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POPSConservative Bloggers Poised to Progress The Republican Party may still be licking its wounds, but conservative bloggers, pointing to recent history of their counterparts on the left, are licking their chops. As Democrats entered the political wilderness earlier this century, liberal sites like www.dailykos.com and others thrived. “I suspect within the next four years," says Erick Erickson of www.redstate.com, "the left is going to be surprised at how well the right progresses and develops online.”
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POPSReport: Military Should Use Less Private Security Government Executive story, by Robert Brodsky, points to more pressure on President-elect Obama to scale back on use of private contractors. Pair this story with another interesting one from the Washington Post today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/16/AR2008111601841.html
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POPSVeins! Via Government Computer News http://www.gcn.com/
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POPSNICE Systems Expects Growth At last check, NICE shares were up 0.4%. Unfortunately for us, however, the stock has slumped since we made a bullish call on it here http://www.forbes.com/beltway/2008/08/27/nice-surveillance-security-biz-belt-cx_atg_0828beltwaybet.html
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POPSLess Biz for Contractors Under Obama? Washington Post story, by Robert O'Harrow, also notes that slimming down federal procurement at the clip Obama proposes would require "a huge cultural change inside the government." Huge cultural changes don't come easily in Washington. For anyone wondering, 19 large U.S. technology services firms, all publicly-held and catering to the public sector, show a 52-week stock decline of 25%. The market's drop over that period: 37%.
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POPSRebuilding the Electricity Grid Pair my colleague Andy Stone's story with Al Gore's op-ed in the New York Times this weekend. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09gore.html?ref=opinion . There, Gore calls for "the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places where it is mostly generated to the cities where it is mostly used." Stone's story fleshes out the matter.
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POPSHouse Leadership Battle to Watch Dan Friedman and Richard Cohen of National Journal's CongressDaily report. Implications here could be big, especially on the matter of climate change. For more on that topic, see this recent story: http://www.forbes.com/businessinthebeltway/2008/10/22/energy-green-congress-biz-beltway-cx_jz_1023climate.html
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POPSLobbyist Reactions to Obama Victory Roll Call's Kate Ackley reports on reactions from Washington's advocacy industry. A notable: Dan Mica, a former congressman who now runs the National Credit Union Association. “They’re talking about having complete and total transparency in advocacy," he says, "That’s tremendous."
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POPSMilitary Spending: Not ‘Recession Proof’ The New York Times' Thom Shanker and Christopher Drew survey the outlook for U.S. military spending. From the equities standpoint, U.S. aerospace and defense stocks are down 33.2% year to date, versus a drop of 33.9% broadly for U.S. equities.
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POPSStump Staple: Bashing Free Trade National Journal's Peter Cohn details just how dirty the words "free trade" have become on the campaign trail. Story notes that in one ad from the Democratic party, Elizabeth Dole, a Republican U.S. senator representing North Carolina, is referred to as "the senator from China."
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POPSHearing on America's Hardware Bloomberg's John Hughes and Greiling Keane take a look at big infrastructure plans under discussion in Washington. The Oct. 29th hearing mentioned in their story can be watched here: http://transportation.house.gov/
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POPSThe U.S. Army's Facebook Government Executive's Gautham Nagesh takes a look at the success of the U.S. Army's online social networking. "I like to say we were Web 2.0 before Web 2.0 was defined," says one Army official in the story.
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POPSUnraveling Tax Dodge Schemes Hit Public Transit Washington Post story details another ugly impact of credit crisis; public transit agencies face huge payments as deals struck to avoid taxes go into technical default following AIG's collapse. Washington's Metro system could be on the hook for $400 million. Other cities named: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta and Chicago.
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POPSBetter Elections Through Biometrics? Curtis Gans, director of American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate, writes today in Roll Call that biometric (the measurement of physical characteristics, such as fingerprints, DNA, or retinal patterns, for identifying individuals) ID cards could take care of both voter fraud and voter suppression. As for privacy concerns, he argues "privacy in America was largely lost when an individual’s Social Security number became an identifier for purposes beyond Social Security," among other phenomena (the Internet, post-9/11 surveillance."
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POPSNo, Lockheed Martin is Not a Small Business Washington Post front page story goes in depth on a persistent problem: the federal government's tendency to count contracts handed to big corporations as small business set asides. Pair this story together with a profile we did earlier this year on tech distributor World Wide Technology. http://www.forbes.com/businessinthebeltway/2008/03/06/dell-cisco-wwt-biz-wash-cz_atg_0306beltway.html A relatively large company now, WWT initially survived on winning set asides from the Small Business Administration.
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POPSNew GI Bill: Leery of Contractors Washington Post story on updated veterans benefits touches on a theme we're watching: a backlash against government contractors. American Legion official quoted in the story expressed his organization's opposition to the VA handing over "one of its most important benefits to the lowest bidder."
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POPSRussian Military Spending: $50 Billion New York Times story adds that certain U.S. military officials are "unimpressed" by Russia's plans. One told the times that “these programs have long been in the works. They are not new plans.” As we noted here, http://www.forbes.com/beltway/2008/09/30/aerospace-defense-washington-biz-wash-cz_atg_0930beltway.html , President Bush recently signed a defense appropriations bill totaling $488 billion.
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POPS$500 Billion Highway Bill Ahead? National Journal's Lisa Caruso does a nice overview of a brewing Beltway battle. We touched on the topic here: http://www.forbes.com/beltway/2008/05/21/washington-lobbying-transportation-biz-wash-cz_atg_0521beltway.html By the way, we mentioned a handful of stocks in that story - on average, those stocks have done horribly since.
