Speaking of Michelle Bachmann, she made the erroneous comment about how it was an "interesting coincidence" that the last swine flu outbreak was under a Democratic president when it was actually under Republican Gerald Ford, but the interesting coincidence is that the first incidence of the current swine flu strain in Minnesota is in her district...

Re: Torture

There were anti-torture protesters in front of the White House today, wearing orange jumpsuits. They were *arrested* and they weren't doing anything wrong. They were exercising their first amendment rights.

What's wrong with this picture? Are the "tea party" protesters the only ones allowed to protest in front of the White House?

Regarding Michelle Bachman and the Cons:

First we fought you, now we laugh at you, then we will ignore you, then we will win.

From V Foxx website: (excepts)
“During this time of considerable economic uncertainty, misleading our state’s senior citizens—many living on fixed incomes—into making a donation to ‘save’ their future Social Security is not only morally abhorrent, but it also seems legally suspect,” Rep. Foxx wrote to Attorney General Cooper.
The same group that sent the Social Security letter, Council of Seniors, was recently cited by the Indiana Attorney General for sending deceptive fundraising appeals to households in Indiana.
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It would seem that Viginia is against SOME hate crimes. Still, I plan to write and chastise her for speaking so lightly of a horrendous crime (Matthew Shepherd). We have seen this and beheadings from young people who think that hate is ok!
Virginia Foxx
Washington, D.C. Office
1230 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2071 Fax: (202) 225-2995
North Carolina District Offices
6000 Meadowbrook Mall, Suite 3
Clemmons, N.C. 27012
Phone: (336) 778-0211 Fax: (336) 778-2290 Toll Free: 1(866) 677-8968
240 Hwy 105 Extension, Suite 200
Boone, N.C. 28607
Phone: (828) 265-0240 Fax: (828) 265-0390

In corporate management, we’re fond of saying “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” We measure customer satisfaction, budget to expenditures, progress towards deadlines, quarterly earnings, and much more.

As I heard about more people being sent home from work today at Chrysler (the latest additions to the burgeoning rolls of the unemployed, under-employed, and “furloughed”), it gave me an idea: Let’s measure something else. Let’s measure what we’re not doing. Let’s measure the effects of idleness on production. For starters, now that so many are unemployed, simply think of the idle man-power we aren’t putting to use, the collective education residing in the hundreds of thousands of unemployed people we aren’t leveraging. Think of the creativity we aren’t tapping, the problems we aren’t solving, the bridges we aren’t reinforcing, the power grid we aren’t attending to, the waterlines we’re letting deteriorate, the inventions we aren’t inventing, the research we aren’t doing. What a waste of human potential. If we measured it, we’d have something to correct, something against which to measure progress.

At the moment, some people have a vague sense we should be inventing, producing, thinking, manufacturing, servicing. But without hard numbers, how will we know when we’re improving or getting worse? I’m not suggesting this is an easy metric, but we have an entire quadrant of the government enraptured with gyrating numbers (GAAP, FASB). A little creativity, a fancy calculator, and who knows?

But seriously, the recovery of the economy depends on the one thing we aren’t doing: Making the most of our human potential. Instead we’re sending it home without a paycheck. We won’t see our citizenry as producers (rather than consumers) until we start measuring the effects of and the ways in which we produce (construct, cure, invent, research, serve)—or don’t (as now)—rather than the effects of and the ways in which we consume.