The Royal Ballet is at crossroads – its current artistic director, Monica Mason, is about to retire and the search is on for a successor who will guard the company's rich classical heritage and also, crucially, shake things up. Here, the Observer's dance critic looks at the contenders for the top job in British ballet

Last week at the Royal Ballet's annual press conference, the company's artistic director, Dame Monica Mason, presented her schedule for the upcoming season, running from the autumn of 2011 to the summer of 2012. It's an exceptional programme, balancing new works by choreographers such as 24-year-old Liam Scarlett with heritage masterpieces by Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan, and it will serve as Mason's swansong. At the end of the season she retires – she's 70 in September – and earlier this month the Royal Opera House launched the official search for a successor.

Mason's departure will signal the end of an era. She became director in 2002, following the resignation of the late Ross Stretton, an Australian whose tenure had been marked by poor artistic decisions and allegations of inappropriate relationships with dancers. The finger of blame for this debacle was pointed at the then board of governors who, it was felt, had not only failed to conduct proper reference checks – Stretton's shortcomings were no secret in the wider dance world – but had shown little understanding of the qualities necessary to a Royal Ballet director.

Mason, by contrast, was the safest possible pair of hands. Having joined the Royal Ballet at 16 and become a favoured partner of Rudolf Nureyev and a muse to the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, she had left the stage to serve the company first as principal repetiteur and then as assistant director. "It's important not to lose touch with what we are, what's made us, and what's got us here," she said, when asked to replace Stretton. "The heritage of Ashton, MacMillan and the classics is an essential part of the Royal Ballet."

Today, the notion of "what we are" is rather more elusive. In 2006 the 36-year-old choreographer Wayne McGregor created a ballet called Chroma for the Royal, with sets by the minimalist architect John Pawson and music which included orchestrations of numbers by the White Stripes. McGregor was not ballet-trained, but the marriage of his cutting-edge contemporary style and the Royal dancers' peerless technique was a thrilling one. The work attracted a smart young audience, and Mason, seizing the moment, appointed McGregor choreographer in residence. Invited to involve himself at every level of the company's activities, McGregor's message was unambiguous. The dancers, and especially those with choreographic ambitions, had to turn their gaze outwards: to learn from the world beyond the confines of the Royal Opera House. Their notion of what constituted dance in the 21st century had to be reconfigured.

Many would agree. The Royal has shown itself a faithful guardian of the classical canon, and excels in the big story-ballets such as Giselle, La Bayadère and Romeo and Juliet. But there's another, growing audience out there, weaned on the work of art-house choreographers like Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Hofesh Shechter and McGregor, and hungry for a very different kind of dance narrative. The Royal Ballet fails to engage with this zeitgeist-surfing young audience at its peril.

But who should lead them into the future, and what will that future be? In Apollo's Angels, her magisterial history of ballet published earlier this year, former dancer Jennifer Homans is fatalistic: "Over the past two decades ballet has come to resemble a dying language… appreciated by a shrinking circle of old believers in a closed corner of culture." Homans is dismissive of the new wave of choreographers, writing of their "infatuation with fragmentation and instability". But ballet is always in crisis; her words would have been just as applicable in St Petersburg at the turn of the 20th century, before Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes launched the art form on a blazing new trajectory. And we live in fragmented and unstable times. It is appropriate that our choreographers should reflect this, rather than taking refuge in sentimental aesthetics.

The dance world has been scathing about the film Black Swan, with its backstage cliches, but its popularity and perverse sexiness have prompted a surge of interest in classical dance. In the UK Black Swan's release coincided with Agony & Ecstasy, a popular BBC4 series showing backstage life at English National Ballet, and earlier in the year a live broadcast of the Royal Ballet's Giselle, shown in cinemas, attracted a worldwide audience. This is not ballet as a dying language, this is ballet in the headlines. The Royal's new director, whoever he or she may be, has everything to play for.

So who's in the frame? According to one source, a shortlist of candidates was circulating among a small group of insiders by the autumn of 2009. That list contained three names: Wayne McGregor, English National Ballet's Wayne Eagling and the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon. McGregor is the first choice of the progressives. A deft and ferociously intelligent operator, equally at home in the worlds of dance and academia, he has run his own contemporary company, Random Dance, since 1992. Since 1996 he has made three brilliantly stylish ballets for the Royal (Chroma, Infra, Limen), as well as initiating mentoring schemes. Whether McGregor would be willing or able to accept the directorship is another story. Much in demand as a choreographer, he has international commitments well into 2013. Additionally, Random Dance is one of a number of companies who have been offered a home in the Olympic village when the 2012 Games are over. For McGregor, the Royal may just be an appointment too far.

Wayne Eagling is inner-family Royal Ballet. One of the company's brightest stars in the 1970s, he has since directed Dutch National Ballet and English National Ballet, and as a knowledgable classicist and an enthusiastic supporter of new dance, has made a success of both. But at 60, has the golf-loving Canadian still got the fire in his belly for the top job? Viewers of Agony & Ecstasy saw him under considerable stress at ENB, with his own staging of The Nutcracker incompletely choreographed by the dress rehearsal. Eagling commands great loyalty and affection from his dancers but his personal style may just be too laid-back for the board.

Christopher Wheeldon is a former Royal and New York City Ballet dancer and an internationally acclaimed choreographer. Young (38), well-liked, highly presentable, and with experience of directing his own company, Morphoses, he is thought by many to be the board's favoured candidate. While liberally endowed with charm, however, his recent history suggests that he is unsuited to the long haul of institutional leadership. A 2007 TV documentary in which Wheeldon attempted to create a ballet version of Hamlet for the Bolshoi shows the project foundering through his indecisiveness, and in early 2010, less than three years after founding Morphoses, Wheeldon walked out on the company, claiming funding difficulties, which his business partner denies. In fact it's probable that he had already signed a contract to choreograph Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for the Royal Ballet, which had its premiere earlier this year. Estimated to have cost around £1.75m, this crowd-pleasing spectacle received mixed notices.

Historically, choreographers have had a hard time running the Royal. The job drove MacMillan to the point of breakdown, and if Wheeldon is to fulfil his spectacular promise as a choreographer – demonstrated in abstract works such as Tryst and Polyphonia – it's unlikely to be from the director's office at Covent Garden. Ashley Page, another ex-Royal dancer turned director, might be a better bet. Currently at the helm of Scottish Ballet, he leaves in August 2012, following contractual wrangles with the company's board. In his 10 years in Glasgow, Page has turned the company's reputation around, by dint of judicious commissioning. His own creations, mostly arch reworkings of the classics, have had a rougher critical ride. But if prepared to put his choreography on the back-burner, Page could be a contender.

Of the ex-Royals, perhaps the least contentious choice would be Bruce Sansom. Formerly a principal dancer of great distinction, particularly associated with the choreography of Ashton, Sansom is currently assistant to the director of San Francisco Ballet. Quiet, diplomatic and a safe pair of hands artistically, his appointment would reassure the traditionalist tendency while leaving the way open for new work. Jonathan Cope, another revered former principal, now the Royal Ballet's repetiteur, also falls into this category.

Of those still dancing with the company, the most significant figures are Tamara Rojo and Johan Kobborg. Spanish-born Rojo is not only an exceptional classicist, held in profound respect by her colleagues, she is one of the few members of the Royal Ballet who is genuinely conversant with contemporary currents in choreography. She is also a popular teacher, in which role she could do much to align the Royal Ballet school and company, currently at damaging odds with each other. As intelligent as she is ambitious, and with a career marked by the steeliest determination, Rojo is clearly destined for a commanding role in the world of dance.

Kobborg burns with a cooler flame, but an equally illustrious future certainly lies ahead of him. Probably the finest actor-dancer of his generation, he trained and danced with the Royal Danish Ballet before coming to Covent Garden, where he has established a notable partnership, both on and off-stage, with the Romanian ballerina Alina Cojocaru. He has staged several ballets in Copenhagen, Moscow and London, including a much praised version of La Sylphide, and these have reportedly been happy and harmonious experiences for all involved. The RDB is one of the world's great companies, and the Royal would greatly benefit from the closer relationship that a Kobborg directorship would entail.

If the board are prepared to look outside the Royal Ballet family, Kathryn Bennetts would be an exceptionally strong candidate. Australian-born Bennetts was for many years assistant to the avant-garde choreographer William Forsythe in Frankfurt, before accepting the directorship of the Royal Ballet of Flanders in 2005. A rigorous perfectionist, she has built a repertoire in which finely honed versions of the classics sit alongside gleaming new works by dance-makers such as Christian Spuck and David Dawson. No other European ballet director has achieved a comparable balancing act. As it happens, Bennetts has been given a hard time in recent months by an unappreciative Belgian Arts Ministry, and with a bit of persuading might just be pried loose. Since its foundation in the 1930s by Ninette de Valois, the Royal has always thrived under a strong woman.

Whoever the board chooses will be faced with a formidable task. Monica Mason has proved a faithful keeper of the flame, and nurtured some exceptional talents: dancers such as Steven McRae and Marianela Nuñez, choreographers including McGregor and Liam Scarlett. Worldwide, the Royal Ballet is held in high regard. Inevitably, though, cracks have been papered over, the most serious of which relates to the Royal Ballet School. Most great ballet schools – the Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg, the School of American Ballet in New York, the Paris Opera Ballet School – stream home-grown students into their parent companies, in this way maintaining the traditions and national character of those companies. The Royal Ballet School, by contrast, fills itself with fee-paying foreign students and cherry-picked international competition-winners, to the degree that local talent barely gets a look in. This is a source of real anger among the parents of young British dancers, and of considerable frustration among those who would like to see the Royal Ballet rediscover its connection to the national community that, among other things, pays for it to exist.

Hard decisions have to be made. The company needs reshaping; a log-jam of imported dancers at soloist level is blocking the rise of talent from the corps de ballet, where most of the British dancers languish. The repertoire needs hard pruning, especially of dated back-catalogue works from the 1970s and 1980s, and the company's Swan Lake, with its garish sets and dowdy swan dresses, is in desperate need of a redesign. More than any of this, though, the company needs a director with vision, capable of shaping and implementing a forward-looking artistic policy. For the time being, all eyes are on the Royal Ballet board.

A non-comprehensive roundup of three weeks'
news of beer and other things.

Weeks 10/11/12
6 March 2011 - 26 March 2011

• 2011.03.25
  Fritz Maytag (founder of Anchor Brewing) and Ken Grossman (co-founder of Sierra Nevada Brewery) reminisce for the keynote speech at the 2011 Craft Brewers Conference.
• 
• 2011.03.25
  The Washington City Paper selects the Washington, D.C. area's best new beer bar, for 2011: Mad Fox Brewing.
• 2011.03.23
  Forever velvet. Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor has died.
• 2011.03.23
  For over 50 years, when it was the Brickskeller, it had no draft lines in the main bar downstairs. Now, the Bier Baron does.
• 2011.03.22
  'Craft' breweries sales volume increases 11% in 2010.
• 2011.03.22
  Sam Calagione, owner of Dogfish Head Brewery, is nominated for a 2011 James Beard Award: Outstanding Wine & Spirits Professional. [Why is there no beer category?]
• 2011.03.22
  Bud break is underway in California vineyards.
• 2011.03.21
  It's Virginia Wine Week, 18-27 March.
• 2011.03.21
  "Beer making is a marvel of industrial chemistry," says Popular Science Magazine ... in an issue published in 1933! Via Brookston Beer Bulletin.
• 2011.03.20
  Happy Spring Equinox ... Sunday, 20 March 2011 7:21 PM EDT.
• 2011.03.20
  After 55 years, how Washington, D.C. got her beer back.
• 2011.03.19
  The so-called Super Full Moon will appear at sunset tonight.
• 2011.03.18
  Today's Birthday in Beer: Steve Hamburg, one of the premier 'real ale' cellarmasters in the US.
• 
• 2011.03.16
  Imbibe Magazine names Virginia's Blue Mountain Brewery as one of "100 Best Places to Drink in the South".
• 2011.03.15
  Orange slice in your beer? Just say no, says blogger 3 Baking Sheets to the Wind.
• 2011.03.14
  For first time since the 'scandal' of the 2003 Brunello vintage, the US gives approval for importation of Brunello, the 2006 vintage.
• 2011.03.14
  "Rather than removing members due to success, the craft brewing industry should celebrate growth." Nick Matt (CEO of F.X. Matt Brewing) on the proposed US Congressional BEER Act
• 2011.03.14
  In the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake & tsunami: 7 simple ways to help.
• 2011.03.14
  Japan’s breweries face uncertain future after disaster.
• 2011.03.14
  A tale of two châteaux. The wine growing pains of China and Bordeaux growing pains.
• 2011.03.12
  Daylight Saving time begins overnight in the US, but not in Arizona.
• 2011.03.12
  The problems with beer blogging, and examples of how to do it better. Via beer writer Andy Crouch.
• 2011.03.11
  Happy Lithuanian Independence Day!
• 2011.03.10
  According to eCairn, 5 of the most influential alcohol websites in USA are blogs about craft beer.
• 2011.03.10
  VeggieDag Thursday: A new logo and a 20th anniversary.
• 2011.03.09
  The Washington Post's annual Beer Madness bracket-style competition with 64 US beers grouped by Malt, Roast, Fruit/Spice, and Hops.
• 2011.03.08
  Arlington, Virginia has a problem with children enjoying acoustic guitar music, if their parents are enjoying beer. Westover Market
• 2011.03.08
  Too much meat + too much sugar + too much (unfiltered) beer = gout.
• 2011.03.08
  Captain Kirk delivers the wakeup call for the final mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery.
• 2011.03.06
  Among all the recent good news for Virginia beer, there is some sad news. Via Relentless Thirst: Shooting Creek Brewery closing.

• Clamps and Gaskets is a weekly wrap-up of stories  not posted at Yours For Good Fermentables.com. Most deal with beer (or wine, or whisky); some do not. But all are brief, and many are re-posts from my Twitter account: twitter.com/cizauskas.
• The Clamps and Gaskets graphic was created by Mike Licht at NotionsCapital.

• The former Turkish Prime Minister Erbakan said — I quote: “The whole of Europe will become Islamic. We will conquer Rome”.
  
• Yunis al-Astal, a Hamas cleric and member of the Palestinian Parliament said — I quote: “Very soon Rome will be conquered.”
  
• Ali Al-Faqir, the former Jordanian Minister of Religion, stated that — I quote: “Islam will conquer Rome.”
  
• Sheikh Muhammad al-Arifi, imam of the mosque of the Saudi Defence Academy, said — I quote: “We will control Rome and introduce Islam in it.”

• In a 1974 speech to the UN, the Algerian President Houari Boumédienne, said — I quote: “One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.” End of quote.
  
• Libyan dictator Kadhafi said, I quote: “There are tens of millions of Muslims in the European continent today and their number is on the increase. This is the clear indication that the European continent will be converted into Islam. Europe will one day soon be a Muslim continent.” End of quote.

By Bruce Berlet

HARTFORD, Conn. – The Connecticut Whale showed little rust Saturday night after a six-day layoff, their longest of the season.

Mats Zuccarello scored twice and linemate Kris Newbury had one goal, two assists and several more good scoring chances to back the 23-save performance of Chad Johnson in a 5-1 victory over the Atlantic Division-leading Manchester Monarchs before 5,321 at the XL Center.

The Whale (11-11-2-4) have won three in a row, are 5-0-0-1 since being rebranded from the Hartford Wolf Pack, have a seven-game point streak (5-0-0-2) and are back to .500 for the first time since Oct. 23. The Whale’s five goals tied their second highest total of the season to a 7-1 rout of Providence on Nov. 7, their only victory during a 1-9-2-1 slide that preceded their current 7-1-0-2 run.

Johnson extended his point streak to seven games (5-0-0-2) since a 4-3 loss at Manchester on Nov. 17. Meanwhile, the Monarchs (17-10-1-1) lost for only the fourth time in 14 games and for the first time in four meetings with the Whale.

After Jeff Zatkoff (32 saves) robbed Zuccarello in front at 5:12 and Newbury in the slot at 10:15 during a 5-on-3 power play, the Whale struck for two goals in 12 seconds and three in 3:34.

Rookie defenseman Ryan McDonagh got the Whale rolling during a power play at 12:11 with a 50-foot one-timer through a screen off a pass from veteran defenseman Wade Redden, who did a good job keeping Richard Clune’s clearing attempt in the zone. It was the first goal as a pro for McDonagh, who left the University of Wisconsin after his junior year and a loss to Boston College in the NCAA title game.

“Nice one-timer with a shooter’s mentality,” Whale coach Ken Gernander said. “It was big goal to get on the board first with the power-play opportunity.”

McDonagh enjoyed the “big win” more than the goal, though he planned to text-message his former University of Wisconsin teammate Derek Stepan, a rookie center with the parent New York Rangers who departed the Badgers after his sophomore year. And McDonagh enjoyed that it brought several hundred teddy bears to the ice as the first Whale goal on “Teddy Bear Toss” night.

“Redden put it right on a platter for me, and I was glad I could get the teddy bears on the ice early,” said a smiling McDonagh, who got the puck to commemorate his first goal from trainer Damien Hess. “The past 12-15 games, I’ve been so much more comfortable and so much more confident, just like with our team. We’re getting used to each other, and everybody is starting to feel better and confident, and that helps my game.”

Even a rookie can notice how the light switch has seemingly gone on for the Whale.

To continue reading, hit the read more button if you're on the home page.

“We had injuries early and just needed those Whale colors and ‘Brass Bonanza.’ Man, I love that tune,” McDonagh said, smiling again. “I had never really heard it before because I’m from out West (St. Paul, Minn.), but I think it’s great. And I feel we’re getting better system-wise, so guys are in the right spots. So it’s just making good passes and using my skating ability to get up the ice and keep pucks in the zone and keep things happening.

“(Assistant coach) J.J. (Daigneault) stresses to get the puck up and out of our zone because we don’t want to stay there. We kind of live by that at the backend, make simple plays whether it’s off the glass or hitting our winger. We’re getting some more goals that way for sure. Everybody wants to stress good starts, and we’ve been really having some good ones lately. Maybe not as good as this one as far as scoring goals, but in general, we haven’t been down in games. To get three goals in the first period only boosts the confidence of the whole team.”

After McDonagh’s goal, Newbury won the ensuing faceoff back to defenseman Jyri Niemi, who bided his time and sent a long diagonal pass off the far boards to Newbury, who got behind defenseman Thomas Hickey and fired a wrist shot that went in between Zatkoff’s legs at 12:23.

Then with 4:15 left in the period, Zuccarello’s rebound went to Newbury, who gave the puck to “The Norwegian Hobbit” for a quick finish past Zatkoff for his 11^th goal in North America and the game winner.

But with the period winding down the teams skating four aside, the Monarchs got a lucky goal after a Redden turnover when Justin Azevedo’s centering pass from the left boards ricocheted off Niemi’s leg and past Chad Johnson with 20.1 seconds left.

“Those kind of goals happen, but when you have a good start, you can afford to give up one like that,” McDonagh said. “Even though we gave up that goal in the last minute, we came in (the locker room) full of confidence, and everybody was hootin’ and hollerin’ and just excited to get back out there and get the offense rolling again.”

Johnson kept the Whale two goals ahead when he stopped Viatcheslav Voynov breaking in off right wing on a 3-on-2 at 1:02 of the second period. Moments later, Redden jumped in to stick up for Pavel Valentenko, who had been slammed into the boards by a charging Richard Clune.

“That was great,” Gernander said of Redden, a 13-year veteran making $6.5 million. “It would easy for a guy like that just to turn and let somebody handle it. But he was sticking up for his defensive partner, and that’s great. It’s nothing to scoff at or joke about. It’s pretty admirable.”

Newbury agreed.

“That gains a lot of respect around the team,” Newbury said. “He’s not a guy who has to do that, but he chose to. I know playing against him before in the National Hockey League, he’s not afraid to drop the gloves, and he does pretty good when he does it. It’s good to see everyone sticking up for each other no matter who you are. It just builds character for our team.”

“We played well and were able to create some chances early. Other than first couple minutes in the second period, we seemed to control the puck pretty well and made plays when we had them. And once again we had a good defensive game and (Johnson) played well.”

After Zatkoff stopped Newbury’s one-timer after strong forechecking by the Whale, Zuccarello found Newbury in the lower right circle, broke for the net and converted Newbury’s return pass into an open net at 11:57.

“Newbury is a great passer, and he found me in the open spot,” Zuccarello said.

“I was surprised for a bit because (Zuccarello) fell down, and I thought they were going to control it, so I took a couple of strides back and stopped,” Newbury said. “Then I realized I couldn’t get to the net, so I held onto it and he created room for himself and no one took him, so I tried to put it on his stick and he put it in the back of the net.

“We had a week off and a good week of practice and wanted to start well because we knew they played last night (a 4-1 victory over Worcester). You have to give them credit because they’re a good hockey team. We got a big win tonight, but next time we play we have to be ready right off the start and give them respect because they deserve it.

“But if we keep playing like this, we’ll be OK. We’re playing a lot better in our own end, and once you do that, guys are sticking together and we’ve got good goaltending. You put those three things together, and it makes for a good team game. Plus, we’re putting the puck in the net a lot more than we were at the beginning of the year. When pucks start going in the net, it’s funny what it does to a team. It seems everything you do goes right. We just want to keep going on with this and hopefully keep up the wins.”

Only 72 seconds after Zuccarello’s second goal, Evgeny Grachev took a pass from Tim Kennedy, dropped the puck to Dale Weise and went to the net to lift home a rebound to cap the scoring.

Johnson kept the Monarchs at bay with right pad save on Voynov at 7:36 of the third period and a blocker stop on Colten Teubert’s bid from the right circle with 5:47 left. A minute later, Zatkoff denied Zuccarello his second hat trick in North America when he made a chest save on the speedy wing.

But the Whale capped another successful night when Devin DiDiomete took on Hickey in a fight with 1:08 left.

“We have to keep climbing the ladder and not be satisfied,” DiDiomete said.

Aside from early in the second period, Gernander said his team did a lot of positive things.

“The power play was really sharp the way they were moving the puck, there were some simple plays that produced goals, we did a pretty good job breaking out of our own end, we competed well, we skated well and there were only a couple of turnovers that you’d like to have back,” Gernander said. “It’s a lot easier if you dictate play or forecheck or make smart decisions with the puck. If you turn it over, obviously you are reacting and on the backcheck.

“If you can start coming out of your end with sound decisions and put pucks in areas where you can pressure when you don’t have the puck, it can make a big difference. We’ve got a full complement of players now and a bit of cohesion because of a learning curve. The fact that guys are feeling better about themselves makes it easier to buy into things when things are going well.”

WEISE, REDDEN RETURN; DUPONT RECOVERED

With the return of Redden and right wing Weise, the Whale was as healthy as they had been since opening night. Weise returned after missing three games with an injury sustained in a 3-0 victory over the Adirondack Phantoms on Nov. 28 and played on a line with Kennedy and Grachev. Redden was back after missing one game with an injury sustained in a 3-1 victory over the Providence Bruins on Dec. 3 and was paired with Niemi.

Left wing Brodie Dupont was recovered from being slammed head-first to the ice without his helmet by the Worcester Sharks’ Andrew Desjardins during a melee late in the second period of the Whale’s 4-3 shootout victory Dec. 4. He played alongside Newbury and Zuccarello. … The Whale scratched forward Kelsey Tessier and defensemen Jared Nightingale and Lee Baldwin. The Monarchs scratched defenseman Jake Muzzin and center Oscar Moller, who was called up by the parent Los Angeles Kings. … McDonagh’s goal resulted in several hundred teddy bears being thrown on the ice on “Teddy Bear Toss” night.  Fans were encouraged to bring new, unwrapped soft toys and attach their names and phone numbers to them. When the Whale scored their first goal, the teddy bears were collected and given as holiday donations to local underprivileged kids. The teddy bear of Kyle Bourque of Massachusetts came closest to center ice, earning him four VIP tickets to the Whale’s outdoor game during Whalers Hockey Fest 2011 against the Providence Bruins at Rentschler Field in East Hartford on Feb. 19 at 7 p.m. … Since the Whale scored at least five goals, each fan won a free taco at Moe’s Southwest Grill.

PHANTOMS AT XL CENTER SUNDAY AT 3

Sunday at 3 p.m., the Whale hosts the Adirondack Phantoms (4-21-2-0), who have the AHL’s worst record but ended a 10-game losing streak (0-9-1-0) and a 1-18-2-0 slide since starting the season 2-2-0-0 with a 5-2 victory over the Syracuse Crunch on Friday night as rookie defenseman Erik Gustafsson had one goal and four assists. It was the longest the franchise had gone without a victory in its 15-year history, surpassing two nine-game winless streaks when the team was based in Philadelphia.

But the Portland Pirates scored two third-period goals to beat the Phantoms 2-1 Saturday night, making them 2-11-1-0 since former Whale coach John Paddock replaced the fired Greg Gilbert behind the bench on an interim basis. Gustafsson, 22, who played at Northern Michigan University, moved into a tie for the AHL scoring lead among defensemen with three goals and 17 assists in 26 games. Goalie Michael Leighton made 29 saves to earn his first victory in three tries on a conditioning stint with the parent Philadelphia Flyers, then lost Saturday night despite making 28 saves. Veteran defenseman Matt Walker is also down from the Flyers.

The Whale won the first meeting between the teams 3-0 at the XL Center on Nov. 28 behind the 25-save performance of Cam Talbot. Fans can get a $48 special that includes three tickets, three hot dogs and three drinks. They’re also encouraged to bring skates as there will be a free postgame skate with some Whale players. … Fans can give the gift of Whale hockey during the holiday season. The Whale Hockey Pack of six dark green undated flex tickets and one Heritage Connecticut Whale hat is $122, a savings of $38. Six yellow undated flex tickets and one hat are $74, a savings of $14. Holiday packages are available through Jan. 3 at the Fan Center behind Section 101 in the XL Center or by calling 860-728-3366 or visiting www.ctwhaleshop.com. … The Whale has moved the starting time of their Jan. 1 game against Providence from 7 p.m. to 5 p.m. so it doesn’t conflict with the University of Connecticut football team playing Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, which starts at 8:30.

NATURAL HAT TRICK IN LESS THAN 16 MINUTES

In notable/Whale-related AHL action Friday night: Rookie forward Casey Wellman recorded a natural hat trick in the opening 15:42 and later added a fourth goal to lead the Houston Aeros to a 5-3 victory over the San Antonio Rampage. Wellman, who also has played in 12 games for the parent Minnesota Wild this season, more than doubled his total of three goals in his previous 13 AHL games. He became the third AHL player this season to score as many as four goals in a game, joining Oklahoma City’s Linus Omark (five on Nov. 7) and former Wolf Pack forward Patrick Rissmiller of Lake Erie (four on Dec. 3). Aeros captain Jon DiSalvatore, a South Windsor native, assisted on the final Houston goal by Cody Almond, the only one not scored by Wellman. Former Rangers and Wolf Pack wing Petr Prucha scored one goal for the Rampage, whose four-game winning streak ended. … Former Wolf Pack defenseman Lawrence Nycholat scored the decisive shootout goal as the Hershey Bears beat the Charlotte Checkers, 2-1. … Former Wolf Pack center Corey Locke ended a six-game, goal-scoring drought with a goal and an assist to support the 25-save performance of Barry Brust and lead the Binghamton Senators to a 5-0 victory over the Albany Devils. … Red-hot Max Pacioretty, a former standout at New Canaan High and Taft School-Watertown, scored at 2:46 of overtime to give the Hamilton Bulldogs a 3-2 victory over the Rochester Americans. Pacioretty, whose 16^th goal of the season moved him back into a tie for the league lead with the Bears’ Andrew Gordon, has 12 goals and two assists in his last 10 games. … Former Quinnipiac standout Brandon Wong scored on a backhander off an assist from former Wolf Pack teammate Chris McKelvie with 6:17 left in the second period to give the Greenville Road Warriors a 2-1 ECHL victory over the Florida Everblades on Friday night. Dov Grumet-Morris, the ECHL Goaltender of the Week last week who played two games with the Wolf Pack earlier this season, made 19 saves to improve to 10-2-0.  With a 5-2 win over the Florida Everblades Saturday night, the Road Warriors improved their ECHL-best record to 18-5-2. The Road Warriors are affiliated with the Rangers and Flyers.

GIROUX, WOTTON NAMED ALL-STAR GAME CAPTAINS

Former Wolf Pack/Whale forward Alexandre Giroux of the Oklahoma City Barons and Sound Tigers defenseman Mark Wotton have been named captains of the Western Conference and Eastern Conference for the AHL All-Star Classic Jan. 30-31 at Giant Center in Hershey, Pa.

AHL president and CEO David Andrews selected Giroux and Wotton in recognition of their outstanding service and leadership to the league.

Giroux has been one of the leading offensive threats in the AHL for more than a decade, totaling 316 goals, tied for 14^th all-time, and 281 assists in 662 regular-season games and 100 points in 112 playoff games since turning pro with Grand Rapids in 2001. Giroux, who has played with the Wolf Pack, Binghamton, Hershey, Chicago and now Oklahoma City, was named the AHL’s MVP in 2008-09 and reached three Calder Cup finals with the Bears, winning titles in 2009 and 2010. Giroux, a Quebec City native who had 60 and 50 goals in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons, will be playing in his fourth All-Star Game (2007, ’09 and ’10).

Hours after being named captain on Friday, Giroux scored two goals in a 4-2 victory over the Manitoba Moose. The AHL’s two-time defending goal-scoring champion has a goal in three consecutive games after going 14 games without scoring. He has 599 regular-season points (318 goals and 281 assists) in 663 AHL games.

A veteran of 849 AHL game, most among active player and 20^th all-time, Wotton has worn the captain’s “C” in 11 of his 14 AHL seasons, including the last five in Bridgeport. A 17-year pro, Wotton has also played for Syracuse, Utah and Hershey, where he was a member of the 2006 Calder Cup championship team before joining the Sound Tigers. A native of Foxwarren, Manitoba, Wotton’s only other All-Star appearance was in 1998.

Gernander and former Whalers players Randy Cunneyworth and John Stevens are among the previous captains. On-line fan voting for the All-Star Classic runs through midnight Jan. 9 at theahl.com and facebook.com/theahl. The fans will pick the starters for each conference, and a committee of coaches will select the reserves, with all 30 teams having to be represented.

HOCKEY MINISTRIES INTERNATIONAL A BIG-TIME HELP

Hockey Ministries International has helped the Hartford-area community and provided a Chapel program to the local AHL team since the Hartford Wolf Pack (now Whale) replaced the Hartford Whalers in 1997.

One of its better stories involves Jose, who appeared destined to failure when he attended a Christian Youth Hockey Camp in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, at age 10. Until then, his time was spent on the streets of Hartford, a product of the society that killed his father in a gang confrontation while Jose, then 4, watched. Jose didn’t trust people and, until that week at camp, never knew the God that loved him. He opened his heart to Jesus and began an adventure of learning to follow him.

Jose, now 24, has moved out of Hartford but remains in Connecticut with his two young children. His life has had many bumps and turns, but he has landed on his feet each time and continues to hold on to the truth and faith that he found 14 years ago. He has learned God never promises life will be easy, only that He will never leave you even in the midst of difficulties.

This is the type of life-changing experience that people can be part of by supporting Hockey Ministries International, a Christian organization that used the unique hook of hockey to reach players of all ages, as well as their families, coaches, trainers and fans with the Gospel. And at Christian Youth Hockey Camps, there are Chapel programs at all levels, from the NHL to high school and other various outreaches.

“This program has yielded much fruit, and we have expanded to provide the same program in 29 of the 30 AHL teams,” AHL Chapel coordinator Rick Mitera of New Britain said.

Ten Whale players usually attend Chapel sessions with Mitera after practice.

To make a donation, send a check or money order to: Hockey Ministries International, Northeast Division, 201 Skyview Drive, Cromwell, Ct. 06416. For more information on HMI, visit www.hockeyminstriesnortheast.org or contact Mitera at 860-817-6440 or rmitera@hockeyministries.org. … The Bridgeport Sound Tigers’ annual holiday toy drive runs through next Sunday. The Sound Tigers are working with the Bridgeport Fire Department to gather toys and teddy bears to be distributed to local children and families. Fans are encouraged to donate during games Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Fans also can donate throughout the week by bringing toys to the Sound Tiger office at the Arena at Harbor Yard. The toys and teddy bears will be distributed by Sound Tigers players and front office staff members. Before a game against Worcester next Sunday, the Bridgeport Fire Department will play a charity hockey game against the Worcester Fire Department to assist families of Bridgeport firefighter Michel Baik and Lt. Steven Valeasquez, who were killed in the line of duty on July 24 in Bridgeport.

LEMIEUX TO PLAY ONE MORE TIME

There should be plenty of emotion at the alumni game prior to the Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh.

Hall of Famer Mario Lemieux, who led the Pittsburgh Penguins to back-to-back Stanley Cup titles in 1991-92 and is now principal owner of the team, will return to the ice to play in an alumni game against the Washington Capitals alumni on New Year’s Eve day. It will be the first time Lemieux plays in an organized game since he announced his final retirement as a player in 2006 and comes a day before the Penguins and Capitals meet in the 2011 NHL Winter Classic.

“We all grew up playing on outdoor rinks, so we’re really looking forward to having this chance to skate on the Winter Classic rink at Heinz Field,” Lemieux said in a statement. “There is so much history between the Penguins and Capitals, and it will be good to get together and see friends on both benches.”

The chance to play with Lemieux is already bringing out the stars. Hall of Famers Bryan Trottier and former Whalers players Ron Francis and Paul Coffey and recently retired Bill Guerin have already signed on to play for the Penguins. The Capitals’ team is led by Peter Bondra and will include former Whalers defenseman Alan Hangsleben. Full rosters will be announced soon.

Tickets, priced at $25, will allow spectators to watch the alumni game at 9:30 a.m. and the Penguins’ practice at 11:30 a.m. Washington’s 2 p.m. practice will be closed to the public. Seating capacity for these events will be 10,000. Tickets will go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. at www.ticketmaster.com or by calling 1-800-745-3000.

