Quiet Declarations

Some people move to DC and feel compelled to live “in the city” for a while, and I take no issue with that, unless your desire simply to have a DC street address overpowers your ability to comprehend the fact that some parts of DC are actually way more sucky than others.

I elected to live in Clarendon, where I pay half the rent for twice the space in a crime-free neighborhood that’s three metro stops, a $13 cab ride, or a 30-minute walk from the city.  But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered living near Dupont, Adams Morgan, Logan Circle, or similar for a while just in order to file the experience.  So if it is important that you experience life “in the city” and you make the decision to invest your time and resources doing so, then more power to you.  I even understand why you might not want to come all the way across that big river separating the District and the state governed from the former capital of the Conferederacy: you paid the premium to live “in the city” so it makes sense to preference hanging out “in the city” and to encourage your friends to join you there whenever possible.

But if you live in Columbia Heights, you are not living “in the city” — you are living in an crime-ridden area exploiting the tax dollars of district taxpayers in a feeble attempt to one day resemble the worst parts of Ballston or Pentagon City.  You also live on Green Line, which essentially negates all advantages of being “in the city” in the first place.  Columbia Heights is a 7-minute metro ride to Gallery Place.  Crystal City is an 11-minute metro ride to Gallery Place, and Clarendon is 12 minutes from Metro Center.  And you probably live father from the metro than most people who live in Arlington, so it’s basically a wash at best.  Want to go to Dupont, the Triangle, Adams Morgan, or Cap Hill?  I guess you can cab it and maybe beat me there by 4 minutes.

And places like Shaw and Columbia Heights are at least the new up-and-coming areas for yuppies to twitter their city experience from their iPhones.  Some people who need the feel of living “in the city” actually move to Tenleytown or Petworth or even 10th & Florida NE — are you people crazy?  This includes people I work with whose office is in freaking Ballston!  If you need to show people you have a DC address that badly just write DC on your return envelopes — as long as the zip code matches the Post Office will probably still be able to find you.  Petworth?  Really??

Yeah, I think I’ve just insulted pretty much 90% of the people I hang out with.  Whatever.  I live in Clarendon and I am in DC at least five times a week.  It takes me less time to get where I usually need to be than it did when I lived in downtown Nashville and owned a car.  And when I want to stay close to home, I’m a five-minute walk from everything I need and there’s plenty of nightlife and zero crime.  If you want to live “in the city” then that’s your business, but please don’t sacrifice your brain to do so.

I haven’t been following this issue as closely as I probably should, but this analysis of the contents of the stimulus bill is pretty sickening actually.

I know the party line isn’t “this will make things better” but rather “if we don’t do it things will surely be worse.”  But come on: even ignoring the gross inefficiencies, does anyone really believe the stimulus bill is going to improve economic conditions?

Jacob alerted me yesterday to this NPR story about the special election in Nashville to determine whether city workers must conduct all government business in English — which was defeated 56.5% to 43.5%.

From this morning’s Times write-up:

The proposal was introduced by Eric Crafton, a metropolitan councilman. It was opposed by a broad coalition including the mayor, civil rights groups, business leaders, ministers and the heads of nine institutions of higher education.

“The results of this special election reaffirm Nashville’s identity as a welcoming and friendly city,” Mayor Karl Dean said in a statement.

Mr. Crafton had said the policy would encourage immigrants to learn English and save the city more than $100,000 in translation and related costs. The policy allowed exceptions to its English-only rule for issues of health and safety.

Critics said the proposal would tarnish Nashville’s reputation as a cultural mixing pot and drive away immigrants and international businesses. They also accused Mr. Crafton of worsening anti-immigrant sentiment and wasting at least $350,000 of taxpayer’s money on a special election.

More coverage by the City Paper as well.

Okay, first, who wastes money on a special election for something like this — can’t it wait till a regularly scheduled election?  Second, English is already Tennessee’s official language, so this is kind of just piling on.  Third, Nashville is 67% white and 27% black, so it’s hard to see why Crafton thought the proposal was passable unless he figured no one would care about that meager 6% of people who look different from everyone else.

