Tag Archives: politics

20th Century Bigotry Updated

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined on the fraud that’s rampant—and hard to root out—in Federal programs intended to give a special leg up on project awards to “Disadvantaged Business Enterprises.” They closed their piece with this bit of truism on the…foolishness…of singling out government-favored groups of Americans for special treatment.

Trying to do social engineering via civil engineering makes federal projects opaque, inefficient and—far too often—dishonest.

To which I add, it’s also just another way for the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party to repeat—updated for the 21st century—the segregationist bigotry of the middle of the last century.

Defenseless

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Wisconsin State Congressman Scott Allen is proposing a state law that would give local school boards the ability to decide for themselves whether to allow firearms in their districts rather than being hamstrung (in several senses) by a Statewide ban on firearms in all schools. Allen, on the origin of his bill:

This bill came about at the request of the Germantown School Board who wrote that the “gun free school zone” signs do nothing but notify a criminal that there will be few, if any, people in the building that can defend themselves. Schools provide soft targets for those looking to do harm, and this bill gives school boards the option to change that.

That’s a pretty sensible step toward Wisconsin’s citizens being able to defend themselves and their children until the second responders, the police, arrive on the scene just a very few minutes later. Those very few minutes are when the shooter’s butchery occurs unless the first responders, the citizens already present, can defend.

Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democratic Party Governor, Tony Evers, says otherwise.

This bill shouldn’t make it to my desk—but if it does, I’ll veto it. Plain and simple. I already vetoed Republicans’ bill to allow loaded guns on school grounds because increasing firearms on school grounds won’t make our schools or our kids safer. So, let me be clear: I’ll veto any bill that weakens Wisconsin’s gun-free school zone law. Period.

Evers doesn’t take Germantown’s school board seriously; he wants that Gun-Free Zone sign posted and that exposure proclaimed. Evers is showing that he doesn’t want common sense firearm laws, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Evers is insisting, instead, that he wants Wisconsin’s schools to be target zones for shooters.

Evers plainly wants Wisconsin’s school children, teachers, and school staff to be as defenseless in those critical minutes as is his gun control ideology.

I Have Questions

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Recall that Maricopa County, AZ, has developed a hoary history of election ballot and counting irregularities, most recently in the 2022 election in which the county was unable to deliver sufficient ballots in sufficient numbers to accommodate the voters, many of whom were denied their right to vote by those ballot failures. Maricopa County investigators, led by Former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor, have released their report on causes of those…snafus.

Between the August primaries and the November general contest, the county expanded the length of the ballots from 19 inches to 20 inches in order to include all of the required information. The increased ballot size in combination with the use of 100-pound ballot paper, the report concludes, was too great a strain on the printers.
“Based on our tests, and for the reasons described in this report, we concluded that the combined effect of using 100-pound ballot paper and a 20-inch ballot during the 2022 general election was to require that the Oki B432 printers perform at the extreme edge of their capability, a level that could not be reliably sustained by a substantial number of printers,” the report states.

That raises questions in my poor, dumb, flyover country northern Texan mind.

Who reviewed the performance specifications for the Oki B432 printers?

Who tested those printers on the larger paper?

Who tested those printers on the heavier-weight paper?

Who tested those printers on the combination of larger size and heavier weight?

Finally, an encompassing question: of the County’s election officials and staff, for how long have the staff members—the bureaucrats and volunteers, not the elected officials—been in place?

Rogue Judge

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A couple of teachers had the impudence to demur from compulsory “antiracism training” imposed by their Springfield Public Schools district managers.

In response, US District Judge Douglas Harpool, of the Western District of Missouri, not only ruled against the teachers, he ordered them to pay $313,000 in legal costs for bothering the district, and he did this cavalierly disregarding their arguments and issuing his ruling via summary judgment—which means the court—Harpool—never really took the case up, or took it seriously. He wrote in pertinent part, as summarized by Just the News:

They have not provided evidence they were compelled to “speak favorably” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.

Never mind that the very parts that Harpool cited demonstrates the compulsory nature of the requirement not to speak unfavorably about the district’s “message” and not to remain unaffiliated or unassociated with the district’s “message.” That pressure to not be unaligned or to not speak unfavorably is exactly the compulsion to speak favorably and to align. The fact that the beratement went unchallenged by the program’s instructors or the district’s managers further emphasizes the compulsory nature of the district’s “message.”

This is a Federal judge who needs to be removed from the bench forthwith. He has shown himself not just incapable of, but openly refusing to, adjudicating a case objectively and on the basis of the facts and statute(s) presented. Instead, Harpool reigns over his court on the basis of his personal agenda.

Harpool’s ruling can be read here.

“Auditors Didn’t Flag”

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Silicon Valley Bank’s third-party auditors did not mention the underlying risk to SVB’s viability in its report, which the group issued two weeks before the bank’s collapse.

When KPMG LLP gave Silicon Valley Bank a clean bill of health just 14 days before the lender collapsed, the Big Four audit firm flagged potential losses on loans as a so-called critical audit matter. But the audit opinion was silent on what actually brought down the bank—its unrealized bond losses and ability to hold them given a reliance on potentially flighty deposits.
“The auditors failed to mention the fire in the basement or the box of dynamite on the first floor, but they did point out the peeling paint on the flower box,” said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business professor. “How could they miss the interest-rate risk?”

And this from Martin Baumann, ex-Chief Auditor at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and who had a leading role in designing the new measure:

Silicon Valley Bank’s unrealized losses in its bond portfolio appear to “meet every definition of a possible critical audit matter[.]”

A critical audit matter is a tool intended to help investors decode risks and uncertainties buried in financial statements, to make audit opinions actually useful.

Thus, how could the auditors have missed the larger risk? Why did they?

Or did they? Maybe this is a demonstration of the weakness of auditors being paid by the auditees for the audits.

One apparent weakness in the PCAOB’s existing requirements, though, is that banks can hide the risks in their portfolios by (re)characterizing some or all of their bond holdings as “hold to maturity” rather than as marketable and so required to report their (fluctuating) market value. But when the bonds are being held in even partial satisfaction of reserve requirements, maybe those “hold to maturity” bonds still should have their current market value reported to the public. After all, SVB had no intention of selling even its “marketable” long-term bonds. That is, until it began to experience deposit withdrawals at rates it could not fill without selling those long bonds immediately, and so at losses driven by the environment’s rising interest rates.

So—again I ask: why did SVB’s auditors not report that interest rate risk? KPMG may well have a valid reason for its silence on that risk, but it should say what that risk is.

In any event, it would be useful to see the timesheets of those auditors—when I worked as a defense contractor, my timesheets were required to be submitted with 10-minute intervals—so we in the public can know what those auditors were doing instead of their jobs.