FERGUSON, MO, POLITICS

It seems weird to me that more blacks in Ferguson, MO, aren't in the local politics.  I'm sorry to say that it looks like Ferguson residents don't care until some tragedy happens.  See the following quotes:

Ferguson’s population is two-thirds African-American, yet the mayor, five of the six City Council members and nearly the entire police force are white.*
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It’s true that Ferguson’s municipal elections schedule doesn’t encourage turnout. These elections take place in April, far from the traditional voting day in November. They also occur in nonpresidential years, when turnout by minorities and young people traditionally drops. In the most recent municipal election, only 12 percent of registered voters — white, black or otherwise — cast ballots. Voters can change those dates.*
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At Brown’s funeral, a family member called on mourners to make themselves heard at the polls. But only 204 residents of Ferguson registered to vote from the time of the fatal shooting to the Oct. 8 registration deadline for voting this year — only 204 in a city of 21,000 people.*

*http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/11/26/ferguson-voting-matters/19536643/

MAJORITY NOW SAY THINGS GOING WELL

According to a CNN/ ORC International poll conducted Nov. 21-23 [2014] of 1,045 adults, 52 percent of people said things are going well, including 8 percent who said they were going very well. This compares to 48 percent who said things are going badly, including 33 percent who said things are going pretty badly, and 15 percent who said things are going very badly.*

This is in contrast to August and November polls of 2011 when only 24-28% said things were going either fairly well or vary well and September, October, and December polls of 2010 when 25-29% said things were going fairly well or very well (less than 1% doing very well).  The worst month since 2005 was the November 2008 poll where only 16% said that thing were fairly well (less than 1% very well).

We've come a long way, Baby.

The best poll year was 2000 when January polls were 80 and 81% doing fairly well or very well (all time best starting in 1974) to  a LOW of 72% in June!  Let the good times roll.  Oh, for those bubble years!

* http://webmailb.juno.com/webmail/new/5?session_redirect=true&userinfo=8b254f2f4f26b1dc56d8fe41da329a7b&count=1417202894&cf=SP2&randid=771484870

GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE IN 5 MIN.

A source has come to my attention that exlpains global climate change in various time limits.  I present under 5 min. here: http://www.howglobalwarmingworks.org/in-under-5-minutes-ba.html

IMMIGRATION REFORM II

I can't believe that President Obama's Executive Order on immigration will be ovterurned in the courts.* There are an estimated 11.5 million illegal immmigrants in this country.  If he exempts from deportation 5 million, that still leaves an estimated 6.5 million to choose from.  He may deport as many as 400,000 illegals/year over the next two years (800,000 total).  There are plenty more than enough illegals to choose from for deportation.

Obama plans to deport illegals with criminal records and those who arrived here illegally during his term in office (whether they have had children during this period or not).  I have no idea except that this grouping may fulfill the total deportations during the next two years. If not, there are plenty of others around to fill the gap.

I think that the last in should be the first out is a sound policy because it helps discourage illegal migration.

The whole foofarah is over nothing really.

* Also see: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/11/immigration-reform.html

IMMIGRATION REFORM

So now with President Obama's modest Executive Order on immigration, the Republicans are REALLY not going to do anything on immigration (or hardly on anything else) instead of just doing nothing on immigration.  When are we going to elect more adults to our congress?

My take is that our deportation king President has just set priorities on who will be deported and particularly will focused on those who have criminal records.

There has been quite of bit of mention on the Executive Order limitation on illegal immigrants having to have been in this country for 5 yrs or more and only to parents of American citizens or that are here legally.  Aside from 5 yrs being a nice round number, it essentially says that you have to have arrived here before I became president (actually 6 yrs would be more accurate but doesn't sound as nice).  In other words, if you have illegally come here during my tenure, you are fair game for deportation.

