US2006: My Projections and More Results

My Projection: I think the Democrats will take the Senate, based on early results (if only because of independents supporting the Democratic caucus), while the Republicans will maintain a tenuous majority in the House. If this happens, you read it here first.

Talent and the fight against Amendment 2 are both still ahead, but with many rural counties tallies complete and St. Louis City still in motion, I fear the rapidly shrinking margins of the leads.

It seems that the choice to make English the official language of Arizona is popular so far; CNN is projecting it as passing. Likewise, CNN shows most of the bans on same-sex marriage as passing hence far, with several projections already given.

AMENDMENT 2: Presently, the Missouri Stem Cells/Cloning amendment is still failing at 53.8-46.2, the no's leading, although that is only with 33% of precincts reporting and hence too close to call — especially since exit polling still favors the amendment.

TALENT-MCCASKILL: Talent is leading 53-43 with 33% of the votes tallied.

US2006: Cautiously Optimistic

OK, it is way to soon to even say there is a chance for victory. I know as well as anyone that things could change — especially as more results come in from St. Louis City and Kansas City. But with 9% of precincts reporting, Talent is leading by about 10 points and Amendment 2 is losing by about 5. I expected that all the news would be bad, so even if only the early results are good, it is better than I expected. Still, maybe?

In other news, I'm pleased to see that Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) won over Democrat Ned Lamont. I personally like the man, as I've said before, though I disagree with him on quite a few issues. The big point is this: I disagree with Lieberman less than I disagree with Lamont, and ultimately politics is a pragmatic game. Moreover, any independent, even one who is a Democrat who lost his primary, is a good step toward getting more independent and third party candidates on the ballot.

Update (21:24 CST): I noticed in the current STLtoday report, the Post-Dispatch (as in its election guide) is being unusually honest on Amendment 2. The article states, “The Senate contest blended with the proposed constitutional amendment to protect research known as somatic cell nuclear ransfer, the medical term for cloning.” Very few supports of the amendment — and the Post was one of them — have honestly admitted they are supporting cloning.

Supposedly the results in so far are a blend of heavily Republican and Democratic counties, which is good to hear, though as the article referenced above notes, it does look like it could be a long night.

Update (21:39 CST): Don't forget that my fellow Cranium Leaker, Michael, is posting live updates and commentary.

Please Vote NO on 2 TODAY!

Please vote “No” on Amendment 2 in Missouri today and help reject protections for human cloning. If you aren't already aware of the amendment's implications, please see my earlier article. Thanks.

The Waste Land

For a long time now I've been meaning to read T.S. Eliot's the Waste Land. I have now done so, and I'm not sure I have anything useful to say just yet. I think I need to read it again. It is not exactly the kind of work that can be made sense of after just a cursory reading. It definitely shows the interesting mind that Eliot had to an even greater extent than the other things I've read of his.

I think I'll try to read it again in the next few days, and then maybe try to conquer the Four Quartets, his last great work.

Regarding my post from last night, I figured studying Eliot is one of the most fruitful things I can do when contemplating writing. Few others have ever had such a mastery of the classic form while freely being able to drift off into free form poetry. Unlike most poets of his age (and our own), his is still a poetry that retains a sense of meter and rhyme — something to drive the reader forward, and at times, faster and faster and faster into the abyss.

Hmm. I guess I had something to say after all.

Bring On the Fiber!

I need to write. I need some time free of distractions to write — and not to write something “practical,” but to see where the muses will take me. If it doesn't seem too strong of metaphor, I feel creatively constipated. I have ideas galore that need to be followed through on, but not the time and energy (at the same time) to do any of them. I need to get them out onto paper and see what can come of them. Even if they didn't accomplish anything, perhaps I'd at least be able to move on to better ideas.

I think I might try some experimentation here on asisaid for the moment. We'll see what happens.

Power Lunch!

I went into my bank yesterday and found out it was Small Business month. Since I have a small business, I was given a free “power lunch” (that's what the packaging actually says). The “power lunch” is a chocolate chip granola bar. Not bad, eh?

Better yet though, I was informed that I really should switch from a business to small business banking package. Whereas I'm currently without online banking because they charge a nice fee for that to businesses, if I tell them I'm a small business, I get that, and all kinds of other goodies, for free.

I suppose I really should keep track of what the bank has to offer a bit more actively.

