Some Thought Must Have Been Involved

The ques­tion often aris­es “What were they think­ing?!” Or, more often, in my own mind “What was I think­ing!?” In my expe­ri­ence the answer to such ques­tions (expe­cial­ly the lat­ter) is invari­ably “Think­ing? There was no think­ing involved.”

But there must have been some thought involved at the Low­er Meri­on School Dis­trict in a Philadel­phia sub­urb. They man­aged to enable them­selves to spy on the stu­dents, even when the stu­dents were at home, through the lap­top web­cams. This did not just happen.

This leads to the ques­tion “How did these peo­ple come to be in charge of edu­cat­ing our children?”

Noth­ing leads a child down the straight and nar­row like the feel­ing of not being trust­ed, right?

Evan Bayh’s Goodbye

Evan Bayh, sen­a­tor from Indi­ana, today announced that he is not going to run for re-elec­tion. Although Bayh is a Demo­c­rat, he has always been on the con­ser­v­a­tive side of the tent. The most recent exam­ple of this was the Mass­a­chu­setts spe­cial sen­ate elec­tion. The moment it was clear the Repub­li­can won the race, Bayh was mak­ing state­ments sup­port­ing the idea that health care reform was dead.

To the end (not that this nec­es­sar­i­ly con­sti­tutes the end), Bayh has been less than help­ful to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. He drops out of the race with a cou­ple of days left to file to run in the pri­ma­ry. This isn’t enough time for some­one to jump in and gath­er the nec­es­sary sig­na­tures to get on the pri­ma­ry bal­lot, so the can­di­date for the fall would be picked by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party.

Except there was one per­son already out gath­er­ing sig­na­tures to run in the pri­ma­ry against Bayh. Tamyra d’Ip­poli­to, a cafe own­er in Bloom­ing­ton, claims to be 1000 sig­na­tures away from the num­ber need­ed to get on the ballot.

I’m not con­fi­dent she will make it, but it might have been bet­ter if Bayh had wait­ed a day or two. It is like­ly that Bay­h’s absence real­ly ener­gized d’Ippolito.

If Tamyra d’Ip­poli­to gets the sig­na­tures she will be the only sen­ate can­di­date on the pri­ma­ry bal­lot. So she will be the Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date in the fall. Judg­ing by her web page, she has no polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence and she has an uphill bat­tle to win.

I think the Democ­ra­t’s chances for win­ning in the fall would be much high­er if the par­ty could pick the candidate.

With luck d’Ip­poli­to fails to get the sig­na­tures and it will make no dif­fer­ence. In any event, thank-you Evan Bayh.

Hat tip to TPM.

But How?!!?

From The Huff­in­g­ton Post:

For­mer Con­gress­man and 2008 Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Tom Tan­cre­do told an audi­ence on Thurs­day at the Tea Par­ty Con­ven­tion in Nashville that “peo­ple who could not even spell the word ‘vote’, or say it in Eng­lish, put a com­mit­ted social­ist ide­o­logue in the White House.”

“His name,” Tan­cre­do said, “is Barack Hus­sein Obama.”

It is inter­est­ing how all of those vot­ers who can­not spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in Eng­lish man­aged to elect the can­di­date they want­ed, isn’t it?

Cabbagetown

A few years ago (2001) Deb­by and I were in Toron­to, Cana­da. One of the things we did there was walk through Cab­bage­town, a his­toric neigh­bor­hood. A few days lat­er, when a local heard that we had been in Toron­to and had vis­it­ed Cab­bage­town his response was “You came to Toron­to and vis­it­ed our slum!”

My response to him was that if Cab­bage­town con­sti­tut­ed a Cana­di­an slum, then Cana­da was in very good shape indeed. Yes, the neigh­bor­hood did not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly high end, but a slum it was not.

This evening on HGTV’s Prop­er­ty Vir­gin pro­gram was a young man look­ing for his first house in Toron­to. Two of the hous­es he looked at were in Cab­bage­town. They were both priced over $550,000.

