Government Waste FEMA Style

I've written before about government waste in the Department of Homeland Security, and just recently I've been thinking about the high likelihood of waste with the reconstruction effort in Katrina-effected areas of the Gulf Coast. Turns out my fears were right on the money.

The Washington Post reports that FEMA contracted with Carnival to have three full service ships available as temporary housing for evacuees at a tune of $236 Million for six months. The best part of the whole article is a statement from Sen. Coburn and Sen. Obama, reproduced here for your enjoyment.

To critics, the price is exorbitant. If the ships were at capacity, with 7,116 evacuees, for six months, the price per evacuee would total $1,275 a week, according to calculations by aides to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). A seven-day western Caribbean cruise out of Galveston can be had for $599 a person -- and that would include entertainment and the cost of actually making the ship move.

"When the federal government would actually save millions of dollars by forgoing the status quo and actually sending evacuees on a luxurious six-month cruise it is time to rethink how we are conducting oversight. A short-term temporary solution has turned into a long-term, grossly overpriced sweetheart deal for a cruise line," said Coburn and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in a joint statement yesterday calling for a chief financial officer to oversee Katrina spending.

My question to the Senators, will having a single chief financial officer actually prevent this sort of abuse? Seems we have a single chief-executive officer, and he routinely fails to prevent abuse.

A Return to Normalcy

Tonight marks the last day of summer, sort of. Technically school started on Monday, and I did in fact go to class. But intermixed with class were a wide variety of summer GPSS tasks as well as finalizing certain budget issues with the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs (he gave us $5000, $2100 less than I asked for, but $1700 more than he gave us last year). Thankfully that all comes to an end today.

As an added bonus, the secretive GPSS Judicial Committee released its opinion regarding some volunteer appointment issues that brought the ire of someone not selected. It was a rather arduous and thorough process; but, in the end, they ruled that I had done nothing wrong. Woohoo! I didn't think I had done anything wrong in the first place, or at least, things that I had inadvertently done wrong I had done my best to rectify as soon as I learned about it. This just confirms it.

Tomorrow I return to my Power90 routine, which has been on something of an irregular pattern ever since my grandmother fell ill. I've been working out during that time, but not with the religious dedication of the summer (although my roommate has kept with it). Now that school will act as the dominate scheduling factor, I will begin to arrange workouts to fit accordingly. I'm through roughly half of the program, so after a week of getting back into the swing of things I'll punch it up a notch by starting the Session 3-4 videos.

In the next few days I'm scheduling a haircut with a more up scale place than my usual Hairmaster gig. I'm looking forward to seeing what they can do with my forsaken head of hair.

Defining Religion for the First Amendment

This quarter I'm enrolled in Freedom of Expression, which focuses on all aspects of the 1st Amendment. It's a really interesting part of the Bill of Rights, both in its historical intricacies and how the law coming out of the First Amendent looks. In the interest of posterity, here is the language in question:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

And with those 45 little words comes American's basic right of expression, thought, and belief. Today's class, while a little on the pedantic side, was interesting thanks to a thoughtful homework assignment: What is "religion"? I limited myself to religion in the First Amendment sense, but the question remains largely the same. Suffice to say, the question is not easy to answer.

Most of class was spent broadening the definition first offered by students... does a religion really need to be organized, must the beliefs be shared, what is a belief? Which were all very interesting questions and lead to an increasingly broader definition. I took a very different tact when trying to answer the question: come up with a definition that includes an accepted religion group like the Catholic Church but excludes an accepted political group like NARAL. Turns out this is not such an easy task.

I eventually developed the following answer.

Religion for purposes of the First Amendment refers to beliefs which cannot necessarily be explained through rational thinking, are held by a large group, and deal with certain non-secular issues. Religious exercise must be confined to those exercises which do not infringe upon the rights of others.

I like the answer, but it really doesn't exclude NARAL as much as I'd hoped. I did get a good definition of non-secular from class: "spirituality and/or creation not grounded in observable fact." But the answer still seems to broad to be workable.

Clearly this class is going to give me a few things to think about.

Geek Parties... Now with Money

For a long time my friends and I have hosted parties. We're not the most social people, but we've had a few go'rounds that have been worthy of note. The Iron Chef Challenge on the premier of Iron Chef American springs to mind. But those parties lacked something that is relevantly new to our lives: excess funds.

Last night we celebrated Brett's 24th birthday, and instead of struggling with my limited English vocabulary in a vain attempt to explain what money can buy you, let me just show you a picture.

First, you will note the blender. That is the greatest blender to ever crush ice. I purchased it as part of my, "Oh God, I'm Lonely, so I'll Buy Stuff" phase of my breakup with Lindsay. I stand by it as one of the best purchases from that period. Yeah, it was little spendy (okay, a lot spendy) but wields such explosive vortex action I might be tempted to compare it to certain vaccum's claim of gravometric proportions.

Next to the blender is a rather large bottle of tequila--moderately priced tequila. Mexican served as the party's central theme... but only to the extent that we ate nachos and I made more blended margaritas in one night than I have consumed in my lifetime up to that point. Back to the bottle... you will note that it is mostly empty. It started full that evening and only seven people attended (with two attendees hardly drinking). That left a rather substantial portion to the rest of us. Sure, the margaritas were a good method, but they lacked sufficient throughput to ensure we polished off the bottle. This is where Trivial Persuit comes in.

