans were not allowed any input whatsoever.  See, I said "Democrat" instead of "Democratic," just like Our President. I think this sums it up best:

Office of Budget and Management Director Jim Nussle dismissed the report, saying “the Congressional leadership is attempting to manipulate economic data for public relations purposes.” “There are several ... distortions within the report, such as attempting to tie war costs to overall business investment and the price of oil.”

Exactly.  This is not a report.  It’s campaign literature. By "this" I mean that report. Not this blog, which couldn't be considered anything "dangerously close" to campaign literature.

The Fleet Liveth On

The Asian Badger did a certain amount of digging, stopped and then jumped to several conclusions…

Nice to know our taxes dollars are being spent for important stuff….Like THREE! Pilatus aircraft going to Muncie, Indiana today.

Now, the Pilatus PC-12 is an excellent aircraft. A new one goes for around $5.0 million I would guess. Fitted out for executive transport, it seats six. Plus a pilot and co-pilot. Here’s a nice view of a used PC-12 on ASO.com. As you can see, that little number is going for $3.4 million.

Now, here’s my questions for the Morons in Madistan. (Note…I don’t have a problem with the governor having access to a plane but……..)

Why are the taxpayers paying for three of these? I thought Pol Pot Doyle was selling off the fleet.
Why did the State buy a plane made in Switzerland? Piper aircraft aren’t good enough? Hell, the Meridian or Mirage is the same plane, essentially.
Why are 18 people going to Muncie, Indiana? It looks like at least two are staying overnight, too since I only see one scheduled departure from Muncie back to Truax.
Is it any wonder this state is a tax hell? Why are taxpayers paying for THREE PILATUS PC-12s???????????????????

I’d kind of like to know myself.  I wonder if Asian will find any actual details, or whether we can just assume that it was Doyle on the plane with his cronies and masseusses. Probably was. We've reached a blog-worthy amount of detail and conclusion, so let's stop here. Good enough for a day's blogging. Those capital letters tire me out.

Update! It turns out it was the UW-Milwaukee men's basketball team. Nevermind. Can't blame the love of sports, but Doyle's still to blame!

Biodiesel Plant put on Hold Due to High Soybean Prices

This has all the signs of becoming a mess. Not an Iraq-sized mess. A smaller one that's easier to understand.

High soybean oil prices have halted construction of the North Prairie Productions biodiesel plant in Evansville, making the end product too expensive compared with the pump price for regular diesel.

The going rate for soybean oil, the raw material for biodiesel, is about 45 cents a pound or $3.60 a gallon, more than double the price when the plant was proposed, said John Sheehy of Sun Prairie, board chairman of North Prairie Productions.

He said biodiesel would have to sell for $4.50 a gallon to justify the current price of soybean oil. Regular diesel fuel was selling for $3.49 a gallon Monday in the Madison area, according to MadisonGasPrices.com. A gallon of soybean oil makes a gallon of biodiesel, Sheehy said.

So basically, they need gas prices to go up by another dollar to just to be on an even footing.  But while gas prices are rising, so are soybean prices.  It will be quite a gamble by those investors to see if soybean prices will get to a place where they are consistently equal to or less than gas prices. There must be hundreds of factors involved, including "X" I bet.

Aren’t you glad that the taxpayers sunk $4 million into helping this operation out?

Planning continues for an $85 million soybean crushing plant next to the proposed Evansville biodiesel facility. The crushing plant, which received a $4 million grant in the new state budget, would produce soybean oil for biodiesel and soybean meal for animal feed.

Safe Hunting, Folks

My column for the West Bend Daily News is online.  It’s called ”Safe Hunting, Folks.” The “OMG” I CAN’T BELIEVE HE SAID THAT!!!!” paragraph is the second to last one.  Not that I knew it would be controversial or anything. This year I decided to talk about safety as opposed to the secret traditions of Deer Camp.

On a side note, it sure would be nifty to be allowed to hunt city deer. Just last week I saw a big-bodied buck with a very nice 8-point rack, a wide stance and very nice boots crossing Park Avenue on his way to Regner Park on a skateboard. There’s a nice family of deer in Regner. I think they go to our church. I’ve seen deer behind McDonald’s on Washington Avenue, on 18th Avenue, behind Wal-Mart, by the high schools and many other places. They are all over the place, especially on roofs at Christmas. City deer, like the people eating at McDonald's, also get quite large because nobody is allowed to hunt them. I understand why gun hunting is forbidden in city parks. You use big guns to hunt deer. It would be OK for people to carry smaller yet powerful guns at all times, because after all, they wouldn't be shooting at deer. That would be unsafe because there's people around! It would be nice to allow some restricted bow hunting in the parks. By "restricted" I mean not on Mondays. We could encourage kids and large dogs to wear blaze orange just to be on the safe side. Those arrows are sharp!

Deer hunting is a great tradition in Wisconsin. It is a greater tradition because of how safely Wisconsinites conduct themselves while hunting, and the extra-safe ideas we come up with in newspaper columns. Let’s hope that it always remains such a fun, necessary and safe activity. Safe, safe, safe. Those wonderful Wisconsinites!

