Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline Of The Week

"Pakistan struggles to attract tourists amid violence"

Education Is Its Own Reward (According To Congressional Budget Office Report)

You've probably seen news reports (like the WaPo's) on a new Congressional Budget Office study comparing federal and private sector pay and benefits. It will add analytic fuel to the election year fire over federal pay cuts and such, because it reinforces an existing narrative that feds get paid way too bloody much.

However, the report itself actually doesn't say quite that. Read it here, or just take a look at the chart above (Figure 4 of the report), which shows how federal and private sector wages compare for employees with different levels of education.

Differences in wages between federal employees and similar private-sector employees in the 2005-2010 period varied widely depending on the employees' level of education.

· Federal civilian workers with no more than a high school education earned about 21 percent more, on average, than similar workers in the private sector.

· Workers whose highest level of education was a bachelor's degree earned roughly the same hourly wages, on average, in both the federal government and the private sector.

· Federal workers with a professional degree or doctorate earned about 23 percent less, on average, than their private-sector counterparts.

Overall, the federal government paid 2 percent more in total wages than it would have if average wages had been comparable with those in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics of workers.

The comparison on non-wage benefits worked out the same way. Feds with high school education did much better than their private sector peers, those with bachelor degrees did about the same, and those with graduate and professional degrees did much worse.

Federal employment is heavily weighted toward professional or technical jobs, more so than in the private sector. The CBO report says that 51 percent of the federal workforce has at least a bachelors degree compared to 31 percent of the private sector, and 21 percent of feds have graduate degrees compared to 9 percent of the private sector.

As best I can tell from the report, the disproportionately small number (compared to the private sector) of federal jobs that require only a high school education are so very lucrative that they offset the lower-than-private sector wages paid to federal professional and technical employees.

That's interesting information, and potentially something that could counter the usual political lines of attack on federal pay. But forget about it! That would never happen in an election year, if ever.

The headlines about the CBO report ought to say "Federal Jobs Pay Really Big Bucks to HS Graduates, Others Get Not So Much." But instead, I think they will be more like "Worthless Feds Paid Far More Than Hardworking Taxpayers!"

Hillary's Dark Sartorial Secret

Foreign Policy's Passport blog has a piece on Hillary Clinton's dark Alinskyite past, with a link to the once-suppressed honors thesis on Saul Alinsky that she did at Wellesley College in 1969.

There is no dark secret in the thesis itself, however, since it amounts to little more than an extended book report. I thought it was a crushing bore when I read it a few years ago.

But Hillary does have a dark secret from those days. Check out the outfit she wore at a press interview around the time of her valedictory address at Wellesley:

Those pants may have been too radical even for 1969.

"Nobody But Us" Russians Against Putin

I just saw this great video on the New York Times' The Lede blog. It looks like Vladimir Putin has some vocal opposition to his plans for re-investiture as Russia's Prime Minister on March 4th.

A video of a musical group, apparently featuring former Russian paratroopers, performing a song with lyrics sharply critical of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, quickly became an Internet sensation after it was posted to YouTube on Thursday. By Friday evening, the band had performed the song on a private television channel, TV Dozhd (Russian for TV Rain).

The video had been viewed over 120,000 times by Friday night. Posted under the title “Putin and Paratroopers,” the song portrays Mr. Putin as nothing more than a corrupt bureaucrat who has “destroyed the armed forces” along the way. It pits the prime minister — who claimed in December that he thought the white ribbon, the symbol for the protest movement, was a condom — against the common man.

You’re no different from me.
A man and not God.
I’m no different from you.
A man, not some hick.


We won’t let you keep lying, we won’t let you keep stealing
We’re liberated troops who defended the motherland
Ribbons of freedom are positive for all, but for you…
[they're] nothing – just condoms.

I love the gusty guttural sound of the Russian language! It sounds fantastic when shouted, I think.

The banners in the background of the video are displaying versions of the post-Soviet era Russian Army Airborne Troops badge.

"Россия" = Russia. "ВДВ" stands for "Воздушно-десантные войска" = Air-Landing Forces.

