Last month I donated to a political campaign for the first time in my life for my family’s congressional district back in Delosa. I made a deal with myself that I would never donate to the campaign of anyone that runs on border hawk positions front and center and of course I broke that deal with myself on my first political donation to Jim Murali a few weeks ago. The thing is that he’s running against “conservative” Republican* Bob Markam, who has represented the district since I was a kid and is one of the more despicable congresscritters in Washington. Murali may be indistinguishable from him politically, but I know people that know Murali personally (he went to my high school and grew up near where I live) and they all say glowing things about him. In the past I’ve tried to work on the campaigns of people running against Markam, which obviously isn’t possible living where I currently do.

One thing that makes me slightly uncomfortable is the disclosure aspect of it. I don’t mind being on record as making the donations that I have for anyone that really wants to know who I’ve donated to, but they made me disclose who my employer is. I’m not sure why I am so uncomfortable with that since I don’t expect to be reprimanded for donating to the wrong entity, but it doesn’t seem right that their name should be on a political donation that they had no say in and I can easily imagine situations where I wouldn’t want any trail to exist between my employer and myself for whenever I am at odds with the views of my employer.

On the other hand, I guess the reason that they do it is as an anti-corruption measure to make sure that employers aren’t pressuring employees to donate to campaigns or (more likely) making donations by proxy. As someone that doesn’t like the restrictions of free speech and whatnot of McCain-Feingold and thinks that transparency is a better mechanism, I shouldn’t be at all uncomfortable with this… but I guess I am, a little.

* – As far as I am concerned, he stands for nothing except his standing within the GOP and his own re-election. He is as sincere as a maggot in all that he says and does.

-{This is the expanded version of the opening of a post that I wrote for Bobvis}-

There were three serious Democrats running in 1966. The first was progressive former governor Ellis Arnall. The second was a young state senator named Jimmy Carter. The third was Lester Maddox, a three-time loser in electoral politics that got a lot of publicity for closing down his restaurant rather than be forced to serve blacks. As was commonly the case, Republicans did not have a seriously contested primary. Uncommonly, though, they had a chance at winning the election in the form of Bo Calloway, the first Republican congressman since reconstruction.

The Republicans felt that Calloway had the best chance of beating the inarticulate radical Maddox than the Arnall or moderate Carter, so Republicans one and all decided to vote in the Democratic primaries to serve up the weakest Democrat to face off against what they hoped would be the first Republican governor since reconstruction. Carter was bumped off in the original election and though he won a plurality in the first round, Arnall was put out to pasture by Maddox with the help of the Calloway voters.

The Arnall voters, however, weren’t ready to call it quits. Maddox was an embarrassment and Calloway himself wasn’t good on the issue of segregation, so they hatched a plan of their own. They sponsored an Arnall write-in campaign. Though they knew that they couldn’t win with a write-in candidate, they reasoned that they didn’t have to. If they could prevent either Calloway or Maddox from getting a majority of the vote, the winner would be determined by a vote in the state legislature. Since the legislature was Democratic, they figured that they might be able to get enough Republicans and anti-Maddox Democrats together to pull off a victory.

Arnall ended up with 7.01% of the vote, managing to keep both Calloway (47.07%) and Maddox (46.88%) from getting a majority of the popular vote. By an overwhelming majority, the state legislature tapped Lester Maddox as the next governor of the state of Georgia. Governor Maddox surprisingly turned in a moderate record as governor as far as race issues in the south went, appointing record numbers of blacks into state office and integrating various state agencies, though never renouncing his staunchly segregationist views. He later ran for president under the banner of George Wallace’s American Independence Party.

Arnall never for public office again and Calloway left Georgia in the 1970’s. Jimmy Carter succeeded Maddox as the governor of Georgia, serving from 1971-1975, and went on to run for higher office.

So… is everyone nervous about the Super Duper Tuesday primaries tonight? Is anyone? Seems to me no matter who you support, you have reason to be nervous. Two candidates lining up for victory that could quite easily be derailed and two other candidates whose candidacies could be killed today. I suppose that today is one of those days that it’s good for the blood pressure to be apathetic or supporting a candidate with virtually no chance of winning.