I still consider it a mystery as to why Republicans in the House did nothing on the Senate immigration bill.  For example they could have picked out completing the fence, adding the 19,000 new border patrol members and increasing the number of drones added and just pass that.  Of course, the Senate would either reject it or not even take it up, but, heck, they passed eliminating the ACA something like 50 times.  They could have added an immigration bill to it.  Perhaps they were wise enough to realize this would make their relations with the Hispanic community even worse.  But as it was, the party of no immigration bill (not even voting on the Senate bipartisan bill)* in the House and shutting down the government paid no penalty in this last election.  It even appears that the electorate liked all the inaction and rejection.  They even got a larger share of the Hispanic vote.  So it is said that Democrats just don't turn out for mid-term elections.  Well, Democrats not voting is actually voting for the Republicans.  A pox on both political houses.

* And many other things like rejecting background checks on guns, raising the minimum wage, failure to endorse the President's actions in Iraq and many others.

DOLLAR INDEX RECENT HISTORY

The Dollar Index (DXY) was originated by the Federal Reserve and was originally designed before the Euro came into being, therefore it may come as no surprise that the Euro makes up more than 50% (57.6% actual) of the dollar index with Japan being number two at 13.6%.  The Pound Sterling (11.9%), Canadian Dollar (9.1%), Swedish Krona (4.2%), and Swiss Franc (3.6%) follow.  The Dollar Index is a weighted geometric mean of these six currencies, our six most important trading countries (Note: China is not on the list.).*

Very recently the Dollar Index has risen sharply, i.e. the dollar has strengthened, making exports from the US more expensive and imports less expensive that will no doubt widen our trade deficit.   Below is a graph of the Dollar Index going back through 2006.  You can see that the Dollar Index is now at its third highest peak since the Great Recession;  however it has been much higher and topped 120 briefly in 2001 and didn't drop below 100 until April of 2003.**  It has remained below 100 ever since.  It dropped below 72 in April of 2008.***  It closed on November 19 at 87.11.

Figure from BarChart: http://www.barchart.com/quotes/stocks/$DXY


* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Dollar_Index
** http://futures.tradingcharts.com/historical/US/2001/0/continuous.html
*** Actually there was a "flash crash very briefly in the dollar index in April of 2007.

INCOMES POST THE GREAT RECESSION

Even though there are now more jobs than before the Great Recession, a recent report* by the U.S. Conference of Mayors and IHS Global Insight found that new jobs pay 23 percent less than the positions lost in the recession. The wage gap is "significantly larger" than that of the country's last recession and recovery, the report found, and implies $93 billion in lower wage income.  Job losses have been prmarily in manufacturing (avg. $63,000) and construction (avg. $58,000) and replaced by lower paying jobs in hospitality, healthcare, and administrative support (avg $21,000-$47,000).  The median household income in 2012 was $51,017 which, when adjusted for inflation, was the lowest since 1995.

The metropolitan areas with the highest percentage of the workforce with incomes above $100,000/yr (above 40%) are: Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT (41.8% with a median income of $81,100/yr in 2013); San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA (45.4% with a median income of $93,500/yr in 2013), and Washington, D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria (44.1% with a median income of $88,100/yr in 2013).  SanFrancsico-Oakland-Fremont, CA came close at 38.4% (with a median income of $75,900/yr in 2013).  Metrolplitan areas with the fewest percentage above $100,000 (below 10%) are:  Gadsen, AL (7.4% with a median income of $34,900/yr in 2013); Muncie, IN (9.1% with a median income of $36,000/yr in 2013);  Yuma, AZ (9.3% with a median income of $39,700/yr in 2013); Brownsville-Harlington, TX (9.4% with a median income of $30,800/yr in 2013 Ranked 363); Ocala, FL (9.4% with a median income of $37,700/yr in 2013); Fort Smith, AR,OK (9.6% with a median income of $36,300/yr in 2013); Morristown, TN (9.6% with a median income of $39,200/yr in 2013);  Cumberland, MD,WV (9.7% with a median income of $36,100/yr in 2013); Joplin, MO (9.7% with a median income of $37,700/yr in 2013); Wheeling, WV,OH (9.9% with a median income of $42,400/yr in 2013).