Their unit motto is "Nobody But Us," which is also the title of the song.  

A Foreigner Responds to The State-of-the-Union Address

British publications frequently offer some of the sharpest and most plain-spoken commentary on American politics.

Take, for example, this piece by Christopher Booker, a Sunday Telegraph columnist, on his reaction to President Obama's State of the Union address - How I woke up to the untruths of Barack Obama:

When I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last Wednesday and caught the BBC World Service’s live relay of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, two passages had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief.

The first came when, to applause, the President spoke about the banking crash which coincided with his barnstorming 2008 election campaign. “The house of cards collapsed,” he recalled. “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” He excoriated the banks which had “made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money”, while “regulators looked the other way and didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behaviour”. This, said Obama, “was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work.”

I recalled a piece I wrote in this column on January 29, 2009, just after Obama took office. It was headlined: “This is the sub-prime house that Barack Obama built”. As a rising young Chicago politician in 1995, no one campaigned more actively than Mr Obama for an amendment to the US Community Reinvestment Act, legally requiring banks to lend huge sums to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was this Act, above all, which let the US housing bubble blow up, far beyond the point where it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of homeowners would be likely to default. Yet, in 2005, no one more actively opposed moves to halt these reckless guarantees than Senator Obama, who received more donations from Fannie Mae than any other US politician (although Senator Hillary Clinton ran him close).

I have two bones to pick with the above paragraph. First, not to take anything away from Obama, but it is Congressman Barney Frank who deserves the title of Fannie Mae's most active defender on Capital Hill in 2005. Watch the video of Frank, then the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, assuring the House that "you're not going to see the collapse that people see when they talk about a [mortgage] bubble."

Second, Booker understates exactly how much money Obama received from those government-sponsored mortgage associations. According to OpenSecrets.org, Obama was the second-biggest recipient of all Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign contributions for the years 1989 to 2008. That's especially impressive when you recall that Obama was not sworn in as a U.S. Senator until 2005, and was elected to the Illinois State Senate only in 1998. The only office-holder who received even more boodle from the mortgage bankers was Christopher Dodd, who had been a U.S. Senator since 1974, and who, as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, could give Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the best return on their influence investment. FYI, Senator Hillary Clinton was the 12th biggest recipient, which is not far behind. 

Booker continues:

A few months after Obama entered the White House, I suggested here that the slogan on which he was elected – “Yes we can” – seemed to have changed to “No we can’t”. It was already obvious that, having won election as an ideal Hollywood version of what “the first black President” should look and sound like, he was in reality no more than a vacuum. His speech last week was as weaselly as any politician’s performance could be, not least in its references to the sub-prime scandal.

I sense a little typical English reserve there, don't you? Hey, don't sugarcoat it for your American readers, Mr. Booker, tell us what you really think.

Friday Document Dumpster Diving

The administration did another Friday night document dump yesterday, this time delivering to Congress a series of Justice Department e-mails concerning the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Officer Brian Terry and the ATF's Project Fast and Furious, which permitted the illegal purchase and "controlled [sic] delivery" to Mexican crime cartels of the rifle used to murder Terry. 

All the back-and-forth messages between AFT Field Offices, DOJ headquarters, then-US Attorney Dennis Burke, and the DOJ Attache in Mexico City, will provide more grist for the investigatory mill of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Who knew what, and when did he know it?

See the dumped documents here. The big enchilada is a discussion of “controlled deliveries” of straw-purchased weapons to Mexican crime cartels. Most of that occurs in several heavily redacted messages from the DOJ Attache in Mexico City reporting on the U.S. Government's belated (on February 4, 2011) disclosure to Mexican officials of Fast and Furious. Oh, yeah, that must have been a cordial meeting.

NPR was the administration's favored news media recipient of a late-night leak of the disclosed material. Here's their report:

For the first time, the Justice Department has made public a series of sensitive messages that passed to the highest levels of the agency within hours of an ambush that killed a U.S. border patrol agent along the Southwest border in December 2010, igniting a national scandal over a gun trafficking investigation gone wrong.

