The Colonel's Forum

Let's continue the jobs theme for today's statistic.  Thanks to Bill Clinton for researching this one for me :-) 42,000,000 - private sector jobs added to the economy under Democrat Presidents over the last 52 years. 24,000,000 - private sector jobs added to the economy under GOP Presidents over the last 52 years. Think he's full of it?   Politifact says his numbers are accurate . In case you're wondering, that's 24 years of Democrats, 28 years of Republicans, going back to (and including) Kennedy.  The Democrats achieved that number with 4 fewer years in the oval office, and this includes Obama's 4 years which were the worst recession during the period. Mitt Romney said " this election is about jobs ."  I agree.  If you can look at these numbers and honestly convince yourself "Romney's financial plan is not at all like Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush; he'll buck the trend," then I can't help you.

Today's number is 4,500,000 - the number of private sector jobs created over the past 29 months.  It doesn't take a genius to look at this graph and see how Obama turned around a negative jobs situation upon taking office.  Mitt Romney claims his time at Bain Capital resulted in the creation of 100,000 jobs, but the Washington Post awarded him 3 Pinocchios for that claim.  For those who don't know how private equity firms work, Bain actually invented a model that is very popular called a leveraged buyout; buying existing firms with money mostly borrowed from banking institutions and using the newly bought firms' assets as collateral, and selling them off in a few years.  A side effect of this is often bankrupting the company or shutting down factories/stores to make the firm more profitable.  It actually makes perfect business sense, to the point that the model has become widely adopted in the finance industry.  You just need to not care about the poor s...

Romney reaching out to white male voters at NASCAR race 2 = number of Nascar races Mitt Romney has attended in a vain attempt to connect with blue collar voters. "I'm not a big fan, but several of my friends own teams." That's an actual quote.

Today's comparison is around personal finances.  Here is a comparison of Mitt, Barack, and an "average" American family.  I especially like that Romney's "wages" number is $0 - the man literally does not have a job. Hasn't had one for years, actually.  Another point is that, if you want to vote for the "poor" candidate, you can't vote for Obama either - his $600K after tax income places him WELL within the top 1%. President Obama Income Wages: $394,821 Other income: $449,764 Adjusted gross income (AGI): $789,674 (Obama's adjusted gross income was reduced $54,911 by adjustments that partially offset wages and other income) Minus exemptions, deductions: $293,298 Equals taxable income: $496,376 Taxes paid Income taxes (19.02% of AGI): $150,253 Payroll tax (4.35% of AGI; Payroll tax includes employee and employer share): $34,378 Tax rate (19.02% + 4.35%): 23.37%. Federal tax paid: $184,631 After-tax income: $605,043 Mitt ...

Today's statistic is on a different defense topic - ZERO.  That's the number of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) found in Iraq, where George W. Bush launched an unfunded war on the premise that they had WMD.  Related numbers include 4,805 coalition forces killed, 32,753 wounded, and 110,000 Iraqi civilians killed (that's the official number, many suspect the actual is higher). Total cost of the war ?  $3,700,000,000,000.  That's $3.7 trillion, kids, and that number is still rising.  August 31, 2010 - that's the day that Barack Obama ended the Iraq war he inherited.  I agree - Obama can't blame Bush for everything.  But that particular $3.7 trillion is fair game, I think. Here's where US Defense spending is today, compared to the next 15 biggest spenders: Mitt Romney wants to place a "floor" on defense spending at 4% of GDP , which is roughly 20% of the federal budget.  He wants to cut government spending, he wants to balance the budget, h...

Today's number is 262, that's the number of drone strikes in Pakistan that Obama has ordered.  That's 5 times the number Bush ordered over his 8-years in office.  Here's a map and a link to more details: I'll leave it to the military experts and ethics wonks to debate whether drone strikes are moral or not.  What I do know is that drone strikes work.  In a New York Times article , a former Air Force officer turned philosopher says "all the evidence we have so far suggests that drones do better at both identifying the terrorist and avoiding collateral damage than anything else we have.”  Sounds pretty good to me. I think this is relevant because it says Obama is not a wuss, which is what the GOP would have us believe.  I guarantee any detailed analysis of any Romney/Ryan budget will reveal that age old Republican stance of "we need to be spending more on defense."  There have already been suggestions that Obama wants to cut defense spending, and...

In part 2 of this series, I'd like to look at Obama's record.  The number is 190 - that's how many of his campaign promises Obama has kept, according to the people over at politifact .  That sounds like a big number, but any good stats professor will tell you "when they give you a number, ask for a %, and when they give you a %, ask for a number." 190 represents 37% of the campaign promises that candidate Obama made in 2008.  He has broken 83 (16%) and there are a total of 161 (32%) that are either stalled or in the works.  A related interesting number is 72 (14%) - that's the number of campaign promises where Obama has COMPROMISED with the Republicans to achieve something that advances his goal, rather than nothing at all. Let's put that in simpler terms with a little rounding.  For every 10 promises this guy made, he's delivered on 4 of them, broken 2 of them, compromised on 1 of them, and the remaining 3 are either stalled or in the works. ...