Though fewer adults are getting married, remarriages are up.
Whether Americans remarry or not matters because marriage is correlated with financial well-being. Some 7% of remarried adults live in poverty, compared with 19% of divorced adults. The median annual personal income of remarried adults is about $30,000, $5,000 higher than for divorced adults.**

* See August 2014: Income and Wage Gaps Across the U.S.:  http://www.usmayors.org/metroeconomies/ I encourage you to look at the entire article.
** http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/11/14/more-americans-are-saying-i-do-again-and-again-and-again/?mod=djemRTE_h

REPUBLICANS AND HEALTH CARE FOR THE POOR

So the electorate in its wisdom has turned congress over to the party that caused the problems.  But all may not be lost.  For example, President Reagan instituted the rule that Emergency Rooms had to take all comers.  This was huge.  I think it was one of the two most major things of his presidency (the other was breaking the Air Traffic controller's Union).  Having Emergency rooms be the primary care source for the poor was maybe as large as the ACA, though it drives up the cost of those that can pay.  And then President Bush (43) got passed (if barely) Medicare D, the prescription drug provision.  Of course it had the weird "doughnut hole" that wasn't covered but it was huge too.  A benefit of having Republican  presidents pass health care provisions is that they remain unopposed.  You don't hear of any opposition to Emergency Rooms having to take all comers even though it clogs the emergency rooms.  You also don't hear opposition to Medicare D.  Neither of these had any attempt to cover the costs.  It is only the ACA that is opposed, certainly because it was passed by Democrats even though it was a conservative bill and attempted to cover the costs.  Like Medicare D, it is flawed but was the best bill that could have passed.

HOW ABOUT AN ASTEROID OR WOULD YOU BELIEVE A COMET

Yesterday (November 12, 2014) the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft Rosetta landed a package (Philae) on a comet (67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko).*  It was a very complex mission just to get to the comet.  Periodically I have been ready to break out in tears all day (the 13th).  In the early 1970s I was a member of a working group in NASA on Missions To Comets And Asteroids.  I’ve waited more than 40 years for this.  The ESA had a good mission to Halley’s Comet in 1968, but a mission by the U.S. couldn’t be sold.  The Japanese and Russians also had less sophisticated missions.  The U.S., however, did have a space craft reprogrammed to fly though the tail of Halley’s.  This sort of completes things for me, especially if the measurements planned are taken.  It didn’t happen on my time table, but it happened.  I’m glad to have lived long enough to experience it.

The lander is not a total success in that its anchoring did not work (so drilling is perhaps impossible) and it is in the shade of a cliff for now.  As it goes around the sun, perhaps it will get some illumination.  Still  many measurements will be made before its primary batteries run out.

Previously, the NASA spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker landed on the near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros, though it was an orbiter and was not designed to land.**  It was able to collect some valuable information, however, from its gamma-ray spectrometer for a couple of weeks.

My participation in the working group of Missions To Comets and Asteroids was probably the most exciting two years of my life.  We would ask the trajectory engineers (trajectory shapers) what kind of a mission we could have in, say, 1983 and a month later we would come back and these engineers would say something like you could go by asteroid such and such, comet thus and so, and rendezvous with comet whatever.  We had a hard time selling missions to small bodies comets and asteroids so the idea was if we could put several together it would be more sellable, but at the time it didn't work.  We did have some successes, however, with targets of opportunity.  A dust storm on Mars permitted pictures to be taken of the two satellites of Mars (Phobos and Deimos) and a storm on Jupiter enabled pictures to be taken of satellites on Jupiter, including the near Jupiter satellite Io where active volcanoes were observed (see the poem Io at http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2011/07/io.html).  Over many years, NASA was to become somewhat more interested in small bodies, perhaps because of the engineering challenges that supplied in getting to them.  I was to learn about all sorts of space tricks like Jupiter gravity assists in getting space craft to these small bodies.  .  (The report of the panel was published as Stuhlinger et al., Comet and Asteroid Mission Study Panel, l972, Comets and Asteroids:  A Strategy for Exploration:  NASA Technical Memorandum, NASA TM X-64677, 93 p. [where I was one of 11 authors])

* (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/13/comet-picture_n_6150592.html)
** http://science.nasa.gov/missions/near/

NOT SURE WHAT IS GOING ON

There were many strange things about this last election.  Perhaps the most weird was the re-election of Sam Brownback as governor of Kansas.  His tax cuts ruined the economy of Kansas and he degraded the schools, but the electorate reelected him anyway.  Are Kansas Republicans constitutionally unable to vote for anyone but a Republican no matter how bad?