Geez, $550,000. In the “slum”. I guess I could nev­er afford shel­ter in Toron­to (or maybe Cab­bage­town isn’t a slum…)

Saints and the Republicans

This from a post at fivethirtyeight.com:

Repub­li­cans were crow­ing about social­ism and gov­ern­ment takeovers way back in the sum­mer of 2008, and oppos­ing vir­tu­al­ly every pol­i­cy that the Democ­rats put forth from the first meet­ing of the 111th Con­gress last Jan­u­ary — a time when Oba­ma’s approval had been in the high 60s. At first, those mes­sages weren’t work­ing for them — they were par­tic­u­lar­ly inef­fec­tu­al, for instance, for the McCain cam­paign, and there were lots of sto­ries in the spring about the num­ber of peo­ple who iden­ti­fied as Repub­li­can slip­ping to all-time lows. But the GOP stuck by their mes­sag­ing strat­e­gy, and it has allowed them to frame every­thing that has come there­after in ways that are more res­o­nant with the public.

This reminds me of the NFC Cham­pi­onship foot­ball game between the Saints and the Vikings. The Saints defen­sive game plan includ­ed an empha­sis on hit­ting Bret Favre. They got sev­er­al hits on him but failed to sack him. Still, they did not change the plan. Favre threw for 310 yards, but still the Saints worked to hit Favre. Sure enough, before the game was over, Favre reward­ed them by throw­ing three inter­cep­tions (the stats say two because the Saints did not catch one of the balls thrown right to them).

And the Saint won.

Why Is There A Law?

I am a bit slow to get to this, but I just came across this quick remark at the end of a blog entry:

When do we get the find­ing in re the qual­i­ty of judg­ment shown by the decision…to Miran­dize the under­wear bomber?

I believe there was not much short­age of politi­cians who made pub­lic com­ments to the effect that Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab should not have been treat­ed as a crim­i­nal but as an ene­my com­bat­ant. Now, I am not a lawyer, but I can not help but won­der how many of those politi­cians helped to pass the laws that Abdul­mu­tal­lab is now charged with.

It seems to me if you do not want a per­son who attempts to blow up an air­plane treat­ed as a crim­i­nal, then why are you crim­i­nal­iz­ing such behav­ior? Oh yes. To look tough on the sub­ject of terrorism.

“Vot­ers, I believe in being tough on ter­ror­ists and that’s why I helped to put laws against blow­ing up air­planes in the fed­er­al crim­i­nal code. Also, because I am tough on ter­ror, I do not believe that any ter­ror­ist should face those charges, but instead should be treat­ed as an ene­my combatant.”

Or some­thing like that.

I sup­pose it is pos­si­ble that treat­ing Abdul­mu­tal­lab as an ene­my com­bat­ant still requires that there be estab­lished law to charge him with. But if that estab­lished law prop­er­ly belongs in the fed­er­al crim­i­nal code, how is it dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed from the oth­er law that is sub­ject to such things as Miran­da rights?

This being the first time I have post­ed about Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab, I feel com­pelled to men­tion that, in the days fol­low­ing Christ­mas, many radio and tv journalists/​announcers avoid­ed pro­nounc­ing his name and sim­ply referred to him as “the Niger­ian man.” I thought that rather amusing.

You Can Leave But You Cannot Check Out

Hav­ing moved to Fort Wayne, we no longer need our pre­vi­ous isp. We kept it for awhile so we could get the email. Yes­ter­day I went by the Mar­i­on cable office to return the modem and set­tle up. I gave the woman the modem and told her to shut it off we have moved. She asked for our new address. I almost protest­ed that they had no need for the new address, but I was lazy and gave it to her.

She told me the amount I owed and I hand­ed over the bills while she fur­ther explained that the amount was only an esti­mate and that we would be sent a bill after the sys­tem fin­ished cal­cu­lat­ing the final bill.

???

I told her (with a smile on my face) that any sys­tem that could not come up with the final bill right here and now was an ef’ed up sys­tem (that’s how I said it).