Lemieux, Francis and Trottier were part of the Penguins’ back-to-back championships in 1991-92, while Coffey was with the team for the first title before being traded to the Detroit Red Wings in 1992. Lemieux is the principal owner of the Penguins, while Francis is an associate head coach and director of player personnel for the Carolina Hurricanes, the former Hartford Whalers.

The alumni game and NHL team practices will be the first official events on the Winter Classic rink at Heinz Field. The Winter Classic will be played on the same rink Jan. 1 at 1 p.m.

WHALE 5, MONARCHS 1

Manchester    1 0 0 -- 1
Connecticut    3 2 0 -- 5

First period: 1. Conn, McDonagh 1 (Redden), 12:11 (pp). 2. Conn, Newbury 3 (Niemi), 12:23. 3. Conn, Zuccarello 11 (Newbury, Dupont), 15:45. 4. Man, Azevedo 9 (Hickey, Voynov), 19:39. Penalties: Johnson, Mch (fighting), 3:32; Soryal, Ct (fighting), 3:32; Kolomatis, Mch (delay of game), 9:06; Cliché, Mch (double minor-high-sticking), 9:50; Clune, Mch (roughing), 19:13; DiDiomete, Ct (roughing), 19:13.

Second period: 5. Conn, Zuccarello 12 (Newbury), 11:57. 6. Conn, Grachev 4 (Weise, Kennedy), 13:09. Penalties: Clune, Mch (boarding, fighting), 1:40; Redden, Ct (roughing, fighting), 1:40; Holloway, Mch (boarding), 3:04; Nolan, Mch (fighting), 8:12; Redden, Ct (fighting), 8:12; Johnson, Mch (delay of game), 14:30; Kundratek, Ct (holding the stick), 17:12.

Third period: No scoring. Penalties: Hickey, Mch (hooking), 7:38; Nolan, Mch (roughing, cross-checking), 11:01; DiDiomete, Ct (roughing), 11:01; Hickey, Mch (fighting), 18:52; DiDiomete, Ct (boarding, fighting), 18:52; Johnson, Mch (boarding), 19:49; Clune, Mch (misconduct), 20:00; DiDiomete, Ct (misconduct), 20:00.
Shots on goal: Manchester 6-9-9-24. Connecticut 14-12-11-37; Power-play opportunities-Manchester 0 of  2, Connecticut 1 of 7; Goalies: Manchester, Zatkoff 9-9-1 (37 shots-32 saves). Connecticut, Johnson 8-10-3 (24-23); A: 5,321; Referee: Chris Brown; Linesmen: Luke Galvin, Paul Simeon.

✒Times are plainly good again at the Daily Mail. The annual thrash thrown by Lady Rothermere, wife of the paper's owner, has been revived. Grand stiffies have gone out, inviting more prominent members of the toiling masses at Associated Newspapers to her ladyship's salon at Claridge's shortly before Christmas. The invitations are personalised with flamboyant calligraphy and recipients can look forward to lashings of drink and a groaning sideboard. "The party stopped during the advertising recession," says one Mail serf. "It's a fabulous do. Last time I went there was a 20-yard table of oysters and prawns on a vast bed of ice. The champagne seems to flow from hoses."

✒Channel 4's chairman, Lord Burns, offered up what will henceforth be known as the "Stravinsky defence" of its more controversial output last week. "I recognise that some of our programmes are not ones that you might naturally choose to watch," he told members of the venerable Voice of the Listener and Viewer. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring provoked a riot when it was first performed, said Burns. "Today he is widely acknowledged as [one of] the most important composers of the 20th century. Many things that in time are seen as innovative ... were very challenging – even shocking – when they were first seen or listened to." Frankie Boyle – about to bring a solo show to Channel 4 – it's over to you.

✒Tough crowd the VLV. Just ask BBC4 controller Richard Klein, who followed Burns onto the conference stage. "I have never watched BBC4 and don't intend to," said one delegate. "How do you intend to convert me?" "If you don't intend to that's quite a tough one," offered Klein, who rebuffed suggestions that his channel was too close to BBC2 by saying that 90% of his output would not find a place there. "We are deep, whereas BBC2 is broad in terms of its appeal." But is he worried BBC4 – and its £37m programme budget – will be a casualty of the tough licence fee settlement? "No."

✒Former Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers is moving on from his position as head of media at troubled oil giant BP. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was not the first disaster Gowers has handled in his brief PR career, having previously been head of communications for Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt in 2008. Gowers wrote a lengthy account of the Lehman disaster for the Times. He could surely get a whole book out of BP.

✒A star-studded turn out last week for Chris Shaw, departing Channel 5 senior controller and news guru. Among those at the Envy Post Production house's rooftop bar paying tribute to the man who invented the desk "perch" were Five News faces Natasha Kaplinsky, Kirsty Young, Charlie Stayt and Helen Fospero. Although Shaw redefined broadcast news, the anecdote featured most prominently in his leaving tape was the time he had a pig hauled onto the ITN building roof and slathered in Ambre Solaire to demonstrate the strength of the summer sun. Some felt this demonstrated Chris behaving a little rasher than normal but as ever he brought home the bacon.

✒Media Guardian is looking for a digital cartoonist – anybody who can produce a witty animation to sum up developments in the business each week. If that's you drop MG a line at media@guardian.co.uk

For years they've been associated with 1970s suburbia. Now, thanks to a global makeover, today's Avon ladies are becoming millionaires, and even men are starting to knock on doors. But in the age of online retail, why is Avon beating the recession – and catching the eye of Hollywood?

The night before I went to meet one of the most successful Avon ladies in Britain, I dreamed swear words had been scrawled on my front door in lipstick. I arrived in Weymouth two hours into one of Gail Reynolds's monthly coffee mornings with visions of violent make-up still hot in my mind.

Gail Reynolds, a mother of three who started selling the products door-to-door eight years ago, now runs an Avon business worth around £5m. She herself earns about £113,000 a year, and has 2,000 Avon representatives (each paying her up to 12% of their sales) in her team. A handful, half men, half women, with toddlers gambolling through their legs, are here today, milling about her large front room wielding mini Crunchies and mugs of milky tea.

Reynolds, immaculate in black, greets me with a kiss. Gold jewellery jangles expensively on her always moving hands. At regular intervals, for instance when she tells me next year's forecasted earnings of £150,000, or whispers that she's already sold £5m-worth of products this year, an eavesdropping representative will ask if I'm tempted to join. "The £15 you pay to join isn't a fee," Reynolds stresses. "It's not a fee. You're fully reimbursed over your next two orders. So there's really no real reason why you wouldn't want to give it a go." In the oven door I see a reflection of myself nodding, wildly.

This has been the year of Avon. In 2010 the company celebrated 50 years in the UK, its iconic "Ding-Dong" TV ad airing a year after launch in fetching shades of pastel pink. Having already conquered America – Avon was founded in Atlanta in 1886 by a door-to-door bookseller named David Hall McConnell, who gave out free homemade perfume in order to encourage women to buy his books – it was in Britain, this year, that they announced the company's first-ever Avon lady millionaire. Debbie Davis, 31, from Sunderland, was a visible, interviewable, grinning sign of the success found by British Avon reps in the grey light of a deep recession. A week after paying the £15 start-up fee to become a representative, she'd recruited enough people (including her partner Dave) to be made a sales leader; with a new Avon catalogue released every three weeks, in a single campaign they typically turn over £18,800-worth of products. "My Avon business has given me the opportunity to do and buy things I had never even dreamed of," Davis says. "I've been able to travel the world, from Monte Carlo to Barcelona, drive my dream car and purchase my home – a far cry from the council estate I was brought up on. This past year my team has grown by almost 25% and I have managed to recruit over 900 representatives." Avon sales director Richard Pinnock (who himself started selling lipsticks door to door) says: "Debbie is an inspiration."

It's partly because of her much-reported million, and partly because of Avon's recent TV campaign targeting women who've been affected by the recession to "be their own boss", that more and more British women are signing up to sell. One in three women in the UK is now an Avon customer, buying, it's claimed, a lipstick every three seconds – Avon sells more lipstick, fragrance, nail enamel, eye make-up and skincare than any other UK manufacturer. In the UK, 95% of Avon's revenue is generated by the Avon ladies themselves, who buy products from Avon at a 20% discount, deliver the orders to their neighbours and earn their salary by keeping the difference. For the more ambitious sellers, such as Gail and Debbie, Avon's management scheme allows representatives to recruit and manage their own teams. It's this work that enables the successful few to get rich quick.

"The mission of the company is to empower women," says the CEO of Avon, Andrea Jung. "The business may have been started by a man, but in the 1880s it was an unpopular thing to give women the opportunity to earn outside the home. They didn't even have the vote. It's about giving women earning opportunities." Today there are 6.5m representatives worldwide, and the annual revenue is £6.7bn. It's so successful L'Oréal is reported to be planning a $19bn bid for the company.

In 2002, at the age of 31, Gail Reynolds had moved to Hastings for a job at an accountancy firm when she saw an advert that said: Join Avon, Meet New People. "And that was why I joined – because I was lonely. I gave up my job at the accountant's after three months, and then went on to meet all my goals – I bought a car, I got married, we went on our first holiday abroad, we bought a home. By 2015 I'll have bought my next house in Bowleaze Cove, which is like millionaires' row. I was brought up on an estate, to work, pay bills and sleep. I'm one of 53 grandchildren and, apart from me, they all work in shops and factories. So I love my life," she says. "But while most people join Avon to earn an extra £50 around Christmas, you do have to be very competitive to do well, to win the Mercedes, to get the prize holidays in New York and Berlin, for being one of the top 20 sales leaders."

Can anybody be an Avon rep? I ask. "In this time of uncertainty," says Gail, "the fact that anyone can do it, and, as long as they follow the guidelines, that nobody can be fired, is a real bonus."

I'm welcomed through the doorway of Gail's living room by independent sales leader Robert Broadbridge. I know this is his name and title because he slips his business card into my hand as I pass. "This is how I do it," he says. "I give a card to anyone who comes within talking distance." Robert is 43 and from Poole. In the past he's run taxi companies and carpet-cleaning businesses, but, he says, while franchises often cost £30,000, an Avon start-up is only £15 – it made sense to move into make-up. Along with Gail's husband, Brian, he talks me through his theory that, despite the company's mission statement, behind every Avon lady there's an Avon man pulling the strings. At a recent Avon conference, Brian counted 150 men out of the 500 people seated, compared with only three when he first attended six years ago.

The trend for male reps is so current that 20th Century Fox is producing a film called Avon Man, which started as a vehicle for Hugh Jackman (he has since dropped out in favour of Wolverine 2). "The story follows men laid off from an auto dealership. One is reluctantly recruited into becoming an Avon salesman, and while the experience is initially emasculating, he uses his charm and good looks to become a top seller," reports Variety. "The car salesman sets out to save his financially strapped family and town by conscripting his buddies into the make-up business to win a regional contest."

On Gail's website she writes that 5% of Avon reps are men, as are "a disproportionate 15% of the top performers". They're obviously making sales, but how? What happens when a customer asks about the benefits of one mascara over another? "I know nothing about make-up," Robert bellows, grinning. "It's not about the product for male sellers, it's just about the business model and the brand. If someone asks me advice on a particular lipstick, I just shrug!" He sits back, triumphant.

Later, Gail and Brian show me their trophy cabinet. First, the cabinet itself, "Beautiful wood, solid oak, it'll look amazing in the new house," and then the Avon trophies, shelves and shelves of them, alongside a framed photograph of Gail with Avon spokeswoman Reese Witherspoon, one of the celebrities (along with Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas) who has helped combat the brand's occasionally mumsy image, and fundraised for their female-focused causes – breast cancer and domestic violence. On the wall of the Reynolds's bright, sunlit office, a map of Britain is pinned beside a print which reads: "It's a hard life."

It's there, sitting on their white-leather sofa, that I start to feel a little strange. Brian is explaining the importance of the community when selling, how it's all about trusting your neighbours, and I ask if the pair are political. "I've never voted," says Gail, "but Brian does." He leans forward in his chair. "I'm not racist," he says, and my throat suddenly feels dry. (The company has a strict code of conduct and ethics, including a chapter on diversity, in a handbook that's been translated into 10 languages.) "But for me, voting BNP is like putting two fingers up at the other parties. I'd quite like to stand myself as an independent, actually. If I put an ad up saying I'd save local people's council tax and wouldn't let British money go abroad, I bet I'd do well." I smile, and in the cooling air my teeth dry slowly. I don't doubt that if Brian, with his concerns about migrating trade, his plans of action, and his growing local fame, did decide to stand as a candidate, he'd have the skills and profile to win votes fast.

Despite Avon's current boom, and the success of the individuals whose home businesses are thriving, Carly Syme, retail analyst at Verdict, predicts trouble ahead for the company's reliance on door-to-door sales. "The mail-order market itself is a declining one," she says, "and that is really impacting on Avon's sales. While it is putting more focus on the online channel [in 1997, Avon became the first major beauty brand to sell online], this needs to be a real focus for it over the coming years if it is to attract new customers to the brand."

When I ask Brian Reynolds about the impact that web sales have on his business, he says the two – the "real-life" doorstep sales, and the impersonal web ones – are so far removed that he doesn't worry about it. Sales on Avon's website make up just 5% of its £10bn international annual revenue. In fact, Brian says, web sales are soon to benefit home sellers – Avon is talking about changing the way online orders work so that each purchase will require a representative to log the buyer in. But, when I later ask an Avon spokesperson about this move, she denies it with a sharp shake of the head.

"Innovation is something that is absolutely vital in health and beauty," Syme says, "and while Avon has been developing new products, it struggles to justify higher price points to its customers compared to its store-based competitors." Customers are willing to pay premium prices for health and beauty products, adds Syme, but door-to-door selling is typically the place for low-cost sales. Will Avon be able to break out of its bargain-basement image?

It's an odd contradiction, the growing achievements of Avon's representatives and the relative doom of Avon itself, a brand only limited by its own sales methods, but whose methods are the thing that makes it unique. While analysts forecast a fall, its Avon ladies and Avon men are thriving in this recession; as well as the much-documented lipstick effect (when facing an economic crisis, consumers are tempted by small luxuries) which is no doubt contributing to their buoyant local sales, the business model is such that there are opportunities to build new careers from the ashes of redundancy, at least as long as Avon's name and heritage remains in lights.

For now, the sales leaders seem thrilled, dazzled by their success, and rightly proud of the business skills they've acquired, skills that they articulate confidently, and publish as advice for their team in comprehensive coloured leaflets stacked on their dining table, skills that seem to have risen to the surface recently, like bodies suddenly floating up from the bottom of a muddy lake.

The future is bright for the Reynolds. Each year stands for another incentive – in the Drive Your Dream scheme they've won their car, now bright with Avon logos (bronze level gets you a car worth £16,500, silver £25,000 and gold £35,000) and next year they'll win another. Gail is writing a business book. Brian is taking flying lessons. In the Avon newsletter he's pictured in black tie on a trip they won to Mallorca, a blond streak in his fringe, his brilliantly white teeth shining. In the background the blue sea shivers seamlessly into a blue sky, and a caption to the right details the home they've bought, the holidays they've won. "However," he says, the best part of his involvement in Avon, "has been the friends I have made, genuine people who are all living the dream."

Eva Wiseman is commissioning editor of the Observer Magazine

In the House, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

First Vote Of The Week: Monday 6:00 p.m.
Last Vote Predicted: Friday p.m.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2010

On Monday, the House will meet at 2:00 p.m. for legislative business with votes postponed until 6:00 p.m.

Suspensions (10 Bills)

1. H. Res._ - Providing for the concurrence by the House in the Senate amendment to H.R. 5566 with an amendment - Prevention of Interstate Commerce in Animal Crush Videos Act of 2010 (Rep. Gallegly - Judiciary)
2. H.Res. 716- Recognizing Gail Abarbanel and the Rape Treatment Center (Rep. Kennedy - Judiciary)
3. Senate Amendment to H.R. 5283 - Help HAITI Act of 2010 (Rep. Fortenberry - Judiciary)
4. S. 1376- International Adoption Simplification Act (Sen. Klobuchar - Judiciary)
5. H.R. __- Marine Sergeant Michael H. Ferschke, Jr. Memorial Act (Rep. Duncan - Judiciary)
6. H.R. __- To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to toll, during active-duty service abroad in the Armed Forces, the periods of time to file a petition and appear for an interview to remove the conditional basis for permanent resident status (Rep. Lofgren - Judiciary)
7. H.R. 5264- Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2011 (Rep. Conyers - Judiciary)
8. H.Res. __- Honoring the 30th Anniversary of the Bayh-Dole Act (Rep. Conyers - Judiciary)
9. S. 3689- Copyright Cleanup, Clarification, and Corrections Act of 2010 (Sen. Leahy - Judiciary)
10. H.Res. __- Recognizing and honoring the 50th anniversary of Ruby Bridges desegregating a previously all-white public elementary school (Rep. Lewis (GA) - Judiciary)

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2010 AND THE BALANCE OF THE WEEK

On Tuesday, the House will meet at 12:30 p.m. for Morning Hour debate and 2:00 p.m. for legislative business. On Wednesday and Thursday, the House will meet at 10:00 a.m. for legislative business. On Friday, the House will meet at 9:00 a.m. for legislative business.

Suspensions (23 Bills)

1. H.Res. 1475- Congratulates the town of Tarboro, North Carolina, on the occasion of its 250th anniversary (Rep. Butterfield - Oversight and Government Reform)
2. H.Res. 1428- Recognizing Brooklyn Botanic Garden on its 100th anniversary as the preeminent horticultural attraction in the borough of Brooklyn and its longstanding commitment to environmental stewardship and education for the City of New York (Rep. Clarke - Oversight and Government Reform)
3. H.R. 5758- To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 2 Government Center in Fall River, Massachusetts, as the "Sergeant Robert Barrett Post Office Building" (Rep. Frank - Oversight and Government Reform)
4. H.Res. 1529- Commending Bob Sheppard for his long and respected career as the public-address announcer for the New York Yankees and the New York Giants (Rep. McCarthy (NY) - Oversight and Government Reform)
5. H.R. 5655- To designate the Little River Branch facility of the United States Postal Service located at 140 NE 84th Street in Miami, Florida, as the "Jesse J. McCrary, Jr. Post Office" (Rep. Meek - Oversight and Government Reform)
6. H.R. 5702- To amend the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to reduce the waiting period for holding special elections to fill vacancies in the membership of the Council of the District of Columbia (Rep. Norton - Oversight and Government Reform)
7. H.R. 6278- Kingman and Heritage Islands Act of 2010 (Rep. Norton - Oversight and Government Reform
8. H.R. 5367- D.C. Courts and Public Defender Service Act of 2010 (Rep. Norton - Oversight and Government Reform)
9. S. 3567- A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 100 Broadway in Lynbrook, New York, as the "Navy Corpsman Jeffrey L. Wiener Post Office Building" (Sen. Schumer - Oversight and Government Reform)
10. H.Res. 1494- Congratulating the champion, finalists, and all other participants in the 83rd Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee (Rep. Sutton - Oversight and Government Reform)
11. H.R. 6237- To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 1351 2nd Street in Napa, California, as the "Tom Kongsgaard Post Office Building". (Rep. Thompson (CA) - Oversight and Government Reform)
12. H.R. 6387- To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 337 West Clark Street in Eureka, California, as the "Sam Sacco Post Office Building" (Rep. Thompson - Oversight and Government Reform)
13. H.R. __- To improve certain administrative operations of the Office of the Architect of the Capitol (Rep. Brady (PA) - House Administration)
14. H.Res. __- Congratulating the engineers, scientists, psychologists, and staff of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for helping to successfully rescue 33 trapped Chilean miners from a collapsed mine near Copiapo, Chile (Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson - Science and Technology)
15. H.Res. 1677- Condemning the Burmese regime's undemocratic upcoming elections on November 7, 2010 (Rep. Manzullo - Foreign Affairs)
16. H.J.Res. 94- Recognizing the 20th anniversary of the outbreak of the Gulf War and reaffirming the commitment of the United States towards Gulf War veterans (Rep. Michaud - Foreign Affairs)
17. H.Con.Res. 259- Recognizing the 500th anniversary of the birth of Italian architect Andrea Palladio (Rep. Pascrell - Foreign Affairs)
18. H.Con.Res. 327- To recognize and support the efforts of the USA Bid Committee to bring the 2018 or 2022 Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup competition to the United States (Rep. Van Hollen - Foreign Affairs)
19. H.Res. 1654- Expressing support for "Undergraduate Research Week" (Rep. Holt - Education and Labor)
20. H.Res. 1652- Expressing support for National Principals Month (Rep. Davis (CA) - Education and Labor)
21. H.Res. 1641- Celebrating September 30, 2010, as the 60th Anniversary of Impact Aid (Rep. Hirono - Education and Labor)
22. H.Res. 1655- Expressing support for "National Farm to School Month" (Rep. Holt - Education and Labor)
23. H.Res. 1648- Supporting the goals and ideals of National Adoption Day and National Adoption Month by promoting national awareness of adoption and the children in foster care awaiting families (Rep. Oberstar - Ways and Means)

Motion to Concur in the Senate Amendment to H.R. 1722 - Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 (Rep. Sarbanes – Oversight and Government Reform)(Subject to a Rule)

• Conference Reports may be brought up at any time.
• Motions to go to Conference should they become available.
• Possible Motions to Instruct Conferees.

In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

Monday:

Convenes: 2:00pm

There will be a period of morning business with senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

There will be no roll call votes during Monday's session of the Senate.

The Senate will be in session the week of November 15-19, 2010.

Wednesday:

As a reminder, on Wednesday, September 29, Senator Reid filed cloture on the motion to proceed to the following bills:

• S.3815, the Promoting National Gas and Eletric Vehicles Act of 2010;
• S.3772, The Paycheck Fairness Act; and
• S.510, The FDA Food Safety and Modernization Act.

Senators should expect the next roll call vote to occur at a time to be determined on Wednesday, November 17, 2010.

The first vote will be on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to S.3815, the Promoting National Gas and Eletric Vehicles Act of 2010.

So, for those of you who wanted to see the 111th Congress come roaring out of the gate in the post-election session, we have 33 suspensions on the calendar for you! Be assured that no matter what political storms we may have to weather, post offices will never go wanting for new names! At least there's one more good BANANAS Alert we can issue: H.R. 5283, the Help HAITI Act. Yes, they needed to try to cram a bad acronym into that one, believe it or not. If you ask me, the "Help Haiti Act" would have been perfectly descriptive. But apparently that wasn't good enough, and now we've got the Help Haitian Adoptees Immediately to Integrate (HAITI) Act." That's a lot better, don't you think? I thought it might be difficult for adoptees to integrate after their homes were destroyed by a series of natural disasters just by changing federal law to make it easier, but this new name will probably fix everything. So, that's good!

The Senate actually comes out with a more aggressive schedule than the House this week, with cloture votes due on three pieces of legislation. Not that they actually expect to get to those votes before Wednesday. Why start on Monday when you've only got about two weeks of work left, right? Heck, you're just going to end up leaving again at the end of the week, anyway. Come to think of it, that's true every week, isn't it? I'm gonna talk to my boss about that.

But really, given the realities of the filibuster and the short time table, is there anything the Congress could actually be doing at the end of its session? Well, there's a path available to them to possibly use reconciliation to get one last major act through, but chances are there's just no appetite for that. Reconciliation? Really? Well, yeah. Here's the theory.

The week's full committee schedule appears below the fold. For fans of the unusual, remember that the ethics "trial" of Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY-15) begins today at 9 am EST. It's really an "adjudicatory hearing," but in all appearances, it'll look largely like you'd expect a trial to look, so that's what the media is going with. Here's an explanation, if you'd like to catch up. And if you'd like to look in on it, Sunlight Live will be on the case. You usually don't see video coming out of the ethics committee (formally known as the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct), so this is a rare treat, so to speak.

Is ‘Peak Oil’ Behind Us?

Peak oil is not just here — it’s behind us already.

That’s the conclusion of the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based organization that provides energy analysis to 28 industrialized nations. According to a projection in the agency’s latest annual report, released last week, production of conventional crude oil — the black liquid stuff that rigs pump out of the ground — probably topped out for good in 2006, at about 70 million barrels per day. Production from currently producing oil fields will drop sharply in coming decades, the report suggests.

Oil prices up to $90 won't hurt global economy: Iran

TEHRAN: Iran's OPEC governor said oil prices of $70-$90 per barrel would not hurt the global economy, the oil ministry's official website SHANA reported on Sunday.

"Consumers and producers are unanimous that the oil at $70-$90 prices are suitable prices and will not hurt the global economy," Mohammad Ali Khatibi told SHANA.

IEA throws doubt on weak dollar driving up oil price

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has questioned the market belief that oil prices must inevitably continue to rise as the US dollar weakens.

Bullish commodities investors should be careful what they wish for, it said in its latest monthly report, released last week.

Iraq sees gas field output at 25 pct in three years

(Reuters) - Iraq expects commercial production from its gas fields to be at 25 percent of the production target within the first three years, an oil official said on Sunday.

"The first commercial production from the gas fields that should be achieved by the contractor will be 25 percent of the production target within the first three years, and the final production target set in the contract should be achieved in six years," said Abdul-Mahdy al-Ameedi, head of the ministry's licensing and contracting office.

BP to begin drilling for oil in Libyan desert

Troubled oil giant BP is expected to start drilling for oil in Ghadames basin in the Sahara desert next month, a milestone in its controversial deal with Libya.

Feuding feds agree to tests on blowout preventer

Beginning Monday, forensic engineers will put the blowout preventer retrieved from the Deepwater Horizon through a battery of tests designed to reveal why it failed to stop gushing oil and gas at BP's Macondo well this year.

A last-minute compromise among federal agencies will ensure that the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board has its own representative in the testing facility, along with five other experts from BP, rig owner Transocean, blowout preventer manufacturer Cameron International, the Justice Department and the plaintiffs in a multidistrict class action lawsuit tied to the oil spill.

What caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster? There's a clue at Chernobyl

One decision, the most crucial, is particularly puzzling. In the hours before the accident, men on the rig carried out the essential test that would tell them whether oil and gas were – potentially fatally – leaking into the well. Three times they tried it and each time the result signalled danger. But they decided to proceed as if all was well.

The well was blown,” Sean Grimsley, one of the inquiry’s deputy chief counsels told us. “Hydrocarbons were leaking in. But for whatever reason the crew decided it was a good test. The question is why these experienced men out on that rig talked themselves into believing that it indicated well integrity. None of them wanted to die.”

The same question arose at another inquiry I covered, nearly a quarter of a century ago, into Chernobyl itself. It is now fashionable to blame the accident on the Russian RBMK reactor design. But, though this was not great, the world’s worst nuclear disaster was, in fact, caused by a similar chain of human errors.

Iran to raise Abadan gasoline output in Feb

TEHRAN: Iran will increase gasoline production capacity of the Abadan refinery to 16 million litres per day from February, an Oil Ministry official said yesterday, state television reported.

By inaugurating the gasoline producing scheme, the gasoline production capacity of the refinery will be increased by 6.5 million barrel per day and reach 16 million litres," said Alireza Mehraban, managing director of the Abadan refinery. Mehraban said the production capacity of the refinery was currently 10 million litres per day.

Gas field talks still on hold between Japan, China

TOKYO — Japan’s foreign minister urged China on Sunday to reopen talks on developing natural gas deposits off islands claimed by both countries.

His Chinese counterpart, however, said tensions must cool before things can move forward, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity, citing protocol.

Topaz to target Brazil and West Africa

The time is right for Topaz Energy and Marine, the Dubai marine services and oil and gas engineering group, to enter markets offshore Brazil and West Africa, according to the company's Omani parent.

Grant helps Montana Refinery and Brix-Berg expand horizons

In the world of oil refineries, Montana Refining Co.'s Great Falls facility, which processes 10,000 barrels of heavy oil a day, is unique. It is one of the smallest refineries making a full slate of petroleum products, manufacturing gasoline, jet fuel, asphalt and more.

How to Get In Early On America's Next Great Commodity Boom

So where will the natural gas go? This is an interesting question, because it yields some surprising answers.

I attended the ASPO conference last month in Washington, D.C. (ASPO stands for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas.) One of the more fascinating presentations was by Jonathan Callahan, founder of Mazama Science.

He looked at natural gas through the lens of the import/export markets. This is a good thing to do for any commodity because it can tip you off to what's happening in that market. When China went from being one of the biggest exporters of soybeans to the biggest importer, the effect on agricultural markets was huge.

Peak Oil: Not if but when (audio)

Each year the world’s oil consumption grows. And as consumption grows, so do fears of shortages and rocketing petrol prices.

According to the International Energy Agency, the planet’s oils fields are already in decline – meaning that oil production is about to peak before significantly falling behind demand.

The question is therefore not ‘if’ we’ll run out of oil - but ‘when’.

2SER’s Tom Washington spoke to one of the world’s leading peak oil authorities, Professor Kjell Aleklett, about the issue.

Oil demand peak 'by 2020' if CO2 is cut aggressively

Oil demand could peak within 10 years, but only if governments act aggressively to curb carbon emissions, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts in its latest long-term energy outlook.

New International Energy and Climate Report Like a Classic Scary Movie

The scariest movie ever, IMHO, is the original The Haunting, released in 1963. It has none of the computer graphics, gore, or techno-sizzle frou-frou found in today's fright flicks. It wouldn't have needed any of that embellishment, even if it had been available in that bygone time. Weird lighting, odd camera angles, and jarring cinematography were enough to prime the psychological pumps of fear.

In a strange sort of way, that's how the International Energy Agency's annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) can stir up anyone who worries about humanity's growing pressure on natural life support systems. It doesn't hit you over the head with the melodramatic language and exclamation points often found in climate change action alerts. Instead, the WEO's dry prose and pedestrian graphics are plenty to get anyone who has a passing grasp of energy issues to wonder if we can crack the global energy nut before it cracks human civilization.

Is this Peak Oil? Go figure

Someone once said that to understand the term "expert," one must first understand that an "ex" is a "has been," and a "spurt" is a "drip under pressure." Nowhere is this more evident recently than in describing our so-called economic "exspurts," specifically the shills at the International Energy Agency.

Panic Time for Peak Oil Pundits

It seems the panic time for both green enthusiasts and peak oil pundits.

According to a new paper by two researchers at the University of California – Davis, it would take 131 years for replacement of gasoline and diesel given the current pace of research and development; however, world's oil could run dry almost a century before that.

A useful little point about new technology and searching for natural resources

Yes, sure, there really are physical limits to the resources we can dig out of the ground. But the limitations, at least in any relevant sense, aren’t the limits to such resources that exist: it’s the technologies we have to get at them.

Why Peak Oil is Peak Idiocy

I reported earlier today on the ongoing oil boom in North Dakota's Bakken region, which has set fresh oil production records in six out of the last seven months and now produces 6% of America's crude oil. And all of this is taking place in an area that was never expected to produce so much oil, despite the 4.3 billion barrel estimate of reserves there, because the dense, nonporous rock in the Bakken region makes extraction extremely difficult and costly. That all changed when advanced horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques started successfully tapping Bakken oil two miles below the surface in 2006.

Energy Secretary Chu in sprint to put stimulus to work on renewable innovations

Chu - a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and former professor at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley - has been in a hurry to get the stimulus money out the door. The sense of urgency is something he has tried to infuse in others. One day in 2009, after biking to the office, he met with a handful of top officials awaiting their swearing-in ceremony.

"Be nice, but don't be patient," he told them, according to one of the officials.

Masdar to Maintain Clean-Energy City Budget, Plan, Chief Al Jaber Says

Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s government- backed renewable energy company, is on track to develop a clean- energy city on time and intends to maintain its current level of spending, its chief executive officer said.

“We are not scaling back, we are not scaling down,” Sultan Al Jaber said today in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in Abu Dhabi. “Our plans are very much the same. Our budget is very much the same.” He declined to disclose figures.

‘Smart’ Meters Draw Complaints of Inaccuracy

The Robertsons are not satisfied by the official explanations.

They noted that their old meter measured 829 kilowatt-hours of electricity use in for their August-September billing cycle last year. For the comparable period this year, they say, the smart meter counted a more than threefold increase, to 2,772 kilowatt-hours — despite the Robertson’s efforts to reduce their energy use by cutting back on air-conditioning and switching to energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs.

Nuclear protests suggest Merkel's tenure not renewable

The backlash to the German chancellor’s decision to extend the life cycle of 17 nuclear plants has been felt on the streets. Leaving its mark on the ballot box may be next.

The protests by tens of thousands of people against the shipping of radioactive waste to a storage site in northern Germany last week have revealed the strength of public opposition to a nuclear policy that will haunt Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, for the remainder of her term.

The Rise Of State Capitalism

The financial meltdown of 2008-09 brought unprecedented disrepute to capitalism and its proponents alike. Many sceptics even termed the crisis as the beginning of the end of free markets. But there is another monstrous trend that threatens the existence of the free-market system as we know it: the obtrusive ascent of command economies on the back of ‘state capitalism’ — a system in which ruling elites use markets to extend their own political and economic leverage. In The End Of The Free Market, US-based political analyst Ian Bremmer expertly illustrates the rise of state capitalism and the threat it poses.

Bremmer says China is experimenting with a form of state capitalism that is being increasingly emulated by others such as authoritarian governments in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ukraine and Algeria. The trend is also seen in democracies such as India and Brazil, though in a limited way. Bremmer says some state-owned energy companies have grown so big that they will play a dominant role in international politics in the years ahead. China’s rush to take control of oil assets in foreign land exemplifies this. Three quarters of global crude oil reserves are now owned by national oil companies such as Aramco (Saudi Arabia), Gazprom (Russia), CNPC (China), NIOC (Iran), PDVSA (Venezuela) and Petrobras (Brazil).

Downsizing the American Dream: The shrinking house

It's not just the inside of the house that's changing, it's the outside, too. The yards are smaller, with many developments favoring shared green spaces over big private yards.

And, the front porch is back. Builders are increasingly moving the garage to the back of the house and adding a big porch on the front.

Seeing a big porch through the dining room, and a shared green space beyond that adds to the illusion that you are getting more — and it makes you want to get out there and reconnect with your neighbors.