The House Republicans love to tell how many bills they have passed that are held up in the Senate (I can't recall if it is closer to 240 or 420), but they never tell us what these bills are to do.  We know that something like 50 are to repeal the ACA (Affordability Care Act), what are the others?

New York Times, Oct. 22: “Some of those things will help,” Matthew J. Slaughter, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, said after reviewing nearly four dozen measures that House Republicans have labeled “jobs bills.” He cited some business tax cuts, for example, even as he cautioned about the cost of such actions.

“But,” added Mr. Slaughter, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, “it just struck me as sort of a compendium of modest expectations. If you ask me, ‘What’s your ballpark guess for how many jobs are going to be created?,’ it’s just not many.”

So there are nearly 4 dozen "jobs bills" passed in the House, but even a Republican economics professor says they are mainly for show.

But then there are some House bills proposed by Democrats that are also held up such as:

"A bill penned by Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.) regarding the Coconino National Forrest is anticipated to be included in a package of Natural Resources bills that will come for a full Senate vote later this year, her office said. (http://thehill.com/homenews/house/200228-house-dems-to-senate-dems-pass-our-bills)"

Or the even noncontroversial bill by a Democrat that:

Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.) has sponsored a bill aimed at naming an outpatient clinic after the late Major General William H. Gourley. It cleared the House in November.   

“It's nothing more than a bill to name a building so I am not sure why it's being held up,” Farr said. “I'd love to see it move.” ( http://thehill.com/homenews/house/200228-house-dems-to-senate-dems-pass-our-bills)


Such things sound silly except Harry Reid (and I am no fan of his) is trying to get the House to act on the Senate bipartisan immigration bill, perhaps one of the most important bills of recent history.  If that is his plan, it is not working.

VOTING WITH THEIR POCKET BOOKS

Why was there a Republican wave this last Tuesday (November 4, 2014) when ALL the economic news is good.  Why didn't the Republicans face a penalty for doing nothing, for shutting down the government, for not enacting background checks for guns when more than 80% of those polled wanted it, for not raising the minimum wage when more than 50% of those polled were for it, for the House's failure to vote on the Senate immigration reform bill that passed the Senate with 68 votes, eight more than needed.  In view of slow employment increase, why was there no infrastructure bill?  Why was there no penalty for the Republicans doing nothing?

The problem is that the employment numbers , in spite of the large increases, are only back to where they were when President Obama took office, and the steep decline in the numbers of jobs started before he took office but continued for some months after he took office.  And wage increases are not only not keeping up with inflation, but household income has actually dropped.  In states with better economies, like North Carolina, the Democratic Senators only lost narrowly, but in states where the economic recovery was poor, like Arkansas, Democrats did poorly.

And then, white male Democrats do not seem to turn out for mid-term elections for reasons not known by me.  Blacks and Hispanics did come out and Democratic women did come out for Democratic politicians if not in the percentages as they do in presidential elections.  Would Democratic candidates have done even more poorly if they had come out for the advances in medical care and lowering of medical inflation?  Would they have done more poorly if they had strongly noted the increase in the economy and job recovery even if there is a long way to go yet?

Well, there seems to be some optimism that now that Republicans control both houses of congress, we will see more bills passed, something on immigration, for example.  But the Senate bipartisan immigration bill was never voted on in the House and thoughts are that it would have passed with sufficient Republican votes if a vote was allowed.  It is expected that the Keystone XL pipeline will now pass (as I believe it should), and I would expect our Center Right President to sign it.  Not mentioned is drilling in ANWR (Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge) as I think should occur under some stringent conditions.  We don't really know if there is even any economic amounts of oil there.  How much of the religious agenda of the religious Republican Party will be pursued?  The Republican party has become such a religious party that I even wonder if it is even a legal party.  And will Republicans get rid of cloture in the Senate to get their bill through?

Well, let's be optimistic and think that now that the Republican are in control of congress, they will agree to some things they formerly opposed.  I tell myself that they will, but I can't help but wonder if they even know how to.  I'm a little more optimistic about the Senate than the House  Time will tell.