frankhagan.com

President Bush, the self-described “compassionate conservative”, revealed over eight years that the word “compassionate” must mean “big spender”. Of other people’s money.

Bush’s spending on education (58% faster than inflation), huge increase in poverty programs (now 3% of GDP) and shift of taxation to the highest wage earners made him look more Democrat than compassionate. The Republicans in Congress merrily went along, stuffing the proverbial Federal dollar into every rathole they could find in their home districts. Adding 2.5 trillion dollars to the national debt, the resemblance of today’s Republican party to the party of Ronald Reagan is limited to the rotund elephant mascot.

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Republicans think they were tossed out of Congress and the executive because they looked too much like Democrats. Maybe. But the American people voted for the most irresponsible, profligate spending Jackasses in the history of the Republic at the last election. God help us if, in reaction to this, the Republican party nominates “really compassionate conservatives” to run against them in 2 and 4 years.

The Heritage Foundation published the following chart showing a comparison of big spender pork-meister Republicans during the Bush years and the upcoming deficits under pocket-change-you-can-believe-in Obama:

Are there any fiscal conservatives left?

Politics

The left was nearly hysterical about President Bush’s “signing statements”, official notes made about the President’s intentions regarding certain provisions of the bills. Usually, they are used to point out where the Executive branch believes Congress has overstepped their authority and tried to dictate policy that should be left to the President to decide.

The The Future of Freedom Foundation has a typical statement:

His action vivifies that the rule of law now means little more than the enforcement of the secret thoughts of the commander in chief.

Search for “Bush signing statements” and nearly a half million Google results show many similar sentiments expressed by the left.

Will the left’s vitriol extend to the new administration?

President Obama has issued his first signing statement. And, not just a clarification, but also an assertion that Congress has overstepped its bounds in trying to dictate the use of American armed forces:

United Nations Peacekeeping Missions. Section 7050 in Division H prohibits the use of certain funds for the use of the Armed Forces in United Nations peacekeeping missions under the command or operational control of a foreign national unless my military advisers have recommended to me that such involvement is in the national interests of the United States. This provision raises constitutional concerns by constraining my choice of particular persons to perform specific command functions in military missions, by conditioning the exercise of my authority as Commander in Chief on the recommendations of subordinates within the military chain of command, and by constraining my diplomatic negotiating authority. Accordingly, I will apply this provision consistent with my constitutional authority and responsibilities.

Will the left be outraged at this latest example of executive privilege, or will they finally realize that the Executive is a co-equal branch of government, with specific duties and obligations it must protect in order to maintain our democratic system?

And will they apologize to George W. Bush?

Politics

The Consumer Protection Safety Improvement Act passed the House in 2008 by a vote of 434 to 1. It was a bill drafted in response to the lead content of toys from China, and was hailed as an example of government “doing something” and “getting tough” with manufacturers of unsafe products.

But the Congresspeople could not think through the process. The law requires sellers of goods to prove the item has no lead. For manufacturers, that means having products independently tested. Woodworkers making wooden toys for charities, who paint the toys with latex, non-lead paint from Home Depot, still have to have the toys independently tested for lead content.

Even main-line toy manufacturers and distributors feel they have a billion dollar inventory problem on their hands:

“We have millions of dollars worth of merchandise sitting in 30 40-foot-long trailers waiting to be hauled out to a landfill somewhere,” says Michael Klein, president of Constructive Playthings Inc., a closely held Missouri toy maker. The banned products include beach balls, inflatable toy guitars and blow-up palm trees.

The way the law is written, thrift stores felt they could be prosecuted for selling older items that had not been tested. Snopes.com said that wasn’t true, but they have had to revise the story several times. Today, the Snopes.com article on the law indicates that thrift stores are exempt from the testing requirements for used products, but casually mentions they still have to comply with making sure there is no lead … or phthalates, the “plasticizer” in most plastics that makes them soft and pliable … in anything intended for children. The assurance is that, at this time, the Federal government will not prosecute thrift stores. That misses the main point, in that any state’s Attorney General can sue them or, since the law enables it, they could face a class action lawsuit from an eagle eyed attorney. And the Federal government can change its mind about who it prosecutes. So thrift stores are tossing out products that parents in stressed financial situations urgently need.

The law has decimated the youth motorsports industry. Because lead is present in metals, including brass, bronze, and most steel, motorcycle shops have removed smaller bikes from their inventory. the Wall Street Journal notes:

The Motorcycle Industry Council, which includes more than 300 makers of off-road vehicles, estimates the law will force the industry to dispose of about 50,000 motorized bikes and four-wheelers made especially for children aged six to 12. Their value: $125 million.

Manufacturers of plastic goods, like bicycle helmets intended for children, are throwing away millions of dollars of inventory. Even ball point pens, because of the trace amounts of lead in the brass tip of the pen, cannot be decorated and sold as primarily for children (kids can still use pens intended for adults.)

Any children’s book printed before 1985 is suspect, as the ink may contain lead. In order for the book to be sold, given, or loaned to children, it must be tested. Libraries are boxing up many books pending clarification from Congress. The problem is that many books don’t have a “printed” date, but a copyright date. So children’s books printed after 1985 may get caught in the trap as well.