It's roughly 60 days until the US Presidential election.  As an exercise in my continuing mission of voter education, I've decided to challenge myself to produce 60 relevant, objective, substantive statistics that will help people compare Romney & Obama. Today's statistic is 5 - the number of key campaign issues on which Mitt Romney flip-flopped.  Abortion, gun control, climate change, health insurance, and taxes.  Personally, I don't think abortion or gun control matter, but I recognize that many Americans do, and Mitt has made them major elements of his platform.  From The Economist : "When Mitt Romney was governor of liberal Massachusetts, he supported abortion, gun control, tackling climate change and a requirement that everyone should buy health insurance, backed up with generous subsidies for those who could not afford it. Now, ... he opposes all those things. A year ago he favoured keeping income taxes at their current levels; now he wants to...

Mitt Romney finally announced his VP choice this weekend.  Paul Ryan is a Republican Congressman from Wisconsin, and a very smart man.  He's young, energetic, and I personally think he was the wrong choice for Mitt when it comes to winning the presidency. Mitt's people have clearly clued into the fact that people are sick of having such a generic GOP candidate out there.  Mitt has done everything he can thus far in his campaign to avoid taking a stand on almost anything.  When he has taken a position on issues, it's almost always a reversal of a position he held previously.  Someone actually created a site  http://mittromneyflipflops.com/  to catalog cases where he's done this, and it's as funny as it is scary.  My point is that we can't really say where Mitt Romney stands on anything, because neither can he. Paul Ryan is another story.  He's pro guns, anti-abortion, anti-gay-rights.  He wants a fence on the Mexico border and he thin...

There's an issue looming on the horizon, one that I have not seen good coverage for in the "mainstream" media, whoever they are these days.  In the next 5 months, Congress faces some tremendous challenges around funding the government and balancing the budget, all within the context of a Presidential election and an economy that is just barely recovering from a recession.  This will not end well, and it will absolutely have a direct impact on all of us.  This is why I can't explain the lack of good news coverage on it. A brief bit of history is needed here to understand how we got into this current mess.  Basically we've been in debt since the Revolutionary war, we've always tried to tax our way out of it, and that's never worked. It started with the 1789 "temporary" alcohol tax that we're still paying today. New revenue gets spent on new government "stuff," and NOT on paying down the debt. As this has been going on for over 200 y...

Yesterday was our primary election here in Kentucky.  For Presidential races, everything is typically decided by the time May rolls around, and this year was no exception.  Mitt Romney has emerged as the likely nominee for the GOP, and no one has opposed Obama on the Democrat side.  What's funny to me is how all the GOP big shots waited until all Romney's challengers had quit before they endorsed him, including Ron Paul.  With one horse left in the race, Boehner, McConnell, a bunch of GOP governors, and even a few of his former challengers all placed their bets on Romney.  I think this is representative of how divided the GOP is these days.  They can't even agree with themselves. Kentucky has a closed primary, and I'm still on the rolls as a Republican, so I voted for Gingrich, who ended up getting 6% of the KY GOP vote.  Romney took 66% (again, this is a 1-horse race in a state known for horse racing), but Ron Paul actually came in 2nd, getting over...

This weekend I will be attending the spring contest for the Cardinal District of SPEBSQSA - the society for the preservation and encouragement of barbershop quartet singing in America - also known as the Barbershop Harmony Society.  Barbershoppers are an interesting group, and their events are always fun.  It takes 4 people to sing a barbershop song, no exceptions.  Singing together well requires hard work, collaboration, and a willingness to let your colleagues take the spotlight now and then.  These are all good things. One of the first things you notice about barbershop singers is that they are really happy people.  They are friendly, they enjoy meeting new friends, learning from each other, and generally having a good time.  Sure, you get that atmosphere at a lot of conventions, but it's even more evident at barbershop gatherings.  There's a real sense of community.  Technically it's a competition, which means there are winners and loser...

I've been spending too much time on other online communication sites lately. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, they all serve their place. Where they fail is in substance. It's all immediate blips of information that almost encourage you to have a short attention span. Sometimes, I need more than a quick post. Today is one of those days. If you know me, you know that politics is one of my passions. I love to follow it, and I love to talk about it, with everyone. I don't care if you're a crazy militia man or a pot smoking hippie, I want to hear your opinion. This, to me, is one of the most critical things we can do to sustain this country - talk to each other, ESPECIALLY when we disagree. You won't always change my mind, and I won't always change yours, that's not the point. The point is to hear as many perspectives as you can, and together with you own knowledge and values, form an informed opinion. On what? Anything. Everything. I am genuinely astonished to thi...

