On the subject of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, I’m reminded of a story I recently shared over at Half Sigma. A couple, actually.

A couple hours from Colosse in Firehole County is Delosa A&T State University, the state’s black agricultural and technical university. Firehole County is one of the more conservative in Delosa, but periodically Yellow Dog Democrats in effort with A&T students can get a Democrat election. The state’s District Attorney and County Registrar released a joint statement declaring that because they were not permanent residents, most A&T students would not be allowed to vote in county elections. Only those that had officially changed their address would be able to do so. As you can imagine, black leaders, Democrats, and the media cried bloody murder. It invoked imagery of when white election officials were keen to prevent blacks from voting at all.

What’s a bit ironic, however, is that one year earlier there was an open race for the mayoralty of Colosse. The leading candidate was a former Colosse County Democratic Party Chairman. When he held that position, he lobbied election officials to prevent soldiers stationed at the local army base from being able to vote unless they had declared residency. As you might expect, his Republican run-off opponent and his supporters cried bloody murder. At a time when our soldiers were fighting for democracy abroad, they were being denied democracy at home.

At the end of the day, the A&T students and soldiers were both allowed to vote regardless of where they officially had residency. The former CCDP chairman became Colosse’s mayor and Firehole County remains solidly Republican.

Tennessee is getting tough on cigarettes:

The Tennessee Department of Revenue said Friday that it will begin conducting surveillance of state-line tobacco retailers in other states, looking for Tennesseans who are buying cigarettes there to avoid taxes.

Tennessee residents may legally possess no more than two cartons of cigarettes without the state tax stamp.

In July, Tennessee’s cigarette tax went from 20 cents per pack to 62 cents per pack, an incentive for many Tennessee residents to cross the state line to buy cigarettes at stores in neighboring states.

This, to me, comes close to running afoul of how the Interstate Commerce clause ought to be read. On the other hand, having to register things that you’ve purchased out of state is not something new and when it comes to guns we do it all the time. So wanting the in-state stamp of approval is not something new. My question is why, then, does this bother me so much? It’s not a smoker’s issue, in my mind, as I would react the same way if it were beer or playing cards or anything else. Also, I wouldn’t be bothered if cigarettes were banned in the state overall.

I can figure out why Tennessee would want to do this. No matter where you live within the state, you’re not too far from another state. So it would make sense that Tennessee, a high-sales tax state, would be touchy on this issue. So I came around to the idea that maybe giving people skirting the law a ticket would not be such a terribly bad idea. Then I read this:

Contraband cigarettes, and any vehicle in which they are transported, are subject to seizure, Farr said.

“If Revenue agents believe that an individual is transporting more than two cartons of cigarettes into Tennessee, the vehicle carrying the cigarettes will be stopped and searched,” Farr said. “If more than two cartons are found, the cigarettes will be seized and agents have the discretion to make arrests and seize the vehicle.”

That is an awful lot of discretion for a state police officer to have. I love the police, I do, but I don’t want them to have the power to decide whether to take someone’s five-year investment for getting some cigs while out of state.

I guess the main reason I am really uncomfortable is that this something that someone like me has done. Like Tennessee, Delosa is a high-sales-tax state with higher cigarette taxes than surrounding states. I would never go out of state for the sole purpose of buying cigarettes, but whenever I was out of the state I would make a point of picking some up. I actually did so even before I was a smoker because Mom would ask me to. I suppose if I heard about it the people of Tennessee have been warned about the consequences of doing such, but nonetheless people could face some pretty stiff consequences for committing a crime that it wouldn’t even occur to them is a crime. Also, this is not a new law. Even before this recent spate of publicity an officer could, if he wanted to, seize someone’s car for trying to skirt a little bit of sales tax.

