The Press has a story about a different form of do-it-yourself publishing called print-on-demand, or POD, which has attracted a number of wannabe authors in Houston. It may be another form of "vanity publishing", as newspaper book editors are wont to call it, but as a blogger with an eponymous domain, I'm hardly one to criticize. I say more power to 'em.
Ginger points to this story about a Houston Chronicle reporter who ran a blog on the side under a pseudonym. He was eventually outed and ordered to shut his site down by the Chron's new managing editor, Jeff Cohen.
For more than a year, Steve Olafson, the Houston Chronicle's Brazoria County reporter, kept an online diary criticizing elected officials and commenting on local politics.[...]
"When we learned about the Web site and Steve's involvement with it, we asked him to take it down," said Jeff Cohen, the Chronicle's executive vice president and editor.
Contacted at his Lake Jackson home Wednesday, Olafson declined comment.
Opinions vary among local officials about whether Olafson did anything wrong. But journalism ethics analysts said the Web site posed a clear conflict that could hurt Olafson's credibility.
Cohen would not comment on whether Olafson's involvement in the Web site violated the Chronicle's code of ethics or whether any action would be taken against Olafson.
"I can't talk to you about how we handle violations of policy because we would not discuss that externally," Cohen said.
Olafson continues in his capacity as a Chronicle reporter, Cohen said.
And I don't buy the so-called ethical issues, either. Olafson is still a private citizen and entitled to express his opinions. He wasn't making any money off the blog, nor was he likely to influence anyone or anything more than he could as a Real Journalist. Where's the conflict?
I'm in favor of all legitimate sources of information about my city. I'm sorry that Steve Olafson's is now extinct.
UPDATE: I should have known that someone would have covered this ground already. Matt Welch did so in 1999. Check it out.
That new git-tuff-on-corporate-crime bill that Dubya signed and is shamelessly claiming cedit for despite opposing it every step of the way? It was supposed to contain full protection for corporate whistle-blowers, the people who will call attention to the future Enrons. Team Bush has decided that they don't want to support that, so they're interpreting it in such a narrow way as to render it meaningless.
Eight hours [after signing the bill], the White House quietly issued a statement outlining how it was interpreting several provisions, including one that grants federal protection to corporate whistle-blowers who present Congress with information that books had been cooked or investors misled.Bush spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the White House views the provision as shielding whistle-blowers from company retaliation only if they talk to a congressional committee "in the course of an investigation." The protections would not apply when evidence is provided to individual lawmakers or aides, she said.
Even Republicans think that's wrong:
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, called the White House move "disturbing.""Our intention is to protect any whistle-blower who exposes wrongdoing to an individual member of Congress, a congressional committee, a media outlet or any other public entity," Grassley said. "Whistle-blowers need full protection. Otherwise they won't come forward. Problems won't see the light of day."
I promised yesterday that I'd write about some of the more interesting things I've seen on the job. Sit back and relax as I tell you about the Horny Employee and the Network Printer.
About a year and a half after I started at the large multinational company where I work, I was asked to join an experimental help desk. Originally, our help desk was set up on a by-technology basis. We had a group that supported the desktop and LAN (Windows 3.1, OS/2 servers, DOS LAN Requester - stop laughing, it was 1995), a group that supported VM, a group for MVS, and a bunch of smaller groups that handled different specialty apps and systems. All users called one number and then navigated a complex phone tree to get to the group they needed to talk to.
Naturally, this system sucked. There were tons of menu choices. Lots of people got lost and had to be rerouted. Some groups were overstaffed, some were understaffed. The customers wanted something better and cheaper.
So what was proposed was a help desk that supported specific locations. It would be staffed by a cross-section of the various support groups, so that there was always someone who knew how to handle any given question. Those with PC knowledge were to help out the mainframe experts, and vice versa. Best of all, customers would call a number and get a technician without having to press any more buttons.
It worked pretty well, and in fact is the model that's still in use today. At the time, the group was a mix of staff and contractors. We had overlapping schedules so we could cover from 6 AM to 6 PM and during lunch.
One of the contractors was a guy whom I'll call R. R was a good employee - he knew his stuff, had good rapport with customers on the phone, volunteered to work the unpopular 6 AM shift, and handled a decent sized call volume. He was a good ol' boy who lived way out in the country (we're talking a 50 or 60 mile commute each way), was married and had two teenage kids.
And one afternoon we were told that he was gone, just like that. We all had to scramble to cover his shift and workload. We were pretty upset until the story leaked as to why R was no longer with us.
It seems that during a lull in the day, R had written an erotic story on his computer. Well, calling it an "erotic story" is an overbid - it was like an unedited letter to the Penthouse Forum. It was a letter from a man to his girlfriend about how he and his wife had really gotten it on the night before (don't ask whether this was taken from real life experience or if it was just straight-on fantasizing, I don't know and don't want to know).
Now, writing such a thing on a work computer is not the smartest thing in the world, but even in our open-cubicle environment, you could get away with it. R's fatal mistake was when he decided that he really needed to print this little masterpiece.
On a network printer.
I don't know about you, but I think if I'd just written a stroke letter and printed it on a network printer, I'd make damn sure that I was there pulling it out of the rollers before it even had a chance to sit in the output bin. R, for reasons of his own, took his time getting to the printer. Alas for him, someone else picked up his printout. And that was the last we saw of R.
It wasn't the last we heard or spoke of him. He called in to the help desk a day or so later and apologized for letting us down. He spoke to a female teammate, which probably made her pretty uncomfortable because after his firing, she and a couple of other women on the team reported that R seemed to enjoy steering conversations with them towards sex. It hadn't yet gotten to the point where any of them were ready to complain to management about it, but all of them expressed relief that now they wouldn't have to.
The postscript on this story is that for several months afterwards, we all gave a good-natured hard time to the employee who found R's magnum opus and turned it in to management. Any time someone disagreed with him, we'd say "Hey, better watch out, you saw what he did to R, you could be next." I still tease him about this from time to time.
The help desk here has long been a starting point for many employees. In my time with this group, I've seen a number of people get fired for various stupid things. R's story remains the most spectacular flameout.
God grant my City Council the courage to change the things they can, the serenity to accept the things they can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.
So what's on the agenda for our City Council these days? The chaos that has been wrought by so much road work? Flood control? Term limits? Property taxes?
Would you believe slavery reparations?
I was going to write a long rant about he misguidedness of reparations, but I'll point you to this article in The American Prospect instead, which captures my feelings pretty well. Let's just say here that I consider this to be a waste of the Council's time, since after all they can do exactly bupkus about it.
In the meantime, let's hope that there's enough time in the Council meeting for them to talk about the West Nile virus outbreak, increased parking meter fees, the proposed pedestrian plaza for Main Street - you know, the things they can change.
Yesterday I wrote about an ad that Governor Goodhair is running which attempts to link Democratic candidate Tony Sanchez to drug money. Today, the federal judge in the case that Perry's ad cites specifically repudiated Perry's charges.
A senior federal judge -- breaking from traditional judicial silence -- Tuesday said Republican Gov. Rick Perry's new television commercial falsely uses one of his 1984 orders to portray Democratic Tony Sanchez as laundering money for drug dealers."Insofar as the ad appears to attribute any of this to me, it's absolutely false," said U.S. District Judge Harry Lee Hudspeth.
[...]
Citing Hudspeth's order approving the government seizure of some of the drug money held in First City National Bank of El Paso, Perry's commercial says:
"A federal judge confirmed Sanchez's bank wired millions of laundered drug money to Manuel Noriega's Panama."
Hudspeth said his order involved the Internal Revenue Service seizing funds from a money broker who was making deposits for a Mexican drug lord. Hudspeth said his order said nothing about whether the banks or bankers had acted improperly or illegally.
"It was not criticism of any banker anywhere," Hudspeth said.
Via Joe Conanson comes this FindLaw column that lays out further the case against Priscilla Owen, Judicial Activist. Cragg Hines stays on it as well.
An interesting piece in Salon today by Keith Olbermann about understanding the consequences of one's actions. Here's the part that got me:
It will never occur to [Ann] Coulter that in the vast crowd of us who appeared on television news in 1998, and focused entirely on the itinerary of President Clinton's genitalia, she was up near the front. It's a big crowd, and some of us tried to disperse it. But we're all there -- I'm including myself -- and as we head to purgatory for our sins, if not hell, we should all solemnly acknowledge that in fact there most obviously was something else to which we should have been paying attention, and didn't.Last September I went back and checked the logs of my old MSNBC show and discovered to my surprise that in the two months before we changed the meaning of the parent company's acronym to "Nothing But Clinton," my most frequent guests were James Dunegan, a craggy bespectacled man who talked endlessly of terrorism and the Middle East and the threat of anthrax being delivered to Broadway, and Dr. Richard Haas, then of the Brookings Institution, who warned constantly of terrorism and the Middle East and the threats to, and in, this country.
Then one day Mr. Dunegan and Dr. Haas were swept away, never to appear again. Instead we got Terry Jeffrey and Bob Barr and Christopher Hitchens, and our lower-grade sister shows got Newt Gingrich and Barbara Olson and Ann Coulter. That I escaped Coulter was merely a throwaway favor from my masters. They had been hinting she'd have to be a guest sooner rather than later. Then she went over-the-top: Despite an eye infection, she could not keep herself off television. I begged my bosses not to make me interview a guest who was literally wearing a huge, distracting eyepatch. Thus my imagery of her as a pirate: For a week she continued to flail away at the wrong evil while looking like a refugee from some camped-up version of "Treasure Island." But not on my show.
Mistake me not here: Ann Coulter didn't cause Sept. 11. Not in a billion years would I accuse her, or any of the others (not even Barr), of that. But with hindsight one has to ask why the prospect of a country unprepared for terrorism wasn't a sexy enough topic for her and the others to use to pound Clinton and the Democrats. Certainly they got with the program after Sept. 11, blaming Clinton for being soft on Osama bin Laden and terror. The Clinton folks struck back, and for a while it was compelling television controversy and worthwhile political debate, a hot TV commodity that at least contained some crumb of public good. Why wasn't that interesting before Sept. 11?
TTLB and Chad Orzel have talked about a desire to see more diversity in blogging; more stuff about what people do and less armchair punditry. I find that I'm slowing down a bit on general purpose punditry these days. There's a lot of people out there with more time, interest, and knowledge than I who pound away at that stuff. I'd rather say something original than add to the echo chamber, so unless I feel I'm really adding some value I've preferred to read rather than write on those topics.
I'm more interested and have been more active of late in local and state politics, partly because it interests me sufficiently, and partly because there's a smaller chorus to sing in. That fits with my original philosophy for this blog, which is that I'll write about what I want to. If I start to feel compelled to write about things, this will start to feel like work, and that way burnout lies.
I just wish I had a sufficiently entertaining job to write about. I have a friend who has had many excellent jobsite tales to tell (I especially recommend this one and this one - standard No Beverage Warning applies to each), but as an email administrator, most of my job would bore a night watchman. If I ever bring my own kid to work on Take Our Children To Work Day I'll have to lie about what I do. "Hey, watch Daddy import this tab-delimited text file! Oooh, now I'm going to write a Perl script to format the output!" Some days I make Dilbert look like a thrill ride.
Even in my time as a Help Desk tech, I never had any truly juicy stories about stupid user tricks. I spent three years as the help desk for a company that made programming tools for DOS. Programmers do tend to be a bit more computer literate than the average user, so there wasn't too much humor potential. Of course, some of these guys used a high-level database language called Clipper, which was mostly geared towards fast application development by people who didn't much care about the inner workings of the system. Calling them programmers is kinda like calling George W. Bush a self-made man.
But I digress. I do have a couple of interesting tales from my work life. One is a Stupid Coworker story from when I'd moved to my current large multinational company. The other is from the small software shop days, and it's more of an It's A Small World kind of thing. I'll post them both in the next day or so. In the meantime, read about A Very Stinky Problem.
Like clockwork, Clymer Wright breaks out the Crayolas and sends a letter to the editor (scroll down) about John Williams' column from Monday, which suggested that his beloved term limits might be wearing out their welcome.
Here's my favorite bit:
Williams claimed I used the "conservative's ultimate slur" in remarking that Borden is getting more liberal the older he gets.As a lifelong conservative, I have never heard a single conservative use this "ultimate slur."
Are you going to heaven or hell? There's gotta be a better way than this to find out:
An argument over who was going to heaven and who was going to hell ended with one Texas man shooting another to death with a shotgun, police said Monday.
Governor Goodhair has fired back in his campaign for reelection by running ads that allege that Tony Sanchez's bank was involved in drug-related money laundering.
The commercial focuses on $25 million in Mexican drug cartel money that flowed through Sanchez's now-defunct Tesoro Savings and Loan in 1983 and 1984. Sanchez and Tesoro officials have maintained they did not know the money was illegal.But Perry's ad claims that as federal agents closed in on the money laundering ring, Tesoro transferred $9 million to a Panamanian bank.
"When given a choice of turning over drug-related funds to federal authorities, Mr. Sanchez and Tesoro instead allowed the drug money launderers to spirit the suspect funds to Panama, then a hotbed of international drug activity," said Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan.
Sanchez's campaign also gave reporters copies of testimony from a 1987 libel case Sanchez brought against a Laredo newspaper over its reporting of the incident. A former assistant U.S. attorney, a federal drug agent and an IRS agent all testified that no Tesoro officials knew of the money laundering.
Chron baseball writer Richard Justice has a regular Baseball Notebook column that runs every Sunday during the season. This Sunday's effort talked about the labor issues and was surprisingly fair to the players' union. Still, he couldn't quite overcome his belief in the myth of competitive balance:
Given the current disparities between the rich teams and poor ones, only a handful of clubs have a real chance of contending for a championship. Others, like the A's and Twins and Royals, can only contend if everything goes right, and even then their window of opportunity is limited by salary issues the Yankees, Red Sox and Mets don't have.
As for the Twins, they're middle of the pack in pitching this year. As Rob Neyer notes, Joe Mays and Brad Radke have combined for five wins so far. And yet the Twins are dominating their division, thanks to much-improved hitting and weaker-than-expected competition. (Don't forget to send a thank-you note to Kenny Williams, Twin fans.)
All teams face a certain amount of adversity. Good teams overcome it. When "everything goes right" you get the '84 Tigers, the '98 Yankees, or the '01 Mariners. The Twins are a good team with a good future. The A's have been a good team for several years. It's time they got credit for it.
Jeff Cooper writes of a longtime Mets fan site which has received a cease-and-desist order from Major League Baseball. He looks at from the viewpoint of trademark law and the doctrine of "laches", which I need to go and look up. (I love learning new stuff like this.)
Cooper rightly notes that regardless of the legality of the situation, the defendant is a 20-year-old college student who's doing this on his own, and thus is in no position to litigate against a multimillion dollar industry. He further notes that this is a prime example of what the Baseball Prospectus calls "anti-marketing", something that Beelzebud and his cronies excel at.
I do have some good news for you, Jeff. Kevin Whited has followed the case of an Astros fan blog that was threatened by MLB but in the end was allowed to live. And after the BP ran this article about how baseball can and should build its fan base, they got this response which talks about what some teams do do. Maybe, just maybe, there's some hope here.
