Oops. Dick Cheney shot a man, and embargoed the news for a day. Why not embargo the news for three years, then haul it out “when politically expedient”:http://www.antiwar.com/bock/?articleid=8528?

Mike Class, a Jesuit priest in Chicago, with yet another “upshot to NSA spying”:http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2006/01/05/boll/index.html:

bq. They get you free phone service! The feds tapped the phone of the Sisters of Mercy in Washington D.C. because of some anti-war stance or something they took in the 1980s. The good sisters noticed some kind of clicking on the phone at times, and finally decided that someone must have tapped into their phone. Their solution: Don’t pay the bill so the phone company will have to shut off the phone. The phone never went dead, and they quit sending them bills! The Feds wouldn’t let Ma Bell shut them down, and probably began paying the bills. The sisters talked long and free with their friends across the country!

Quoted by Bob Cringely

Tim Kane from St. Louis on the Canadian election, at the “Globe & Mail”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060124.welmain0123_6/CommentStory/specialDecision2006/#comment86063

bq. I had flashbacks to 2000 in the US and I’m traditionally conservative. Bush came to power on a minority vote. Today 2000 looks more like a minority coup that looted the treasurey and laid siege to nearly every institution, be it local, national or international, including the UN and Nato. At its core, the conservative movement here doesn’t believe in Democracy. They believe in Aristocracy and they want to prove that Democracy doesn’t work. To make that point they undermine its institutions. Looting the treasury served two purposes. They have not solved a single problem and have spawned numerous new ones. The Iraq war will cost us $2 trillion.Iraq may do to us what Afganistan did to the Soviets… Today the U.S is under a virtual dictatorship of fear, paranoia, war, multilayered deceit and corporate journalism that serves the beast. Harper’s is a minority government, but that’s hardly any different than it was with Bush… With the 2000 election of Bush, America took its first step to fascism and a dark age of anxiety, fear, war, torture, and intimidation.

Lawrence Kaplan wrote in September about the wasted opportunity to re-engage civil society in the wake of 9/11:

(_emphasis_ added)

As the famous World War II poster put it, _Remember Pearl Harbor: work — fight — sacrifice!!_ And Americans did. Legions volunteered to join the military (and millions more were drafted), while, on the home front, millions of others labored directly in support of the war effort. They did so, in part, because their president asked them to… “You see those bombers in the sky,” the Irving Berlin tune went, “Rockefeller helped build them and so did I. _I paid my income tax today_.”

Ironically… FDR felt “let down” by the American people. In 1943, the president complained that too many Americans were “laboring under the delusion that the time is past when we must make prodigious sacrifices.” What would he make of the present era? The circumstances that required mass mobilization during World War II are, of course, not the circumstances the United States confronts today. In Bush’s telling, however, the war on terrorism requires something closer to _mass demobilization_.

Meanwhile, it turns out that TV gets trashier as civic engagement declines. Not that I know many people who watch TV, but it’s no wonder that I don’t know anyone who watches trash: they’re all either at home or bowling alone.

During the ’90s, the DDB Needham Life Style survey, which tracks viewer preferences alongside civic habits, showed that viewers who imbibed the trashiest fare were the least likely to be engaged in their communities, while those who watched the news were the most involved… True, Americans have been indulging in wartime escapism ever since the proliferation of carnivals during the Civil War. But “Fear Factor” isn’t escapism. It’s the hallmark of a society that feels it has nothing from which to escape.

I finally dug this out of my list of things to post after piping up at a recent community meeting. Others tended to blame apathy on demographics: give us more families with children who stick around and fewer renters, and supposedly everything will be better. Yet the couples building those problematically huge McMansions — my favorite example: the couple “thinking about” having children who demanded 5,500 sq ft with a penthouse hot-tub cabana — have children and own single-family houses, and yet are less invested in the neighborhood than some young renters. (I was easily the only one in the room under 30, and certainly the only non-White.) Even if PTA soccer moms invaded the neighborhood, they wouldn’t solve the problem: their primary complaint is always over-extension. With “affordable” houses going for $1M, it’s no wonder that both parents have 60-hour weeks down at the firm.

