The Colonel's Forum

If you're mad about the fact that we just expanded health care to an extra 10% of the population, well, I feel sorry for you. The mere fact that the health insurance companies launched a $20 million ad campaign against this legislation means it's got some meat to it. A good, non-partisan review of the House bill is available here , including the fact that the Democrats included just one of the three main sticking points that the Republicans brought up at the much-hyped health care summit. If you want to blame someone, blame Kentucky's own Senator Mitch McConnell. He's letting this thing pass for his own personal gain. This legislation provides the perfect campaign platform for the Republicans this fall. "Repeal Obama-care!" And if the Republicans regain a majority, then Mitch once again becomes king of the Senate. It's really that simple. He could have filibustered the legislation. He could have amended it so that it got some Republican votes. He...

One of the things that's been bugging me lately is the deterioration of civility in America. I know it's been going on for some time now, but I think the polarizing politics of the '08 election (and President Obama's agenda) have made matters worse. What bothers me most I think actually just a symptom of this trend, and that is the increasing unwillingness of people to talk about politics, at all, ever. We Americans define ourselves so much by religion and politics, yet we've reached a point where we can't talk about either one for fear of starting a riot. This is really a shame. I meet people all the time when I travel. It's easy to tell the frequent business travelers from the vacationers for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons though is that a couple business travelers who are stuck on a plane together for 4.5 hours will almost certainly strike up a conversation to pass the time. We're not going to talk for the whole flight, and we're no...

I finally met one - a nice, friendly TSA agent with a good sense of humor. I'm sure he'll be fired by the end of the week for not fitting in with the rest of the gang, but this morning, at "o-dark-thirty," this guy actually made me laugh. He said "good morning, how are you?" I said I'm fine, how are you? "I'm livin' the dream, can't you see?" "I like Monday mornings.," he said. "Monday mornings it's almost all experienced travelers coming through here. You guys know the routine and we can move you through here in no time. Thursdays are the worst - it's amateur hour. Thursdays are the days when I get the people who say 'o, I didn't know that water is a liquid.' It makes me want to start selling a product I've thought of called 'instant water.' I figure it would be something like a pet rock. You sell people an empty bottle and explain to them that, once they're through the ...

I am spending the week in Bloomington, Indiana as I begin a new journey in life. I am now officially a graduate student at Indiana University - a card carrying member of the Hoosier nation. This is something I had been considering for some years now, and I finally reached a point in my career and in my life where the timing fit to "get this done now." I am pursuing a masters in business administration at the Kelley School of Business. It's named for the founder of Steak 'n Shake, one of my favorite restaurants. He did a lot of other relevant things in his life, including giving a truck-load of money to IU, but the one I like to remember him for is creating a burger chain that puts McDonald's to shame in terms of quality and service. My time on campus is already reminding me of my days at Miami University, and the charming town of Oxford, Ohio. Blooming is actually a really cool town too, I just never took the time to notice. Growing up in a Boilermaker hou...

With his term almost 25% complete, I've decided it's time for some reflection on our President. Since terrorism has again bubbled to the top of the news in recent weeks, I'll start there. Many people were concerned that Obama would be soft on terrorism, that he could not take the fight to the enemy as well as John McCain, that he couldn't spew bellicose rhetoric as well as Dick Cheney. In the first 11 months of his presidency, Obama has launched more successful missile attacks against al Quaeda targets (primarily in Pakistan) than Bush/Cheney did in the previous four years. On Christmas day, Obama authorized a combined jet and missile strike in Yemen, that successfully prevented a terrorist attack on our embassy there. These are aggressive, successful attacks in two countries that Bush and Cheney basically ignored. Obama has authorized a total of an additional 50,000 troops to be sent to Afghanistan. He's also getting us out of Iraq, as he promised. It has no...

After 32 years on this planet, I am still amazed at the level of ignorance that educated adults can exhibit. There is absolutely zero uncertainty within the scientific community that the average global temperature is on the rise. The polar ice cap is absolutely melting. Seasonal arctic sea ice is disappearing earlier and earlier each year. Animal habitats, breeding, and migratory patterns have been impacted. Swamps that turned to perma-frost a million years ago are thawing out and turning back into swamps. These things are facts. Yet, still, I actually heard a friend say this week "it snowed in Houston this year, how can there be global warming?" Good point. I'll just tell all those climate scientists to find new careers. They've been studying trends over millions of years of course, using that silly "scientific method." How can all that research any analysis possibly stack up against your brilliant observation that it snowed, in one city, on one d...

