Centerfield

Free Speech Ups And Downs

This mall in Charleston's wrong to boot an anti-Obama bumper sticker vendor.

On the other hand, here at the University of Texas here in Austin, a long-standing poster ban was reduced. The new policy still requires signs to be non-pornographic. UT has long limited serious speech to a Free Speech zone next to the student union building.

Samuelson IMHO Too VS Obama Health-Care Plan

Must sell those papers, eh, Samuelson? I mean, politician overstates upside and understates downside of major new bill that could land him in the history books. EXTRA, EXTRA, read all about it!! Steve Benen's also unhappy and has a particularly good reply. There's plenty more blogger unhappiness, but most replies start with Benen links.

It's certainly what I've ALWAYS expected - politicians've been telling me since I've been old enough to understand the issue that having more widely accessible medical care'll will save money despite the clear implication of more health care visits. Sure enough, that's still happening. Of course, to be fair, my mind's been made since Mass-Care showed up on being willing to shoulder the poor's burden of within a capitalist inurance system; I'm a liberal, after all.

BUT - Samuelson, in addition to telling us that sky might fall any day now, also claims there's no real cost reform, which is simply wrong. First, the packages give more ability to Medic[aid|are] to negotiate costs. More importantly, Samuelson's neglecting a cost containment measure that an economist oughtta appreciate - the new system will have alot more competition, and for everybody, not just employers. That means the nation won't be stuck with bureaucratic and expensive near-monopolies like Blue Cross / Blue Shield; they'll have to reform or lose their customers.

I AM mad at Congress fot not giving the health insurance harbor now associated with employers to anybody two years ago - that would've been simple, and bills were filed in both bodies. What was the problem, Congress - were they lacking Pelosi and Reid as cosponsors, or were they too boring without also adding ponies for everybody?

Sunday Open Thread: New Willis Book, and Why Texas' Dry As A Dog Biscuit

We got a new Connie Willis book in, D.A.. It is, of course, pretty damned good.

I just found out why Texas is so dry from an alternate history thread about an alternate timeline where New Zealand's much bigger. Key quotes:

"There’s more to it. Hills and mountains are vital. See, clouds are pretty stupid. They just go where the breeze takes them. But when clouds meet up with mountains... Well, those things are just too high, the really heavy water bearing clouds can’t go over them. So they just kind of stop there, piling up like sheep at a fence. Eventually they end up getting so thick and crowded that they release their water, and you get a lot of rain. So one side of the mountain range ends up pretty wet with lots of rainfall, the other side ends up pretty dry. On the wet side, that rainfall collects, winds up turning into rivers and lakes, and so you’ve got nice drainage basin forming, which produces good farmland or a tidy little rain forest. Most of the worlds great rivers can be traced to mountain ranges. . . .

The bottom line is that complicated geography makes Europe a pretty nice place to live, while uncomplicated geography makes places like the Sahara and the Australian outback, not so nice." [or like West Texas, hmm...]

Today isn't being the most fortunate day we've ever had, though. EVERYTHING in one bathroom clogged, and today's nap's run very late. I hope your Sundays are going better, though.

College Is Now The Door To Opportunity

Good post here on how opportunity takes more work and money to come by because now it needs a college degree; it's a long-term trend, so it's only going to get worse.

This, I think, is a vital point for parents and kids to know so they're likelier to plan appropriately. I'm glad we finally have a President who finally understands about our post-industrial economy and what kind of words formerly industrial towns need to be hearing.

What good is it getting a Ph.D.? The money's only mildly good unless you're doing something particularly practical like bioengineering or nano, but you do get the best chance of getting the most intellectually challenging work; if that's not what a kid's after, Ph.Dhood might not be cut out for him.