On a sidenote, there was some maniac cutting back and forth through traffic today, incurring the wrath of all of the drivers. Why was he driving so maniacally? So that everyone could see his “Honk if you support Ron Paul” sign. I suppose that’s one way to drum up support. My coworker Roberto somewhere got the idea that the honkers may have been doing so because they were agitated and not because they support Mr. Paul because it was usually the drivers that he was cutting off at any given moment that were honking. My other coworker Pat thinks that they were supporting Mr. Paul and only the drivers that were getting cut off could read the sign. In an effort to avoid work, we discussed this for about ten minutes.

Many years ago George Bush was campaigning in Colosse and traffic was shut down by secret service during a jog. My friend Kaye’s husband voted for Bill Clinton. It was the first time he’d ever voted for a Democrat and I don’t think that Kaye has forgiven him for that to this day.

There is the way that the world should be and then there is the way that it is. There is the way that our ideas should abstractly work and then there is how they work in reality. There is the disaster we foresee when our grand ideas are thrwarted, and what we actually see when that happens. When confronted with this dissonance, we are left to admit that (a) our original idea was wrong, (b) whatever unexpected good/bad we see must not be that good/bad after all, or (c) whatever good/bad we see was actually caused by something other than the success or failure of the policy on which we stand so firm or firmly against.

In short, sometimes reality intrudes on our ideas.

I’ve noticed this happen on a couple of issues recently and I haven’t really decided on whether I am falling on the side of (a) or (b).

The first involves smoking bans, which I’ll address tomorrow, and the second involves toll roads, which I’ll address today.

Ideally speaking, toll roads are one of the best forms of government revenue in existence. People that use it pay, people that don’t do not. Most of the time there is an alternate route someone can take if they don’t want to or don’t have the means to pay. In Delosa, there’s always an adjacent frontage road or even a freeway (that traffic usually sucks on). Does it get any more perfect than that? Voluntary tax!

There are a number of ways that toll roads go awry, though. Many have been “temporarily” set up as toll roads in Colosse but in my lifetime I have never seen toll booths get shut down. It’s originally supposed to fund the building of the road, then it’s for maintenance and the extra money goes towards building other roads. So much for the ideal of taxing for use, though the money does have to come from somewhere I suppose. Increasingly, toll roads are privatized and the profits don’t even go into the pocket books of private enterprise than to further expansion, though in that case the toll company is paying the city or state something.

Even setting those aside, though, one thing that I’ve noticed is that toll roads can serious impede development. Santomas, the city where I currently live, is building a toll road look around the inner part of the city. Santomas is a north-south city wherein traffic on the north-south freeway is so bad that half of the time on my drive home I’ll spend half an hour or more on backroads to avoid three miles or fewer in the Interstate.

One of the goals of the loop is to create more east-west development so that the city becomes less north-south and getting from Point A to Point B in the city doesn’t always involve going on the dreaded Interstate. This plan is failing miserably. New developments are going up further north and further south rather than east or west. Why? Because developers don’t want to build houses and then have to tell people that to get to work they’re going to be needing to pay an additional $3 on toll roads.

Even though the economics say that the $3 is a bargain, people won’t do it. They’d rather spend fifteen minutes more on the road going north-south even if the economics say that thirty minutes of your time is worth far more than $3. People’s inability to recognize the economics of commutes are a subject for a different day, but the perception is there. People are used to free roads. It’s difficult to get them to pay for what they’re used to getting for free, no matter how much you explain to them it makes sense.

Huckabee is running an add wherein some people say that there is a floating cross behind him.

Even before I heard Huckabee’s official explanation, it looked pretty plainly like a shelf of some sort to me. I will say this about Huckabee: it the bookshelf were intentionally placed behind him and lit to subliminally reinforce his religiosity, he is a much more shrewd and creative man than I’d given him credit for being*. Given that when it comes to the role his religious convictions play in his politics he is about as subtle as a sledgehammer**, I find that very unlikely.