Justice officials sent the documents to Congress late Friday evening, only a few days before Attorney General Eric Holder is set to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The email messages show the former top federal prosecutor in Arizona, Dennis Burke, notifying an aide to Holder via email on Dec. 15, 2010 that agent Brian Terry had been wounded and died. "Tragic," responds the aide, Monty Wilkinson. "I've alerted the AG, the acting Deputy Attorney General..."

Only a few minutes later, Wilkinson emailed again, saying, "Please provide any additional details as they become available to you."

Burke then delivered another piece of bad news: "The guns found in the desert near the murder [sic] ... officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store."

That investigation, dubbed Fast and Furious, was supposed to follow U.S. weapons into the hands of kingpins in the violent Sinaloa Mexico drug cartel, building a big case against the gangs. Instead, it cost Burke his job, got the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reassigned, and has prompted multiple federal probes by Congress and the department's own inspector general.

The Justice Department also sent a letter to lawmakers Friday night outlining several changes they had made within their own ranks and at the ATF: from requiring additional oversight in cases that involve wiretaps and confidential informants to extra procedures at the ATF for putting weapons purchases under surveillance to a realignment at the U.S. Attorney's office in Phoenix and the ATF itself.

The new documents are certain to stoke the fires among congressional Republicans, who have questioned what the attorney general knew about the botched investigation and asked why the chief of the Justice Department's criminal division, Lanny Breuer, didn't do more when he found out about other questionable tactics used by ATF in gun trafficking probes in the Bush administration.

In a meeting with Mexican government officials in February 2011, for instance, Breuer "suggested allowing straw purchasers cross into Mexico so [police] can arrest and [prosecutors] can convict. Such coordinated activities between the US and Mexico may send a strong message to arms traffickers."

A Justice official, speaking on background, said Breuer's proposal involved coordination between the governments and didn't contemplate agents losing track of guns, as happened in the Fast and Furious debacle.

A few days after the meeting between Breuer and Mexican authorities, the department's attache to Mexico raised this issue, according to an email: "there is an inherent risk in allowing weapons to pass from the U.S. to Mexico. The possibility of the [government of Mexico] not seizing the weapons, and the weapons being used to commit a crime in Mexico."

The attorney general, in testimony to the House and Senate last year, said he feared the Justice Department could be living with the consequences of more than 1,000 guns connected to Fast and Furious that remain unaccounted for years to come.

Market Downshift To Automatics

I made a hasty remark in my previous post, to the effect that only blue collar men and rich old geezers are stick-shift drivers anymore. Within a couple hours I heard from several women who also prefer driving manuals, so the stick-shifting driver demographic may be broader than I'd assumed.

But I wondered: what percentage of cars in the United States have manual transmissions, regardless of the driver's gender, age, or income, and where could I find an authoritative source for that information? And immediately I realized: by asking the federal government, of course, since they know everything and put it all on the internet.

Sure enough, the EPA's data on light-duty vehicle trends (see the executive summary excel tables) reports that in 2010 only 7 percent of our cars had stick-shifts, compared to 13 percent in 1998 and 29 percent in 1987. So, our stick-shift cars are slowing becoming a niche market for driving enthusiasts.

Not so in Europe. I've seen news media reports that as many as 85% of European cars are sold with manual transmissions. That accords with my own observations while traveling abroad, however, I haven't found an official source on the subject. For some strange reason, European governments don't seem to be so loquacious as ours.

Next I wondered: what American car brand sells the highest percentage of its cars with manual transmissions? (And I'm not including paddle shift transmissions or 'manualmatics' here; it has to have three foot peddles to count.) Is it Porsche, or BMW? Maybe Audi, or Volkswagen? Mazda?

It's none of those. I learned that Mini Cooper sells more of its cars with stick-shifts than any other maker in the U.S., as much as 50 percent. Mini has a whole ad campaign directed at that market segment. See this informational video on becoming a manual, for example.

I might wave to the next Mini driver I see while on my way to work tomorrow morning. We stick-shifters are a rare breed, and getting rarer.