Texas' Stimulus Package For Humorists

Our Governor Perry warned he might try nullifying Obama's healthcare package - nullification's a proclamation that a federal law is invalid in your state; yes, it's obviously unconstitutional, and it makes far-rightie Southerners swoon because South Carolina did that very thing so they wouldn't have to pay pesky taxes and to try and keep off the future shadow of anti-slave legislation powered by a Northern majority. What I find ironic about this is that nullification claims were shot down pretty early in our history 150 years ago by another conservative Southerner, President Andrew Jackson. But, of course, he's all hat and no cattle on this one - he's just playing to his base - not that he has any power to nullify or secede anything but his own self. He's playing to the base even harder and faster than usual, because the base's is now most of what there is left in the GOP right now.

Well, Bush said you're either for us or against us, and apparently his coattailee, my Senator Cornyn, believes India's against us, contrary to what India, the US,and even Bush think (see the recent India nuclear treaty). Has Cornyn been reading too much Clancy? Clancy's works're set in an alternate reality in which, among other differences, an Indira Gandhi-like figure's in power indefinitely, and is generally against us - presumably because the boring Indian truth of buddy-dom would be harder to sell thriller novels about.

Additional Hangar Queen Funding Goes Down

Every once in a very long time, Congress manages to do the right thing instead of the corrupt one. This is one of those times; Funding for additional F-22s, which I labeled a hangar queen ten days ago, has been turned down. Thanks, Congress!

More partying here

Professor Henry L. Gates of Harvard Arrested When He Forgot Key

Henry Gates for disorderly conduct after a nearby woman complained of a breakin after he forgot his key. Gates accused the police of racism and complained very loudly and paranoidly about their presence at his own home, and eventually was arrested for that.

You know, two things occur to me about this. First, I've done my share of forgetting my key and knocking loudly and throwing rocks to attract attantion in a high-density college town like Cambridge. Somehow, nobody thought to call the cops on my white self. I gotta wonder about the caller's fairness a bit here; was she a neighbor whom should've known better; would she've called if Gates'd been white?

Second, I certainly and unquestionably WOULD engage in disorderly conduct if this'd happened to me, and think Gates was right on that; I think cop departments have a responsibility that you don't see lived up to teach their cops to put themselves in suspects' shoes a bit when you show up at their houses and Gates'd already shown ID matching his address. The cops were wrong to arrest him, I say.

1984 Is Here In Today's Intellectual Property

1984 is unfree, of course, like just about every other contemporary intellectual property. When I was a small kid, intellectual property, like 1984's hero Winston Smith, was largely free. Copyrights lasted 25 years, so 1984'd would be free; no software patents had yet issued; and the patent office still actually looked at prior work instead of just claiming to. Owning a copy of intellectual property didn't yet subject you to onerous, multi-page restrictions, despite record company wishes. The civil court judicial corruptions that I see as slavery hadn't yet become broadly applied.

But, that was before the lobbyists got to work and were listened to instead of American expectations of freedom, fairness, and customer voter interests. Now I have no expectation that the 60-year-old Orwell will EVER be out of copyright, since it came after Disney's Mouse, and I've seen a clear pattern of repeated copyright extensions to keep Mickey Mouse and other early

So, why's indefinite intellectual property bad? Because it takes many dynamic new products out of the market. The Mouse took existing stories and songs and improved them; Shakespeare stole many of his best plays' stories from a couple of books; it hurts consumers to give Disney the special protection. And our patent length and other abuses deprives us of ten legal software product generations of improvements of new products; I think one product generation's protection would be a better balance.

Please Keep Running Against Empathy, Republicans

Please! It makes you wonder how they got elected in the first place. Whatever happened to President Bush' rhetoric on "compassionate conservatism" (unmatched by his CHiP performance even back in Texas).

UPDATED: Open Bouiallabaisse Blogging

I might've bitten off more than I can chew here. Bouiallabaisse turns out to call for 22 ingredients, some not the least bit cheap. And not so many of those 22 ingredients are easy things to deal with. Fivish are a rouille sauce, which I've never made before.

Right now, I'm 11 of those 22 ingredients in. We'll see if we end up eating pizza, or if I give up on the rouille and croutons, and just add the seafood and salt and leave it at that.

