Alabama Crimson Tide – Sunday morning roundup

What they’re saying about the Alabama Crimson Tide’s come from behind win yesterday in Fayetteville, Arkansas:

• Let’s get physical: Alabama is still the most physical team in the SEC, and it’s not close. Everything with the Crimson Tide begins and ends with being able to mash you up front, and we were reminded of that in the second half Saturday in their come-from-behind 24-20 win over Arkansas on the road.
• The key in this game? Alabama finally read the book on Mallett, and the book revealed the following: Mallett has a glass jaw.
• At kickoff Saturday, there was one prime Heisman Trophy candidate in Razorback Stadium. His name was Ryan Mallett. At game's end Saturday, there still was one prime Heisman Trophy candidate in Razorback Stadium. His name was Mark Ingram.
• On such afternoons are national champions built. Down 20-7 on the road against an Arkansas team that had seemingly written the perfect script for its biggest home win in history, No. 1 Alabama simply would not wilt. No. 1 Alabama would not relent. No. 1 Alabama would not concede anything on a day when it seemed like absolutely everything was against the Crimson Tide.
• It took Ryan Mallett only 50 seconds to expose Alabama's young secondary Saturday, completing his first two passes for a total of 74 yards and a touchdown.  Fortunately for the Crimson Tide, a football game is 60 minutes long. By the time those 60 minutes were up in Razorback Stadium, those young defensive backs had grown up a bit. Because they did, top-ranked Alabama escaped Fayetteville with a 24-20 win.
• Two words. Mark Ingram. Any questions? Are we talking the best player on the best team in the nation, even during its worst performance of the season? The answer is Ingram. Are we talking the best player on the field for either of these top-10 teams in the biggest game in this stadium in ages? The answer is Ingram.
• Mallett picked on Kirkpatrick once too often. More than a few passes from Mallett — who finished with 357 passing yards — were completed in Kirkpatrick’s direction. But with less than two minutes remaining and Mallett trying to engineer a comeback victory, he tried to pick on the Alabama sophomore one too many times.  The result: Kirkpatrick’s second career interception. And Arkansas never took another snap.

I’ll add this:  For the first 30 minutes of yesterday’s game, Alabama looked like a young, inexperienced team playing its first big SEC opponent on the road.  For the second 30 minutes, Alabama looked like a trained killer.  For the first 30 minutes, it was easy to remember that these are just kids.  For the second 30 minutes, you had to remind yourself that these are just kids.  Those kids—especially the really, really young ones in the secondary—grew up awfully fast yesterday.

Road Trip Mission Accomplished. We now return to our regularly scheduled right wing extremism

Road Trip:  Mission Accomplished.

I’d hoped to land one engineering and consulting contract on this week’s road trip, and ended up with two.  Not only that, but I’ve also developed the inside track to getting several others after the calendar turns in January.  Unfortunately, I had to tell my marketing guy to pass on some other near-term opportunities that, in different times, we would have gone all-in on.  Business is good, but it could be a lot better.  The two contracts I signed this week will keep my division busy through the end of March, 2011 and the additional contracts would keep us busy through next year and beyond.  But we can’t expand and go after more work tomorrow than we’re doing today.

The climate is just too uncertain.  We did hire two new people over the summer—one was a replacement; the other was a new hire.  It was the first new professional hire in over a year at my firm.

We have the potential to go after a lot more work than we’re carrying now, but that would mean hiring more new people and we just can’t do that with any confidence right now.  The climate is just too uncertain.  The company president has some idea how his tax situation will be in January if Congress doesn’t act to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, but he won’t be sure until the extension is passed or defeated.  We also have a very uncertain picture regarding the entire company’s healthcare insurance plan.  We’ve gotten some scenarios from our insurance reps, and absolutely none of them are good.  Some are just less bad than others.

If I expand my division and add new employees, I’d have to be confident that my clients are expanding too, or that they are about to increase their demand for the engineering, consulting and planning services we provide.  If I had that confidence, I could deal with the uncertainty by knowing that we’ll remain viable and profitable despite the current regime’s attitude.  If I knew my customers were buying, I would, too.  But I just don’t get that vibe from them.  And believe me, I’m good at getting the right vibe from the client.  We didn’t get where we are by not being in tune with the people who pay us so handsomely.