A local conservative Republican activist is seeing a change in attitude towards the idea of term limits. Term limits had been a rallying cry for GOP activists in the early to mid 1990s, but even then some people questioned their wisdom:
[Bill] Borden is one of a growing number of conservative Republicans in the Houston area who now oppose term limits as an intrusion into voters' rights."The truth is, term limits haven't helped Houston or anyplace else," Borden says. "It hasn't helped do anything but create problems."
Borden converted longer ago than most. He was silent a decade ago, when Clymer Wright proposed that voters limit Houston's elected city officials to three 2-year terms.
He had been a term-limits supporter for much of the 1980s. Borden and others held that periodically replacing elected officials would refresh and reshape government.
But by 1991, when voters approved Wright's referendum, Borden was talked out of the position by U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land.
"Tom always argued that it's not right to restrict who a voter can vote for," Borden said. "By 1990, I agreed with him. The truth is, term limits was a position many Republicans held to get Democrats out of office."
Given the politics, it may take a Republican mayor to lead the charge against term limits here. I hate dilemmas like that. Hey, Joe Roach, what's your position on this?
You're the President of the most powerful nation in the world. You're being blamed for the current economic turmoil, while your Treasury Secretary is busy making a fool of himself. Your business experience, a cornerstone of your campaign, is being shown to be a fraud, even by conservatives, while your Vice President is being sued by a conservative watchdog group over his allegedly fraudulent behavior as a CEO. And if that weren't enough, you're preparing for war.
So what do you do? Why, you go on vacation, of course. For a month.
Well, hey. Sometimes, when the chips are down, when the odds are stacked against you, when hack amateur pundits are taking cheap shots, there's only one thing to do. And you're just the man to do it.
Charles Dodgson does some pundit watching, and it's not pretty:
In the conservative Weekly Standard, two scholars from the American Enterprise Institute argue that the prospect of further regulation, such as the bill that recently passed through Congress on stiffening up accounting standards, ruining confidence in the economy, and driving down the markets.On Meet the Press this morning, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill praised the bill as a useful measure to restore confidence in the economy, and should help the markets come back (as have several Republicans in Congress).
[daffyduck cartoon="duckamuck"] Is it too much to ask you to make up your minds??? [/daffyduck]
I've now had two requests to bump up the font size in the blog content area, so I've changed it from 11px to 12px in the style sheet. I hope this is better. As always, any constructive feedback is appreciated.
Brad DeLong shows us an interesting memo from 1993 that measures budget deficits of the 1980s by Presidential versus Congressional component. You know how blame for the deficits in those days always seemed to go to the irresponsible, spendthrift Congress? Well, it wasn't really like that. Check it out.
Kevin had pointed awhile back to this interesting take by Jeanne D'Arc on perception and bias. Sometimes, seeing distortions and slurs in a news story says more about you than it does about the writer.
Here's the funniest thing about Ryan Leaf's announced retirement from the NFL: Leaf, who was once considered one of the top quarterback prospects in the game, threw a total of fourteen touchdown passes in his career.
Walter Payton, who was not a quarterback, threw eight touchdown passes in his career.
Congratulations to Lance Armstrong for winning his fourth straight Tour de France. It's an amazing accomplishment, no matter how you slice it, and despite what some dumbass sportswriters may think, makes Lance Armstrong on e of the world's greatest athletes.
But the big question remains: How would Lance do at the Tour de Donut?
I had a bit of difficulty implementing categories fully. The sticking point had to do with changing the footer on my entries to contain the category name and link to that category's archive page, as well as adding a list of categories to my main archive page. The MT user manual does give you all the information you need, but it's in bits and pieces all over the place. A few examples would have helped me immensely.
Normally, I'd simply view source on someone else's blog to guide me, but MT renders all of its tags in index files, so what you see when you view source is the finished product. That's not helpful, since I want to see the code. I figure someone else might benefit from this, so I've documented everything I did and placed it in this text file here. It's in a text file to ensure that MT doesn't try to render its tags, and to make it easier for anyone interested to save a copy for themselves. I may update this file someday as I dink with my blog config, so I'll add a link to this file in my main index under Blog Resources.
Hope it helps. Any feedback on this is appreciated. Thanks to Ginger and Michael for helping me work through my category issues.
UPDATE: Byron found this post useful, and he's added some corrections for those who've updated to MT version 2.64. He's also made me realize that I don't have categories configured for my individual archives, a situation I'm about to rectify.
Larry and Meryl are in the second half of their 24-hour Blogathon. There's still time to sponsor them (or others - you can see a full list of participants on the Blogathon site) if you want. They're blogging for good causes, and unlike public radio it doesn't interfere with the stuff you like. I mean, admit it - it sucks listening to CarTalk during pledge drive time.
Anyway, go give 'em some love. And guys, if you run out of ideas, you can always follow Dawn Olson's lead.
Apparently, the Chron editorial page was taken over by a Republican National Committee member with a talking points list today. That's the only explanation I can come up with for this entry, which uses the phrase "death tax" and makes it sound as though it mostly falls on hardworking farmers and small business owners instead of rich folk.
No mention of how much the repeal of this tax will cost the Treasury, though you can be sure that the crack staff at the Chron will bleat in righteous indignation at Congress when the pesky deficit refuses to go away.
There's a case to be made against the estate tax, but this ain't it. This is propaganda.
A total of ten people have contracted the West Nile Virus so far in the Houston area. I've been told that the virus has been discovered in our neighborhood as well - they've found dead birds which were contaminated. I think I'll be putting on a space suit before I walk the dog tonight.
San Antonio is finally getting flouride in their drinking water, a year and a half after a proposal to do so was approved by voters. The vote was the third such initiative since 1966 and was the first to overcome fierce resistance.
This article from the Express-News archives, gives a good picture of the forces at work in this battle. I was a sophomore at Trinity University when the 1985 ballot was cast. I still don't understand the likes of C.A. Stubbs and Kay Turner, two of the leaders of the anti-flouridation movement. For the four years I lived in San Antonio, every time I read a quote in the papers from Stubbs I was struck by how little overlap there seemed to be in his universe and mine. As for Turner, whom I don't remember, she seems to have misplaced a husband somewhere along the line:
Turner had said her marriage was to "an intelligence agent" who died without a trace in Central America while on a covert mission. During the [1997 mayoral] campaign, Turner was unable to produce a photograph, marriage license or any other record of J. Adam Walker III. Since then, she has said that another former husband, Tom Turner, threw away her records dealing with Walker.
Anyway, now San Diego is apparently the largest US city to not have flouridated water. Nice to know that everything doesn't have to be bigger here.
Andrew Northrup tells us about the top ten fashion victims of the 80s. I'll give you now the standard warning about not consuming beverages while reading this.
I think we need to pass federal legislation that orders the immediate burning of all high school yearbooks from the 80s. I know quite a few people whose future authority with their not-yet-teenaged children depends on it. Let's face it: Anyone for whom there is documented evidence of having worn parachute pants has no right to say "You're not going out dressed like that!" to his or her offspring.
BTW, Andrew, does this make you the poor man's Mr. Blackwell, or is he the poor man's Andrew Northrup?
Man, I don't know what Avedon has been eating for breakfast lately, but whatever it is, I want some of it. Take a look at these two entries for some really good stuff. Brava!
In the wake of the big money signings of star free agents Rick Reilly and Gary Smith, Major League Sports Magazine Commissioner Larry "Bud" Smellig has reiterated his plea for a salary cap on sports scribes.
"Our industry cannot survive this kind of rampant salary inflation," Smellig said. "How can small-market magazines hope to compete with the likes of SI and ESPN for writing talent? Fans of small-market magazines have no hope and faith that they can go up against the big guys and win."
Smellig believes that the only solution to the rapid rise of sportswriter salaries is to impose a salary cap and revenue sharing.
"SI and ESPN are owned by Ted Turner and Disney, for chrissakes. How can you expect a mom-and-pop magazine like the Milwaukee Sports Journal and Fishing Report to retain talent when gazillionaires like Turner can wave his bank statements around? The only solution is to force the successful magazines to share their revenue with the less successful ones," said Smellig.
Smellig longed for the days when writers started with a magazine and stayed with that same magazine for the rest of his career or until he was fired. "Writers today have no loyalty. They go wherever the big money is. It's just un-American that a writer can choose where he wants to work and negotiate his own salary, and it's ruining the sports magazine business."
Smellig forecast dark days for the sports magazine industry if spiralling salaries weren't artificially capped. "Look, everybody knows that sports magazine owners are mouth-breathing idiots who'll throw millions at any over-the-hill hack with a smidgen of of name recognition. We need to impose rules to prevent them from spending their money in an unwise fashion. It's just the way of capitalism."
If things don't change quickly, Smellig warned, some magazines might not survive. "In fact, I know of at least two magazines that won't make payroll this week. They may have to auction off the secretaries to pay the ungrateful writers' salaries or they'll have the writers' union all over their asses. Is that what you want to have happen?" When asked to provide the names of the magazines that might not make payroll or for a look at those magazines' books, Smellig drew back in horror. "What, don't you trust me? We let a blue-ribbon commission of magazine owners look at our books and they wrote a blue-ribbon report saying that everything I've ever said about the state of our finances is totally true, including things I haven't said yet. And did I say that two magazines might not make payroll? I meant four magazines. Maybe five."
(Inspired by this Mac Thomason post.)
Fritz Schranck has the goods on the next Bruce Willis action movie. I'm so there.
The state clean air plans for Houston-Galveston and Dallas-Fort Worth are in jeopardy as the means of funding for them has been ruled unconstitutional.
Federal environmental officials are preparing to deliver a sharp warning to their Texas counterparts: Get the Houston-Galveston area's clean air plan back on track by September 2003 or we may have to do it for you.So said the state's top environmental regulator Wednesday as he and other state officials warily awaited an announcement by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on clean air plans for the Houston-Galveston and Dallas-Fort Worth regions.
Jeff Saitas, executive director of the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, said he expects the EPA to announce, perhaps today, that both plans are in trouble with the federal regulators because of a collapse of funding for a key package of incentives that could significantly reduce air pollution. The EPA had no comment.
[...]
Saitas said it is his understanding the "approved" status of the Houston plan will not change until Sept. 1, 2003. If the Legislature has not restored funding by then, the EPA will find that the state is failing to implement its plan as promised and could withdraw its approval.
That could result in the loss of billions of dollars in federal highway funds and a federal plan, rather than a state plan, to clean the air.
The incentive package, known also as Senate Bill 5, is a crucial ingredient in efforts to cut air pollution in Texas metropolitan areas that do not meet the federal Clean Air Act's air quality standards.It offers grants and incentives to private citizens, government entities and businesses who voluntarily purchase cleaner vehicles and equipment or who act to achieve greater energy efficiency.
When the bill was introduced by Sen. Buster Brown, R-Lake Jackson, chairman of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, the $137 million cost was to be funded by taxes and fees on such things as vehicle inspections, new vehicle purchases, hotel occupancy and taxi rides in polluted areas.
But, wary of voter reaction to the new fees and taxes, the bill emerged with about three-quarters of the funding coming from an inspection fee on all out-of-state vehicles -- a fee that went from $1 to $225 per vehicle with a stroke of Gov. Rick Perry's pen.
The fee was challenged by two Austin-area auto dealers and ruled unconstitutional by state District Judge Lora Livingston.
Sadly, it ain't gonna get better any time soon:
The Legislature will fund the plan, all agree, but the question is how."As a state, we place the highest priority on protecting health, and I am confident we will work to provide the funding necessary to acquire final approval," Perry said.
He and Democratic gubernatorial rival Tony Sanchez, however, pledge no new taxes.
"Tony has said tax and fee increases are absolutely off the table," said Sanchez campaign spokesman Mark Sanders.
Let's give our thanks to Axel Emmermann, who tipped the FBI to a solicitation to buy "a rare and historically significant piece of the moon", thus leading to the capture of the Moon Rocks Four. It's nice to know in this day and age that you can still trust the morals of Belgian rock collectors.
The Comal River is availableto tubers again, much to the delight of residents and business owners in New Braunfels.
To the cheers of area residents, the cool, clear Comal River reopened to tubers on Wednesday, but flooding continues to keep parts of the Guadalupe River off-limits to recreation.There were even louder cheers when officials announced that musician Willie Nelson agreed to perform a benefit concert for this flood-ravaged community.
[...]
Nelson plans to play Aug. 5 at Gruene Hall. Tickets cost $100 and all proceeds are earmarked for New Braunfels Rebounds, an ecumenical group that was formed in 1998 to rebuild homes from that year's major flood.
The NYT has a mouth-watering article about four great barbecue places near Austin. I've been to the Salt Lick in Driftwood several times, and I'm here to tell you, it's worth every single artery-clogging calorie. I'm Pavloving right now just thinking about it. One of the many great things about the Salt Lick is that for $13.95 it's all you can eat. You can always start that diet tomorrow, you know...
The House of Representatives voted 420-1 to expel James "There's a dead opossum on my head!" Traficant from its esteemed body for being a lying, cheating scuzzball who had the temerity to get caught.
Normally, when I see a vote of something-to-one in the House, I assume that Ron Paul, the eccentric libertarian from Texas, is the one nay vote. Not this time. Wanna guess who Jimmy the T's lone remaining friend is?
Only Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif., who was defeated in a primary for re-election after he was romantically linked with Chandra Levy, a government intern who was murdered, voted against Traficant's expulsion.
Two recent items have gotten me thinking about the death penalty. This article in The American Prospect talks about recent shifts in opinion on the death penalty. I find that sort of thing to be more wishful thinking than anything else, and I'm never sure how much I sympathize with it. I've gone up and down on the death penalty. I remember once as a teenager trying to convince my Dad that the death penalty was just and good. How exactly I came to be to the right of my Catholic, Republican father remains a mystery to me. I think I've been making up for it ever since.
Despite my relentless surge to the left on many issues, I remain basically in favor of the death penalty. I just feel that it's the only possible response to certain crimes and certain criminals. Back in the day when Mario Cuomo was governor of New York and the death penalty was not on the books, a prisoner serving a life sentence killed a guard. As it happened, this was a rare loophole in the New York penal code - a lifer who committed murder was the one type of New Yorker who was eligible for the state-sponsored big dirt nap. Cuomo categorically ruled out the possibility of executing this killer, in keeping with his principles. I always thought Cuomo gave him a free pass. How else can you punish someone who's never going to breathe outside air again? It made no sense to me, then or now.
As with many things, of course, familiarity can breed contempt, and there's no place more familiar with the death penalty than Texas. There are many capital cases in Texas that make one question one's commitment to the idea of governmental killing. One such case, profiled in the July Texas Monthly is that of Darlie Routier (subscription required), a housewife from Rowlett who was convicted on the bloody stabbing murder of her two young sons. Darlie has claimed her innocence all along, saying that the boys were killed by an intruder, who also stabbed her. There's a pretty good case that she may be right. At the very least, there's room for a fair bit of doubt.
The evidence presented at trial painted a circumstantial picture of Darlie's guilt. Her story varied. Her stab wounds were described as "superficial" by one doctor. When police arrived, she seemed more concerned with her own injuries than the boys'. There was evidence that her blood had been wiped from the sink, as if she'd cleaned up after cutting herself, and evidence that the basement screen which was the alleged means of entry for the iintruder had been cut by a knife from the Routiers' kitchen. Possibly the most damning piece of evidence was a videotape of Darlie, on what would have been her son Devin's birthday, wishing him a Happy Birthday and spraying Silly String on the tombstone.