I don’t dispute the legal authority of a city or state to declare its own language, and moreover, I’m sympathetic to the idea that a city shouldn’t spend excessive amounts of money accommodating every cultural demographic.  But it doesn’t sound like the proposal was designed to save on printing forms in other languages; it sounds like the proposal was intended to prevent non-English speakers from being able to communicate with their government.  And that’s not cool.

Will’s column today is excellent and worth reading in its entirely, so I will quote only a small portion:

Obama’s preternatural confidence is intended to be infectious. His presidency begins as an exercise in psychotherapy for a nation suffering a crisis of confidence. But neither the nation nor the government that accurately represents it is constructed for consensus. And he will be unable to fault his office for his frustrations because, more than any predecessor except the first, the 44th president enters office with the scope of its powers barely circumscribed by law, and even less by public opinion.

Obama’s unprecedented power derives from the astonishing events of the past four months that have made indistinct the line between public and private sectors. Neither the public as currently alarmed, nor Congress as currently constituted, nor the Constitution as currently construed is an impediment to hitherto unimagined executive discretion in allocating vast portions of the nation’s wealth.

He acquires power just as the retreat of the state has been abruptly reversed.

O brave new world!  That has such people in’t!

It’s worth reflecting on the best reasons for Americans and free individuals across the globe to celebrate Inauguration Day, and it’s worth dismissing the worst ones.

It’s worth reflecting on the fact that Inauguration Day 1801 represented the peaceful transition of power to an opposing party, a sight rarely if ever witnessed prior to the birth of America.

It’s worth dismissing the notion of Inauguration Day as an opportunity for the victorious party to celebrate a collective licking of chops at the possible spoils they can extract at the expense of the losing party.

It’s worth reflecting on the best meaning of “Yes We Can,” that millions of people have descended on Washington to celebrate that decades of prosperity and productivity and human ingenuity have produced a nation that can elect a man who rose to power not on the circumstances of his heritage or ethnicity or financial advantage, but instead because of his commitment and intelligence and political aptitude and, yes, the content of his character.

It’s worth dismissing the worst meaning of “Yes We Can,” that millions of people have descended on Washington to gloat that one of the most skilled candidates in a generation held a $700 million fundraising advantage and seemingly the will of the world and only barely beat a geriatric candidate of a grossly unpopular incumbent party in the midst of two wars and a spiraling economy.

It’s worth reflecting on the historic significance of President Obama’s opportunity to, as the Post describes it, “recast the very nature of the presidency” and considering the various possible outcomes of that opportunity in the context of the limited powers granted to the executive branch by the same Constitution that provides for today’s peaceful transfer of power.
It’s worth dismissing the notion of a president as Commander-in-Chief of the economy — or worse, the country — instead hoping for the best results of leadership by inspiration as President Obama has proven so skilled at over the course of these past two years.

Inauguration Day represents an opportunity for us to hope for the best, and suspend our fear of the worst, if only for one day.  Congratulations to President Obama, and to the best elements of the country that he will now in many respects represent to the world.

It’s not the parade or the fanfare: it’s how they completely move one presidential family out and the other family in to the White House in six hours!

Last week I attended a panel discussion subtitled A Libertarian and Conservative Plan for the Future that I had much to take issue with — most notably the idea that any of the proposals had much if anything to do with libertarianism — but nonetheless included several interesting takeaways for consideration.

I’ll only comment briefly on just one item.  One of the panelists asserted that leftists tend to win when they create a successful narrative about the benefits of government, while conservatives tend to win when they create a successful narrative about the costs of government.  He went on to claim that GOP activists have been losing the narrative battle because they are way behind the Democrats in developing new ways to harness the power of technology, and in particular the internet, which is extremely conducive to building a shared sense of community around a compelling story.

I certainly understand the power of narrative, but I have two major problems with this theory.  First, narrative is useful but it is not sufficient to withstand the power of results.  Republicans are out of favorability because of their actions, not because of their spin.  Second, this analysis is inherently pessimistic toward the limited-government cause, essentially suggesting that conservatives have to be on permanent attack and that narratives about the benefits of choice and individual freedom are never winning strategies.  I’m not convinced.

