Joe the Plumber Asked the Wrong Question

I'd been wondering why, after we learned that "Joe the Plumber" wasn't "Joe," and wasn't quite a plumber, news and the blogosphere didn't erupt in a firestorm of outrage.

This bald plumber from Ohio had, after all, tricked Barack Obama into making a clear statement about Obama's economic philosophy.

By posing as himself, Joe the Plumber lured Barack Obama into saying "I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," an unscripted statement that was entirely too easy to understand.

Oh, No, Joe! Say It Ain't So!

News leaked out, last week, that "Joe the Plumber" was really Samuel J. Wurzelbacher: and that he wasn't a licensed plumber. Not in Toledo, Ohio, anyway. After the revelation that Barack Obama had been ambushed by a 'right-wing zealot working under an assumed name,' there wasn't anywhere near the amount of fuss I expected. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places.

Someone probably found out that the "J" in Samuel J. Wurzelbacher stands for "Joseph."

The full name of "Joe the Plumber" is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.

So, Joe the Plumber would rather be called Joe than Sam: So what?

Joe the Plumber: Person of Interest

When Joe the Plumber, AKA Joe Wurzelbacher, AKA Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, presented himself as a plumber who wanted to buy the business he'd been working for, Barack Obama explained: " 'I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody,'" and that "Joe" would be okay, personally.

John McCain and his campaign have been claiming that Obama wants to redistribute the wealth. Obama says, 'do not!'

I suppose it's a matter of semantics.

Whether it's "spread the wealth around," or 'redistribute property,' Joe the Plumber got Mr. Obama to state his economic philosophy: simply and directly.

And quite a few Americans are savvy enough to realize that penalizing people for being successful isn't part of the American dream.

That makes Joe the Plumber a person of interest for quite a few people who honestly believe that society would be better if people who make too much had their property confiscated by a wise and benevolent federal bureaucracy.

Joe's Virtual Proctology Exam

Somebody's been feeling around in Joe's records. Data about his driver's license was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles not long after the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama.

Three times.

(Turns out, Joe owns an SUV. You might have known that he'd be one of those people.)

So far, although we don't know exactly who nosed around inside Joe's records, we do know where the digging was done. The data was accessed by accounts assigned to the:

• Office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers
• Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency
• Toledo Police Department

Without, apparently, any official reason.

Professor Rogers holds the Michael E. Moritz Chair in Alternative Dispute Resolution at Ohio State University's Moritz College. She's filling in as Ohio's Attorney General until the November election. She just happens to be a Democrat¹.

The Ohio Attorney General's office is investigating the unauthorized access.

It'll probably take a while. At least one of the leaks was from a "test account" given to the attorney general office's information technology section. That doesn't narrow it down as much as you might think. Apparently, the test accounts are shared with, and used by, other "law enforcement-related agencies," as the Columbus Dispatch put it.

One thing is for sure, officially, at least. Mr. Wurzelbacher's information wasn't accessed from inside the attorney general's office. A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office said so.

Sam Joe Wurzelbacher isn't at all happy about this (officially) unauthorized snooping. " 'It upsets me greatly, to be honest with you,' Wurzelbacher told FOX News' Neil Cavuto on Saturday. 'For a private citizen to ask a question of his elected leaders and then turn around and get a proctology exam, that's just kind of wrong.' " (FOXNews (October 25, 2008))

I think Joe the Plumber has a point.

Joe the Plumber for Congress?

It could be "Joe the Congressman" after 2010. Mr. Wurzelbacher's thinking about running for office. I'd say that the citizens of Ohio could do a lot worse.

