Category: Journal

Whose Fault?

This is three weeks old, but you get what you pay for.

Jeb Golinkin, on Frum­Fo­rum, post­ed on the sub­ject of the race for Oba­ma’s for­mer Sen­ate seat in Illi­nois. He is mak­ing the case for why the Repub­li­can Kirk might well beat the Demo­c­rat Giannoulias.

Gian­nou­lias has the prob­lem of

his ties to cor­rupt Illi­nois pol­i­tics as usu­al (Bla­go, Tony Rezko, the fact that his biggest fundrais­er was recent­ly arrested….etc.)…It also helps that Gian­nou­lias can’t stop find­ing his way into the news for all the wrong rea­sons. His fam­i­ly bank is on the brink of col­lapse and has loaned a clean $20 mil­lion to con­vict­ed felons.

Kirk has advantages:

Kirk is an estab­lished mod­er­ate. He vot­ed for cap and trade, a vote which prob­a­bly hor­ri­fies many read­ers but might actu­al­ly play in his favor by demon­strat­ing that he is will­ing to go out on a limb, buck his par­ty, and sup­port a pres­i­dent who still remains pop­u­lar in Illi­nois. Kirk also has impec­ca­ble nation­al secu­ri­ty cre­den­tials (for years, he has been lead­ing the push in Con­gress for sanc­tions on Iran). Fur­ther­more, his eco­nom­ic posi­tions will appeal to vot­ers eager to get their jobs back and see the econ­o­my mov­ing again.

And then there is:

the fact that Rod Blago­je­vich, with whom Gian­nou­lias has worked, is going to be on the front page of every Illi­nois paper as his tri­al unfolds.

So, Kirk is a mod­er­ate with a lib­er­al vote on the record sup­port­ing Oba­ma and Gian­nou­lias is tarred with corruption.

Cou­ple that analy­sis with the fact that the Pres­i­den­t’s par­ty always los­es seats in the mid-term election.

But you can bet your boots that if Kirk wins, there will be plen­ty of spin on the right that this race is just anoth­er exam­ple of the fail­ure of Oba­ma and the elec­torate’s rejec­tion of him.

Actually, I Had The Same Thought Myself

Ezra Klein cites Lim­baugh­’s com­ments on the sunken oil drilling plat­form.

Rush is won­der­ing about the tim­ing of the event and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of sab­o­tage by envi­ro-extrem­ists. Ezra says “Is there lit­er­al­ly noth­ing this man can say that will con­vince Repub­li­cans to dis­avow him?”

I will be shocked and appalled if that event was the result of delib­er­a­tive sab­o­tage, but I would con­sid­er the author­i­ties to be remiss in their job if such a pos­si­bil­i­ty is not at least in the back of their minds while inves­ti­gat­ing the event.

Accord­ing­ly, I can not fault Rush for say­ing what he said.

An Adult? Really?

A cou­ple of coun­ties over from me, three boys recent­ly killed the old­est boy’s step­dad. The old­est boy is 15 years old, the oth­er two are 12. The sto­ry is that the 15 year old and one of the 12 year olds sat in the room wait­ing with their guns and shot the step­dad when he entered the room. I am not sure what the role of the oth­er 12 year old is.

The judge has ruled that the two shoot­ers should be tried as adults.

I have nev­er under­stood this. We set up a sys­tem so that we treat juve­niles dif­fer­ent­ly than we treat adults. Pre­sum­ably we do this because we rec­og­nize that chil­dren are sim­ply not adults.

But let the crime be seri­ous enough and we for­get all about such fine distinctions.

Per­son­al­ly, I think it is wrong that either child is charged as an adult, but I accept that there are prob­a­bly argu­ments to be made for deal­ing with the 15 year old as an adult.

I can­not fath­om an argu­ment for treat­ing a 12 year old as an adult.

The first result:  hous­ing the kids in the adult jail.

Credit Where Credit Is Due, Please

I thought that it was cus­tom­ary to pro­vide a link to a web­site when it is being men­tioned in anoth­er website.

All too often we find a sur­feit of opin­ion, absent doc­u­ment­ed ratio­nal­iza­tion, and a pauci­ty of infor­ma­tion. This leads to much pos­tur­ing in order to main­tain one’s “brand”…It’s pos­si­ble that the the­o­ret­i­cal infin­i­ty of cyber­space encour­ages throw­ing what­ev­er is lying around into the void. It achieves noth­ing. It is sim­ply wast­ing time by peo­ple who have time to waste.

If that is not a ref­er­ence to My Time To Waste, well, I do not know what is.