At the height of the market it was all about "suburban sprawl," with everyone in their backyards, with their own deck, their own swingset, their own pool — and barely knowing their neighbors. Today, the buzz word is "smart growth" — smaller more sustainable communities that really have a sense of community.

The rise of the surgical shopper as impulse buying declines

The days when shopping was a leisure activity unto itself are over, at the nation's largest shopping center and beyond. Americans are being more precise in how they shop, regardless of what they are buying.

They're visiting fewer stores, checking off their lists and walking away. They're spending less time online when they shop. They aren't stockpiling food or clothes.

Shoppers today visit an average of three stores during a trip to the mall, according to ShopperTrak, a Chicago research firm that tracks sales and customer counts at more than 70,000 stores. That compares with an average of five stores in 2006.

Film on climate change bad boy says 'Cool It' over panic

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Humanity has what it takes to adapt to global warming and there's no need to panic: so goes the message in a new documentary on the bad boy of the climate change debate, Bjoern Lomborg.

KYRGYZSTAN: Fast Melting Glaciers Threaten Biodiversity

BISHKEK (IPS/IFEJ) - Kyrgyzstan's glaciers are receding at what scientists say is an alarming rate, fuelled by global warming. And while experts warn of a subsequent catastrophe for energy and water security for Kyrgyzstan and neighbour states downstream reliant on its water flows, devastation to local ecosystems and the effects on plant and wildlife could be just as severe.

Arab world among most vulnerable to climate change

BEIRUT, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Dust storms scour Iraq. Freak floods wreak havoc in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Rising sea levels erode Egypt's coast. Hotter, drier weather worsens water scarcity in the Middle East, already the world's most water-short region.

The Arab world is already suffering impacts consistent with climate change predictions. Although scientists are wary of linking specific events to global warming, they are urging Arab governments to act now to protect against potential disasters.

Sea level rise threatens Alexandria, Nile Delta

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt (Reuters) - Twenty years ago, Taher Ibrahim raced his friends across Alexandria's beaches, now rising seas have swept over his favourite childhood playground.

Alexandria, with 4 million people, is Egypt's second-largest city, an industrial centre and a port that handles four-fifths of national trade. It is also one of the Middle East's cities most at risk from rising sea levels due to global warming.

"There were beaches I used to go to in my lifetime, now those beaches are gone. Is that not proof enough?" asked Ibrahim, a manager at a supermarket chain who is in his 40s.

As Glaciers Melt, Scientists Seek New Data on Rising Seas

Scientists long believed that the collapse of the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica would take thousands of years, with sea level possibly rising as little as seven inches in this century, about the same amount as in the 20th century.

But researchers have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica.

As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 — an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over.

And the calculations suggest that the rise could conceivably exceed six feet, which would put thousands of square miles of the American coastline under water and would probably displace tens of millions of people in Asia.

Real-Time News Curation: Part 7 - Business Opportunities

1) Where Is The Money?

“So here's a prediction. Barring legal hurdles, one day we will see the likes of the Drudge go behind a pay-wall even if most of the content they link to is free. If you are a publisher and you don't have enough good content to compete with the aggregators, you need to start linking out.“ Want Loyal Readers? Then Aggregate - Nico Flores

2) Key Business Drivers for Real-Time News and Content Curation

1) Too Much Information

There is too much information out there and to find what is relevant to one's interest it takes more and more effort. "The time it takes to follow and go through multiple web sites and blogs takes tangible time, and since most sources publish or give coverage to more than one topic, one gets to browse and scan through lots of useless content just for the sake of finding what is relevant to his specific interest. Even in the case of power-users utilizing RSS feed readers, aggregators and filters, the amount of junk we have to sift through daily is nothing but impressive, so much so, that those who have enough time and skills to pick the gems from that ocean of tweets, social media posts and blog posts, enjoy a fast increasing reputation and visibility online." "No matter whether you see it as " information overload" or " filter failure" the key fact here is that there is so much information being produced out there, that it is next to impossible to follow or keep up with just about any specific topic, without spending considerable amounts of time looking at irrelevant stuff. That is the the essence. To make the issue even more frustrating, no matter how much junk you go through, you may still be missing on some important news story or product announcement just because there are so many sources to look up and it becomes physically impossible to scan them all. There is indeed much more food than we can chew. And so, we start relying on a few trusted sources to do the heavy lifting for us, and to bring back to us what we really need not to be missing." Real-Time News Curation: Why We Need It

2) People Trust Their Friends More Than Big Name Journalists

Distrust in mainstream media reporting has been a key characterizing trait of this past decade, as the majority of traditional publishers and reporters have failed to adapt to the new information ecosystem generated by the Internet and to the need from people to want to dig, quuestion and even interact and contribute with those who make the stories. And with the rise of independent media in the form of blogs, RSS feeds and new small independent publishers, individuals craving for higher quality information have started searching and digging the news sources themselves, becoming in their own personal universe, personal curators and editors of their own news. Since the year 2000 social media technologies have given the opportunity to these active news consumers and reporters, to become also sharers-publishers of their curated discoveries, and in this way, some of them have gradually become highly trusted and relevant information sources for those sharing their same interests. Robert Scoble, for those who follow new technologies is great example of this. And this is why a growing number of people trusts more their "expert" online friends, than the popular media sources.

"There is value in content, and there is value in aggregation, but there is limited value in providing the two together. The value that I get from the 'aggregator' publications that I follow is rarely to do with their content and mostly to do with their aggregation - i.e. with their links. When they write too much content they are not giving me value - they are wasting my time. By 'aggregating the aggregators' Google would not just be doing its users a favour. It would also help reward original content creators. Yes, mainstream media may stand to benefit from this, and if so that is their due (and yes, some pay-walls would get money from this). But it would also benefit anyone with something genuinely interesting to say. As to those who have nothing to say but lots to aggregate, I say two things: First, you started this, so you can't complain about being aggregated away. Second, as far as I'm concerned, you have little to worry about. My loyalty is to you, not to content creators, and this is worth money. You can show me advertisements, invite me to events and tell me about jobs. You can do this better than anyone because good aggregation is a great way of reaching a professional niche. Just don't think it's about your content. It's not that sort of relationship. In fact, take it out, make me happier and save some costs." Nico Flores - A Feature Request for Google Reader: Aggregate the Aggregators

3) Curators Add Value and Provide a Key Competitive Advantage

"I’m one of those who argue for the higher value of editors. My reasoning is simple: Online news is a competitive business. Given competition, readers will choose between news sources based on perspective, voice, and quality. It is editors that craft and maintain voice and quality. Thus, they (as curators), will form the core of a news source’s competitive advantage. Good writers are necessary but not sufficient. Their work cannot be distinguished in a sea of searchable articles without the handiwork of a good curator. On the other hand, as we’ve seen from numerous examples of “curated” link lists, aggregated news services, (HuffingtonPost…), etc. a good curator can build a competitive advantage even without on-staff writers. Thus, curators seem to be both necessary and sufficient to build competitive advantage." Bob Wyman - Comment on No News is No News

4) People Want True Stories, Straight From The Source

People would like to hear and see more stories coming straight form the source, without too much editorial intervention to package in ways to make it interesting and digestible for everyone. But to get deep into content and straight to the sources you need to bypass mainstream media and find the gems of reporting and insight that float inside social networks, research papers, collaborative wikis and blogs. It is in this space that there is opportunity for those news explorers that know how to move into the information jungle to bring back only valuable gems and memorable stories.

5) People Don't Care Who Has Written It or Where It Sits

People want good, valuable, selected information. They don't care who has written it or where it comes from.

"The big elephant in the room with publishers, in my opinion, is how long do they hold onto their own content and their own audience, versus this consumer demand for, ‘I don’t really care where it came from as long as you can tell me where it came from and that it’s credible...’" Will Hunsinger - CEO Evri - How Publishers Curate World Content

6) News Information Has Become a Commodity

"General interest news is like the tip of an iceberg, something that any online news producer can match. This brings gradually the general interest news production value to near zero, as it approximates becoming a full commodity. That is why general interest news cannot and should not be monetized. Rather it should be used to build visibility, exposure and to build additional revenue via advertising approaches." Bill Densmore - What exactly is newspaper premium content? That's not the point

7) There Is Strong Demand for Specific, Niche Information

People want to know. But they want to evaluate, question and decide on their own. Finding something on Google is easy, but finding an answer to a topic, a doubt or an interest requires a different level of information support. Whether you are thinking about individuals needing expert curated information and advice on health, or professional ice-skating it makes little difference. The demand is now for those who can provide organized access to all of the valuable information that is out there, and not just to their personal reporting and commentary.

8) Learning Demand

There is a growing number of jobs in which the ability to stay up-to-date with industry developments, new legislation, new tools, new business opportunities dos make the difference between those who succeed and those who do not.

9) Beyond News To Information Bundles That Are Useful, Valuable, Applicable

"News has become grist for an array of increasingly personalized and targeted services. What’s the value of grist - flour - compared to a baked good? The services we sell have to be more than the grist, although the grist is an essential ingredient. We can’t sell grist; we have to sell the baked goods."

10) Exposure Visibility Authority

A high quality thematic, topic-specific newsfeed that covers the niche or the industry in which a company operates provides prominence, visibility, exposure, prestige allowing it even to become gradually an "authority" in that field. I mean, if a company is able to produce news feeds that are the best resources on the specific "vertical" it curates, no matter which technology, tool or process they use to achieve this, not only it achieves the above goals, including extra organic visibility in the search engines and a higher linkup rate from outside sources, but it also gradually becomes an information authority. By creating complementary services and content areas around this specific vertical interest area, such as grassroots commentary, opinion, forums, live events or conferences, which all build on top of the content created by this curated content channel, then there is all the opportunity to naturally become the authority, the point of reference for others to go within that field of interest.

4) Business Applications: The News

"...many "reporters" today don't really do what is described as reporting... That is, they often do try to take wire copy or stories that were written elsewhere, and go through the wasted process of "re-reporting" them just to pretend it's a new and unique story for that publication. In many ways, this is a waste of resources. What would be better is if they actually encouraged #3 above -- let a "curator" handle that sort of news." The Role Of Curation In Journalism

"The new model for news curation and selection, I feel, will be a balance of professional editing and collaborative news filtering. In one incarnation, news organizations will look at feeds from highly respected news fans, and that will drive stories that are featured more prominently." Craig Newmark - A Nerd's Take On The Future Of News Media

• Business intelligence
• Competitive analysis
• Professional updates
• Trend spotting

"Consider legal news… There is a massive tip of the iceberg market for general interest news about major cases (O.J. Simpson, various rapes, etc.) but, there is a vibrant market (satisfied by organizations like the Bureau of National Affairs, Commerce Clearinghouse, etc.) that sells news about the law to folk in the business of law. In the pharmaceutical business, a good story on Viagra is always fun in the realm of “tip of the iceberg," but there are also a variety of specialist publishers who crank out dozens of stories every day to a small but well paying audience. The same market division applies whether you’re talking about pork bellies, the computer business, or State House politics. You monetize “tip of the iceberg” with advertising, you monetize the deep-news market with premium pricing for access, conference attendance, lectures, newsletters, alerts, specialized books, annual reviews, etc." Mike Shatzkin - Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change

5) Business Directions / Future Trends

a) Making sense - Story-Telling - Showing the Big Picture

The name of the game when it comes to the future of consuming information is "making sense". We do not lack information, sources, variety, differing viewpoints and unmediated reports. They are all available out there. But they are difficult to get to, and we are just starting to learn how to bring together, organize and present this "organic" bundles of information in an effective way. Search engines, though in a perfect position to play a role into this, are not yet equipped to help us out. This is where news and content curators come into play, by finding, aggregating and bringing together rare and valuable pieces of content, while organizing and juxtaposing them in ways that help tell a story we can understand. Sense-makers: this is what curators are. And, as readers increasingly demand the “whole picture” on a subject, we will need more people, tools and services to help us take on effectively this challenging task.

b) Niche Info From Trusted Sources

What an increasing number of people want today is "quality information, news and resources" on very specific topics from a handful of highly trusted, opinionated, human sources. Trust in "industry" "trade publications" has been sliding away on and off-line as people have been increasingly losing trust in the brands reporting and being reported, for an evident lack of transparency and disclosure of the commercial terms over which much such publications decided what to cover or not. People prefer to get the special-interest news they are highly interested in from people they trust and respect and with whom they can feel they could have a direct line of communication and exchange.

c) Visual Curation

Making sense of things, on whichever topic you are confronted with, requires looking at different pieces of information, viewpoints, data. Recounting, summarizing, explaining and illustrating this rich information texture, by using only lineat text, can be highly limiting. News and content curators will need to rely heavily on tools that help them "summarize", "index", and provide a "bird's eye view" on a topic, before diving into the specifics of it. In this light visual communication, mapping and diagramming tools will likely play a very important role both in helping newsmasters organize and layout their content but also in giving them new and powerfrul ways to illustrate it effectively to their audiences.

d) Topic-Specific / Highly Vertical Interests

"Publishers will start to produce curated, topical or thematic content “feeds” for their target audiences. For example, consumers will be able to subscribe to curated sports feeds for the latest news about their favorite teams or athletes or gadget feeds covering digital cameras or iPad news. Publishers will also offer more engaging (and valued) user experiences for consumers who “opt-in” to these personalized, filtered feeds providing convenient updates wherever consumers go. Think a better version of Google Alerts — curated by skilled editors from your favorite publisher and available anywhere (Facebook, Twitter, MyYahoo, iPad, iPhone etc.)." Matthew Kumin / GigaOM - The Web of Intent is Coming (Sooner Than You Think)

e) Location Specific

News channels in the future will also be location specific, allowing readers to subscribe to the news streams that really match their specific interest based on the location they are at.

f) Collaborative Filtering and Sharing

Curation is a complex, multidisciplinary challenge, requiring much time, patience and special skills. Identifying sources, selecting and editing content, finding relevant images, crediting and referencing, are just a few of the many tasks a news curator needs to carry out. The opportunity for multiple subject-matter experts to collaborate on curating a specific news channel, issue, topic or event can certainly provide additional value and quality. Given the emerging features of curation services supporting small curation teams and the widespread availability of online collaboration tools it is only a matter of time before such opportunity becomes a necessity for pubishers and a valuable opportunity for marketers, advertisers and companies alike.

g) User Personalization

Consumers will be able to customize these feeds across topics or stories, prioritize sources, receive recommendations and discover new content via their friends and social graph. New forms of social sharing (community) will emerge organized around consumer’s interests and the curated feeds they subscribe to." Matthew Kumin / GigaOM - The Web of Intent is Coming (Sooner Than You Think)

h) Capturing and Preserving Unique Events and Interactions

Another emerging trend is the one of capturing and preserving the multi-dimensional content, information, images and other media being generated and exchanged during a live event. Preserving and curating the universe of artifacts emerging from any unique event is certainly a way to create evergreen content value and more opportunities for business around the event.

i) The Curation is the Branding

"Newspapers are obviously aggregators and curators. The differences in their curation create their brand. The New York Times leaves out the comics. The New York Post leaves out the multi-syllable words. The Daily News beefs up its sports section and, for years, was known for having the best pictures. But one thing has been common to all of them and to all other newspapers: they cover the waterfront. (I have called that being “horizontal.”) They aggregate news of the world, the nation, and the city with sports, weather, stock quotes, advice to the lovelorn, and many other things. They sell almost all their advertising against the aggregate and against the brand, not against any specific item or interest being aggregated. And the competition for each paper is against other curated aggregates. Newspapers can sell the curated aggregate to people who don’t want most of it because the total price is a good deal for the parts they want, just like the album was a good deal even if you only liked some of the songs. Or they could. But now they are suffering precisely the same fate as the record album. The unit of appreciation is smaller than the whole. And for each unit of appreciation — each ball score, stock price, report from Washington, or political cartoon — there is a whole host of new competition. So the long story short on newspapers is this: a business model of selling a horizontal (many-subject) aggregate, curated by something other than subject, was based on the economics of a physical world where aggregation produced efficiencies of production and distribution. The Internet changed that. It is no longer necessary for an aggregator to provide news to deliver me sports, or to provide a whole newspaper to deliver me the weather or a stock quote. Horizontal aggregation was more efficient in a world of physical delivery. Vertical aggregation makes more sense in a world of digital delivery. And enabling the customer or user to have some control over the curation is possible in the digital world but hardly is in the physical." Mike Shatzkin - Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change

j) From General to Specific - Niche - Vertical

From generalist, a bit-of-everything type of news coverage that we have seen spreading from mainstream to tech blogs and aggregators, to specific, vertical, niche news channels, hubs and feeds. General interest news it's a commodity and can be found anywhere. It's value added contribution is rapidly decreasing, as any individual can now get his personalized general interest news load straight from his curated set of sources inside his custom start page, Google reader and through his different social media channels (Facebook and Twitter mainly).

k) The Curator Is The New Producer-Distributor

The emerging curator / newsmaster is in fact the new producer-distributor of content as, in an fast growing ocean of content, it is the curator that gives valuable content proper visibility, reference and context. Not search engines (at least so far).

l) Greater Open-Mindedness Toward Letting Content Be Shared and Re-Distributed

"What is needed... for professional news organizations to succeed in online content licensing is a system that encourages the distribution of their content through the most efficient and popular channels available at any given moment. Instead of fighting your audience, empower and encourage your audiences to be distributors of your content - and help them to profit from it as well."

"...the news of today - and tomorrow - needs to collect the best content from whatever source..." "You can have some exclusive content, to be sure, but exclusivity alone cannot power success. This can be seen clearly in how information providers in the financial industry are required to aggregate content from as many different sources as possible to help information-hungry decision makers." John Blossom - http://www.masternewmedia.org/online-news-content-and-distribution-strategies-content-curation-and-user-syndication-are-next/

m) Building Passionate Communities Around Specific Interests

As individuals learn and find new ways to match up people having great affinities with their interests and passions thrugh social media, opportunities for creating vertical content communities around very specific interest will grow exponentially. While this is a long established trend online, curation and curators may bring the efficiency, order and organization that often gets highly diluted inside existing community hubs and forums. "Curation is about matching context and content to the right audience." http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/01/20/video-vortex-curating-online-video/

n) Scaling Oneself With Curation

For many small and medium-sized online publishers the rush against a growing competition of content producers has become a nightmare. Producing quality content is very expensive and time consuming and competing in terms of quantity, coverage and breadth with new and existing publishers has become a losing battle. For those who have mastered the blogging paradigm, or those who have the ability to produce quality content, reviews and analysis, curation offers the opportunity to "scale operations and content quality up". Scaling operations up means transforming your online publising role from one of exclusive contributor and content writer to the one of an aggregator/filter/selector of the best news/content coming from anywhere and serving a very specific audience/target/interest..

“For those that claim that mainstream media brands and content can’t be matched by the long tail, they misunderstand the point and purpose of personal publishing and storytelling. The impulse (and the outcome) is not to replace polished, professional and well told stories. The point is that people trust their friends more than they trust journalists or companies. The point is that today, you can get your news directly from the person living the incident. The point is that there is a hunger for authentic first hand accounts, niche subject matter and opinion.” Chris Saad - Essay: Real-Time Storytelling

o) Active Engagement

"Publishers will also offer more engaging (and valued) user experiences for consumers who “opt-in” to these personalized, filtered feeds providing convenient updates wherever consumers go. Think a better version of Google Alerts - curated by skilled editors from your favorite publisher and available anywhere (Facebook, Twitter, MyYahoo, iPad, iPhone etc.). Matthew Kumin / GigaOM - The Web of Intent is Coming (Sooner Than You Think)

6) Curation Business Models

"...The former news industry is now competing for the attention of users . . . of citizens . . . to be the most sophisticated "information valet" in their lives. If you save time, provide the best insight, help the user to do their job better or live their life more fully, you get their attention. Again, noting Crosbie Fitch -- the service is a performance. If you perform well, you may be paid, by subscription, by click, or perhaps by advertisers who are pleased you have presented to them the attention of your users." Bill Densmore - What is exactly newspaper Premium content? That's not the point

"The ideas of “premium” and “General Interest” are incompatible. “General Interest” implies a large market and that alone ensures that competition will eliminate opportunities for premium pricing. In the past, newspapers exploited geographic monopolies that allowed them to charge for delivering General Interest news. But, the Internet has eliminated barriers to entry into the business of delivering news… Nonetheless, an organization that publishes General Interest news can still do a great business by also selling premium content… (Just not General Interest content.) The issue is in how you structure the organization and how you view the structure of the market for information. The key thing to understand is that “General Interest” really means “tip of the iceberg”… Now, pick any industry, or any kind of “interest” in your community and you’ll see that there is a large market for “tip of the iceberg” news that will be free and there is a layering of additional markets that get progressively smaller but require more and more content and greater and greater expertise to satisfy. Each of these markets can be a distinct source of revenue." Steve Outing - So What Is Exactly Newspaper Web Premium Content

"What we need is an "unwalled garden," in which users are free to choose from an array of service providers, all of whom operate across a common platform, giving access to unique bundles within and outside their particular "unwalled garden." And each unwalled garden needs to be hyper personalized -- to use a phrase coined by Marissa Mayer of Google. Each of these unwalled gardens may constitute the deep-news focus advocated by Bob Wyman, in his "tip-of-the-iceberg" analogy. He says general news is the tip of an iceberg, which every news producer can match, and which is therefore now a commodity, and not of value. But the hyper personalized, niche content -- the "deep content" which my colleague Martin Langeveld notes is not even available on the web today because nobody can make money on it -- is an untapped source of value to users as part of an overall "information valet" relationship. In 1997 and earlier, I wrote that newspapers were going to face a train wreck once fat pipes came into the home and people could go anywhere for information. Newspapers, I wrote, would need to learn how to make money referring people to information from anywhere, sharing both users, and content. Today, that is still the challenge." Bill Densmore - What is exactly newspaper Premium content? That's not the point

"Let’s say you have a newspaper in New Jersey and you see your profits fall. What should you do? I argue that instead of laying off most of your pharmaceutical and state house reporters, what you should be doing is hiring more of them and building a secondary revenue stream in the deep-news markets. The way you get additional revenue is by going deeper into the news and thus deeper into the stack of news markets. You then get your deep-news folk to bubble up to your general interest site a regular selection of the hot “tip-of-the-iceberg” stories that they cover while addressing the needs of the deep-news market. But, don’t try to “sell” the tip-of-the-iceberg general interest news… Any attempt to do so will merely put you at a disadvantage to others who can easily enter the market. Profit from your ability to provide deep-news and from your ability to generate general interest news as a side product of deep news. (Note: Since you can’t build out and succeed in all areas of deep-news focus on those in which you have a particular expertise. Then, buy the “tip-of-the-iceberg” stuff from other deep-news producers. Do what you do best and link to the rest…)" Comment by Bob Wyman on So what exactly is newspaper web ‘premium’ content? Please tell me by Steve Outing

This year will mark the end of the annual meeting of border rivals Iowa and Wisconsin.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the two teams have met 84 times, with the Hawkeyes posting a record of 42-40-2.

No other Big Ten rivalry has that level of parity.

Nevertheless, the powers-that-be have decreed that the Heartland Trophy—an admittedly contrived trophy for a real rivalry—will be sacrificed, so that Iowa can keep its...uh...traditional hated rivalry with the Purdue Boilermakers.

Oh well, the Big Ten expansion has its sacrifices and drawbacks.

Unless the Big Ten expands to nine conference games, from here on out, the Badgers and Hawkeyes will meet exactly four times every 10 years.

Regardless, it could be argued that no meeting between these two teams ever had as much riding on it. Obviously, I haven't been around that long, but it seems that every time Iowa has been up, Wisconsin has been down, and vice versa.

Certainly, both have been competitive over the last decade, but this game could be integral in deciding who will win the Big Ten title; a championship that both teams are very much in the hunt for. Moreover, this may be the best team Kirk Ferentz has fielded, and it is certainly the best team Bret Bielema has fielded, at least on paper.

In the end, it should be the low scoring, back-and-forth game that these teams specialize in. Lots of ball control, lots of punts, and first down plays that see off-tackles and stretch plays over the left side.

However, this being the Big Ten, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Begin Slideshow

Will Mizzou be able to move the mountain that is Oklahoma?

You won’t have to go through the Ozarks to see it.

For the first time ever, this Friday and Saturday (Oct. 23), ESPN’s College Game Day will broadcast from the University of Missouri campus.

Homecoming festivities will be in full swing.

The Tigers will host the Sooners for the annual game that has been dominated by OU. Kickoff is set for Saturday at seven o’clock under the stars at Faurot Field in Columbia.

The Sooners come in ranked No. 1 in the BCS Standings, Mizzou is 11th. The two teams have identical records (6-0, 2-0 Big 12).

Missouri has played what some would call the little sister’s of the poor schedule while Oklahoma has already faced Florida State and Texas.

Illinois, McNeese State, San Diego State, Miami (OH), Colorado and Texas A&M have all fallen victim to the Tigers this season.

Not bad.

Except they have only had one game on the road so far.  They still have to go to Nebraska and Texas Tech.

The Sooners are ranked third in the Coaches Poll while the Tigers are ranked 16th.

Is this year’s version of the Tigers ready for the physical nature of elite Big 12 football? Oklahoma will test them with a punch-em-in-the mouth technique to see how they respond.

On offense Mizzou is a finesse team that lives and dies by the passing of 6' 5", 235 pound junior Blaine Gabbert from Ballwin. He finished second in the Big 12 with 3,593 passing yards and had 24 touchdowns as a super sophomore.  This season he is averaging over 230 yards in every game.

Oklahoma is ranked No. 20 in college passing offense and Missouri is 32.

The Tigers keep a solid group of receivers and dual threat quarterbacks, and the catch-and-run style of the spread offense has taken the program to new heights.

Alumni Jeremy Maclin is performing well in the NFL with Michael Vick and Kevin Kolb. 

Brad Smith with the Jets was Mizzou’s record setting quarterback before Chase Daniel went on to star on the depth chart behind Drew Brees.

Two Tigers have 49 and 50 receptions each: junior tight end Michael Egnew and sophomore receiver TJ Moe ala Wes Welker of the Big 12.

Wes Kemp is a 6' 4", 220 pound junior receiver from Saint Louis who has NFL talent.  He has 23 receptions and is virtually unstoppable on smoke screens in the red zone.

On the other side, Oklahoma receiver Ryan Broyles has 61 receptions.  

He will be thrown to by Landry Jones, a 6' 4", 219 pound sophomore who is the “grasshopper” character who learned under current Rams quarterback master Sam Bradford. Jones has already thrown for over 1,700 yards for 14 touchdowns.

Oklahoma is ranked 20th in college football passing offense and Missouri is 32.

How will the Sooners tailbacks fare against the mighty Tigers? 

Under defensive coordinator Dave Steckel, Missouri has the sixth ranked defense in the nation. Oklahoma sits at 13th in total defense.

The Tigers have the talent and scheme to shut the Sooners entire offense down.

Mizzou had gone six consecutive quarters of Big 12 play without allowing a point until A&M got a field goal on the last play of the third quarter last week. It was a 30-9 victory for the Tigers in College Station, the fourth victory for them over A&M in the last five tries.

Sophomore defensive lineman Brad Madison had three sacks by the third quarter.

The Tigers are four-deep at corner back this season and can match most college wide receivers one-on-one. Steckel leaves them on islands and allows the blitz to go bananas.

Anchored by 6' 1", 200 pound sophomore Kip Edwards from Arlington, Mizzou has its best group of corner backs since the Eric Wright era. 

Who will do things right and win this hyped battle of Big 12 unbeatens?

The rushing game will be important.

According to ESPN.com, Oklahoma is ranked 65th in college football rushing offense while Mizzou is ranked number 87th out of 120 teams.

Running back DeMarco Murray is the career touchdowns leader at OU.

Missouri employs a running back committee led by Kendial Lawrence, but the passing game keys the run in the spread offense most times.

Oklahoma State is the only other Big 12 team remains undefeated.

All three teams are former members of the Big Eight Conference that merged with the Southwest Conference to create the Big 12.

This game comes down to these 12 points, or maybe to these two.

1. The Tigers will gain chunks of yards and score some points if the line can keep their kin Blaine Gabbert with a clean pocket.  

2. The running game has to keep the Sooners honest or Mizzou has no chance.

Oklahoma is coming off a 52-0 shattering of Iowa State last week at Owen Field in Norman. The Tigers are 6-0 for the first time since 2006.  They will try to be seven up to start the season for the first time ever under head coach Gary Pinkel.

Oklahoma eat, sleeps and dreams seven up straight victories under Bob Stoops. They know what it takes to beat Mizzou and they know how to do it. The Sooners have de-clawed the Tigers since the history of history.

Prediction: Oklahoma 38, Mizzou 36

~Contents~

News, Events, Articles, Treatment Center Information, Research and Announcements.

[READ ALSO "JUNKETS FOR JESUS": How congressmen travel the world to preach to dictators on the taxpayers' dime.]

1935	Seattle preacher Abraham Vereide experiences a revelation: Christianity is about helping the strong, not the weak. He sets out to organize an anti-New Deal coalition of Christian businessmen.
1940	Success! Despite accusations of fascist sympathies, one of Vereide's men, Arthur B. Langlie, is elected governor of Washington.
1942	Having established prayer groups of politicians and businessmen across the country, Vereide moves his operation to Washington, DC. Howard Coonley, ultraright president of the National Association of Manufacturers, invites several dozen congressmen to Vereide's Capitol Hill debut.
1946	State Department sends Vereide on a mission to scour Allied prisons for Nazi war criminals willing to switch allegiance from the Führer to Our Father.
1953	Eisenhower reluctantly agrees to come to first National Prayer Breakfast, envisioned by Vereide as annual ritual to consecrate the nation's political leadership for Jesus. Attended by every president since, the breakfast will become the movement's most potent recruiting tool, with foreign leaders invited for face time with US politicians and businessmen. Oil and defense especially well represented.
1959	Senator Frank Carlson (R-Kan.), a leader of the movement Vereide has incorporated under the umbrella of International Christian Leadership, takes a delegation of US businessmen to Haiti to meet a promising young leader. With their support, he'll become dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier.
1965	CIA-supported General Suharto takes power in Indonesia through what the spy agency will later admit is "one of the worst mass murders in the 20th century." Vereide and his understudy, Douglas Coe, consider it a "spiritual revolution" and organize junkets for congressmen and oilmen who will become Suharto's champions in Washington.
1969	Vereide "promoted" to heaven. Coe assumes leadership and takes Vereide's publicity-shy approach to new extremes, "submerging" the organization and instructing congressmen not to speak of what he begins calling "the Family."
1973	Coe introduces Watergate hatchet man Chuck Colson to what Colson will describe as a "veritable underground of Christ's men all through government"—men who'll vouch for Colson's early release from prison a year later and back him as he begins building his own conservative Christian ministry.
1983	The Family embraces Somali dictator Siad Barre—a self-described "Koranic Marxist" who is looking for a new patron after being dumped by the Soviets—and will organize prayer meetings for him with a defense contractor, two successive chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
1986	In Uganda, Yoweri Museveni takes power at the head of a guerrilla army following a massive civil war. The Family pledges support for the new government, calling for prayer and foreign aid to ensure that "the most Christian country in Africa not take the wrong ideological direction."
1994	As a speaker at National Prayer Breakfast, Mother Teresa declares abortion "the greatest destroyer of peace today."
1995	Thanks to the 1994 GOP landslide, the Family's townhouse on C Street fills up with a bumper crop of fresh-faced conservatives; house becomes the place to be for policy discussions and game-night parties.
1998	Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) begins his career as the Family's most active congressional missionary, promoting the "political philosophy of Jesus" to Africa's oil-rich strongmen.
2003	I publish the first inside report on Coe's movement, in Harper's, based on a month spent living with the organization. The investigation will grow into two books, The Family (2008) and C Street (2010).
June 16, 2009	C Streeter John Ensign, fourth-ranking Republican in the Senate and a presidential hopeful, confesses to an affair with the wife of his best friend, senior aide, and fellow Family member. It soon emerges that C Street helped him cover it up, even allegedly orchestrating payments to the cuckolded friend's family.
June 24, 2009	South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford calls a press conference to reveal longstanding "impossible love" for Argentine mistress; says C Street is helping him save his marriage. Sanford's wife, Jenny, will later reveal that husband's C Street brothers counseled her not to express anger or withhold sex.
October 14, 2009	Ugandan legislator David Bahati, a Family leader in the Ugandan Parliament, introduces Anti-Homosexuality Bill (PDF), which he describes as the direct fruit of his involvement in the Family. It dramatically expands punishment for homosexuality (already illegal in Uganda) and calls for the death penalty for "serial offenders" and imprisonment for failing to report gays to authorities.
February 4, 2010	National Prayer Breakfast faces protests from gay-rights activists and Christians outraged by the Uganda bill. Family has already persuaded Bahati, a prayer breakfast regular, not to attend. Obama denounces the Ugandan bill from the podium.
September 6, 2010	After decades of not acknowledging its own existence, the Family announces it will soon launch a website.

Photo: Vereide with Eisenhower: Billy Graham Center archives; "Papa Doc" Duvalier: KPA/Newscom/Zuma; General Suharto: State Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia; Coe with Bush Sr.: George Bush Presidential Library and Museum; John Ensign: US Congress; David Bahati: Marc Hofer/New York Times/Redux; Mark Sanford and Jim Inhofe: US Congress; Arthur B. Langlie: Washington State Archives

    

To begin with, I decided to travel by Amtrak. I really hate flying theses days due to what I've seen as horrible service by most airlines I've flown in the past few years (which includes added fees for things that used to be free in recent years, such as baggage fees and charging for meals, and planes that seem to experience delays that cause missed connections), uncomfortable, cramped seating in planes, and all those security hassles associated with airports, and how one's arrival at one's destination and one's luggage arrival at the same destination seems to becoming more and more of a lottery than an assuredly.

So, I decided to travel by train. My thought before traveling was "How could Amtrak lose luggage? They have hundreds of pieces of checked luggage in their system each day, while airports see hundreds of thousands of checked luggage each day." And too, I thought "I'm retired. I have lots of time, a laptop, and a Verizon 3G Card -- Train travel sounds both European and fun!"

Oh, I sooooo underestimated how many things could go wrong during one cross country trip. Here begins my tale of the worst travel experience I've ever had in my entire life. But, I actually had a great time at SCC.

