exempli gratia

Every time I write a bit on Congress, I go back to thinking about Representation. I am rethinking my original idea on making it 1 representative for every 100,000 citizens. The Constitution sets a lower limit of 30,000 per representative but it doesn’t set an upper limit. Evidently, 100 years ago Congress fixed the House of Representatives at 435 because they ran out of room in their chamber. This leads to one representative for over 700,000 citizens, on average, with Montana having one representative for over 950,000, today.

While 1/100K is a reasonable number – I think it give the citizens of each district a better chance to meet and know their representative and to share their views with them – I am willing to work with other numbers. 210,000 is about as high as I would like to go.  Close to what the level was when congress fixed the number of Representatives. People still have an opportunity to know their rep. Montana would have 5 representatives (OK there is a down side to most ideas). We would be closer to a representative democracy, closer than the country has been in a hundred years.

Of course, if We the People don’t do our job, nothing much will change in Washington.

I watched Tom Watson make his penultimate putt on the 72nd hole of the British Open. If it goes in he wins and it is the Ultimate putt. Oh, the heartache.

I had been watching Tom play the previous day and as he sat there at the top of the leaderboard, the TV cameras captured his image and it was an image of joie de vivre. As some of the commentators remarked, he had spirit. And I saw it today, as well. Here was a man playing the game of his life and loving it. He knew he could win and he would win. But that penultimate putt veered away from the hole and ultimate putt put him into a playoff. You could see that the spirit had left him at that point and that he had conceded the playoff; he was just going through the motions. And when the cameras focused on his face duringm the playoff you could see that the spirit had been replaced by a dull heartache. It was such a vivid heartache I felt it myself.

Thanks, Tom, for a great tournament and I hope you make the ultimate putt next year at St Andrews.

I am looking at going to Montreal this summer and decided to see what it would take to train my way there.

Basically, it takes time.

I looked at two different route options: DEN to MTR via TOR or via ALB.

For your consideration.

No matter which way you go, you will need to overnight in either Toronto or Albany.

So the Optimal way to train it seems to be go via Toronto. That is a nice city to visit plus there are a number of TOR-MTR trains to choose from if you don’t want to catch the 1135. I I actually ignored some earlier trains so I could sleep in.

And Return via Albany, where the are minimal layover times and you can get back to Denver in three days.

Reading Krugman today, he raises some concerns about Us, the people, bailing out the banking system without getting an ownership stake in the banking system.

My response to this prospect is: so? If taxpayers are footing the bill
for rescuing the banks, why shouldn’t they get ownership, at least
until private buyers can be found? But the Obama administration appears
to be tying itself in knots to avoid this outcome.

There are two good approaches I have heard about in regard to the bailout.

One is to create a parallel banking system to the current one that will handle the ‘credit crunch’ everyone is worried about. Let the existing banking system fail and then sell the new banking system to investors to recoup the people’s investment (and maybe make a profit.)

The second addresses the mortgage morass. The People can look at and underwrite all outstanding mortgages (I would only do this for primary residences and not for investment properties.) Basically, we look the current mortgagee’s ability to pay on their mortgage. If they have a $750K mortgage and can only make payments on a $500K mortgage, we would step in and take over the $250K difference. In exchange, when the owner sells the house we would our $250K plus interest and 1/3 of the profit (if any). (I am assuming that the current owner may hold on to the property until the market rebounds and the house is once again worth more the $750K) This allows the mortgagee to keep a house at a price they can afford, maintains the mortgages underlying the mortgage bond market, hopefully stops the mounting pile of foreclosures, and steadies the financial foundations that are crumbling away.

This is just a test.

testing

a test?

A test?