Last week I wrote about Prop 19 in California and the kooky provision that doesn’t allow employers to discriminate against pot users the same way they can discriminate against the users of other legal products:

If it doesn’t affect job performance, I believe it should be a non-issue. However, it not-infrequently is going to cause problems in the workplace the same way that alcohol consumption does. Adding a layer making it more difficult to fire people that smoke pot compared to people that don’t is highly concerning.

Mike Hunt noted in the comments:

Can we admit that the whole medical marijuana thing is a scam?

I never responded to that snippit, but my response was going to be “Maybe. But it’s not just a scam. It’s also a start.”

As if to bring these two thoughts together, I ran across this article about how the new medicinal marijuana law in Arizona puts employers in the same bind as employers in California would have been if the law had passed:

“If the positive drug test is of a person who’s a cardholder, the law has a presumption that the marijuana use was for medical purposes, not recreational,” Phoenix attorney David Selden.

That, Selden said, presents a new hurdle for a company that wants to fire a worker: proving impairment.

“One of the most common ways is through symptoms,” he said, “a delayed reaction, a lack of perception, loss of energy, bloodshot eyes, dilated pupils – those kinds of things that people remember from college,” Selden said.

“It’s turning employers into the equivalent of a field sobriety test,” he continued. “There is a not a scientific measurement of impairment the way there is for alcohol.”

This is where the fact that medicinal marijuana is a scam is problematic. If medicinal marijuana were regulated like other drugs with prescriptions and all those other buzzkills, I might actually agree with this provision. If someone has a condition for which they need the drug, perhaps they should not be discriminated against unless their job performance suffers. But… come on. It’s not being used that way. This is something that Arapaho learned very quickly after implementing their system. It’s a backdoor to legalization. And as such, I think that discrimination against card-holders (on the basis of a failed drug test) ought to be legal unless they’re willing to undergo the exact same procedures that other people do for other medications. Or at the very least have put together a proposal to make really look like it was for dying cancer patients.

Of course, for that to happen, you would probably have to get pharmaceutical companies involved rather than letting people grow it on their own. Which defeats the real purpose of it. And lets profits go to the “bad guys” who non-libertarian supporters of medmar hate. And is just generally a buzzkill. Of course, if it ever really becomes legal, the profits will start going to you know who. Which will be a buzzkill even before they start putting pictures of people dying on the boxes.

ED Kain defends the notion that, if a municipality wants it, they should be allowed to have multiple trash collectors:

It may be a small issue – so long as your trash is collected, it doesn’t really matter that much who picks it up – but the Tea Partiers are right this time: having choice is a good thing, even for trash collection. If the government came in and said “You can only buy Dell computers from now on” people would be unhappy. We want to be able to choose what kind of computer we buy – and not just because maybe we prefer Apple, but because we know that competition keeps innovation up and prices down.

Now, in trash collection you probably won’t see too much innovation, but competition will keep prices down and quality of service high. If you don’t like the people picking up your trash, or the containers they provide, or the driver is rude, or whatever – you can switch.

I agree on all counts. I would imagine it’s the case as often as not that it makes more sense to have a single collector. But while monopolies can have their virtues for some things, they can also create drawbacks.

In addition to the scenarios that ED describes, I can also pretty easily imagine scenarios where you might simply want things done a different way than a monopolistic trash-collecting agency would prefer to do them. For instance, you may want a larger bin collected once every other week rather than a smaller one collected weekly. You may prefer an on-call collection if you only need trash picked up periodically.

Some of these options may be difficult to pull off with everybody making the profit they need, or it could lead to price escalation if the local monopoly is able to keep prices low because of the monopoly. These are issues for local areas to fight out amongst themselves. To be fair, this was a local issue decided locally. But it’s natural and not-crazy for the people to object to policies that they dislike. Calling it “socialism” extends the word beyond any useful meaning, but it’s not hard to be sympathetic to people that want things a certain way and the powers at be decide they should be another.