It reminds me a little bit of a movie that Clancy and I saw in Deseret called Latter Days, wherein a closeted Mormon missionary falls in love with a West Hollywood gay highlifer. Mormons don’t do crosses, so I was surprised to see subtle, Huckabee-bookshelf-like crosses sprinkled throughout the film. I thought to myself that the movie must have been placed in the hands of someone that was fairly ignorant of Mormon ways. In the commentary I find out that no, the writer/director, Jay Cox, was in fact raised Mormon. He actually comments on the Huckabee crosses as completely unintended. He’d in fact gone to the trouble of having actual crosses removed from the church scenes that the set manager had mistakenly put there.

The cross is such a basic design, I guess, that it’s hard to entirely remove. Nonetheless, Cox said he’d gotten many compliments by non-Mormons on the subtle inclusion of crosses throughout the film as a testament to his directing skill.

* – I suppose it could have been done by one of his handlers, but as near as I can tell up until the last few days it’s been a more self-directed campaign.

** – Not to knock on the guy too hard. I don’t have any particular disdain for the man. He’s a mix of good and bad, just like the rest of’em.

My Webmaster and I were discussing some of the differences between working in the private sector and the public sector. He works for Southern Tech University while I’ve worked mostly in the private sector. My father, on the other hand, worked in accounting for the Department of Defense, so I’m well aware of the differences in incentives between working for the government and working for a profit-making entity. He’s written a post on his experiences and I’m going to write a post on mine.

Before starting my current job at Soyokaze America, I did work with a temp agency whose only client was the State of Estacado. I only took one job there that lasted a couple of weeks, but in that time I happened to be privy to a whole lot of government waste.

The job involved moving the Child Protective Services (CPS) from one building to another building. The entire move was actually an example of said waste. According to Estacado State Law, the government cannot lease a building for more than two years uninterrupted. While they could invest in buying some property, instead what they do for a number of agencies is have them relocate every two years. This is a very expensive and time-consuming process that really doesn’t serve anyone.

I’m not sure there is enough money in the world that could adequately pay those that are taking the calls for the CPS. They listen to one horror story after another. Unlike social workers, they don’t even get the satisfaction of building a relationship with those calling for help. Instead they file a report and pass it on and likely never hear from them again. As it stands, these folks start at about $25k/yr. It’s good pay for a phone job, but it’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

So our job was to move the phone bank as well as the rest of the agency over to a similarly sized building a few blocks away. This involved moving a whole lot of computer equipment, which is where I came in. My job was to take the computers down, box them up, and then set them up at the new place. Easy enough. It was also to box up the stuff from the warehouse, which is where I really got the education experience.

They had hundreds and hundreds of copies of Microsoft Streets & Maps 2006, all unopened. Sometimes in the private as well as the public sector this sort of thing happens and I would have been understanding of, except that they also had hundreds and hundreds of copies of Microsoft Streets & Maps 2005, all unopened. They had half that many from 2004. Why would they keep buying software that they’re obviously not using? The answer, of course, was that it was in the budget and if they said they didn’t need it, they wouldn’t get it. It seemed to me that if they were worried about expending their budget that money would be better spent on the call-takers, but that fell into a different category and besides the money was clearly marked for that specific software package.

The other oddity involved inventory. I would be hard to fault the state for having so many extra sets of speakers. They come with the computers but rules and regulations prevent the employees from having them on their computers. Fair enough. The only problem with this is that if they get rid of the speakers within two years, the retail cost of the speakers is deducted from their budget even though they really couldn’t buy the computers without them. The idea behind this was to “cut down on waste”, which is a laudible goal but one they are only sporadically concerned with and only, it seems, in the least applicable circumstances.

They they waste warehouse space maintaining speaker inventory that they don’t need. Each box had a date on it. Anything before that date was to be disposed of and anything after that date had to be shipped to the new location, where it would wait for a while and then be disposed of.

You might ask yourself (I know I would be), “What does he mean by ‘disposed of’?”

There is a Goodwill not six blocks from the complex that they were moving out of that they could give it to. They could sell the stuff on eBay. They could raffle them to their employees for a job well done and put the money raised towards an office party or something. Actually, no, they can’t do any of that. Instead they post excess inventory for 90 days and then give it away to anyone that calls dibs. Most of the speakers ended up going to a company that turned around and made a profit selling them boxed and in mint condition. State money was spent helping them load up.