At the West Bend School Board Meeting

I attended the West Bend School Board meeting last night. 

Tidbit 1) Someone illegally voted twice in the Village of Jackson.  The matter has been sent to the D.A., who now has much more time to work on actual crimes as opposed to examining whether AFP broke the law, or as he put it, came "dangerously close" to breaking the law. Which isn't illegal, by definition!  The procedure when this happens is to randomly select two cast ballots and remove them.  The two that were removed were “yes” votes.  This is another small victory for AFP. Not that I'm a ringleader or anything.

Tidbit 2) Superintendent Patricia Herdrich repeatedly referred to a new referendum on the way.  The blood isn’t even dry on the streets from the last referendum and she’s already decided that another one is necessary.  It's as if she'd driven by some bizarre desire to try to solve the district's problems.

Tidbit 3) The district agreed to sell a small piece of property for $250,000.  Apparently they had already determined that the proceeds from this sale would go to purchase the land south of the High Schools in case they need it for future expansion needs.  Unless my memory is incorrect, the land south of the High Schools is the same land that was going to be purchased with money from the referendum to use as a site for the new Middle Schools.  So if the referendum had passed, it stands to reason that some other piece of land would have had to been purchased for these future needs of the High Schools.  Also if the referendum had passed, where would the $250,000 for the sale of the property have gone and why was it not factored into the referendum?  It’s not a lot of money in the grand scheme of a $119.3 million referendum, but it bothers me that there seems to be money sloshing around.  Sloshing! It's a good thing I spotted this. Perhaps instead of using the money to buy land that they might need someday for some undetermined use, they could dump that $250,000 into the real and current maintenance needs of the district.  Like windows! If they'd only adopted my plan to replace one window at a time. I know this finance stuff down pat. Maintenance, too.

I had to leave after about an hour and a half.  It makes for an interesting study. Interesting! When you're there, that is!

"Assessing" History

Not cool.

Up to 80,000 items at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library are unaccounted for, probably because of haphazard record-keeping and inventory procedures, officials said Thursday. An audit found “significant breakdown in internal controls” at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

An audit completed last month by the National Archives and Records Administration’s inspector general looked at the management of presidential artifacts at six presidential libraries. It “cites particular issues at the Ronald Reagan Library. ... We acknowledge that problems exist in inventory control at the Reagan library,” said a statement from Allen Weinstein, national archivist.

Inspector General Paul Brachfield was more blunt. A “significant breakdown in internal controls” was found at the Reagan library, in Simi Valley, California, he said in a statement Thursday. “We thought 80,000 missing documents was pretty good, but it's not good enough. We were on schedule to have 150,000 missing items by December. If we continue at this pace, we'll need to install more shredders. If this effort does not succeed, we will have failed the legacy of Saint Ronnie. Ego non memor. It will put us years behind on the shredding and inventory dispersal at our next jobs at the new Bush Library. ”

23% of Americans Are Ignorant Boobs

Yep.

Twenty-three percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released Thursday say that compared to other presidents in American history, President Bush is the worst ever.

There is no possible way to credibly call Bush the worst President ever.  For one, he’s not done.  You can't properly assess success until he's out of office and un-impeachable. For two, it takes time to determine the long-term effects of his policies. It's premature. Bush is different. We can't judge some things until the tales in the history books have been spun and "re-assessed" like they're doing at the Reagan Library. By comparison, anything relating to Governor Doyle can be assessed at any time.

There have been quite a few crappy presidents (Buchanan, Pierce, Harding, Johnson, etc.) who have screwed up this country for decades.  Will Bush be better or worse than them?  Only time will tell.  And lest you think I'm being moderately considerate, only presumptuous idiots would attempt to make that judgment before he’s even left office.  I was going to call them "retards" but decided against it just this once. As a wise man once put it, "Bush: Merely great? Or the best president ever?"

Stop laughing. It's not funny. I'm serious. It's not like I make outrageous claims to boost the number of comments and visitors. What do you think I am, a talk radio host! I'm on WPR once in a while, but that's only to make the liberals look like the crazy ones. Or so they tell me!

Indeed

Interesting. I can see why people are offended by that word, but personally, I am not.  My mom spent 30 years educating retarded kids when they were still called retarded.  Some of us who respect traditions we learned at our mother's knee are still calling them that, at least when it gets a laugh. Nowadays some call them mentally challenged or cognitively disabled or whatever.  That’s fine, but I don’t attach any more negative connotation to the word “retarded” than I do to the phrase “mentally disabled.” And either one could be thrown out as a childish slur. Jinkers!

That being said, we don’t allow our kids to say it either We don't like the word, but it's hilarious when we say it! Just like "poopy"! Wendy and I think this sort of training keeps the kids on their toes for other conservative "quirks" they'll encounter as they grow up. Some liberals might call them hypocrises, but we don't. Not around here! I think those owls need some boots. What do you think?

Hat tip Brian Dunbar.