So anywho, let me tell you about my tale of improbable travel disasters -- my actual, travel disasters -- which include stories not only about my laptop, but about my checked baggage and my cell phone too.

The Acer-Black Coffee Disaster

So, on September 3rd, 2010, I began my  Amtrak train ride from San Diego, California to Atlanta, Georgia. On day two of my ride - somewhere in Texas -- coffee was spilled on my computer. To make a long story short regarding the details of the spill, I had a lidded, aluminum, travel coffee mug that fell over during some railroad track induced "turbulence." The black, unsweetened coffee in my cup doused my keyboard. I thought my standard travel style lidded cup would protect me from spills, but oh how it didn't.

Apparently, the coffee got all over the innards of my ACER 5732Z laptop, frying my motherboard (and perhaps my network card as well). Before I even arrived for a planned overnight stay in New Orleans, I found myself to be laptopless.

So, on my cell, I called my friend Monica Helms (who lives in Murrieta, just outside of Atlanta, with her girlfriend Darlene), and told her I needed to find a computer repair shop in her neighborhood. She arrived to me up from the Atlanta Train Station -- where the next travel disaster became apparent.

Where's My Checked Baggage?

My checked bag didn't show up at Atlanta with my train. I had three days worth of clothing for my train ride (the travel length of my train ride from San Diego to Atlanta) in my carry-on luggage, but that's all I had. Monica and I had planned to go to a store that did computer repair, but because of the amount of time I waited for the luggage than didn't show that evening, we didn't make it to the computer repair shop.

I filled out a form at the Atlanta Amtrak station -- and that turned out to be no help at all. More on that later.

[Much, much more below the fold.]
Wash, Dry, And Begin Handling Broken Computer Issue

Things looked somewhat hilariously grim at this point, but I decided to laugh at my travel woes and just move forward. So, I washed and dried what little clothing I had (so I'd make sure I had at least some clean clothes) in Monica's washer and drier, and checked my email on Monica's 'puter.

The next morning, Monica's girlfriend Darlene and I went to the Marietta Micro Center computer store that has a good rep for repairs, but the repair guy there said it would take a week to even look at it. I didn't have a week in Murrieta/Atlanta.

So back to Monica's we went, and did an internet search for local computer repair businesses in Murrieta. I settled on That Computer Chick as the close business that sounded pretty professional. And wow, were they ever.

Long story short, about four hours later I was made aware by That Computer Chick that my laptop's motherboard  was unsalvageable, and that I needed a new laptop. Fortunately, my hard drive was still good, so That Computer Chick encapsulated my hard drive's data within an Island Pro USB 2.0 SATA Enclosure.

So, my plan was to order a brand new ACER 5732Z computer so that I would 1.) have a laptop with features I liked, and 2.) be able to salvage some useful parts from my now destroyed computer, such as the battery (so I'd have two batteries for my new laptop) and the power cord.

The Shopping Nightmare With SaveSonic Inc Begins

On getting back to Monica and Darlene's house, I got back on their internet and did a search for another  Acer Aspire 5732Z. I found SaveSonic Inc. said on their website that they had the product to sell for $450. So, I bought one on my emergency credit card, and set the purchase to be shipped to the Southern Comfort Conference's hotel on a two-day ship. That meant that since I was ordering the computer on a Tuesday evening, the computer should arrive as early as that Thursday -- or more likely that Friday. I thought I solved my computer problem, but I didn't.

Calling  Amtrak...Calling  Amtrak...

In that four hour window between dropping my laptop off at That Computer Chick and picking the laptop and its encapsulated hard drive, Darlene and I ate at Judy's Country Kitchen (What a great buffet! I highly recommend the restaurant if you ever find yourself in Marietta, Georgia!), and then I called  Amtrak's Atlanta station to find out if my lost luggage had been found. I didn't get through, although I'd left two messages  -- two messages that were never returned. My mental picture of  Amtrak's luggage handling procedures was beginning to look something like this:

I ended up calling  Amtrak's one-eight-hundred number, and getting put on hold, waiting to talk to the luggage handling department at Atlanta's  Amtrak station. After 10 minutes of waiting online with the ticketing agent, I ended up waiting yet another 20 minutes by myself to talk to the luggage handling department -- literally to be hung up on with no luggage handler actually talking to me.

I was fuming at that point.

What? No Registration?

Pam, Lurleen, and I registered early for the Southern Comfort Conference. Pam and I later signed up to give a presentation about new media diversity, and a discount was to be applied to our registration.

Well, when I went to check in on Tuesday, and my registration was missing. So, even though I was signed up as a presenter, I wasn't registered for the conference.
On Wednesday morning, two hours of waiting at then Southern Comfort Registration Office and $150 fixed the registration snafu, so my registration problem was corrected. Finally, something actually was corrected.

Another day or three, another day talking to Amtrak

On Wednesday, I called up  Amtrak, and after spending a lot of time on the phone on hold, I finally ended up talking to Pat of  Amtrak's national Customer Relations department. She took a report from me -- so this was now the second report regarding my lost luggage taken by an agent of  Amtrak. She told me that a report would be sent to all  Amtrak stations.

Now at this point, let me say that my luggage is not a common color combination. I have three sizes of Liz Claiborne's Marina Spinner Collection -- these are rolling, expandable, four wheel suitcases; these suitcases are chocolate brown with pink piping. In other words, my 25-inch high piece of Liz Claiborne luggage should have been relatively easy to spot in the relatively small number of checked suitcases that  Amtrak handles nationwide on any given travel day given the limited number of places my luggage could have mistakenly been sent to  -- definitely a small number of checked suitcases compared to how many checked suitcases that are handled at United States airports on any given travel day.

However,  Amtrak lost my luggage, and was having trouble finding it.

You see,  Amtrak doesn't match passengers to luggage on trains the same way airlines (post 9/11) track passengers to luggage on airplanes. They also don't appear to have barcode tracking capabilities that airlines and package delivery businesses (like UPS, USPS, and FEDEX have) for tracking packages. Heck, there are off-the-shelf versions of barcode tracking software -- one can only wonder why there weren't stimulus dollars set aside to improve baggage handling and baggage security in our passenger train system.

But I digress into talking about security when by traveling by train, I was specifically making a choice to avoid heavy security.

What Amtrak's Customer Relations agent Pat told me on the phone that Wednesday was that if my luggage was found, I would receive a call from Amtrak on my cell phone. I had also given the luggage handlers at Atlanta my cell phone number in my first report on my lost luggage -- they also told me I'd receive a call if my luggage was found. And too, my San Diego address and cell phone number were on the tag on my luggage. So, there were three locations where my cell number was available to the luggage handlers of Amtrak should they find my lost luggage -- On my pen-and-paper report of lost luggage turned in at Atlanta, in the Customer Relations report of my lost luggage, and on my lost piece of chocolate-brown-luggage-with-pink-piping itself.

By the way, if there ever is a conference that a male-to-female transsexual doesn't want to be short her luggage, it's the Southern Comfort Conference. Many of the crossdressers at this conference change their clothing three or four times a day -- I just wanted to look nice for the parts of the transgender community I don't get to see often.

Thursday Afternoon, No New Laptop

On Thursday afternoon -- after a few more calls to Amtrak to find out if my luggage had been located --  I checked at the hotel's front desk to see if my new laptop had arrived. It hadn't, but that was to be expected.

So on Thursday night, Pam, Lurleen, and I went to Monica and Darlene's for Monica's annual Southern Comfort Lasagna Dinner. We three had our photo taken in front of the actual first Transgender Pride Flag that ever was created and flown at a pride event -- it felt significant to be in the presence of that particular flag with its particular history. Monica Helms is the creator of that flag.

I went and used Monica's internet access again to find out what the shipping status of my laptop was, only to find out the status for my computer order was still "processing."

Processing? Processing?

So, I called SaveSonic Inc. customer service number, only to find out that SaveSonic was closed for the entire week before Rosh Hashanah. They didn't mention that on their website when I put in for a two-day ship of a new laptop to be sent to my hotel.

I had a "break down" moment. None of the "disasters" had really got my goat up to that point, but it dawned on me that even though I took specific actions to try and deal with the issues that kept popping up, I wasn't having much luck actually taking actions that mitigated my travel problems. My luggage still was missing, I was running out of clean clothes again, and I still didn't have a computer to blog the convention with.

So, I went kind of emotionally numb that night.

First Day Of An Outfit Worn At SCC Earlier In The Conference

Le *Sigh.*. On Friday morning, I put on an outfit I'd worn first on Tuesday. I only had three-and-a-half outfits that I'd taken with me on the train, so since Tuesday was the first day of the conference...well, I was wearing on Friday an outfit I'd wore to the conference on Tuesday. That moment of wearing an outfit others had seen me in previously was a much more disheartening moment than I thought it would be -- but thinking about all those favorite pieces of packed clothing that at that moment I believed I had lost forever just contributed to a pretty disheartening moment.

The top I was wearing, as well as my underwear, I'd hand washed in hotel room sink. The jeans...well, I'd worn the pair on Tuesday, and didn't have a chance to wash it. Le *Sigh.*.

I called the Amtrak Station in Atlanta early Friday afternoon, and my bag hadn't arrived either on Thursday night or Friday morning. After 84-some hours, I just thought my luggage was gone forever. One more cry, and then I just accepted that I'd never see my checked suitcase ever again.

Of course, the Southern Comfort Conference had their dress ball that evening, and I wore jeans -- my shiny violet Blue Plate top, my black palazzo pants, and my black sandals that I planned on wearing that evening were in my missing piece of checked baggage.

Saturday Morning Shopping

Well, It had been a ritual at the convention -- Lurleen and I ate breakfast at the hotel's breakfast buffet as we had every morning at SCC. As usual, it was delicious. A bit after breakfast, I went to the Mall and went shopping. I needed fresh underwear and clothing for the return trip to San Diego. Between Old Navy, Marshals, and Macy's, I spent $146 on 3 pairs of socks, 3 pairs of panties, 3 bright colored tees, 1 pair of jeans, and 1 vest.

The Crackberry Storm Goes Bright

I set the alarm on my Crackberry Storm for gawd-awful-early so I could catch my Sunday morning Amtrak to New Orleans. Got an automated call from Amtrak at midnight-thirty that Sunday morning telling me my train was going to be delayed by at least three hours. An hour later, while my cell was charging  my Crackberry Storm screen turned bright white -- so bright it woke me up. The phone wouldn't reset, so I did what I was told to do previously by a Verizon sales guy -- take the battery out and restart the phone. When it came up, my phone was acting funny. I checked my cell, and not only was my alarm cleared on the phone, but everything I'd personalized on the telephone as well.

I lost me entire contact list -- and my list hadn't been backed up. So, if you think I have your contact info in my cell, I no longer do -- I lost it on early in the morning on September 12th.

Amtrak didn't follow procedures and call?

Lurleen and I then got on Atlanta's Marta. She was heading to the Airport, and I to the Amtrak station. I gave Lurleen a hug, and off at a local light rail station to walk to Amtrak train station.

When I arrived at the Atlanta Amtrak Station, I did a "What the hell, why not?" checks with the Atlanta Amtrak luggage department to see if my luggage ever showed up. The luggage handler told me that my luggage had arrived in Atlanta on the Friday evening train.

I filled out a form at the Atlanta station on pervious Monday evening. I kept calling the Atlanta Amtrak Station and Amtrak Customer Relations multiple times. There was a luggage card on my luggage with my name and cell number on it. I was promised someone would call my cell if my luggage arrived in Atlanta; no one at Amtrak called me when my luggage arrived. I spent $146 I wouldn't have if Amtrak would have followed their procedures.

Monday Morning Call To SaveSonic Inc.

I called SaveSonic Inc. on Monday Morning from the Amtrak Train Station in New Orleans. I waited a half an hour on the phone waiting to talk to a service agent, and changed the address I was sending my new laptop to -- I asked them to send my new laptop to arrive at my San Diego address to arrive on Thursday, September 16th.

Address changed, my laptop was supposed to arrive the day after I arrived home.

New Cell

On Wednesday, September 15th, I took my cell -- which by the end of the Amtrak ride back to San Diego didn't even have a working keypad for dialing numbers -- to Verizon. A lot of dollars later, I had a new Droid to replace my Crackberry Storm.

Okay, now I had to begin learning a new smart phone's interface. *Ugh.*

Again With A SaveSonic Fail

My laptop didn't show up on Thursday, after I spent the whole day waiting for my laptop at home. I was having a WTF moment.

So on Thursday evening, my neighbor Malia let me use her laptop to check on the shipping status of my new laptop. The status?

Processing.

Seriously?

So, Let's Call SaveSonic Again And Again!

At 10:20 PDT on Friday, September 16th, I called up SaveSonic to see where the hell my computer was. I was angry before the call -- the answering machine message left me angrier. Apparently, SaveSonic is a four-and-a-half day a week operation, and they close each Friday afternoon at 1:00 PM, EDT. Since it was 1:20 PM EDT at that point, I wasn't going to be able to find out the shipping status of my laptop until the following Monday, September 20th.

On that Monday morning, I called, only to hear from SaveSonic that they didn't have any Acer Aspire 5732Z laptops available. It literally took them two weeks to tell me this when I'd requested two day shipping not just once, but twice. I told the customer service agent that I wanted to cancel my order -- with commentary that their service was "absolutely horrible," and that I never was going to do business with them again.

Fixing The Coffee Cup Issue

One way to make sure I never travel and spill a cup of coffee on my computer again is to get a computer again that doesn't tip over. When I was in the Navy, there were these wide bottom coffee cups -- remembering those cups, I decided to find an unbreakable cup with a wide bottom.

So after shopping local stores that sold coffee mugs with no luck, I went online on Malia's computer, and found a stainless steel cup that fit the bill on EBay. It's on order, and should show up soon.

When At First You Fail, Try, Try Again!

So on Monday Morning, I went to the Amazon Marketplace, and ordered a new Acer Aspire 5732Z from Sky Comp. I had my new computer by Thursday morning. So after spending a day personalizing my new laptop, I posted two Pam's House Blend pieces on Friday afternoon.

So ends the tale of my travel nightmare regarding the Southern Comfort Conference. Without qualification, I'd call this the worst travel experience of my entire life.

Hopefully, life is finally back to an approximation of "normal" (as "normal" as my life gets, anyway), and I'll start posting on a regular basis again.

But *Whew.* I never want to have a travel experience like this last one ever again.

.

[READ ALSO "JUNKETS FOR JESUS": How congressmen travel the world to preach to dictators on the taxpayers' dime.]

1935	Seattle preacher Abraham Vereide experiences a revelation: Christianity is about helping the strong, not the weak. He sets out to organize an anti-New Deal coalition of Christian businessmen.
1940	Success! Despite accusations of fascist sympathies, one of Vereide's men, Arthur B. Langlie, is elected governor of Washington.
1942	Having established prayer groups of politicians and businessmen across the country, Vereide moves his operation to Washington, DC. Howard Coonley, ultraright president of the National Association of Manufacturers, invites several dozen congressmen to Vereide's Capitol Hill debut.
1946	State Department sends Vereide on a mission to scour Allied prisons for Nazi war criminals willing to switch allegiance from the Führer to Our Father.
1953	Eisenhower reluctantly agrees to come to first National Prayer Breakfast, envisioned by Vereide as annual ritual to consecrate the nation's political leadership for Jesus. Attended by every president since, the breakfast will become the movement's most potent recruiting tool, with foreign leaders invited for face time with US politicians and businessmen. Oil and defense especially well represented.
1959	Senator Frank Carlson (R-Kan.), a leader of the movement Vereide has incorporated under the umbrella of International Christian Leadership, takes a delegation of US businessmen to Haiti to meet a promising young leader. With their support, he'll become dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier.
1965	CIA-supported General Suharto takes power in Indonesia through what the spy agency will later admit is "one of the worst mass murders in the 20th century." Vereide and his understudy, Douglas Coe, consider it a "spiritual revolution" and organize junkets for congressmen and oilmen who will become Suharto's champions in Washington.
1969	Vereide "promoted" to heaven. Coe assumes leadership and takes Vereide's publicity-shy approach to new extremes, "submerging" the organization and instructing congressmen not to speak of what he begins calling "the Family."
1973	Coe introduces Watergate hatchet man Chuck Colson to what Colson will describe as a "veritable underground of Christ's men all through government"—men who'll vouch for Colson's early release from prison a year later and back him as he begins building his own conservative Christian ministry.
1983	The Family embraces Somali dictator Siad Barre—a self-described "Koranic Marxist" who is looking for a new patron after being dumped by the Soviets—and will organize prayer meetings for him with a defense contractor, two successive chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
1986	In Uganda, Yoweri Museveni takes power at the head of a guerrilla army following a massive civil war. The Family pledges support for the new government, calling for prayer and foreign aid to ensure that "the most Christian country in Africa not take the wrong ideological direction."
1994	As a speaker at National Prayer Breakfast, Mother Teresa declares abortion "the greatest destroyer of peace today."
1995	Thanks to the 1994 GOP landslide, the Family's townhouse on C Street fills up with a bumper crop of fresh-faced conservatives; house becomes the place to be for policy discussions and game-night parties.
1998	Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) begins his career as the Family's most active congressional missionary, promoting the "political philosophy of Jesus" to Africa's oil-rich strongmen.
2003	I publish the first inside report on Coe's movement, in Harper's, based on a month spent living with the organization. The investigation will grow into two books, The Family (2008) and C Street (2010).
June 16, 2009	C Streeter John Ensign, fourth-ranking Republican in the Senate and a presidential hopeful, confesses to an affair with the wife of his best friend, senior aide, and fellow Family member. It soon emerges that C Street helped him cover it up, even allegedly orchestrating payments to the cuckolded friend's family.
June 24, 2009	South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford calls a press conference to reveal longstanding "impossible love" for Argentine mistress; says C Street is helping him save his marriage. Sanford's wife, Jenny, will later reveal that husband's C Street brothers counseled her not to express anger or withhold sex.
October 14, 2009	Ugandan legislator David Bahati, a Family leader in the Ugandan Parliament, introduces Anti-Homosexuality Bill (PDF), which he describes as the direct fruit of his involvement in the Family. It dramatically expands punishment for homosexuality (already illegal in Uganda) and calls for the death penalty for "serial offenders" and imprisonment for failing to report gays to authorities.
February 4, 2010	National Prayer Breakfast faces protests from gay-rights activists and Christians outraged by the Uganda bill. Family has already persuaded Bahati, a prayer breakfast regular, not to attend. Obama denounces the Ugandan bill from the podium.
September 6, 2010	After decades of not acknowledging its own existence, the Family announces it will soon launch a website.

Photo: Vereide with Eisenhower: Billy Graham Center archives; "Papa Doc" Duvalier: KPA/Newscom/Zuma; General Suharto: State Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia; Coe with Bush Sr.: George Bush Presidential Library and Museum; John Ensign: US Congress; David Bahati: Marc Hofer/New York Times/Redux; Mark Sanford and Jim Inhofe: US Congress; Arthur B. Langlie: Washington State Archives

    

Hundreds of LA Digital Divas Gather to Redefine Social Networking

Female Executives from AOL, Disney, MTV, Tremor Media and Warner Bros. Collaborate at the 7th Annual Digital Diva Conference in Southern California

PR Newswire — September 20, 2010

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 20 /PRNewswire/ — Digital Diva Connection, the digital industry’s first female-only professional association, offers outdoor fitness and a speaker series lunch at their 7th annual Digital Diva Summit. Saturday, September 25 in Santa Monica, California, two hundred female new media executives will come together to discuss work/life balance and breaking industry trends. Rather than congregate in a traditional conference room, the group meets for surfing and yoga on the beach followed by lunch at Monsoon Cafe.

“We all have our stories of trying to break into the boys club. I finally decided to go and create my own version,” says Marian Thomas, founder of Digital Diva and a current Yahoo! executive. Thomas wanted to create a community where women in digital media could gain industry insights from other female colleagues in a supportive, non-intimidating environment. “This community, and particularly this day, are dedicated to the incredibly talented group of female digital marketers that make up the fabric of this growing industry.”

Sara Bordo, Founder of Women Rising and former head of MGM Digital Marketing, will kick off the speaker series with her organization’s mission, “Champion women so that they may be inspired to champion others.”

Bettina Sherick, Vice President, International Digital Marketing, 20th Century Fox International, will keynote the lunch with a focus on striking a Work/Life Balance.

For full event details click here.

About Digital Diva Connection

Digital Diva Connection is the online industry’s first female-only professional association that offers networking through both content-driven and physical activity events. Founder and current Yahoo! executive Marian Thomas created this community where women in digital media could gain industry insights from other female colleagues in a supportive, non-intimidating environment. In its seventh year, the Digital Diva Summit remains the premier event for the community, gaining increased turnout year-over-year. Attendees include representatives from Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, NBC, Activision, AOL, Yahoo!, Tremor Media, Adap.tv, Terra, Alloy, Eventful, Initiative, OMD, Saatchi and Saatchi, Universal McCann, Disney, Clearspring, Flixster and Tribal Fusion.

SOURCE Digital Diva Connection

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Each weekday morning, BDL serves up a handful of NBA-related stories to digest with your soft food diet.

Marc Stein and Chad Ford, ESPN: The Denver Nuggets' resistance to trading star forward Carmelo Anthony is fading away, according to sources with knowledge of Denver's thinking. The Nuggets still aren't aggressively shopping Anthony and haven't withdrawn their longstanding offer of a contract extension, but numerous sources told ESPN.com that Denver officials have in recent days let other teams know for the first time that they will listen to pitches after previously resisting such discussions. "I'm not sure how soon, but I do think they're going to trade him [between now and February]," said one rival GM. Said another source briefed on Denver's plans: "There's no doubt they are working on it. Eventually they're going to pull the trigger. " Reports have persisted for weeks that Anthony, who can become a free agent at the end of the coming season, wants out. ESPN The Magazine's Ric Bucher reported Aug. 16 that it was "a matter of when, not if, Anthony and the Nuggets will go their separate ways," while CBSSports.com quoted "multiple sources" last week as saying that the 26-year-old "has not wavered in his desire to be dealt" and that the New Jersey Nets are making the hardest active pitch for Anthony. Although Anthony has not made any such declarations publicly, it appears that Nuggets management is growing increasingly resigned to the fact that they won't be able to change their franchise player's mind.

Gary Washburn, Boston Globe: If the Celtics had fallen in the first or second round of the playoffs, exhibiting a feeble effort from an aging team, the decision would have been easy. Instead, they sliced through the Heat, pounded the Cavaliers, and jumped to a 3-0 lead over the Magic before winning the Eastern Conference finals in six games. So a decision to dismantle the Big Three and rebuild wasn't so simple, and the painful Game 7 loss to the Lakers gave ownership even more reason to retain the core of the roster. As the Celtics left the Staples Center on the night of June 17, they carried not only the disappointment of a disheartening loss but also an undeniable uncertainty. Doc Rivers was considering a respite, lured by the opportunity to watch his son play his senior year of high school basketball. Paul Pierce had an opt-out clause to ponder. Ray Allen was an unrestricted free agent for the second time in five years. And reserves Nate Robinson and Marquis Daniels were planning to search for new clubs after uneven stints in Boston. But Celtics management not only retained the coach and those players, it added Jermaine O'Neal, Shaquille O'Neal, Von Wafer, and Delonte West, and drafted Avery Bradley and Luke Harangody. The idea of rebuilding was dismissed, at least for two more years, replaced by the desire to make another run at the Lakers and an NBA title. With little regard for the dollar-for-dollar luxury tax, ownership again exceeded the limit and has committed more than $78 million in salaries for one more chance (or maybe two) to sip championship champagne before it is time to rebuild. "When you are leading a Game 7 and then you lose, I think everybody on that team naturally wants to come back together, try to get back to the mountaintop,'' said principal owner Wyc Grousbeck. "So I was not that worried about bringing the guys back together. "I thought that the guys would want to come back. I thought that Doc would want to come back. So I played the hand that way.''

Brian Windhorst, Cleveland Plain Dealer: The Cavs have until next July to use the $14.5 million and their plan is to be patient and see what develops. You just never know which players will become available as events take place during the season. Most teams looking to dump a player for an exception are when they are in distress and teams aren't in distress right now. Fans should remain grounded, however. Do not expect the Cavs to be able to just trade for a star player with it. They can break it into pieces and, frankly, that is what is most likely. They may use it to absorb mid-level players in salary-cap clearing trades to pick up extra draft picks or prospects from teams looking to dump money. Also, there are a handful of teams out there with large trade exceptions created over this wild summer. There's more money in trade exceptions out there right now than there's been in a decade so it doesn't have as much value. But it is a valuable asset that can be used many different ways.

Jeff McDonald, San Antonio Express-News: On March 14, 2007, nearly all the 700 some-odd souls who call this flyspeck town straddling the Arkansas-Louisiana border home gathered in a small park near the high school football stadium. There, over plates of hot dogs and potato salad, they honored one of their most distinguished citizens. Junction City's inaugural James Anderson Day was equal parts church picnic and civic celebration. Unofficially, it would not be the last. Less than two weeks shy of his 18th birthday, and still months away from enrolling in freshman classes at Oklahoma State, the man of the hour - a tall, quiet teenager known the town over as "Humble James" - found the entire affair positively blush-worthy. "It was nice to see how much the community thinks of you as a person," recalled Anderson, a 6-foot-6 guard from Oklahoma State whom the Spurs selected 20th overall in the June NBA draft. "But I don't know if I deserved that." In Junction City, where Anderson led the Dragons to the 2007 Class 2A state championship as a senior before collegiate stardom in Stillwater, Okla., the locals respectfully disagree. March 14 - James Anderson Day - has become a de facto annual holiday, an excuse for the town to reconvene at the city park. And yet the depths of this small town's feelings for its first NBA player can't be confined by the calendar's constraints. "In Junction City, every day is James Anderson Day," says Jerry Brewer, the town's former mayor and public-address announcer at the high school basketball games.

Ira Winderman, South Florida Sun Sentinel: There certainly is nothing wrong with open competition in training camp for a starting position. That, Mario Chalmers and Carlos Arroyo say, is all they want. Yet what if that starting position doesn't actually exist? That well could be the reality for the Miami Heat at point guard, where Chalmers opened last season as the starter and where Arroyo finished with the first team. With the ballhandling of LeBron James and Dwyane Wade in the lineup, the Heat already feature players who ranked Nos. 6 and 10, respectively, in the league in assists last season. Chalmers? He ranked No. 44 among those who qualified for a listing. Arroyo? He finished at No. 53. The wildcard is the Heat's "other" prime offseason signing, beyond the Big Three that also included Chris Bosh. No, Mike Miller is not a point guard, but he is another option for the Heat starting perimeter rotation alongside Wade and James. The concern with such an alignment is containing speedy, undersized opposing point guards. But even Arroyo appreciates that such concerns might be overstated. "To be honest with you," Arroyo said, "I think we're going to be one of the best defensive teams in the NBA this year. That should be everybody's mentality, coming into training camp. I think we have the talent to do it and the mindset to be one of those top teams." And it's not as if Chalmers or Arroyo have in any way been defensive stoppers at the position over their careers. The counterargument is the team otherwise would be exposing Wade or James to early foul trouble. Chalmers is aware of the speculation of Miller supplanting a true point guard in the starting lineup. "I kind of take it personally," he said. "But, at the same time, Mike's been in the league 11 years. So he's proven himself. He's proven that he's a great player."

Jimmy Smith, New Orleans Times-Picayune: With just more than a week remaining before the start of training camp, the New Orleans Hornets on Friday added two players - guard D.J. Strawberry, the son of former major league baseball player Darryl Strawberry, and center Darryl Watkins. Their addition puts the New Orleans roster at 14. The first training camp two-a-days begin Sept. 28 at the Alario Center.

Howard Beck, New York Times: An envelope containing the N.B.A.'s referee schedule arrived in Steve Javie's mailbox the other day, as it has every September for the last 25 years. This one felt different. "It felt like Christmas Eve," Javie said gleefully. "I didn't know if I would get one again." Only a month ago, Javie was perched on the edge of retirement, unsure if his creaky right knee could endure another season of daily pounding. He missed nearly all of last season, including the playoffs. It appeared that the N.B.A. would lose one of its best officials. But a combination of treatments has given the knee some comfort and Javie some hope, and he plans to be back on the court, whistle at the ready, this fall. "I'm very cautious right now; I'm cautiously optimistic," the 55-year-old Javie said by phone from the Jersey Shore, where he was vacationing with his family. Even Javie is unsure how long his comeback will last. He has no cartilage left in his knee, a result of 30 years of wear and tear. When he runs, "it's bone on bone," he said. Javie could have reconstructive surgery, but it would require a year of recovery, and the prosthetics are not designed for the abuse of an N.B.A. schedule. So Javie has been working hard to strengthen his quadriceps and hamstrings to take some pressure off the knee. He has undergone platelet-rich plasma therapy, which some doctors believe could help regenerate cartilage. Javie also recently began receiving viscous injections that simulate cartilage and provide some buffer between the bones. He hopes the injections "can buy me another year or two."

Jason Jones, Sacramento Bee: The Kings winning more games would certainly attract more fans to Arco Arena. But six weeks before the regular season begins, the front office is already doing all it can to entice fans to buy tickets. The Kings will announce today they will introduce variable pricing when individual game tickets go on sale Oct. 2. That means ticket prices will be market-driven. So games likely to be in high demand - the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat - will be priced higher than games not so high in demand - the Los Angeles Clippers or New Jersey Nets. The Kings sought out consumers' opinions on how to bring them back to Arco, and variable pricing is the latest response to fans' concerns. "We've talked to our season-ticket holders at length, both in person and through a lot of surveys, and the NBA," said Kings vice president of marketing and communications Mitch Germann. "A lot of NBA teams are going to do (variable pricing), too. I know in Major League Baseball some teams have been doing it for a while."

The GridWise Alliance and the United States Department of Energy are co-hosting the inaugural GridWise Global Forum in the nation's capital Tuesday, September 21st through Thursday, September 23rd. We thought it an opportune time to sit down with Mr. Bartels, the handsome Dane who chairs the GridWise Alliance, to get his thoughts on next week's conference and the smart grid industry as a whole.

What is the primary theme of this year's conference?

According to Bartels, it's all about "international collaboration" around a few "big-ticket items" that affect the global community. Economic growth, energy independence, security and climate change are all global issues, and Mr. Bartels sees these as a few of the "big-ticket items" that the smart grid underpins, eventually emerging as the "ultimate enabler" of positive change.

Beyond even the scope of this conference, Bartels sees the need to set up a global federation for national smart grid industry groups to collaborate, but observes that "getting such an ecosystem together in advance of such a massive transformation is not an easy task."

In the past, the group has collaborated with Clasma/GridWeek to host a similar event. Why the departure from previous years' plan? Why did you decide instead to partner with the DOE to create a new conference?

Bartels said that the U.S. Department of Energy and the GridWise Alliance "made a very conscious decision to start a different event." With GridWeek becoming more commercial and placing its focus on scaling up an exposition, the aim of the GridWise Global Forum is to focus on "thought leadership" and a "global agenda." In order to do this effectively, they felt it was not necessary to link the event to an expo like GridWeek. In some ways, Mr. Bartels regards the GridWise Global Forum as the "Davos/WEF of the smart grid."

What are a few of the top industry and/or technology trends you foresee over the next two years?

Largely in agreement with GTM Research on two key points, Bartels believes that distribution automation (DA) is an "enormous open space for opportunity," noting that many international utilities have started with DA and not AMI. Another area of interest is EVs. Bartels believes that EVs will be "interesting, but the industry may still struggle given the adoption rate question." He believes the country "needs to build up the view now."

Where is the industry today, relative to one year ago, and what progress has been made?

Bartels contends that although the industry seems to have been moving pretty rapidly over the past year, we are "only at the beginning"; he believes we will soon see a "drastic modernization of the electric system." And although the industry has made positive strides forward, we need to do better job of evolving the discussion around "what smart grid is and why it's important."

After $4.5 billion in smart-grid stimulus, what needs to happen next in terms of national policy?

Bartels wants to see more appearances by Obama on David Letterman talking national energy policy and specifically mentioning the term 'smart grid.' With the smart grid being the "critical platform for big-ticket items" like economic growth, climate change, energy independence and a more reliable energy supply, Bartels makes the case that energy transformation is more important than healthcare. If not more important, he believes that the U.S. "should have at least as much focus here as with healthcare. There are countries outside the U.S. that see this infrastructure vision better than the U.S. does in terms of national competitiveness."

What are a few of the more significant smart grid deployment success stories, in your opinion?

"First off, in the U.S., there have been strong deployments and great progress in California, Texas and on the East coast, much of which is being supported by stimulus funds."  In Australia, the government has the smart grid/smart cities project where they are investing "$100 million across 5 cities located in and around Sydney."  In countries like China, Japan and Korea, they are "moving ahead in distribution automation and also with ultra high voltage transmission, and these countries are now achieving very high reliability numbers."  And in Europe, we have already seen large metering projects "such as the one undertaken by ENEL in Italy." Bartels also observes that in "Scandinavian countries and the U.K." there has been a lot of recent activity pertaining to smart grid deployment.

Do you see the pricing of climate change in retail electric rates, as Ofgem is now trying to do in the U.K., as an increasing trend? How do you expect to see these large smart grid CAPEX projects getting funded? 

"It's interesting, because today the running joke is that if you went to your company's CEO and said, 'Hey, I discovered a very good investment to enable us to sell less to our clients,' well, that would likely be your last day on the job." Bartels points out that this is akin to the framework within which a large part of the utility industry operates today in regards to investments in smart grid and energy efficiency.  He says we "need to find a way for the utilities to be rewarded, or we are leaving something very important off the table."  A second point he offered is that utilities around the world are already investing billions upon billions in their infrastructure on an annual basis, and now, "We need to ensure that these funds are going to new technologies and applications, and not being spent as they have in the past on legacy products." 

Given the recent M&A activity and general market momentum, what do you see ahead for the vendor community in terms of consolidation, partnership, room for new startups, etc.?