On the drive home today, it occurred to me that it is getting increasingly more difficult to do business in America.  Dammit, the business of America IS BUSINESS.  We build things.  We make things.  We invent things and we sell things like no other civilization on the planet has ever done.

Why should we suffer idiots in Washington who are hell bent on making it more difficult to do business in this country?  Why should we suffer them in the State House?  City Hall?

Is it “extreme” to expect a candidate for election to make it easier to do business in this country?

Liberal media planning bombshell; alleging John Boehner affair

When you are losing the debate on the facts, change tactics and start attacking personalities.  It’s a tried and true strategy of the left, and who really expected it wouldn’t be tried again in 2010?  Via the NY Post:

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Liberal media outlets are trying to smear the highest-ranking Republican in the House just weeks before the midterm elections with a deal-breaking scandal before he has a chance to take the speaker's chair from Nancy Pelosi.

A blogger from liberal Web site The Daily Kos pierced through Boehner's security detail at yesterday's unveiling of his leadership policy "Pledge to America" to ask if he was sleeping with a lobbyist from the Printing Industries of America.

The congressman ignored the pesky blogger with a flip camera and kept moving to his fleet of black Suburbans.

The lobbyist who was named in the confrontation and then was contacted by he Daily Kos blogger Lisbeth Lyons denied the accusations. "As you can imagine, I was stunned by such a question," Lyons said. "I found it to be highly insulting, particularly as a female political professional, as well as unfounded. Beyond that, I have no further comment on the matter."

Insiders on Capitol Hill are buzzing about an upcoming New York Times exposé that will detail an alleged Boehner affair. Sources say the Times is looking for the right time to drop the story in October to sway the election, similar to how the Times reported during the 2008 presidential campaign on an alleged John McCain affair that supposedly had taken place many years before and that was flatly denied by the woman in question.

"Catching Boehner with a mistress is the only way to destroy him politically before the election," a source said.

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This election is not about John Boehner, so even if there is a smidge of truth to the allegations, it’s a futile and desperate attempt to knock the debate off of the issues.  A lot of people heading to the polls on November 2 probably don’t even know who John Boehner is, despite the recent Democrat leadership’s attempt to make him the hot target.

TARP, Porkulus, Obamacare, Financial Regulation Reform, Cap and Trade, Amnesty, the drilling moratorium, Arizona immigration enforcement law.  The Democrats are on the wrong side of all eight issues. This election is all about issues, and when Democrats are on the wrong side of the electorate, out come the long knives.  People are motivated to vote in this mid-term because they’re sick and tired of junk like this. 

Dark Avenger Redux: Stuxnet and the next generation of virtual warfare

Have you ever heard of Stuxnet?  If not, you will soon.  It may be the most destructive piece of code to be released into the wild since the days of the Dark Avenger virus.

When I was running a FidoNet Bulletin Board System (BBS) in 1990, nothing struck dread in the heart of a BBS surfer more than seeing the following string of text, written randomly in sectors on his hard drive:

""Eddie lives... somewhere in time!"

Dark Avenger, nee Vesselin Bontchev (or, Todor Todorov?), is/was a computer programmer from Sofia, Bulgaria who authored the DOS program that bore his name.  The Dark Avenger virus was the seminal code that set off the whole war between virtual warhead and digital armor.  It’s infectiousness and its stealth mode of operation made it difficult to control, detect and destroy. During the debate surrounding researcher Sarah Gordon’s research on the Dark Avenger, there was considerable—and informed—speculation that the virus was developed by a team behind the Iron Curtain.

It’s 2010. Enter Stuxnet. 

Stuxnet is the world’s first virtual super weapon that was intentionally designed to take down a real-world target.  It could be a manufacturing facility, a chemical plant or… a nuclear power plant?

