The Blaisdell Blog

In the past three months the House of Representative has been in session exactly 12 days.   Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has now cancelled the last two weeks of the session scheduled for the last of September and all of October.   The House will not be in session again until after the midterm elections.   Despite a backlog of legislative responsibilities, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has canceled the final two weeks of the September legislative session.   That leaves House lawmakers only one more 4-day work week before the midterm elections. The chamber won’t be reconvened until mid-November.   That amounts to over 100 days of paid vacation.   The average salary of a member of the United States Congress is $174,000.   That puts them in the top 5% of income earners in the United States. If you divide that salary by the days they have been in session, they are making about $608 per day.   I ask you, are you getting your money’s worth? ...

Let’s start with a situation of which almost every one of us has personal knowledge.   You have overspent your income, probably without intending to, but stuff happens.   You are running behind on your bills and think, “I just need enough money to get by for the next month, then I can get things under control.”    So, you take out a loan, pay some bills, buy some groceries and get the kids some shoes.   But at the end of the month, you are more in debt than before.   You try for another loan, and then another, and another.   Soon the only people who will loan you money are demanding you pay exorbitant interest.   You know you have hit bottom when you are thinking about a pay day loan. The United States government does the same thing.   When a government needs to raise money that it hasn’t raised in taxes, it sells bonds.   But if all they do is pay interest on the debt, instead of paying down the debt, we keep getting in more trouble. ...

  Today is National Dog Day.   Dogs are a supremely domesticated animal.   They read our moods, respond to our needs, love us even when we are not loveable and can be trained to be useful as well as companions.   I have owned two dogs in my adult life.   One was a white German Shepherd who grew up with my girls.   They could not have had a better friend.   The second was a neighborhood puppy.   His mother was a shepherd, but his father was a traveling man.   Like his predecessor, he was gentle, good natured and lived to make his family happy.   If you get the impression that I like big “doggy” looking dogs, you would be right. My dogs have been wonderful, loving and supportive animals.   Neither was particularly smart, but I know people I could describe the same way.   Since I am a scholar of Presidential history and this is a subject much in the news, I thought I would do a little research into Presidential dogs.   What...

Fifty years ago today, Colonel Ralph Albertazzie, then pilot of Air Force One, was flying over Jefferson City, MO with President Richard Milhous Nixon and his family on board.   He was taking the Nixons home to California. Passing the mid-Missouri air control, he received word that Vice President Gerald R. Ford had just been sworn in as President of the United States. Albertazzie contacted ground control and gave this message: "Kansas City, this was Air Force One. We are now redesignating SAM 27000." The reversion of the plane to its assigned tail number indicated there was no longer a President on board. Nixon had resigned a few hours before and was heading into a shameful retirement.   The resignation, the shame, the enduring stain on what was, in many ways, a laudable Presidency was the result of Nixon’s Presidential hubris and latent moral flaws.   I met Richard Nixon once.   I was at the Western States Young Republicans’ Convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico...

While our poorly equipped Secretary of Defense, Little Peter Hegseth is concerned about testing our military for low testosterone, there is another measurement to which this this country should be paying more attention.   It seems we are suffering from both low and dropping albedo.   I will pause here while someone tells Little Peter and his confused boss that “albedo” does not refer to levels or effects of testosterone.   For those of you who have never had the fun of a class on meteorology, the word albedo rhymes with speedo.   [Oh, there goes Peter again—he starts to hop around and giggle the minute he thinks of men in speedos.] Albedo refers to the amount of light Earth reflects into space.   It is measured on a scale from 0 to 1.   Zero means you absorb all light (like a black hood on a car); 1 means you reflect all light (like a field of fresh, icy snow).   As anyone who has rested their hand on the surface of a black car standing in the sun ...