In Callie, where I live, I doubt it makes any sort of sense to have anything but the standard one-collector model. But when I was living in Soundview, a much more urban area, there may have been more room to maneuver. In Soundview, we had small bins collected weekly, which was kind of a pain in the rear because if you ever had anything of any size, you had to go to the dump. In Callie, we have large bins collected weekly and I find that I only put the trash out every other week or so… but the large bin means that if I have something large I can stick it out there, which is nice.

And a thing about trash collection is that, unlike fire service, there is room for experimentation without houses burning down and pets dying. If competition leads to higher prices, you can reverse yourself. If a monopoly become exceedingly indifferent to customer needs, you can privatize.

To me, this doesn’t really need to be an ideological issue at all. The notion that municipal trash collection equals socialism makes socialists out of a lot of us. Questioning the notion that municipal trash collection (either by city workers or a sole city contract) does not mean that you HATE GOVERNMENT. Different models work in different places. Of course, I am more than willing to condemn Obion County for their fire department arrangements that caused that house to burn down, but it’s because quite apparently the system they chose (a) wasn’t working and (b) lead to tragic events that were entirely foreseeable.

-{Note: Yeah, this post is kind of dated. It slipped through the cracks.}-

Aside from the fact that Arapaho had no competitive races to name, part of me hoped that I was in California simply so I could vote for Proposition 19. The Pot-Prop. Different people have different views on decriminalization in general, and to each their own, but while I do not favor decriminalization of all drugs I do favor it for marijuana. Not out of any desire to smoke pot myself (I tried it; it wasn’t for me) nor any love of pot smokers. Mostly because in the cost-benefit analysis of the comparative virtues and vices of the increased pot usage that would come with legalization and its share of the War on Drugs, I come down on the side of decriminalization. For some it’s a matter of freedom, but not so much for me. I don’t favor the decriminalization of all other narcotics, though I can be convinced on a case-by-case basis using the same criteria for cocaine as for pot.

In addition to the War on Drugs angle, Sheila Tone made a good point about the repercussions the illegality has on reuniting families where one parent or the other breaks that particular law.

Unfortunately, the legalization movement is saddled with, among other things, The Barry Cooper Problem. It’s my view that the legalization movement needs to be spearheaded by reasonable and humble individuals who recognize that rightly or wrongly people have reservations about legalizing pot and it does no good to call them ugly names, insult them, or treat their concerns as utterly invalid. Instead we have Barry Cooper’s antics and apparently people who believe that it’s not just a question of whether pot should be legal or not but a question of respecting the decisions of those who choose to partake. For me, one of the stronger arguments in the pro-freedom side of most issues is “just because something is a bad idea doesn’t mean it should be illegal” and its cousin “just because something is legal does not mean you have to approve.” For a free society to work and to keep Big Brother out of it, I believe we have to condemn behavior we consider inappropriate. Otherwise, given the choice between something being illegal and something being condoned by society at large, a lot more people are going to choose “illegal.”

If Mickey Kaus is right, the people behind Proposition 19 forgot this or simply didn’t care:

The measure seems to have been hurt by a wacky, overreaching provision that would effectively have made stoners a protected class when it comes to hirings and firings. Even the Greenberg poll found a 50-44 majority think employers should be able to fire those who test positive on drug tests even if “they come to work sober and ready to work.” I voted against 19 because of this provision (and wouldn’t trust an initiative that was written by anyone who’d write that provision, even if it were excised). After all, once a new protected class has been created, is it ever un-created? Stoners would have special legal protections against firing, probably forever (with employers having to prove their pot use “actually impairs job performance”). I might have to become one myself

This is… highly problematic. Now, as it happens, I believe that hiring people you know smoke pot but that perform well regardless is good business practice. Those old school Hit Coffee readers will remember Falstaff, my former Mormon-dominated employer that sought to weed out all the weedheads even as we tried to explain that we could be weeding out some of our best performers. If it doesn’t affect job performance, I believe it should be a non-issue. However, it not-infrequently is going to cause problems in the workplace the same way that alcohol consumption does. Adding a layer making it more difficult to fire people that smoke pot compared to people that don’t is highly concerning.