So how does a man living in Texas come to be making bouiallabaisse? Well, since the election, and voting for Obama here in Austin, I've found myself wanting arugula, going to a French restaurant here, and needing to make bouiallabaisse.... ;-)

UPDATE: Made it through all 22 ingredients. But barely - I cut myself on the final, 22nd ingredient, parsley that I'd replaced with cilantro. Despite two mistakes - doing the wrong thing with the rouille and not having enough mussels, it was still great soup. But I'm never making it again....

F-22 Turns Out To be Hangar Queen

Why pay so much for the F-22 when it spends 97% of its time in maintenance, and has an average of 1.7 hours between failures. Forget it doing anything useful, like that air superiority we're buying it for.

That turns out to be because Lockheed intentionally put them together badly, preferring to ship bad stuff than to take a penalty on the contract.

And, it's the wrong kind of thing for us. Big wars've been over for us and other nuclear-armed powers for sixty years. That means we need small-war equipment like tons of helos and more cheaper fighters, and not so many high-end air-superiority fighters like F22, especially since they quickly clog up the budget.

I think we should return each failing plane to the manufacturer, and expect a refund for each. Fat chance, though, sigh.

More Civil War And Lincoln

Ta-Nehisi Coates has an interesting post about the Civil War.

He's so appalled by the mistakes in the Battle of the Crater, where the Union had such a serious oops and couldn't take advantage of a successful try at blowing up a Confederate wall in the last siege of the war, that he wonders if the mistakes in that battle were normal.

In fact, he brings up an important point. Reading about the war has led me to believe that, bad as it sometimes was, Union leadership was better and that was the reason we won, really; the Confederates made even more and worse mistakes, hard as it can be to sometimes believe.

The Civil War marks the beginning of a period in military history when defenses had an advantage, and it took lots of extra army to The trench warfare that dominated WWI was even invented in Stonewall Jackson's part of Lee's army. I think there's a good chance that, if the Southern high command had understood that and been dynamic enough to take proper advantage, they could've prolonged the war much longer and made it cost enough to make the Union give up.

Civil War leadership started about equally green on each side, and better in different regions of the war; near DC, the rebels were better; far from DC's politics and interference, Union had the edge. But, as the war went on, things slowly changed. Both sides grew more experienced, but the Union leadership grew epter. That was because, while President Davis most valued existing seniority to on general officer promotion and assignment, Lincoln cared most about who could win. The result was that the South's best general, Forrest, had a limited role, while the North's best, Grant and Sherman, came to appropriately high commands, with Grant in overall charge. The reasoning Lee gave for trying a second Northern invasion makes me think Grant and Sherman understood the nature of the war better than Lee did (big, brutal numbers of deaths being needed for invasions to succeed, alas).

Lincoln Bicentennial July 4th Post

This July 4th post's in honor of this year's Lincoln bicentennial, talking about Lincoln.

For the first century of the U.S.' existence, most special-interest groups and politicians running for office talked in terms of the Constitution as their basis for action; slavery was deliberately left out of discussion to preserve the compromise that had kept the colonies together in the Revolution. As the country grew more and more polarized over slave vs free territorial issues, though, more and more the observation that American slaves had every cause of action that the Declaration of Independence listed as well, especially the bit about all men being created equal, was heard, especially in the states that stayed in the Union. You won't be surprised to read then, that Lincoln's little addition to Pericles funerary speech genre, started as follows:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Similar arguments, of course, were also suited to later marches of egalitarianism, like female suffrage, and the anti-racist and anti-sexist marches of more recent memory.

Until the war was mostly done, Lincoln was severely constrained by his realization that he needed to speak carefully to keep the Border States from joining the Confederacy.

