Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Here in the Boston area, the so-called Big Dig has had more than its share of mismanagement, incompetence and outright fraud. The total price for the project, which is mostly done, is about $14 billion; an amount that has been rightly called an outrage and a scandal. How much of that is due to fraud and waste?

In Iraq the overhead for graft and corruption alone is estimated at $10 billion. Money that’s been skimmed right off the top by contractors, including Dick Cheney’s cronies at Halliburton. We need more outrage.

Audit finds $10 billion in fuzzy spending

Inspectors reviewed one-sixth of $350 billion U.S. has spent on Iraq

Dan Duray, Hearst Newspapers
Friday, February 16, 2007

(02-16) 04:00 PST Washington — More than $10 billion of the money paid to military contractors for Iraq reconstruction and troop support was either excessive or unsupported by documents, including $2.7 billion for contracts held by Halliburton or one of its subsidiaries, Congress was told Thursday.

The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their review of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State department officials condoned or allowed repeated work delays, bloated expenses and payments for shoddy work or work never done.
Continue reading Big Dig vs. Big Hole

Now is the time to order your Laura Bush roses from Jackson & Perkins! Why waste your money on, say, Girl Scout cookies? And look! Her mother-in-law, legendary battle-ax Barbara, gets to have her own roses, too. They’re the extra-thorny kind!

I was stunned this morning while driving to work, listening to a story on NPR about a lawsuit in Israel, brought by Jewish women who have been harassed by ultra-Orthodox Jews during bus rides. The story can be heard here.

Gender segregation? The assertion that women should not be educated beyond high school? Fundamentalist Judaism sure sounds a lot like Fundamentalist Islam.

Zillow was started by the ex-Microsoft guys who started Expedia, which is now part of Barry Diller’s empire. I occasionally use Zillow to check on the value of our house.

I’ve cropped out the numbers, but the turquoise line is the median price of homes in my town, the blue line is our house, and the red line is for the county. See how our house started to fall below the median right before we moved there? Good timing, although I admit it was purely luck. We’re in a good town to be below the median. The $ indicates when we bought the place.

A year or so ago property values started to drop, as they did in most places. We’re back down to where we were three years ago, and now I see we’ve dropped below the median for the county for the first time. Well, we’re not moving, so I’m not going to worry about it!

I don’t know if Zillow is truly reflective of property values, but it’s useful for tracking trends, as it does in the chart above. One thing I wonder, however, is if Zillow will do to real estate what the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide once did to back issues of comic books, and start to lead the market rather than follow it. Later, eBay came along, greatly diminishing the utility of an annual price guide. Old comics flooded the market and prices for certain issues collapsed, while the market for one-of-a-kind original art skyrocketed.