:)

Hat tip to Alt­house.

Financial Regulation

I do not pre­tend to under­stand the ins and outs of big banks and deriv­a­tives and what not. My guess is that more reg­u­la­tion is needed.

On the oth­er hand, even more impor­tant than reg­u­la­tion is lead­er­ship that will stand tall and address prob­lems before they become disasters.

It was obvi­ous there was a tech bub­ble at the time. Peo­ple made mil­lions sell­ing com­pa­nies with lit­tle more than an idea.

It was obvi­ous there was a hous­ing bub­ble at the time. Peo­ple were mak­ing thou­sands of dol­lars flip­ping hous­es. Often with­out doing any­thing to the house oth­er than hold­ing on to it for a few months.

Bub­bles pop and dam­age the economy.

When the next bub­ble appears, what will be need­ed is a leader who will take action to gen­tly let the bub­ble down, not reg­u­la­tions designed to pre­vent the last breakdown.

More Hoosier Pride

I came across this in Sun­day’s Jour­nal Gazette. It seems Indi­ana Gov­er­nor Mitch Daniels, fre­quent­ly men­tioned as a pos­si­ble 2012 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, took a bite out of his shoe. A recent cer­e­mo­ni­al bill signing

was punc­tu­at­ed by tears and emo­tion as fam­i­ly and friends of an Ohio woman who was killed in Allen Coun­ty gath­ered to watch Daniels sign a bill spurred by her case.

After ini­tial­ly behav­ing appro­pri­ate­ly for the occa­sion and sign­ing the bill, Daniels says to the Ohioans:

Any­time you all want to move to Indi­ana, low­er your tax­es, you’re welcome.

More com­pas­sion­ate con­ser­vatism I guess.

Taking The Easy Way

Giv­en what Sarah Palin has been up to since I last com­ment­ed on her, I have to con­clude that she resigned as gov­er­nor to either cash in or to run for pres­i­dent. If she left to cash in, then I guess she’s not doing too bad a job of it.

But if she does indeed plan to run for pres­i­dent, then I do not believe she is going about things in a help­ful way. In a post at Frum­Fo­rum, Danielle Crit­ten­den describes a Palin appear­ance at a char­i­ty fundrais­er in Cana­da. Her appear­ance fee appar­ent­ly was between $100,000 and $200,000, so that is def­i­nite­ly cash­ing in.* Beyond the hefty fee, Crit­ten­den describes how every­thing was arranged to lim­it Pal­in’s expo­sure to unscript­ed or unan­tic­i­pat­ed situations.

I am not pay­ing enough atten­tion to Palin to know if this is how her appear­ances are nor­mal­ly han­dled. Assum­ing that it is, then this is poor train­ing for a pres­i­den­tial run. Her cozy perch at Fox News is also no help. Now is exact­ly when she should be mak­ing as many appear­ances as pos­si­ble and expos­ing her­self to unscript­ed sit­u­a­tions fre­quent­ly so she can com­pile some expe­ri­ence deal­ing with them. One does not get elect­ed to the pres­i­den­cy with­out an abil­i­ty to ad lib a wide vari­ety of situations.

Sure, if she fol­lowed this advice, she might com­pile a resume of gaffs. But the gaffs would be ancient his­to­ry by the time 2012 came around.

* Long ago I read some­where a com­ment that when­ev­er an esti­mate var­ied by 100% or more, one could infer that there was real­ly no clue as to the actu­al num­ber and the esti­mate was worse than worth­less. So who knows how much she was actu­al­ly paid!

Grandad’s Orchard Blueberry-Peach Jam

I picked up a jar of Grandad’s Orchard Blue­ber­ry-Peach Jam at a farmer’s mar­ket here in Fort Wayne.

The list­ed ingre­di­ents are sug­ar, blue­ber­ries, peach­es, pectin, all­spice, cloves, cin­na­mon. There is no nutri­tion label, so I had no idea how many grams of sug­ar per table­spoon (oth­er than the fact that sug­ar is list­ed first), and the young lady tend­ing the table was not help­ful on the sub­ject. But I thought I would give it a try.

A knowl­edge­able observ­er would note the inter­est­ing tri­fec­ta of spices: all­spice, cloves, and cin­na­mon. A quick glance at google search results shows them used for mulling cider, etc. That would be OK. A blue­ber­ry peach jam that has a fla­vor of being mulled.

But that’s not what I tast­ed. I tast­ed pump­kin pie. The tex­ture is not pump­kin pie, but the fla­vor is. This made for an odd peanut but­ter and jel­ly sand­wich. Per­fect­ly edi­ble, but strange.