By contrast, fortunately for the Union, the Confederacy was utterly amateur-hour at diplomacy. The Davis Administration and South Carolina and their top men were so bad at the putting themselves in somebody else' shoes that they alienated many whom might've considered helping them. States stopped making it into the Confederacy after six months in a much longer war, leaving many so-called Border States in the Union, and Lincoln even detached half Virginia to get an extra state. And, the Confederates' idea of diplomacy to Britain was to threaten the most powerful nation in the world with a cotton suspension, drying up the sympathies that had existed before a Confederate diplomat actually showed up.

One angle that's not so well understood today is that the North-South disagreements weren't just about slavery and state's rights. Most Southern states' elites were big slaveholders, and most of the culture saw itself as aristocratic and were at least a little dubious of democracy, except as a way to elect which aristocrats to serve as the next oligarchs, and most especially in the South Carolina that started the war, while the North was much more enthusiastic about popular democracy. Southern states' constitutions stayed unfairer longer than their Northern counterparts, letting the slave aristocracy have unfair advantages and either disadadvantaging or outright disenfranchising the common man. Southern commitment to freedom, especially to challenge the ruling class, was minimal, unless you happened to be a wealthy plantation owner, of course. There was some real similarity, I and Lincoln's Secretary of State agree, to the earlier war Pericles spoke in and our civil war. That war was between the democratic (albeit slave) Athens, with a commitment to freedom, and an aristocratic Sparta reliant on agriculture done by Southern-style, almost-rightless, slave classes.

Sean Wilentz, who also wrote a good book I'm reading, "The Rise of American Democracy," has a good article up on this year's series of Lincoln books. He does have an unfair grumble about Obama's run grumbling about politics as usual, maybe unsurprisingly, since it's aimed at his generation of leadership. Mugwumpery was the opposite of Obamaism - a disdain for getting involved in hardball politics because it's hardball, a label that hardly works for a man who worked his way up hard in Chicago politics and won the Presidency against the odds. No, "politics as usual" is a grumble about the need to prioritize getting things done on behalf of the American people OVER culture wars, I think a fair criticism of too much of the generation of leadership before him, and most especially right on target of Bush II after 9/11 - and I bet Wilentz'd agree about W.

Lincoln was our greatest President, I think, because he faced the biggest challenges. He dealt with, suddenly half the bureaucracy and half the Army, and half the states around the capital being enemy. He brilliantly avoided all talk for years about the freeing of slaves, that the conflict at once allowed and needed to keep from reoccurence, because he couldn't afford to lose the slave Border States, until the right moment, when the Border States were committed to Union. He pushed hard on that extension on ideals from the Declaration of Independence that's brought so much extra liberty, both in Lincoln's time, and in the century since, 'til a black president could be chosen. Lincoln faced the most deaths of any American President. Obama, I think, will not be in Lincoln's class because, fortunately for us, there is no crisis of that size outstanding. On the other hand, so far, he seems up to the not inconsiderable demands of today, what he called seven crises left by Bush, of course the economic crisis being the worst.

Why Didn't Baby-Boomer Leadership Deal With Their Generation's Benefit Deficits?

Isn't it their responsibility? But it's taken a post-Boomer President to get serious about looking at these things atall seriously.

Clinton only talked the talk, and didn't walk the walk atall. I'm not seeing how Hillary-care would've cut costs. Bush II only made things worse. His Part D, of course, was severely underfunded. And we're all fortunate that his SS reform failed, because it would've also made things WORSE, not better; the privatization option was so stupidly done it would've needed extra money on the table(!).

Thanks for nothing!

Open Desperate Washington Post Thread

This is sad. You know what all this desperation is about? It's because, after centuries of monopoly rent, papers have to be lean and competitive. But that means firing a ton of people they should never've hired, especially well-paid executives and editors, who're ol' buddies and sons or of those who need to swing that axe, so it ain't happenin'. So, they're mostly just piling on more and more and more debt. Bye, bye newspapers! We'll miss you!

Hope you have a much less desperate July 4th weekend than the Post's! Our plans are to hang in a nearby mall parking lot with a good view of downtown that attracts a just-right-sized crowd. I've been liking to make the effort to go downtown about every third year, so probably next year.

What are your plans?