Google Docs now allows you to set up forms that automatically save results in a Google Docs spreadsheet. In other words you can brew your own surveys now with an interface that’s incredibly easy to use. I’ve decided to test it out by asking you to participate in a one question survey. The question: Where do you live?
Thanks for your help. I’ll share the results in a future post.
On January 29 Rep. Foxx, NC-5, introduced the Federal Tax Withholding Act of 2008, otherwise known as "H.R. 5175 To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to repeal the withholding of income and social security taxes." Hmmm, and interesting proposal from my Representative. As a small business person I’m thinking "su-weet", but what does this mean? Since I haven’t seen diddly squat about it in the local press I’m going to check ye old webosphere. Basically I found a short item on Wilkes News and this letter from National Taxpayers Union and that’s about it. There are two reasons that pop to mind why this hasn’t garnered a great deal of interest in these parts:
This got me wondering what else my Representative has been up to. Here’s the most recent bills she’s sponsored:
Below is a sampling of her most recent voting activity (January 08) and doesn’t include things like resolutions to congratulate LSU on their national championship in football. BTW, according to GovTrack Rep. Foxx has only missed 8 of 2,440 votes since she’s been in Congress. You may not agree with her politics, and believe me I often don’t, she’s showing up to do her job. Kudos to her for that. Also, according to the GovTrack Ideometer, which is that image you see to the left, she’s about as far right as you can get on the political spectrum:
Yep, I’ve gotta say that I’m not going to often agree with my Representative, but I am glad to see she has one of the best records on the Hill for actually showing up to work. Obviously since Rep. Foxx has been elected twice to Congress since I’ve lived here I’m in the minority in terms of political leanings so until that changes I’m going to have to take what I can get, and if that’s someone who I disagree with but fulfills her commitment to her constituents then so be it.
That said come November I’m voting for a fellow named Roy Carter. He may be a Democrat but he’s closer to that area on the Ideometer that I reside that’s part blue and part red.
Celeste and I had coffee with Esbee this morning at SimplYummy off of Reynolda. Celeste found Esbee as beguiling as I did and we managed not to get kicked out of the joint, what with all our fun had at the expense of various institutions-that-shall-remain-anonymous. Made for a great morning.
I had lunch on Tuesday with a friend who shall remain anonymous to protect his identity. He urged me to blog more about big issues like the war, our country’s moronic leadership and all the illegal immigrants flooding our border from Canada. Said I have an informed opinion and, besides, it’d do great things for my traffic. Of course all my friends and family have told me it bores them silly when I write about such things and I think it’s because they know I don’t know squat about spit. But since ignorance has never stopped me before I guess I’ll give it a whirl. Here goes.
Can we please, please, please just skip forward to November 4, 2008 and then just go right to inauguration day 2009? At this point we’ve whittled our prospects for a new president down to four people who can’t possibly be any worse than what we’ve got and the differences between the four are essentially the same as the difference between a Honda Accord and a Toyota Camry. Slightly different body, pretty close to the same price and about as exciting as oatmeal.
Personally I’d least like to see Huckabee ascend to the throne that King George II is abdicating if only because I’m sick and tired of hearing Onward Christian Soldiers. Yes, yes, yes we’re fighting a war but for God’s sake it’s not the Crusades no matter what the Bible-thumping nimrods like Cal Thomas think. Honestly I almost don’t care what else Huckabee thinks, I just don’t want to spend even one more day with a President who thinks he’s there due to divine intervention. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s what his website says: "My faith is my life – it defines me. My faith doesn’t influence my
decisions, it drives them." I think we’ve had about enough of that.
I’d have to put Clinton as my next-to-last pick. Why? I think she’s just as obstinate as King George II and maybe even less likely to say the words, "Sorry I was mistaken." We’ve had plenty of stiff-lipped resoluteness over the last seven years and look where it’s gotten us.
That leaves me with Obama and McCain. Eh.
We have all kinds of big issues facing us (crappy economy, crappy health care system, crappy foreign policy, etc.) but I find myself thinking that really all I want is for our next president to restore our good name and start to rebuild our honor. I find it disturbingly ironic that when King George II was elected it was seen as a way to lift the Presidency out of the moral gutter that Clinton had dragged us in. Maybe without 9/11 we’d have simply had four or eight years of a president who really didn’t do much of consequence but ran really well organized meetings. Maybe God would have merely been invoked in King George II’s great campaign to further redistribute our booty to his silver spoon cohorts rather than in his campaign to smite the infidels sitting on top of his oil fields thumbing their noses at his daddy. We’ll never know since fate conspired to punish us for our hanging chads. Did you ever think we’d get to the point where someone could look at Clinton’s, uh, indiscretions and say things like "At least all he did was diddle the intern, it’s not like he blew up the Middle East or anything?"
Since there’s no use crying over spilled milk I guess the best we can do is hope that we get through this year without the King doing too much more harm before our next "president" can come in to start reminding the world that we aren’t all a bunch of torturing, incompetent bureaucrats who leave their own people to die and fester in swamped cities while we do a fly-by. We need someone to remind the world of all the good that we’ve done and that we continue to do.