Fighting apathy requires a fundamentally different approach to politics. What exactly that is, I’m not entirely sure yet, but I’d sure be interested in examples.

In What’s the Matter With Kansas?, “Tom Frank”:http://www.tcfrank.com/essays.html puzzles for a moment over why Johnson County, Kansas — the “Cupcake Land” of mostly prosperous western suburbs of Kansas City, far and away the wealthiest county in Kansas (it being the only metropolitan county) is split between libertarian moderates in the east (closer to KC) and reactionary conservatives in the western exurbs. The two groups create an uneasy alliance that returns Republicans to office time and again, relying on the votes and the fervor of the Cons to further the Mods’ capitalist aims, even though the Mods are sometimes troubled by the culture-war rhetoric that gets the Cons hopping. The puzzle is that the two camps live side by side and appear demographically similar in many ways, including occupation and income.

One distinction here lies in each group’s habitus; the two camps do live in different cultural milieus and relate to the wider economy and society in different ways. The “Claritas PRIZM NE”:http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp?ID=30&SubID=&pageName=Segment%2BLook-up consumer segmentation system draws a line through Johnson County separating metropolitan “suburban” consumers in the east and non-metropolitan “edge/second city” consumers in the west. The most common clusters in two Johnson County towns:

|Mission Hills, 66208|Lenexa, 66220|
|01. Upper Crust|09. Big Fish, Small Pond|
|03. Movers & Shakers|11. God’s Country|
|08. Executive Suites|23. Greenbelt Sports|
|21. Gray Power|28. Traditional Times|
|30. Suburban Sprawl|45. Blue Highways|

The numbers refer to overall SES, ranked 1-66. Not only are the Mission Hills clusters notably more upscale, but their tastes are far “bluer.” Executive Suites, “a haven for white-collar professionals drawn to comfortable homes and apartments,” watches “Will & Grace” and drives BMWs; similarly wealthy Big Fish, Small Pond reads _Southern Living_. Gray Power goes to museums; Greenbelt Sports watches pro wrestling on pay-per-view. Suburban Sprawl drives Nissans; Traditional Times drives Buicks.

The distinction reminds me of “Chris’ point at LCL”:http://leftcenterleft.typepad.com/blog/2005/08/whats_the_matte.html about those in the major metros who’ve bought into the metropolitan status game and those who haven’t; in this case, the “Plen-T-Plaint” that Frank refers to comprises the latter’s litany of resentful, rebellious grievances against the largely self-imposed cultural hegemony of the former. Of course, all Americans play some sort of status game — as evidenced by the mere presence of the clusters — but the primary axis of urbanity remains the primary division.

(Finally published; started in January 2005, after I finished the book.)

Governing magazine’s 2003 Government Performance Project begins with an overview of the structural problems of state tax systems:

The vast majority of state tax systems are inadequate for the task of funding a 21st-century government.

Most of those tax systems are also unfair. They break the golden rule of tax equity: collect the lowest possible rates on the widest possible base of taxpayers.

In addition, at a time when states are desperate to collect every dime they’re owed, many are short-changing their tax-collection departments, cutting revenue agency budgets with a heavy hand…

“It’s the old classic,” says Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. “Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

Now that it’s our Presidentially anointed, patriotic duty not to drive, I’ll do my part by cutting my driving to, well, zero.

Danny Hakim and Jeremy Peters in the NYT:

Drivers can only bend so far, however. “People can’t change where they live,” said Richard Porter, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. “They can’t change where they work, and there aren’t any clear substitutes to gas.”

Well, in the short term perhaps not, but in the long term perhaps people will change where they live — refashioning communities to reduce the need for driving. Imagine that! In the meantime, maybe now that “driving less” is a national policy, how about radically refashioning all the federal policies that encourage wasteful driving? Five to start:
# Many key federal facilities are sited with an anti-urban bias, from defense installations with needless “security” setbacks to post offices with gonzo parking lots.
# The feds pay 90% of capital costs for highways but 50% or less for transit.
# Transit commuters can receive only $75 in transit costs pretax, versus parking spaces worth up to $120 — and walkers or cyclists get no preferential tax treatment.
# The nation’s truckers get federally managed highway maintenance, but their competitors on the railroads must pay their own way.
# Affordable housing tax credits typically favor larger projects (e.g., mortgage revenue bonds require a minimum of 100 units on one site) and end up favoring larger, suburban sites.