This is a level of protection that cigarette smokers do not get. Nor, I should add, should they/we. I resented the former employer of mine that refused to hire smokers, but I believe that while their policy was unwise, intrusive, and indicative of an employer I did not want to work for… it was also, like a number of their other policies, within their purview*. The same goes for alcohol consumption, though no employer I am familiar with tests for that sort of thing. The only reason that up until recently it seemed bizarre to discriminate against smokers is that they were so large in number and it was such an accepted activity. Ultimately, we don’t want pot to become as socially accepted as cigarettes were. We don’t want cigarettes that accepted, either! Those things I say above about societal disapproval applies to my own vices as well. Easier to keep the cat in the bag, though, when it comes to things currently on the periphery of society the same way that we should wish smoking were.

That the pushers of Proposition 19 felt the need to put this in there shows a pretty significant disconnect with the rest of society. I see it on a number of blogs where “all reasonable people” agree that pot should be legal. The problem is that “all reasonable people” is a minority of the population. It does the movement no good to ignore that. And even among those “all reasonable people” a lot of people feel the same way I do about employment law. Some may hold their nose and vote for it anyway, but a lot won’t. And a lot of people who recognize on some vague level that the War on Drugs (as it pertains to marijuana) is not a fight worth fighting will use that as an excuse to vote against decriminalizing a behavior that they only marginally object to (or, in some cases, indulged in when they were younger).

The point of this exercise should not be to vindicate pot-smokers. Nor should it be, as Barry Cooper is inclined to do, to stick it to the buzzkills that want to stand between you and your weed. The point is to take this minimally-harmful substance and separate it from the substantially-harmful war against it. Because if you’re asking people to line up behind pot-smokers, you’re going to lose just as surely as smokers are losing one battle after another to stigmatize their/our habit.

* – And not just because of the “it saves them money on health insurance” rationale. Bregna, the former employer in question, didn’t care about that. The president of the company just didn’t like smokers. He wanted a certain kind of employee working for him and viewed the overlap of people that fit that profile and smoke were small. There are also issues of smokers having, in general, lower levels of productivity.

A couple of Wall Street Journal articles of interest.

First, an article about consolidation in the health care industry:

Unlike Medicare and Medicaid, private reimbursement rates are determined by negotiations, often highly antagonistic. Insurers always attribute premium increases to the underlying cost of care, while doctors and hospitals always argue that there isn’t enough competition among health plans. Both claims are “true,” some of the time—but it depends on which side has more market power.

Insurers extract lower rates by steering patients and revenue to certain providers through their networks. Providers gain bargaining leverage when health plans can’t credibly threaten to exclude them, whether because their share of the market is too large or due to public demand for “must have” hospitals. Consolidation will increasingly feed off itself as providers and insurers vie to get the whip hand in rate negotiations.

Most neutral experts believe the balance of power has tipped toward providers over the last decade, though this isn’t always anticompetitive. Higher rates generally reflect investments in staffing, technology, specialization and sometimes consumer preferences. There is also the cost-shift to private insurance to offset Medicare’s price controls. However, most economic studies on hospital M&A over the last two decades show that consolidation increases unit prices, though there is significant disagreement over the magnitude.

If most neutral experts believe it, it’s probably true. A few factors are worth noting. If providers have increased leverage, it’s due in part because they’ve had to make sacrifices to get it. As the article copiously notes, consolidation in the health care industry is increasing. The local hospital bought up a number of the local doc practices and Clancy is an employee in the hospital. The job she interviewed in Gemini Falls was also part of a large, multi-practice group. Autonomy used to be one of the big plusses when it came to doctors but it’s no longer worth it. It’s sort of like an invading army forcing a local medieval town into the castle. Yeah, they residents have got the high ground, but only because they left where they want to be.