Yes, I know, I've been neglecting my blog here. Here's a brief update on what's been happening in my life since September. October, of course, is racing season at Keeneland. As usual, we had a steady stream of friends and family come visit to wager on the ponies. Keeneland started publishing its race meet statistics online, and I created a database to analyze them. Sounds geeky, and it is. I also won my first Superfecta with the trends I identified, so I'm geeky all the way to the teller window. The trends, by the way, were quite surprising. You want to bet on horses that have run a race within the past 4-6 weeks at a distance that is within 1 furlong of today's race. You want the last race to be on an all-weather surface or on the turf, and horses that start in the #3 starting position do well at Keeneland. Certain jockeys also do better with certain lengths of race and some are better at helping a horse transition between different surfaces. October also ...

I have decided to move my political ramblings back to my blog. I think my friends are getting tired of seeing all that stuff on facebook. This disappoints me, because I like to think of my friends as more politically savvy than most, but in reality I understand that 1) not many people share the interest in politics that I do, 2) people have good reason to believe that their views on the issues are irrelevant because the morons in Washington have to please more than just the electorate these days and 3) everyone is busy these days, and following current events is just not a high priority for some people. Today's note is quite simple. This is a great article from Evan Handler. Yes, it's on the wacky liberal Huffington post. Get over it. I found it via Google news, which means bazillions of internet users (that's a technical term) found it interesting enough that some computer program flagged it as "popular." In it, he points out exactly why Joe Wilson is a ...

I'd like to take a quick review of South Carolina politics this year. 1) Republican Governor Mark Sanford hikes the Appalachian trail to Argentina , where he happened to run into his mistress. 2) Republican Senator Jim DeMint says “If we’re able to stop Obama on this [health care] it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Nice. 3) Republican Congressman Joe Wilson calls the President a liar . 4) Republican Senator Lindsey Graham pulls an [Mythbuster] Adam Savage in describing the President's speech to Congress this week, going for the "I reject your reality and substitute my own" approach. Graham hit the press with repeated claims that Obama was "combative" and showed "little sign of compromise." Really? If anyone reading this is a resident of South Carolina, could you please see that the Palmetto state puts some brighter people in office? Otherwise, we may need to take away your electoral votes. Thanks.

There was a news story that came out today which did not receive much press, but yet it's the kind of new story that should be front page news. This story is related to a court case brought against our government by a US citizen. This citizen, let's call him Dave, a married man with two children, was arrested at a Dulles International Airport ticket counter. He was handcuffed, taken to the airport’s police substation, and interrogated. Over the next sixteen days, he was confined in high security cells lit twenty-four hours a day in Virginia, Oklahoma, and then Idaho, during which he was strip searched on multiple occasions. Each time Dave was transferred to a different facility, he was handcuffed and shackled about his wrists, legs, and waist. He was eventually released from custody by court order, on the conditions that he live with his wife and in-laws in Nevada, limit his travel to Nevada and three other states, surrender his travel documents, regularly report to a probatio...

OK, "This American Life" is actually the title of a (great) radio show from WBEZ up in Chicago, but the topics they cover are the topics we all deal with every day - what it's like to live in America in 2009. I've been on the bench this week (in-between projects), and I've been reflecting a lot about the state of affairs in this patch of land we call the United States of America. Here's what I've noticed: 1) There are still a lot of people in this country who think that Barack Obama is crazier and more powerful than any President in American history. When I say "a lot" of people, I not just talking about your typical right wing nuts here. There are people who think that his Hawaiian birth certificate is not real so he's not a citizen. The NRA has successfully convinced its members that he's going to take their guns. He's a socialist, a Marxist, a racist and/or a communist, depending on which Fox News anchor you prefer. He's...

Here I sit in my lovely home office, killing time on a conference call. I think conference calls are almost worse than an in-person status meeting, especially in terms of the frequency with which they are abused/over-used. My own theory is that such meetings/calls are generally held for the benefit of just one person. In my own experience it's often true that the one person in question is holding the meeting or call simply because they are too lazy to do the leg work necessary to gather the information they need. Come on people! We're all busy these days. We're all working for companies that have laid off half the work force and expect the rest of us to absorb the additional work load. Don't ask me to join a call unless you need me to - how hard is that? I could be playing Mafia Wars or Rock Band or something. Hopefully, this time on the bench will be short-lived. There has been talk of projects in New Jersey, Alaska, Montreal, and Cincinnati. Hopefully one of...

Check out this article from the town of Corydon, Indiana. Senator Williams decided to puff himself up real big and take a big stand against gambling, and the Indiana casinos couldn't be happier. Everyone knows that all this does is 1) delay the inevitable and (more significantly) 2) hurt the horse industry, Kentucky's biggest revenue generator. Way to go Senator Williams. I hope your fountain pen explodes in your pocket.