The CPSIA is a disaster. Congress got it wrong, and by a wide margin …. all but one member voted for it. Republican and Democrat alike, they got it wrong. They are not capable of seeing what impact their regulation would have on the marketplace. The heavy handed, blunt force trauma approach to a serious issue shows how inept they are at solving real world problems.

Now they want to reform health care. Yeah, that will work.

Politics

I use Shadow Protect Desktop as my back up agent of choice, archiving backups to an internal 1TB drive. Every Sunday, I do a full image back up, and then an incremental back up every subsequent day. Shadow Protect makes it easy to do this, as it manages the image files, leaving the last 3 weeks on the disk (configuration options allow you to keep as many backups as you desire).

Then, I was manually copying the full image back up to an external USB hard drive in case a problem happens within my system that trashes both internal drives. But I had to remember to do this, and well, that can be a problem.

Shadow Protect has the ability to run any command before and after a backup operation. I decided an old-fashioned batch file would be great to delete the old full image backup file on the external drive and copy the new one over. In order to write a batch file to do that, I had to be able to select the file created the day the batch file runs, but only if it is Sunday. But I didn’t see an option to have the “post-backup command” run only on certain days within the Shadow Protect control panel.

The first order of business is to determine the day of the week in the batch file, and process the commands if it is Sunday. Here are the commands to do that:

set dow=%date:~0,3%
if %dow%==Sun goto sunday
goto theend

“dow” is a variable we just made up, and we’re calling on the “date” routine to tell us what to put into that variable. When you do a “Date” command from the Start * Run * CMD window, you get a return from the operating system like “Sun 03/08/2009″ (at least in my version of Windows XP, SP3). The command “set dow=%date:~0, 3%” is telling the operating system “OK, let’s create the variable ‘dow’ and, starting from the very first letter in the string, let’s put 3 characters from the date command into the variable. On Monday, that will be “Mon”, and on Tuesday, it will be “Tue” and so on.

Now we want to see what day it is … so we say “If the dow variable contains the letters ‘Sun’, then go the portion of the batch file called sunday”. If the letters aren’t “Sun”, then the batch file won’t jump to the portion called sunday. Instead, the system will continue to “go to the label called ‘theend’”. (Edit: I originally had “next” as the label here, but that can cause the batch file to continue processing rather than jumping … “next” is a command and should not be used as a label).

Now, let’s say we’ve determined it is Sunday and we want to copy the file over to our external drive:


:sunday
FOR /F "tokens=1-4 delims=/ " %%I IN ('DATE /t') DO SET mydate=%%J-%%K-%%L
DEL F:\*.spf
xcopy e:\*.spf f:\ /D:%mydate%
:theend


“:sunday” is the portion of the batch file we want processing to continue at if it is indeed Sunday. The line starting with “FOR /F” tells the system to tell us the full date, and fills another variable called “mydate” with the values of the month, day and year, separated by the dashes.

Next, since it is Sunday and we know we’re about to copy over the new backup file, we can delete the old backups on the external drive. Then we can use xcopy to copy the *.spf (full back up image file) from the e: drive to the external f: drive … but only if the date of the file … “/D:” … is equal to the value we stored in “mydate”. This enables us to copy only the backup file made today.

You’ll have to change the drive letters and paths to suit your situation, but here is the complete batch file again:


set dow=%date:~0,3%
if %dow%==Sun goto sunday
goto theend
:sunday
FOR /F "tokens=1-4 delims=/ " %%I IN ('DATE /t') DO SET mydate=%%J-%%K-%%L
DEL F:\*.spf
xcopy e:\*.spf f:\ /D:%mydate%
:theend


This is a simple solution without the use of add-on programs. Batch file programming used to be common place in the days of command line DOS, but its still valuable today.

Tech

Fox News reports yet another attack on a venerable American institution, the Barbie doll:

West Virginia state lawmaker Jeff Eldridge proposed a bill Tuesday that would ban sales of the busty Mattel doll, and others like her, in the state, just days before the doll officially logs a half century on March 9.

“I just hate the image that we give to our kids that if you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful and you don’t have to be smart,” Eldridge told West Virginia Media. “I’d like to send a message to not only our children but parents and educators that let’s push education over the importance of beauty.”

I’m not sure what lawmaker Eldridge really has against Barbie, but he seems to give in to the same temptation other kill joys fall prey to; he hates beauty.

Many of the Barbie-phobic resort to criticizing the “impossible measurements” of the doll, if scaled up to full size. Barbie is said to be 6′ tall, weigh 100 pounds, and have measurements of 39-19-33.

Its not surprising that the Barbie-phobic would also be ignorant of art and the rules of proportion. The Pieta, Michelangelo’s masterpiece, features a Virgin Mary holding the crucified Christ on her lap with body proportions that are indeed “impossible”:

The figures are quite out of proportion, owing to the difficulty of depicting a fully-grown man cradled full-length in a woman’s lap. Much of the Virgin’s body is concealed by her monumental drapery, and the relationship of the figures appears quite natural.

From Wikipedia

It is said the Virgin in the Pieta would be 10′ tall if she stood up. But she looks natural there, holding her baby, the adult Christ.

A small sculpture of a woman, with exact proportions scaled down, would appear to the eye as an androgynous figure. Proportion has to be changed to retain the feminine essence of the figure.

I say leave Barbie and the little girls who love her alone. Try solving some grown up problems, like your state budget woes. Or violent crime. Or why Ken was neutered.

Politics, humor