And I have to take this moment to point out that physician wages have, despite the leverage, been stagnant*. So where is this extra money going? I would guess it’s as the article said: infrastructure improvements. Probably increased administrative staffs, too. Clancy’s employer is building a new hospital, for instance (but they’ve also forced an essential wage-cut amongst at least some of the doctors). Another area of concern is that a lot of these infrastructure improvements can be geared towards things that will ultimately increase the costs of health care in the long run. Buying new machines that will perform expensive tests and the like**. Once you have these machines, you want to use them! So care and testing will probably become more aggressive and, hence, more expensive. There’s not much good to be said about the doctor shortage in this country, but in some ways it probably is keeping health care expenses down. You might pay doctors more than you otherwise would, but there are fewer doctors performing aggressive and ultimately unnecessary treatment***.

Also, did Medicare kill the family doctor?

Eventually, that disconnect (and subsequent program expansions) resulted in significant strain on the federal budget. In 1966, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated that by 1990 the Medicare budget would quadruple to $12 billion from $3 billion. In fact, by 1990 it was $107 billion.

To fix the cost problem, Medicare in 1992 began using the “resource based relative value system” (RBRVS), a way of evaluating doctors based on factors such as education, effort and specialized training. But the system didn’t consider factors such as outcomes, quality of service, severity or demand.

Today most insurance companies use the Medicare RBRVS because it is perceived as objective. As a result of RBRVS, specialists—especially those who perform a lot of procedures—do extremely well. Primary-care doctors do not.

The primary-care doctor has become a piece-rate worker focused on the volume of patients seen every day. As Medicare and insurers focused on trimming the costs of the most common procedures, the income and job satisfaction of primary-care doctors eroded.

If you wonder why it’s so hard to get much of a doctor’s time, this accounts for a lot of it. As mentioned before, doctorly pay has been stagnant. This is due to the fact that doctors have made up for what would be substantial losses by seeing patients in much more rapid succession. Due to the general nature of their work, there can simultaneously be a shortage in primary care (both in absolute terms and relative to specialists) and primary care physicians can be seen as “a dime a dozen” when it comes to negotiation. The result is fewer and fewer doctors going into primary care and more and more specialists which end up limiting what primary care physicians can do (for instance, Clancy can only perform cesarean sections because there are no obstetricians in town to object) which ends up making it so that primary care physicians get to do less of the things that might provide job satisfaction and pay boosts.

Specialization doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but at the very least you need a more complete “front line” to screen patients and refer them to specialists. This is an area where having mid-level providers may be more of a help. Or importing more doctors. I am skeptical of the notion that having more primary care docs (or docs in general) will lower health care costs without other substantive change, but it could help the front line problem. The only alternative to the supply-side is the demand-side, and it’s difficult to ask patience to triage themselves, determine that they don’t need care after all, or to seek the cheapest available option when their copay is the same no matter what they do.

One idea I have been toying around with is shifting more of the primary care to the government or insurance companies and let them worry about containing costs. I am not sure how much I trust the government to contain costs and I’m not sure how much I trust insurance companies to give patients a fair shake.

* – This isn’t a complaint. Doctors are still very well paid.

** – I don’t have any information on whether any of this is going on at Clancy’s hospital. But it’s an industry-wide issue.

*** – Some of this may be in the form of doctorly profiteering, but that’s not even what I am referring to here. Tests can be unnecessary but still be beneficial. Think of it like taking medicine to get over a cold two days earlier than you otherwise would have. It’s not necessary, but it’s nice. It’s nice, but it ultimately costs the system money. One of the peculiarities of the health care industry is that the two primary decision-makers, doctors and patients, often have little incentive to consider costs of treatment. Those whose job it is to consider costs, insurance companies and the government, face really bad publicity by stepping in and stopping payment on what a doctor thinks would be beneficial and a patient wants on the grounds that the substantial cost outweigh the smaller but potentially very real benefits.

