Hurricaine Predictions

I'm not a meteorologist, but nonetheless I have predictions about what happens next.

• Any criticism of the Bush administration for policies that arguably made the disaster worse -- cutting funds for disaster preparedness, gutting wetlands protection, parking the Louisiana National Guard in Iraq -- will be dismissed as political opportunism.
  
• Meanwhile, nonopportunistic Republicans will use the disaster as justification for drilling in ANWR because of the new petroleum crunch.
  
• Nonopportunistic Republicans will use the disaster as justification for lifting whatever logging restrictions have escaped the axe so far because we will need cheap lumber to rebuild.
  
• Nonopportunistic Republicans will use the disaster as justification for another tax cut since anything serves as justification for a tax cut.
  
• Some fundamentalist preacher somewhere will declare what God is punishing us for this time.
  
• No one will question whether we should rebuild in flood-prone areas since doing so would mean that the Hurricaine Has Won.
  
• President Bush will say that we should come together as a nation and make sacrifices to help rebuild, but the liberal community will anyway.
  

Check back to see how I did.

Catastrophe

When the footprint of God impacts upon the land, everything else seems miniscule. My attempts at blogging last night just seemed ridiculous. Having absorbed somewhat the enormity of what happened, I'm feeling a little more ready to face the challenge.

Summit County's local Red Cross chapter has stepped up, sending 7 workers down to the disaster site with more to follow. According to their website.

The fastest way to help is by making an online contribution to the Disaster Relief Fund at http://summitcounty.redcross.org/. You can also help by calling 1-800-HELP-NOW. The American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund enables the Red Cross to provide shelter, food, counseling and other assistance to those in need for this disaster and thousands of other disasters across the country each year.

In addition the website notes we are in a blood emergency (usually happens in the summer, with or without nature's help). Just like we did by buying new emergency equipment after 9/11, Akronites have an opportunity to step up and make a difference.

Gag Me

I've spent the day thinking of a rationale for not blogging the civil war between Summit County Council and County Executive James McCarthy. I dowanna. For reasons I will discuss anon. For the uninitiated, you can read the sorry tale here.

What we get from the BJ report is that McCarthy accused County Council of harassing his employees, so he imposed a gag rule on each of them. Now all Council information requests go through one person. Council has responded by threatening to hold up legislation important to McCarthy and McCarthy has fired back that the information requests are all about Council members steering contracts.

So why do I need my eleven-foot pole for this story?

For starters, this is largely about Democrats vs. Democrats. I have no problem calling out a D when he's acting a ass. But it distresses me nonetheless.

More to the point, I know and like a number of the individuals cited in the story; Clair Dickenson and Pete Crossland on the Council side, Yamini Adkins on the Executive side. I don't know McCarthy, but my impression has been generally favorable.

But mostly the problem is that the limited information that makes the papers is all over the place. Accusations; counter charges; no, that's lie; no, that's a lie. It's hard to write about this and feel 1) I'm bringing something new to the party and 2) it's coming from somewhere other than my butt.

So, I would rather pass. But I took up the challenge of blogging Akron so blog Akron I must. A few observations.

Nobody, least of all the citizens of Summit County, is served by the current state of affairs. On one hand, the policy creating a single portal for information emanating from the Executive seems untenable. An information request (what non-government types call a "question") generally leads to a follow up question, which leads to another, etc. The single portal policy seems doomed to bog down the legislative process. It also feels like we are on the road to the familiar sitcom situation where two characters are "not speaking" by sending messages via an intermediary. The County doesn't need the equivalent of Lucy upbraiding Ricky through Ethel.

On the other hand, holding up legislation just because is no solution. If Council genuinely needs information that is tied up in channels, that's one thing. But to hold up the people's business for the sake of a "whose is bigger" contest is unacceptable. The parties involved have a duty to the people they serve. They cannot simultaneously fulfill that duty and butt heads like Bighorn Sheep trying to impress a ewe in heat.

So for anyone involved in this sad tale who happens to find my blog, let me conclude with the one suggested solution I can bring, based on the experience provided by my day job.

KNOCK IT OFF BOTH OF YOU AND PLAY NICE OR NO TV FOR A MONTH!!!

Hope it works better for them than it does for my kids.

Death to BlogSpam

I had heard of this, but this is our first experience at House of Pho. Evidently the spamosphere has developed webcrawlers which find blogs that allow comments and drop "comments" that happens to contain a link to "blogs" that happen to be tied to some sort of for-profit enterprise.

I got seven -- yes seven -- of these "comment" in response to the last post. I've left up the most innocuous for instructional purposes.

And OK so partly I'm pissed because they are an asspain to delete but mostly I'm pissed because I was initially excited about seven comments.

I won't bother telling the people responsible the degree to which they suck cock in Hell since they no doubt have never actually read the blog. But I will anounce a new comment policy. If you comment anonymously, add nothing to the discussion, and pimp your "blog" or the blogfront for your business, you will be deleted and I shall curse the eyes of your children.

Carry on.

ProChoice Absolutists Targeting Tim Ryan

How far this will go, no one knows, but the liberal blogosphere is buzzing with nastygrams directed at Representative and potential Senate candidate Tim Ryan.

The Background

Ohio Watch has links to the discussions about Tim Ryan's membership in Democrats for Life. The hook for the discussion is the recent relevation that a large cohort of girls at Canton Timken High School are pregnant. Unlike Jeff Seeman who accurately uses it to cast aspersions on abstenence-only sex education (though he hyperbolically declares it a end to the debate), a poster named Parker goes after Ryan for the mess "in his back yard."

