The Perils of Polling

pa href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/42_say_climate_change_bill_will_hurt_the_economy"img title="in_polls" style="border-right: 0px; border-top: 0px; display: inline; margin-left: 0px; border-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px" height="138" alt="in_polls" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_7Jg6_0lMHc0/SoRvDWdflzI/AAAAAAAAA0k/Mh7P96Sktek/in_polls%5B4%5D.jpg?imgmax=800" width="138" align="right" border="0" / Rasmussen/a and a href="http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.cfm?ID=1730"Zogby/a both have polls out that aim to figure out how Americans feel about the climate change legislation travelling through Congress./p pIf Rasmussen happened to call you, you were in a a href="http://www.businessweek.com/blogs/money_politics/archives/2009/08/dueling_polls_o.html"bad mood/a:/p blockquote pIn late June, Rasmussen Reports surveyed 1000 adults. The poll showed that only 12% of respondents were strongly in favor, while 25% were strongly opposed. And 42% said that the measure would hurt the economy, while only 19% said it would help./p /blockquote pAnd you were much happier when Zogby caught up with you:/p blockquote pNow comes a competing poll from Zogby, which presents a far different picture. In this poll, a stunning 45% of the 1005 respondents were strongly in favor of the climate bill. Only 19% strongly opposed it./p /blockquote pWhat does this mean? Well, Business Week’s John Carey thinks that Zogby put the most positive spin possible on their questions while Rasmussen aimed at “objectivity” – emgood luck on that one!/em Carey concludes that “the public really doesn’t yet know what to think.” /p pWell, maybe. But we like the idea that Scott Rasmussen offers – that he was aiming to create a baseline for future polls. That works for both Zogby and Rasmussen. The trick is to see where the numbers go in future polls – especially as people start paying attention after the health care kerfluffle clears out and climate change comes back to the fore./p pFor ourselves, and only for right now, we’d lend more weight to Zogby because 45 in favor, 19 against (and presumably 36 undecided) seems a more plausible starting point for legislation not quite in the public eye but one about which strong advocates – and the House – have weighed in fairly positively. /p pA few more polls on the topic (from Gallup and Pew but really anyone) wouldn’t hurt, either./p pWe expect the polls will get really interesting when the Senate starts fighting over the bill in the Fall. Until then, let’s just say the numbers are all over the map./p pemDo you favor puppies or kittens? Why, yes, yes I do./em/p div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/10911751-5680988791433813785?l=neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com'//div

Mid-week music madness

Helen, my caseworker, proving that it is not just sorting out tax credits and benefits that she is good at. Apparently, this is a live version of the band's single.br /br /object width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/IaJAd1GXGUshl=enfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/IaJAd1GXGUshl=enfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/objectdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8266684-3874157639956516010?l=peterblack.blogspot.com'//div

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Takes on Facebook

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Gene Wojciechowski is standing outside Derek Jeter's window, lofting a boom box into the air

Shorter a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=wojciechowski_geneid=4392903sportCat=mlb"Wojo/a:blockquotEIf Derek Jeter is discovered to have used PEDs, I, too, will pump my fist -- span style="font-style:italic;"into my own broken heart/span!/blockquoteArguably the worst part of drug war moralism (Sporting Division) is that people like Gene Wojciechowski are permitted to earn a living by repeating the idiotic fantasy that certain players bear within them with game's Purity of Essence. It's bad enough that such declarations of abiding love for the game actually indicate their opposite, but when this peculiar form of romance is folded into the catechism of the Order of St. Jeter, it's difficult not to feel embarrassed for the guy. I mean, imagine if the "template for baseball professionalism" included, say, not adding superfluous leaps to routine grounders, or sharing pernicious viruses with supermodels -- ihow could Gene Wojciechowski face his children each morning?/idiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7163938-1742663981554836374?l=lefarkins.blogspot.com'//div

The Pain of Prayer

Jesus called his followers to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him. This is the cross-life. It is the only entry into the abundance life Christ promised. Yet it involves suffering and hard work (not to earn salvation, but in following the Savior).br /br /Part of the pain is prayer. Prayer, especially as praise and thanksgiving, can be joyful--communion with God as he reveals his goodness. But prayer can be hard and agonizing work. It often is for me. I must deny myself to pray over worries and concerns regarding myself, others, and this fallen and bleeding world, to keep praying when nothing seems to be happening, when my thought wander. Yet Jesus said to his disciples before his own supreme suffering, "Could you not pray for emone hour/em?" How many of us in America today pray for one hour at a time, or even one hour a week? I mean time dedicated only to prayer, not prayer throughout the day or ten second prayer before a meal.br /br /Jesus said we should not make a spectacle of our prayer, as did the Scribes and Pharisees, but how do we pray with feeling and intelligence publicly in a way that reveals our anguished yearning for the greater span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"in-breaking/span of God's Kingdom? How often do we weep over the world's woes as we pray--in the manner of Jeremiah?br /br /In hedonistic American, where for so many, the principal values are personal peace and affluence (Francis span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"Schaeffer/span), we tend to avoid the difficult and medicate the painful at all costs. Yet the gospel calls us to embrace certain kinds of pain--the pain of struggling against a sinful world and self--for the sake of the greater good of the Kingdom of God.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/14410967-2647710029436726451?l=theconstructivecurmudgeon.blogspot.com'//div