Recently, I’ve been seeing a large number of articles claiming that things are “less civil” in society than in the past. It’s to the point where comedians John Stewart and Stephen Colbert actually held a rally in support of polite discourse.

Some people writing columns or discussing matters point to recent epithets like “rethuglican”, “demoncrat”, “teabaggers”, and on and on. They discuss whether the “decline of civility” leads to bad behavior and the occasional “off-camera, off-microphone” remark that nevertheless gets recorded and magnified since it can be played as a moment of “the candidate being honest” in a bad way. Instances and occasions that are more the result of one or two hotheads in a crowd of thousands or millions are claimed, by the other side, to be “representative” of everyone present.

A number of them from one side make the claim that Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States, is getting “more than his fair share” because of the color of his skin. Of course, many of these same article writers laughed and enjoyed and said nothing about things like this.

The idea of political discourse being un-heated and non-insulting at some mythological point in the past… well, it’s just not true. Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, was derided by his opponents as the “Negro President”. One guy’s done a great job translating the words of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams into modern-day attack ads. Jefferson’s opponents also circulated scurrilous verses regarding his alleged relationship with a slave by the name of Sally Hemings.

Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr settled their political differences by a duel to the death. Preston Brooks beat a fellow senator with his cane; Stephen Douglas had said of the beaten man, “this damn fool [Sumner] is going to get himself shot by some other damn fool.” Lyndon Baines Johnson ran this ad. Spiro Agnew was skewered with a mere laugh track.

In 1986, comedian Robin Williams was already making Alzheimer’s/senility jokes about Ronald Reagan. When 1994 came around and Reagan was actually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, there were certain very incivil people who thought that they were being inventive or unique by asking “does he even remember being president?”

It is a mark of some hilarity, actually, that for the man often derided in recent memory as the “worst president ever”, the worst nickname that could be brought up (at least until, post-presidency, he revealed a very nasty anti-semitic streak) was “Jimmah Cardigan”, and that the worst portrayal of him was that of a bumbling milquetoast. Carter is definitely an outlier.

So, to sum up: is Obama on the receiving end of insults? Undoubtedly. Are they any worse than those received by previous Presidents? I think “Chimpy McBushitler”, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, as well as most of the others who were at all notable, have a definite case to make that they’re not.

Hit Coffee is not a partisan political blog, so I am going to avoid making any sort of direct commentary on the goodness or badness of the GOP’s success in Tuesday’s elections. Everyone’s got their opinion (some excited, some mixed). Everything I have to say about the Republican success this year applies equally to the Democratic success in 2006.

Among the Democratic casualties this time around was the local County Board Member, Mona Garacci. Think of a Delosian CBM as a cross between a city councilman and a mayor of sorts. They vote on county policy, but also have some executive authority on how money within their district is spent. District Four, which includes East Oak and the larger Mayne area where I was raised, really hit the jackpot when a former Colosse City Treasurer decided to make her landing place as our district and decided to represent us when term limited out of her previous job. Despite having no real connections to the area that I am aware of, she relocated to Mayne and represented the district quite well. My mother, who almost never votes for Democrats, voted for her twice. My only complaint was that she didn’t run for mayor or something more substantial. After two terms in office, she’s been unseated.

This happens in Colosse and Delosa, as well as the rest of the country I am sure, any time a party has a particularly good showing in national elections (usually in an off-year election). I knew of some really good Republican judges that were wiped out four years ago. Twelve years before that, when the Republicans started taking over the state, I didn’t know many of the Democrats that got unseated but there were a lot of Republicans that got elected that had no business in public office. I don’t mean that they had ideas with which I disagreed. I mean that someone was elected to the State Supreme Court who hadn’t yet passed the bar. But he was the only Republican that declared for that race, won the nomination on that basis, and then was swept in with a general Republican sentiment.