A lot of the other (non-boxed, non-mint) stuff was thrown out. There were monitors galore that were literally left at the curbside. They actually put a sign on it that said “Do not take” so that someone would assume that they were good and would steal them. I myself got away with five sets of 3-part speakers and three laptop satchels.

Good for me, not so good for the State of Estacado and its taxpayers.

Many moons ago, the Colosse Spiders basketball team was aching for a new basketball arena. Around the same time the NHL was looking to expand. So the proposed basketball arena was also set to double as a hockey arena. This was meant to up the value to sell it to the public that would have to vote on it, but in some ways it hurt the referendum more than it helped.

There were two prospective owners for the NHL team we were trying to get. The first was Stephen Goldberg, the Jewish New York implant that owned the Colosse Spiders. The second was Miles Carpenter, the owner of the local power company and the minor league hockey Colosse Crushers. Since the new arena was primarily for basketball, Goldberg was in the driver’s seat in the referendum.

Asking that voters pay for a new basketball arena apparently wasn’t enough for Goldberg. He also wanted full ownership rights to the stadium even before the voters had finished paying it off. He wanted to be able to personally pocket naming rights, advertising, revenue from other events held there, and even street parking surrounding it. The big thing, though, is that in exchange for the voters building him a new arena, he wanted it written down that any NHL team that came to Colosse would be his. Essentially, he wanted to freeze Carpenter out.

Carpenter, needless to say, didn’t like this one bit. So while Goldberg, the city Chamber of Commerce, and the city government tried to sell the arena, Carpenter was one of only a couple major figures against it. Radio talk show hosts supplied the ground troops of the opposition, but Carpenter supplied almost all of the funding.

Colosse was the only city of twelve voting that actually had a team threatening to move to reject a stadium/arena referendum. That didn’t hold Goldberg and the Spiders machine back. They vowed to keep putting it on the ballot until it passed. What’s really interesting about it, though, is what happened to Carpenter.

Carpenter was a bazillionaire. He was the owner of the local utility company. He was buying companies left and right. He thought himself to be somewhat untouchable. He was wrong. Carpenter was shunned by the business community. He and (more importantly) his wife were shut out of all marquee social events. The influence he’d used to get his oldest kid into the prestigious University of Colosse was no longer effective as his daughter’s admission was denied even though she had a better academic profile than did the son who got in. His utility company was kicked out of the Chamber of Commerce on a technicality.

As far as I know, nothing he did cost him any money. You can’t boycott the power company, after all. But it was apparently more than he could bear. Two years later, they held another referendum. It wasn’t quite as skewed in favor of Goldberg, though he still got dibs on the hockey team. Carpenter campaigned for the second referendum, it passed, and he was suddenly no longer socially toxic.

I think of the story of Miles Carpenter whenever the subject of peer pressure comes up. Carpenter had it all, but in the end signed on to a deal that denied him one of his dreams simply because it wasn’t worth having it all if no one you cared about liked or respected you. He gave up the millions he would have gotten from the hockey team in exchange for a little social detoxification.

When I was in junior high I started hanging around with a kid that lived around the block with an unsavory reputation. My folks, for the first time ever, prohibited me from playing with him. They thought he was trouble and even at the time I couldn’t disagree. But I loudly declared that just because he does bad things didn’t mean that I would. Didn’t they trust me? They just didn’t understand, which is the last rhetorical refuge for a kid without a valid argument to make.

I first started noticing in high school that it did seem to matter a great deal who you hung out with. Some guys that I was friends with in junior high started hanging out with the wannabee gangbangers. Once they were the smart kids in the regular class like me, but I doubt half of them ultimately graduated from high school. Others started hanging out with “South will rise again” racists. Ditto for that.

Granted, in many cases there were likely other things going on that drove these kids to these groups, though they usuallywere the I-don’t-have-friends sort of problem rather than the I-was-born-a-bad-apple variety. I first smoked pot because I was around kids smoking pot. I taught myself to learn how to like beer because I was around drinkers. These things weren’t the end of me, obviously, but they’re things I would have been much, much less likely to do otherwise.

