Primary election

I did not vote in the Alabama primary election June 1, 2010. Shame on me, right.

The idea that a single vote "counts" is rather self-important. Even with the Republican primary for US Congressional District 5 tally within 200 votes, one vote would not have made a difference.

However, consider the recount that one candidate is paying about 1/5 of $1M to execute. Last I heard he was losing ground. So far though, if the same amount of votes were errors in his favor, the outcome of the primary still would not change. It does beg to question the accuracy of voting all across the country.

If everyone who felt as I did, that their vote didn't "count" had gone to vote, the turnout would have been overwhelming. Would the election have been more expensive?

More importantly, would the outcome have been better? That would be hard to guess. Hindsight is often 20/20 but a lot more voters would have been less informed about the candidates. Possibly the most convincing, high budget campaign would win instead of a candidate whose record speaks for itself. It too often does anyway.

The candidates themselves paint a broad picture of a platform and let the audiences fill in the blanks of what it means to them. This way they sway a lot more voters, having different views of what the candidate stands for.

They also know their audiences and change the rhetoric even if ever so slightly to ring bells on specific talking points for a specific audience, even if it is just as non-specific as their platform as discussed elsewhere.

So as the majority sits back and says, "I didn't vote for him" while the elected candidate makes whatever level of disaster, we're left wondering if it could have been better if everyone had voted whether fully informed or not.

Banks to lose $12B a year from new regulations

Some regulations were approved against greedy banking malpractices. By simply "playing (more) fair" they give up $12 BILLION they were essentially stealing from their customers.

One such practice was looking at your credit report and seeing another bank lowered your credit limit OR you were one day late on another credit card ( lowering your "credit score" as much as 50 points!). They call it a general default even when they know late payment and especially lowered credit limit are NOT default. Not even incrementally, changing the rate from 7.99% to 28.99%.

The sad thing is they will keep stealing this money from you until early 2010 when the new regulations go into effect, giving them plenty of time to find new ways to steal from you.

They get 3-6% of every purchase even if you pay off the amount in full each month.

Another theft they will not be able to do anymore is double-cycle billing where the average daily balance is magically bloated to get them more interest and compound interest, ..., ... , and then interest an extra month after you pay it off.

~Channing Humphries (originally posted on my MySpace blog December 21, 2008)

Flex Fuel Vehicles, Where's the Ethanol

My dad has a Flex Fuel pickup truck. It's a 2001 Mazda. For all intents and purposes it's a Ford before Ford bought Mazda.

The truck will burn gasoline or ethanol. The problem is there wasn't anywhere to buy ethanol. Even now, the closest station is about 60 miles away.

Here's a link to find alternative fuel stations close to you:

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/locator/stations/

The cheapest source of ethanol would presumably be processed from corn. Supply and demand would seem to make it cheaper if much more were produced. If many people used ethanol to fuel their cars gas demand would go down and could cause its price to drop. That would be good but could curtail efforts to reduce dependence on foreign oil.

So mass production of corn into ethanol would likely make for cheaper ethanol which would be replacing the use of gasoline.

So 8 years later, why are we still not seeing ethanol on every corner along with gas as long as gas would still be in demand?

Is there not enough profit to be made from corn? Is it not insanely cheaper to grow and process corn than to drill, pump and refine oil?

Interestingly enough, corn is SO cheap that it is processed into a substitute for sugar. The US government subsidizes a large amount of corn farming (which means tax dollars pay for it). Over-processed High Fructose Corn Syrup seems to be perfectly fine for consumption, even processed with a genetically modified enzyme and a fungus that gets reused until it stops giving results to get maximum profit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup.

So it sounds like the only reason we are still dependent on foreign oil is that we want to be.

Channing H.

How to Track a Vote in the House of Representatives

I know this is quite a convoluted process, which is why it has to be explained in the first place.

Note that this information is subject to change, the website look an navigation can and will likely change. The terminology could change (not that they would make it more difficult to find information, right?).

In the past I have seen House votes listed in a meaningful way, like the Senate's votes (which I will cover in a later post), by state is the most useful as people might not know the name of their representative or their name could be similar to another representative.

Here goes:

To get the proper info "from the horse's mouth" so to speak, start at

http://www.house.gov

Along the left side is a menu list. Under the "Resources" find "Clerk of the House."

Click on that and it takes you to http://clerk.house.gov .

On the navigation bar across the top of this page:

About the Clerk's Office
Member Information
Committee Information
Legislative Activities
Art & History
Public Disclosure
House Library

Hover over Legislative Activities, and the frame underneath changes accordingly.

Under Legislative Activities should be:

House Floor Proceedings
Congressional Schedule
Roll Call Votes
House Documents

Click on Roll Call Votes.

That should take you to a page called "Legislation & Votes."

On the right side of the split layout is "Roll Call Votes." Under this, click the current Congress which right now is

111th Congress, 1st Session (2009)

That will take you to an index, currently http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/index.asp with the most recent votes up to 99 or 100 per page.

The table contains the following items:
Roll Call Vote Number
Date
Issue (e.g. resolution name and number)
Result (P = Passed, F = Failed, A = Agreed-to)
Title/Description

These are labeled on the table.

For results prior to the most recent items, there are links at the bottom for each grouping, e.g. 1-99, 100-199 (to date it is only up to 192). Click on the link and you get a table of those entries.

Then to navigate, use Back because those pages do not have links back or to other pages.

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Now, for example we want to look at the vote on House Resolution 1 (first resolution for the 111th Congress).

Click on Roll Calls 1 Thru 99 [sic]

Now scroll down to at least Roll 70 which was 13-Feb and you will see H R 1 underlined as a link. Note that the vote # is also a link to the tally (which is currently a table of names, first and last separate and state listed in parentheses with last name, i.e. a mess).

Click on H R 1 and you get the THOMAS Library of Congress listing with a descriptive title and links to all kinds of good information about the resolution.

Clicking on "Major Congressional Actions" will take you to a timeline of actions in Congress.

For this particular item, you can see the House and Senate vote totals for each time it was brought to a vote. If you click on Roll no. ### you will get the jumbled table mentioned from the Roll # link above.

The Senate vote tallies are also listed along with a link to their vote (Record Vote Number: ### which can also be found starting from the senate homepage). Note how these tallies are actually useful in multiple ways.

The final Txt or PDF is currently not available, but if you go back to the H R 1 info page you can click on Text of Legislation which brings you to an index of all forms and the last is the most recent (though no dates appear on the index). For this one you can see #8 is listed as passed by both House and Senate).

The link takes you to yet another outline of links for the text, but there is also a Printer Friendly Display link which is more of a document form but I wonder if it is the entire text.

Warning: looking through the index table can be nauseating, especially looking at some of the items time is wasted on when they don't bother to read or even give time to read $X trillion spending bills before passing them.