If the main lesson the GOP draws from 2008 is that it needs to create more compelling narratives to highlight the costs of government, I would expect it to continue to hemorrhage libertarians and to spend quite a bit more time in the wilderness.

Some of you who read this will think I’m crazy while others will think I’m late to the party, but about a month ago I got a little too bored during my down time and became a hardcore Facebook stalker.

I don’t think you’re supposed to call it Facebook stalking, I think you’re just supposed to call it Facebooking or something.  Kind of like how you can’t call checking your Twitter feed religiously stalking, because that’s the whole point of the application.  But whatever, if you are constantly seeing what certain people do and you never really care what other people do, you’re basically doing a form of publicly sanctioned stalking.

Since I am now a Facebook stalker, I hereby request that some of you users consider the following guidelines to make life easier on me:

1. Profile pictures. Your profile picture should be a headshot of you.  Not a pet, not a cartoon character, and definitely not your boyfriend or girlfriend.  Pictures involving other people in addition to you should be rare and it should be obvious which person you are without having to click or mouse wave all over the place.

1a.  The marriage exception.  If you get married, your profile picture may be a wedding photo of the two of you for one month.  ONE MONTH.  After that, you return to being a normal human being.  Marriage is special but it is not rare, and you cannot milk it forever.

2.  Names.  Do not include initials instead of your actual first and last name.  If you are that concerned about your privacy, do not join Facebook.  If you are that concerned about the volume of random messages and pokes you receive, turn off messages and pokes, or pick an uglier profile picture.  Do not try to attract attention from certain people while avoiding it from others in a place like Facebook, you will fail.  Married women: do not remove your maiden name entirely when you get married.  It makes you hard to find and when you friend request me it is confusing.

3. Status updates.  Writing something that invites commenting is part of Facebook.  Writing something that no one knows what the hell it means without asking you is attention-baiting, don’t do that.  Also, when you write a status update that’s an inside joke for 3 people, do keep in mind that you will confuse almost everyone except those 3 people.  And I suggest keeping the links to a minimum — the less selective you are with your links the less people will click on them.

That’s all for now, but expect more on this subject.  I have many social networking pet peeves.

In a ridiculous and possibly racist move, the Nashville Metro Council meets tonight to consider a proposal to ban single bottles of beer in a very specific part of town that just happens to house mostly poor black citizens.

If you are concerned about excessive intoxication, you might target hard liquor or beer with a high alcohol content.  If you are concerned about underage drinking, you might target easy-to-obtain liquor or ID checking.  If you are concerned about alcohol-related crimes, you might target loitering or curfew ordinances or increase surveillance.

You only target single beer sales in an economically-depressed region of town if you want to keep poor people away from the alcoholic beverage they are most likely to want to purchase, because you specifically don’t like something about them.  And in that particular region of town, hmm, I wonder what that something could be?

I don’t really keep up with the proceedings of the Nashville City Council, so I don’t know what the rules are for a proposal to make it to the floor for discussion, but I do hope the Council isn’t seriously considering something so patently absurd and prejudicial as this appears to be.

The Titans lost to the Ravens on Saturday, fair and square, but it’s hard to get that bent out of shape about it because the Titans mostly beat themselves — and when a team beats themselves they don’t really deserve to win.

It was a game eerily similar to the 2000 Titans-Ravens playoff game, in which the Titans thoroughly dominated but lost essentially on freak plays.

The Titans look back to Jan. 7, 2001, and see their offense piling up 317 yards on the Ravens’ record-setting defense, they see 23 first downs to the Ravens’ six, they see 126 Titans rushing yards compared with the Ravens’ 49.

They even see 40 minutes, 29 seconds of possession time compared with the Ravens’ 19:31.

Yet they also see, and always will and forever see, a crushing 24-10 loss to end the last season the Titans finished a regular season with the best record in the league, at 13-3.

Last time, the Ravens’ Ray Lewis returned an interception for a touchdown — he simply ripped the ball out of Titans running back Eddie George’s hands — Baltimore blocked a Titans field-goal attempt and returned it 90 yards for a touchdown, then Titans kicker Al Del Greco missed two other field-goal attempts.

