Month: July 2008

New Study: Kindergarten Red-Shirting Bad for Kids

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There is a study by David Deming and Susan Dynarski that seems to indicate that delaying entry into first grade actually reduces academic achievement.

This is interesting,since the, “Boy Crisis” crowd, is aggressively holding boys back a year to deal with the delay in language development of young boys vs. young girls.

My, admitted anecdotal, information would suggest not to red-shirt.

My son, Charlie, is an Asperger’s child, and as such, he is socially delayed, and has issues with social issues with rules and conflict resolution, though he is performs at least one grade level above his age academically.

According to the red-shirting folks, his entry into first grade should have been delayed, which would have been a disastrous.

While he can be a handful when upset or frustrated, when he is bored, he’s like Plutonium.

Will the Last USAF Senior Staffer Pleas Turn off the Lights?

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We have two more resignations of senior staff at the USAF, Ken Miller, special assistant for Air Force acquisition, and William Anderson, USAF logistics chief.

I think that the military in general, USAF specifically, need adult supervision to ensure that their procurement does not become too incompetent, and that their interactions with other services are too hostile, and this is blowback from Rumsfeld not giving a damn about this.

Another Day, Another Financial Term

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This time, it’s “Covered Bond”, and Sec Treasury Paulson is clarifying regulation to make them more attractive in the United States. (They are more common in Europe, particularly, according to the Wiki, Germany)

The difference between this and more common mortgage backed securities is that the banks have to keep the mortgages on their books, and the bonds are specifically secured with these bonds.

I don’t think that this will make much of a difference.

Until house prices bottom out in absolute dollar terms, which means that inflation might save us, the housing market will remain sluggish to frozen.

Taser Death Heads to Grand Jury

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Well it now appears that the Taser murder investigation is heading toward a grand jury (background here).

I do not expect an indictment. This is a dead black man, and the ex-cop who Tasered him 9 times after he was in handcuffs, Scott Nugent, has little to fear from a Louisiana jury.

Even if it goes to trial, you can expect Taser International to supply tens of thousands of dollars in expert testimony to the defendant saying that a Taser can’t kill, because they know what happens if they get tagged with one death.

Why Amy Sullivan is a Complete Idiot

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Amy Sullivan has always been a one note pundit: The Democratic party must reach out to religious voters, and protect them from those evil radical secularists who would make fun of them.

The problem there is very basic: there are no radical secularists in the leadership of the Democratic party.

For that matter, I believe that there has been one atheist who has ever served as a member of Congress, so she is talking about people who do not exist.

Now, she is prattling on about how Obama is making overt evangelical religiosity work for him.

First, she claims that Obama has “pivoted to announce that an Obama administration would fix, expand and elevate the faith-based initiative”.

Except, of course, if these organizations take federal money, Obama won’t allow them to discriminate on the basis of religion, and they will be subject to federal accounting and auditing standards, which has always been the case until Bush set up his own “faith based initiative.”

The purpose of Bush’s program was to ensure that there was neither fiscal accountability nor discrimination protection, so it is a complete refutation of Bush’s program.

In fact, what is implied is that he will sweep up massive numbers of white evangelicals in so doing, even though the religious right demand that they be subject to no fiscal accountability and be given the right to discriminate.

The core message of the politicized right wing evangelical is hostility to integration and to minorities.

Similarly, when she lauds Bush’s “Compassionate Conservativism”, she does not understand, or more likely refuses to understand that this is a dog whistle to the religious right, referring to Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, which says that “true compassion” is not giving charity, because, “Compassion means tough love in which those who give must demand self-help from those who receive,” which means let “black babies starve”.

The religious Evangelical does not begin with Roe v. Wade and abortion, bur rather with Green v. Connally, which revoked the tax exempt status of discriminatory private religious schools.

So we can run a poll on religious affiliation vs. candidate support, and you can see that Obama is polling lower than either Kerry in 2004 or Gore in 2000. (h/t Talkleft on the poll)

Barack Obama has no chance of picking up white right wing Evangelical voters, and the votes he picks up from black Evangelicals and Hispanic Catholics are because the Republican party is implacably hostile to them.

Amy Sullivan is a one trick pony, but her pony is a dog, and I’ll call her my “Wanker of the Day”.

Wearing Out the Batteries on “Straight Talk”

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Well, it’s starting to look like NBC has found limits to their man-crush on John McCain (see also here), and are starting to actually report on what he says, and what it means.

Additionally, it appears that McCain may be losing Chuck Hagel on his scurrilous attack ads.

I had thought that there were no limits to the amount of excuses that the beltway kule kidz would supply for McCain, but it appears that I was wrong, at least for ABC (earlier posts) and MSNBC.

The WaPo, still appears to be alibiing with the best of them though.

Economics Update

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The dollar is down relative to the Euro, because the further deterioration in the credit markets makes Fed rate hikes unlikely, though the US dollar has strengthened against the Canadian dollar, because oil has been down so much recently, which means that the Canadian trade surplus to the US, they are the US’s largest external oil supplier.

It looks to me like the financial markets are continuing their slow motion car wreck.

Banks are tightening business loans and commercial paper, decreasing total lending by 3%, and requiring much higher interest rates to account for the uncertainty.

As to what foreign investors are doing, I can’t speak for all of them, but Russia has cut investment in Fannie and Freddie by 50%, and the international monetary fund sees no light at the end of the tunnel on the housing crash.

The result is fairly straightforward, much tighter money, particularly for entities like Lehman, which has seen its borrowing costs skyrocket. They are now 7.7%, 6 months ago they were 5.2% for a 5 year bond.

This is a 4.2% premium US Treasury notes, which is about double the number in early January.

In energy, oil is up about $1/bbl today, largely on Iran concerns, but retail gasoline prices have continued to fall.

Department of Justice Broke Law on Hiring

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Representatives of Bush and His Evil Minions™ at the Justice Department routinely broke the law in the hiring of career lawyers.

In particular Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson aggressively selected on the basis of partisan affiliation.

Bush’s butt boy at the DoJ, Michael Mukasey, released a statement that he is, “disturbed” by these developments, but I see no suggestion of actual prosecution.

There can be no greater threat to the nation than when political partisanship is used to corrupt the administration of justice.

Lawrence Summers Calls for Nationalization of GSEs

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He is suggesting that if the GSEs do actually need a bailout, that the government should operate them for some period of years:

We need the GSEs to be highly active in support of the housing market and financial system in the months ahead. If authorities can see a path to their being able to play such a role in a framework where their borrowing is based on confidence in their financial position, rather than primarily on federal guarantees, then this is obviously the preferred alternative. But after what we have seen, such a judgment cannot be based on the GSEs’ own claims, the understandable desire of government officials to maintain confidence and attract private capital, or the fact that the GSEs are able to borrow — which only reflects the strength of federally provided credit assurances.

If this preferred alternative is, as I fear, not realistic given the state of GSE finances, the government should use its new receivership power to protect taxpayers and the financial system. In the process, payments to stockholders, holders of preferred stock and probably subordinated debtholders would be wiped out, conserving cash for the benefit of taxpayers. The GSEs’ borrowing costs would fall considerably, helping prospective homeowners.

In this scenario, the government would operate the GSEs as public corporations for several years. They would then be in a position to extend credit where appropriate to support resolution of the housing crisis. Once the crisis has passed, the federal government would divide their functions into government and private components, the latter of which would be sold off in multiple pieces. The proceeds could be used to fund the low-income housing support activity that was previously mandated to the GSEs.

It should be noted that Fannie Mae was a federal agency from the late 1930s to the late 1960s.