Views:

• "Commentary: Liberals let loose on Palin and Joe the Plumber
  CNNPolitics.com (October 23, 2008)
• " 'Joe the Plumber' Wurzelbacher: American Taxpayer, Entrepreneur, and Voice of Reason in 2008 Election"
  (October 16, 2008)
• " 'Joe the Plumber' Isn't Quite a Plumber, and Isn't 'Joe!' "
  Another War-on-Terror Blog (October 16, 2008)
• " 'Joe the Plumber,' Barack Obama, Taxes, Racist Pennsylvanians, and 'Those People' "
  Another War-on-Terror Blog (October 16, 2008)

In the news:

• "Ohio probes 'Joe the Plumber' data search"
  United Press International (October 25, 2008)
• " 'Joe the Plumber' Considers Run for Congress"
  FOXNews (October 25, 2008)
• "Report: Government Computers Used to Get Information on 'Joe the Plumber' "
  FOXNews (October 25, 2008)
• "Government computers used to find information on Joe the Plumber"
  Columbus Dispatch (October 24, 2008)
• "Hacker targets Ohio secretary of state's site"
  Toledo Blade (October 22, 2008)

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¹ Interim Ohio Attorney General Rogers' political affiliation isn't discussed much. Ohio's Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, said he didn't know that Professor Rogers was a Democrat when he appointed her, so that should settle the matter.

News and views:

• "Strickland taps Ohio State law dean for attorney general"
  PolitickerOH.com (May 29, 2008)
• "Dean of Ohio State law school Nancy Rogers to head Ohio attorney general's office"
  Cleveland.com / NEWS FROM THE PLAIN DEALER (May 29, 2008)
• "Dean of Ohio State law school Nancy Rogers to head Ohio attorney general's office"
  Cleveland.com Openers / The Plain Dealer Politics Blog (May 28, 2008)
  

Commercial Space Travel: As Practical as a Mission to the Moon

This post is a bit off-topic, but:

• I'd gathered this information for another blog
• The information wouldn't interest my target audience there
• It seemed a shame to let it go to waste
• Space exploration and commercial development in space is something I'm very interested in

So, with that flimsy set of excuses, here goes.

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There's a 'race to the moon' again: this time in Asia. Depending on which side of Earth you're on, India launched a spaceship bound for the moon yesterday, or early today. (Excerpts from the news at the end of this post)

Getting a spaceship to the moon is a pretty big deal. Five organizations have sent missions to Earth's only natural satellite so far: the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China. If all goes well with Chandrayan-1, India will make it six.

Space Programs and a Social Conscience

The "...still live in dire poverty..." in one article reminded me of the sixties here in America, when the argument was that money for the space program should have been spent on well-intentioned programs like Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project.

Even though some of the federal budget was siphoned off to build places like the Johnson Space Center in Houston, America made an earnest effort to end poverty by concentrating poor people in housing projects and giving them money to stay unemployed.

Those social programs didn't work out quite as well as some had expected.

The Johnson Space Center, on the other hand, does business with contractors from Aerospace Corp. to Wyle Life Sciences Group, with outfits like Al-Razaq Computing Services (the contact person is Ralph Schomburg - I love this country), MacDonald Dettwiler Space Robotics, and Major Constructors, LLC in between.

Although the connection isn't too obvious to some, when a company like Aerospace Corp. gets a contract, it hires people to get jobs done. Or, sometimes it hires subcontractors, who hire people to get jobs done.

The point is that, although I hope that the company owners and managers profit from the contracts, quite a bit of the money goes through the company, to employees. Then, the employees spend it in groceries and gas stations, and - well, you get the idea.

An amazing number of people don't.

So, although in the sort run it looks like India ought to spend money on things like housing projects and social programs, I think that the country's space program will do more good to those people 'living in dire poverty' than housing projects and welfare.

It takes people, lots of people, to build launch pads, support facilities, office buildings, and roads to connect everything. It takes other people to do everything from empty the wastebaskets in the office and answer the phone, to design robots for moon missions.

And, unless things have changed in India, those people will be paid.

To paraphrase Mae West, 'I've been employed, and I've been unemployed. Employed is better.'

Moon Marketing

There's a lot of money in commercial satellites, and India (quite understandably) wants a piece of the pie. This moon mission, if they pull it off, will get them publicity and status that no marketing campaign could produce. Although arguably the moon mission is a marketing campaign. I'm not going to go off on that tangent.

Sending a robot spaceship to the moon, successfully, is a good way of demonstrating competence in space technology: and it gets quite a lot of (free) publicity.