Not sure about Tennessee, but in Delosa everyone skirts sales tax any time they leave the state. By Delosa state law, anything you purchase out of the state, you’re supposed to voluntarily pay state income tax. Nobody ever does, but the law is there. There was a hub-bub a couple years back when the State Treasurer slapped a fine on the Insurance Commissioner (both of whom were gearing up to run for the same higher office) for buying a bunch of furniture outside state lines and not paying the taxes on it. It all backfired on the Treasurer because everyone pretty much said “Holy crap! That’s illegal?!” and feared that the Treasurer would go after them next.

That’s just nuts.

State officials estimate that annually the new tax will bring in $195 million for education, $21 million for agricultural enhancements, and $12 million for trauma centers.

While I’m on the subject, couldn’t they at least pretend that this tax — a tax that will disproportionately target the poor and uneducated, I might add — has something (or at least more than 5%) to do with the public health?

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Social Justice Crusader, also known as a rights activist. You believe in equality, fairness, and preventing neo-Confederate conservative troglodytes from rolling back fifty years of civil rights gains.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

My Conservative Identity:

You are a Flag-Waving Everyman, also known as a patriot. You believe in freedom, apple pie, rooting for America at all times, and that God gave us a two-day weekend so we could enjoy football and NASCAR.

Take the quiz at www.FightLiberals.com

Fun, but more than a bit silly.

I’ve heard it before somewhere, but an interesting idea nonetheless:

The Santa Fe Police Department is considering the possibility of recruiting Mexican nationals to fill vacant police jobs. {…}

But Police Chief Eric Johnson said New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy regulations prohibit non-citizens from serving as police officers.

Alessio said the Santa Fe police force, like others around the country, is vying to recruit the same 21- to 30-year-olds as the U.S. military, whose need for recruits is taking a toll on the police department.

“Every day, we get approached by young men and women from Mexico who are in the country legally but are not naturalized,” Alessio said.

I have only one concern about the program: It’s easier to do background checks on Americans than it is someone that was raised outside the US. It seems like it might be easier for someone to slip through the cracks. Then again, the same could be said of American citizens born and raised abroad and Americans that have spent a significant amount of time overseas.

I also speak from a position of ignorance for what kind of background checks we do before we let people in the US legally. If they look as closely at people immigrating as they do at police officers, then the point may be moot. Maybe Logtar can provide some insights?

The discs I sent into Netflix on Monday still haven’t gotten there.

It’s almost like there’s something tying up the postal service.

🙂

I remember in high school my friend Clint’s girlfriend Bethy was writing for the school paper. I’m not sure how, but the subject of affirmative action came up. She didn’t really know what it was so we explained it to her. She was incensed. The newspaper’s next publication contained a point/counterpoint on the issue in which Bethy wrote the “anti” argument. The rather bland article contained two of the strangest sentences I’d seen printed: “By promoting affirmative action, public officials and educators are promoting their own affirmative action” and “Affirmative action is simply affirmative action by another name.”

As it turned out, that made it in there because an editor took offense at her original wording, which suggested that proponents of affirmative action were engaging in some racial preferences of their own. He didn’t like the the term “racial preferences”, which she used repeatedly, so he did a mass-replace with “affirmative action” and never looked back.

I thought of that whole incident while watching the 80’s British comedy Yes, Minister. The serial’s villain is one Sir Humphrey Appleby, the bureaucrat extraordinaire whose primary function is to try to thwart the idealistic (if more than a little vain) Minister of Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker. Appleby’s entire philosophy can be summed up with, “Sir, you can’t just go in and change things, and if you keep trying then things might change and that would be utterly unacceptable!”

In the third season he gives a stirring defense of being a moral vacuum. If he believed in all of the policies that he was ordered to do, he would be on both sides of every issue (depending on who is in power) and ultimately schizophrenic, so he takes no side ever. This would be one thing if it meant he dutifully carried out the will of his Minister without regard to his personal feelings, but instead it is his reason to thwart whatever it is that the minister is trying to accomplish in five simple steps. A man without a party, his interests begin and end in perpetuating the bureaucracy.