As Delosa became more Republican generally, this kept happening though less and less with each passing election as more Republicans of substance started running. Then the local and state party apparatuses started making sure that those that mistakenly got in started getting opponents that would unseat them. The system ultimately worked itself out save for some of the misjudgments of Republican politics in the south more generally (but that’s a matter of subjective judgment).

When the Democrats stormed in in the 2006 elections, you actually saw the same things except in the other direction at the county level which flipped from red to blue. Colosse has hundreds of elected judges and so unless a judge is particularly notorious, it doesn’t really matter what they stand for (if such things should matter with judges) or what their ethics are (which should matter). One judge all but refused to allow prosecutions to go forward if the law was one he did not agree with. A district attorney in neighboring Southport County announced that it was county policy never to pursue the death penalty (which I oppose, but such broad policy-making should not be a DA’s job). And so on, and so on.

Little is known of Board Member Garacci’s opponent even by those that actually follow local politics. He was, like some of the kooky Republicans of 1994 and Democrats in 2006, the guy who just happened to decide to run. Garacci, for her part, speaks well of the guy. She also shot down some pretty shameful attempts by the Colosse Herald to suggest that her loss had something to do with the fact that she was a woman and a childless and unmarried one at that. Losing with class was perhaps her best revenge.

As I’ve been contemplating the problem of the Obion County Fire (mentioned here and here), I’ve come to the conclusion that this is ultimately a systems problem. The South Fulton Fire Department developed a system that was so untenable that a good portion of the time they refused to stick to it. In the past, they had let people slide on the annual fee and taken care of their houses anyway. In this case, they didn’t. In my mind, this selective enforcement of the rules is the biggest error they made.

I mean, the imagery of watching a house burn while protecting the house next door simply doesn’t set well. But forcing fire departments to take care of emergencies that they do not have jurisdiction over and are not being paid for isn’t right, either. Yes, the landowner said that he would pay whatever the cost. Even leaving aside the question of Free Riderism for a moment, the fire department had no way of knowing whether he would even be able to. Transplanted Lawyer and Peter mention that they could arrange something where you put a lien on the house, but as far as I know they do not presently have the power to do so. Maybe they should be given that power. Or maybe they should have a county-wide fire department.

And non-payment is a real problem. According to the County (which is not the entity running the fire department in question, so this is not an arse-covering thing), municipalities recover their fees (in addition to the annual $75 fee, you get charged $500 to get them to come out) less than half the time. That’s one of the reasons that many municipal fire departments, including South Fulton, instituted the annual fees to begin with. In order to recover costs, they add an annual fee of money they get upfront.

The problem with this arrangement is that incidents like this are entirely forseeable. Responding regardless of whether they are up to date on their dues leads people to ignore their dues. This is, of course, where the Free Rider problem comes into play. Why pay the fee if they’re going to respond anyway? As with most forms of insurance and warrantees, most people who pay in don’t get their money’s worth. Most people paying the fee won’t have a fire. Not paying the fee makes sense. This is where South Fulton’s inconsistent application of policy is so problematic.

The most obvious solution to this is to implement mandatory coverage and/or taxes, which is what most places seem to do. South Fulton does not have the ability to tax non-city residents, but Obion County could make accommodations or could start their own fire department. In fact, some tried to do just that, but the idea was shot down. The people of the county, through their representatives, chose precisely the incomplete system that let Cranick’s place burn.

There was a system in place. A bad system, in my estimation, though I am not a resident of Obion County and maybe there are good reasons for it that I am not seeing. But… they took their chances and decided that mandatory fire protection was not the way to go, and so Cranick’s house burned to the ground. South Fulton bears part of the responsibility for coming up with a system that until Cranick even they couldn’t live with. Cranick bears part of the responsibility for failing to pay his dues. Most of the responsibility, though, is the system that decided that houses burning to the ground was an acceptable outcome for the sake of lower taxes or personal choice/responsibility.