According to Bartels, "No company can do soup-to-nuts in the smart grid, and the need for collaboration is critical." Given the current state of the industry, there is "enormous competition for thought leadership." Bartels believes that many companies in the industry need to do a better job in representing what their solution provides and what it does not. In his eyes, the industry will "absolutely see more M&A activity," especially as more and more IT vendors and traditional electric power equipment vendors come together in the market. Although he sees M&A increasing, it doesn't mean there won't be room for startups, which will be spurred largely by "applications we cannot yet envision."

***

As the conference's Official Interactive Media Partner, Greentech Media has teamed up with the GridWise Global Forum to broadcast select conference sessions live on the Greentech Media website.

Greentech Media will be broadcasting three sessions (one from each day of the conference) live over our website. The sessions that will be broadcast live are listed below (all times are Eastern Standard Time).

1. Tuesday, September 21st, 1:30pm - 3:00pm: Energizing Leadership: Lessons for all Nations

2. Wednesday, September 22nd, 8:00am - 9:30am: Engaging the Consumer

3. Thursday, September 23rd, 2:15pm - 3:30pm: Innovating for the Future

In addition to broadcasting these live sessions, Greentech Media staff will be at the conference in full force for the duration of the event, holding meetings, sharing our latest market research (scheduled to be published on Monday, September 20th), covering conference news, and drinking champagne at the Australian Embassy party. David Leeds, GTM Research's smart grid analyst, will be moderating a session on Thursday titled Meeting Climate Goals, which will focus on the relationship between smart grid deployments and a reduction in greenhouse gases.

The current mortgage crisis in the US is more severe than any since the 1930s. So it makes good sense to examine the origins, impacts, and consequences of that last great mortgage crisis great mortgage crisis – indeed many commentators have made a direct comparison between the two (see for example Eichengreen and O'Rourke 2010). The case for examining the last great crisis is especially pronounced given that the US Secretary of the Treasury has just asked Americans to “consider the challenge of how to build a more stable housing finance system” (Geithner 2010).

Yet we should be humble in taking up this challenge. We are after all reforming a mortgage system that was built on a framework that Depression-era policymakers forged in response to their own crisis. One of those policymakers was Henry Hoagland, who described the situation he faced in 1935 as a member of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board thus:

[A] tremendous surge of residential building in the [last] decade…was matched by an ever-increasing supply of homes sold on easy terms. The easy terms plan has a catch…[o]nly a small decline in prices was necessary to wipe out this equity. Unfortunately, deflationary processes are never satisfied with small declines in values. In the field of real-estate finance… we have depended so much upon credit that our whole value structure can be thrown out of balance by relatively slight shocks. When such a delicate structure is once disorganized, it is a tremendous task to get it into a position where it can again function normally. (Hoagland 1935)

This column looks back over the terrain that Hoagland described by examining how the residential mortgage market worked before 1930 and how it was changed by crisis and policy in the 1930s. It turns out that this history lesson provides some fresh perspective on today’s mortgage crisis (see my accompanying paper, Snowden 2010, for more details).

A century-long view of the 1930s mortgage crisis

To place events in the 1920s and 1930s into perspective, Figure 1 presents a long-run view of developments in the housing and residential mortgage sector using annual series of non-farm residential building starts and growth rates of inflation-adjusted residential mortgage debt.

• Between 1921 and 1929 the nominal volume of non-farm residential mortgage debt tripled, and inflation-adjusted debt grew faster than in any decade before or since.
• The rapid expansion financed a home-building boom and an increase in the rate of home ownership from 41% to 46%.
• Nominal mortgage debt started to contract abruptly in 1930, but remained constant in inflation-adjusted terms over the next decade as the visible manifestations of a mortgage crisis unfolded – record levels of foreclosure, widespread distress among mortgage lenders, a collapse and weak recovery in home building, large decreases in home values, and the reversal of the gains in home ownership made in the 1920s (Wheelock 2008).

Figure 1. Building starts and decadal change in CPI-deflated mortgage debt, 1910-2008

Notes: see Snowden (2010).

Figure 2 provides a companion view showing how the structure of the residential mortgage market has changed over the past century. During the 1920s, for example, the share held by institutional lenders – commercial banks, life insurance companies and, savings institutions – remained virtually constant. The big change during that decade was the rapid growth in two new forms of private real estate securities that by 1929 funded nearly 10% of the outstanding residential mortgage debt. Goetzmann and Newman (2010) examine one of these innovations: single-property real estate bonds that were used to finance commercial property, including multifamily residential projects, in large urban areas. The second form of securitisation was introduced by New York mortgage guarantee companies that issued participation certificates, similar to modern pass-through securities, on groups of mortgages that they insured and placed into trusts.

Figure 2. Shares of non-farm residential mortgage debt, 1910-2007

Notes: The Savings Institutions category includes Building & Loan Associations, mutual savings banks, Savings & Loan associations and other savings institutions. See Snowden (2010).

Against this backdrop, two striking changes in market structure occurred during the 1930s.

• First, the share of private real estate securities gradually fell to zero.

Behind this decline, however, were decade-long liquidations of both single-property real estate bonds and guarantee mortgage companies after both innovations failed in the early 1930s. Unwinding these structures proved to be so difficult, involved, and costly that privately-sponsored mortgage insurance and securitisation disappeared from the US mortgage market for decades (Snowden 1995).

• Second was the the large impact of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the mortgage crisis (Figure 2).

This agency was created in 1933 to serve as both a bad mortgage bank – by buying distressed mortgages from private lenders – and as a loan modification programme – by refinancing the mortgages it purchased with long-term, high-leverage, amortised loans. Within three short years the HOLC held mortgages on one-tenth of the nation’s owner-occupied homes and only now are beginning to understand just how it worked and how well it worked (Courtemanche and Snowden 2010, Fishback et al. 2010 and Rose 2010).

A few other institutional developments during the 1930s deserve comment. One set involved Building & Loan Associations (B&Ls) which were the most important source of home mortgage debt during the 1920s, but hit hard by the onset of the crisis. Three new programmes were created for B&Ls between 1932 and 1934: the mortgage loan discounting facility of the Federal Home Loan Bank System, a new system of Federal Savings & Loan charters, and an insurance programme (FSLIC) for members’ share accounts. Most B&Ls did not participate in these new programmes and by 1941 a total of 6,000 B&Ls had failed – half of the number that had been operating in 1929. Some 4,000 of the remaining associations embraced the new system and became the core of the modern S&L industry.

A second development of note was the creation of a federal mortgage loan insurance programme in 1934 through the auspices of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The FHA loan programme was heavily used by intermediaries that were not served by the Federal Home Loan Bank System – mortgage companies, commercial banks, and life insurance companies. To provide a dedicated secondary market facility for the new insurance programme, the National Housing Act of 1934 authorised federal charters to be issued to privately-financed, mortgage associations that were permitted to use FHA loans as collateral for covered mortgage bonds. Not a single private mortgage association had been chartered by 1938 and the responsibility for creating the secondary market for FHA loans was then given to the federally-funded Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA).

How did we get here?

Figures 1 and 2 also show how the crisis of the 1930s altered the long-run development of the residential mortgage market. After WWII the portfolio lenders that were so well-supported by the new federal programmes of the 1930s became dominant as Savings & Loans, commercial banks, insurance companies, and mutual savings banks held an unprecedented 80% of the nation’s residential mortgage debt. Competition was limited and innovation de-emphasised within the postwar system, but all major lenders had plenty of “skin in the game” as they held mortgages that they, or close affiliates, originated and serviced. Supported by the secondary market operations of the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Bank System, this framework financed a rapid expansion in home building, mortgage debt and home ownership in the 1950s without, as shown in Figure 1, crisis or substantial instability.

The postwar mortgage system began to unravel in the late 1960s because portfolio lenders could not profitably underwrite the risks of funding long-term mortgages with fixed rates and generous prepayment privileges after the rate of inflation, and nominal interest rates, became high and variable.
While bad policy and lax regulation eventually turned the failure of this business model into the thrift debacle, the key development during the 1970s was the return of securitisation. The innovation did not return as the federally-sponsored, covered mortgage bond system that had been envisioned in 1934. Instead, securitisation reappeared through the operations of one federal agency (Ginnie Mae) and the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that were carved out of secondary market facilities – the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Bank System – that had been designed in the 1930s to support portfolio lenders.

We can see in Figure 1 that the distress and change in the nation’s residential mortgage market between 1970 and 1990 was accompanied by increased instability in home building and in the growth of inflation-adjusted mortgage debt. This volatility, however, was moderate by historical standards.
Figure 2 shows that agency securitisation made modest inroads at first, but captured virtually all of the mortgage business lost by insurance companies and savings institutions during the 1980s. Private agencies played an important role in the process by repackaging the virtually default-free cash-flows generated by government-sponsored enterprise pass-through securities into collateralised mortgage obligations that offered investors different exposure to the prepayment and interest rate risks that were generated by the underlying pools of mortgages.

The boundaries in mortgage securitisation became blurred during the 1990s in two ways.

• First, government-sponsored enterprises began to hold large numbers of the mortgages and securities that they underwrote in their own portfolios because they could profitably fund them with debt that enjoyed an implicit federal guarantee.
• Second, private agencies began to securitise on their own by underwriting the credit risk on pools of mortgages that the government-sponsored enterprises, at least at first, would not securitise.

After 1995 the two forces converged to generate the third great expansion of residential mortgage debt in the past century, a re-emergence of private-label securitisation on a scale not seen since the 1920s, and a surge in homebuilding and homeownership. The second great mortgage crisis was just around the corner.

References

Courtemanche, Charles and Kenneth Snowden (2010), “Repairing a Mortgage Crisis: HOLC Lending and Its Impact on Local Housing Markets”, NBER Working Paper 16245, July.

Eichengreen, Barry and Kevin H O'Rourke (2010), “A tale of two depressions: What do the new data tell us?”, VoxEU.org, 8 March.

Fishback, Price, Shawn Kantor, Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, William Horrace, and Jaret Treber (forthcoming), “The Influence of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation on Housing Markets During the 1930s", Review of Financial Studies.

Geithner, Timothy (2010), “Opening Remarks at the Conference on the Future of Housing Finance: August 18, 2010”, Downloaded 8/18/10.

Goetzmann, William N and Frank Newman (2010), “Securitization in the 1920's”, NBER Working Paper 15650, January.

Hoagland, Henry (1935), “The Relation of the Work of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to Home Security and Betterment”, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, 16(2),45-52.

Rose, Jonathan (2010), “The Incredible HOLC? Mortgage Relief during the Great Depression”, Unpublished Working Paper, April.

Snowden, Kenneth (1995), “Mortgage Securitization in the U. S.: 20th Century Developments in Historical Perspective", in M Bordo and R Sylla (eds.), Anglo-American Financial Systems, New York: Irwin, 261-98.

Snowden, Kenneth (2010), "The Anatomy Of A Residential Mortgage Crisis: A Look Back To the 1930s," in L. Mitchell and A. E. Wilmarth (ed.), The Panic of 2008: Causes, Consequences and Proposals for Reform. Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar Publishing.

Wheelock, David C (2008), “The Federal Response to Home Mortgage Distress: Lessons from the Great Depression”, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, May/June, 90(3):133-48.

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There is something for everyone on the SCC. Whatever your connection to the transgender community - whether you are transsexual, a cross dresser or in between; a spouse, a partner or a family member; straight, gay, bi or omni-sexual; post-op, pre-op or non-op; young or old; married or single; FtM or MtF - if transgender is an issue in your life, you are welcome!

Autumn and I arrived on the scene today, and Pam will join us tomorrow.  Posting will be a bit light until Thursday evening due to the untimely spillage of coffee on Autumn's laptop, which happened after Amtrak lost her luggage and before she learned that our hotel reservation was MIA.  After hearing Autumn's tale of travelers woe cheerfully retold, the hotel graciously upgraded us to a suite.

In the mean time, here's a little teaser photo posted to the Blend from one of the Crown Plaza's much appreciated lobby computers.  Monica Helms and Autumn Sandeen are modeling the temporary interview studio now set up in the Pam's House Blend suite.  Monica was our first interview guest.

Java.net blogs

While looking at the latest GlassFish map Monday night, I started wondering about some of the dots that appear in fairly remote locations on the globe. (My apologies to those who live in these locations -- of course, they're not "remote" to you!) In fact, I see quite a lot of dots in places I've long wanted to visit, like the Arctic, islands in the Pacific Ocean, the Carribean Islands, Africa, and Teirra del Fuego.

Since I may never get the chance to actually visit these places in person, I've decided to "follow the GlassFish Trail" (like the explorers of old) and make virtual visits in a new blog series to be called "GlassFish Outposts."

So, get ready for some adventure. I'm packing my bags today, getting ready for my first journey. Who knows where it will take me!?

And if we're lucky, when I get there, maybe some of the GlassFish denizens of those locations will post comments introducing us to their GlassFish projects!

Java Today

Adrian Deccico investigates Concurrency in Hudson:

Hi, the following Groovy script checks if there is any other job waiting for an executor or being executed in that precise moment. It can be useful if you eventually want to launch an exclusive task, like reloading Hudson’s configuration, which will affect current executions...

On developerWorks, Masahiko Maedera presents "Unicode surrogate programming with the Java language":

Since version 1.5, the Java™ language has provided APIs supporting Unicode supplementary characters that can't be represented by a single 16-bit char data type. This article discusses the features of these APIs, shows their correct usage, and evaluates their processing performance.

The JavaOne Conference Blog announces that we'll be able to Follow JavaOne and Oracle Develop As It Happens: Oracle Technology Network Live:

Join us for three full days of great interviews, news, and buzz--LIVE from JavaOne and Oracle Develop in San Francisco! Oracle Technology Network's Justin Kestelyn, Rick Ramsey, Tori Wieldt, Bob Rhubart, and Kevin Farnham host dozens of community experts for the latest news and buzz from the world's biggest and best conference. Programming starts Monday, September 20th at 8:00 am PT. If you are at JavaOne/Oracle Develop, join us in the Mason Street Tent to be part of our live studio audience! If you can't be there, watch it here (bookmark the page!)...

The JCP Program Office announces And the nominees are...:

The nominations for the 8th annual JCP Program Awards have closed and it is time for the JCP Executive Committee (EC) Members to cast their votes. This year we have combined the awards into a total of three categories. The winners will be announced during the Wednesday evening event during JavaOne, which will be held this year on 22 September at the Intercontinental Hotel (more details on the event to follow later). I've listed the nominees as well as their nomination justifications below. Congratulations to the nominees! ...

Poll

The topic of the current java.net poll is the "JavaOne Strategy and Directions" Keynote, which will feature Larry Ellison and Thomas Kurian. Our poll asks: Which area will receive the most attention in the JavaOne "Java Strategy and Directions" keynote? The poll will be open until next Mondy.

Spotlights

Our latest java.net Spotlight is Community Manager Sonya Barry's blog post Tell me what you think:

"For several years now I've been involved in on-again, off-again plans to do a major upgrade to the site. This time it's really happening. People are working on building out the new site now, and we're going to start rolling out the migration plan here once the first tests are complete. Our goal for migration...

We're also currently highlighting the JavaOne Conference Blog's announcement of the JavaOne and Oracle Develop Unconference as a java.net Spotlight:

In addition to the power packed "official" sessions of JavaOne and Oracle Develop, there will be an unconference that runs in conjunction with the main conference from Monday-Thursday at the Parc 55 hotel. If you want to lead a session, you can register your session in the currently open three tracks at the unconference website write an abstract to get others interested in your session...

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-- Kevin Farnham
Twitter: @kevin_farnham

• 2.6 million entries from China alone create a new overall record number of participants
• Theme for 2011: "Life in the Forests"

SuccessFactors Kicks Off Week of BizX Events in Asia Pacific

SuccessFactors Founder and CEO to Deliver Keynotes at Events Bringing Together Customers, Partners, Prospects and Thought Leaders

PR Newswire — August 16, 2010

BRISBANE, Australia, Aug. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Today, SuccessFactors, Inc. (Nasdaq: SFSF) began a weeklong series of customer conferences in Asia Pacific.

SuccessConnect Asia Pacific, the company’s third global customer conference of five in 2010, kicked off today in Queensland, Australia, and on Wednesday, the 20th Annual Inform Conference will begin. Both events will bring together hundreds of customers, prospects, partners and thought leaders throughout Asia Pacific to share experiences and discuss how to best leverage SuccessFactors’ Business Execution (BizX) Suite to accelerate business execution and achieve maximum results.

SuccessFactors Founder and CEO Lars Dalgaard will present the opening keynote for SuccessConnect Asia Pacific, as well as detail several important product announcements and updates surrounding the SuccessFactors BizX Suite.

“It’s an honor and an exceptional reward that our first acquisition in Inform has enabled us to more than triple the size of our event, putting SuccessConnect Asia Pacific back-to-back with one of the most important and largest attended workforce planning and analytics events in Asia Pacific, Inform’s 20th Annual Conference,” said Lars Dalgaard, founder and CEO of SuccessFactors. “This week, we are inviting Inform customers to experience SuccessFactors, and SuccessFactors customers to experience the great success of Inform throughout this region. It will be a week of business opportunity building and learning from each other on how all organizations can execute business better in rapidly growing world economies.”

SuccessConnect Asia Pacific also features a keynote from former Siemens AG board member and CEO of HI TEC INVEST, Dr. Frederick Froeschl, and numerous sessions from SuccessFactors executives and customers, including Siemens Australia, Crown Worldwide Group, NSW Audit Office, University of Technology Sydney and PFD Foods. In addition, the event has various product tracks to discuss specific modules within the BizX Suite, as well as a collaborative panel debate, featuring SuccessFactors executives and customers, on BizX and how organizations are leveraging SuccessFactors to execute more effectively and drive bottom-line results.

Other presentations scheduled for SuccessConnect Asia Pacific include:

1. Saints 13-3

Even with the element of surprise gone and teams gunning for them, the Saints are good enough to maintain a chair at the grown-up table, if not carve the turkey again this year.

Any team with Brees under center is dangerous, particularly with Sean Payton dictating the pace.

There is enough talent on this roster, on both sides of the ball, to make them our favorites entering the season.

2. Colts 14-2

The Indianapolis Colts enter this season as the favorites to win the AFC South for the 198th year in a row. Coming off of one of his best seasons (career highs in completion % and 300 yard games), Peyton Manning will have as many weapons as ever at his disposable.

Reggie Wayne, emerging stars Pierre Garcon and Austin Collie, along with returning slot receiver Anthony Gonzalez, elite tight end Dallas Clark and running backs Joseph Addai and Donald Brown, combined with a pretty good offensive line should keep defensive coordinators up at night.

On defense, the Colts may be vulnerable to the run with all DTs weighing less than 310 pounds, but edge rushers Robert Mathis, Dwight Freeney, and the new rookie Jerry Hughes can make a pocket disappear instantly.

The Colts once again will be among the NFL’s elite in 2010.

3. Ravens 9-7

The Baltimore Ravens come into the 2010 season being a favorite to win their division and becoming a contender.

They have long been known for their hard-hitting defense, but with the progression of their young QB Joe Flacco, their star RB Ray Rice, and bringing in a valuable receiver in Anquan Boldin, the NFL competition better be ready for their offensive power.

With all that said, they do have some concerns.

It doesn’t appear that their All-Pro safety Ed Reed is going to be ready to play until mid-season. They just lost Dominique Foxworth all season to injury. The rookie Sergio Kindle just fractured his head.

Each year it seems that a team considered a favorite goes through devastating injury problems crippling the team’s chances for success. Will that be the 2010 Ravens?

4. Vikings 12-4

The star-studded Vikings are expected to be a strong NFC contender again this season, that is if Brett Favre comes back to take the reins for his 20th season.

Even Favre’s most vocal critics cannot deny the excellent production from the gunslinger last season, perhaps his best season ever at age 40.

As great as he was, is it possible for him to repeat that performance?

Whatever his numbers this season, he will have a lot of help around him. Adrian Peterson has been working on his fumbling issues this summer and will likely be out to silence the talk of Chris Johnson being the best RB in the league.

Jared Allen and the defense have all the tools to be the best defense in the NFC.

The Vikings look to have some strong divisional competition in their bitter rival Packers, but right now we have the Vikings edging them out for first place in the NFC North.

5. Cowboys 11-5

The Dallas Cowboys are trying to be the first team to play a Superbowl in its home stadium.

Jerry Jones got rid of the headache Terrell Owens two years ago and drafted a new toy in the talented, yet headstrong, rookie Dez Bryant to work with Tony Romo (although just yesterday Bryant sprained his ankle which will keep him out of commission, and pad carrying, for the next four to six weeks).

The Cowboys won their first playoff game in the Romo era last season and believe that to be a jumping point for a successful 2010 campaign.

With a questionable offensive line and secondary concerns, they are not a lock as division champs and NFC champions as some would have you believe.

But, they are talented and if they come together and play to their potential (is Wade Phillips capable of extracting it?), they have the potential to host the biggest game of the year.

6. Packers 11-5

The Green Bay Packers are projected to be a team competing for a Superbowl berth.

Don’t let the defensive collapse in the playoffs last season fool you. The Packers defense was ranked 2nd overall in 2009 and the collapse can be contributed to backups playing due to injuries.

The Packers boast one of the best offenses in the league, led by rising star QB Aaron Rodgers and his plentiful stable of receivers.

The Packers would love nothing more than to give the bird to their rival Vikings and Brett Favre by taking over the top spot in the division and perhaps taking the top spot in the conference.

If injuries to the offensive line and secondary are held in check, there is no reason to believe this team will be anything other than dominant in 2010.

7. Jets 9-7

The J-E-T-S, Jets. Jets. Jets. are the darling of NFL analysts and a popular pick to represent the AFC in the Superbowl this season.

With the brash Rex Ryan proclaiming their superiority, they have definitely retained the swagger picked up as they rolled to the AFC Championship game last season from the wild card spot.

Tannenbaum has brought in a cast of big names and the Jets are putting all their money on the table to win big and win now.

Will it work? If the 2009 #1-ranked defense can replicate their dominance from 2009, if someone emerges to pick up the lost yardage from the departed Thomas Jones, and if Mark “Sanchize” Sanchez does not have a sophomore drop-off, then there is every reason to believe the Jets could be in the mix in the playoffs.

8. Patriots 10-6

This is the first time in awhile that the Pats are in the lower part of the top ten to start a season.

The image of Ray Rice still running on that defense seems to be in the back of our minds. But, the fact is that the Patriots still won the AFC East last season and their young defensive players have had some time in the system.

Tom Brady was apparently hampered by injuries at the end of last season which should be gone by now and is another year removed from his knee injury.

With Welker still a question mark to start the season, the Patriots likely will be spreading the ball around more than they have the last couple seasons.

Their schedule is brutal and it is not clear yet how they are going to manufacture a pass rush, but never count out the Flying Elvis as Superbowl contenders as long as they have Belichick calling the shots.

9. Dolphins 7-9

The Miami Dolphins come in as the third team in the top 10 representing the projected toughest division in the league in 2010.

New defensive coordinator Mike Nolan should help the defense tighten up against the big plays they gave up last year.

After winning the AFC East in 2008, the Dolphins only went 7-9 in 2009. Much of that can be explained by major injury issues and an extremely difficult schedule.

The Dolphins believe they have found their QB of the future in Chad Henne and brought in superstar receiver Brandon Marshall to be his number one target.

If Ronnie Brown is fully healthy and returns to his 2008 production level, the Dolphins will be a sleeper pick for a potential playoff team.

10. Falcons 9-7

Injuries played a major role in their modest decline last year.

If they can avoid that bug, regain some of their 2008 stride and Ryan continues to develop, this team can be a force in the NFCS and possibly the playoffs.

A healthy Michael Turner alone may be the extra push they need. They are still a young team whose star should continue to rise, and 2009 may have made them hungrier.

11. Chargers 13-3

The Chargers seem to be caught in a vicious annual cycle of high preseason expectations, followed by disappointment at some point in the season/postseason.

Maybe their slightly diminished expectations this year will be the shove they need to finally get over the hump, but it is doubtful.

There are several reasons why they have slipped out of their typical top five initial rating, starting right in the trenches.

Will the O-line be able to protect Rivers, and run block for rookie Ryan Matthews as he tries to re-establish San Diego's flagging rushing attack?

On the defensive front, will they be able to solidify nose tackle in the wake of Jamal Williams?

At a minimum, the offense should be effective enough to cover any defensive shortfalls to the point where they'll walk out with another division title in a relatively soft AFC West.

12. Bengals 10-6

Last season the Bengals won the AFC North and swept all their division rivals. This was accomplished through great defensive play and good rushing production.

With the drafting of TE Gresham and bringing in Terrell Owens to line up opposite Ochocinco, this may be a put up or shut up year for the once-considered-elite QB Carson Palmer.

If the Bengals can control the theatrics of their attention-seeking WRs, they have a good chance to compete for division supremacy for the second straight year.

13. Texans 9-7

Coming off of their first winning season in franchise history, the Texans look to improve and seek their first ever playoff appearance in 2010.

Elite WR Andre Johnson teams with Pro Bowl QB Matt Schaub to form an elite passing attack, which will be aided by returning TE Owen Daniels.

The Texans will need rookies CB Kareem Jackson and RB Ben Tate to shore up weaknesses in the Texan secondary and backfield. RB Steve Slaton will look to improve on his disappointing season last year.

The Texans have solid DEs in Connor Barwin and Pro Bowler Mario Williams, but the middle of the DL is lacking with two unimpressive DTs in Amobi Okoye and Shaun Cody.

The strength of their defense is the LB corps, which boasts Rookie of the Year and All Pro Brian Cushing and newly re-signed Demeco Ryans.

This may be the year the Texans finally break through after years of being predicted to do so.

14. 49ers 8-8

San Francisco is the pundits' favorite to win the NFC West this season, due in large part to their promising competitiveness last year and Arizona's personnel losses this offseason.

The 49ers should remain a fearsome defensive squad led by Patrick Willis, but their ability to take the next step to a division crown and a return to the playoffs after a seven-year drought relies on their offense.

Was Alex Smith's solid play down the stretch in '09 a mirage or a sign of the former number one overall pick finally coming into his own?

The team invested two first round picks on the O-line to find out.

If Smith continues to make strides in his development and develops good chemistry with Michael Crabtree and Vernon Davis, the 49ers just might live up to these preseason expectations.

15. Giants 8-8

The New York Giants were decimated by injuries last season resulting in a .500 record in 2009.

We expect the Giants to rebound from their down year and at least give the Cowboys some competition in the division.

Head coach Tom Coughlin again appears to be on the hot-seat for his job. New York is a city not known for its patience and the collapse last season is firing up the talk of his removal.

The Giants have a deep well of talented receivers for Eli Manning to work with and the defense enters training camp healthy.

The question is have they done enough in getting healthy and bringing in additional talent to compete with their division rivals? Stay tuned.

16. Steelers 9-7

The Steelers are the wildcard team of the AFC North.

It is hard to predict what this team will look like when their full complement of players are in the game.

Will Roethlisberger’s off-field issues have any effect on the field (beside him missing at least the first month of games)?

Can the defense return to the dominance of 2008 with the return of Troy Polamalu?

Will the offense return to the traditional Steelers run, run, and run some more instead of flinging the ball around in the air?

How will the season-ending injury to Willie Colon affect the already questionable offensive line?

Questions abound about the Pittsburgh Steelers and it will be interesting to see the answers as the season unfolds.

17. Titans 8-8

The Titans finished 2009 as one of the hottest teams in the NFL after starting the season in abysmal fashion.

The Titans averaged around 27 points per game with Young as the starting QB. Though a threat to beat you with his legs, Young will have to focus on getting the ball to receivers Kenny Britt and the rest of the receivers to spread out the defense for the Titans’ phenomenal running attack.

Although running backs tend to see a major decline after leading the NFL in carries, Johnson will be running behind one of the top offensive lines and there should be no reason he should not be among the league’s top RBs in 2010.

Tennessee’s defense needs to bounce back.

The pass defense looks to improve one of the league’s worst attacks. A healthy Finnegan and Griffin should help, but they need another CB.

The front seven is also a major question mark needing rookie Derrick Morgan to generate some sort of pass rush in order for the D to succeed.

With question marks on D and going against the Colts and Texans four times this year, the Titans may need some luck to make the playoffs.

18. Panthers 8-8

A lot more losses than gains on a team that was even par in 2009.

Even with some addition by subtraction, there is no denying the Panthers are in the midst of a youth movement with what is probably a lame-duck coach.

If they focus on the run and the defense can find a way to be noticeable on the line of scrimmage, they could be competitive most weeks.

But this is a team in transition in a lot of ways, and thus we have no great expectations.

19. Eagles 11-5

The Philadelphia Eagles are projected to be a middle-of-the-pack team this year.

While Eagle fans may disagree, many of us believe it was a mistake to trade away Donovan McNabb to a division rival and it could bite them in the end.

We will get to see if the long-tenured success of the last decade was more Andy Reid or more Donovan McNabb with newly appointed starter Kevin Kolb taking over the QB reins.

The defense is expected to be bolstered by the loading up of defensive draft picks this offseason, but we project that the Eagles will have a down year by their standards and miss out on the playoffs.

20. Redskins 4-12

Dan Snyder is tired of owning the doormat of the NFC East so he brought in Mike Shanahan to head the team and Donovan McNabb to lead the offense.

Shanahan is making his authority known by putting his foot on the neck of the grossly well-paid Albert Haynesworth to start training camp. Hopefully, this hard line with keep the star DT in line and bring out the talent on a defense that underachieved in 2009.

Donovan McNabb comes in as the long under-appreciated QB from the division rival Eagles.

Although McNabb has less weapons to work with on the Redskins, he does immediately upgrade the QB position and perhaps Shanny’s magic with veteran QBs will bring many joyful Sundays to Redskins fans.

The rumor is that the Skins are trying to pry the malcontented but very talented WR Vincent Jackson from the Chargers.

If they are successful in nabbing a talent like that, this team has a shot to compete in this tough division.

21. Bears 7-9

Highly lauded QB Jay Cutler was a major disappointment in 2009 after the fanfare from his arrival in a blockbuster trade with the Broncos.

To remedy the failure of last season, Mike Martz has been brought in as offensive coordinator. Martz is known for his high-flying “greatest show on turf” offensive strategy from his stint in St. Louis.

This marriage of Martz and Cutler should provide some highlight reel plays if they can find a consistent threat at wide receiver.

Head coach Lovie Smith appears to be on the hot-seat with an impatient Bears fanbase after three years of missing the playoffs following their 2006 season Superbowl appearance.

The defense should be bolstered by the arrival of DE Julius Peppers.

The Bears will have a tough road to go through if they are going to make the playoffs this year because of the strength of division rival Vikings and Packers.

If the Bears do end up surprising us and are still playing mid-January, they will have earned it.

22. Broncos 8-8

It is hard to know where this team stood overall by the end of a very uneven 2009.

I don't think their true status was accurately represented by either the nearly bulletproof team that opened 6-0, or the completely hapless team that finished out 2-6.

One thing is sure though, defense was their stronger suit and likely will remain so.

Their biggest offseason transactions were the loss of Brandon Marshall, and the acquisition of rookie QB Tim Tebow, a polarizing figure in terms of public opinion, and a very big question mark in terms of onfield potential.

Even if Tebow's critics are wrong and he does eventually succeed in the NFL, I do not think he is a ready made starter, which tells me their offense will keep them out of the competitors circle this year, even if their D is up to snuff.

23. Cardinals 10-6

Talk about getting hit hard in the offseason.

Losing Antrel Rolle isn't that big a deal, especially with Kerry Rhodes replacing him, but losing Kurt Warner, Karlos Dansby, and Anquan Boldin is huge.

Questions remain about Matt Leinart's work ethic, maturity, and leadership; if he isn't ready to step into the spotlight, this team's decline will be fast and unforgiving.

Arizona did manage to get a bit lucky in the draft, with NT Dan Williams falling to them in the latter half of the 1st round, and picking up LB Daryl Washington from TCU. Arizona's strength this season just may be its defense.

24. Seahawks 5-11

If there's one number that might illustrate how much change has occurred in Seattle this offseason, it is 97. That's how many transactions new GM John Schneider and HC Pete Carroll have overseen as Seattle's new braintrust.

In the spirit of competition, they have churned the roster from top to bottom, and whether the team sees results is anybody's guess.

There have been some obvious positives: the hiring of Jeremy Bates as OC and Alex Gibbs as the O-line guru, a fantastic draft weekend in which the Seahawks addressed two of their most glaring holes (LT and FS) in the first round, the possible resurrection of Mike Williams.

But there have also been some negatives: Charlie Whitehurst looking pedestrian after Seattle invested in him, the LenDale White gamble not paying off, the loss of last year's best three DEs.

There are some pundits who see Seattle as a dark horse, but there remain too many questions about this team (anemic pass rush, Hasselbeck's health, mediocre run game) for them to be anything but a team in transition.

25. Raiders 5-11

Lately it has been hard to track this team’s general strengths and weaknesses.

Behind coaching controversies, Al Davis’ eccentricities, and their roster’s sucking chest wound JaMarcus Russell, it has been hard to focus on anything else.

If you can though, you will find the team has been quietly improving.

Though they will likely lean immediately on some rookies to start, the defense should be solid even while muscling through the often treacherous shift to the 3-4.

The offense should see immediate improvement as well with a functioning quarterback in tow, and a presumably better organized rotation of their RB platoon.

Any early opponents coming in and expecting the same old 5-11 (or worse) Raiders may be in for a shock.

26. Jaguars 7-9

The Jaguars appear to be the weak link in the AFC South.

One the bright side, RB Maurice Jones Drew is one of the elite running backs in the NFL. Unfortunately, he is running behind one of the worst offensive lines.

The Jaguars need second year OTs Eugene Monroe and Eben Britton to improve on unsettling rookie campaigns. If OG Justin Smiley stays healthy, he can be a key component on the Jaguars offensive line.

Although QB David Garrard made the Pro Bowl last year (after the first 42 selections declined their invite), he must improve to spread the defense.

WR Mike Sims-Walker looks to return to the player he was during the first four games of the year.

After finishing last in the league in sacks, the Jags are counting on newly acquired DE Aaron Kampman and number 10 overall draft pick DE/DT Tyson Alualu to get pressure on the QB.

The Jags secondary is full of holes, but there is some hope as second year CB Derek Cox did improve as his rookie season continued.