The Argument

Ryan belongs to Democrats for Life
Democrats for life generally vote with pro-life Republicans
Many pro-life Republicans are against widely available contraception and believe in abstinence-only sex education
Abstinence-only sex ed is responsible for Timken
QED

If you don't see a hiccup between the second and third steps of the argument, you may wandered into the wrong blog by mistake. In fact Democrats for Life's platform favors real steps to reduce abortion by supporting women financially and making contraception available. They also favor abstinence-plus over abstinence-only. Pinning Timken on Ryan is fundamentally dishonest.

The Tone

Parker, the leader of all this, speaks in the strident tones of an abortion rights absolutist. Any disagreement and you are a mouth-breathing, wife-clubbing Neanderthal. Tim Ryan is not simply someone to be disagreed with, he is an evil oppressor of women. On virtual paper it looks something like this:

Responsible Poster: Is it really fair to pin all this on Ryan? He's simply voting his conscience.

Parker: SCREECH SCREECH SCREECH MY UTERUS SCHREECH SCREECH SCREECH LIVES OF WOMEN AND GIRLS SCREECH SCREECH

Responsible Poster 2: Well I agree with Ryan on a lot of things. On balance he seems like a good choice.

Parker: SCREECH SCREECH CAN'T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE YOU'RE A MAN SCREECH SCREECH BOOT OFF OF WOMEN'S NECKS SCREECH SCREECH

Jeff Seeman: It's not Ryan's fault. Canton isn't in his district. Blame Ralph Regula.

Parker: SCREECH SCREE-

OK I'll give her that one. Pretty lame on Jeff's part.

I've had my say over on MyDD. Mostly I'm posting this as a hook for decrying the toxic effect abortion dogma has on Democratic politics. A discussion with that tone is guaranteed to turn off anyone not in the 25% of Americans who believe in unrestricted abortion on demand.

Friday Random Ten

Pho's Birthday Edition:

1. "This Old Porch" by Lyle Lovett
2. "Death of a Party" by Blur
3. "Breathless" by Jerry Lee Lewis
4. "When Joy Kills Sorrow" by Bela Fleck
5. "Crazy Rhythms" by The Feelies
6. "Shine" by the Meat Puppets
7. "Hideaway" by John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers
8. "Whoever" by Lewis Taylor
9. "Poor Places" by Wilco
10. "High Water (For Charley Patton)" by Bob Dylan.

House Odds

The casino gambling report sponsored by CG Partnership has sent a couple of ripples through the blogosphere. In addition to my post, Joe at RubberBuzz chimed in with the standard "money is leaving the state now" argument. He personalizes it by discussing his recent trip to Wheeling to lose money.

In addition, Bill Callahan cited my post (thanks for the love) and generated a bit of discussion including another money-leaving-the-state take. And a reader emailed me with cites to the local business/nonlocal chain stats I had been groping for in my first gambling post.

My main objection to legalized casino gambling is more economic than moral. The only argument for casino gambling that makes economic sense is the money-already-leaving-the-state argument. But even a cursory look at the numbers from the CG study knock the feet out from under it.

Let's do a little rough math based on the numbers from the CG study. We are going to set aside the restaurant and hotel revenues because of concerns about tradeoffs. We are just looking at the "revenues" that constitute gambling losses.

I'm going to make an assumption about how much of the gambling loss money will stay in the state. To be fair, let's assume that the casinos are owned by a mix of homegrown corporations and out-of-staters. Since the percentages for local vs out-of-state business are 45 vs 15, lets be generous and split the difference. We will assume that 30% of money lost in casinos will recirculate in the state as opposed to being immediately repatriated out of state.

Recall the numbers from the study:

$2.975 billion in gambling loss revenues from Ohioans, including $925 million currently going out of state. That breaks down to:

$2.050 billion in new gambling losses
$ 925 million in recaptured gambling losses

Plus we get another billion from out-of-state suckers.

I contend that the total money that recirculates in the state from gambling losses must be more than the money that leaves the state as a result of the new gambling losses for this to make economic sense. Otherwise it's a net loss, even before you figure in tradeoffs, more problem gamblers, regional impacts and so forth.

The 70% of the recaptured money and out-of-state money that flows out of the state can be ignored since we would not see that anyway. The 30% that recirculates from recaptured and out-of-stater money is free money. For our purposes, I'm granting that we wouldn't see any of that money without legalized casino gambling.

So let's see how this all totals up.

The money that stays in the state is:
$601.5 million from new gambling losses
$277.5 million from recaptured gambling losses
$300 million from gambling losses by out-of-staters

Total = $1.178 billion recirculating

The total leaving the state due to new gambling losses is $1.4 billion -- 70% of $2 billion. That is a net loss of $222 million dollars.

Look, I'm not an economist. These are calculations done literally on the back of an envelope. Maybe I'm missing something, but when I saw the figures for revenue from new gambling losses, this started to look like an even worse bet than I thought.

One lesson I learned from watching to much poker on TV is that a good bet is one in which the odds are in your favor, not one you win. Every game of chance at a casino is a bad bet. You are playing at house odds -- the house will win a greater percentage of the time than you will. Rest assured that prospective casino owners know all the numbers, including the numbers I've crunched above.