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A gradual dawning of Stuxnet's purpose

Stuxnet surfaced in June and, by July, was identified as a hypersophisticated piece of malware probably created by a team working for a nation state, say cyber security experts. Its name is derived from some of the filenames in the malware. It is the first malware known to target and infiltrate industrial supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software used to run chemical plants and factories as well as electric power plants and transmission systems worldwide. That much the experts discovered right away.

But what was the motive of the people who created it? Was Stuxnet intended to steal industrial secrets – pressure, temperature, valve, or other settings –and communicate that proprietary data over the Internet to cyber thieves?

By August, researchers had found something more disturbing: Stuxnet appeared to be able to take control of the automated factory control systems it had infected – and do whatever it was programmed to do with them. That was mischievous and dangerous.

But it gets worse. Since reverse engineering chunks of Stuxnet's massive code, senior US cyber security experts confirm what Mr. Langner, the German researcher, told the Monitor: Stuxnet is essentially a precision, military-grade cyber missile deployed early last year to seek out and destroy one real-world target of high importance – a target still unknown.

"Stuxnet is a 100-percent-directed cyber attack aimed at destroying an industrial process in the physical world," says Langner, who last week became the first to publicly detail Stuxnet's destructive purpose and its authors' malicious intent. "This is not about espionage, as some have said. This is a 100 percent sabotage attack."

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SCADA systems automate the controls of everything from a neighborhood package water plant to a massive steel manufacturing facility; from a candy factory to some of the world’s most sophisticated energy facilities:  Nuclear reactors.

As mentioned above, there was a lot of speculation that Dark Avenger and the variants that followed it were coded by Iron Curtain development teams, with the intention of releasing them into the wild and eventually, getting them to find their way across the pond into the nascent virtual networks (like FidoNet) and government networks, like ARPANet (that would be the Internet that Al Gore invented).

So where did Stuxnet come from?  Good question.  The experts say that the elegance of the code, the depth of the encryption and the specific nature of the program’s intended target indicate that it is the product of a program that could only be funded at the state level. 

Just like the same experts were saying about the Dark Avenger.

The real $64 trillion question is: “What facility was Stuxnet designed to destroy?”

Weekly jobless claims take a dip

Fresh from the Dept of Labor website:

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In the week ending Sept. 18, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 465,000, an increase of 12,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 453,000. The 4-week moving average was 463,250, a decrease of 3,250 from the previous week's revised average of 466,500.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.5 percent for the week ending Sept. 11, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week's revised rate of 3.6 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending Sept. 11 was 4,489,000, a decrease of 48,000 from the preceding week's revised level of 4,537,000. The 4-week moving average was 4,519,500, an increase of 2,500 from the preceding week's revised average of 4,517,000.

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It’s worth noting that for the second week in a row, the previous week’s revisions all but wiped out the gains announced with the initial release.  Last week’s revisions produced a net gain of 1,000.  This week’s revision produced a zero gain, and this week’s initial release shows a loss of 12,000 for a three week trend of a weakening job market.

Markets probably won’t like this news.

Existing housing sales data are out later this morning.  Expectations are for another contraction.  And this is “absolutely moving in the right direction?”

Update:  Existing home sales came in somewhat higher than expected.  Analysts were expecting continued contraction but the period saw a decent 7.6% increase.  The increase was a “bounce” off of last month’s historic low. We still have about a year’s worth of inventory to work down, which should continue to pressure home prices.  While that’s not good for those looking to sell, it’s good for a potential upward trend through the fall. 

O’Reilly vs. Krauthammer, and Krauthammer is wrong

I wrote this in a post last week, but it’s worth recycling here after watching Bill O’Reilly ruffle the Krauthammer feathers on The Factor tonight:

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It’s the Senate races that bear the most interest because, if you’re going to start shifting the center of gravity, the most deliberative body of Congress is the place to establish a long term trend.  The Senate elects one-third of its members every six years. And, because of the rules of debate in the upper chamber, the minority party holds considerably more power than a minority in the House of Representatives.  If you’re going to make an ideological stand, it makes sense to put your assets in play in the Senate, and take a few risks with candidates who line up more closely with the principles espoused by the movement.  The power of the minority party allows you to block measures that run counter to the center-right agenda while building coalitions with moderate Democrats to pass measures supporting the center-right agenda, all while building for the next cycle of elections, where you’ll have a shot at another one-third of the seats.  How do you think the Democrats did it?