But the evidence wasn't clear. Despite reports of financial difficulties, the boys had minimal life insurance policies - $10,000 each, which didn't leave much after the funerals. (Husband Darin was insured for $800,000.) One of Darin's socks, which contained only a few drops of the boys' blood, was found on the street several houses away. The timeline made it virtually impossible that Darlie could have dropped it there before the cops arrived. One of the boys was still barely alive when paramedics arrived, so instead of making sure they were both dead before calling 911, he could have survived to finger her. Finally, unlike Andrea Yates or Susan Smith, Darlie had no history of depression, incest, abuse, or adultery.
In any event, Darlie was convicted and now sits on death row. Since her conviction, some truly bizarre things have happened. The court reporter in her case was fired after a staggering 33,000 errors were discovered in the case transcript. Most amazingly, her husband has admitted that his financial troubles at the time of the murders were such that he had hatched a plan to hire a burglar to break into the house, steal a bunch of stuff, then sell it back after the insurance company paid out. This has led to some speculation that the killings were a hit on Darlie gone wrong, as she was insured for $200,000.
Her appeal is underway, and I daresay we'll be faced with another case where questions of punishment will be overshadowed by questions of guilt or innocence. There's a lot of people out there who think Darlie got screwed - do a Google search on "Darlie Routier" and see for yourself. This web page has registered over eight million hits. Someone out there believes her.
I do still believe that the death penalty is a viable option. I just believe we need to be very careful about how and when we apply it. I'm far from convinced that Darlie Routier deserves it.
Jim Henley apparently didn't much care for the light gray color of my text, and proffered the hope that I'd change from this default MT color to something else. Well, I did a little research on cascading style sheets, which led me to this useful guide, and now my text should (I hope) be a nice dark black. Whaddya say, Jim? Better?
(I must admit, I didn't realize how not-dark the text was until Jim's comment made me change it. I like it better this way. Thanks, Jim!)
Today was Take Our Children To Work Day here at the office. Last year's event was so well-received that over 250 kids signed up to come in today at three different locations. I was roped into volunteering to work for TOCTWD last year, and I had a sufficiently good time that I signed up again this year. Naturally, since I was now an experienced hand at this, I was made a group leader. Ah, the fruits of success.
TOCTWD is divided into group activities in the morning and free time with regular tours of the building (which means the server room and the help desk in our case) in the afternoon. I was assigned to oversee a group of eight- to ten-year-olds. We had some "learning exercises" disguised as games for them. First, we played the Telephone Game as a demonstration of communication skills. The first time through, the kids had to pass along the story they were told without asking any questions or repeat recitations. As you might imagine, the end result bore no resemblance to the starting point. When we allowed them to ask questions and do repeats, they did much better.
The second game was a beach ball relay, in which two people must carry a beach ball across the room, around a chair, and back, then pass it off to the next pair in line, all without using their hands. This went over very well, and the kids really got into it. We wound up doing it twice, and again you could see a difference, as the kids had figured out the best way to keep the ball pinned between each other as they moved.
Unfortunately, the beach ball relay game took less time than we had budgeted for, so us three volunteers had about 30 minutes to fill and 19 fidgety kids to keep entertained. There were a few minor skirmishes and a fair amount of yelling and running about, but overall they were pretty well behaved.
Last year I'd worked with the 11 to 13 year old group. Both groups were fun, and I'm not sure if I'd have a preference for next year. I just know I'll volunteer again.
I work as an email administrator. Today my boss forwarded this link about HP dealing with employee email abuse in Britain and Ireland to our team as an FYI. What's surprising about this is not that a company might take action against employees who "distribute pornography and tasteless jokes" via email, but that it's news that firms are "cracking down" on this sort of thing. I mean, US firms have done this for years - is Europe behind the times, or is this reporter uninformed?
I will say this - Many companies' official email policies are really broad. At my office, I've often said that if a random audit of 100 employees' mailboxes were to be done, you could find cause to fire 95 of them. I wouldn't expect to find much porn - most of us work in open areas, and our web proxies have blocked adult sites for years now - but jokes are routinely passed around, and there's no shortage of other non-business related mail.
Really, the sticking point on most email policies has to do with personal mail. As with personal calls, taking breaks, and general goofing off, some undefined level is acceptable. Go beyond it and you're in trouble. Of course, unless your company is into spyware (and has the time, manpower and budget to actively snoop), you generally have to get caught first. That either means doing something dumb or letting the non-work stuff affect your performance.
In short, everybody does it and everybody knows that everybody does it. Had this occurred in the States, I'd expect that this "crackdown" was the result of things being sufficiently out of hand that a number of people complained about it. Is it really not like that in Europe?
My dad sent me word about this recent decision by the NY State Appellate Court, in which the "single publication" provision of libel law was upheld.
"Single publication" means
"the publication of a defamatory statement in single issue of a newspaper, or a single issue of a magazine, although such publication consists of thousands of copies widely distributed, is, in legal effect, one publication which gives rise to one cause of action and that the applicable [s]tatute of [l]imitations runs from the date of that publication"
In 1998, when the lawsuit was filed, the state moved to dismiss it on the grounds that the one-year statute of limitations had been passed. The plaintiff claimed that since the web site that linked to the report had been modified since then, that meant that the page which contained the defamatory statements had been republished, thus restarting the clock.
Instead, claimant maintains that because a Web site may be altered at any
time by its publisher or owner and because publications on the Internet are available only to those who seek them, each "hit" or viewing of the report should be considered a new publication that retriggers the statute of limitations.
In Gregoire, we held that a publisher's sale from stock of a copy of a book containing libelous language did not constitute a new publication. We explained that if the multiple publication rule were applied to such a sale, "the [s]tatute of [l]imitation[s] would never expire so long as a copy of such book remained in stock and is made by the publisher the subject of a sale or inspection by the public. Such a rule would thwart the purpose of the Legislature to bar completely and forever all actions which, as to the time of their commencement, overpass the limitation there prescribed upon litigation"...The policies impelling the original adoption of the single publication rule support its application to the posting of the Inspector General's report regarding claimant on the State's Web site...Communications posted on Web sites may be viewed by thousands, if not millions, over an expansive geographic area for an indefinite period of time. Thus, a multiple publication rule would implicate an
even greater potential for endless retriggering of the statute of limitations, multiplicity of suits and harassment of defendants. Inevitably, there would be a serious inhibitory effect on the open, pervasive dissemination of information and ideas over the Internet, which is, of course, its greatest beneficial promise.
Dad thinks that the court got this right, and I agree. Web pages, as the court noted, change all the time. Adding something here shouldn't affect the publication status of something there, even if your publishing software decides to repost the whole site. Blogs in particular would never see the statute of limitations run out on them if the plaintiff's motion was held to be valid.
It's an interesting case, and the ruling is fairly short and easy to read, so check it out. Thanks, Dad!
I made a note last week to comment on Meryl Yourish's link lament. I was amused by it, as I think most people were, but I was a little disappointed that no one mentioned Allan Sherman and his little ode to Frere Jacques. So I thought I'd mention it. Now you can have a different version of that song running endlessly through your head. You're welcome.
UPDATE: I stand corrected. Rob Humenik made this observation last week. Way to go, Rob!
I've had some requests for details on the steps it took me to transition everything to the new domain and blog editor. I've still got a number of things on my to-do list - importing my Blogger archives, getting categories working, getting a bio and FAQ in place, adding a search function - so this will be a status report with more to come later.
You can't run Movable Type on Blogspot, so the first order of business was getting a web host. I could have put this on my personal home page (which is also in transition right now), but I decided that I'd rather have my own domain. That meant registering the domain name as well. Some web hosts will do that sort of thing for you. Dreamhost, the web host I settled on, did that work for me but gave me the rights to the domain name. I liked their price and their knowledge base, so I signed up with them.
Once the domain was ready, I downloaded the Movable Type install and FTPed everything to the server I'm on. I decided to install MT and the blog files into a subdirectory instead of having the blog index file at the root of offthekuff.com. I figured I might eventually want something else as the domain index, but I may change my mind on this.
I had to grab a couple of Perl modules from the MT web page, as the mt-check.cgi file said they were out of date. I ran into a snag setting permissions on all of the nt*.cgi files. I knew I needed telnet to run the chmod command, but I'd set up my default domain login as an ftp-only account. Once I changed it to be a shell account, I was fine.
During the MT install, I ran into two problems. One had to do with the default database. MT lets you use either a Berkeley db or mySQL. In reading their documentation, it looked to me like mySQL was their future path, so I followed the instructions for that. Unfortunately, MT was assuming that you already had a mySQL database configured and were merely giving it the details to access it. I assumed that MT was taking the information I gave it and creating the database for me. Once I realized my error, after a discussion with Michael Croft, I switched to the Berkeley db and got past that problem. I had a different issue with some MT subdirectories that had the wrong case. Fortunately, the MT install instructions made this error easy to catch and fix.
After everything was installed, I did a couple of test posts (which I ought to delete one of these days). When I saw the blank, featureless result, I realized that MT lets you get started without choosing a default template. So, back to the MT homepage to pick a style sheet. After the blog went live, I got some feedback from Josh Trevino, another recent MT convert, that I needed to add "height:100%;" to the #links and #content sections of my stylesheet. Not having that caused IE6 users to be unable to see any content underneath my blogroll.
Finally, Ginger and Ann alerted me that my permalinks weren't working. Since the Blogger permalink bug helped spur me in this direction, that was a big deal. Turned out I'd simply configured the path to my arhives incorrectly in the blog config. I could swear I'd copied the results of a "pwd" command, but either I'm mistaken or something changed on my web server. In any event, once I realized the error it was easy enough to fix.
So that's where I stand. If you're already on a web host and you've got all the right Perl modules already in place, installing MT shouldn't be too bad. It's got so many features, and it makes you think a lot more about your configuration than Blogger does, so the install and first posts are not necessarily anywhere near the end of the story. I expect this blog to mutate and morph over time, though the basic look of the front page is unlikely to change too drastically. I like fooling around with that sort of thing, so it's more of a treat than a chore. Obviously, YMMV on this score.
I'll post another update once I've got my Blogger archives and a few desired features in place.
The FBI has busted up a moon-rock-selling operation by arresting four former employees of Johnson Space Center in a sting operation.
Sometimes, when the Dow is again in the crapper, and there's not much interesting going on at work or on TV, and your wife has just left town for a three-day business trip, it's nice to know you can still find something to make the whole thing worthwhile. Thanks, guys.
Ted Barlow has the goods on the threat of violence from unhinged gymnastics fans. Check it out.
I haven't made up my mind yet about whether proposed national standards for getting a driver's license are a good thing or a step down the slippery slope. I just wanted to point out that this picture of Tom Ridge is butt-ugly. Hey, Karin, is it time for another caption contest?
Ginger and Ann were kind enough to inform me, via comments and blog entry, that my permalinks were bollixed up. It's fixed now - I had a bad directory structure listed in my config. Sorry about that!
Tiffany and I spent a few hours today as the guests of Spec's Liquor Warehouse at the Texas Package Store Association (TPSA) convention at the Westin Galleria hotel. This article from the 2000 TPSA shindig should give you some idea of what it's like - a huge wine/beer/port/liquor tasting that lasts for six hours. With booth babes. Is this a great country or what?
We made a couple of trips through the display areas, tasted all sorts of good stuff, then came home for a nap. I don't know when the next one will be in Houston, but whenever it is, we'll be there.
Despite dire warnings about a "flood" of death row inmates demanding IQ tests, since the Supreme Court halted executions of the mentally retarded exactly one death row inmate out of over 450 in Texas has petitioned to have his sentence reevaluated.
The last paragraph of this story is interesting:
Texas is one of 20 states that, until the Supreme Court decision, allowed execution of the mentally retarded. The Death Penalty Information Center claims Texas has executed at least six mentally retarded inmates since 1982, a number disputed by death penalty proponents.
The Chron has a review of the new Rhino collection Like, Omigod! The '80s Pop Culture Box (Totally). It looks like a winner. A few comments:
Welcome to the all-new Off the Kuff. I've said my goodbye on Blogspot, now I'll say hello on my brand-spanking-new domain. This is very much a work in progress - I'm not sure I want to stick with this color scheme - so please feel free to give me feedback in the comments or via email.
Though the recent Blogger permalink problems helped to give me a push, this move was a long time in coming. I've always liked the look of Movable Type blogs, and since you can't use it on Blogspot, that meant I'd have to find a web host. Ultimately, I wanted the freedom to do things that I couldn't on Blogspot, such as incorporate pictures and my own archive structure more easily. I may even be able to use some of those Perl/CGI skills I learned in a class last year (I get to sling some Perl at work, but it's never been convenient for me to do any CGI work). I'm free to do what I want, within the bounds of my disk space and bandwidth allotment.
I'd like to address what Brian Linse, Matthew Yglesias and Chad Orzel in Matt's comments have said about the recent spate of migrations from Blogger and Blogspot. After two days of fooling around with Movable Type and nearly a week of having my own domain, I can definitely say that I like it but it's not for everybody. I'm an IT professional and I ran into a few bumps in the road getting everything configured. Had I not had a decent amount of tech fu in me, I'd have been sucking my thumb and crying for Mommy. If you think telnet is a long-distance plan and FTP is a brand of motor oil, take my advice: Stay on Blogspot. You can always get Blogger Pro if you want to spend a few bucks for extra bang.
(On a side note, I must say that I've been impressed with my web host so far. I've found the answer to every question I've had in their knowledge base, usually with a minimum of fuss. Most of the issues that I encountered with the MT install had to do with my web site config. I'd still be futzing around with configuration if I'd had to resort to sending questions to tech support and waiting for answers.)
So I'll send my heartfelt thanks to Ev and the crew at Pyra for getting me started down this path. They made it easy and accessible. I made the decision to challenge myself, but I wouldn't be trying to run now if I hadn't learned how to walk first.
With much gratitude to Larry for the following appropriate sendoff. Eat your heart out, George Clooney.
This is a blog of constant sorrow
I've seen errors all my day.
I bid farewell to old Blogspot
The place where this was born and served.
(The place where he was born and served )
For six long months I've had such trouble
No pleasures here on site I found
For in this 'sphere I'm bound to ramble
There is no help to help me now.
(chorus) He has no help to help him now
It's fare thee well my old sitename
I never expect to use you again
For I'm tired of archive errors
Perhaps I'll now not post with pain.
(chorus) Perhaps he'll now not post with pain.
You find me at offthekuff.com
For many years where I may write
Then you might want to host your own site
Instead of being Blogger's slave.
(chorus) Instead of being Blogger's slave.
Maybe your friends think I'm just a whiner
My site you'll never see no more.
But there is one promise I'll give you
I'll write for you on this blog's roll.
(chorus) He'll write for you on this blog's roll.
With apologies and no offense intended to the good folks at Blogger and Blogspot, without whom many of us, myself included, would never have gotten started.
Please update your blogrolls and bookmarks and point your browser to http://www.offthekuff.com/mt/ for my new home on the web. Thanks!