You wouldn’t think that a show about bureaucratic struggle could be so funny, but Yes, Minister succeeds admirably. Though Jim Hacker is the protagonist, it’s Appleby that’s really the star. His rationalizations, his sophistry, and his the genius of his manipulations are so funny because they are so familiar. It’s like watching Richard III and finding yourself sometimes more eager to congratulate the manipulative villain rather than the dupe in charge.

And Appleby isn’t always wrong. And even when he is wrong, I found myself understanding his need to guard his own interest, his very way of life in the face of those that would go needlessly upheaving everything. William F. Buckley famously characterized conservatism as “standing athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!'” and in that vein Appleby is very definition of conservatism. There is much to protect about the British way of life and he is there to protect it. Forever, in amber.

But of course Appleby goes too far and views any and all change as a threat to the very Kingdom. And he makes the classic mistake of viewing his own needs as intertwined with the needs of the Kingdom. Many a mistake has been prevented by those that live and die by protecting the status quo, but government is serious business and it is people like Appleby that fiddle while levees deteriorate.

A free and democratic people simply cannot accept that the bureaucracy is and always will be and the status quo cannot change. The biggest case and point in the United States is Louisiana. They came to accept the corruption in their state and it actually became a marker of perverse pride as ego prevailed over self-esteem. They did make some attempts to change things as Edwin Edwards got shipped off to jail and, believe it or not, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was elected on a platform of competence and honesty. And indeed, prior to Katrina, Nagin was the most honest and competent mayor they’d had in decades. Think about that.

The seriousness of the stakes make us need to be careful before we laugh too hard. Yes, Minister, like our own The Daily Show, lives and breathes by our own cynicism. And as strange as it sounds I wonder if laughter is a form of acceptance. Forrest Gump once said if you can’t sing good, sing loud. AA has the prayer about changing the things you can and accepting the things you can’t. Shows like Yes, Minister and The Daily Show simply subtly tell us to skip the whole try to change part and have a good, sneering laugh.

of course, how does one try to affect change without being an obnoxious outrage generator? Right now liberals are purely outraged every time The President sneezes. Eight years ago Republicans were the same. And I absolutely hate those damn bumper stickers about “If you aren’t outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Oh, spare me. And while you’re at it, don’t mistake outrage for conscientiousness or conviction. Which then makes me wonder if I’ve just become cynical about cynicism.

So I really can’t tell you whether this post is a review of Yes, Minister, an obnoxious Public Service Announcement, or a simultaneous expression and disdain of cynicism.

Anyhow, Yes, Minister is a great show. Because pits unrealistic idealism against cynical realism and political arrogance against defensive institutionalism, it’s as relevant twenty years later as it was then. Though this is a series that probably couldn’t be Americanized very well, any American that can appreciate dry, sophistical (as opposed to necessarily sophisticated) humor, could laugh as I did. I just hope we don’t laugh too long.

While looking up to see if I could find anything online about the Nguyen Count, I ran across an interesting set of stories about an interesting special election in Orange County, California. A seat vacated by a Hispanic Democrat was apparently hotly contested with two Vietnamise-American Republicans, both named Nguyen, vying for the seat on an advisory board. Follow the link if you’re at all interested, but I’ll just say that there were recounts involved, a margin of victory of seven votes (out of 26,000), a contested result, and butterfly-like ballot confusion. A month later and it still isn’t entirely over.

It’s only actually relevent if you live in Orange County (which I obviously don’t), but sure was an interesting read.

This article gives the rundown of the election, while this one profiles the one of the two candidates (I couldn’t find a profile of the other). This is the most recent article I’ve found on the subject.

We’re going to leave the land of Delosa and Deseret and Estacado for a moment and return to the world of Georgia and Missouri and West Virginia. Specifically, we’re going to look at the state of Georgia, its flag, and it’s relationship to the flags of the Confederacy.

