Category Archives: US politics

Smash society

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From Michael Tomasky’s review in The New Republic of Jonah Goldberg’s latest waste of a tree carcass:

Here is where Liberal Fascism gets simply ridiculous. For Goldberg, the fact that Progressivism and totalitarianism shared certain traits–a belief in the possibility of collective action through the state, basically–tells him all he needs to know about both creeds. Ipso facto, any totalitarian impulse must therefore have leftish origins. Never mind that there actually was a totalitarianism for which the left was responsible–the one called communism… [O]nce you start implementing public pension systems, well, how far away can the execution of political opponents really be? Government, planning, centralized administration, social engineering, fascism, totalitarianism: for Goldberg they are all finally the same. Why isn’t he an anarchist? And when you get to this point, what isn’t fascist?

So, for a leading scribe of today’s neo-nihilist (dare I say “libertarian”?) Right, the mere acknowledgment that there is such a thing as “the public” (much less “public interest”) amounts to totalitarianism, a term he thinks equivalent to Fascism. Forget “smash the state,” today’s right really does agree with Maggie Thatcher: “there is no such thing” as society, except perhaps when it comes time when “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Now, that sort of talk (from one of Goldberg’s former esteemed colleagues), through is use of that most totalitarian of pronouns (beginning with W) pronoun, seems to suggest belief in some kind of common project. Hmm.

Now, about that raise

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posted at The Swamp

It’s odd that people are surprised by the dollar figures involved. Michelle Obama is a VP of an organization with a $1.6 BILLION annual budget. The community that UCH addresses extends far beyond Hyde Park to the whole South Side, which usually views the university and its hospitals with a great deal of suspicion.

It doesn’t matter whether her employer is a for-profit — it does in fact clear operating income — or not-for-profit corporation; regardless, its a huge and complicated organization which requires great management talent, and that deserves proper compensation.

I say this as someone who quite willingly, and knowingly, earns about 60% less money at a non-profit than I could in the private sector.

Trib: just plain lazy

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From an article by Jon Hilkevitch and Josh Noel in today’sTrib:

“It’s what they do with the money they have that concerns me,” said Grace Graham, 58, of Rogers Park as she waited to board the Red Line at Berwyn. “The government needs to step in and do an audit…

Nowhere in the article do the reporters bother reporting that the government DID step in and do an audit. A million-dollar, 650-page audit, no less. WTF?

Everyone’s Fault

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Wonkette‘s Anonymous Lobbyist, though not an ISTEA junkie like yours truly, kind of nails it on the head:

The current transportation funding mechanism is called SAFETEA-LU, which stands for “Safe Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users,” but the “Lu” is actually former Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young’s wife’s name, so he made his staff come up with a fucking acronym that used that because that’s how stupid and parochial transportation policy is… everyone gets to more or less keep ignoring our crumbling current infrastructure in favor of new roads (which are way more popular with constituents, since they don’t tie up traffic as much as that nasty roadwork). So, everyone won, sorta, and everyone lost, like usual.

In fact, a smart guy* presented a paper at TRB this year called “SAFETEA-LU Earmarks in Minnesota, a Rural Advantage: Minnesota’s Other Growing Pork Industry.” Among his conclusions: “the earmarking process is optimized for political stability, and not for public utility… earmarks are inefficient allocators of resources, in that they… do not explicitly consider long-range national transportation, social, economic, and environmental objectives.”

The paper goes into detail over Oberstar’s earmarks; one which I like is the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program, a $25M fund for bicycling and walking projects around the Twin Cities. (It mostly funded new bike lanes around Mpls in its first year.)

Not that the I-35W’s bridge “50 score… structurally deficient” means anything, really. A bridge scoring in the single digits on the same scale — Hillsborough Street over the CSX tracks, about a mile west of the Capitol — was part of my routine in Raleigh years ago. The last time someone was carried away from CCM in an ambulance was apparently from a fall on the 31st bridge over the IC tracks, which rates a 22; the famously awfully paved Chicago Ave bridge over the river gets an 11; and, perhaps most shockingly, Congress’s bridge over the river (as it emerges from under the Old PO) rates 2. Yes, two, on a 1-100 scale (apparently, Illinois uses 100, other states 120.)