Mortgage Laws and the Case for Moving Insurance Across State Lines

The most common argument against allowing health insurance to move across state lines is that each state has their own state laws governing health insurance and thus it is not practical to do this. Different states have different levels of regulations and allowing health insurance to cross state lines would turn into chaos and take power away from the states the critics say. The critics say that insurance companies will simply set up shop in those states with the a href="http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/triage/2008/10/purchasing-insu.html"loosest regulations/a.br /br /blockquoteToday, I asked Sandy Praeger to share her perspective on the issue. Praeger is insurance commissioner for Kansas and president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.br /br /Praeger told me she was against lifting restrictions on the sale of insurance across state lines.If the change was implemented, here’s what she predicts will happen: Insurers will set up shop in states with few regulations and market low-cost policies to people across the country. These policies will offer minimal coverage and appeal primarily to younger consumers.br /br /“It will be a race to the bottom,” Praeger said, and there will be “very few consumer protections. … You’ll have plans that don’t cover the benefits that people need. … And healthy people are going to buy those less costly plans, because they don’t think they need [the protection].”br //blockquotebr /br /br /Now, I have dealt with something similar in mortgages for years. In fact, in mortgages, there are numerous state laws and federal laws. For instance, in Illinois, there is something called the Illinois a href="http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-75019525.html"high cost law/a. This law does two things. First, it sets a maximum rate that any borrower can be charged on any loan. Second, it sets the maximum fees that can be charged on any loan, 5.5%. My only experience with a href="http://theeprovocateur.blogspot.com/2007/12/illinois-high-cost-and-my-favorite.html"Illinois high cost /awas when a protege of mine tried to do a difficult loan that was deemed illegal at the end of the process. This was a loan on an investment property with a borrower with a marginal credit score and they were putting little down to purchase the property. As such, the rate on the loan approached 11%. Everything seemed fine until we got the loan ready to close and the bank realized it couldn't be done because the rate was illegal. In fact, there was no way to make the loan legal.br /br /Illinois high cost also comes up often fora href="http://portal.hud.gov/portal/page?_pageid=73,1827594amp;_dad=portalamp;_schema=PORTAL" FHA loans/a. That's because there is a 1.5% fee that FHA charges up front for Mortgage Insurance Premiums. As such, before anyone charges a single dime, there is already 1.5% of the 5.5% used. Of course, different banks have different interpretations of whether or not that 1.5% should be counted in the overall 5.5%. So, often there are disputes between bank and broker about whether or not a loan has exceeded the Illinois High Cost law.br /br /That's just in the state of Illinois. The state of a href="http://theeprovocateur.blogspot.com/2008/02/minnesota-case-study-in-complexities-of.html"Minnesota has created all sorts of state laws to prohibit "predatory lending". /aThe state of a href="http://www.hud.gov/local/nc/homeownership/predatorylending.cfm"North Carolina /aalso has very strict "predatory lending" laws. If a bank wants to do business in any state, they must follow the laws of that state along with federal laws as well rules set out by Fannie/Freddie and FHA. Sometimes, laws become so burdensome that banks actually stop doing business in a state. For instance, a href="http://theeprovocateur.blogspot.com/2007/12/sb-1167-and-my-favorite-reagan-quote.html"HB 4050/a, in my county of Cook, became so burdensome in 2006 that dozens of banks simply stopped doing business in that County.br /br /Why do I point this out? It's because mortgages is among the most heavily regulated industries in the country. Anyone who has ever closed on a loan knows full well just how regulated it is since they sign hundreds of pages worth of closing documents in response to regulation. We have something called a a href="http://www.bankersonline.com/regs/226/226.html"regulation z/a. That's because there are so many regulations that they span the alphabet. Each individual state sets out their own regulations along with federal regulations. Yet, banks are able to sell loans across state lines even despite this hyper regulation.br /br /In other words, the mortgage industry allows for mortgages to "cross state lines" despite the plethora of competing regulations. In fact, banks, much like insurance companies, set up shop in one state and then sell mortgages across state lines. They are able to figure out how to navigate all of the state laws, federal laws, and other regulations, and still be able to produce their product in all fifty states at one time. The regulations and complexity of mortgages is no less than is the regulations and complexity of health insurance. Yet, banks are able to figure out how to sell mortgages across state lines, and no one is claiming that you can only get a mortgage from a bank in your home state. In the same way, we could figure out how to sell health insurance across state lines.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3098264341625381422-6595817996692559023?l=theeprovocateur.blogspot.com'//div

The Russians are Coming?

With Akula subs off the coast, is it time to start re-reading The Hunt for Red October?br /br /Some of my thoughts over at a href="http://sitrep.globalsecurity.org/articles/090811443-the-russians-are-coming-3.htm"GlobalSecurity.org/a.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/19194934-6828975014671744022?l=washingtonrealist.blogspot.com'//div