Outside the South (and commonly inside it) people have some mistaken impressions about the flags of the Confederacy. The most commonly attributed flag was never actually the flag of the would-be nation:

The above is the Navy Battle Flag, the Southern Cross, the Battle Flag (or an elongated version of it), the Rebel Flag, or the Confederate (Navy) Jack. The recognizable emblem would be used on later flags, but what we consider “The Confederate Flag” has mostly persisted not because it was the official flag of the Confederacy, but rather because it is the most instantly recognizable. The official flag of the Confederacy was considerably more forgettable:

That would be the Stars & Bars, which was the official flag of the Confederacy until people began confusing it with the American flag on the battle field. So they replaced it with a white flag that was subsequently confused with a surrender flag and then, about the time they were actually surrendering, they put a red bar on it.

But enough about the Confederacy for a moment, let’s talk about Georgia. In 1956, Georgia replaced three horizontal bars on their flag with the Confederate emblem. It doesn’t take a whole lot to figure out why, in 1956, Georgia might be so motivated. Flash forward forty years and Georgians are stunned and outraged to discover that their black population doesn’t so much like their state flag including an emblem from an era that, to say the least, was not one they were particularly nostalgic for.

Eventually something was going to have to give, so at the turn of the century they designed what is considered by flag experts to be the most poorly designed flag in history. It allowed the Confederacy-boosters to keep the emblem somewhere on the flag, but kept it as small as possible and part of the old Georgia among a collection of mini-flags below the state emblem. Pro-Dixie whites were angry cause the Confederate emblem was so small. Blacks weren’t satisfied cause it was still there.

So they went back to the drawing board. It was seeming as though it was going to be impossible for the flag designers to come up with something that could please everybody. Then somebody got a clever idea.

Blacks don’t mind it because it doesn’t have the emblem. Pro-Dixie types like it cause it’s their little inside joke. The design of one and the number of stars from the other. Utterly brilliant.

I don’t care what you think of politics or even what you think of her personally, you have got to feel at least a little bit sorry for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There she is, the first serious, office-holding politician to take a shot at the presidency. History-making stuff!

But who is she running against? The first serious, office-holding black presidential candidate in American history. And the first serious, office-holding Hispanic candidate.

With a black senator and a Hispanic governor running, a senator woman is a lot less newsworthy. She’ll probably win so I guess we shouldn’t feel too sorry.

Of course the ironic thing is that the black guy “isn’t really black“, the Hispanic guy is named Richardson, and the feminist owes her senate seat in large part to her husband. All that’s required to make the joke complete is if the white guy ends up winning the nomination.

Ron Washington, my home city of Colosse’s most recent former mayor, was a police commissioner of Colosse and a handful of other cities before getting elected. When he was first elected in the late 90’s, I remember thinking it odd that he only had support of one of the city’s two police unions and that endorsement took a lot of behind-the-scenes work by a local state senator. The support that he did receive was tepid at best and they declined to support his re-election bid.

As it turned out, Washington was a startlingly poor mayor. When he was re-elected the only rationale his supporters could offer up was that he was too incompetent to be corrupt (which was true, though since he was term-limited out, a couple of his former aides are now in jail). I remember thinking at the time that you would think that cops would support a commissioner-candidate because his cop background would make him more likely to consider faults in the department (such as cop pay and resources) a priority. After became obvious what a bumbling fool Washington was, I figured that the union had some insight into the mayoral candidate that the rest of us lacked.

But I stumbled across something interesting the other day.

Mike Moakley is Colosse’s current commissioner and the article I ran across was on the site of a police union of Sierra City, where Moakley was chief before moving to Colosse. It was pointing out Colosse’s rising crime and how Moakley’s top priorities are not particularly aimed at correcting this problem (upping grooming requirements, cutting down on high speed chases). I found it odd that the Sierra City cop union would take up web space denouncing a former chief and not so subtly saying his new employer should push him out the door.

That got me thinking that often the people that worked under you, regardless of how well you performed, may actually be the least likely to support you once you are no longer their boss. I would be reluctant to vote for many, probably most, of the company heads I’ve worked for. You get to know them a little too well and you’ve often suffered for their mismanagement. This is probably particularly true for something like a police chief, whose job is not to support the police officers but rather the mayor.