Jacksonville’s LB unit will be interesting to watch with the trade for Kirk Morrison, but it may not enough to make up for other holes on the defense.

The Jaguars may once again be in contention for a top 10 draft pick next year.

27. Lions 2-14

The Detroit Lions are projected to again come in last in the NFC North.

While they have good young stars in Matt Stafford and Calvin “Megatron” Johnson, we believe they still have a couple years of additions to erase the tenure of the Matt Millen era.

Rookies Best and Suh are both projected to be excellent assets to the team.

We don’t believe that the 2009 32nd ranked defense will be able to elevate much from the bottom third of the league and it would be very surprising to see this team end up anywhere except for last place in the division.

28. Buccaneers 3-13

The Bucs are in the midst of a total rebuilding job and the jury is out whether they have truly hit bottom.

There are potential bright spots. But overall, there are a lot more “ifs” than we are comfortable with even to predict mediocrity.

But any improvement should be noticeable in something more than their three wins of 2009.

29. Chiefs 4-12

We like what the Chiefs did in the draft this year.

Though it's obviously all speculation for a while, it would not be surprising to see at least four long-term starters come out of this class for them, most notably in the secondary with safety Eric Berry and corner Javier Arenas.

The Chiefs appear to be headed in the right direction, particularly on defense, however they are starting from a very low point and not all or even most of these promising new players can be expected to have an immediate impact.

For 2010, prospects of success will be severely stunted when Matt Cassell once again fails to duplicate anything near his meteoric success of 2008, and no one behind him will do much better if it comes to that.

Look for them to draft in the top 10 again.

30. Browns 5-11

Cleveland fans have had a rough summer with the middle finger given to them from their Miami-headed hometown son and they aren’t likely to find solace with a winning NFL team.

The Browns are projected again to come in fourth place out of four in the AFC North division.

But, keep hope alive Brownie fans because the front office made a smart decision bringing in Mike Holmgren to take charge and we believe this franchise is headed in the right direction.

2010 seems to be a stop-gap year at the QB position with the Browns FedEx-ing Brady Quinn to the Broncos and bringing in the struggling veteran Jake “Interception” Delhomme.

With a likely good draft position in 2011, perhaps they can target a much-needed franchise QB to go with their young and talented offensive line.

31. Bills 6-10

While the Bills campaigned diligently for the last spot in the order by one of our AFC East contributors, they still managed to stay one spot above the bottom of the barrel.

However, there have been many that are of the mind that the Bills will be drafting in the number one slot come April 2011.

There really is no position of strength on this team starting with the most important position of QB.

Trent Edwards has had talent at his disposal in Lee Evans and Terrell Owens in the past and has not been able to do anything with it.

The Bills front office appears to be unconcerned.

They did draft a good RB in CJ Spiller but with that offensive line, it will be miraculous if he shines.

The 19th ranked defense doesn’t appear to be getting any better.

The verdict on the Bills is that they will exceed expectations if they get more than five wins this season.

32. Rams 1-15

It looks as if the Rams have finally decided that they want to improve themselves.

They cut loose the albatross of Marc Bulger (who looked like he'd given up caring/trying three years ago) and sent their two biggest O-line headaches (Alex Barron and Richie Incognito) packing.

They picked up Roger Saffold in the draft to bookend with Jason Smith (who has hopefully recovered fully from the concussion-related issues that sidetracked his rookie season), and both of them will work to protect St. Louis' shiny new star, QB Sam Bradford.

As long as expectations are kept reasonable in St. Louis, Bradford can develop into a pro-caliber QB sooner rather than later.

Luckily for Bradford, expectations in St. Louis have been lowered about as low as they can go.

If he shows flashes of competence and leads the Rams to four wins, he'll be the toast of the town.

Thanks go out to several members of the Helmet2Helmet community: Cats, Ben, SMGC, Dwill, PhillyPride, metalmilitia, GFC, Dtexan, Stigmata, ceterusparibus, Sideshow, FourthStooge, and any for helping put together these rankings.  Please come join us in our community forum (www.helmet2helmet.net/forums ) to discuss your opinions on where we ranked your team.

On the football field, Al Groh's Virginia teams were a woeful 1-9 against in-state rivals Virginia Tech during his 10 years as head coach from 2001-09—but they almost always beat Tech in the first round of the NFL Draft.

From 2004, when the first class of Groh's recruited seniors graduated, up to this past April, the Cavaliers have sent five first-rounders to the next level.

Among them, Heath Miller (2004) turned into one of the NFL's best tight ends, and offensive linemen D'Brickashaw Ferguson (2006), Branden Albert (2008), and Eugene Monroe (2009) have become fixtures up front for their respective teams.

The Hokies have only sent three: DeAngelo Hall and Kevin Jones in 2004, and Duane Brown in 2008. Aside from Hall's Pro Bowl appearances in 2005 and 2006, none of them have found much success.

Throw in the two colleges' second-rounders, of course, and Tech instantly overtakes Virginia by a 9-7 margin. Adding their draftees in rounds three through seven widens it to a decisive 34-23 advantage for the Hokies.

Still, the Cavaliers have clung tenaciously to their upper hand at the top of the draft. Even after this past season, which saw Virginia finish last in the ACC Coastal at 3-9 overall (2-6 in conference play) while Tech ended up ranked 10th nationally, the Hoos sent cornerback Chris Cook to the NFL 18 picks ahead of the Hokies' Jason Worilds.

For those keeping track, it marked the fifth of Groh's seven recruiting classes where the highest-drafted Cavalier went before the highest-drafted Hokie.

In next year's draft, even without Groh on the sideline in 2010, Virginia's Ras-I Dowling will have a chance to make it six out of eight. His biggest competition from Virginia Tech will be redshirt sophomore Ryan Williams, a third team All-American running back who ran for 1,655 yards (an ACC freshman record) in 2009.

Barring injury, neither player's draft stock will be limited by his physical attributes. Dowling (6'2", 200 pounds) has rare size for a corner, and Williams (5'10", 210) is built well for 300-plus carries a year at the next level.

It's the 40-yard dash—the be-all, end-all event of the annual NFL Combine—that will likely keep these two out of the top 10 overall. Neither is likely to cripple his stock with a slow time, but both have been clocked closer to 4.5 seconds (Dowling barely over, Williams just under) than the ideal of sub-4.4 speed.

The competition they'll face within their position groups is tough to gauge before the underclassmen have officially declared for the draft, but the stars are easy enough to spot. At corner, LSU's Patrick Peterson and Nebraska's Prince Amukamara both have size comparable to Dowling and better timed speed.

Among the 2011 class of running backs, on the other hand, Williams might play spoiler to Penn State senior Evan Royster. He'll be hard-pressed to go as high as Oklahoma's DeMarco Murray or Alabama's Mark Ingram, though—the fastest and strongest, respectively, among this year's top-tier prospects.

Positional value, the last conceivable tiebreaker between Dowling and Williams, is pretty much a toss-up. In the last three NFL drafts, 11 cornerbacks and 11 running backs have gone in the first round.

The difference in their average draft position (20th overall for corners, 19th for backs) is negligible, though the cornerbacks were less likely to go extremely high or low in the first round. Most NFL teams, arguably, could sensibly upgrade one corner spot, whereas a first-round running back is usually either a game-changer or a luxury.

And that's what it'll come down to, ultimately—whether it's Dowling or Williams who suits the tastes of a team picking higher. An early run at either's position could tip the balance; otherwise, expect both to come off the board in the mid-to-late first.

Unlike Virginia and Virginia Tech's November 27 clash in Blacksburg, their race to the 2011 NFL Draft podium figures to be neck-and-neck 'til the end.

With campaign season underway, pols of all stripes are ratcheting up the posturing, self-promotion and equivocation...oh lord the equivocation. Zach Wamp says he doesn't want to secede from the union, despite implying last week that some states may do just that. On the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Jeb Bush is appearing alongside Rand Paul at a campaign function, despite Paul's opposition to the act and it being a cornerstone of George H. W. Bush's presidency. And Brian Bilbray's office is engaging in some damage control after we reported on his cigar association's nefarious activities. We also have reaction to the Afghanistan documents, although Robert Gibbs suggests our mentioning the leak may endanger us all. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Monday, July 26th, 2010:

MOMENTUM FOR FILIBUSTER REFORM - HuffPost Hill spoke with Senate candidates Jack Conway, Elaine Marshall, Paul Hodes and Roxanne Conlin at Netroots Nation, along with a bunch of sitting senators and the executive director of the DSCC, and they all say that there is real grassroots fury at the filibuster and broad support for reforming it. The supermajority requirement in the Senate has become such an obstacle to reform that it infiltrates policy discussions at every step. Last week at the Netroots Nation political conference, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) gathered environmental writers to discuss energy legislation; the first few questions were related to energy, the rest of the conversation was dominated by the filibuster. Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) said that the discussion has radically changed in the Senate. "The tone has changed. It used to be, when I first got here, people would say, 'Why are we doing this this way? This doesn't make any sense. And they would be referring to the procedure and the rules. And the saying always was, 'Oh, we're stuck with these rules. You can't change them. You need 67 votes. It's part of the filibuster. You just can't change it.' And people don't say that anymore," said Udall. Chuck Schumer's Rules Committee meets Wednesday morning to talk rules reform and will hear from Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.). http://huff.to/aRcYHP

GOVERNMENT RESPONDS TO WIKILEAKS RELEASE OF CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS - The exercising of the first amendment, according to a whole bunch of government officials, will apparently harm people defending the first amendment. What a country: "Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, said the military would probably need 'days, if not weeks' to review all the documents and determine 'the potential damage to the lives of our service members and coalition partners.'" http://huff.to/9RZnpA

Gibbs: "You have the potential for names and for operations and for programs to be out there in the public domain, that it, besides being against the law, has the potential to be very harmful to those that are in our military, hose that are cooperating with our military, and those that are working to keep us safe."

Kit Bond, ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Somebody ought to be wearing an orange jumpsuit."

Salon's Justin Elliott highlights a particularly gruesome episode: "In September 2006, in a remote area northeast of Kandahar, troops found a decapitated body on the side of the road, with the knife 'presumed to be used to decapitate him ... still there,' along with a letter. 'The letter states that he was a contractor working for the US at Nawa and that he was murdered because he was helping the US,' the log says. The log ends with 'nothing further to report.'" http://bit.ly/cHJKI5

Meanwhile, the Afghan army we're relying on to take over is a bunch of drug-addled, corrupt incompetents, says Al Jazeera. http://bit.ly/cyB4vy

Robert Gibbs: "I would say Elizabeth Warren is a terrific candidate. I don't think any criticism in any way by anybody would disqualify her. I think she's very confirmable for this job," said the White House press secretary about the Harvard professor whose name has been floated to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that she devised. http://huff.to/9DKVJG

In other Elizabeth Warren news, Tom Udall sent a letter to the White House calling for her appointment.

COMING TOMORROW

CIGAR ASSOCIATION CAUSING PROBLEMS FOR BILBRAY - Local San Diego media have been having a good time with Brian Bilbray's cigar association, which HuffPost Hill reported was run and funded by lobbyists. The Union-Tribune referred to a "cloud of controversy" and noted the club is "under fire." His Democratic challenger said he was "blowing smoke" by defending the organization as a place for staffers and members to discuss trade issues. And there were lots of Freudian variations, such as: "Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Convenient Way to Do Some Political Schmoozing, " and "My That's A Big Cigar You Have, Congressman." There's been some substantive movement, too: "Bilbray staffers said the congressman told the group to rid its leadership of lobbyists," reported the local NBC affiliate. The Union-Tribune, meanwhile, reported that Cigar "Association staffers say their 'officers' are all House staffers, as required, and that the lobbyists on the board are mere figureheads not involved in running the group." That's a flat-out fiction: At least one of the three lobbyists, Thomas Kim, took the lead in sending out the invitation to the group's one-year anniversary." One GOP flack, meanwhile, sent in this advice for Bilbray: "I think Bilbray's crazy for not just saying he didn't know what was being done and when he found out he withdrew his support from it. One letter to house admin saying that and this thing would've been a one day story." Bilbray, of course, is sitting in Duke Cunningham's seat.

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR PORKING: CONGRESS TO TAKE UP APPROPRIATION BILLS - From CQ: "The House will vote this week on the fiscal 2011 Military Construction-VA and Transportation-HUD bills, while appropriators in both chambers continue to move spending measures at the committee and subcommittee levels. As of Monday, House appropriators have moved 10 spending bills through subcommittee, but just two through full committee. In past years, the House had completed action on all of its spending bills by the August break. But growing concerns in both parties this election year about the debt and government spending have made it increasingly difficult to move appropriations bills and measures related to the budget." http://bit.ly/avor6j

Video of the day: Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI), who is quadriplegic, became the first member of Congress in a wheelchair to preside over the House of Representatives today on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. http://bit.ly/b44Cq3

HUFFPOST HILL ENDORSEMENT: ADAM LEWANDOWSKI FOR KINGSBURY GENERAL IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT BOARD OF DIRECTORS IN STATELINE, NEVADA - While ESPN rejected our request to air this announcement live and the Boys and Girls club of Greenwich wanted nothing to do with us, we are proud to throw our weight behind Adam Lewandowski, one of ten candidates for three seats on the Kingsbury General Improvement District Board of Directors. "My campaign strategy has relied pretty heavily on the Alvin Greene effect up to this point ($0 spent on advertising, "informal" campaign rallies in my living room, and hoping they list candidates in alphabetical order by first name so people are inclined to pick me because I'm the first one on the list). While this strategy may be effective, I believe the Huffpost Hill endorsement would give me the bump I need in this important election," he writes in. Lewandowski says he hopes to "be a strong and fair voice on the issue of water metering, to ensure that programs to promote water conservation are put in place without sudden and drastic impacts to ratepayers. I will actively seek funding for market-based incentives (such as rebates for low water use landscaping) to promote water conservation." Adam, a self-described "progressive independent," cites his "background in budget management, environmental planning and engineering" as evidence of his municipal prowess. He adds that he will "strive to maintain the District's high level of service without increasing costs to residents." HuffPost Hill's pinko sympathies are chafed by Lewandowski's market-based proposals, but hell, he's gotta be good enough for at least one of them seats. Questions about Adam's plans for Stateline can be e-mailed to the candidate at adamlewandowski@hotmail.com. Wait. Hotmail? Rethinking that endorsement...

TOMORROW'S PAPERS TODAY - The Hill: Alexander Bolton on how President Obama and Democratic leaders have turned their attention to the Disclose Act, which is expected to come up for a vote Tuesday in the Senate. The bill is not considered likely to pass but it's an important gesture to the liberal base that has lost enthusiasm over the past 20 months because of compromises on healthcare and Wall Street reform and the stalled military mission in Afghanistan. Washington Post: Richard Cohen on how Wikileaks has provided documentation of what we already knew -- that the war in Afghanistan is not going well. Roll Call: Jennifer Bendery reports that the Obama administration is facing new headaches over its war policy with the unauthorized release of tens of thousands of military records outlining a dire picture in Afghanistan. But liberal Democrats are hoping the leaks will fuel new momentum in their push to block the war supplemental when it comes to a vote this week.

JEB BUSH CELEBRATES DISABILITY ACT ANNIVERSARY WITH RAND PAUL, WHO OPPOSES IT - Today is the 20th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), signed into law by former President George H. W. Bush. Today, Bush's son, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, will attend a fundraiser for Kentucky Senate candidate and (we're guessing) owner of 50,000 buffalo head nickels. What makes the pairing so interesting is that Paul opposes the ADA. "I think if you have a two-story office and you hire someone who's handicapped, it might be reasonable to let him have an office on the first floor rather than the government saying you have to have a $100,000 elevator. And I think when you get to solutions like that, the more local the better, and the more common sense the decisions are, rather than having a federal government make those decisions," he said earlier this year. Sam Stein: http://huff.to/aQFhw

This Wednesday, the Brookings Institution will host a discussion with outgoing OMB director and straight up sexy, sexy man Peter Orszag. If you're interested in hearing the gentle purring of America's foremost budget wonk, the event will commence at 10:30 [1775 Massachusetts Ave. NW].

Tomorrow, a group of lawmakers and organization will hold an event promoting the Local Jobs for America Act. Among the groups on hand will be the National League of Cities, the US Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties [Rayburn 2257].

Don't be bashful: Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to huffposthill@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill

DAILY DELANEY DOWNER - From Arthur: "Congress is all set to throw tens of thousands of jobs in the trash as the TANF Emergency Fund expires and subsidized employment programs in several states shut their doors on September 30. The Senate first said nay to reauthorizing this jobs program back in March, before deficit reduction became as cooooool as it is now. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that as a result, the unemployment rate in some states will go up." Story from Arthur Delaney tomorrow morning.

BREAKING: Arthur Delaney gives himself a haircut. It looks great. Developing...

Officials from Google, Facebook, AT&T; and Apple will be on the Capitol Hill hot seat Tuesday at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on online privacy. Bennett Roth in Roll Call: http://bit.ly/dexCkH

ZACH WAMP TACKS LEFT, SAYS HE DOESN'T WANT TENNESSEE TO SECEDE - Last week Tennessee Rep. Zach Wamp suggested that if Congress continues to defy the public by passing President Obama's agenda, some states might have to secede from the union. Some weaklings on the left, made queasy by the prospect of our country being engulfed in a cataclysmic internal conflict, pitting brother versus brother, took issue with this suggestion. This weekend, Wamp clarified his position. "Of course we will not secede from the union," he told reporters. CNN: "Wamp's primary opponents, Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey and Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam, both have said they don't support secession." Good! http://bit.ly/btnjOg

PAWLENTY: 2012 GOP NOMINEE WILL BE SOMEONE WITH PERSONALITY... LIKE ME! - At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast this morning, the Minnesota governor told the crowd that the Republican presidential primary will be more about personality than politics. "There will be general agreement as to the content of the message," he said, "but the real question is going to be ... who is best situated to open the door to people who are not yet Republicans to say we understand what you are going through and we can make a connection with you in ways that have some credibility." You'll never guess who he suggested might fit that mold: http://bit.ly/aoYj2n

A new survey finds Mitt Romney is the early favorite in the primary battlegrounds of Florida and Nevada. PPP: "Romney won the Nevada caucuses in his 2008 bid and he would again if the vote was being held today. 34% of Nevada Republican voters say they prefer Romney to 28% for Newt Gingrich. Sarah Palin at 16%, Mike Huckabee at 11%, and Ron Paul at 7% poll much further back. Romney came up just short in Florida last time, but for now Republicans in the state prefer him to the other leading potential 2012 candidates. Romney gets 31% with Palin and Gingrich tied for second at 23% and Huckabee and Paul further back at 15% and 6% respectively." http://bit.ly/bmS8Gw

POLITICAL DICTIONARY WORD OF THE DAY - Hopper: Legislators introduce bills by placing them in the bill hopper attached to the side of the clerk's desk. The term derives from a funnel-shaped storage bin filled from the top and emptied from the bottom, which is often used to house grain or coal. "After his colleagues left the chamber, Russ Feingold slipped his bill, the 'Will You Go Out With Me Maria Cantwell Y/N Act,' into the hopper." http://bit.ly/cWrGrQ

VIDEO PROVES ANDREW BREITBART HAS COCKTAILS WITH TERRORISTS - After USAD employee Shirley Sherrod was fired due to Andrew Breitbart's suspiciously edited video of her NAACP speech, MoveOn.org struck back this weekend. The liberal group unveiled a new video that remixes a February speech by the conservative media mogul, making it seem as if he says he "hearts" terrorists. A barrel full of LOLs: http://bit.ly/c1hRxT

TOM TANCREDO ENTERS COLORADO GUBERNATORIAL RACE, HUFFPOST HILL TO WRITE ITSELF FOR NEXT FEW MONTHS - The former Republican congressman and darling of the let's-not-get-ahead-of-ourselves-with-women's-suffrage wing of the Republican party says he could enter the race as early as today. "The front-runner Republican candidate for governor, Scott McInnis, has already been wounded by admissions in recent weeks that sections of a water study report that had his name on it several years ago, for which Mr. McInnis was paid $300,000, contained plagiarized material. He blamed a researcher, but apologized and said he should have been more diligent in checking." NYT: http://nyti.ms/a8jwmc

A new ad from Americans for Job Security attacking Colorado Republican Senate candidate Jane Norton appears to either darken the president's face or -- though it would seem impossible -- lighten Michael Bennet's countenance. http://bit.ly/9RZ2Pw

California voters don't much care about Carly Fiorina or Barbara Boxer's hair. A little over a month has passed since Senate candidate and understudy for the TV show "V" Carley Fiorina's open-mic gaff criticizing her Democratic opponent's hair came to light. According to Public Policy Polling, 67% of California voters don't have a preference on way or another. Still, more voters prefer Boxer's hair over Fiorina with 19% choosing their current Senator and 14% her Republican challenger. We report, you decide. http://bit.ly/aoEOA2

ALVIN GREENE (D - The Coen Brothers' Imagination) RECEIVES MOST MEDIA ATTENTION AMONG 2010 CONTENDERS, STUDY, HUFFPOST HILL SUBSCRIBERS FIND - Yahoo's Michael Calderone: "The South Carolina Democrat has been the lead newsmaker in 2010 coverage since coming out of nowhere to win the June 8 Senate primary. Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism crunched the numbers and provided The Upshot with its internal analysis of media coverage across 52 major news outlets, from South Carolina's primary day through July 18. South Carolina Republican gubernatorial contender Nikki Haley came in second place, according to the nonpartisan organization. Other candidates near the top: California's Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln and Nevada's Sharron Angle." http://yhoo.it/dln9DE

Local beat: Spike Mendelsohn's We The Pizza is officially open. The former Top Cheftestant and owner of Good Stuff Eatery and chef Michael Colletti debut their new eatery today. Described as serving "Homemade gelato, Italian sodas, subs, and pizza-by-the-slice options like roasted potato and pancetta and spinach and artichoke" [305 Pennsylvania Ave].

JEREMY THE INTERN'S WEATHER REPORT - After seeing temperatures as high as 106 degrees, it will stay much cooler Tonight. Expect the mercury to top out in the high-80s, with more comfortable 70s overnight. Tomorrow: Expect more of the same, as the Eastern coast of the country is under a beautiful high-pressure system. It could hit the low-90s, but humidity should be a minor annoyance. Thanks, JB

Trivia time!: The lowest air pressure ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere was associated with which storm? As always, winners will get a HuffPost Hill shout out, which is worth its weight in gold. A real head scratcher, JB!

COMFORT FOOD

- Because someone had to: A spoof of "California Gurls" featuring some gloriously pot-bellied dudes. Behold, "Pennsylvania Dudes." http://bit.ly/a8xixD

- Oh yeah, and here's "Staten Island Girls." http://bit.ly/bdlY8M

- A very enthusiastic overview of Super Mario Bros 2. http://bit.ly/bcdyok

- The Jane Austen fight club. http://bit.ly/cpjaa3

- Attention all you single gents, this is NOT the way to get a girlfriend. http://bit.ly/9HNogn

- The ongoing Whale vs. Yacht wars continue. No armistice in sight. http://bit.ly/bcdyok

- The Pat Boone of hip hop...only whiter. http://bit.ly/ddnoco

TWITTERAMA

@pourmecoffee: Rep. Wamp: TN will not break-up with US, loves US, wants to make out with US right now.

@stranahan: BROKEN NEWS : Hit squads, war crimes, unspeakable acts...Wikileaks releases thousands of pages of Mel Gibson phone messages

@ConanOBrien: An LSU professor has invented a remarkable cheap & effective homemade device that soaks up oil. It's called "Conan's face in high school".

THE TUBE

TONIGHT: Chris Matthews spoke with Chellie Pingree, Paul Ryan and Joseph Crowley. On Schultz, Raul Grijalva and Dennis Kucinich discuss the House's relationship with the Senate and the Wikileaks controversy, respectively. TOMORROW: Ed Rendell and Chris Van Hollen stop by Morning Joe. Margaret Brennan reports live from the Gulf on Bloomberg.

ON TAP

TONIGHT

7:00 pm: Chromeo take their brand of hip-hop/electro-funk to 9:30 Club. Trust us, these shows are fun [9:30 Club 815 V Street NW].

8:00 pm: Al Jazeera presents "Dying Inside- Elderly In Prison." A real romp, we hear [Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th Street NW].

8:30 pm - 10:30 pm: This week's installment of Screen on the Green features "12 Angry Men" [700 Independence Avenue SW].

TOMORROW

5:00 pm: "Gasland" a documentary which examines the U.S. natural gas industry, is screened for staffers [B-339 Rayburn].

6:00 pm: The incredible Seu Jorge performs at 9:30 Club. He is joined by Almaz [9:30 Club, 815 V Street NW].

8:00 am: With a (pared-down) energy debate expected in the Senate this week, it's good to see the Democratic leadership getting it's priorities straight. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) hosts an "Energy Industry Breakfast." AGA PAC, Edison International PAC, Sempra Energy Employees PAC, PG&E; Energy PAC, Calpine PAC and Democratic power-player Brian Wolff are hosting [American Gas Association, 400 N Capitol St NW].

8:00 am: Carol Shea-Porter (D-N.H.), forgetting her parents' rule about excluding people, hosts a "Labor Only Breakfast." Debbie Wasserman Schutlz (D-Fla.) [Tortilla Coast, 400 First Street SE].

5:30 pm: The ever quotable Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is in town and attends a campaign function. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) is scheduled to attend [The Monocle Restaurant, 107 D Street NE].

5:30 pm: When he's not accusing liberals of infiltrating health care protests, Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) braises things. The Texas lawmaker hosts "Louie's Famous Ribs" [Strategic Healthcare Townhouse, 230 Second Street SE].

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm: Current favorite in the Arkansas Senate race John Boozman (R-Ark.) hosts a "Young Professionals Reception" [Venable Law Offices Rooftop, 575 7th Street NW].

6:00 pm: You have to admire some lawmakers for the brazen way they name their fundraisers. Wally Herger (R-Calif.) attends his "15th [!] Annual Insurance and Financial Services Dinner." MetLife PAC is among the hosts [Ruth's Chris Steak House, 724 9th Street NW].

6:30 pm - 8:30 pm: Facing her first serious primary challenge since who-knows-when, Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) passes the hat with increased vigor [The Home of Carolyn Maloney, 206 D Street SE].

7:00 pm - 8:30 pm: The DCCC hosts a "99 Days until Election Day" reception featuring unspecified "House Chairmen" [Jones Day, 51 Louisiana Ave, NW].

7:00 pm: John Conyers's (D-Mich.), whose reeelction is much more assured than the Nationals' postseason cheances, hosts a campaign event in Nats Town [Nationals Park, 1500 South Capitol Street SE].

Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffingtonpost.com), Ryan Grim (ryan@huffingtonpost.com) or Nico Pitney (nico@huffingtonpost.com). Follow us on Twitter @HuffPostHill (twitter.com/HuffPostHill). Sign up here: http://huff.to/an2k2e

In the House, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

First Vote of the Week... Monday 6:00 p.m.
Last Vote Predicted... Friday p.m.

MONDAY, JULY 26, 2010

On Monday, the House will meet at 12:30 p.m. for Morning Hour debate and 2:00 p.m. for legislative business with votes postponed until 6:00 p.m.

Suspensions (9 Bills)

1. H.Res. 1504 - Recognizing and honoring the 20th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (Rep. Hoyer - Education and Labor)
2. H.R. 3101 - Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (Rep. Markey (MA) - Energy and Commerce)
3. H.Res. 1058 - Honoring and praising the Sojourn to the Past organization on the occasion of its 10th anniversary (Rep. Lewis (GA) - Education and Labor)
4. H.Res. 1543 - Honoring the educational significance of Dr. Jane Goodall's work on this the 50th anniversary of the beginning of her work in Tanzania, Africa (Rep. Polis - Education and Labor)
5. H.Res. 1456 - Congratulating the University of Dayton men's basketball team for winning the 2010 National Invitation Tournament basketball championship (Rep. Turner - Education and Labor)
6. H.Con.Res. 275 - Expressing support for designation of the week beginning on the second Sunday of September as Arts in Education Week. (Rep. Speier - Education and Labor)
7. H.R. 1320 - Federal Advisory Committee Act Amendments (Rep. Clay - Oversight and Government Reform)
8. H.Con.Res. 226 - Supporting the observance of "Spirit of '45 Day" (Rep. Filner - Oversight and Government Reform)
9. H.Res. 1525 - Honoring the 50th anniversary of the publication of "To Kill a Mockingbird", a classic American novel authored by Nelle Harper Lee of Monroeville, Alabama (Rep. Bonner - Oversight and Government Reform)

TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2010 AND THE BALANCE OF THE WEEK

On Tuesday, the House will meet at 9:00 a.m. for Morning Hour debate and 10:00 a.m. for legislative business. On Wednesday and Thursday, the House will meet at 10:00 a.m. for legislative business. On Friday, the House will meet at 9:00 a.m. for legislative business.

Suspensions (25 Bills)

1. H.R. 5730 - Surface Transportation Earmark Rescission, Savings, and Accountability Act (Rep. Markey (CO) - Transportation and Infrastructure)
2. H.Con.Res. 258 - Congratulating the Commandant of the Coast Guard and the Superintendent of the Coast Guard Academy and its staff for 100 years of operation of the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut (Rep. Courtney - Transportation and Infrastructure)
3. H.Res. 1401 - Expressing gratitude for the contributions that the air traffic controllers of the United States make to keep the traveling public safe and the airspace of the United States running efficiently (Rep. McCarthy (NY) - Transportation and Infrastructure)
4. H.Res. 1366 - Recognizing and honoring the freight rail industry (Rep. Hare - Transportation and Infrastructure)
5. H.R. 5825 - To review, update, and revise the factors to measure the severity, magnitude, and impact of a disaster and to evaluate the need for assistance to individuals and households (Rep. Hill - Transportation and Infrastructure)
6. H.Con.Res. 266 - Expressing the sense of Congress that Taiwan should be accorded observer status in the International Civil Aviation Organization (Rep. Berkley - Foreign Affairs)
7. H.Res. 1538 - Condemning the July 11, 2010, terrorist attacks in Kampala, Uganda (Rep. Davis (CA) - Foreign Affairs)
8. H.R. 1623 - International Megan's Law (Rep. Smith (NJ) - Foreign Affairs)
9. H.R. 3040 - Senior Financial Empowerment Act (Rep. Baldwin - Judiciary)
10. Senate Amendments to H.R. 2765 - Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act (Rep. Cohen - Judiciary)
11. H.R. 5281 - Removal Clarification Act of 2010 (Rep. Johnson (GA) - Judiciary)
12. H.R. 2780 - Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act (Rep. Rooney - Judiciary)
13. H.R. 5827 - Protecting Gun Owners in Bankruptcy Act of 2010 (Rep. Boccieri - Judiciary)
14. H.R. 5143 - National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2010 (Rep. Delahunt - Judiciary)
15. H.R. 5810 - Securing Aircraft Cockpits Against Lasers Act of 2010 (Rep. Lungren - Judiciary)
16. H.R. __ - To provide for an additional temporary extension of programs under the Small Business Act and the Small Business Investment Act of 1958 (Rep. Velazquez - Small Business)
17. H.R. 5681 - To improve certain administrative operations of the Library of Congress (Rep. Brady (PA) - House Administration)
18. H.R. 5682 - To improve the operation of certain facilities and programs of the House of Representatives (Rep. Brady (PA) - House Administration)
19. H.R. 415 - Fallen Heroes Flag Act (Rep. King (NY) - House Administration)
20. H.R. 2480 - Truth in Fur Labeling Act of 2009 (Rep. Moran (VA) - Energy and Commerce)
21. H.R. 5320 - Assistance, Quality, and Affordability Act of 2010 (Rep. Waxman - Energy and Commerce)
22. H.R. 1796 - Residential Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Prevention Act (Rep. Matheson - Energy and Commerce)
23. H.R. 5156 - Clean Energy Technology Manufacturing and Export Assistance Act of 2010 (Rep. Matsui - Energy and Commerce)
24. H.R. 4692 - National Manufacturing Strategy Act of 2010 (Rep. Lipinski - Energy and Commerce)
25. H.R. 847 - James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act (Rep. Maloney - Energy and Commerce)

H.R. 5822 - Making appropriations for military construction, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2011 (Rep. Edwards (TX) – Appropriations) (Subject to a Rule)

H.R. __ - Department of Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2011 (Rep. Olver – Appropriations) (Subject to a Rule)

Further Action on H.R. 4899 - Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2010 (Rep. Obey – Appropriations) (Subject to a Rule)

• Conference Reports may be brought up at any time.
• Motions to go to Conference should they become available.
• Possible Motions to Instruct Conferees.

In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

Monday:

Convenes: 3:00pm

Following the prayer and pledge, the Senate will resume consideration of the motion to proceed to S.3628, a bill to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to prohibit foreign influence in Federal elections, to prohibit government contractors from making expenditures with respect to such elections, and to establish additional disclosure requirements with respect to spending in such elections (DISCLOSE Act).

There will be no roll call votes during Monday’s session of the Senate.

Votes:
There will be no roll call votes on Monday, July 26.

Tuesday:

Votes:

2:45pm roll call vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to the DISCLOSE Act (S.3628).

August is coming, and in Washington that means recess. Like, for the whole month. This is serious business. Or not-business, I suppose. And what better way to get ready for a month without any legislative business than to spend the week leading up to it on 34 suspensions? Well, that and a few appropriations bills, which means spending money. There are three "approps" bills on the schedule for this week. Two are regular, annual appropriations bills (of which there are 12) which are normally passed to fund government operations. Military construction, usually among the least controversial each year, is up this week. But I wouldn't have guessed that we'd see Transportation/HUD leading into the recess. That usually sparks a little more fight, though probably not as much as Labor/HHS.

The real fight, if there is one, will be over the supplemental. We've been talking about the supplemental for a while now, but by way of background, it's not (supposed to be) one of the routine 12 annual bills (one each from the 12 appropriations subcommittees) that fund the government. They're for "emergency" spending not covered or otherwise unforeseen by the 12 regular bills. But they've become routine nonetheless -- mainly used for funding the apparently unforeseen multiple wars -- and that alone is something of a sore point for retiring Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-MN-07).