From the news wires:
A Gaelic football team has been disbanded after players were caught on a hotel security camera playing pool naked during a late night drinking session.County Roscommon's Gaelic Athletic Association said the drastic decision to sack the entire county side had been taken to restore the good name of the team after allegations of off-the-pitch misbehavior.
"We feel this is something we have to do for the good of Roscommon football. It's a fresh start," county board chairman Stephen Banahan was quoted as saying in Friday's edition of the Irish Sun newspaper.
Following the brilliantly successful and customer-endearing strategy of the RIAA, the MPAA is taking steps to crack down on those who swap digital movie files online.
Look, I'm not going to defend piracy. Maybe the recording industry really has been hurt by all that scurrilous Napstering, even more than their decisions to throw millions at Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson, and the motion picture industry is wise to take action now before things get worse.
But I think the movie industry is making a big mistake. Never mind the fact that the impact of file swapping on music sales is debatable, as these conflicting stories show. Never mind the fact that you can't stop swapping. Never mind the effect on fair use and privacy - the linked story talks of "legislation that would allow entertainment companies to obstruct the peer-to-peer networks with a variety of invasive electronic techniques".
This is a bad decision by the movie industry because the new technology is as much an opportunity as it is a threat, something which the music industry is finally and grudgingly realizing. There's no reason why it can't be leveraged into something profitable by Hollywood. The time to investigate how is now, not in a few years after you've spent millions shoveling sand against the tide and pissing off your best customers in the process.
The choice is yours, fellas. Try not to screw it up.
I'd been meaning to blog this article from the MIT Technology Review magazine which describes why software is so bloated and buggy for awhile now. Among other things, they quoted my buddy Dan Wallach. Unfortunately, it seems they've gone to a subscriber-only policy since the last time I linked to them, so all I can do is tell you to find a print copy if you can.
I was also going to point to this Simson Garfinkel column, which helped spur me along the path of getting my own domain, but it too is only open to subscribers. Guess you'll have to take my word for it.
Vice President Dick Cheney was in town to deny allegations of wrongdoing during his tenure as CEO of Halliburton, to support notorious judicial activist Priscilla Owen, and oh yeah, to campaign for John Cornyn in his Senate race against Ron Kirk.
Cheney vowed that the Bush administration will pursue corporate wrongdoers as a way to maintain confidence in America's economic system, which he said should not be tarnished "by the deeds of a few."
Football coaches, especially in Texas, are taking extra steps to protect their players during practice. Sadly, every year a few kids drop dead from heat exhaustion. Everyone was shocked when the Minnesota Vikings' Korey Stringer died in training camp last year. I'm even more surprised that more kids didn't die in years past, given the old-fashioned views of hydration. I hope that with all the emphasis on being careful nowadays that heat exhaustion fatalities become a historical curiosity.
To the folks who sent me a note announcing their new blog:
First, I suppose I should thank you for cospamming me along with the likes of Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, and Tom Tomorrow. I don't get mentioned in the same breath as them very often, and after being ignored by everyone's favourite wanker I was beginning to question whether I'd ever get noticed by a link slut. So thanks for giving me a little Stuart Smalley moment this morning.
Of course, when you think about it, the A List gets a ton of unsolicited mail, most of which gets ignored since they can barely keep up with the mail they want to read. You're just wasting your time spamming them. You'd be much better off aiming at B and C listers, who might actually have the time to read your mail and look at your blog.
If you do, though, you run the risk that one of those lower-tier fellas (like, say, me) might discover that he's been begged for a link by someone who hasn't already linked to him. Which might lead to him writing a sarcastic blog entry about clueless link sluts and their pathetic attempts to garner attention.
(Actually, on second look, you don't link to most of the people that received your spam. I haven't seen such chutzpah since a UN representative from an OPEC country complained about New York City's gas lines in 1979. Bravo!)
I've already written about some of the ways in which one can properly try to draw people to one's blog. Leaving good comments with your homepage URL, sending feedback to specific entries, writing responses to other people's stuff on your blog (two words, Sparky - "referral logs"), the list goes on but stops rather short of spamming. If I happen to come across your blog by these means in the future, I may pay you another visit. I may even respond to something you've written or (heaven forfend) give you that link you crave. I'm a forgiving chap. Until then, I'm applauding your blog with one hand and deleting the email you sent with the other. Have a nice day.
This is a second test to see if the blog body will increase in size. I want to get all the archive and link stuff off to the right rather than underneath.
This is a test of Movable Type. If this had been...oh, hell, you know the drill.
Hey, Avedon! If a few of your friends here on this side of the pond help to stuff the ballot box generate support for your weblog in the Best British Blogs contest, will you buy us all a round with the prize money?
Apple has found the perfect spokesperson for their Switch campaign.
Former City Councilman Joe Roach has thrown his hat into the ring for the 2003 Mayoral race.
"I am running for mayor," said Roach, 41. "I moved to Houston in 1963. My father helped start NASA here. Houston has given me a tremendous opportunity."The city has overlooked my obvious disability and enabled me to become a lawyer, (assistant) district attorney, councilman and to have a tremendous law practice right now," said Roach, who is a dwarf. "Now, it's time to help those who helped me."
One would hope that Roach gets a better reaction to his announcement than Michael "The Boy Wonder" Berry has gotten to his. Here's the best thing any observer could say about him:
Republican political consultant Allen Blakemore accords the councilman a bit more respect. He believes Berry could draw Republican support away from Sanchez in a general election because "he's done as much on the issue of tax cuts in six months as Sanchez did in six years."
I will say this: As long as Orlando Sanchez isn't the beneficiary, I'm now officially hoping that Berry's candidacy helps sink Sylvester Turner, who helped to impose Berry on us by supporting him over Claudia Williamson. In return for Turner's support, Berry apparently promised to help Turner run for Mayor in 2003. Oops.
If you're looking for alternatives to baseball this weekend, the Chron has a couple for you: The second International Double Wicket Cricket Tournament is going on at the Astrodome, and the 25th World Series of Dog Shows is right next door at Reliant Park. This has been a public service announcement.
This time the political bloggers outnumbered the personal bloggers. We had a smallish crowd at Cahill's pub last night, but we hung out, drank a fair amount of beer, and yakked for nearly three hours. Though the H-Town Blogs group has grown quite a bit lately, we only had two newbies last night, Dave and Alex. We did have the first official meeting of the Heights Area Axis of Left-Leaning Bloggers, as Ginger, Michael, Ted, Rob and I were all present. (I'm pleased to report that our plans for world domination are on schedule, by the way.)
Rounding out the group were Mike, freshly back from his stint in London, Erica, our fearless leader Elaine, and Larry, who brought four loaves of fresh baked bread to give out. I left a bit before things broke up, so I don't know who the lucky recipients were. We did eat one of the garlic-and-parmesan loaves there, and it was excellent.
Once again, a good time was had by all. The H-Town group has done about one happy hour per month, so we really didn't need an "International Blog Meetup" promotion except as an excuse to pick a day. Anyone else do a get-together?
Man, it just sucks to be dependent on the tourist industry sometimes:
The Guadalupe River could be closed to tubing and other recreation below the Canyon Dam for the rest of the year, compounding the economic hardships wrought by the Central Texas floods.A ban on recreation on the Comal River also will remain in effect for at least another week, officials said Wednesday.
"None of this is good news," said New Braunfels Chamber of Commerce President Michael Meek.
Flooding ruined river-related business on the Fourth of July, one of the summer's three crucial holiday weekends. Meek called the floods a "worst-case scenario" that hasn't finished unfolding.
Comal County and Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority officials extended the bans on water recreation that had been in place since torrential rains and flooding struck the region beginning July 1.
The ban covers the waterways in Comal and Guadalupe counties and also applies to lakes in the region.
[...]
"I would think it would be close to the end of the year," said Comal County Judge Danny Scheel when asked how soon full use of the Guadalupe River might be restored.
People who live in the area will soon be allowed to use the river to access their flooded homes, Scheel said.
Scheel said that without doubt, the loss of almost an entire summer season will compound the economic misery of riverside concessions and other businesses that were flooded or rely on tourism.
"This has a trickle-down effect through the entire community as well as city and county government. On the Fourth of July weekend, we probably lost $125,000 in sales tax revenue," he said.
The disaster's full impact hasn't been felt or measured, Scheel said.
"Right now, we're still working on debris removal. We're trying to get people placed in housing of some sort, either rentals or mobiles," the judge said.
The good news, as the story says, is that the Schlitterbahn is still open, and there's more to New Braunfels than just river activities. I've already heard one of the radio spots they're doing which extols its other virtues for visitors. But it's still gotta suck to have that many eggs in one basket.
From the bidness section of today's Chron:
A judge's ruling brings University of Houston political scientist Richard Murray a couple of steps closer to sipping what he calls "nature's great gift to the world" without having to retreat to his home in California's wine country.Laying aside recent rulings to the contrary, U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon on Wednesday decided that Texas' ban on the direct import of out-of-state wine to individual consumers is unconstitutional.
President Bush is lobbying for Priscilla Owen, a Texas Supreme Court judge and nominee for the federal bench, to get a hearing from the Senate Judiciary Committee. You can argue about whether the Committee is being needlessly obstructionist or just playing by the rules that were in play when Bill Clinton was President, but as Chron columnist Cragg Hines says, there are plenty of good reasons why Judge Owens should stay in Austin.
Here's the best reason of all:
If President Bush really wants "strict constructionists" on the federal bench, why on earth did he nominate Priscilla R. Owen to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals? She's got to be a finalist for Judicial Activist of the Year.[...]
It doesn't take a raving pinko to catch on to Owen's act. Actually, it was pointed out very astutely by Alberto R. Gonzales, now Bush's White House counsel, when he was on the state's top civil court with her.
In dissents and concurrences in abortion cases two years ago, Owen said everything except that the U.S. Supreme Court majority in Roe v. Wade should be shot at dawn. She sought to contort the state court's already conservative interpretation of the parental notification provision to make it even more, well, conservative.
Gonzales, hardly an ACLU flamer, took a moment in his concurring opinion in one abortion case to point out that what the dissenters (who included Owen) were trying to accomplish were "policy decisions for the Legislature." What the dissenters had in mind, Gonzales said, "would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism."
Great article on the issues at stake in the baseball labor dispute by Allen Barra of Salon.
Not too surprisingly, the Astros players don't give much credence to owner Drayton McLane's fiscal sob story from yesterday:
"You can throw the names of all these fancy accounting firms around all you want," said Gregg Zaun, the backup catcher who serves as the Astros' player rep. "When the big giants like Arthur Andersen go down and they're proven to be dirty, what are you going to think about the rest of these people and their creative bookkeeping?"We've seen all the ways that they can hide money and make it look like they're losing so that the big momma corporation or the big pappa corporation gets a tax write-off at the end of the year."
[...]
"They're telling us one thing, and Forbes Magazine is telling us another," said Zaun, referring to a Forbes article the refuted MLB's claims earlier this year. "Until Major League Baseball is willing to open up the books to an independent auditor, it doesn't make any sense. They've lied to us so many times. But if I was going to believe any owner, Drayton would be it."
If Drayton McLane actually does sell the team, he's likely to get anywhere from a 100 to 200% return on his investment in less than ten years. Don't waste any sympathy on him, OK?
Astros owner Drayton McLane makes his annual statement of poverty to the ever-credulous Chron. He claims he's lost $105 million since he bought the team in 1993, and that he projects a cash loss of $5 million this year.
In a word: bull. Like I said, Drayton has made these claims every stinking year. The people of Houston, myself included, voted to pay for a new stadium with all the bells and whistles so that McLane could make ends meet. If he can't make a buck with Enron Astros Minute Maid Field, then I have to wonder how he ever made his fortune in the first place.
McLane's comments are the latest salvo fired by management in recent days. Last week, commissioner Bud Selig said two teams have such severe financial problems that they were in danger of not finishing the season. One team, he said, might not even make its next payroll.That team, the Detroit Tigers, did pay its players Monday, but Selig insisted the problems he described were real.
Since allowing owners to speak publicly on labor matters, they've come forward to detail their losses and the need for significant changes in the labor agreement.
Kevin also takes his shots at McLane.
Meanwhile, the new Cleveland owner is blaming George Steinbrenner for his problems. Look, I'll stipulate that the Yankees have more money than God, and that most other teams can't compete with the Yankees' checkbook. So don't. Don't give big contracts to "proven veterans". Develop young talent and keep them for as long as they're affordable. However unfair the system may be, does it make sense to compete where you can't fight? Again, I'm struck with how often the complaints of the owners boil down to statements about their own lack of business acumen.
I guess the reason why I don't understand people who get angry with the players for their salaries and willingness to strike is that the alternate choice is to side with a bunch of even richer guys who are fundamentally dishonest. The owners have never told the truth about their finances, their every move is calculated at shifting their costs to players and fans, they threaten to relocate if they public doesn't buy them new stadia - this is who I'm supposed to root for?
I know what it means to be a fan of major league baseball. I put up with the crap because I love the game. The game is bigger than any owner or player or labor dispute. I go to Rice games when I can, I sometimes travel with my dad and uncles to see minor league games, and someday I'll coach Little League for my kids, because it reminds me that the game is more than just what you see on ESPN. It's possible that arrogance and stupidity may someday kill Major League Baseball as we know it, but the game and the love it engenders will live forever.
Congratulations to Matthew Yglesias for his new domain and new blog look. Update those blog rolls, folks.
I'll take this opportunity to announce that I'm not far behind. I've settled on a hosting company (Dreamhost), and as of today I'm the registered owner of offthekuff.com. As soon as I can, I'll be moving everything there. Stay tuned!
Tony Adragna outlines what the candidates for Maryland Governor plan on doing about that state's looming deficit. Here's Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's position:
Top-to-bottom management and budget review.
I will direct a review of the structure and budget of every state agency to identify cost-saving measures and organizational changes to improve performance and save money. I will draw on the expertise of leaders from the private, public, and non-profit sectors during this review. Economic Growth, Fiscal ResponsibilityTough choices.
Based on this top-to-bottom budget review, we will make tough choices and eliminate any wasteful and duplicative spending. Last year, we took steps to freeze hiring and reduce spending across state agencies, and eliminated 3,500 vacant positions from the budget this spring. Until our economy is fully recovered, we will examine all budget options carefully and continue to make tough decisions where necessary.
Her opponent, Bob Ehrlich, is even more vague:
Excessive government spending has led to a $1.5 billion deficit. Maryland's budget must be balanced in an honest and efficient manner, without sacrificing programs for the poor and others in need. Excessive spending on non- essential initiatives must be curtailed and our budget priorities redefined.
Kyle Still has an excellent post on why exactly there is a constitutional right to privacy, even if the document itself never says the word "privacy". Kyle's been bugged by the permalink problem, so scroll down to the July 15 post.
As long as I'm blogging about blog etiquette, may I recommend TTLB's post on drawing attention to one's blog. As Maarten Schenk says in the comments, I've sent some emails to individual bloggers when I've responded to something they've written, and I've added my share of comments on other folks' sites, both of which are well within the bounds of what I consider to be good behavior. Spamming, on the other hand, is right out. Anyone who does it - and that apparently includes everyone's favorite (oops, sorry, I meant "favourite") wanker - is someone who deserves to become a pariah.