Much of what I’m saying here will be obvious to a lot of you. What I find most interest about it is how soooo unobvious it was back when I was young. How silly it was. How stupid old people were for believing it. It just didn’t make any sense.

Then I think of Miles Carpenter. If a rich millionaire can’t stand up to the pressure of his social environment, a pimply kid hasn’t got a prayer.

When I was dating Julie, I spent a lot of time in the city of Phillippi. Phillippi {pronounced FILL-PEE} is a blue-collar city on the outskirts of Colosse and by far the city’s largest suburb. North Phillippi is mostly known for being a heavily industrial area where most of the inhabitants spend their days working in the chemical plants in eastern Colosse and spend their nights breathing in the fumes. Unfortunately the factories are technically in Colosse, so while they get the fumes, they don’t get the tax dollars. The south part of town is more middle class and upper middle class.

Julie’s father was a volunteer with the Phillippi Volunteer Fire Department and most of his friends were firemen and a lot of them were cops. Julie’s grandfather was a businessman and an aide to former Mayor Mack Kramer. Because of this, I happened to become rather knowledgeable about Phillippi politics despite not living in the city.

I noticed, shortly after dating Julie, that there seemed to be two different people asking to be re-elected mayor. There were “Return Mack Kramer” and “Re-elect Bill Rose” signs. When I finally thought about it, I was able to put the pieces together. Rose had deposed Kramer from office and they were running against one another. I asked Mrs. Bernard and got an earful because of her father’s work with Mayor Kramer.

The two apparently absolutely hated one another. Rose was Kramer’s nemesis while the former was on city council and the later mayor. When Kramer was term-limited out of office, Rose won and promptly took Kramer’s name off all of the things that Kramer had helped the city build (Kramer Fairgrounds because the Rose Fairgrounds, for instance). Then Rose was term-limited out, Kramer was elected, and we were back to the Kramer Fairgrounds. Rose ran against Kramer, knocked him out of office, and the city council finally settled on the Phillippi Fairgrounds. Rose was seeking re-election and Kramer was running against him by the time that I started becoming familiar with the area.

Rose won, and when he was term-limited out, Kramer ran for the post against a proxy from Rose’s camp and lost, the city finally had a new mayor. Kramer died a couple of years later and Rose ran for a City Commissioner post. All of Kramer’s families lined up behind Rose’s opponent, City Comptroller Marge Calvert, and all at once the war was renewed with Calvert running by proxy. It being a slightly Democratic district, the Calvert won and Rose, a Republican, went to work campaigning for his son who was running for Justice of the Peace and then went back to doing whatever he did when he wasn’t mayor.

In addition to ego, one of the differences between the two was style. Mack Kramer represented the industrial northside. He was an old-school conservative Democrat with a populist streak. Bill Rose, and his ascendency in local politics, represented the city’s shift from an industrial Flint-like town to a posh suburban enclave. Rose was a business-friendly Republican who seemed as uncomfortable around poor people as Kramer did around educated people. They really came by their dislike quite honestly. Kramer was fighting the Republicanization of Phillippi and lost that fight.

I was reminded of the battle as Clancy and I left for Beyreuth. The mayor that succeeded Rose resigned because (as he claimed) God told him that he was destined to run for Delosa Congressional District 6. Mayoral signs were everywhere: local businessman Pete Kramer vs. State Representative Buddy Rose.

A story on News.com has the US Congress trying to pass a law that offers victims of identity theft the “right” to sue for restitution. As anyone who has or knows someone who’s had their identity stolen, there’s a lot of expense and effort involved in putting your credit score back together once it’s been trashed.

Unfortunately, the law as currently written is (at least to my mind) horribly flawed, in three very important ways. It counts as an excercise in misdirected effort.