Almost Christmas

With Halloween out of the way, I find myself longing for Christmas carols and lights and cookies and all the other wonderful things that come with the season of Christ's birth. Anyone else ready for the most wonderful time of the year?

Stupid Comment Spammers

Spambots are continuing to attack the old OFB archive (which runs PHP-Nuke). The new OFB site runs SAFARI, but I left the old site up as an archive of the first five years worth of articles. I ended up having to turn off comments because spammers were adding hundreds of spams to the articles.

While they are no longer able to add actual comments, these spammers also seem to hope to spread their names by using bogus referrer data when accessing the site (since many sites list what sites are linking to them). So, I still see hundreds of page views show up in my logs each day that try to access the comment pages that no longer exist and leave referrer links to insurance, pharmacy and poker sites. It is making it hard to gather relevant statistics with so much “noise.”

To combat this, I've moved some things around while trying to make it so real human visitors can still find the pages they want without additional hassles. We'll see if what I've done actually helps.

Talent and the Minimum Wage

Some ads airing in Missouri are accusing Jim Talent of being against raising the minimum wage. Others are claiming he has worked hard to support increases. My question is: who cares?

I know a lot of people think the minimum wage is the way to create a wonderful, almost utopian society where everyone makes a “living wage” that allows them to do what they want with their lives. The problem is that the minimum wage will never be able to provide a living wage for longer than a very brief period of time.

The problem is simple and involves two facts. First, those who actually “benefit” from the minimum wage are at the bottom of the corporate ladder — the laborers who make stuff and keep the machinery of business running. That means every product you buy probably has some minimum wage people dealing with it. Second, companies exist to make a profit and usually aim to make a certain margin of profit. Now, if the minimum wage workers make $1.00 more an hour, the company will (rightly) transfer that additional cost to the price tag of the product, since they need to maintain the margin of profit that keeps the company solvent (at the very least).

So, let's say Bob is a minimum wage worker and he makes ten widgets an hour. If he makes $6.00/hr and we hike the minimum wage to $10.00/hr (a “living wage”), we have added $.40 to the cost of the product. Put simply, on labor intensive products, the product may actually double in price if we double the minimum wage.

Now, when products start going up in price, everyone starts demanding raises to meet the rising costs. This further increases the rise in prices as the raises move further and further up the corporate chain to the very top. Soon, Bob may be making $10.00 in 2007 dollars, but those dollars are worth the same as $6.00 in 2006 dollars, since milk and bread now cost nearly twice as much to purchase. The big idea is that the minimum wage causes inflation. It comes no closer to giving everyone a “living wage” than a hamster comes to traveling across the country by running in his little wheel.

I've passed over an important issue thus far. In this consideration, I've assumed companies will always simply raise the price of a product when wage rates are forced up. That is not true; sometimes companies will simply cease production (or outsource to places with cheaper labor). For example, if the most people want to pay for a widget is $1.00 and an increase in the minimum wage forces the price up to $1.25, the company will necessarily stop making the product and then Bob and all of the other minimum wage workers simply won't have a job at all. Now, it is true that eventually (in most cases) inflation will level things out so that $1.25 is essentially what $1.00 use to be, but that takes time — time that can kill off a product. Moreover, if the industries affected by a wage hike are makers of non-essential items, demand for those items may simply cease rather than causing inflation.

I wish everyone could have a living wage, really, I do. But the simple fact is that it does not matter if Talent or anyone else supports increasing the minimum wage. Because of its close ties with inflation, you will never make the populous better off by arbitrarily increasing the minimum wage.

Reformation Day and Halloween

Boy, I could go one of two ways with a post on a day such as this. In fact, I think I'll just cover both ends by linking to things.

Regarding Reformation Day, as I've said before, it is useful to see it as a reminder of what we should do today, not as a day of remembering old dirty laundry between parts of the one, catholic Church. I may not agree entirely on doctrine with my (big C) Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ, but I don't dwell on today as a way to further divide us. The division is an unfortunate part of the story of this day, and one that we are at least repairing somewhat as Protestants and Catholics continue to work together more. Today, the Reformation is a reminder that we should always be reforming our doctrine so as to avoid, to use a favorite term among my English Lit friends, “the signifier slipping from the signified.” The ever thoughtful Ed writes to that end on OFB.

For Halloween, check out this morbidly amusing video, entitled “the Life and Death of a Pumpkin.”

Happy Halloween and Happy Reformation Day!