Over at MSNBC, coverage of some disgusting behavior by some disgusting individuals masquerading as “first responders”:

Cranick, who lives outside the city limits, admits he “forgot” to pay the annual $75 fee. The county does not have a county-wide firefighting service, but South Fulton offers fire coverage to rural residents for a fee.

Cranick says he told the operator he would pay whatever is necessary to have the fire put out.

His offer wasn’t accepted, he said.
…
“They put water out on the fence line out here. They never said nothing to me. Never acknowledged. They stood out here and watched it burn,” Cranick said.

South Fulton’s mayor said that the fire department can’t let homeowners pay the fee on the spot, because the only people who would pay would be those whose homes are on fire.

As we’ve discussed earlier, the problem with people buying in “only when needed” on certain items like health insurance is ongoing. Will proposes a graduated-coverage solution for “previously existing conditions”, wherein people are given incentive to have continuing coverage.

This isn’t quite the same, but at the same time, it’s a point where the behavior of certain entities – hospitals, police, firefighters, certain mayors – goes beyond what I think any sane human would consider reasonable. Was Mr. Cranick un-covered for the year? Yes. Could the firefighters have come out, put the fire out, and then assessed a reasonable fee – at 20x the $75 fee it’s only $1500 to save his irreplaceable family items and pets? Absolutely.

Instead, the firefighters – apparently by order of their chief, if not the mayor – actually stood by and did nothing while a man’s entire life and family pets burned to ashes.

I don’t really have much else to say on it. I’m at a loss for words as to how not a single firefighter would say “hold the phone, put the fire out, figure out the money crap later.” It goes against any code of ethics I’ve ever seen, and it strikes me that whoever made this decision and held the firefighters to it probably should go up on animal cruelty charges as well; they had every ability to save the lives of the family pets, but deliberately decided not to do so, for whatever reason.

My faith in human nature just took another dent.

A while back I commented on Redstone and compared it to Fort Beck:

It reminds me of all I liked about Fort Beck, where I lived in Deseret, in comparison to Mocum, where I worked. Mocum had the whole “Mormon town” thing that was problematic to a Gentile like me, but in addition to that and despite the better amenities, the better economy, the more educated population, and a number of other factors I never warmed to it the same way I warmed to the usually disdained Fort Beck. Fort Beck and Redstone are both disdained by their respective states, but in my view both had more personality than the places populated with people disdaining them.

One of the things these two towns have in common is that they are both blue dots in seas of red. Redstone in particularly is a Democratic stronghold owing back to its mining days and the unions that protected the minors’ interests.

Fort Beck is historically blue-to-purple owing primarily to unions as well, in this case railroad and manufacturing unions. However, unlike Redstone, Fort Beck is trending purple. It started shortly before we moved there. Beck County was host to what were known as the Beck County Eight, a group of six state reps and state senators that were members of the Democratic supra-minority in the state legislature. Deseret is a very conservative state and so this was a significant portion of the liberal delegation. However, that started to change as the Mormon population increased and as union power waned. So all six were considered vulnerable in the 2004 election.

I didn’t have a TV with any reception during the 2004 election, so after dropping off at the voting booth I needed to find some place to watch the election returns come in. I chose the diner that happened to be the location of the election party of the Beck County Democratic Party. I didn’t know this at first. I jut happened to strike up a conversation with another guy at the bar who happened to be a firey liberal. Then another guy joined in and he was to the left of the first guy. I was feeling positively rightwing. Eventually I put the pieces together.

At some point a little later in the evening I saw a man being interviewed by the local TV network. I asked Bill, the guy sitting next to me, who the interviewee was. Turns out it was State Senator Don Edwards, one of the Beck County Eight. When Edwards was done and the TV cameras were gone, he sat down next to Bill and they started a conversation. Bill commented that some mutual acquaintance of theirs (a Republican, I gathered) said that he was confident that all of the BC8 would be wiped out.