Jacob Hacker has a great analogy for “the ownership society” in TNR:
The conservative response to rising insecurity is equivalent to tossing a lead weight to a drowning man on the assumption that, now, he will really have an incentive to swim.
It’s all about incentives, right?

From DC’s truth-stranger-than-fiction department, the new “highway bill” contains, of course, a record number of earmarks — since Congressmen, not planners, of course, know what’s best for America’s transportation needs. Riiiight. Rep. Don Young (R-AK) proudly says he “stuffed” TEA-LU — the “Legacy for Users” an excuse to put his wife’s name into his true pride and joy — “like a turkey,” particularly with one project so incredibly useless that its folly could only be paralleled in a land ruled by a feebleminded (if sharply dressed) despot:

$231 million for a bridge that will connect Anchorage to Port MacKenzie, a rural area that has exactly one resident.

The same amount of cash invested in, say, the Mid-City Transitway could buy a transit line with 30,000 passengers a day. But… no. This is how the Republicans describe “smaller government.” Maybe I should write a check to the Alaskan Independence Party to help them secede from the Union and stop wasting our tax dollars.

Edit 18 August: Garrison Keillor writes in his syndicated column: “Had Minnesota voted Republican, as Alaska wisely did, we might have gotten a canal connecting the Mississippi to Lake Superior and a high-speed rail link between Bemidji and Roseau and maybe a 10,000-foot runway at the Waseca (pop. 8,389) International Airport.” He also suggests that English majors band together to demand $223 million libraries from the feds, “equipped with leather sofas and an espresso bar and librarians who are trained in pressure-point massage. Greek columns would be nice, and a pair of stone lions, and a rare book collection and a three-story lobby with marble floors so your footsteps echo as if you were in an Edith Wharton novel. And a statue of Minerva.”

When government disappears, private citizens will be moved by their own consciences to treat one another with Biblical kindness. Yeah, well, let’s start with the people who tell us these lies daily, like the staff of the Heritage Foundation. Indeed, their VP for finance has been charged with jumping out of his car and shoving a bicyclist who was about half his size. Says the assaulted cyclist,

“”It was some kind of road-rage nonsense. When he got out of the car, I told him: ‘You’re crazy! Get back in the car!’… I was pretty scraped up and bruised. And he just got back into his car and floored it. He took off.”

bq. “[L]eave Social Security intact. Paying down debt now is fiscally useful but politically useless. Instead, be bold, invest for future productivity growth in a way that the private sector cannot do, and in ways which (given the dearth of public investments recently) are very expeditious, offering high rates of return… What should the government do, with the present blessing of low long-term interest rates? Obviously, it should borrow! But for a purpose, please — not merely to keep 150,000 soldiers on a mission impossible in Iraq. It should borrow to repair and rebuild our cities, our transport, our schools, our environment — either directly or through state and local government. That’s the only way the country as a whole can become materially richer, a generation from now, than it would otherwise be.

James Galbraith, in “Salon”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/03/21/greenspan_deficits/index1.html

In DC this weekend, someone left a “New Homes Guide” in my hotel room. The map of sprawl shows commuter suburbs springing up not one, but two counties past the West Virginia line, in Spotsylvania County, five counties from DC, and across from Annapolis on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

The beauty and functionality of Metrorail and the new National Airport leave me feeling jealous: I haven’t seen infrastructure this well-designed and well-kept since Paris. Train headways have been 2-3 minutes at rush hour, 10 minutes even on Sunday afternoons.

The American Prospect makes an interesting pair of contrasts in its Social Security package this month: first, from Norma Cohen, that Britain’s privatization schemes have backfired in a big way due to exactly the sort of “price-indexed” benefit cuts that Bush has proposed and due to overly greedy securities brokers (are there any other kinds?); and second, from Dean Baker, that Argentina’s partial privatization and the new public debt it incurred played a significant role in driving that country towards default and fiscal ruin.

Baker says, “[t]he United States is obviously very different from Argentina.” Yeah: we’re running even larger deficits.