The first problem is that the law addresses the problem of identity theft in a backwards manner. It presumes that thieves can be deterred by passing more punishment. The problem here is that it assumes the criminal has been found, and the vast majority of identity thieves are very hard to track down. Just as one example, recent IRS statistics place between 10 and 12 million duplicated (or worse) Social Security numbers in the tax system due to fraudulent SSNs used by people ineligible to work in the United States. Each of these is a serious enough problem to start with (try applying for college loans and finding out you’re an 18 year old with a 25 year credit/work history), but becomes worse when bank accounts and credit cards start to get involved.

The second problem is that even if you do find the criminal, and convince the authorities to prosecute, you’re then having to go back to the court a second time to get restitution. The way the law is worded, it’s not something that the judge can simply order; you have to sue the criminal in civil court. By the time you can get a civil judgement, there is likely no money left to have it paid from. It will all be gone, spent on the defendant’s lawyer in the criminal case or otherwise vanished/confiscated by the authorities, or even repossessed by credit companies trying to make back the money the criminal will never pay them.

The final problem is that this law doesn’t address the real root problem of identity theft, which is the credit companies themselves. A couple decades ago, credit was harder to come by. People started with a gas card or store card, a bank account, perhaps an ATM / Debit card, and worked their way up. Now, the credit agencies are offering credit cards to everyone and their dog, the sooner the better, and with much less requirement of proof of identity and ability to handle money. It goes without saying that the less verification the credit card agencies do, the more fraud slips by them until it’s too late. Ultimately, if the law held the credit agencies (rather than the merchants who don’t get paid and the consumers who currently suffer increased interest rates and fees) responsible, you’d see fraud go down significantly as they started to pay attention to who they were giving credit cards and credit lines to.

I’d be very interested in a real law that could crack down on identity fraud, but I don’t think this law does anything at all.

Atlanta Constitution-Journal:

The days of nightclubs hosting “18 to party, 21 to drink” events may soon come to an end in Atlanta.

The Atlanta City Council unanimously passed an ordinance Monday prohibiting anyone younger than 21 from entering or working at businesses where alcohol is consumed. It should go into effect next week.

Councilwoman Cleta Winslow, who wrote the ordinance, said she is troubled by the city’s law that allowed 18-year-olds to work in businesses where people are drinking. It does not affect restaurants where alcohol is served, nor supermarkets or convenience stores.

Winslow worries about teenagers drinking in strip clubs or bars and endangering themselves.

“Since a person under 21 can’t drink in a nightclub, they should not be in these establishments,” said Winslow, chairwoman of the council’s public safety committee.

How utterly retarded. Underage drinking is already illegal. If the laws aren’t being enforced, start enforcing them. If the laws can’t be enforced, then explain to me how this new law is any more enforceable.

First, there are reasons to go to some bars even if you can’t drink: entertainment. People 18-20 are now going to be shut out of the live music scene. Since live music often caters to the younger set, that’s not an insignificant demographic. I once went to a local wrestling event at a bar, too. If there’s an exception for bars that display entertainment, the article doesn’t say.

Even if there is such an exception, it makes life more difficult for barely-of-age patrons. A lot of bars are already 21-and-over, but some aren’t precisely because they know that people that are 21 or 22 have friends that are 19 or 20. The underage can have a coke while his friends drink beer. Bars face enough competition with coffeehouses as a third-place venue and this makes it worse. This also encourages more drinking in apartments and dorm rooms, which is entirely unregulated and much, much more likely to result in severe drinking and the alcohol poisoning that comes with it. At least in a bar you’re limited by the underage drinking laws, public intoxication laws, and a high price-tag.

On top of that, people that are 18-20 make great designated drivers and keep drunk drivers off the street. Kyle did his job keeping us drunkards taken care of and in return we paid cover and bought him cokes. It was a win for Kyle, a win for us, and a win for the late-night drivers of Colosse.

I might be able to understand if they were concerned about underage people serving a product that they cannot consume, but (1) there are better ways to do that and (2) this doesn’t even take care of that. Eighteen year olds will still be serving alcohol as waiters in restaurants and 16 year olds will be doing the same at grocery store check-outs.

So what problem does this solve? What does this little piece of legislation do other than give the appearance of tackling a problem while not only failing to do so but actually making it worse in some cases? Oh… “appearance of tackling a problem”… I guess I answered my own question there.