And I walked away laughing.

The famed effi­cien­cy of the pri­vate sector.

So Good At Communicating He Fails to Communicate

Or some­thing like that.

Oba­ma reminds me of Clin­ton. I remem­ber think­ing that Clin­ton would be a lib­er­al Rea­gan in that he, too, could be a “great com­mu­ni­ca­tor.” I thought that because he seemed to com­mu­ni­cate with the pub­lic so well as a can­di­date. But once he was in office, he stopped. And the Repub­li­cans con­trolled the mes­sage. Soon Clin­ton was declar­ing the era of big gov­ern­ment over.

Oba­ma seemed to be able to com­mu­ni­cate as a can­di­date and seems to not be able to do so as a Pres­i­dent. The Repub­li­cans con­trol the mes­sage and Oba­ma is try­ing hard to sound more cen­tric in the State of the Union address.

It is inter­est­ing that when polled about spe­cif­ic ele­ments that make up (one of?) the health care reform bill, the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans are in favor of almost all of them. http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/upload/8042‑T.pdf

In oth­er words, if peo­ple under­stood what was in the leg­is­la­tion, there would be a lot more support.

I found the poll from a link on Jonathan Chait’s blog at The New Republic.

If only Oba­ma could communicate.

Memo to Democratic Congressional Reps

You have one chance. Pass the sen­ate health care bill.

The pub­lic does not dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the house bill and the sen­ate bill.

You already vot­ed for the house bill.

Your repub­li­can oppo­nent in the fall is going to pin that vote on you incessantly.

And those who sup­port reform are not going to be all that enthu­si­as­tic because you did not pass it.

So you have the worst of both worlds: blame for the vote, and no cred­it for passage.

The repub­li­cans had one goal: pre­vent the pas­sage of health care.

They have almost succeeded.

The only bills (of any con­se­quence) that will pass between now and Jan­u­ary 2011 (if not lat­er) are bills through rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. The repub­li­cans have zero incen­tive to coop­er­ate with any­thing. Obstruc­tion has served them very well in the polls.

Health care reform can­not be done sole­ly through reconciliation.

Pass the sen­ate bill and then fix what can be fixed through reconciliation.

That is all.

Free Speech and Money

So the Supreme Court knocked down (large?) por­tions of McCain/​Feingold. Spend­ing is speech and Con­gress will make no law etc.

Gen­er­al­ly I am a lib­er­al, so I guess I am sup­posed to be out­raged that the Court did what it did.

But I am not out­raged. I applaud the deci­sion. I have felt for some time that all the reg­u­la­tion of cam­paign spend­ing is not con­sti­tu­tion­al. Now, I did not make a mis­sion out of try­ing to undo it (I do not look for­ward to all of the com­mer­cials), but I have long thought it made no sense.

Part of my prob­lem with cam­paign finance laws goes back to a uni­ver­sal truth. Cre­ate a rule and there will (imme­di­ate­ly!) be those out there look­ing for a way around the rule. This cre­ates anoth­er rule, and the process con­tin­ues ad nau­se­um. Soon (a long time ago), the reg­u­la­tions are so com­plex that it is sim­ply too easy to break them even with the best of inten­tions. All of that for rules that are uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in the first place and, lets face it, did not do much to keep mon­ey out of pol­i­tics as was intended.

I think any­one should be able to give as much mon­ey as he or she (or it) wants to give to any can­di­date desired.

The one catch I would have is that all can­di­dates must pub­lish who gave (with occu­pa­tion) and how much.

This kind of trans­paren­cy is part of the cur­rent scheme and is the one part that strikes me as effec­tive. I have on sev­er­al occa­sions lis­tened to a news sto­ry on how a giv­en can­di­date received a dona­tion from a sul­lied donor and the can­di­date returned the mon­ey. This works. And the inter­net makes it eas­i­ly doable. Post the info and the press and the blog­gers will let us know if there is cause for concern.