There's a kerfuffle over at Brad DeLong's weblog concerning some rules he's decided to enforce in his comments. Basically, Brad has said that he expects commenters to be polite, and if they're not he'd do something about them.
For some odd reason, this has inspired quite a few people to say nasty things about Brad in the comments to this post. They seem to be upset that the rules he's laid down for commenters don't apply equally to himself.
At the risk of being Mister States The Obvious, let me state the obvious: It's Brad's weblog. It's his forum to say what he wants. He's not required to give equal time to anyone else. He could turn off comments if he wants to. I note that all but two of the people who responded to him have their own blogs, so it's not like disabling comments would silence them.
I really don't see what's so controversial about this. If any of Brad's readers think that his policy makes him a wimp, or a hypocrite, or whatever, they're free to drop him from their daily blog reading and from their blogrolls. They're also free to handle feedback on their own blogs in whatever manner they see fit.
I've not had any problems with cantakerous commenters, but like Ginger, if I did I'd have no qualms about tossing them out. I'm doing this strictly for my enjoyment, after all.
In short, I am the Master Of My Blog. Soon I will be (as they say) Master Of My Domain. While I'm really glad everyone is here, and it's always a kick to hear from new people, my blog is not Usenet, it's not a town square, and it's not a bulletin board. It's my little home on the Internet. At the risk of making my wife spew Diet Dr Pepper onto her screen, I intend to keep it somewhat clean.
I see that the IRA has issued an apology for the deaths of "noncombatants" in the last 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. You can read the text of the apology here.
Not everyone is happy with this, of course. An apology is generally more symbolic than anything else, though those symbols often mean a lot to their recipients. And as recent news stories have shown, not everyone has necessarily gotten the message.
But let's face it: If the PLO or Hamas ever issued such a statement, there would be a whole lot more hope for peace in the Middle East. For that reason, I applaud the IRA. A step in the right direction is always a good thing.
Thanks to everyone for the web hosting feedback. I've commenced research, and hope to take action soon. Count your days, Blogspot. I've got your permalink problems right here...
Meanwhile, Ron Kirk is holding his own in the money department against John Cornyn. He's also starting to get noticed by the national press. Took them long enough.
The soon-to-be-eponymously-domained Matthew Yglesias points to this week's PunditWatch, which contains the following bits:
I want to reassure our audience, they could be forgiven for not being sure who Larry Klayman is, because when he was filing an avalanche against the Clinton administration, he was largely ignored. Now that he's filing lawsuits against Dick Cheney, he's an avenging Clarence Darrow leading off all the network shows. -Kate O’Bierne, CG
Fox’s Tony Snow showed three contrasting clips of network reporting on Klayman. He was always “conservative” when filing suits against Clinton; he was a “watchdog” filing against Cheney.
If you look closely at the aforementioned Salon article, you'll note that Larry Klayman is quoted as describing himself as the "conservative Ralph Nader". However, JW does call itself a "non-partisan, non-profit foundation" which serves as "an ethical and legal 'watchdog' over our government, legal, and judicial systems to promote a return to ethics and morality in our nation's public life", so perhaps there is something to this.
It is true, as Jason Zengerle noted last year, that Klayman has been an equal opportunity litigant lately. Still, it's hard for someone like me to recall that avalanche against the Clinton administration, which was funded in part by grants from uber-Clinton-hater Richard Mellon Scaife and which included tinfoil-hat allegations about Vince Foster and Ron Brown as well as an attempt to subpoena Chelsea Clinton and not think that maybe Judicial Watch has been fueled by a bit more than an interest in good governance. Perhaps if the Snows and O'Biernes of the world had been equally dismissive of Larry Klayman when he was serving their agenda as they are now when he's not, I'd have more sympathy for them.
Tony Sanchez has outspent Governor Goodhair by a 5-1 margin so far in the gubernatorial race. Sanchez has shelled out over $31 million, compared to $6 million for Perry, of whch nearly $28 million is his own money.
Both candidates are also getting some big-money donations. This one caught my eye:
The second-most generous donor [to Governor Perry] was Sam Wyly at $90,000. Wyly founded a Dallas investment fund that manages funds for the University of Texas. He also is a major owner of Green Mountain Energy Co., which competes in the deregulated electricity market.
Green Mountain Energy positions itself as a provider of electricity from renewable and nonpolluting sources such as wind. Some people challenge its credentials as a truly "green" provider, some others go farther than that. I wonder what the slacker types who have a Green Mountain signup booth at our local hippie-friendly eatery think about this.
This is going to be grist for someone's mill, I just know it:
BRUSSELS killjoys want to wipe the smiles off drinkers’ faces by BANNING pub happy hours.Euro MPs will vote next month on outlawing the practice of cutting booze prices for an hour or two to attract punters.
Scandinavian socialists in the European Parliament claim big pub firms lose money on happy hours simply to crush rival bars that can’t afford discounts.
They also say happy hours encourage irresponsible drinking.
Get the Straight Dope on why baseballs travel farther at Coors Field than they do elsewhere.
Jeff Cooper responds to my most recent post on this topic. Go check it out.
One clarification: In his original comparison of baseball versus football playoffs, Jeff had only included the top NFL wild cards. I missed that distinction, which is why I made a point of there being more playoff teams in the NFL in my response. Sorry about that.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer got off track in season 6. So says Leslie Moonves, channelling Joss Whedon. Expect more of the show's humor from early seasons next year.
By the way, did anyone else catch Robin Williams' live HBO show last night? It was good to see him back doing what he does best. And the Sopranos' season debut is September 15. About time!
Kevin links to this report that shows that the Astros' concession prices are among the highest in baseball. That's a legitimate gripe, but I think Kevin goes off base here:
Granted, nobody has to pay [high concession prices], and I don't. But it shows some real nerve for Drayton to ask so much from fans when he won't even shell out the cash to keep, say, a Castilla or Alou or Astacio, or consider trading for Hampton (who is on the trading block, but deemed too expensive).
First, there's Moises Alou. There's no question that he was a very productive player in his time as an Astro. Unfortunately, he entered the 2002 season as a 35-year-old left fielder with a history of injury problems. He's had a huge dropoff in productivity, with an anemic .244 batting average, a miniscule .380 slugging average, and only eight homeruns. The Cubs are on the hook for Alou for three years and $27 million.
Vinny Castilla has always been an overrated offensive performer thanks to the time he spent in Coors Field, the greatest hitting environment that baseball has seen in over fifty years. He's another 35-year-old, though free of the nagging health problems that have plagued Alou. Like Alou, he's having a poor season at the plate, with a crappy .274 on-base percentage, a .383 slugging average and nine homeruns. The Braves signed him for two years and $8 million.
Geoff Blum is keeping third base warm for the 'Stros until Morgan Ensberg is ready. He has better numbers that Castillo in batting average, OBP, and slugging, he's six years younger, and he can play the outfield in a pinch. I can't find 2002 contract info for him, but he was a one-year signee by the Expos in 2001, so he's likely got a one-year deal this year as well. As this is only his fourth major league season, he's also likely to be a low-cost player.
Daryle Ward is eight years younger than Alou, and is also outperforming him in average, OBP, and slugging. Ward has actually not done as well as he was expected to, but unlike the 35-year-old Alou, there's still room for Ward to improve. And like Geoff Blum, he's cheap.
So, by letting Alou and Castillo go, the Astros have gotten better production for less money. However popular these guys may have been, I find it hard to argue with that.
Unlike the hitters, Pedro Astacio has had a fine season. He's 9-3 with a 3.14 ERA, tenth best in the league. He also would have cost Houston $9 million to keep him in 2002. The Astros had picked him up last year when rookie phenom Carlos Hernandez went down. This year, with a projected rotation that included Wade Miller, Shane Reynolds, Roy Oswalt and Hernandez, the 'Stros had to decide if they'd be better off with Astacio, a 33-year-old who had also had injury issues, or someone from the colection of Dave Mlicki, Tim Redding, or one of their other kids. The difference is that if AStacio had bombed out, he'd be an untradeable multimillion dollar albatross. If a kid like Redding bombs out, or Kirk Saarloos isn't ready, Houston has the room to make a move. Gambling on Astacio would have worked, but it's important to remember that the gamble involved high stakes and came with a limited upside.
I can understand where Kevin's coming from with these complaints, but I think it's misguided to call a refusal to overpay for veterans when a decent and cheap alternative exists a lack of commitment on the part of team ownership. Remember Doug Drabek and Greg Swindell? Their signings at the beginning of the McLane era was proof of his desire to win. Too bad neither player actually contributed to any winning.
There's a larger point here, and it's that many major league teams make this kind of decision incorrectly as a matter of course. They do so in part because of backlash from fans, media, and their own players, who don't see that $27 million for Moises Alou today is $27 million that won't be available for Oswalt or Lance Berkman tomorrow. Bill James demonstrated 20 years ago that the vast majority of players hit their peaks around age 27, coincidentally right at the time that they tend to become high-priced free agents. If more owners started to learn the difference between replaceable talent and non-replaceable talent, they'd have no need to call for a salary cap.
I should note that the guys at the Baseball Prospectus beat this horse all the time. Their regular Transaction Analysis feature is a treasure trove. If you consider yourself a serious baseball fan and you don't read the BP, you're like a French Lit major who's never read any Sartre. Don't leave home without it.
Magdalena Donea, a system administrator at Web hosting company KIA Internet Solutions, found a set of her company's IP addresses blacklisted recently on SPEWS. She successfully lobbied to get the listing removed, but it was relisted a second time with additional IP addresses, a move that also affected a company client, the Libertarian Party."The SPEWS system is unapologetic about false positives and even regards them as a plus. They've taken the 'ends justify the means' argument way farther than I've seen anyone else take it," Donea said.
"Their philosophy appears to be that if innocent businesses and individuals on the periphery of spam-house blocklists are affected, then those innocents will have no other choice but to pressure their upstream provider to remove the spammers from their blocks, thereby solving the spam problem bit by a bit. Draconian, yes. Effective? Sure."
OK, this time I mean it. I've had it with Blogger archive problems and Blogspot unreliability. I'm ready to get my own domain and move this thing onto its own server so I can run Movable Type. I would very much appreciate it if anyone with positive or negative recommendations for web hosting services would leave word in the comments or drop me a note.
I don't need anything too fancy. I'm just a guy who gets 250 hits on a good day, so something low end is probably sufficient for my needs. Reliable and reasonably priced is what I'm looking for. Thanks very much for any feedback you can offer.
The Kerrville Folk Festival is 30 years old and still going strong. It's amazing that they can draw so many people out to where the Hill Country meets West Texas in the middle of the summer for three weeks of music and camping. I really need to do this one of these years before I die.
Houston does well in bid for Olympics, at least according to this Chron article. Sounds like the number of facilities we already have in place helped to impress the USOC.
Best news in the article:
"We talked at length about the prospects of adding some more high capacity, whether light rail or otherwise, particularly going to the two airports and other key centers that need to move people," [USOC task force chair Charles] Moore said. "It's not done, but it looks promising."
A new poll shows that a majority of Texans favor a publicly funded national health-care plan. Fifty-two percent favored such a plan, while 43 percent opposed it. Nationally, only 40% like this idea.
One person who ought to be worried about this is Governor Goodhair. Only 57% of Hispanics in Texas have health insurance, yet he vetoed a bill to expand Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. As Clay Robison notes, Tony Sanchez's latest TV ad attacks him for this veto, and links high insurance rates in the state to Perry's close relationship with the insurance lobby. I've seen this ad, and it's pretty harsh. It's just gonna get uglier from there.
An entrepreneur has made a splash on Lake Travis by opening a floating barbecue restaurant that delivers:
Pink-bikini-clad Nicole Taylor is on a delivery mission for Tug's Bar B Que. Before she makes it back to the mothership, she'll drop off five sacks of brisket sandwiches, jot down orders from a dozen customers floating in life jackets and politely deflect the catcalls of several admirers.The bright yellow restaurant, a 1969 Stardust Cruiser houseboat equipped with a large warming oven and remodeled to look like a tugboat, first pulled into the cove on Memorial Day weekend. A week later, it added the delivery boat to ferry barbecue and watermelon directly to boaters.
As you might imagine, the sun-baked, beer-fueled clientele tends to differ from that of, say, a quiet little French restaurant in downtown Austin.
"Yesterday we served a naked woman," said Nicole's father Norm Taylor, who runs the business. "It's a hoot."
New station owners with a bottom-line philosophy have canceled public-affairs programming, dismantled news departments and replaced local DJs with broadcasts of prefabricated material to cut costs.Case in point: When KRBE's Sam Malone and Maria Todd first went on the air in 1993, most radio stations in Houston had a flashy, larger-than-life morning show. Now they're among the dwindling number of megawatt morning personalities.
Malone and Todd consider themselves lucky to work for a relatively small company -- Susquehanna Radio Corp. -- that runs its 29 stations the old-fashioned way, with on-air personalities around the clock and a full-time production, marketing and promotion staff that concentrates on only one station and touts its program at every opportunity.
"The tables have turned in 10 years," Malone said. "(Back then) people were saying, 'Don't go to KRBE in Houston, because they're a mom-and-pop operation.' Now everybody wants to work for a mom-and-pop operation."
"Instead of an evil empire," Todd added.
Now, I listen to all-80s station KHPT in the morning. They play music instead of DJs. Sometimes I listen to KKRW's Dean and Rog show, which has been around for awhile and which is usually pretty funny. If KLOL started rerunning old Stevens and Pruett shows from about 10 years ago, I'd listen to that.
I'm moderately surprised that this article didn't touch on the Stevens and Pruett saga at all, since they were a highly rated morning show and their dismissals were sudden and unannounced. It does include this bit of unintentional comedy from a Clear Channel spokesdrone:
Clear Channel spokeswoman Pam Taylor argues that consolidation has led to more diversity in formats rather than less."If you own the No. 1 and No. 2 stations in the market, you're not going to compete against yourself. You're going to position yourself in some other niche," she said.
What I really want to know is how much has been done with the proposals to reinforce cockpit doors? This June 19 Reuters story contains the following quote from Minnesota Rep. James Oberstar about the proposal to arm pilots:
The House Transportation Committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, had called the original House proposal "horrible." He said he embraced the compromise on Wednesday because other security measures, such as reinforced cockpit doors and the screening of all baggage for explosives, were not completely in place.How "not completely in place" are they?
One thing I did find while searching for information was this Aviation Safety newsletter from April, which pointed to this Transport Canada news release. Here's what our neighbors to the north are doing:
The Government of Canada has already made numerous enhancements to the air transportation security system since the attacks of September 11, 2001. For example, the Government of Canada:
- required that cockpit doors on all Canadian airlines' passenger flights, domestic and international, be locked for the full duration of flights; and
- committed more than $2.2 billion in the December 2001 budget to new aviation security initiatives, including:
- the creation of the new Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, which is responsible for the provision of several key aviation security services including pre-board screening;
- implementing a national program of armed RCMP officers on selected domestic and international flights;
- funding of up to $128 million per year for pre-board screening; and
- funding of more than $1 billion over the next five years for the purchase, deployment, maintenance and operation of new explosives detection systems.
Meanwhile, Alex Frantz opens to a random page of Coulter's potboiler and finds several things to dissect, including a patently wrong claim about the first Reagan-Mondale debate of 1984. You really have to wonder about people who consider Ann Coulter to be a reliable source of information.