And from yesterday’s rematch:

It was the 2000 season all over again, in many ways. Just like the playoff loss that season, the Titans outplayed the Ravens on Saturday but lost. Tennessee became the third No. 1 seed from the AFC in the past four years to lose its playoff opener.

“You can say we gave that game away,” said defensive end Jevon Kearse, one of three Titans still around from the 2000 team, “but this one we really gave it away.

While the Ravens celebrated, many Titans stood motionless as the stunned crowd filed out of LP Field, their AFC Championship tickets now just a souvenir. What they’d seen was a mistake-filled game that ended up costing their team.

It didn’t matter that the Titans had out-gained the Ravens 391-211 and outnumbered them in first downs 21-9. What mattered were the three crucial turnovers, the 12 penalties for 89 yards, a mishandled snap on fourth down at the Baltimore 30, and some blown assignments in the secondary that led to Baltimore points.

As for those 211 Ravens yards: one 48-yard touchdown pass on completely blown coverage, one 37-yard pass into double coverage where two defenders went for the likely interception but crashed into each other to fall out of the way, and a critical 23-yard third-down pass on the game-winning touchdown drive after the play clock had clearly expired.  Over half their total yards on three garbage plays?  Sigh.

Anyway, if you watched the game you know how loud it was — it was truly a great game to be at in spite of the score.  But now I get to decide which team is the least evil to root for in the playoffs, and my choices are the Eagles, Cardinals, Steelers, and Ravens?  So I’m an Arizona fan now?  Ugh.

Okay, enough of that.  Time to get ready for next season!

As an SEC fan I’ll be supporting Florida in tonight’s BCS championship game, but when the Associated Press voters cast their ballots for national champion, I hope they pick Utah.

BCS supporters are certainly correct about one thing: compared to the preceding system, it makes it more likely for the top two teams to meet at the end of the season.  That’s not why I hate the BCS.  I hate the BCS because when the unlikely scenarios roll around, such as the Texas/Oklahoma/Texas Tech three-way or Utah and Boise State finishing the regular season undefeated, the process for resolving the issues is tainted by flagrant, unapologetic, money-grabbing cartel behavior.

The NCAA is easily the biggest cartel in the world — more famous and powerful and successful in its aims even than OPEC.  But the BCS, amazingly, is a cartel within a cartel!  It is a pact between 66 of the 119 “Football Bowl Subdivision” teams to reward certain conferences with major bowl payouts and TV revenues and deny other teams a similar opportunity.

And this brings us to the Utah-Alabama game.  If the BCS hadn’t rewritten their rules to allow a couple of narrow scenarios for including mid-major conference champions, which they did purely out of fear that the backlash had teeth, Utah wouldn’t have even been in a BCS bowl in the first place.  And interestingly, they would have been playing Virginia Tech instead of Alabama, except that the Orange Bowl had last pick this year and nobody wanted Cincinnati — a 10-2 team from a conference that was crappy this year but got into a BCS bowl anyway because the cartel rules give their conference an automatic bid.

And Utah won.  They beat a team ranked #1 for much of the season whose only loss was to a team playing tonight for the BCS championship — and it wasn’t even that close of a game.  Rick Reilly, in a fantastic column, says the BCS has no credibility if a team like Utah finishes the season undefeated and can’t be declared the champion.

Argue with this, please. I beg you. Find me anybody else that went undefeated. Thirteen-and-zero. Beat four ranked teams. Went to the Deep South and seal-clubbed Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. The same Alabama that was ranked No. 1 for five weeks. The same Alabama that went undefeated in the regular season. The same Alabama that Florida beat in order to get INTO the BCS Championship game in the first place.

I also thoroughly enjoyed John Feinstein’s challenge: if the only team that wins all their games can’t be declared the champion, then college football isn’t even a real sport.

Championships, as we all know, are supposed to be won, not selected. That’s one reason why figure skating, though it may be athletic and at times sublimely aesthetic isn’t a sport. The same goes for diving or any alleged competition that involves judging. Chess is a sport; gymnastics is not.