* Michael Smart from UCLA, ha ha

Morsels

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* I feel sick. Why? Earlier today, I was hit (no damage, at midday, in the middle of the Loop) by a driver who was clearly in the wrong — double parked, no signals, suddenly backing up without looking (through an illegally black-tinted rear window) — and suddenly found myself with four cagers all simultaneously screaming obscenity-laced insults at me. (None asked if I was all right.) One person on the sidewalk, a woman smoking, seemed to care, and told me to take down details for the cops. Of course, the cops arrived 22 minutes later, moments after the driver finished his business and pulled away, and there being no blood, there was no way to press charges.

Yet when there is blood, as with architect Steven O’Rourke (evidently a friend of a friend) — his body dragged for one mile through the streets of Jefferson Park, knocked out of his shoes just steps from the home where his wife and three small children were sound asleep — it’s too late. Your best witness is dead.

Not one week later, a child riding in the middle of Critical Mass was violently struck by a car fleeing the scene of a crash; his bike was dragged under the car for six blocks. Not just any kid, either, but a regular, an eager boy whom I’d seen graduate from trail-a-bike to his own two wheels, whom I’d fed cookies to. He’s shaken and bruised, but the gall!

Soon, I won’t be able to count the number of people I know — or have known — struck by hit-and-run drivers with mere single digits. This fact, and the utterly nonchalant attitude that countless drivers and the authorities have towards this most soulless, evil-hearted cowardice, fills me with toxic rage.

* A text ad on that O’Rourke story directs readers to the Campaign for Global Road Safety, which points out that worldwide, road deaths kill more people than malaria and diabetes, and as many as either of two lung diseases (tuberculosis and lung cancers) — and that every minute, a child is killed or maimed on the world’s roads. Worldwide, most of these deaths are of pedestrians. This is beginning to get attention from the UN, with a General Assembly session on road safety set for this fall.

* How to end our long national nightmare. [Wonkette]

* At a recent event, new alderman Brendan O’Reilly mentioned one idea worth grabbing from NYC: camera enforcement of Gridlock Sam’s “Don’t Block the Box” directive. Between these, the Natarus sound cameras, and various anti-terrorist cameras, downtown could have a pretty thick network of cameras — pretty useful for also ticketing double-parkers, or for London style cordon pricing.

* Recently viewed and highly recommended: the Criterion Collection release of Tati’s Play Time. No plot whatsoever, but the views of oppressively modernist, traffic-choked “Tativille” alternating with his gentle physical humor made for an enjoyable (if long winded) viewing.

* Speaking of oppressive modernism, I was amused to see that an “urban quarter” (named Quartier sur le Fleuve, but that name currently generates no Google hits) at the northeast corner of Montréal’s Île-des-Soeurs was submitted for the LEED-ND Pilot. The place really looked like a Tati nightmare. [PDF from earlier planning process]

* Québec also passed a “carbon tax” last month, amounting to 0.8c per liter. Curiously, part of Illinois’ gas tax is really an “environmental impact fee” (415 ILCS 125/310). I’d be curious to see what kind of interesting local projects could be funded under a CMAQ-like regional grant program to cut carbon emissions: car sharing, bike sharing, hybrid cabs, beater car trade-ins, electric peak load conservation, whatever.

* “Airplane security seems to forever be looking backwards.” So, billions of dollars in America’s most valuable workers’ time is wasted stuffing “Freedom baggies” and pulling off shoes, all to CYA over yesterday’s threats. [Schneier on Security]

* Pithy comment by Carrington Ward on the Obama-arugula flub:

It’s an interesting point about the price of arugula. One of the problems Iowa farmers face is a dependence on monocrop agriculture — corn, corn, corn.

It is a flipside of the problem that many urban neighborhoods face: bodies sculpted by corn syrup, corn syrup, corn syrup.

We’d be better off as a nation if Iowa farmers were paying attention to the price of Arugula (or apples) in Chicago.

* Portland has a Courtyard Housing Design Competition underway. I’ll be curious to see how they reconcile this type (among my favorites, as you probably already know) with parking. The jury is pretty solid; my sense is that they’ll tend towards the traditional, though.