A lot of people have commented on this earlier post which speculated about a John Kerry-John McCain Democratic ticket for President in 2004. People, this is the political equivalent of pretending to be the general manager of your favorite sports team. We may as well debate about the guys who call into radio sports-talk shows and say things like "What if the Royals traded Neifi Perez for Miguel Tejada? Do you think they could get in the wild card race then?" It's just sound and fury.
That said, there are a couple of things to address. One theme in the comments, a theme I've seen elsewhere as well, is that the Democrats must be really desperate to win in 2004 to consider letting a RINO like John McCain on the ticket. Well, yeah, of course they're desperate to win in 2004. They damn well better be desperate to win in 2004, just as the Republicans were desperate to win in 2000. When a party doesn't feel at least a little bit of desperation (the corporate weasel-speak that I'd use here is "a sense of urgency"), they nominate guys like Michael Dukakis. (When voters don't feel that sense of urgency, they cast their ballots for Ralph Nader.) You better believe I want the Dems to figure out who has the best chance to oust Team Bush in 2004.
Yeah, but McCain doesn't believe in all the things that Democrats believe in, I hear you cry. Sure, but so what? The only potential candidate who believes in everything I do is me, and I ain't running in 2004. I've long since accepted the fact that whoever I punch the chad for in an election is a compromise of some sorts. McCain likes vouchers and has a pro-life voting record? I'll weight that against what I perceive to be his positives, as well as the pros and cons of any alternatives, and I'll consider his odds of helping a ticket win versus someone else's, and make my choice. What's so hard about that? It's not like you Bush voters haven't had to make compromises, unless of course you supported steel tariffs, McCain-Feingold, the farm bill, and the Kennedy education bill. Are you going to change your vote in 2004?
And if McCain wants this, he'll have to make compromises, too. He can start by saying "Though I personally oppose abortion, I no longer think the state should prevent a woman from getting one." Again, it's not like he'll be the first or only politician to ever do such a thing for a prize like the Oval Office. Back in the 1960s there was a Houston congressman who was so progressive on issues of contraception that his nickname was "Rubbers". In a subsequent Presidential primary, he derided an opponent's plan to balance the budget while cutting taxes and increasing defense spending as "voodoo economics". Needless to say, that was Poppy Bush, and he changed his tune on both subjects pretty quickly when he was approached about costarring with Reagan in 1980.
Sure, the True Believers may never fully accept McCain as a Democrat, just as they never accepted Poppy Bush as a conservative Republican. Someone would have to convince them that the alternative of four more years of Dubya is worse. It wouldn't be easy, and in fact I'd bet that a Kerry-McCain ticket would draw spirited opposition in the primary. They'd have to make their case, which I think they'd be able to do, that not only will they ably represent the issues of their supporters, they're also the ticket with the best chance to ever be able to represent those issues.
In the comments to Rob's post, August J. Pollack suggests that the legal issues of divvying up federal campaign funds when there's a two-party ticket involved would bring the whole thing to a screeching halt. While I agree that this would be a legal nightmare, the answer is obvious - McCain would have to switch parties first. Like I said, if he wants it he'll do what it takes.
Finally, a commenter named Zizka thinks that McCain is pulling a fast one on us liberal suckers, and that once in power he'd revert to his previous conservative ways. That's an interesting thought, but I think it's way too deep a position for McCain to take. If he wanted to screw liberals, he could have sucked it up, made nice to Bush, and helped push Bush's agenda through Congress.
Jeff Cooper has published his promised response to my most recent post about competitive balance in baseball.
Jeff focuses on the period since 1995, when baseball signed its last Collective Bargaining Agreement, and came to the conclusion that baseball does indeed have less competitive balance than the NFL. He suggests that the revenue sharing in the NFL as well as its salary cap have helped it to enable more teams to truly compete for playoff spots than in baseball during the comparable timespan.
I don't deny that the rapid increase in average salary in MLB has made it very difficult for small market teams to compete, though it should be noted that when MLB talks about "small markets", they often include places like Houston and Philadelphia, while lumping Seattle and Cleveland as "large market". If you can wrap your mind around that, you're more limber than I am.
What I do dispute is the following:
If you allow 12 teams (6 from each league) to the MLB playoffs, you add Toronto, Minnesota, Anaheim, and Montreal to Jeff's chart. As the yearly standings show, many years any club over .500 would be in contention. Isn't that how it is in football?
In this article, Joe Sheehan discusses salary caps in much more detail. The Baseball Prospectus has been all over this issue for months now.
To the extent that the salary cap contributes to competitive balance, I would say that it works negatively: it punishes success, forcing well-built, winning teams to shed talent on a near-constant basis. It also makes it virtually impossible to trade, increasing the impact of a single catastrophic event in a league where teams cannot make adjustments on the fly. A system that punishes success, rather than rewards it, seems an odd construct for any endeavor, and it's one I have difficulty supporting.
One final word: Bud Selig and the owners have spent the years since 1995 denigrating their product in order to get people to believe that a device whose only purpose is to limit their costs is good for the game. The first thing they did after the exhilarating and uplifting World Series of 2001 was to announce that they wanted to kill two franchises, one of which is seven games in first place and the other of which has just traded for two All Stars because they think they can win the NL wild card this year. If they had spent this time talking about all of the wonderful, exciting, unique, and historic things that have happened in baseball instead, would you still feel the same way about the state of the game and its finances?
My blog and Real Life buddy Mike Tremoulet is back in the States after an extended gig in London. He's got some pictures from his deportation party here. I just have one thing to say about this:
You're in England! Where they invented the pint! What are you doing drinking Budweiser?!?!
(BTW, if you really don't know the punchline to the joke, admit to it in the comments and I'll post it there.)
That said, one team that's had cash flow problems for awhile is the Arizona Diamondbacks. I suspect that David Stern would have words for Jerry Colangelo if his straits were that dire, so I wouldn't put too much credence into this. Larry has since posted a report that the Tigers may be such a team, but again, until I see actual proof, I don't believe a word that Selig says.
One of these days I need to write my How I Would Run Things If Baseball Got Wise and Named Me Commissioner Instead Of That Two-Faced Lying Rat Bastard They Have Now manifesto. I suppose I have to decide what my manifesto is first. Details, details...
Oh, and by the way: Larry Simon is a Norse God
(See here if you're confused.)
The partnership [between Massachusettes Senator John Kerry and John McCain] is so tight, in fact, that insiders in both camps are speculating about the pair teaming for a 2004 presidential ticket, according to a source close to the buzz -- even without McCain switching parties, as Beltway rumors have previously hinted.
Liven up your next staff meeting by bringing your dog to the office. It's good for you, according to a British psychologist. Well, it depends on the dog:
[N]ot all canines are suitable for the dog-eat-dog world of business. Animals which have coat odour or flatulence would be inappropriate, as would those who are over-excitable or over-sexed.
"It’s not a good idea to go for small dogs who wear ribbons or which are yappy and excitable. Some people have strong prejudices about such animals."
Continuing the case that Charles Murtaugh made about why the whole Harken business is likely to be bad for Team Bush, Spencer Ackerman says that there's a simpler way to frame the debate in a Democrat-favoring way:
Throughout his political career, Bush has cited his experience in corporate America as proof that he understands the world of business and is, by extension, a capable steward of the American economy. But if the "charitable" explanation for Bush's explanation is true--if Bush really had no idea about Harken's troubled finances--it casts the president's business experience in a far less flattering light, whatever the legal implications. Put simply, more important than whether Bush is guilty of insider trading, his Harken past shows him to be either lazy, or stupid, or both.
He starts by giving the managers a pass on their concerns about overusing someone else's pitchers, a concern which Rob Neyer discussed in his All Star Game diary. Here's Barra:
Let's not blame this one on the managers. The managers are always caretakers of their owners' investments, and it is perfectly understandable that a manager wouldn't want to risk overusing (or, just as bad, to be accused of overusing) someone else's pitcher. That's why it was the commissioner's job to overrule the managers' requests -- in other words, to overrule the owners' wishes -- and let the game continue.Fair enough. But while Neyer suggests that an answer to the extra innings problem is for the fans to name an extra player and pitcher for each team, both of whom are only to be used in "emergencies", Barra takes a detour out into left field:
As for what is to be done if future games go into extra innings, I would have thought the solution to be staggeringly simple: Let the players play. I mean, this isn't the World Series; isn't everyone entitled to a little fun? Why not let the fielders pitch an inning apiece until the issue is settled? Call for volunteers among the players already in the lineup: Who wants to pitch an inning?Barra is suggesting that any player called on in these circumstances basically throw batting practice, but I still can't help but think of two words here: Jose Canseco. Remember how Canseco blew out his arm pitching an inning of mopup relief in a blowout? However much Lou Piniella might have griped if Freddy Garcia had thrown five or six innings on Tuesday, imagine his reaction if Torre had put Ichiro on the mound, especially if he were to complain of a twinge in his arm the next day.
Neyer's suggestion is for whoever winds up as the last pitcher to throw batting practice. Jim Caple advocates unlimited substitutions, so a guy like Barry Zito, who threw all of three pitches in his appearance, could come back later if needed. I'd say either of these is a better idea.
Finally, Fritz Schranck has the funniest bit I've seen about all this. It should be noted, however, that Tuesday was not the first All Star Game to ever end in a tie. Back when there were two All Star Games per year, the second game of 1961 at Fenway Park was called off after nine innings due to heavy rain with the score 1-1. I strongly suspect there was a whole lot less fuss about it.
Personally, I hope Houston gets the Games, not so much because I love the Olympics - I'm indifferent - but because I think it would be a huge boost for mass transit, particularly rail. If landing the OIympics helps or forces us to build rail lines along I-10 and I-45, it will be well worth the trouble and expense.
A lot of people gave their time and money last year to help Houstonians who were wiped out by Tropical Storm Allison. I hope the same will be said of the flood victims this year.
It's only been in place since July 1, but people are already reporting a decrease in telemarketer calls in Texas. I didn't get off my lazy butt on this until the third wave, so I'm still under assault until the end of the year. But I can enjoy the rewards that others have gotten.
The telemarketing industry is still singing the same sad song:
Since 1998, 26 states have adopted no-call legislation, and nearly everyone in the industry expects the other 24 to follow suit.Keeping up with the differences in the existing laws has created a costly nightmare for the $668 billion industry, which claims the regulations threaten jobs and violate commercial free speech.
"The problem is each of the 26 states has its own list with its own set of rules," said Christina Duffney, a spokeswoman for the Direct Marketing Association, the largest trade group for telemarketers. "For a marketer to have to learn all 26 of the rules and abide by them, it increases the chance for errors, and it increases the cost of services provided by the marketers."
The Federal Trade Commission also has proposed a national do-not-call list that could arm consumers with one more weapon in the battle against unsolicited calls as early as next year.The national list, which would fine telemarketers $11,000 per violation, may or may not override the state restrictions, but it looms as another obstacle for the industry to overcome.
Here's one marketer who gets it:
The no-call lists do, however, provide a time-saving benefit for some companies, said C.J. Johnson, senior vice president of CCC Interactive Corp., which employs 385 people at the Houston Community Call Center."The people that get on to the DNC lists are the people who are not going to buy anyway," Johnson said, meaning time and expenses can be better spent on potential customers for his call center's Fortune 100 clients.
It's almost a shame that, as our Lege only meets every other year, the Gov won't get a decent photo op out of this until after the election in November. By that time, if he's really lucky, no one will remember any of this. If he's not so lucky, it'll be Tony Sanchez's problem. We can only hope.
I found Jeff Cooper and Paul Orwin through Ted Barlow - good to have you back, btw - and Ann Salisbury via Fritz Schranck, both of whom certainly count as good references.
The blogroll is pretty big these days, which reflects a growing number of quality blogs out there. There was a time (you know, back in the Good Old Days of blogging) when you could read just about anyone who was worth your time to read. Anyone who tries to do that now is either unemployed or soon to become unemployed. I figure I'll visit the favorites more or less daily, and the rest at least weekly.
Anyway, check 'em all out. And remember to use BlogRolling and Weblogs ping to make life easier for you and your readers.
Blogger sure picked a great time to give me permalink problems, when I've been getting cited by Ginger, Scott, O-Dub, Atrios, and Kevin. Republishing my archives seems to have fixed the problem, but I'm still leery. Anyway, thanks to everyone who's pointed people here. I hope the "page not found" errors hasn't discouraged too many of them.
UPDATE: Well, there's another possibility - I just got a message from Blogger that their server went boom, so no publishing is available. Sigh...
Showing a lot more sense than Frantic Fran Blinebury is King Kaufman in Salon, who notes that there was a perfectly good reason for halting the All-Star Game last night, even if it was done in a tin-eared way:
The problem is that All-Star managers want to get all of their players into the game. They'll try to do that if the roster is 30 men or 32 or 35 or 40. With skillful substitutions, it can be done. But if the manager wants to get everyone in the game, he has to get them in before the ninth inning ends, because he can't count on extra innings. So if the game does go into extra frames, he's out of luck.
That's what happened Tuesday. Both Bob Brenly of the National League and Joe Torre of the American League used all their players in the first nine innings except one emergency leftover pitcher, Vicente Padilla of the Phillies for the N.L., Freddy Garcia of the Mariners for the A.L. By the 11th, those two had both gone two innings. It would have been unfair to them and to their teams to ask them to pitch for the duration, when it wasn't their regular day to start and they had prepared themselves to pitch only an inning or two. These guys have regular jobs, you know, in real games, which resume Thursday."These organizations and other managers entrust us with their players," Brenly said. "We have to make sure we don't do anything that could hurt them."
Chron sportswriter Fran Blinebury shows why he personifies the problems that most of us have with his employer with today's turd-ugly hack job that passes for his regular column. He hits all the usual cliches about Barry Bonds and the players not "getting it", going so far as to blame the MLBPA for the mythical "competitive balance" problem.
How many times and how many different ways do I have to demonstrate that there is no such thing as a "competitive balance problem", at least not in the way that the typical room-temperature-IQ sportswriter understands it? Let's take one more look, just for yuks. In the last 20 years, how many baseball, football, and basketball teams have played for their sports' championship?
Basketball - 14 of 31 teams (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Chicago, Indiana, LA Lakers, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio, Utah)
Football - 18 of 31 teams (Buffalo, Miami, New England, Pittsburgh, Tennessee, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Denver, Oakland, San Diego, Dallas, NY Giants, Washington, Chicago, Green Bay, Atlanta, St. Louis, San Francisco)
Baseball - 20 of 30 teams (NY Yankees, Boston, Baltimore, Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, Minnesota, Kansas City, Oakland, NY Mets, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Florida, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Arizona)
And look at the 10 who haven't: Seattle is a pretty good bet to get to one soon. The Angels are three games out of first place. The Astros and Rangers have made the playoffs consistently in recent years. Pittsburgh was a champ in 1979 and had three excellent shots at the Series in the early 90s. Montreal might have made it in 1994 had it not been for the strike. The only complete loser is the expansion Devil Rays. Baseball is the only sport of the three to have a recent expansion team as champions (Florida and Arizona).
I knew most of this off the top of my head, but Fran Blinebury, a Professional Sports Writer, can't be bothered to do the ten minutes of light reading required to see if what he's saying makes sense. And on a newspaper that also features Dale Robertson, he's not even the worst we have. Arrrgh...