A keen eye might also have not­ed the hash marks on the label. I put them there. I have on occa­sion kept track of how many sand­wich­es I got out of a giv­en jar of jam. There is quite a wide vari­a­tion on this depend­ing on the tex­tures of the jams. I knew as soon as I made the first sand­wich that this jam was not going to go far. In fact, as the hatch marks show, I got only five sand­wich­es from this jar. The jar was $5.00 so it added $1.00 to the cost of each sand­wich. Tastes strange and is expen­sive! Look­ing at my records I show the fol­low­ing size jars pro­duc­ing this num­ber of sand­wich­es: 20 oz., 23 sand­wich­es; 16 oz., 16 sand­wich­es; 12 oz, 13 sand­wich­es; 10.5 oz., 13 sand­wich­es; 8.5 oz, 11 sandwiches.

So five sand­wich­es from five ounces is not much. And the $5.00 for 5 ounces is expensive!

For the record, here is a pic of the por­tion of Grandad’s Orchard Blue­ber­ry-Peach Jam I put on the sandwich:

The label shows a web­site: www.bigsistersalsa.com which does show Grandad’s Orchard prod­ucts, but I can not find the blue­ber­ry peach jam there.

What Presidents Demonstrate

This is from Four Brands of Impos­si­ble by Nor­man Kagan, a short sto­ry of sci­ence fic­tion copy­right 1964 by Mer­cury Press, Inc.:

“…Did you know we have a top-secret Con­gres­sion­al Project to auto­mate the pres­i­den­cy? Fact. The chair­man of the Depart­ment of Cyber­net­ics told me the sys­tem phi­los­o­phy behind it: Roo­sevelt showed that some­one could be Pres­i­dent as long as he liked. Tru­man proved that any­one could be Pres­i­dent. Eisen­how­er demon­strat­ed that you don’t real­ly need a Pres­i­dent. And Kennedy was fur­ther proof that it’s dan­ger­ous to be a human Pres­i­dent. So we’re work­ing out a way to auto­mate the office.”

Leav­ing aside the ques­tion of why those demon­stra­tions lead to the con­clu­sion that the office should be auto­mat­ed, if Mr. Kagan was writ­ing today, I won­der how this would change. FDR still stands as the best evi­dence that some­one could be Pres­i­dent as long as he liked, though I sus­pect there are many who feel Rea­gan could have held the office as long as he want­ed if not for the con­sti­tu­tion­al limit.

That any­one could be Pres­i­dent might have been more recent­ly shown by Rea­gan, Clin­ton, Bush, and Obama.

That we don’t real­ly need a Pres­i­dent by Ford per­haps, or maybe Rea­gan’s sec­ond term?

That it is dan­ger­ous to be Pres­i­dent? Rea­gan is the only Pres­i­dent to be shot since Kennedy.

So, real­ly, if the para­graph was writ­ten today, Rea­gan could be used to ful­fill all of the categories!!

Voucher Study

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Arkansas has a report out on how Mil­wau­kee’s school vouch­er pro­gram is doing. Fred­er­ick Hess writes at The Enter­prise Blog:

Wolf, who has led this effort as well as the fed­er­al­ly endorsed eval­u­a­tion of the D.C. vouch­er pro­gram, sum­ma­rized, “Vouch­er stu­dents are show­ing aver­age rates of achieve­ment gain sim­i­lar to their pub­lic school peers.” Trans­la­tion: when it comes to test scores, stu­dents with vouch­ers are per­form­ing no dif­fer­ent­ly than oth­er kids.

If I recall cor­rect­ly, I many times heard the argu­ment for vouch­ers to include the idea that a vouch­er sys­tem would improve the pub­lic schools which had to com­pete for stu­dents. That being the case, that the vouch­er stu­dents “are per­form­ing no dif­fer­ent­ly than the oth­er kids” would be the ide­al, not a fail­ure. And there is the “stu­dents are show­ing aver­age rates of achieve­ment gain…” Gain over what?

There is this from Hess: “black stu­dents in the pub­lic schools have the low­est read­ing scores of any cohort of black stu­dents in the coun­try.” So that would seem to indi­cate that there has not been much improve­ment. But maybe only the most chal­leng­ing black stu­dents remain in the pub­lic schools and the rest got into the vouch­er system.

I am too lazy to read the study itself so right now I am a bit con­fused over whether the vouch­er sys­tem failed or not.

Hat tip to Jonathan Chait at The New Republic.