Politics for the next generation

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A recent Washington Monthly featured a piece by Zachary Roth on how U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan — a Democrat from the moribund parts of northeast Ohio surrounding Akron and Youngstown, and elected to Congress at the tender age of 28 — is attempting to forge a new politics that will speak to the interests of Gen X-ers and Millennials.

Ryan’s one of the “fighting Dems,” another former football star with fiery anti-Bush rhetoric, is reaching for a pro-trade message that acknowledges the fact of globalization, countering it with a renewed focus on education — and selling the message with attention-grabbing political theater.

“In our part of the country, we have a very strong cultural tie to steel,” Ryan told me later. “And whether we like it or not, the world has changed.” The speech, he said, “was a challenge to change your way of thinking.”

Quick redistricting

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A volunteer effort to map out geometrically compact Congressional districts with a simple algorithm reports that “Illinois has some of the weirdest districts I’ve seen.” While this particular guy defines compactness slightly differently from me (he minimizes distance to center of district, I’d minimize the perimeter to area ratio), it’s still a neat exercise.

Perhaps that weirdness accounts for the status-quo result reported by “Garance Franke-Ruta”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061106&s=franke-ruta111006 in TNR:

bq. [besides Duckworth] “six other Democratic challengers also went down to defeat in Illinois, and the only new Democratic congressman elected in the state won his race in an open contest in a traditionally Democratic district.”

Remembering our friends

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From the front page at WSJ.com:

bq. CONGRESS RUSHED to a messy end of 12 years of Republican rule, sending Bush a $45.1 billion tax-cut bill laden with provisions benefiting oil, coal and health-care interests.

As the Billionaire slogan goes, “Hey Congress! Put your mouth where our money is!”

1 in 13,208

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The IHT reports that the AP/National Election Pool exit poll is based on a mere 13,208 respondents in just 250 precincts nationwide — one of which was me! (CNN has “poll results”:http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/states/US/H/00/epolls.2.html for the Midwest House poll, which appears to be what I took.) I was pleased as punch to be able to tell the world that I am “angry” with George W. Bush, the war, etc., etc., and apparently the nation agrees!

The art of compromise

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Ken Silverstein snagged the cover of the November _Harper’s_ with a strange article titled “Barack Obama Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine.” The article’s not the hatchet job that the title implies, but ends with a paean to these liberal lions:
* John Anderson
* Fred Harris
* William Proxmire
* George McGovern
* Frank Church

Why not throw Eugene V. Debs into the mix? Sure, back in the days of the liberal consensus and the Thirty Glorious Years, outright socialists on Capitol Hill could rail against the oil trusts. Lovely, but what the heck does that have to do with 2006? I’m sorry that Obama isn’t pure enough for you; he wasn’t pure enough for the 1st Congressional district in 2000. (Note to world: the man has actually lost an election.) Boo hoo. Well, Pat Buchanan is ideologically pure, mostly. Let’s rally around him.

Silverstein’s main charge seems to be that Obama has accepted money from corporate lawyers, financial interests, and ethanol interests. Well, Obama is a law professor at Chicago’s top law school, a city where lawyers and financiers have the big money (and where lawyers launder money from their anonymous clients).

Now, I’m “no fan of ethanol subsidies”:https://westnorth.com/2006/02/28/bush-a-peak-oil-convert but, quite simply, elections in downstate Illinois are ethanol lovefests. There’s a whole lotta corn here, as some Eastern elitists might notice if they glanced down from the plane once in a while. The farmers, for better or worse, have tied their fortunes to ADM’s, and what you call “politically courageous” might well be “politically suicidal.”

There’s also an implication that Obama is responsible for the Hastert Highway and for “pork” in the highway bill. No, Hastert is responsible for the Hastert Highway. A Democrat in the Senate could not stop the Republican Speaker of the House from doing whatever he needs to do to get his bill through the House and through a conference committee stacked with Republicans, especially if said Democrat has been urged by the leaders back home (saddled with a ragged, rotting transportation infrastructure) to give Hastert whatever he wants as long as the rest of the region can share in the riches.