Brian Linse quotes Maureen Dowd as follows:
Can a Bush - born on third base but thinking he hit a triple - ever really understand the problems of the guys in the bleachers?That's a great line. It was also a great line in 1988 when it was said about Poppy Bush by either Jim Hightower or Ann Richards. Doesn't really matter, my point is that Dowd is actually quoting someone. She ought to say so.
Another reason why I gave up on Kaus is his recent entry about the possibility of violence from the left, spurred on by Paul Begala and MediaWhoresOnline. It's not so much that Kaus thinks that "the left" may cause violence, it's that he makes the same mistake of lumping "radical environmentalists or fringe anti-globalists" with Begala and MWO. I've had this argument before, and I maintain that the problem is in trying to force the same label on the loony fringe as the mainstream. I find such practice, which Kaus engages in here, to be disingenuous at best. I'll say it again, and I'll type slowly so even Mickey Kaus can understand me: The loony fringe is not the same as the mainstream. Applying the same label to both makes the label meaningless. Using that meaningless label to draw parallels between the loony fringe and the mainstream is dishonest. Is that so hard to understand?
Even if you accept Kaus' lazy labelling, he's still off base. Last I checked, fringe anti-globalists were quite busy throwing rocks at Starbuckses during the Clinton administration, when all us "leftists" were supposed to be fat and happy. EarthFirst! was founded in 1979, and the Earth Liberation Front started setting fires in 1998. So why the sudden fear that we're about to be hip-deep in violent "left-wing" protest?
I don't know who's been peeing in his Wheaties lately, but as noted, I no longer care. Happy blogging, Mickey. Hope your new permalinks work better than your buddy Sullivan's do.
Anyway, O-Dub, Atrios, and Kevin Raybould all give Kaus the business as well. Check 'em out.
(Note: Edited to note the fixed permalink on Lean Left, and to correct the spelling on Kevin Raybould's name. Sorry, Kevin!)
By now you've probably read that big NYT magazine article about the dawning realization that a low-fat diet may not be all that it's cracked up to be. Of course, if you're a longtime reader of Off the Kuff, this should come as no surprise.
For the second time in two years, the Houston Press has had an article about an inner-city resident complaining about the noise of a nearby bar or restaurant. This time, the complainer lives in a downtown loft; previously, the complainer lived just outside the Heights.
You'd think I'd be a pretty sympathetic audience for these guys, given that I'm a light-sleeping homeowner with distinct early-bird tendencies. You'd be wrong, though, for the simple reason that each of these whiners bought their overpriced lofts and townhomes knowing fully well that they were in close proximity to places that featured loud music. In each case, the music venues existed before the residences were built. It would be one thing if one day you woke up and discovered that a nightclub was being built next door. It's another thing entirely to buy a house next door to one and then bitch about the noise.
I note that two years later, the Jax Grill on Shepherd still features live zydeco music on Friday nights. I strongly suspect that in two years, the Spy nighclub downtown will still be playing its music. Which is as it should be.
Well, my blogroll on the left has finally been converted to BlogRolling. All the blogs that are fit to link are there. I've officially given up on Mickey Kaus, who hits the quinella of defending Ann Coulter and getting the facts wrong on TAPped's web stats in the space of a few days. Hey, Mickey, if I want to read NRO, I'll link to them.
Meanwhile, I'll add Matt Welch and Ken Layne back when I add some new links, since as Movable Type users they ought to show up as modified whenever they get around to updating.
MT sends an automatic ping to Weblogs.com when users add something new, but Blogger users need to do this manually. I suggest you take a moment and check Larry's handy dandy blogrolling tips, with all Blogger users giving extra attention to the one-click Weblogs ping so you too can show up with the nifty "New!" tag on my blogroll. Larry tells you how to add this URL to your Favorites; as I tend to publish from more than one computer, I've found it more convenient to add the link to my template, so it's always with me. Whatever floats your blog.
In case you were wondering, the July 4 shooting spree at LAX by a terrorist disgruntled ex-employee nutball dirtbag was actually Tom Daschle's fault. You just can't make up stuff like this.
Via Atrios.
Contenders for the 2003 Houston mayoral race are lining up already in anticipation. I agree with Kevin in that Michael Berry has no chance. The reason is right here in the Chron story:
Berry, 30, has served on council since January after beating Claudia Williamson in a runoff election for the at-large seat formerly held by Chris Bell, who ran last year for mayor and now is a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives.So far in his short council tenure, Berry's only real push was for a property tax rollback that council rejected last month when it set the city budget. He has said he will make another run at cutting taxes by 1 cent per $100 valuation this September.
None of the known or rumored candidates so far excites me. I'm still holding out hope for Gabriel Vasquez, my City Council person, but given how bloody and expensive the race is likely to be, I'd rather he stay in his nice, safe Council seat until he's term-limited out.
It's hard to believe, but a mere one year after Tropical Storm Allison unleashed hell on Houston, Central Texas has been hit by even worse flooding. Thirteen counties have been declared disaster areas.
Even more incredible, the same storms that caused all this damage then headed northwest and did some more. Buried in this story is the following paragraph:
In Abilene on Sunday, hundreds of people returned to homes that had been deluged by the same storm that dumped more than 30 inches of rain in Central and South Texas last week. The storm moved north and west and poured a foot of rain on Abilene and surrounding areas in a single day.
Annoyingly, the Chron couldn't be bothered to give info on how or where to make a donation to help these flood victims. I had to go to the San Antonio Express-News and the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, which points to this American Red Cross Page. Thanks, Chron!
Mother Nature fact checks Glenn Reynolds' ass, as reported by Brian Linse. Someone needs to tell the InstaPunditWatcher that it's time to get back on the job.
Nice to know that Matt Welch is keeping busy during his blog hiatus. Via the newly permlink-enabled Josh Trevino.
In another 5-4 Supreme Court ruling the SCOTUS has struck down a law that prevents judges from saying in campaign ads how they'd rule on a particular issue. A local former judge disagrees with this ruling:
Most people who can count to three know the separation of powers is why we have three branches of government, instead of two. The judiciary is supposed to declare the law, no matter how unpopular. Unlike the executive and the legislative departments, the judiciary is not supposed to declare public opinion. If people don't like a judicial decision, they can amend a constitution or a statute or they can elect a new judge. But, until now, they could not expect candidates for judge to say in advance how they would vote on particular cases.Is that change good or bad? Some say it's good. They say the public can't cast a meaningful vote for a judge without knowing how he or she will rule. Without that information, there's nothing to vote for or against. Others say it's bad. How, they ask, can you get a fair trial from a judge who has declared how he'll rule before he has heard the case? A judge who has publicly pledged to vote one way cannot be, or be perceived to be, the neutral magistrate the law requires. If the judiciary is not neutral, it is worse than useless. It's fraudulent.
This op-ed piece in the Sunday Chron makes an interesting point about school vouchers and their promise to improve schools, namely that the better schools, usually located in suburbs, have resisted and will resist efforts to take away their autonomy.
People in the suburbs are generally satisfied with their neighborhood schools. They want to protect the physical and financial independence of those schools, as well as suburban property values, which are tied to local school quality (real or perceived). School choice threatens the independence of suburban schools by creating the possibility that outsiders, particularly urban students, will enter them and that local funds will exit them.When suburbanites perceive a threat to their schools, they fight back -- and usually win. Consider school desegregation and school finance reform. Suburban districts largely succeeded in insulating their schools from the reach of desegregation decrees, which rarely went beyond urban districts or required suburban schools to participate. Consequently, urban school districts were left to experience the costs and benefits of school desegregation, while most suburban schools remained safely on the sidelines.
Suburban school districts have been equally successful in protecting their financial independence. Efforts to equalize school funding have largely failed. Even when funding schemes are reformed, wealthier, suburban districts are usually left free to devote as much of their local resources as they wish to their own schools.
A similar pattern can be seen in school choice plans, almost all of which work to protect the autonomy of suburban schools. Public school choice programs, which include charter schools, rarely require suburban schools to open their doors to students from neighboring districts or to send locally raised revenues to another district.
The Cleveland plan, at issue in the Supreme Court's decision, is an example: Students in Cleveland were given a voucher that could be used in private schools within Cleveland and in any suburban public school that volunteered to accept voucher students. No schools volunteered.
Meanwhile, proposals to expand voucher programs have been defeated time and again, in both legislative arenas and at the ballot box. Those proposals failed not because teachers' unions opposed them but because suburbanites did.
It's been a busy weekend for me, as we threw a housewarming party on Friday night, so I haven't had a chance to blog about the death of Ted Williams. The ESPN piece linked gives a good overview of him, but there's two bits in it that I'd like to expand on. One has to do with the near-trade of Williams for Joe DiMaggio. It was the Yankees who backed out of the trade, giving the reason that their fans thought DiMaggio was the better player. I'm a diehard, lifelong Yankees fan, but the numbers say that Williams was better. Yankee fans will argue that DiMadge was a stellar performer at a much tougher position as well as a much better baserunner. It quickly becomes a bigger morass than Vietnam, which may speak to the wisdom of not taking that particular road.
It also leads in to my second point, about what DiMaggio and Williams said about each other post-retirement. They both figured that stoking the who's-better debate would likely be counterproductive in the long run, so they came to an agreement where DiMaggio would call Williams "the best pure hitter he ever saw" and Williams would call DiMaggio "the best player he ever played against", thus acheiving equal parts truth, wiggle room, and accession to ego.
Jayson Stark now wonders who is the best living player with Teddy and Joltin' Joe deceased. Again, with all due respect to the Yankee Clipper, I think it's only deference to his legend that put him above Willie Mays and Hank Aaron in the first place. (There was also a poll taken in the 1960s that asked this question. DiMaggio won, and no one ever had the cheek to ask when we should ask again.) My vote goes to Mays, but it's close. And I refuse to consider Pete Rose a serious contender.
Rest in peace, Teddy Ballgame.
I really thought I had nothing more to say about the whole Cal Thomas/where's-the-outrage kerfuffle. I'd gotten some good feedback that showed there was some outrage, and this made me feel better.
After reading Kevin Whited and Owen Courreges, I got to wondering about my motives for all this in the first place. I have to confess, a certain part of it was the defensiveness that I, as a left-leaning blogger, have when it comes to right-wing attacks on stupid things that are said and done by leftists. What I see in these attacks is a sometimes implicit, sometimes totally blatant attempt to link outrageous radical left behavior (think "Terror Widows", or that Canadian feminist who claimed that Afghan women were better off under the Taliban than they'd be in America) with, well, me.
(By the way, if you're wondering what I'm talking about, here's an odious little example. What do you say to someone like this? I don't know what blogs this guy does or doesn't read, but either he isn't reading the liberals that I read or he's in serious need of some remedial education. I suppose this guy is barely worth my contempt, let alone any defensiveness, but there's no shortage of this kind of thing out there. Link via Alex Frantz.)
What do you do when you identify as a liberal and you come across people saying that all liberals must be idiots because Ted Rall (a known idiot) is a liberal? I can't speak for anyone else, but I feel like I have to do what I can to demonstrate that I'm a liberal who isn't anything like that idiot. The easiest and most effective way to do that is to join in the attack on the idiot in question.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you - most often, the objects of derision are indeed idiots who should be attacked by anyone who's capable of critical thinking. Some people in the blogosphere, notably Charles Johnson, realized that critical thinkers on both sides of the left/right split had way more in common with each other than they did with the radical fringes of their own sides, and attempted to bridge the gap by dividing the world into idiotarians and anti-idiotarians.
But still I'd feel like I was under attack. Again, I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be rather surprised if no one else felt this way. And so, when an obvious opportunity came to put the shoe on the other foot, I took it. Cal Thomas is an idiot and a conservative. You conservatives - prove to me you're not idiots! Fair is fair, sauce for the goose, blah blah blah.
It's a pretty lousy reason, I suppose. After all, if what I thought was being done to me was wrong, then what I was doing was also wrong, and if what was being done to me was right, well, what am I bitching about? I'm not sure which contradiction I'd rather choose, but for what it's worth, that's how I felt.
So, I apologize for doing unto others as I don't want done unto me. As it happens, I believe it was ultimately worthwhile, if for no better reason than this little bit of blog synergy that I encountered. In his response to me, Kevin Whited gives a perfectly good reason why he considers slapping Cal Thomas to be beneath him:
I generally don't find him very interesting at all (just went poking through Reductio to see how often he shows up, and the answer is -- not very). I don't really consider him to be one of the columnists that I just can't miss while doing my daily reading. And isn't that a more damning critique than any denunciation TAPped might want from conservative bloggers: I just don't read the guy because, frankly, columns like this aren't all that surprising!
So what's a flag-waving leftist to do? Well, there's always bashing the right, which the Nuisance does with zeal and pleasure. I don't spend equivalent energy going after the American far left simply because at this time they don't matter very much, although I always enjoy a shot at Ralph Nader.
Kevin points to this KTRK story of how Reliant Energy had to restate its earnings yesterday. Seems they somehow managed to overstate them by, uh, $7.8 billion.
I guarantee, if I were CEO, I wouldn't lose that much money. One billion, maybe two billion tops, and I'd save you a ton in salary, perks, and golden parachutes. Come and get me, Corporate America, while you still can!
Interesting Chron story today about how state judges in Texas have gotten a lot younger on average over the past two decades. The accompanying graph really shows the trend in recent years. Factors involved in this are pay and a change in the pension rules, coupled with electoral uncertainty.
But the Texas Legislature amended the judicial pension requirements in 1985, diminishing the economic incentive to become a judge and remain one. Before the legislative change, judges could begin earning a pension after serving 12 years on the bench or after eight years if the judge had prior military service.Now, judges must serve 20 years on the bench to qualify for a pension. Because of financial and political uncertainty, many judges do not stay on the job that long anymore.
Judges say money is often a factor in determining whether a lawyer runs for or stays with a judgeship, considering the lucrative urban market for top-notch lawyers.A first-year associate at one of Houston's prestigious firms can earn an average of $150,000 annually, lawyers and judges said.
The average state district judicial salary is about $114,000, although county-court-at-law salaries, tied to more county benefits, average about $122,000.
"Clearly if the Legislature wants judges to spend more than a few years on the bench, it will have to pay judges at least what top-notch, first-year lawyers make," [state District Judge Mark] Davidson said.
"How much can you ask of children to sacrifice their education because you want to do public service as a judge?"
I think Murtaugh is absolutely right about the late filing, which I note that Team Bush is blaming on "clerical error". The bit about how Bush came out of this with nearly a million bucks is probably just a corollary to the moral scandal that Murtaugh talks about. The Chron article lays out the case pretty nicely, with the crucial bit being right here:
So here's the beauty part for the Democrats: it doesn't matter whether or not Bush broke the law in his insider trading. The scandal here is moral, rather than legal: Bush was intimately connected with a corporate accounting scandal precisely akin to those now in the headlines, and costing tens of thousands of jobs. If the Democrats focus solely on the legalistic question of how Bush made his eight hundred large, they'll be making a Starr-esque error. It really didn't matter whether or not Clinton lied to the grand jury about his affair, the real Lewinsky scandal was that he'd been having the affair at all. The conservatives were right: character matters.In Harken-gate, it makes little difference whether Bush broke the law by waiting thirty weeks to alert the SEC of his stock sale, instead of the required two or three (yawn... eyes... glazing... over... must... follow... the money...). What will be harder for Bush to shake off between now and 2004, particularly if the corporate accounting scandals continue to drag down the economy, is his guilt-by-close-association with a book-cooking energy company.