To which Edwards replied, “If they’re going to vote against themselves like that, this shithole deserves what it gets.”

Not how you expect a state senator to refer to the town which he represents.

Bill’s Republican acquaintance was wrong, the Beck County Eight were not wiped out despite Bush taking the state by a nearly 40% margin. Instead, they became the Beck County Seven, with Edwards being the only Democrat to lose. Notably, this was not because he was in a more conservative district within the county. The districts are overlapping and the same voters who returned 7 of the 8 were the ones that left him out. Perhaps it was not the first time he expressed contempt for his constituency.

I saw on the news yesterday that congress is considering legislation that will restrict youth’s ability to drive:

U.S. Senator Chris Dodd and U.S. Representatives Tim Bishop and Michael Castle were chief sponsors of the bill which will push states to adopt the Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) program. The importance of the bill was emphasized with the display of two vehicles that had been totalled in a car crash where teenagers were killed.

The main focus of this campaign and proposed federal act is to save the lives of our teenagers. Auto accident-related death is the number one killer of young people between the ages of 15 and 20. On average, 10 teenagers are killed in car crashes, either as drivers or passengers, each and every day in the U.S.

I don’t oppose most of the law on principle. Having a graduated system where more and more rights are accumulated over time would indeed save lives. While it’s true that a portion of the teenage driver accidents is a result of inexperience which would be a problem whether you’re driving for the first time at 16 or 46, there’s no question that innate maturity also plays a role. To take the items one by one:

A 3-stage licensing process (learner’s permit and intermediate stage before unrestricted driver’s license)

This strikes me as reasonable. Having a system where increased privileges are earned could be a benefit to more than just driving.

A prohibition on unsupervised nighttime driving during the learner’s permit and intermediate stages

What about a sixteen or seventeen year old with a job? What if they’re coming home after football practice or some other extra-curricular activity? There are a lot of valid reasons for kids to be driving at night. Also, what if you’re 17 and in college? Curfews have exemptions for these sorts of things. Does this law?

A passenger restriction during the learner’s permit and intermediate stage (no more than 1 non-familial passenger under the age of 21 unless a licensed driver over 21 years of age is in the vehicle);

This could be an inconvenience for parents who have their kids carpool while driving to school or at home from practice. Clancy wants to apply this rule to our future kids whether it’s the law or not. I am less convinced. The safety stats are there, of course, but there is more to life than safety (my views are this are subject to change when I am actually responsible for taking care of a kid). In fact, a law would settle this disagreement with us and probably for the better. Our kids wouldn’t be at a social disadvantage if it were the law rather than us clipping their wings. Our kids wouldn’t lose out because some other parents let their kids do what we won’t let ours.

A prohibition on non-emergency use of cell phones and other communication devices, including text messaging, during the learner’s permit and intermediate stages;

No problem with these laws in theory, but they don’t work where they’ve already been tried with adults.

Age 16 for issuance of learner’s permit and full licensure at age 18;

See above for the problem with these age limitations. Also, there’s something to be said for allowing kids more freedom while their parents are able to look after them rather than when they’ve already left for college and already dealing with the potential of too much new freedom at once. But those are relatively thin objections. Still concerned about extra-curricular activities, jobs, and other reasons the kids might be out late, though.

Any other requirement adopted by the Secretary of Transportation, including learner’s permit holding period at least 6 months; intermediate stage at least 6 months; at least 30 hours behind-the-wheel, supervised driving by licensed driver 21 years of age or older; automatic delay of full licensure if permit holder commits an offense, such as DWI, misrepresentation of true age, reckless driving, unbelted driving, speeding, or other violations as determined by the Secretary.

No arguments here.

The other problem I have with this generally is that I don’t like this being determined on the federal level. Obviously, the ship has sailed on the federal government’s right to do this. But different states have different needs and different priorities and I don’t see anything wrong with that. This doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing that is inherently an interstate problem. I would likely be more supportive of this law in the state legislature than in congress itself.