Space and the Private Sector

Spaceships aren't a government monopoly, at least not in America. Branson's Virgin Galactic and Rutan's Scaled Composites LLC are examples of business getting space-savvy. Not that the CNN article ("Branson, Rutan to unveil mothership" CNN (July 28, 2008)) put it quite that way.

I've run out of the time allotted for this post. So this wrap-up will be quick.

Moon missions were science fiction when I was growing up. Now, they're publicity projects (and a little more) for a half-dozen nations and organizations. Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites are very close to providing passenger service on suborbital flights.

I was going to write about serious proposals for Low Earth Orbit tourist resorts. Maybe some other time.

Background:

• " 'Hot Eagle:' the Space Marines Are Coming"
  Another War-on-Terror Blog (October 19, 2008)
• "'La force motrice' of Reusable Launcher Development: The Rise and Fall of the SDIO's SSTO Program, From the X-Rocket to the Delta Clipper
  NASM Talk / NASA (November 18, 1999?)
• "Getting to Low Earth Orbit" (Space Future (April, 1999))
• "Chandrayaan to carry 11 payloads"
  ITExaminer.com (October 14, 2008)
  Includes details on the payloads:
  1. Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC): Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)
  2. Hyper Spectral Imager (HySI): ISRO
  3. Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI): ISRO
  4. High Energy X-ray Spectrometer (HEX): ISRO
  5. Moon Impact Probe (MIP): ISRO
  6. Chandrayaan-1 X-ray Spectrometer (C1XS): European Space Agency (ESA) with collaboration between Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK and ISRO Satellite Centre, ISRO
  7. Near-IR Spectrometer (SIR-2): Max-Plank-Institute for Solar System Science, through the Max-Plank Society, Germany and ESA
  8. Sub Kev Atom reflecting Analyser (SARA): ESA, in collaboration with Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Sweden and Space Physics Laboratory, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, ISRO
  9. Radiation Dose Monitor Experiment (RADOM): Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
  10. Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar (MiniSAR): USA through NASA
  11. Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3): Brown University and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA through NASA

India's Chandrayaan-1 in the News:

"India Launches Moon Mission in Asian Space Race"
Space.com (October 21, 2008)

"NEW DELHI (AP) — Scientists have better maps of distant Mars than the moon where astronauts have walked. But India hopes to change that with its first lunar mission.

"Chandrayaan-1 — which means "Moon Craft" in ancient Sanskrit — launched from the Sriharikota space center in southern India early Wednesday morning (Local Time) in a two-year mission aimed at laying the groundwork for further Indian space expeditions.

"Chief among the mission's goals is mapping not only the surface of the moon, but what lies beneath. India joined what's shaping up as a 21st century space race with Chinese and Japanese crafts already in orbit around the moon....

"...As India's economy has boomed in recent years, it has sought to convert its new found wealth — built on its high-tech sector — into political and military clout and stake a claim as a world leader. It is hoping that a moon mission — coming just months after it finalized a deal with the United States that recognizes India as a nuclear power — will further enhance that status...."

"Lunar mission blasts off"
The Strait Times (Singapore) (October 22, 2008)

"SRIHARIKOTA (India) - INDIA on Wednesday successfully launched its first lunar mission in a major boost for the country's space programme.

"There were cheers in mission control as the unmanned lunar orbiting spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 was launched with an Indian-built rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on the southeastern coast...."

"...India is hoping the mission will boost its space programme into the same league as regional powerhouses Japan and China.

"As well as looking to carve out a larger slice of the lucrative commercial satellite launch market, India, Japan and China also see their space programmes as an important symbol of their international stature and economic development.

"The launch was carried live on most Indian television channels, although some critics have questioned the sense in spending so much money on space when hundreds of millions of Indians still live in dire poverty...."

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Chandrayan? Chandrayaan? The first spelling is used in most of the articles I read, the second in the ITExaminer.com. This is the sort of thing that happens when words from one language - and writing system - are dropped into another. I'm using the first for what I write in this post, and leaving the 'double a' version in the ITExaminer.com article.