During the 1994 gubernatorial campaign, Bush denied knowing Harken was having financial problems at the time of his stock sale even though he was on the board's audit committee.Where have we heard that defense before? From Kenny Boy and the Enron Ensemble all the way back to Poppy "I was out of the loop" Bush, the standard response is always one of ignorance. Never mind my position of authority, I had no idea that things were going to hell in a handbasket all around me.
Well, forgive my impertinence, but maybe you should have known. As Gregg Easterbrook notes, CEOs have been built up as talented, visionary superheroes, with salaries and perks to match. Yet when performance fails utterly to justify the remuneration, the CEOs still get paid handsomely, often with bonuses, while the people who did the real work get shown the door.
Here's a modest proposal for corporations: Tab any random idiot to be CEO, pay him or her a simple million bucks, and keep doing what you're doing. The cheaper CEO will have as much effect on your long term profitability as any overpriced Jack Welch wannabee, and their cries of ignorance when your earnings inevitably have to be restated will be much more credible. It's a clearcut win-win for all involved. I'm available if you ask nicely, and I bet Larry would be happy for the chance to take a major step closer to his billion-dollar goal.
OK, I'm a bit off track here. Anyway, if the Dems keep it simple and say that whenever you put a Bush in charge, things fall apart while he and his friends make out like bandits, they might be able to get somewhere. We'll see what happens.
Oh, and as an aside to Mickey Kaus: This may not specifically be Enron, but it's close enough. Still think there's no campaign issue here?
A college buddy I lived with for a summer introduced me to Ray Brown via the excellent CD Soular Energy, which featured a lovely arrangement of Take the A Train and the rip-snorting Mistreated but Undefeated Blues, which is on my short list of Greatest Song Titles Ever. Take a moment and check it out.
Vaya con Dios, Ray Brown.
In an editorial on the budget deficit (from Wednesday, which I forgot to publish), the Chron actually gives praise to Bill Clinton in a manner that is neither snarky nor left-handed. Is the regular editorial board on vacation? How could they let this happen? Look! In the streets! I see dogs and cats living together! Aaaahhhh!
Governor Goodhair picked up an endorsement from a group of black ministers, which may help him peel off some of the black vote from Tony Sanchez.
"I don't see why you need to change a horse in the middle of the stream," said alliance member the Rev. F.N. Williams of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.
The good news comes from some poll numbers:
Wow. Kirk is doing better than I'd have thought. I'm actually surprised that John Sharp is not leading his race, but a statistical tie isn't bad. And Rick Perry doesn't seem to have much of an incumbent's advantage. So all in all, not too bad.
As Perry received the endorsement, the UH Center for Public Policy released its new Texas Public Policy Survey showing that Perry leads Sanchez by 42 percent to 32 percent.Pollster Richard Murray, a UH political science professor, said the poll indicates a sizable gain for Sanchez, an oilman and banker from Laredo.
A separate Scripps-Howard Texas Poll released in early June showed that Perry had a 20-point lead.
Murray said Perry appears to be slipping amid attack ads by Sanchez and a recent string of bad news for Texas, including a projected $5 billion state budget shortfall.
"Sanchez isn't so much gaining support as softening up Perry," Murray said. "Perry is an incumbent governor, but he succeeded to the office and is not yet well known to many Texas voters."
[...]
The Texas Public Policy Survey -- a telephone poll of 739 registered Texas voters conducted June 20-29 -- had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The poll also showed that:
- Democrat Ron Kirk holds a lead of 36 percent to 28 percent over Republican John Cornyn for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Phil Gramm. The earlier Texas poll showed Cornyn leading 35 percent to 30 percent. Cornyn is Texas attorney general, and Kirk is a former mayor of Dallas.
- The race for lieutenant governor is tight, with Republican David Dewhurst, the state land commissioner, at 31 percent to 29 percent for Democrat John Sharp, a former state comptroller who narrowly lost the 1998 lieutenant governor's race to Perry. Dewhurst led the Texas Poll 36 percent to 29 percent.
Elsewhere in this piece, Sanchez bashes Perry for not returning all of the campaign contributions he got from WorldCom, and Perry bashes Sanchez for having made money off of Enron in the past. A Perry spokesman claims that Sanchez should return the money he got from selling Enron stock in 2000 as well as any profits Sanchez's oil and gas company made from doing business with Enron.
Um, I think there's a small bit of difference between owning stock in a company and getting a campaign contribution from a company. Plus, in 2000 when Sanchez sold his Enron stock, Enron was still on top of the world. Is Perry saying that Sanchez had really advanced knowledge of Enron's collapse, or is he saying that any money earned from Enron is tainted? If it's the latter, there are lots of people who will need to cleanse themselves. This all strikes me as silly.
Two Andrews, Andrew Ian Dodge and Andrew Sullivan, continue with the conservative spankings of Cal Thomas. My thanks to those who took up the task, and those who helped find these examples for me.
On another front, TAPped has also been leading the charge against Anvil Annie Coulter. A number of people, such as Scoobie Davis and Bill Herbert, have been doing this for awhile - anyone who can read as much Coulter as Scoobie does is either superhuman or masochistic, I'm not sure yet.
I think Meryl really captures the reason behind why I sometimes obsess over things like this. I had tried to say something like what she said when I wondered where the conservative condemnations of Cal Thomas were, but I didn't say it nearly this well:
The fact that Coulter can proclaim this crap and not be excoriated from the rooftops of all conservative institutions bothers me a great deal. A great deal.How you can claim this woman as one of your own astonishes me. How you can respect anything this woman writes astonishes me. How you can take seriously anything she utters angers me.
You ask liberals to decry the Cynthia McKinney loons. Fine. Now I'm asking conservatives to do the same for Ann Coulter. Stop being proud of idiots like Coulter and slam them the way you slam McKinney. I'm getting a little tired of the bozos getting a free pass because you agree with a few of the things they say. Fair practices, my conservative friends-that's all I'm asking for.
Yeah, I know, Reynolds is off galavanting around somewhere, Welch and Layne are off doing the "Hey kids! Let's start a newspaper!" routine, and Diane is taking a breather. Cheer up - I've taken about all the vacation I'm gonna take for the year. Doesn't that make you feel better?
And hey, Kimberley Swygert is back from her world tour, and she's got lots of interesting stuff. Go check it out.
On Sunday, Chron political columnist Clay Robison wrote about politicians who campaign on the promise to "run government like a business".
It was amusing last week to hear Sanchez, the Democratic outsider, vowing to "scrub" the budget and Perry, the Republican governmental veteran, defending state spending and insisting that Sanchez didn't know what he was talking about.
(OK, so Robison's column only runs on Sundays. Sue me.)
Robison also throws rocks at Tony Sanchez's idea that "scrubbing" the budget will magically solve our looming multibillion dollar deficit. It's a pretty nice fantasy, the idea that, essentially, if we root around the government's seat cushions we'll find enough dropped change to make us solvent without having to make any unpopular choices. Anyone remember the Grace Commission, which was supposed to help Ronald Reagan balance the federal budget by eliminating "waste, fraud, and abuse"? Or maybe the liberal-fantasy movie Dave, in which Kevin Kline's accountant friend balances the federal budget, and they pass a full-employment bill after the Prez kicks the bucket? Each had about the same level or realism.
I've started to wonder just what issues Sanchez will campaign on. As Robison notes, the "run government like a business" claim is even dicier these days. The other article I linked says he's going to attack Perry for the bills he vetoed last year. Perry got a lot of criticism for that, so maybe there's some traction there. I haven't watched much TV since the various season finales, so I haven't seen any recent ads. I have to say, though, I'm getting more worried about Sanchez's ability to win. He's easily the weakest part of the "Dream Team", and if he doesn't at least boost turnout among likely Democratic voters, we can look forward to four more years of GOP domination of the state.
Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who has already forfeited $85,000 in campaign contributions from failed energy giant Enron, has decided he won't keep a $10,000 contribution from WorldCom Inc."We will not keep the funds," said Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan. "We are looking for alternatives rather than return the money to the company."
The University of Texas Medical Branch here in Houston is apologizing for the actions of a former employee who may have sold donated body parts for profit, and for accidentally mixing up the ashes of cremated bodies:
Federal agents are investigating allegations that an employee at the University of Texas Medical Branch illegally sold body parts for his own gain, an FBI spokesman said Monday.And, in what UTMB President Dr. John Stobo called "an unforgivable failure of oversight," officials at the medical school said they have discovered that the cremated remains of many people who willed their bodies to science were mixed.
[...]
The problems were revealed in a management audit of UTMB's Willed Body Program that began in March and resulted in the May 9 firing of Allen Tyler Jr., 56, of Galveston.
Tyler was responsible for receiving and shipping all bodies and body parts at the medical school, as well as for dismembering bodies and shipping parts to other research facilities across the state and nation, according to a document obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
The Willed Body Program receives an average of 300 bodies a year, officials say, only about half of which are used by medical students and researchers at the Galveston medical center.
Under direction of the Anatomical Board of the State of Texas, UTMB can ship cadavers and body parts to medical schools and research facilities in other states, but not for profit.
The FBI is investigating whether an employee at the center was running an illegal body-part brokering operation, Houston FBI spokesman Bob Doguim said.
"There may have been someone inside that program who was selling those body parts," Doguim said.
He did not mention Tyler but said officials at the medical center had asked the FBI to investigate its Willed Body Program.
Stobo said Monday that UTMB requested the investigation when Tyler was fired.
Larry sends an open letter to Larry Flynt regarding the woman in Florida who insists on covering her face for her driver's license photo. It got me wondering - When do you think Playboy will feature its first Muslim/Arab Playmate? They've featured a Jewish Playmate - Conservative, even, not Reform - and we all know how fast-growing Islam is, so it makes you wonder. Well, okay, it made me wonder.
Today is the day that the Texas No Call law kicks in, meaning that people who have signed up to be on the no-call list for telemarketers should start to see a decline in annoying telemarketer calls.
Naturally, the evil telemarketing industry is trotting out its usual sob stories:
"I think folks at the state and federal levels had in their mind that this was kind of a small business that kind of annoyed people, so it's OK to revile it," said Louis Mastria, spokesman for the New York-based DMA. "But those things don't match up with the economic reality."An estimated 185 million Americans purchase goods or services by phone each year, including many older residents who don't feel comfortable doing business over the Internet, according to industry records.
For every 19 people who yell at or hang up on telemarketers, there's at least one who's receptive to the sales pitch, according to industry statistics.
"I don't think people mind being called at home. Most consumers are bothered by the volume of calls," said Kevin Brosnahan, spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based American Teleservices Association.
It's too soon to tell whether the no-call laws will prompt companies to cut back on telemarketing, industry officials say.But the additional costs -- registering with the state, buying no-call lists several times a year, hiring people to input the lists and paying hefty fines for violations -- likely will be passed on to consumers.
"It will force legitimate telemarketers to pay for the sins of the 20 percent of the industry that give us all a black eye," Mastria said.
Meanwhile, a four-Claude rating goes to this headline: "Some telemarketing officials think no-call list unneccesary".
Many telemarketing industry officials say the Texas no-call list, effective today -- and more than two dozen other states' similar lists of residents who don't want telemarketing calls -- is unnecessary. They say consumers already are protected under federal law, which:
- Prohibits telemarketing calls before 8 a.m. and after 9 p.m., based on the resident's time zone.
- Prohibits companies from using automated dialers and leaving prerecorded messages for commercial purposes on a resident's answering machine.
- Requires firms to keep a no-call list of residents who specifically have asked that company not to call them anymore.
- Requires every telemarketer to state his or her name, which can be an alias as long as the company can identify the employee if a customer files a complaint.
- Requires telemarketers to state their company, that they are calling to sell a good or service, and the seller's address or phone number if a customer wants to cancel the order or lodge a complaint.
The Chron gives Dubya the business for abandoning his free-trade principles. It's a good piece, and it's always heartening to see a bastion of pro-Bushiness such as the Chron take him to task, but would it kill them to note, even in passing, that Clinton (who bucked his party on NAFTA) and Gore (who eviscerated Ross Perot in a debate on NAFTA) had solid records on free trade? I know, the cognitive dissonance would probably make their heads explode. I'll go off into a corner and be happy with what I can get.
I see that Owen agrees with this editorial, noting that "like a broken watch, the Chronicle is still right a small percentage of the time". Given our differing perspectives, it's amusing that we both see Houston's Only Information Source (motto: As If You've Got A Choice) as being the classic blind pig finding an acorn on this issue. Note to theChron's editorial board: This is not one of those times when you should take comfort in the belief that you must be doing something right because you're being attacked from all sides.
I got mentioned on TAPped. Woo hoo! Just goes to show what a relentless commitment to quality and a well-placed double sawbuck can do.
Anyway, Atrios points to this entry from Privateer. Well done! He also points to this VodkaPundit entry. I agree with Atrios in that VodkaPundit misses the point. Look, many of us on the left thought Noam Chomsky was an idiot long before 9/11. We've had to spend a lot of time since then disavowing him and people like him since then, people with whom we'd never identified or sympathized. There were many reasons why we felt compelled to do this, not the least of which was a strong desire to not be associated in any way with the kind of wrongheadedness that they espoused.
It may seem like a waste of time to shoot down idiots like Cal Thomas. It is in some ways, but there's an important reason to do it anyway: There is probably some portion of my readership, as well as VodkaPundit's, that had never heard of Cal Thomas before today. We're doing these people a favor by making sure they know who he is and why, should they ever encounter a blogger who quotes or cites him favorably, they should seriously consider whether that blogger has anything worthwhile to say. I suppose VP's blithe dismissal of Cal Thomas accomplishes that, but I still wish he'd taken this more gravely.
In the comments on yesterday's entry, Josh points me to this Midwest Conservatove Journal entry, and to today's WSJ Best of the Web, in which James Taranto makes the same body-count observation that I did. Thanks, Josh!
Andrea Harris nominates Cal Thomas for Dumbass of the Month. With all due respect, he should get a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Andrea points to Rand Simberg, who I believe gives Cal way too much credit for subtlety:
If he'd said, "I believe it's a greater injury..." then I might say, what an idiot. But he's simply saying that many will conclude that, which may, as far as I know, be perfectly true.
DailyPundit takes the same ho-hum approach that VodkaPundit does. As noted above, I think that's copping out. It's easy to point to one stupid thing someone says and say "I always knew that guy was an idiot". If you really believe that, you ought to provide some evidence for it.
Besides, it's not the case that TAPped "suddenly discovered" that Cal Thomas is an idiot. When TAPped says "But never did Tapped believe that anyone -- even Cal Thomas -- would say this", that sure sounds to me like there's an implied "a big dumbass such as" in there. The point that TAPped was making was that even by Thomas' incredibly high standards for idiocy he managed to shock them. That's worth commenting on, frenzied or not.
On a completely unrelated note: Is it just me, or does Cal Thomas bear an uncanny resemblance to Dabney Coleman?