You’re not going to win every race. Angle faces a formidable foe in the sitting Senate Majority Leader.  That’s a toss-up.  Rubio is up against two candidates, one backed by a well-funded Democrat party apparatus; the other the sitting Governor.  Another toss-up. O’Donnell has the longest, tallest road to climb in beating a Democrat in a deep blue state without any party establishment support at all.  That’s almost surely a loss. 

But you will win some of them, and you’ll win enough of them so that your voices are heard loudly on Capitol Hill for the next six years.  And, you’re also putting the GOP establishment on notice—conservatives are willing to lose races by nominating candidates on conservative principle.  That is to say, conservatives—and the grassroots movement that became the Tea Party—are willing to sacrifice a race here or there by nominating principled conservatives and unwilling to sacrifice conservative principles just to win.  Conservatives will nominate a “non-electable” candidate if they think the “non-conservative” candidate isn’t worth voting for. It will cause establishment-type Republicans to think twice about seeking nominations in the 2012 and 2014 Senate cycles while encouraging principled conservatives to explore and possibly seek seats.  This is a long process, but it’s the best one if we’re ever going to see center-right common sense on Capitol Hill.

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Maybe, just maybe, the Delaware seat isn’t as far out of reach as I thought it was on the Wednesday after O’Donnell upset the GOP establishment favorite.  Yeah, she’s down a double-digit in the polls as of today, but there’s still six weeks of campaigning to go and O’Donnell is raising money from folks from coast to coast.  Can she win?

Not the point.

The point of the excerpt above is to make the case for nominating risky candidates here and there on the basis of the fact that the minority party in the Senate enjoys a very powerful position. We don’t need an outright majority in the Senate like we do in the House.  We just need a strong enough 41+ minority to block those measures that do not comport with our agenda.  The majority just determines what measures come to the floor for debate.  Ending debate requires 60+ votes, so a sizable minority lets the right begin a long term plan to establish a center-right majority while gambling in a few places that would likely have been lost anyway.

Castle was the wrong Republican.  He’s a liberal.  He’s no better than another Lindsey Graham.  So why not go all in with a real conservative?  Why not gamble on O’Donnell getting her message to Delaware voters in a way that might get her seated in a volatile year like this?  Sometimes, you have to put your chips in the pot when the odds are against you.  People who don’t take big risks don’t make big returns.

Krauthammer, Rove et all seem to miss this point completely.  It’s Ok if a conservative-laden GOP doesn’t win the Senate in 2010. Going all-in on O’Donnell doesn’t lose the tournament.  The 2010 election is one hand in a long, long process where taking a risk here or there makes sense and is part of a long term strategy. 

Tens of millions more people will be voting in this off-term election than in recent such contests.  There’s no reason to think that a long shot can’t win, and the way O’Donnell is raising money and managing her message, she might not be as much of a long shot as the experts think.

Light blogging this week…

I am on a sales and marketing road trip this week, from Mobile to New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Houston.  Blogging will be light and sporadic.

We’ll return to our regularly scheduled right-extremism next week.

Karl Rove needs to stop asking Christine O’Donnell to answer questions, and answer this one:

Why are you working so diligently to defeat a Republican candidate for the US Senate, who was duly nominated by the Republican Party of Delaware in that state’s primary on September 14, 2010?

Mr. Rove, either answer the question, or STFU.

That is all.

Ding Dong, the Well is Dead. Gulf Oil Spill comes to anticlimactic end

In a statement released this morning, Admiral Thad Allen (RET) confirms the results of last night’s final pressure test and proclaims the Macondo Well dead; the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill over:

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"After months of extensive operations planning and execution under the direction and authority of the U.S. government science and engineering teams, BP has successfully completed the relief well by intersecting and cementing the well nearly 18,000 feet below the surface.  With this development, which has been confirmed by the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, we can finally announce that the Macondo 252 well is effectively dead.   Additional regulatory steps will be undertaken but we can now state, definitively, that the Macondo well poses no continuing threat to the Gulf of Mexico.  From the beginning, this response has been driven by the best science and engineering available.  We insisted that BP develop robust redundancy measures to ensure that each step was part of a deliberate plan, driven by science, minimizing risk to ensure we did not inflict additional harm in our efforts to kill the well.  I commend the response personnel, both from the government and private sectors, for seeing this vital procedure through to the end.  And although the well is now dead, we remain committed to continue aggressive efforts to clean up any additional oil we may see going forward."