Obey has drawn a line in the sand this year, insisting that including the war funding in the supplemental (a practice that Democrats including President Obama campaigned on the promise of ending) was out of the question unless critical domestic priorities were funded along with the war. The House sent out a supplemental that at first had no war funding, but it was added by the Senate and sent back to the House. That's when Obey said OK, but there's got to be this additional domestic funding.

Well, the Senate just said no to that last week and handed it back to the House. So the question this week is whether the House insists on its position, or buys into the old line about how the whole 60 vote thing makes it so tough in the Senate, and wouldn't it just be better if the House would just STFU and pass what the Senate tells them they're comfortable passing? Stay tuned to see how that one comes out. And yes, that makes the supplemental your filibuster reform story of the day, though it's still developing.

On the Senate schedule this week: the DISCLOSE Act, billed as the legislative response to Citizens United, and a BANANAS favorite.

This week's committee schedule appears below

With all the draining drama of "The Decision" saga and parties happening at South Beach, LeBron James left Cleveland as a jilted lover in tears. Shortly after there was the aggravated insanity and stereotypical remarks that sounded out of the mouth of Rev. Jesse Jackson, who went over the top by lashing out about Cavs owner Dan Gilbert’s vindictive comments in a letter, that had to be dealt with.

But it’s now the mid-summer months, a time when the media circus initiate a ruckus in football as the average fanatic speculates on Brett Favre. The indefinite facet is that nobody knows whether he’s returning next season or not, leery to believe him during his summer episodes and eternal deliberations.

Every summer, his decision-making interrupts our sports society and our airwaves, as we guess whether he will retire or un-retire instead of taking a retirement plan and traveling home to the rural areas of Mississippi. The craziness of Favrecenter finally begins to adopt our consciousness in an agitating frenzy, and it normally lasts eternally.

Instead of making up his damn mind, he annoyingly makes a nuisance out of himself, affecting the decisions of other people. With that said, maybe we suffered headaches because of his epic retiring/un-retiring turbulence, largely impelling exhausting debates and vigilant explosion.

All I know is that each summer of the annual adventure involving Favre I suffered severe headaches and needed Tylenol to alleviate pain. The caveat of avoiding possible headaches is to ignore the tiring madness, though it’s very difficult whenever the status of his future remains indefinite.

Mired in uncertainty, Favre is overly dramatic and creates publicity hype for such a narcissistic, egomaniacal and self-loving persona, wearing down all of us jaded with his unknown decision. A little more than two years ago, you probably grew weary of his wishy-washiness. The problem is you’ve never stopped adoring the game of a gunslinger, a damn near perfectionist on Sundays, with unbelievable precision and stylish footwork.

Rarely, if ever, has a future Hall of Famer hurled passes this late in terms of his long-tenure as arguably the greatest quarterback of all-time. Few still are curious to know if he’s planning on making a comeback and possibly engineering the Minnesota Vikings back to the top in the NFC North division. But hearing all the time that Favre is uncertain and won’t inform the Vikings of a potential comeback is tiring.

By all accounts, he’s more concerned with appeasing himself than pleasing Brad Childress, the one coach who willingly brought in Favre and allowed the self-centered, aging veteran inspire a doomed organization of inconsistencies and uselessness in the mournful quarterback department.

Now is a good time for Favre to weigh options, but, of course, he won’t give a timetable because his ego is larger than a crusader’s voyager, bigger than the land of 10,000, and bigger than the population in Minnesota. Most notably, though, he’s obviously resisting the disclosure of his status to return or retire in order to avoid mini camp and training camp.

That is exactly his initial plans, with an attitude that preparations or minor workouts in the offseason aren't mandatory. It’s worth bringing to your attention that explosive running back Adrian Peterson missed mandatory minicamp and traveled home instead of joining teammates. The Vikings give Favre this kind of freedom, without even cringing or raising a fuss, favoring the selfishness of an uncertain veteran demanding for a very patient franchise to wait for a public announcement.

If he decides to return for another season in the league, the Vikings will welcome in the old-timer with a savvy mindset after never compromising and unselfishly informing Childress of his plans next season. If so, it would be an immense boon for an atmosphere truly embracing and adoring Favre, selling tickets and watching television ratings grow.

All the worshippers and cynics are gushing over the diva-like quarterback in the summer, wondering if he will ever return or permanently sit on his couch and ride his tractor to mow grass. Ever since he announced his so-called retirement at an emotional press conference, he hasn’t been able to be distance himself from the game, even when he claimed he was mentally and physically drained.

It’s apparent he missed the game that brought fame and gratification, what with his constantly retiring, un-retiring, retiring, un-retiring.  The pattern is common, as is our weariness with his wishy-washy psyche, as Favre is seen waffling on his state turning the charade into a publicity dilemma.

He clearly can return for his 20^th season in the NFL, but when the season ended so abruptly after suffering the disappointing loss to the Saints in the NFC Championship Game, he said it was “highly unlikely” that he’ll come back. If anything, he owes this to Childress for hiring him as the starting quarterback and having strong confidence that he can orchestrate heroics and lead the Vikings to a long-awaited title.

When no other team pleaded for Favre, Childress was amiable in giving the legendary quarterback a call, asking him whether the Vikings were a precise suitor. It was very feasible at first that the Vikings were the potential frontrunners in landing Favre.  Especially after allegedly being accused of tampering before his contract had expired in Green Bay.

Within moments, he was labeled as a traitor for joining the Vikings, the Packers divisional foes and most hated rivals. Last season, he was booed badly for such betrayal in his return to Lambeau Field, akin to what is unfolding in a jilted Cleveland. 

He denies ever coming back for revenge, but only out of admiration for the game. We may never know. It’s very unlikely that he will retire and call it quits on a franchise in the position of possibly winning a Super Bowl, surrounded with marquee players and dangerous weapons.

Although he could be unhappy with the way Childress chastised him for skipping mandatory meetings, Peterson is an explosive running back and untouchable if he secures the ball and limits fumbling. Among all things, he could rely on a prolific receiving core by flinging passes to Sidney Rice and Percy Harvin, viable elements that carried the Vikings deep into the playoffs.

The common theory from most perspectives is that he ages moderately, with his grayish beard and streaks of gray hair. There’s a real good feeling that he’s returning. He may be worried about his aching bones, aging body or slower recoveries, but he's prepared to suit up and emerge from the tunnels for another season.

Being the oldest papa tossing passes in the NFL, he will likely design the playbook by dictating his own plays and calling audibles.  This had an unrelenting Childress losing his mind last year.  Eventually resulting in a heated confrontation between him and Favre on the sidelines, when he tried yanking his leader in the third quarter.

This is the moment when his critics have ammunition, while he has the leverage to join the team whenever he’s ready. If he doesn’t return, it won’t be for taking on another job in mowing grass or committing time to a laborious task on the farm, but it will be for his surgically repaired ankle. He said his ankle has limited his physical abilities.

With a debilitated ankle that requires a healthy recovery, which hasn’t allowed him to pivot or scramble efficiently, Favre will probably underperform.  Thus he is probably carefully considering retirement.  He is already the most accomplished quarterback ever, grabbing record-setting plateaus, collecting two MVP awards, and winning a lone Super Bowl title.

What else is there to accomplish? This would be the time to leave the game on top, but knowing Favre, he’ll be back.        

Just how dynamic is the US job market? If I told you we created over 4 million jobs in April, would you believe me? I had a long conversation with Mohamed El-Erian of PIMCO yesterday. He is openly speculating that employment may no longer be just a lagging indicator but may also be predictive. It is an interesting insight, which we will explore as we take a very deep look at US employment. And I answer a few questions about my thought that there is a 60% chance for a recession in 2011, and why there is a 40% chance we won't. What could change those numbers? We explore that and more, while I suffer from the injustice that LeBron will play with Wade and Bosh. Where's a nonproliferation treaty when you need it?

First a quick commercial note. I want to let Conversations subscribers know that we will post on Monday a Conversation I recently did with Rick Rule and Marin Katusa. Rick is a decades-long friend and maybe the smartest and most successful resource investor I know of. Katusa writes a resource letter for Casey Research and is wicked smart on energy. This is a very good piece that you don't want to miss, as Katusa identifies what he thinks are some of the really great new energy plays.

A month or so ago we also posted a Conversation with two noted hedge-fund managers, Kyle Bass of Hayman Advisors (and his staff) here in Dallas and Hugh Hendry of the Eclectica Fund in London. Our discussion centered on what we all think has the potential to be the next Greece, but on a far more serious level (that would be Japan).

That garnered a lot of positive response. Herb wrote, "Wow. What a great discussion. What smart guests, how little BS. Congratulations. It's the best of your Conversations that I've listened to."

And ACK wrote: "Wow!! Just the most important discussion I have been treated to as an investor and fund manager this year or last. Your product is dreadfully underpriced, as it delivers more value and education than almost any other subscription that I have... Thanks so much... This particular conversation was just mind-blowing!"

Actually, we get that last comment almost every issue, as we somehow seem to connect the dots for different listeners. When we started, I promised to do 6-8 a year, and we have already posted 6 timely Conversations in the first 6 months of this year, including my special Biotech Series as well as the Geopolitical Series with George Friedman.

For new readers, Conversations with John Mauldin is my one subscription service. While this letter will always be free, we have created a way for you to "listen in" on my conversations (or read the transcripts) with some of my friends, many of whom you will recognize and some whom you will want to know after you hear our conversations. Basically, I call one or two friends every now and then, and just as we do at dinner or at meetings, we talk about the issues of the day, back and forth, with give and take and friendly debate. I think you will find it enlightening and thought-provoking and a real contribution to your education as an investor.

As noted above, I have also recorded a Conversation with Mohamed El-Erian, who is one of the smartest human beings I know, as well as one of the nicest. We will work hard to get it up ASAP.  As you can see, I can get some rather interesting people to come to the table. Current subscribers can renew for a deeply discounted $129, and we will extend that price to new subscribers as well. To learn more, go to http://www.johnmauldin.com/newsletters2.html. Click on the Subscribe button, and join me and my friends for some very interesting Conversations. (I know the price says $199 on the site, but for now you will only be charged for $129 - I promise.)

All of the previous Conversations are posted and available, as well as most of the speeches from my Strategic Investment Conference a few months ago. I do work hard to make sure my subscribers get more than their money's worth. And now, to the letter.

It's More Than Just Birth/Death

Last week, I wrote about the Birth/Death Adjustment in the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly employment numbers. Jeff Miller took me to task in his blog for not noting that the B/D numbers are not seasonally adjusted (which I know) and a few other items. I did some research on his work on employment numbers and came away with a few new thoughts that I think are worth sharing. Miller (a former professor and a nice guy) and I spent several hours on the phone talking about the BLS data and what he sees as an unusual divergence in the data, which I agree is far more interesting than the B/D Assessment.

To get to the interesting part, I am going to risk boring you with a few wonkish background paragraphs. First, let's look at the basic process of how the BLS does its survey. Basically, the BLS tries to count every job in the US every month. They survey 140,000 businesses and governments representing about 410,000 worksites each month. It takes a while to get companies to respond. You get about 60% on the first round, another 20% the second round, and another 10% the next time. That is why there are revisions each month to previous data as the BLS gets more accurate info. And since the revisions represent a significant number of businesses, the direction of the prior month's data revision is often more important than the current number.

But that also means that the BLS must make an estimate concerning the other 10% who did not respond. They more or less assume that those who didn't respond are statistically like those who did. One of Miller's points is that this estimated number is far larger than the B/D Assessment.

It's a Seasonal Thing

The non-seasonally adjusted number for any given month is a VERY noisy, volatile number. If that number made the headlines it would cause massive rejoicing or heart attacks each month. Let's look at just how volatile it is.

First, there are about 130 million employed people in the US. Every month we get a report called the JOLTS report (the Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey) on data a few months old, which is mostly ignored because it is "old" data. Last June 8, we got the data for April. There were 3.1 million job openings, up from 2.5 million a year ago. 4.3 million people found jobs and 4 million either voluntarily left or were laid off. In one month. And that pretty much has been the case every month for the last year or so, but note that the number on the positive side of the ledger is down a million from what it was a few years ago. Remember, this is not net job creations we are talking about, just activity.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, in January 2010 we lost 2.8 million jobs (January is always a big loser). In April and May we created 1.1 million jobs each month. And then there were the 1.5 million we lost last July or the 224,000 we gained last April while we were still in recession. September and October saw a combined 1 million jobs, November was plus 80,000, while December shed 521,000.

Like I said, it's all over the place. One month you're way up and the next you're way down. Then you could be flat. There is in fact a seasonality or rhythm to the numbers, but that is way too much detail for this letter.

So, why does the BLS use the Birth/Death Assessment? They found out early this decade they were missing new businesses, so they created the B/D Assessment to try to get closer to the real number.

Nine months (more or less) after the BLS does it payroll employment number, we get the actual number from the state employment insurance reports. Since no one will pay unemployment insurance on employees they don't have, if you add up the number of employees in the program, you come pretty close to the actual number (again, with some adjustments).

That and other data allow the BLS to adjust the unemployment numbers to something on the order of pretty darn close. By adding in their B/D Assessment they have been able to reduce their revisions rather dramatically. The following chart shows what the revisions would have been without using the B/D model, and what they are by using it. Clearly the B/D numbers have been useful in damping down the volatility in the BLS employment data. Since they started using this number, the average revision has been less than 0.2%.

Stay with me. The BLS adds the non-seasonally adjusted B/D number to the non-seasonally adjusted survey numbers and then seasonally adjusts the total, so that the number we get each month have a more smoothed appearance.

And Miller is right about this. The imputations they must make for non-respondees is far larger than the B/D Assessment. And in months with large basic survey numbers the difference the B/D numbers makes is very small. In other months it can have more impact, but it does smooth out the overall number. I stand corrected.

When you think about it, the fact that the BLS can survey an economy with 130 million jobs that sees 3% of those jobs change each month, with tens of millions of new jobs being created and lost each year and hundreds of thousands of new businesses being created or dying, and then get within + or – 100,000 jobs with reasonable probability on their number, is pretty good.

A Breakdown in Communications

Miller tracks job creation and losses from yet another report, the BED report, which is based on state unemployment insurance data and is thus accurate, if nine months behind. Let's look at the chart he produces:

Note that even in the worst of the Great Recession, the US was creating almost 6 million jobs a quarter. It's just that we were losing over 8 million, so unemployment rose dramatically.

Second, Miller notes that job creation and loss more or less tracked with each other for the last ten years, until early 2009, when the relationship simply fell apart. In our discussion, he was curious about the reason for this. I told him I think the reason is in the next charts I am going to show you. (You can see his piece on the whole employment issue, with a lot more detail, at http://oldprof.typepad.com/a_dash_of_insight/2010/06/understanding-the-employment-issue.html.)

Notice the dramatic falloff in bank lending below. It occurred about the same time as the large differential in the job loss and gain numbers. Also notice that lending at large banks is down by over 25%, and there seems to be no sign of that improving. Leverage and loans allowed small and medium-sized businesses to expand. That blood supply has been cut off, and with it the job creation that comes from business expansion.

Mohamed El-Erian's thought is that employment is now a leading indicator in the sense that the Fed and other policy makers look at the employment numbers and adjust their policies going forward, influencing the economy of the future.

Some Thoughts on Double-Dip Recessions

Let me be clear about something. The US economy should not dip back into recession next year. I certainly think the data tells us it will slow down as the stimulus starts to go away, but a slow Muddle Through Economy is not a recession. Double-dip recessions are rare. The last one we had was in 1980-82, and then it was Volker with his foot on the inflation brake that caused it.

The reason I think that we could see a double-dip recession is the rather large tax increases (over 1% of GDP) that will come beginning in January 2011, coupled with large tax increases or spending cuts at the state and local levels (also 1% of GDP). We will get to see whether taxes matter.

Now, if Congress decides to delay those tax increases or stretch them out over a few years, or reduce them, that assessment could change. Right now, there seems to be little talk about doing that. Stay tuned.

Vancouver, New York, Maine, etc.

I fly to Vancouver in two weeks for the Agora Wealth Symposium and will also do an event with my Canadian partner John Nicola on the evening of the 20^th. Then back home for a few weeks before I fly with my son Trey to New York for a day and then on to our annual fishing gig in Maine with David Kotok and friends. It looks like CNBC will be covering it again this year. I will come back to NYC for a day, then it's on to Washington DC and then Miami and a five-day vacation with good friend Barry Habib in the Caribbean. Life is good.

I am working furiously on my book, The End Game. Slowly, it is taking shape. It is a challenge to write a book even a Congressman can understand.

And I guess my dismay at LeBron going to Miami (who I congratulate, as I wish we had those guys here in Dallas!) is tempered by the announcement a few hours ago that the Texas Rangers signed Cliff Lee. Finally, a real pitcher to go with our hitting. Maybe this year we could see a game in October. It's funny, since I moved from the ballpark a few years back, I have not been back for a game. Looks like I will start to try and hustle some tickets.

Have a great week. And here's hoping Mark Cuban can figure out how to sign our own nuclear options to go with Dirk.

Your just almost having more fun than the law allows analyst,

John Mauldin
John@FrontLineThoughts.com

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The 2009-10 NBA season is over, and the NBA draft is in the books. Now it’s time to focus our attention on the annual NBA free agency buffet, with one caveat: This year’s buffet features filet mignon with the superstar trio of Lebron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh headlining the menu. Every NBA franchise should be lining up to partake in this wondrous bounty of talent, right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, looming in the backdrop of this year’s free agency market are two storm clouds —the financial restrictions placed on owners because of the current recession and the pending Collective Bargaining Agreement that has the potential to stall the NBA season altogether just like in 1998-99.

With so much uncertainly, it pays to have your major pieces locked into existing contracts, and it is even more beneficial if the majority of your roster is intact before the free agent market opens on July 1.

This brings us to the San Antonio Spurs and their roster projection for 2010. Last year the Spurs made the biggest splash in free agency by signing Antonio McDyess and acquiring Richard Jefferson through trade. They effectively used up their cap space originally earmarked for this summer one year earlier. While the end result wasn’t another championship title or even a conference finals appearance, the long-term wisdom of their decision to use their cap space in 2009 should not go unnoticed.

Consider this: The Spurs will enter the 2010-11 season with the same starting five and two primary reserves from last season (Tim Duncan, Antonio McDyess, Richard Jefferson, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker, DeJuan Blair and George Hill). This lineup was key in their surprising first round victory over their in-state rivals, the Dallas Mavericks. One should expect this core to play better in 2010 after one year of on-the-job training and another summer camp. 

Also under contract are two young wing players (Alonzo Gee and Malik Hairston) who have spent several years learning the Spurs' system as players for the D-league Austin Toros. This gives the Spurs nine players under contract prior to the start of free agency.  Most teams do not play more than an eight or nine man rotation during the course of the regular season. Nevertheless we should expect the Spurs to carry anywhere from the league minimum of 12 players to the maximum of 15.

Who might the Spurs target to fill out their roster, and what effect could these players have on the team? The primary target of the Spurs this summer is their 2007 1st round draft pick, Tiago Splitter.

In 2007 Splitter chose to remain in his native country of Spain and play international basketball instead of going to the NBA. However, the Spurs still retained his draft rights. Now there are clear indicators that Splitter will choose to opt out of his current contract in favor of playing in the NBA. Shortly after July 1 we should know if Tiago Splitter will be the 10th player added to the Spurs roster. Splitter would bring much needed size and athleticism to the aging frontcourt of the San Antonio Spurs.

With the 20th overall pick in the 2010 draft, the Spurs acquired another wing player with the selection of James Anderson, who will bring another scoring option to the team. He averaged 22 points last season with Oklahoma State, and at 6’6” he should be a suitable replacement for Roger Mason at a third of the cost.

As previously mentioned, many teams will be hampered in their quests for free agents because of financial restraints; the Spurs are not exempt. In fact with nine players already under contract,  San Antonio exceeds the projected salary cap of $56 million and is close to the projected luxury tax threshold of $68 million. This means every player starting with Tiago Splitter and James Anderson will cost the team a dollar for dollar per contract.

The Spurs will take advantage of three exceptions (Mid-Level, Bi-Annual and Minimum Salary) to fill out their roster.  San Antonio will most likely use the MLE to sign Tiago Splitter. Expect them to target another shooter like Mike Miller or Kyle Korver with their BAE. Of course they might just decide to use it on Matt Bonner, which would eliminate the learning curve the aforementioned players would experience.

By signing any of these three outstanding sharpshooters the Spurs would bring their roster to 12. They could play the majority of the regular season with 12 players under contract in order to keep the cost down, but more than likely they will fill the seats at the end of their bench with a revolving door of players from their D-League affiliate.

The San Antonio Spurs are going into the new season the way they left it, with their major parts intact. They will attempt to fill various holes through draft picks and various exceptions. Will it be enough to give Tim Duncan and company one last shot at glory?

Time will tell.

Chapter 10

of

Globalization and Maritime Power
Sam J. Tangredi, editor (Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 2003), pp. 189-200.

Asia’s Energy Future: The Military-Market Link

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Globalization has resulted in the expansion of market capitalism throughout much of the world, particularly in East Asia.¹ Even China, with its recent entry into the World Trade Organization, appears poised to open its markets and unleash its commercial potential. China could be the world’s largest auto market by 2020, increasing the oil needs of its enormous population by 40 percent. Obviously, this would have significant effects on the already-globalized energy market. In light of these global effects, both the Pentagon and Wall Street must understand their interrelationship: economic and political stability are crucial to reducing energy market risk.

As is evident in chapter 6, the Department of Navy is continuing its effort to enunciate the presumed linkage between the Navy’s worldwide operations and the progressive unfolding of economic globalization. The goal is nothing less than the Holy Grail of naval presence arguments: proof positive that ship numbers—especially aircraft carriers—matter to international stability.² Some of this analytic effort will be rightly dismissed as pouring old wine into new bottles because many “Navy-as-the-glue-of-globalization” formulations sound an awful lot like the old bromides about the “Navy as the glue of Asia.” Nice work if you can get it, but given the relative lack of naval crisis response in East Asia since the end of the Vietnam War, it is a hard story to sell. Simply put, once the Shah of Iran fell in 1979, U.S. naval crisis response activity quickly became concentrated on Southwest Asia—a pattern that continues to this day.³ As far as “proving” the utility of naval presence, East Asia has long remained the dog that did not bark.

But all that is about to change, if you believe the stunning Department of Energy projections of growing Asian energy consumption over the next 20 years.⁴ Not only do a lot of bad things have to not happen over the next 2 decades, but also a lot of good things must occur in both East Asia and the Middle East—and across all paths in between—to ensure the region’s much-anticipated economic maturation will actually occur. In short, if you want a Pacific Century, you will need a U.S. Pacific Fleet—strong in numbers and forward deployed.

Asian Energy: A Globalization Decalogue

For several years, a Naval War College project (NewRuleSets.Project) on how globalization alters definitions of international security has provided considerable opportunity for an examination of the views of Wall Street executives, as well as of regional security experts (both military and civilian), on Asia’s future economic and political development.⁵ The following decalogue (summarized in table 10–1) distills the essential rule sets our project has identified concerning Asia’s energy future:⁶

Global energy market has the necessary resources

Asia as a whole currently uses about as much energy as the United States, or about 100 quadrillion British thermal units.⁷ By 2020, however, Asia will roughly double its energy consumption, while U.S. consumption will rise just more than 25 percent. Asia’s plus-ups are significant no matter what the energy category, as evidenced in the following current estimates:

• oil consumption to increase by roughly 88 percent
• natural gas by 191 percent
• coal by 97 percent
• nuclear power by 87 percent when Japan is included, but 178 percent for the rest
• hydroelectric and other renewables by 109 percent.

This is a genuine changing of the guard in the global marketplace—a shifting of the world’s “demand center.” Today, North America accounts for just under a third of the world’s energy consumption, with Asia second at 24 percent. But within one generation, those two regions will swap both global rankings and percentage shares. In short, Asia becomes the world’s center of gravity for energy flows, giving it virtually the same market clout as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries—or North America and Western Europe combined.

The good news is that there’s plenty of fossil fuel to go around. Confirmed oil reserves have jumped almost two-thirds over the past 20 years, according to the Department of Energy, while natural gas reserves have roughly doubled. Meanwhile, our best estimates on coal say we have enough for the next 2 centuries. So supply is not the issue, and neither is demand, leaving only the question of moving the energy from those who have it to those who need it—and therein lies the rub.

Slide from old NewRuleSets.Project brief

But no stability, no market

Asia comes close to self-sufficiency only in coal, with Australia, China, India, and Indonesia the big producers. All told, Asia self-supplies on coal to the tune of 97 percent, a standard it will maintain through 2020. That is important, because virtually all of the global growth in coal use over the next generation will happen in Asia, mostly in just China and India.

Natural gas is a far different story. In 2001, Asia will used around 10 trillion cubic feet, with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan representing the lion’s share of consumption. The three of them already buy virtually all of the region’s currently available methane (for example, from Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia). The trick is this: Asia’s demand for natural gas skyrockets to perhaps 25 trillion cubic feet by 2020, with the majority of the increase occurring outside of that trio. So if those three countries already buy what is available in-region, that means the rest of Asia will have to go elsewhere—namely, the former Soviet Union (Russia with 33 percent of the world total) and the Middle East (Iran with 16 percent). This is what futurists might call an historical inevitability.

Finally, even though oil will decline as a percentage share in every major Asian economy over the coming years, absolute demand will grow by leaps and bounds. Asia currently burns about as much oil as the United States, or roughly 20 million barrels/day (mbd). Since oil is mostly about transportation nowadays, and Asia is looking at a quintupling of its car fleet by 2020, there is a huge swag placed on this projection. The latest Department of Energy forecast is roughly 36 mbd, but even that means Asia as a whole has to import an additional 12 mbd from out of region, or close to double what it imports today from the Persian Gulf region.⁸

Asia already buys roughly two-thirds of all the oil produced in the Persian Gulf, and by 2010 that share will rise to approximately 75 percent.⁹ Meanwhile, the West’s share of Gulf oil will drop from just under a quarter today to just over a tenth in 2010. The strategic upshot is that the two most anti-Western corners of the globe are inexorably coming together over energy and money over the coming years. Increasingly, the Middle East becomes dependent on economic stability in Asia, and Asia on political-military stability in the Gulf. If either side of that equation fails, the energy market is put at risk.

No growth, no stability

All this predicted growth engenders social expectations. In other words, Asia’s developing societies have been placed on consumption trajectories that are nothing short of revolutionary. As a middle class develops in these countries (small as a percentage but enormous as an absolute number), a significant portion of the global population is being rapidly promoted from an 18th- or 19th-century lifestyle into a 20th- or even 21st-century consumption pattern—and they will get used to it pretty darn fast.

Moreover, if Thomas Friedman’s “electronic herd” of international investors decides to take it all away one afternoon in a flurry of currency attacks and capital flight, the struggling segment of the population that suddenly finds itself expelled from the would-be middle class is likely to get upset. This is basically what happened in Indonesia following the tumultuous events of the Asian Flu of 1997–1998. Huge portions of Indonesia’s economy had experienced rapid development in the preceding generation, only to see it disappear virtually one fickle market day.

Yes, some good resulted; Suharto’s crony capitalism collapsed, but with it went much of the country’s emerging middle class. Now, as the country disintegrates into pockets of chaos, the machetes are flying as disoriented villagers work nightly to dispatch the “sorcerers” and “black ninjas” purported to be behind this continuing economic decline. In short, Indonesia loses its growth trajectory and suddenly finds itself transported back in time several centuries.¹⁰

No resources, no growth

Asia cannot grow without a huge influx of out-of-area energy resources. The quintupling of cars is impressive enough, when you consider that General Motors predicts China will indeed be the world’s largest car market in 2020.¹¹ But even more stunning is the three-fold increase in electricity consumption, which will be generated mostly by coal and—increasingly—natural gas. Put those two together, and we are talking about an Asia that must open up to the outside world to a degree unprecedented in modern history. Or to put it in another way, Asia’s choice of energy will largely determine its attitude on globalization. China is the classic example here.

One can think of China’s decisions about its pattern of energy consumption as a choice between the past (coal), the present (oil), and the future (methane, or natural gas). If China chooses to remain, as much as possible, in the “past” with coal, this decision will essentially delay its full-fledged absorption into the global economy. This is clearly the path of least resistance for Beijing, and there lies the temptation, for the perception of autonomy afforded by coal allows China to:

• remain more opaque to outside scrutiny
• retain more control over its energy future
• continue the more easily directed top-down path of extensive growth (that is, more inputs versus more productivity).

If China chooses to move—as much as possible—into the “future” with natural gas, this decision will speed up its full-fledged absorption into the global economy. This is obviously a far more difficult path, because it:

• opens the country to greater interdependency with the outside world
• forces more transparency upon its financial systems
• asks it to trade control for calculated risk (nothing is guaranteed in the free market)
• demands a far greater push for intensive-style economic growth.

The bigger point, however, is this: neither China nor Asia as a whole can develop without opening to the outside world economically, and energy is the essential driving force in this process.

No infrastructure, no resources

Asia’s infrastructure requirements over the next 2 decades will be unprecedented in human history. Simply put, never have so many people developed an economy at such a rapid pace in such a concentrated chunk of global real estate. This rough doubling of energy consumption will place extraordinary demands on the environment. The combination of rapid rises in energy consumption, population, urbanization, and water usage (especially for agriculture) will further damage an already battered regional ecosystem, creating great political pressures on national governments—both from within and outside—to limit the pollution associated with energy production.

Cleaner cars and more mass transportation are important, but even more so is the choice of how all that electricity is to be generated. Asia will attempt to grow its nuclear and renewables capacity to the fullest extent possible, but as a combined share of total energy production (that is, 10 percent), these categories will not grow—even as they double in absolute amounts to keep pace with economic development. The story is roughly the same with coal, which stands at just over 40 percent of total energy production now and still will in the year 2020. The real shift in Asia’s energy profile comes in oil and natural gas, with the former declining from roughly 40 percent to 30 percent, and the latter basically doubling from 10 to 20 percent.

This 275 percent increase in the absolute amount of methane energy employed across the region highlights the story-within-the-story of Asia’s energy future: the push for energy is really a push for infrastructure. Regarding natural gas, this infrastructure comes in three forms:

• For the near term, the vast majority of natural gas that flows into Asia will arrive in a liquid form on ships. That means port facilities on both ends of the conduit, plus liquidification plants on the supplier’s end and regasification plants on the buyer’s end.
• Over the longer haul, pipelines become the answer to meet the rising demand—both by land (for example, Kazakstan-to-China, Russia-to-China) and sea (Russia-to-Japan, Iran-to-India).
• Finally, there is the domestic infrastructure required to pipe all that gas to the final consumers.

None of this comes cheaply, and as the recent history of regional electricity development makes clear, lots of outside money is required.¹²

No money, no infrastructure

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is the most significant scenario variable for Asia’s energy future. Energy infrastructure requirements could easily top $1 trillion by 2020, according to many estimates. Such numbers will overwhelm the region’s ability to self-finance, and that means Asia will have to open up its energy generation and distribution markets to far more joint or foreign ownership—a touchy subject, as former global energy giant Enron’s experience in India demonstrated.¹³

Right now, Asian states invest in one another to a very high degree, as many developing regional economies funnel upward of 90 percent of their external capital investments into their neighbors. But their combined resources are very limited compared to the West. A good estimate of Asia’s current outward stock—meaning the cumulative value—of foreign direct investment would be roughly $750 billion. In contrast, the United States and the European Union—even when one discounts intra-European investments—control roughly three times that amount of capital.¹⁴

Until now, Asia has relied on intra-Asian FDI for almost two-thirds of its cross-border capital needs, keeping the West at a certain distance in the mergers and acquisition trade. But this will have to change for Asia’s ambitious energy future to unfold according to plan. On an annual basis, the European Union and the United States routinely account for over 80 percent of all cross-border direct investment flows, far outdistancing their combined share of global gross domestic product, which sits as just under 60 percent.¹⁵ These two economic giants mostly invest in one another (and Europe in itself), creating an unbreakable trans-Atlantic bond. So if it seems inevitable that Asia must turn to the former Soviet Union and the Middle East for energy in the coming decades (the energy triad), it is just as inevitable that it must turn to the West for the money to finance this trade (the capital triad).

No rules, no money

Many on Wall Street voice the opinion that Asia has not sufficiently “cleaned up its act” as a result of the 1997–1998 financial crisis. The buzzword here is transparency, which refers primarily to internationally accepted accounting practices in the financial and corporate sectors. This is a huge challenge for Asia to overcome in terms of attracting the necessary foreign direct investment for future energy needs. Simply put, institutional investors need to feel confident in their ability to get a long-term return ofinvestment and not just a short-term return on investment, and that sort of confidence comes only with the firm rule of law.

Another problem with Asia’s energy investment climate is the current mix of private-sector investments and public-sector decisionmaking—in effect, too many bureaucrats with too much of other people’s money. In most Asian economies, the government still plays far too large a role as far as Western financiers are concerned. For the most part, Wall Street likes to see monopolies build networks but prefers them to be run by market forces once they are operational—their version of having a cake and eating it too. But so long as rule sets lag behind, the rise of private-sector market makers is delayed, for firm rules of play are required before deregulation of state-run energy markets can proceed.

Viewed from this angle, it might be said that the greatest long-term threat to Asia’s energy security is internal: its own proclivities for crony capitalism. Whether it is called Asian values, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, or globalization on ourterms, all Asian claims to a particular brand of capitalism are ultimately self-defeating. In sum, money has to behave in Asia just like it does in the West if the region hopes to attract the investment necessary to secure its energy future.

No security, no rules

Foreign direct investment does not occur in a vacuum. Long-term certainty is the greatest attraction a country can offer to outside investors, whereas war and political-military instability (especially leftist revolutions) are the best methods to scare them away. Not surprisingly, the strongest FDI bonds exist between the three main pillars of the Cold War’s trilateral alliance structure: the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.