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POPSmaps.google.com/vote Ginny Hunt, a D.C.-based Google spokeswoman, walks the National Journal through a new political offering. Apparently, the company isn't trying to cash in on it just yet.
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POPSHow to Get a Job with the Feds Roll Call book review also notes this: "Jobs that compete with Wall Street for employees generally come with the highest paychecks. Employees at the Treasury and the Federal Communications Commission can earn bonuses in the tens of thousands."
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POPSDefense Contractors Get Jitters Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics all get mentions in this Washington Post story. Pair the story with our item earlier this month on an aerospace trade group's approach to the budget: http://www.forbes.com/beltway/2008/09/30/aerospace-defense-washington-biz-wash-cz_atg_0930beltway.html
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POPSBailout Price Tags Since 1971 A nice breakdown from the National Journal. Since 2001, the federal government's private sector bailouts add up to $1,032.4 billion. In the prior thirty years: $248.1 billion.
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POPSU.S. Budget Deficit: $438 Billion AP clip, via our Washington feed http://www.forbes.com/breakingnews/AP_Washington_full.html, also points to the current administration's poor track record in fiscal matters. "A later promise to cut the deficit in half by the time Bush leaves office is in tatters," story says, "and virtually no one takes seriously his proposed path to a balanced budget by 2012."
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POPSTax Credit Victory for Fuel Cell Biz FuelCell Energy, which makes stationary power generators, notched a Beltway win last week with the long-term extension of a tax credit subsidizing fuel cell tech. We mentioned the company's support of the tax credit in this story: http://www.forbes.com/businessinthebeltway/2007/02/14/sunpower-fuelcell-energy-biz-wash-cz_atg_0214fuelcell.html Unfortunately, our bullish call on FuelCell Energy's stock now doesn't look so great. The stock has lost 24%, a hair ahead of the S&P 500's 25% decline, since our story published.
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POPSRFID Update Journal of Commerce runs a decent survey of the state of radio frequency identification. Lockheed gets a mention - we covered that company's keen interest in RFID here http://www.forbes.com/beltway/2007/06/13/lockheed-savi-rfid-biz-beltway-cx_ag_0613beltway.html Further down in the story, watch also for the the mention of Ekahau, a company we profiled here http://www.forbes.com/businessinthebeltway/2007/04/26/beltway-ekahau-wifi-biz-wash-cz_atg_0426ekahau.html.
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POPSSenate Clears $1.5 Billion for Washington Metro Good news for Washington residents or anyone visiting. As detailed by the Washington Post here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/22/AR2008092201144.html, Metro's needs are considerable and include "replacing one-third of its rail fleet, about 300 rail cars that are more than 30 years old and nearing the end of their life cycle; replacing about 100 buses every year; repairing leaky tunnels and crumbling station platforms; and repairing bus garages, one of which is more than 100 years old."
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POPSThe Hill: Soros Floats Bailout Plan with Dems Story, by The Hill's Alexander Bolton, picks up on George Soros' opinion piece in the Financial Times today http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d68e10cc-8f45-11dd-946c-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1 The Hill story speculates that Soros "could jumpstart congressional negotiations in a new direction, especially now that some strategists believe the Paulson-based plan that failed Monday will be difficult to revive." Here's more on George Soros: http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/10/billionaires08_George-Soros_L9II.html
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POPSU.S. Department of Energy: Six Solar Bets Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Energy gave the nod to six solar companies working on advanced photovoltaic tech. The companies chosen hail from California, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Among them: 1366 Technologies, a company we profiled recently here: http://www.forbes.com/businessinthebeltway/2008/08/19/beltway-solar-vanmierlo-biz-wash-cz_atg_0820beltway.html The dollar amounts here are a long way from staggering, and, as the DOE's press release notes, they are "subject to annual appropriations." At the very least, the win fits 1366's explicit strategy of working with public sector.
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POPSGoogle Pushes Into Government Market We observed in April that Google was making its presence felt more aggressively in the U.S. federal technology market http://www.forbes.com/beltway/2008/04/02/amd-chipmaker-semiconductor-biz-wash-cz_atg_0403beltway.html. This Washington Post blog post goes into a bit of detail on one Google public sector customer: the District of Columbia. 38,000 District employees now use Gmail and other Google applications.
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POPSCarbon Dioxide Emissions Outpacing Projections Pair this Washington Post story together with the item, clipped last night by my colleague Rebecca Ruiz, on impact of carbon overload on coral reefs. Further down in the Post story, James L. Connaughton, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality, stresses the "need for a broader and more aggressive effort by the major economies to come together."
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POPSObama Takes Careful Aim at Contractors Government Executive story covers a recent Obama speech on his approach to government contracting. Further down in the story, there's cautious approval from trade groups representing government contractors. "It's certainly not a harsh assault on the public-private relationship," said one. Welcome words, no doubt, to many companies on our Forbes Beltway Index http://www.forbes.com/fdc/beltway/fbi.html.
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POPSRadiation Detection at Ports? $3.1 Billion According to the clip, via National Journal's Earlybird news digest, the Department of Homeland Security says GAO's estimate is misleadingly high "because it includes operation and maintenance costs." Unless I'm missing something, that strikes me as an unusually lame response. Why wouldn't you consider maintenance costs for something like a system to detect nukes?
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