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It’s something of an anticlimactic end, as the well was successfully capped on July 15 and no oil has flowed from the well since then.  There’s been quite a bit of speculation as to whether the relief well completion was even needed, as the “top kill” procedure that followed the successful cap stanched the flow of oil and could have been the permanent fix.

Nonetheless, a slow motion disaster has come to a quiet end, nearly five months to the day since April 20, when a methane gas bubble erupted and blew out the well.  The ensuing explosions and fire killed 11 men, sank one of the world’s most advanced drilling rigs and started the worst marine oil spill in US history.

Now comes the continuing recovery, which the Obama regime can hasten by dropping the arbitrary, capricious and economically devastating drilling moratorium.  Let the Gulf Coast get back to work, and it will recover all by itself.

Moratorium only cost 12,000 jobs. “Let them eat cake.”

“Let them eat cake.”

This regime has many aspects about it that rub people the wrong way.  The cavalier attitude towards those affected by its misguided policy decisions might be the most acute.  Late Thursday, the regime released its analysis (PDF) of the economic effects of the deepwater drilling moratorium.  The report estimated that between 8,000 and 12,000 jobs would be impacted by the moratorium, and up to $1.8 billion in spending by the oil and gas exploration sector would be lost.  The report categorizes the effects as “not large.”  “Not significant.”

“Let them eat cake.”

In an editorial yesterday, the New Orleans Times Picayune takes the administration to task for its indifference:

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Louisiana officials and industry observers disputed some of the premises in the government's analysis, and their observations have merit. But even if the administration's figures are correct, 12,000 jobs lost is a major hit for the economy of a recovering region – and the administration shouldn't be cavalier about that.

LSU economics professor Joseph Mason, who has studied the moratorium's impact, said the government's estimate of job losses doesn't differ much from his own. The distinction, he said, is in how federal officials are framing their conclusions. In particular, Mr. Mason noted that many Gulf Coast communities are small, meaning the loss of even a few hundred jobs can be devastating.

"The administration says 'only' 12,000 jobs will be lost," Mr. Mason said. "This is almost as if they are telling a region that has been hit by disaster – both natural and manmade – time and time again that we'll 'only' wipe out a handful of their communities."

He's right, and that goes against President Obama's promise that his administration would help our region recover from this disaster.

The problem is not just that government officials were, and apparently still are, oblivious to the economic pain caused by the deepwater moratorium. The administration has not even acknowledged the damage from what local officials have characterized as a de-facto moratorium on shallow-water drilling.

Federal officials have said there's no official ban on shallow-water drilling. But 15 of 46 shallow-water rigs active when the Deepwater Horizon exploded are now idle, and four other have left the country. In addition, the federal government has granted only four permits for new drilling operations in the past four months. That many shallow-water permits were granted on any given week before the moratorium.

Industry officials said the shallow-water slowdown also is costing jobs. Shallow-water operator Hercules Offshore, for example, said it's laid off a few hundred employees. Seahawk Drilling Inc. has idled four rigs and put 150 workers on unpaid leave.

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The regime’s unwillingness (or apathy toward) admitting that its capricious policy of halting drilling in the gulf is having a significant economic impact, combined with the cavalier attitude towards the impacts that it does acknowledge, gives lie to the promise Obama made “heal the Gulf.”  He either doesn’t care, or he doesn’t care to care.

It’s this attitude—along with a long list of other dilettantish traits—that irks and angers so many Americans, not the least of which are the people of the Gulf Coast. They are “only” losing 12,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in economic impacts from the moratorium.

“Let them eat cake.”