I read a great opinion piece today by David Frum, a former adviser to "W." Frum is a really smart guy, and a great example of something that still baffles me about W's Presidency, which is "how can anyone surrounded by brilliant minds like Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and others make so many dumb decisions? There was something about the culture he had in the White House that turned smart people into morons. I just hope Obama fumigated before moving in to get rid of it. Frum's article makes a point I've been quietly screaming for years - the loud people in Congress who claim to be "conservative" "Republicans" are neither one. In fact, I think they've ruined both terms. These loud mouths just landed a debt deal that will do absolutely nothing to actually solve our debt problems, and in fact is very likely to make our economy worse before it gets better. Here's a great quote from the article: " Only about one-third of Re...

Decided I'd better updated my blog before Google decided I'm no longer using it. Perhaps the fact that I've gone so long without updating here means that I'm getting my social media fix through other means - I have been using Twitter more and of course Facebook. Part of it is certainly that I've become super busy at work since I transferred jobs at the start of this year. I'm now working in HP's TS consulting group as a cloud strategist. Sounds silly, and cloud computing is one of the most overused buzz-words in existence at the moment. I'm betting that cloud computing really is going to change the way people look at IT, and the conversations I've been having with our customers this year seem to confirm this. The biggest change in my personal life was a move to downtown Lexington. We love this town, and we found that we were spending so much of our time downtown we might as well move there. Plus we had a four bedroom house, which was a bit mor...

Here is my latest complaint about politics in this country. If you voted for Barack Obama because you thought he was going to change Washington D.C., then you deserve every bit of disappointment you're feeling today. The American Presidency is one of the WEAKEST heads of state on the planet The powers-that-be in D.C. are extremely happy with the status quo - the special interests (teachers, lawyers, doctors, big pharma, big oil, farmers...) and the career politicians will continue to do all they can to resist change Between these two reasons and a hundred or so others I could list, it's no surprise at all that Obama hasn't changed Washington. To all you independents and Democrats who are crying foul, get over it. Now let's examine the Republican + Tea Party message. "How's that hope and change working out for you?" implies that nothing has changed. "We need to take back our government" and "Obama has implemented his socialist agenda ...

Mitch McConnell released a statement this week warning my fellow Kentuckians about how the proposed energy bill will ruin our livelihoods. One of Mitch's largest campaign contributors is Peabody coal. Any chance these two facts are related? "We'll pay more at the pump for gas and more for keeping the lights on if it passes," he says. That is true, because any sensibly energy bill will account for the economic cost of carbon emissions (there is one) promote energy efficiency (because the current growth in US energy consumption is unsustainable) make us less dependent on oil. we use 19M barrels a day, and we import 12M (63%) of those. Anyone who thinks we can simply stop importing and triple domestic production, is stupid (and wrong). “It’s American troops whose lives are endangered because we’re dependent on oil companies in countries that hate us. It’s American consumers who are tired not just of prices at the pump that soar each summer, but sick and tired o...

Interesting article about how Verizon is joining AT&T in disabling certain features on phones running the Android operating system. If you've never heard of Android, it's a phone operating system from Google that is free, uses open standards, and is available on many different handsets from many different manufactures and many different wireless providers. The new version of Android OS (2.2 Froyo) supports tethering (tying your phone to your PC for use as an Internet connection) and also the ability to use your phone as a WiFi hotspot that serves several devices in the immediate area (I think up to 5). These are useful features, but they increase the amount of data usage on the wireless networks. If you buy your phone from your wireless provider, you're generally buying a handset that has a modified (provider-specific) version of the phone operating system. In short, the wireless companies add programs (often useless, but designed to sell you crap) and disa...

I can't remember the last time I've been this busy at work. I logged in here today to find that my last post was April 9th, over a month ago. It feels like I wrote that yesterday. I've been working in L.A. for a few months now, and I have returned to operating like a professional traveler. I know that the E concourse in the Atlanta airport has the best restaurant, and I know that the A concourse in Memphis has the best Delta lounge. Room 431 at the Renaissance hotel is below the concierge lounge, so you don't want it, and room numbers that end in 25 are smaller due to the location of the laundry chute. Delta is flying the 777 on its ATL - LAX routes for at least the next 4 months, and if I book my flights with 7 days advance notice, I can generally get an "M" fare class which 1) earns me double MQMs and 2) almost guarantees me an upgrade to first class. And don't tell Hertz that you want satellite radio if you booked a "full-size" car at LA...