Trivial Persuit, you ask? Sure, you read the title of the post, right? Win yourself a pie piece, you and your partner both take a shot. Easy as... pie, I guess. But no, not really. I'm pretty good at Trivial Persuit, and when I get on a roll, I tend to be unstoppable. My team suffered some bad setbacks at the start (Mars/Moon... Keneset/Synagogue...), but in a period of less than an hour we obtained five pie pieces, and the five corresponding shots, all on top of the blended fruit margaritas I was pumping out. I was pretty gone by the time the evening wrapped up.

Much to my surprise, I suffered no ill effects in the morning and was able to make it to the hospital to see my grandmother. Who, by the way, is doing much better and may very well be discharged by the end of the week.

They Bumped this for Grey's Anatomy!

Last year I started watching Boston Legal. Pretty much from episode one I declared it to be the West Wing replacement. Both smart and funny, the show's writing, characters, and general feel were truly stupendous. I'll admit that the legal spin to the show dovetailed nicely with my legal education, but the show was really good without the legal bit. Brett even enjoyed the show... and I think Timber did too.

Well, the show only aired for half a season! And why? For stupid Grey's Anatomy. I'm told that Grey is all sorts of sexy and the Seattle setting is theoretically local and thus appealing (never mind they would have to rearrange the city to make it actually appear as it does in the show). Suffice to say, I didn't really care for Grey's. We were told that Boston Legal would return eventually, next seasons hopefully. As of right now plans are still on to bring back the show (with some minor cast tweaks).

None of that matters now, because the Academy has spoken and Boston Legal is not just a good show, it is an award winning show. And they only got to air half the season. William Shatner took home the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama and James Spader won for Best Actor in a Drama. Take that Grey's Anatomy... you couldn't even win in the Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series category!

A Day of Ups and Downs

Nothing like a whirlwind day of madness to make you long for the more simple relaxed life of yesteryear. This morning I woke up bright and early, ready for a my one and only On Campus Interview. The firm is a fairly sizable IP firm based in Washington, D.C. specializing in patents. Of course, I'm not eligible to sit for the patent bar, so I was surprised to see they accepted my bid for an interview... but if nothing else, it was going to be good interview experience.

As it turns out, the interview went really well. I really enjoyed talking with him and we had a fair number of things in common (for example, we are both Eagle Scouts). Based on that, I would say my chances for a callback are reasonable... however, getting such a callback requires a patent firm to decide they want to hire a copyrights lawyer. It's not impossible, but chances are slim.

After the interview, I went back to the GPSS Office to prepare for a presentation I was to give at the Microbiology New Student Orientation. Just before I was going to leave I heard word from my mother that my grandmother (age 93) had been taken to the hospital for breathing difficulties. Unfortunately, I couldn't go to the hospital because I had to complete the presentation... and even after I was done, Shannan and my Mom asked me to wait before I headed down.

While I waited for them I began preparations for an email announcing that the student governments had agreed to allow all Katrina students at the UW to access student funded facilities free of charge. It's kind of a big deal and one of the small things I'm trying to do to make their lives easier. But before I was able to finish writing the announcement, I was summoned to Swedish Hospital to visit my Grandmother and check on the mental state of my sister and mother.

When I arrived I was immediately struck with how much I dislike hospitals. Just not a very happy place. My grandmother didn't look so good, and was hooked up on a pretty gnarly looking breathing apparatus. But it was later revealed that she was doing okay and might be released as early as Friday. While certainly a scare, it may turn out to be not so bad. The big question we need to face now is when to tell Judy, my aunt in Nicaragua, she should come up. My grandma might live another week or another year. It's hard to tell.

Then I went to play poker... first game in months. The game started out slow for me, but a few good hands and a few well played hands came together, putting me in a strong first place position. But as with all my poker nights, luck turned against me and I was quickly out of the game. Still the best entertainment you can get for just $20.

The real bummer though, after all of that, is that the scheduling of everything forced me to miss my workout session for the first time since I started.

It hurts... and not just a little bit

First, things are going better in the work world. Issues are under control with LegSim and the computers are all setup at the GPSS Office. But that doesn't mean everything is right with the world. This morning, while working out, I did something horrible to my right shoulder/back region. And when I say horrible, I mean to say I'd rather not have an arm right now then deal with this particular pain. Of course, the pain the is of the variety where you don't feel it until you do something with the arm... which the absence of pain prior to the doing conveys the idea that doing may be a good idea. But no, doing is not a good idea; doing is to be avoided at all costs.

Tomorrow is cardio/abs, so hopfully I won't be using that particular muscle group very much and can give it time to rest and regenerate. But the next weights day is just around the corner, and I'm really not sure what is the appropriate course of action. I know stopping is a bad idea (worse than the doing I advised against so forcefully), but stopping and doing and often diametrically opposed, so there may be some difficult choices in the near future. On the plus side, I now weigh and outstandingly low weight of 155lbs!!! Quite frankly, I don't want to weigh any less. Now the trick is to convert the fat into muscle, and I think that process is coming along quite well.

I have an interview tomorrow with a big fancy D.C. firm specializing in patent law. If I were to be offered a job there, I would seriously drop a lung... but I do want to walk away feeling like I did well in the interview, and this muscle pain isn't going to make it very easy. My strategy, and I think it's a good one, is to rely on the total awesomeness of my new tie.