Sadly, the preening, hypocrital [sic] presidents who run the so-called Bowl Championship Series have turned college football into figure skating. Maybe next year at season’s end, coaches who believe their teams have a case to be national champion can sit together in a “kiss and cry,” area, hold hands and wait for the judges’ scores to be posted. Wouldn’t you just love to see Mack Brown and Bob Stoops holding hands while they wait?

Saying Utah doesn’t deserve to play for the national championship because they’re from the Mountain West conference is a bit like saying Obama didn’t deserve to run for president because he was a senator and senators don’t usally end up becoming president anyway.  And if that analogy holds, the BCS is something like the Republicans and Democrats making a pact to prohibit senators from running for president from their parties, then launching a media blitz against any senator who runs from a third party arguing that running from a third party is sufficient evidence that senators are unqualified.

Point being: the BCS sucks, cartels suck, the BCS is a particularly effective cartel making it a particularly sucky institution, and this all sucks particularly badly for Utah right now.  I sincerely hope that university presidents listen to the strong opinions of their fans on this matter and react accordingly.

This morning, Isaac Morehouse at Students for a Free Economy takes on a reporter’s whining about legislative turnover.  The reporter in question, Tim Skubick, is annoyed because all the reporters and lobbyists have to learn 46 new faces this term, making it harder to curry favors in the elevator and whatnot.

Two comments on this.  First, I concur with Isaac — if there are that many favors being curried in the elevator by reporters and lobbyists in the elevator (and we know there are) then we want new blood as often as realistically possible in part to intentionally keep those relationships from getting too cosy.  He notes how term limits can be useful in this regard.

Second, I work in a job that practices and teaches networking as a part of offering career assistance.  I attend a number of conferences and events each year, meeting probably 400 new students in total, and I need to learn their names, skill sets, and career interests in a very short period of time as part of the worthwhile cause of helping them get jobs.  So I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for a reporter’s challenge in learning the faces of 40 relatively high-profile figures he’s going to spend the next several years with.

And since his primary role is presumably to figure out what representatives are doing with the cash they’re taking from the paychecks of their citizens, I hope he takes the time to investigate a lot more than just putting names to faces.

Saturday’s Titans-Ravens game is going to be a bloodbath, but also an opportunity to exorcise old demons.  Yours truly will be in attendance, for good or ill.

From Reason:

One of the axioms of American democracy is that we are a government of laws, not of men. But as Steve Chapman writes, the Democrats in the U.S. Senate may ignore the rule of law and indulge their own preferences by rejecting Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s lawful selection of Roland Burris to fill the senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama.

Steve Chapman’s article lays it out pretty clearly, and I’d be hard pressed to disagree.  Blagojevich is reprehensible at best, criminal at worst.  But he hasn’t been convicted yet, and he certainly hasn’t been removed from office.  The governor seems to have every right to make the appointment provided that he does so before being impeached, and if the Senate doesn’t like it their only lawful recourse seems to be to try and impeach Burris upon arrival.

Sure, I think vacancies ought to be filled by special election rather than appointment.  In addition to being more democratic, it would decrease this business of appointing a bunch of Senate colleagues to cabinet positions, then letting people who couldn’t get elected in their own right, e.g. Burris, Michael Bennet, Caroline Kennedy, get appointed to the vacancies and later run as incumbents.  But that’s not current Illinois law, and unless the Supreme Court can find some reason to rule the law unconstitutional I’m pretty sure we can’t ignore it.  (In fact, as Chapman points out, the Court specifically drew the opposite conclusion!)

I put a more interesting question to you: let’s say it was conclusively proven after the appointment that Blagojevich had effectively sold the seat, but we couldn’t prove the appointed senator had anything to do with it.  Would there be grounds for impeaching the senator?

So I was watching a crappy movie on TBS this evening, and I noticed something very interesting about their censoring decisions.  The movie is rated PG-13, and the uncensored version uses nearly all of the standard profanity.  The TV version edits all of these words except “bitch,” which was used frequently and in a variety of contexts.  What could possibly have driven them to apply a standard for censorship that prohibits every word except this one?