The Supreme Court today decided that you're not allowed to use race as the grounds for promoting people. A bunch of firefighters in Connecticut took a test. The white guys (and the Hispanic) did better than the blacks. So the city threw out the test results and promoted the blacks. The white guys and the Hispanic took the city to court for discrimination, and today, they got a favorable verdict from the U.S. Supreme Court. http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN2936044120090629

Ah yes, there's still nothing like the sound of pre-recorded predator birds squawking at 4:45AM. After the "double bird strike" of that plane that landed in the Hudson river though, I guess I should quit complaining that Bluegrass Airport is attempting to scare off as many birds as possible. We don't exactly have a convenient river to ditch in if we hit a couple birds on take-off. This also means of course that I'm on the road again. This time it's off to Danbury, CT for a "reunion" project with the guys I worked with in Sweden a few years back. I'm also hoping that Danbury in June is warmer than Sweden in February, but I think that's a safe bet. Speaking of bets, the Kentucky State Senate is receiving a bill today that just passed our House of Representatives; a bill that would allow video gaming machines at horse tracks. This is one of those things that still amazes me - that Kentucky can't pass a gambling bill. It's no secr...

That's the nifty airline term I learned today. Me: Hello - I'd like to find out where I am on the standby list for this flight? Delta Lady: You're first on the list, but right now we are in a negative inventory situation on that flight. Me: I'm sorry? Delta Lady: That just means that we have more people with confirmed seats on that flight than the total number of seats on the plane Me: Oh. So it's oversold. Delta Lady: You could say that. She went on to explain that they were oversold by 6 people. In order for me to hop on an earlier flight home, I simply needed 7 people who had already checked in for the flight to vanish. I called "Condi" Rice and inquired about the possibility of a mid-airport rendition, but she told me she and Cheney were busy this afternoon frying ants with a magnifying glass. Bummer. It was a long weekend, but a good one. We took a buddy to Miami this weekend for his bachelor party. Most of us had never been to Miami, and...

I’d really like to be able to say that I’m not worried about the “recession” (or whatever we’re calling it) that seems to dominate the news these days, but that would not be completely accurate. While it’s not something I worry about, it is something that is on my mind a lot these days. Specifically, I think this is the first time in my life where I’m actually wishing things were a bit more like the environment my parents enjoyed when they joined the workforce. You know, back when you could count on some degree of loyalty from your employer, back when pensions were still common, back when you couldn’t get a mortgage for a home you couldn’t afford, back when everyone paid off their credit cards each month… Ella and I are just now getting on our feet. She’s making real money in real estate these days, after we’ve spent several years investing in her career. I’ve finally landed a job that I enjoy and that pays really well. We’ve spent 3 years fixing up our home and it’s finally gett...

I'm absolutely done with CNN. They've been annoying me for years, and today they finally pushed me over the line. "Outbreak Fears Spread" was their banner for most of the day. The swine flu is coming to get us all. Aren't you panicked? All my friends, family and co-workers are. Oh wait, that's not the case at all. In fact, I don't know a single person with "outbreak fears." I remember in 2001 when the introduced the permanent ticker. I hate the permanent ticker, mostly because other news agencies felt obligated to follow suit. You're nothing in the news business these days if you don't have a ticker. CNN uses these ridiculous pseudo-headlines ending in question marks like "End of the world coming on Tuesday?" and "Dick Cheney actually a robot?" OK, so maybe Cheney is a robot but whatever. You need the ticker in case there is some piece of news that's so insanely urgent that you have to get it out there...

It was one of those beautiful spring days that makes life in the Bluegrass so nice. Jason and Kim.5 came down with Leo, and we all tailgated at Keeneland with the Parrotheads. I say Kim.5 because they're having another kid! With many of my friends two kids would concern me, but these two are probably the most grounded set of parents I know. The Budweiser Clydesdales were at the track and boy did Leo think that was cool. Well it was cool, actually. Seeing a Clydesdale next to a dinky little Thoroughbred makes you wonder why they don't race draft horses! I'll bet the average Clydesdale poop weighs more than the average Thoroughbred jockey. We walked Leo around the barns to visit some of the big money horses racing this weekend, then I went inside the track to do my great grandfather proud by losing some money at the track. He's probably up there somewhere wondering why I was making those measly $2 bets. Ella and I were going to do Thunder over Louisville, but her ...

Today, the new Treasury Secretary (Tim Geithner) announced his proposal for implementing some new regulations in the financial markets. In short, he has come up with a system of checks and balances to ensure that things like hedge funds, credit default swaps, and other financial instruments that have remained largely unregulated start getting some oversight. There are a lot of people out there who will say "this is awful, the government should stay out of the markets," or "the government can't do anything right, they'll ruin capitalism." Republicans and conservatives will argue that this is just a massive expansion of government that's going to cost the taxpayers billions. Newsflash - it's the absence of regulation that got us into this mess. People (let's call them idiots) theorized that the investment banks would self-regulate in a free market. Now, we're spending billions of taxpayer dollars to bail them out and avoid the complete coll...