This triad controls 80 percent of the world’s stock in foreign direct investment, keeping two-thirds of that total invested in one another. That means the other 90 percent of the global population has to get by on the remaining half of global FDI capital available. In a nutshell, investment follows the flag far more than trade. For example, the United States does about a third of its trade with Western Europe and Japan but concentrates closer to a half of its FDI in these two markets.¹⁶

Developing Asia, in contrast, readily presents a handful of potential and/or existing security trouble spots that could negatively impact the region’s FDI climate in significant ways:

• India-Pakistan nuclear standoff
• Indonesia’s disarray
• The Korean situation (especially the North’s nuclear/missile programs and/or “imminent collapse”)
• China-Taiwan
• Overlapping sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.

Bluntly stated, Asia is still a place where military conflict could dramatically alter the FDI landscape, unlike a Europe where the conflict in the former Yugoslavia had a negligible impact on economic integration and investment flows.

No (benign) Leviathan, no security

Many international experts agree that Asia’s current security situation belongs more to what Thomas Friedman calls the “olive tree” world, where backward tribes fight over little bits of land, even as its rising economic powerhouses clearly join the “Lexus” world, producing many of the global economy’s best high-end technology products.¹⁷ Lacking Europe’s crucible-like history of 20th-century warfare, as well as its currently robust regional security alliances, Asia remains the one place in the world where direct great power warfare seems possible over the next generation. This becomes especially true as previously authoritarian states experience greater amounts of political pluralism, typically the most dangerous time for interstate wars.¹⁸

In this region where the concepts of spheres of influence and security dilemma are still valid, there remains a viable long-term market for the services of an outside Leviathan—namely, the United States. In a part of the world where numerous states are still technically at war (dating back more than half a century), the United States enjoys healthier security relationships with virtually every government than any two governments there enjoy with one another. While it is easy to deride the notion of a “four-star foreign policy,” there is little doubt that the combatant commander of U.S. Pacific Command plays a special—even unique—role in working the security arrangements that underpin the region’s strong record of structural stability over the past quarter century (basically, since Vietnam was reunified).¹⁹

And if there was no U.S. military presence, then what? How comfortable could Japan be with China? Taiwan with China? South Korea with North Korea? India with Pakistan? India with China? Vietnam with China? The list goes on and on. Simply put, the U.S. military occupies both a physical and a fiscal space in Asia: our forward presence both reassures local governments and obviates their need for larger military hedges. Our presence is a moneymaker on two fronts: local governments spend less on defense and more on development (the ultimate defense), and FDI is encouraged, however subtly.

No U.S. Navy, no (benign) Leviathan

As noted earlier, what Asia needs in terms of future energy requirements is entirely available either in-region (for example, coal) or from the central portion of the Eurasian landmass (gas and oil from the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and Russia). These distances are all feasibly conquered by pipelines, and most of the involved sea lines of communication lie within the reach of the region’s naval forces—for good or ill.

Meanwhile, the West, which has come to rely less and less on Persian Gulf oil, is likewise becoming more regionally focused in its energy trade patterns. The United States, for example, imports more energy supplies from Canada than any other nation, and gets the bulk of its imported oil from North and South America.

None of these statements are meant to suggest that East-versus-West energy blocs are forming. In reality, the regionalization of energy trade occurs precisely because the commodities in question are behaving more and more as one would expect of a globally traded, highly fungible good. If price determines all, then reducing transportation distance makes sense.

In the end, all this regionalization comes about because the energy trade is no longer confined to the sort of strategic bilateral relationships of the Cold War era, so the new rules of energy are nothing more than that sector’s joining up with the global marketplace and losing its special status as a strategic asset.

Having said all that, the U.S. Government—and the U.S. Navy in particular—faces a far more complex strategic environment in the 21st century, whether or not it yet realizes the change: our national security interests in the Persian Gulf, while increasingly important for the global economy, no longer hold the same immediate importance to our national economy.

In effect, U.S. naval presence in Asia is becoming far less an expression of our nation’s forward presence than our exporting of security to the global marketplace. In that regard, we truly do move into the Leviathan category, for the product we provide is increasingly a collective good less directly tied to our particularistic national interests and far more intimately wrapped up with our global responsibilities.

And in the end, this is a pretty good deal. We trade little pieces of paper (our currency, in the form of a trade deficit) for Asia’s amazing array of products and services. We are smart enough to know this is a patently unfair deal—unless we offer something of great value along with those little pieces of paper. That product is a strong U.S. Pacific Fleet, which squares the transaction quite nicely.

Understanding the Military-Market Connection

The collapse of the Soviet bloc and its longstanding challenge (or rejection) of the Western economic rule set made possible—really for the first time in human history—a truly global rule set for how military power buttresses and enables economic growth and stability.

How so? For the first time in human history, we have a true global military Leviathan in the form of the U.S. military, and no peer competitor in sight—not even a coherent alternative economic philosophy (although one clearly brews in the anti-globalization protests that started with Seattle). This unparalleled moment in global history both allows and compels the United States to better understand the national security-market nexus, in large part because of its complete reversal of the priority from that of the Cold War era. During the strategic standoff with the Soviet Union, economic might was seen as supporting military power, but now that situation has been turned on its head: to the extent that the military matters, it matters because of the stabilization role it can play in the global economy.

How do we define this yin-yang relationship between the military and business worlds? First, we speak of stability, which flows from national security, and then we speak of transparency, which is both demanded and engendered by free markets. These two underlying pillars form the basis of the single global rule set that now essentially defines the era of globalization.

Within those two pillars, the United States clearly plays a crucial role:

• The U.S. Government, through the U.S. military, supplies the lion’s share of system stability through its Leviathan-like status as the world’s sole military superpower.
• The U.S. financial markets, which lead the way in fostering the emergence of a truly global equities market that will inevitably operate all day, every day, play the leading role in spreading the gospel of transparency—any country’s best defense against the sort of financial currency crises that have periodically erupted over the last decade (Mexico 1994, Asia 1997, Russia 1998, Brazil 1999, Turkey 2001).

As such, it is essential that these two worlds—the Pentagon and Wall Street—come to better understand their interrelationships across the global economy. Uncovering and comprehending this fundamental relationship is especially important because—the vast majority of the time—the security and financial communities operate in oblivious indifference to one another.

One is tempted to counter, “So what? They don’t need to be aware of one another on a day-to-day basis.” And in a basic sense, that is true. But if you consider the rise of system perturbations as a new form of international security threat, and if you understand that many of these perturbations first appear in the form of financial crises that can engender serious subnational violence (for example, Indonesia today), then perhaps this connectivity seems more pertinent. Ultimately, the global economy operates on trust, which is based on certainty, which in turn comes from the effective processing of risk.

In the end, the national security and financial establishments are in the same fundamental business: the effective assessment and mitigation of international risk. For the military, it is the risk of conflict and the disruption of normal life by large-scale violence, while in the financial world, it is the risk of bankruptcy (insolvency) and the disruption of normal business by large-scale panics or meltdowns.

Invariably, these two problem sets merge in the historical process that is economic globalization, so understanding the military-market connection is not just good business, it is good national security strategy. Osama bin Laden understood this connection when he selected the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as his targets. We ignore his logic at our peril.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is professor and senior strategic researcher at the Naval War College. He directed the NewRulesSet.Project, an effort to draw new “maps” of power and influence in the world economy through collaboration with financial corporations such as Cantor Fitzgerald. Currently, he is serving as the assistant for strategic futures in the recently formed Office of Force Transformation within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His articles appear with frequency in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and an abbreviated version of this chapter appeared in the January 2002 issue. The author would like to thank Bradd Hayes and Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt, USN (Ret.), for their comments on the original draft.

Notes

¹ For the purposes of this article, the author defines Asia as extending from Afghanistan to Japan, but not including Australia and New Zealand (Oceania), although he identifies Australia as an in-region supplier of energy (coal and natural gas) due to its proximity. 

²For a good example of this sort of work, see Thomas P.M. Barnett and Linda D. Lancaster,Answering the 9–1–1 Call: U.S. Military and Naval Crisis Response Activity, 1977–1991 (Center for Naval Analyses Information Memorandum 229, August 1992). 

³For the best analysis on this subject, see Henry H. Gaffney, Jr., et al., U.S. Naval Responses to Situations, 1970–1999 (Center for Naval Analyses Research Memorandum DOOO2763.A2/Final, December 2000). 

⁴ See the Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook 2000: With Projections to 2020, DOE/EIA–0484 (2000), March 2000, accessed at <www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/index.html>.

⁵The NewRuleSets.Project was a multi-year research effort designed to explore how globalization and the rise of the New Economy are altering the basic “rules of the road” in the international security environment, with special reference to how these changes may redefine the U.S. Navy’s historic role as security enabler of America’s commercial network ties with the world. The project was hosted by the online securities broker-dealer firm, eSpeed (an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald LP), and involved personnel from the Decision Strategies Department of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Adm. William Flanagan, USN (Ret.), and Philip Ginsberg of Cantor Fitzgerald (then-senior managing director and executive vice president, respectively) served as informal advisers to the project, actively participating in all planning and design. The joint Wall Street-Naval War College workshops in the series involved energy, environmental issues and foreign direct investment in Asia. All research products relating to this effort can be found at <www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets>.

⁶ All the energy data presented in the decalogue, unless otherwise specified, comes from the Department of Energy’s International Energy Outlook 2001. 

⁷ A good rule of thumb for thinking about a quadrillion British thermal units (Btus) is that you can take the annual number for a region and divide it by two, giving you the rough equivalent in millions of barrels of oil per day the region would need to burn if it was achieving that entire energy amount by oil alone. For example, North America used about 110 quadrillion Btus in 1997, so that would equate to approximately 55 million barrels a day (mbd) of oil if that entire amount was achieved by oil alone. For point of comparison, note that the United States currently uses about 20 mbd, importing roughly half that number. 

⁸ For an excellent exploration of this, see Daniel Yergin, Dennis Eklof, and Jefferson Edwards, “Fueling Asia’s Recovery,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 2 (March/April 1998), 34–50. 

⁹ The Middle East currently accounts for roughly 90 percent of all Asian oil imports; on this see Fereidun Fesharaki, “Energy and Asian Security Nexus,” Journal of International Affairs 53, no. 1 (Fall 1999), 97. 

¹⁰ For a frightening description of this situation, see Nicholas D. Kristof’s chapter, “Search for the Sorceror,” in Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia, ed. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 5–23. 

¹¹ Cited in Clay Chandler, “GM’s China Bet Hits Snag: WTO (Car Shoppers Await Discount From Trade Deal),” The Washington Post, May 10, 2000, E1.

¹² See “Foreign Investment in the Electricity Sectors of Asia and South America,” in International Energy Outlook 2001, 120–21. 

¹³ For a good description of Enron’s difficulties in the Indian electricity market, see Celia W. Dugger, “High-Stakes Showdown: Enron’s Right Over Power Plant Reverberates Beyond India,”The New York Times, March 20, 2001, C1. 

¹⁴ These figures are derived from United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), World Investment Report 2000. 

¹⁵ In contrast, Asia accounts for less than 10 percent of global foreign direct investment flows, even though its gross domestic product share sits at 25 percent.

¹⁶ Estimates based on the figures taken from UNCTAD, World Investment Review and CIA, World Factbook, various years.

¹⁷ See Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus And The Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999). 

¹⁸ On this subject, see the data analysis by Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and War,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 3 (May/June 1995), 79–97. 

¹⁹ For an excellent exploration of this concept, see Dana Priest, “A Four-Star Foreign Policy? U.S. Commanders Wield Rising Clout, Autonomy,” The Washington Post, September 28, 2000, A1. See also the second and third articles in the series (September 29–30).

This will be my 20th SHRM Annual Conference and the 15th consecutive time I'll address a concurrent session (my first time in Chicago 1996 my talk was entitled "HR and the Internet" and fewer than 10% of the people in the room had ever seen a page on the web.) 

I'm already in CA but hanging with relatives in Sacramento before taking a quick flight down tomorrow.

SHRM anticipates 10,000 paid attendees and at least 3k more can be added when vendors, speakers, journalists and others are counted. The numbers appear up significantly from last year.

Of the 25 or so gigs I do each year, this isn't the most intimate, or the easiest to plan for, or the easiest to speak at or the one I'm going to have the most fun at. It simply is the biggest and, it is about the business of HR and its relationship to a function I'm passionate about. 

As much as I love the various niche staffing seminars, expos and unconferences, missing SHRM's annual is tantamount to taking a step back and here's why:

- Collateral meetings. Over the years hundreds of professionals in HR and staffing -some SHRM driven but many external to SHRM meet before, during and after the conference. The networking opportunities to engage people who are at the very top of their area of expertise in day long conversations is without peer. SHRM has a dozen specialty panels, the SHRM foundation and HRCI boards to name just a few groups that regularly meet at these conferences. They do  make a difference. Getting on these panels is not as difficult as some might imagine and the work is not about preserving a static past but instead creating initiatives to develop alternate futures.

- Sessions. Of the 200 sessions there are likely to be many that miss the mark but the few that resonate with me will be worth examining. Trends may not start here but they certainly are indicative of how extensive needed changes are understood. I watch the audience reaction as much as I do the speakers. I also note which of the speakers spend any time in the audience.

- Tweetups, meetups and side sessions can be overwhelming but there are certainly enough of them and enough variations in size and locale to meet every taste for additional networking. (I invite anyone interested in a very boring subject...staffing standards to stop by th Sapphire Room in the Hilton from 2-4 on Tuesday to network with the work groups involved in this long term initiative. We promise to bore you but also to enlist you if we can.)

- EXPO. The SHRM vendor expo is larger than any other. Who is making a splash and who didn't show tells much about the space.(Only the HR Technology Conference IMHO offers a similar sense of what is happening by walking the aisles.) Ignoring the chotchkes and asking better questions is a major opportunity for vendors, consultants and practitioners who get it...or want to get it.

After 20 years I still enjoy the challenge of being a good student. If I'm lucky, I'll never graduate.

If you see a hat and I'm under it, say hi.

Well over three months before the first puck drops to start the 2010-2011 NHL Season, the National Hockey League has already released the schedule.

The original statistics are just the same as before: the season begins near the beginning of October, and will end mid-April. Each of the 30 teams plays 82 games: six against each other team in their division, four against each other team in the conference but not in their division, two games against three other teams from the other conference, and one game against 12 other teams from the other conference.

The upcoming year will, however, expand on several interesting events that have grown popular over the last few seasons.

The NHL Premiere, where teams play back-to-back games in a European city to begin the season, has expanded to six teams for the 2010 edition.

Minnesota and Carolina will open the year at noon (Eastern Time) in Helsinki, Finland on October 7, then play again on the 8th. San Jose and Columbus will play on the 8th and 9th in Stockholm, Sweden, and then Boston and Phoenix will face each other on the 9th and 10th in Prague, Czech Republic.

From the seventh to the 27th, each team will also, in turn, hold their home opener. Toronto, Pittsburgh, Colorado, and Edmonton will be the first four to do so; Carolina will be the last.

As it has been for three years now, New Years Day 2011 will also be the date of the 2010 NHL Winter Classic, when Pittsburgh hosts Washington. Canada will also get their share of outdoor hockey during the February 20th Heritage Classic, when Calgary hosts Montreal.

As the third and final major event of the season, the 2010 NHL All-Star Game and Skills Competition will be hosted by the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh on January 29th and 30th.

As you read over the highlights for the next autumn and winter in the scorching heat of late June, one team seems to be continuously popping up.

That would be the Carolina Hurricanes, who, after playing their first-ever game against a European opponent on an October 4th exhibition against SKA St. Petersburg (KHL), will take part in the season opener in Finland, return to North America only to stay away from home until October 27th due to the N.C. State Fair, and then host the All-Star Game at the RBC Center in late January.

It's quite a mouthful, isn't it?

Between those key dates, the day-to-day schedule for the Hurricanes also holds plenty of interesting notes and patterns.

Early October will be a time full of many openers for the 'Canes. After their trip to Finland, they'll return for their North American opener in Ottawa on October 14. Carolina will make their United States 2010-2011 debut five days later in San Jose, and then finally have their home opener on the 27th after a four-game West Coast run visiting the Canucks, Sharks, Kings, and Coyotes.

October will finish up its 10 games with a back-to-back, taking the 'Canes to Madison Square Garden on the 29th and then back to Raleigh to host the Penguins on the 30th. The month actually will be one of the quieter ones. October's 10 games are the least of any full month, compared to 14 in November, January, and March.

November will open up with a bang just two nights later as Carolina travels to Philadelphia to take on the defending Eastern Conference Champions. On the 3rd, the 'Canes will begin a stretch where they'll have seven of ten games in the RBC Center, including a rematch of the 2006 Stanley Cup Finals when they host Edmonton on the 9th.

The beginning of December will also bring a strange stretch of three consecutive back-to-backs, which also encompasses a five-game road trip following a game against Colorado in Raleigh on Dec. 3rd. In that stretch will be a road date in Nashville, the final Western Conference team (along with Minnesota and Dallas) that Carolina will play twice.

The trip finishes up in Atlanta for the first meeting of six between the Thrashers and Hurricanes, beginning the annual rivalry.

Carolina will have three games Christmas week, visiting Tampa Bay on the 20th, hosting Montreal on the 23rd, and then staying home for Washington on the 26th. Following yet another of the 21 back-to-backs the Hurricanes will play in over the course of the season, the 'Canes will then kick off 2011 with a game against the Devils in Raleigh on January 1st.

A January 13th game in Buffalo will make the Sabres the last of the 14 other Eastern Conference teams to begin their four-game season series with the Hurricanes. The two teams will play each other three times in March and April.

Boston will visit the Carolinas on January 18th for the back end of a home-and-home between the two opponents, the last of five matinee games over the course of the year.

Following the five-day All-Star Game break, once the excitement of the event dies down in Raleigh, the 'Canes will finish their first four-game series of the season, playing the Bruins again on February 1st. From the 8th to the 16th, the 'Canes will embark on yet another five-game road swing, visiting Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, and New Jersey twice.

Once they return from that "vacation," the Hurricanes will have their longest homestand of the season (four games) to get back to normal. The Flyers, Rangers, Pens, and most notably the Devils will be the opponents. The game against New Jersey on the 19th will be the third game between the two sides in just 11 days, and will also finish out the season series.

Just before the trade deadline, the Hurricanes will get their one and only try in Chicago to defeat the defending Stanley Cup Champion Blackhawks, who did fall to the 'Canes 4-2 in their one hookup last season.

On March 11th, Carolina will resume their interrupted six-game set with the Capitals, who they met four times in the fall but had not played since the day after Christmas. A similar situation will be brought into play on the 22nd, when the 'Canes host the Senators for the first (and last) time since Dec. 29th, despite meeting them three times in late 2010.

For the final 12 games of the year, including the match with Ottawa, eight of them will be in the RBC Center, hopefully giving the Hurricanes a convenient chance to finish strong. The middle six games will also be the second of two stretches of three straight back-to-back matches, including the final game against rival Washington on March 29th.

After hosting the Red Wings for the first time in almost three calendar years, Carolina will play the 81st and 82nd games of their 82-game regular season with a inner-division back-to-back, playing in Atlanta on April 8th and then hosting the Lightning on April 9th.

No matter the event, we already know that the 2010-2011 NHL Season is going to be a very interesting one for the Carolina Hurricanes. The matter now is, who's going to be on the roster once we get there?

Photo Credit: NHL.com

Mark Jones is currently Bleacher Report's featured columnist and community leader for the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes . In his 21 months so far with the site, he has written over 205 articles and received over 145,000 total reads.

Visit his profile to read more.

In the House, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

FLOOR SCHEDULE FOR TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2010

House Meets At... 9:00 a.m.: Morning Hour
10:00 a.m.: Legislative Business
First Vote Predicted... 12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Last Vote Predicted... 5:00 – 6:00 p.m.

The House will convene at 10:00 a.m. for legislative business. Shortly thereafter, the House will recess for the Former Member’s Association annual meeting. The House will reconvene at approximately 11:30 a.m.

"One Minutes"

Begin Consideration of H.R. 5297 - Small Business Lending Fund Act of 2010 (Rep. Frank – Financial Services) (Subject to a Rule)

Suspensions (4 Bills)

1. H.Res. 1389 - Recognizing the immeasurable contributions of fathers in the healthy development of children, supporting responsible fatherhood, and encouraging greater involvement of fathers in the lives of their children, especially on Father's Day (Rep. McIntyre - Education and Labor)
2. H.Res. 1414 - Congratulating Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men-Englewood Campus for achieving a 100 percent college acceptance rate for all 107 members of its first graduating class of 2010 (Rep. Rush - Education and Labor)
3. H.R. 4855 - Work-Life Balance Award Act (Rep. Woolsey - Education and Labor)
4. H.Res. 1322 - Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program and recognizing the significant contributions of Albert Einstein Fellows (Rep. Honda - Education and Labor)

Postponed Suspension Vote (1 Bill):

1. H.Res. 1383 - Honoring Dr. Larry Case on his retirement as National FFA Advisor (Rep. Luetkemeyer - Agriculture)

• Conference Reports may be brought up at any time.
• Motions to go to Conference should they become available.
• Possible Motions to Instruct Conferees.

In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader:

Convenes: 10:00am

Following Leader remarks, there will be a period of morning business until 11:30am with senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each. The Majority will control the first 30 minutes. The Republicans will control the next 30 minutes. The remaining time will be equally divided between the two Leader or their designees.

Following morning business, the Senate will proceed to Executive Session to consider the District Court nominations listed below. There will be up to 20 minutes for debate equally divided between Senators Leahy and Sessions or their designees. At approximately 11:50am, the Senate will proceed to vote on confirmation of the nomination in the order listed.

• Tanya Pratt of Indiana,
• Brian Jackson of Louisiana, and
• Elizabeth Foote of Louisiana.

Upon disposition of the nominations, the Senate will recess until 2:15pm to allow for the weekly caucus luncheons.

When the Senate reconvenes at 2:15pm, the Senate will resume consideration of the House Message to accompany HR4213, Tax Extenders. Roll call votes in relation to amendments are expected to occur throughout the day.

As a reminder, today Senator Reid filed cloture on the motion to concur with an amendment with respect to Tax Extenders. The only applicable filing deadline is for second degree amendments. Those amendments must be filed one hour prior to the cloture vote on Wednesday.

The House's day will be mostly consumed with H.R. 5297, the Small Business Lending Fund Act, which under the rule proposed for its consideration will also incorporate the text of H.R. 5486, the Small Business Jobs Tax Relief Act of 2010.

What?

Yes. Just another of the many little tricks the Rules Committee can use to facilitate the passage of bills. They want to move both the Small Business Lending Fund Act (H.R. 5297) and the Small Business Jobs Tax Relief Act (H.R. 5486) together. That appears to make a certain amount of sense, just from the titles of the two bills. But theoretically, I suppose it's not even necessary that it make sense. Either way, they want both to move at the same time, for whatever reason. The solution? Simply say so in the rule. In this case, the rule (H. Res. 1436) governing the terms of debate for the Small Business Lending Fund Act will simply declare that the consideration of the Small Business Jobs Tax Relief Act is also to be in order. Ta-da! Done. Each bill gets an hour of general debate. No amendments will be allowed on the Small Business Jobs Tax Relief Act, while the Small Business Lending Fund Act will permit 17 pre-printed amendments.

And if you liked that trick, you'll love this one: the rule also directs the Clerk of the House, when engrossing the H.R. 5297, to add the text of H.R. 5486 to the end, and then table H.R. 5486. The end effect of which is to pass both, but send just one bill (with both texts in it) to the Senate.

But wait, there's more!

Clause 6(a) of rule XIII for a two-thirds vote to consider a report from the Committee on Rules on the same day it is presented to the House is waived with respect to any resolution reported through the legislative day of June 18, 2010, providing for consideration or disposition of any Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to the bill (H.R. 4213) to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to extend certain expiring provisions, and for other purposes.

What's that mean? It's the Rules Committee paving the way for expedited consideration of the tax extenders bill (H.R. 4213) when it finally comes back from the Senate. Remember, H.R. 4213 was:

1. passed by the House in December of last year, then;
2. amended by the Senate and sent back to the House in March, then;
3. amended by the House and sent back to the Senate again, just prior to Memorial Day.

That left the Senate in the position of either accepting or amending the:

1. House amendment to;
2. the Senate amendment to;
3. the bill (H.R. 4213).

And if they amend it again, which they're currently working on doing in the Senate, then when the Senate returns the bill to the House, the House will be asked to consider the:

1. Senate amendment to;
2. the House amendment to;
3. the Senate amendment to;
4. the bill (H.R. 4213).

Just like it says in the blockquote. Get it?

Now, that's quite a mouthful. What's so "expedited" about that? Well, in order for the House to do what it needs to do after the Senate finishes and send H.R. 4213 back, it has to adopt a rule governing debate for consideration of the Senate's latest work. And ordinarily, House Rules (and I mean the permanent ones when I use capital R "Rules") require that a rule for debate (with a lower case R, meaning the special rules in the form of resolutions reported by the Rules Committee that govern only a single debate) can't be considered by the House on the same day they're reported from committee. But this lower case R rule waives that capital R Rule against same day consideration. So that means the House can act right away on whatever version of H.R. 4213 gets sent back from the Senate.

See? Expedited!

It's so easy once you get the hang of it!

And that brings us to the Senate. Remember the Senate? (This is a song about the Senate.) Well, they're trying to finish up work on H.R. 4213 and send it back to the House, as we just discussed. But first, they'll take care of a little executive business -- in this case the executive business of getting the legislative branch to consent to the appointment of some members of the judiciary. What a well-rounded constitutional exercise! Then after that, it's on to some amendments to H.R. 4213, and then a possible cloture vote tomorrow to end Senate obstruction and stalling on the bill the House will spend part of today preparing to consider on an expedited basis.

And... scene!

Crazy, right? Well, all this back and forth nonsense is why they came up with the conference committee process in the first place. So instead of having the House consider Senate amendments to House amendments to Senate amendments to a House bill, all spread out over the course of six months or more, you could just go have a single conference if one house amended the bill sent to it by the other. But tragically, the motions necessary for the Senate to agree to a conference are subject to the filibuster, and in today's environment of obstructionism-as-policy, that means it's actually more efficient to do things by ping-ponging bills back and forth than it is to try to settle differences like adults.

Told you the filibuster needed reforming!

Your full committee schedule appears below the fold. Who even has time to get into what they're on about?

BP CEO Tony Hayward and other leaders of top oil companies will testify this week before members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  President Obama has stated that he would have fired Hayward if he were in charge of BP and Members of Congress are expected to treat Heyward as the whipping boy for the Gulf crisis.  Hayward will face some tough questioning this week.  Committee members will want specific explanations on why the spill has yet to be capped, why it has taken so long to slow the leaking of oil,  why the cleanup effort has been so poorly implemented and whether this CEO is prepared to pay the full cost of cleanup.  The Gulf of Mexico oil spill hearings will be the big ticket item this week in Washington.

The left is using the oil spill in the Gulf to argue for ending offshore drilling and imposing Cap and Trade on the American people.  From National Journal:

Reid has asked committee chairmen to give him recommendations for addressing the spill by the Independence Day recess, along with a broader blueprint of ideas that could be incorporated in energy legislation.  At the same time, he is considering the extent of the scope of that legislation, including whether it should include a climate change proposal by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. The Senate Democratic caucus is meeting Thursday to talk strategy for moving a bill this summer.

The Senate will continue work on the so called “Tax Extenders” bill this week which includes an extension of unemployment benefits.  The House will work on a government efficiency bill and TARP Jr. for small business.  CQ reports that the DISCLOSE Act, a bill setting new disclosure requirements for campaign ads may come up this week.  Both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Armed Services Committees will have hearings on the START Treaty.

The issues for Conservatives to watch are the following this week:

• START Treaty - As hearing on the START Treaty are conducted in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, it is important to understand the reasons why this treaty is flawed.  The New START Working Group has issued a paper that explains, in part, ”the United States and Russia recently signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). An independent assessment by the New START Working Group raises questions about the treaty that should be considered important by all interested in national security and the integrity of the arms control process and its outcomes. Hopefully, a broad and bipartisan set of U.S. Senators will take up these questions as they pursue their solemn responsibility of providing advice and consent on New START.”  Treaty ratification is one of the Constitutional duties of the United States Senate and require a two thirds vote to pass.  Conservatives argue that the Adminstration is wrong in claiming that ”START includes no limits whatsoever on ballistic missile defenses.”  As the Working Group argues, “the preamble to the New START Treaty adopts the position publicly expressed by Russian officials on missile defense and implicitly adopts the deterrence theory known as Mutual Assured Destruction” and “this language appears to commit the United States to a logic that would dictate reductions in U.S. strategic defensive capabilities corresponding to the reduction in Russian strategic offensive capabilities.”  The Working Group has many reasons why this Treaty is bad for national defense, yet the diminution of missile defense as a deterrent to nuclear attack should be the one issue that conservatives watch closely.   
• DISCLOSE Act - The House may take up this week a bill to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v FEC.  In that case the Supreme Court held that ”corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment.”  In response to that ruling, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) have drafted up legislation likely for another trip to the Supreme Court if passed called the DISCLOSE Act.  Hans Von Spakovsky writes for National Review Online that this legislation is a “morass of confusing, duplicative, unnecessary, and onerous provisions that are clearly designed to deter political speech and political advocacy, particularly criticism of incumbents like Schumer and Van Hollen.  Despite claims to the contrary, it also abandons the longstanding policy of treating unions and businesses equally, which highlights the partisan motives underlying the bill.”  Conservatives should keep an eye on this legislation to see if it is railroaded through Congress before the fall elections.
• Bailout of States - President Obama requested $50 billion over the weekend in your tax dollars to bailout fiscally irresponsible states.  The Washington Post reported on Sunday that “President Obama urged reluctant lawmakers Saturday to quickly approve nearly $50 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments, saying the money is needed to avoid ‘massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters’ and to support the still-fragile economic recovery.”  Conservatives should watch this request closely to see if Congress will offset any new $50 billion in funding with cuts to other programs. 

The schedule for the Senate this week according to the Senate Majority Leader’s web site:

Convenes: Monday at 2pm

Following any Leader remarks, there will be a period of morning business until 3:00pm with senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each, with the time equally divided and controlled between the two Leaders or their designees.Following morning business, the Senate will resume consideration of the House Message to accompany H.R.4213, Tax Extenders. There will be no roll call votes during Monday’s session of the Senate. However, the bill Manager will be here to continue working through amendments on the Extenders bill.

On Tuesday, June 15, at 11:30am, the Senate will proceed to Executive Session and debate concurrently the nominations listed below for a total of 20 minutes, equally divided and controlled between Senators Leahy and Sessions or their designees.

- Cal.#732- Tanya Pratt, of Indiana, to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Indiana;
- Cal.#775- Brian Jackson, of Louisiana, to be United States District Judge for the Middle District of Louisiana; and
- Cal.#776- Elizabeth Foote, of Louisiana, to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Louisiana.

Upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate will proceed to vote on confirmation of the nominations. After the first vote, the succeeding votes will be 10 minute votes. Therefore, senators should expect a series of up to 3 roll call votes to begin at approximately 11:50am on Tuesday, June 14.

The schedule for the House this week according to the House Majority Leader’s web site:

MONDAY, JUNE 14, 2010

On Monday, the House will meet at 12:30 p.m. for Morning Hour debate and 2:00 p.m. for legislative business with votes postponed until 6:30 p.m.

Suspensions (4 Bills)

1. H.R. 5502- To amend the effective date of the gift card provisions of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act (Rep. Maffei - Financial Services)
2. .Res. 1409 - Expressing support for designation of June 20, 2010, as “American Eagle Day”, and celebrating the recovery and restoration of the bald eagle, the national symbol of the United States (Rep. Roe - Financial Services)
3. H.Res. 1368 - Supporting the goals of National Dairy Month (Rep. Courtney - Agriculture)
4. H.Res. 1383- Honoring Dr. Larry Case on his retirement as National FFA Advisor (Rep. Luetkemeyer - Agriculture)

TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2010 AND THE BALANCE OF THE WEEK

On Tuesday, the House will meet at 9:00 a.m. for Morning Hour debate and 10:00 a.m. for legislative business. Shortly after 10:00 a.m., the House will recess for the Former Member’s Association annual meeting. The House will reconvene at approximately 11:30 a.m. On Wednesday and Thursday, the House will meet at 10:00 a.m. for legislative business. On Friday, the House will meet at 9:00 a.m. for legislative business.

Suspensions (10 Bills)

1. H.R. 4451- Collinsville Renewable Energy Promotion Act (Rep. Murphy (CT) - Energy and Commerce)
2. H.R. 4855- Work-Life Balance Award Act (Rep. Woolsey - Education and Labor)
3. H.Res. 1389 - Recognizing the immeasurable contributions of fathers in the healthy development of children, supporting responsible fatherhood, and encouraging greater involvement of fathers in the lives of their children, especially on Father’s Day (Rep. McIntyre - Education and Labor)
4. H.Res. 1414- Congratulating Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men-Englewood Campus for achieving a 100 percent college acceptance rate for all 107 members of its first graduating class of 2010 (Rep. Rush - Education and Labor)
5. H.Res. 1322- Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program and recognizing the significant contributions of Albert Einstein Fellows (Rep. Michaud - Education and Labor)
6. H.Con.Res. 242 - Honoring and praising the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the occasion of its 101st anniversary (Rep. Al Green - Judiciary)
7. H.Res. 1422- Honoring the Department of Justice on the occasion of its 140th anniversary (Rep. Sensenbrenner - Judiciary)
8. H.R. 2142- Government Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Performance Improvement Act (Rep. Cuellar - Oversight and Government Reform)
9. H.Res. 879- Supporting the goals and ideals of American Education Week (Rep. Minnick - Oversight and Government Reform)
10. H.Res. 1357 - Commending and congratulating the Hollywood Walk of Fame on the occasion of its 50th anniversary (Rep. Watson - Oversight and Government Reform)

H.R. 5297 - Small Business Lending Fund Act of 2010 (Rep. Frank – Financial Services) (Subject to a Rule)

Possible Consideration of H.R. 5175- DISCLOSE Act (Rep. Van Hollen – House Administration) (Subject to a Rule)

Possible Further Action on H.R. 4899 - Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2010 (Rep. Obey - Appropriations) (Subject to a Rule)

* Conference Reports may be brought up at any time.

* Motions to go to Conference should they become available.

* Possible Motions to Instruct Conferees.