So can we just fast forward 10 months and be done with it? Whether it’s Senator McCain, former Arkansas Governor Huckabee, Senator Obama or Senator Clinton…oh man we’re screwed.
I’ve always loved rules of thumb, but if you pressed me to define what they are I’d just flubber out something obtuse. That’s why I was very pleased to find this on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools:
(Tom) Parker has refined his explanation of what rules of thumb are, and why they are cool tools. He writes:
"A rule of thumb is a homemade recipe for making a guess. It is an
easy-to-remember guide that falls somewhere between a mathematical
formula and a shot in the dark. Rules of thumb are a kind of tool. They
help you appraise a problem or situation. They make it easier to
consider the subtleties of the topic at hand; they give you a feel for
a subject. A rule of thumb is not a joke or a ditty. It is not a
Murphy’s Law. Murphy says that things will take longer than we think; a
rule of thumb says how much longer. While a proverb says that a stitch
in time saves nine, a rule of thumb says to allow one inch of yarn for every stitch on a knitting needle."
Kelly also links to Parker’s new website dedicated to rules of thumb which I think might be one of the most interesting sites I’ve ever come across. What makes it REALLY cool is that he solicits rules of thumb from readers and then asks other readers to rate the rules so he’s probably going to amass an even greater treasure trove of wisdom in the near future. Here’s a couple of my favorite rules from just a five minute perusal of the site:
- If you can’t adequately and clearly explain a concept to a neophyte, you don’t understand it clearly enough yourself. —
Adam, CIO, Perth
- For fatty foods, leave 40 percent of the grill exposed to avoid flareups. —
Gerri Willis, USA
- When you’re playing blackjack, assume that any unseen card is an 8.
- For marketing purposes, elderly consumers think they are 15 years younger than they actually are. —
Tracy Lux Frances, Bradenton, Florida
- Advertising costs should not drop below 10 percent of sales until a business has been around 20 years. —
Captain Haggerty, animal trainer, actor, author, and philosopher, New York, New York
- The year you start growing dark hair on your chest is the year that the loss rate of your head hair exceeds its growth rate. (I must be the exception that proves the rule, because if this was true I’d be bald twice over by now; Jon). —
Mark Ryan, Dallas, Texas
- You are middle aged when your high school and college days are featured
as nostalgia on TV. You are at old age when your wedding presents are
sold as antiques. —
Margaret M. Day, Locke, New York
- When forced to estimate an adult woman’s age in her presence, take the
figure you think she is, divide by two and add 15 (add 20 for a woman
presumed over 50) —
Jim Veihdeffer, PR pundit, Phoenix, AZ, US- If you can touch the ceiling of your house with the palm of your hand, your ceiling is too low. — Bob Horton, consultant and writer, Largo, Florida
- If friends ask you to help them move, remember that the work will begin
an hour after you get there, you’ll finish an hour later than expected,
the pizza will be colder than the beer, and the beer will be in lesser
quantities than promised. —Tom Sacco, West Des Moines, Iowa- It takes as much time to paint the trim in a room as it does to paint the walls and ceiling. — R. A. Heindl, design engineer, Euclid, Ohio
The GAO released a report on the dollars we (we being Americans) have spent from on the Global War on Terrorism. The GAO reports that from 2001-2007 Congress provided the Department of Defense with $542.9 billion for its GWOT efforts. And it’s not like the spending is slowing down. Take a look at the graph to the left (click on it to enlarge) from the report and you can see that the pattern definitely trends up and if DOD gets what they want for 2008 it will continue to climb. They’ve asked for $189.3 billion in 2008 after getting $161.8 billion in 2007, or an increase of roughly 17%.
What’s interesting to me is that the growth in spending is due to Operation Iraqi Freedom, which I tend to think of as "Bubba’s Folly". I think most American’s equate the GWOT with the War in Iraq, but the reality is that Operation Iraqi Freedom is but one of three large operations in the GWOT. The chart to the left shows a comparison of spending in all three operations and you can clearly see that the Iraq operations are responsible for the vast majority of the spending. From the report:
DOD’s reported obligations through fiscal year 2007 include about $378.1 billion for operations in and around Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and about $86.2 billion for operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines, and elsewhere as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. It also includes about $27.9 billion for operations in defense of the homeland as part of Operation Noble Eagle.
Reported obligations associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom continue to be far higher than those for other GWOT operations in fiscal year 2007. As figure 2 shows, from fiscal years 2003 through 2007, DOD’s reported obligations for Operation Iraqi Freedom consistently increased each fiscal year. In contrast, DOD’s reported obligations for Operation Noble Eagle have consistently decreased since fiscal year 2003, while those for Operation Enduring Freedom have remained within a range of $10.3 billion to $20.1 billion each fiscal year.
The GAO also takes the DOD to task for crappy accounting practices and writes that they aren’t sure how reliable DOD’s reporting is as a result. In other words the GAO can say for sure how much money Congress gave to the GWOT effort, but they aren’t confident in DOD’s reporting on how the money’s been spent.
Who’s surprised?
Hat tip to Lex for pointing to the report.
Befuddled 