Makeup is one of those things that girls do that guys often fail to appreciate. In fact, we’re often inclined to say “I prefer girls without makeup” when what we mean is “I prefer girls who apply their makeup with more restraint.” Cause few guys really like pimples. Most guys like smooth-looking skin. These are things that makeup provide. Granted, I myself fall into the category of guys that “prefer girls without makeup.” Indeed, my wife rarely wears it and I easily consider the low-maintenance aspect of it to outweigh the visual benefits when she does wear it. A step further, a surprising number of romantic interests in my past and present (Clancy, Evangeline, Tracey, Dharla, Carla, Libby) never pierced their ears (though Tracey pierced her nose some years later).

So a part of me is quite sympathetic to Redefining Beautiful, a club at a Texas high school that go bare-faced on Tuesdays. Well, not just a club of girls, but a club of pretty conventionally attractive girls. Comments Phi:

On the one hand, I’m encouraged that that someone wants to call a truce in the clothes and cosmetics arms race among high school girls. But on the other, it’s not clear that these girls are redefining much of anything. On the contrary, most of the girls in this picture are in the very flower of their natural beauty by its existing definition. What’s changed is that they are not dressing in ways that signal sexual availability, but that isn’t the same thing, and every high school boy knows it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this sort of thing caught on. I’ve commented in the past about how female fashion seems to be geared towards exclusion. You have tops that look good only on the slimmest of slim girls. You have uncomfortable shoes that only the most dedicated will suffer to wear. If a medium-size girl with an unimpressive chest (and/or a modest pocketbook) looks okay in it, female fashion has no use for it. This is sort of a reversal of that in that any girl can go without makeup, but it’s also an extension of it in that not any girl can look good while doing it. Sort of like how the popular and/or good-looking guys in high school could get away dressing down in a way that the rest of us can’t. Except that in girlworld, this is of greater import.

It gets me thinking about all of the steps that girls must take to define their attractiveness that guys don’t. I mean, like girls, guys have to watch their weight and it’s helpful to put some thought in how you dress. But outside of certain circles it’s really pretty easy for guys to get to that middle of the personal-appearance bell-curve as far as dress and hygiene are concerned. Shower regularly, comb your hair, moderately groom yourself, and you’re right there in the middle. And there aren’t a whole lot of guys out there trying to one-up you by dressing a little bit better. Indeed, we’ve made lemon out of lemonaid. Losing your hair? Just shave it off. Don’t want to shave? Well, we’ve made that okay. And guys that try to separate themselves from the pack by trying to look too impressive? Well, we have words for those people. If we could get the ladies to go along, we’d all just sport large beards and brag about how smelly our armpits are. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one.

Of course, there is another side to this as the RD girls inadvertently demonstrate. These girls can go without makeup and still look good. What about the girls who can’t? In that sense, makeup has a certain egalitarianism about it. With enough effort, it allows so-so looking girls to look a heck of a lot better. The wide array of fashion may make things remarkably more complicated than it is for men, but it provides the underdog girl with options that men don’t have. If a guy is so-so looking, he can’t wear a stunning outfit (because again, we have words for guys that do that). If he has pimples, he can’t use makeup without significant risk. There are industries around helping heavier women find outfits suitable to their figure. Guys are stuck in the same outfit as their peers. And one of the biggest basis of discrimination against men – height – simply can’t be accounted for. The biggest tool in our chest that women don’t have is facial hair to make the chin more distinct, but we’ve already got men calling men out for that, too.

The makeup thing in particular is problematic for the young and pimpled. Makeup will only take things so far, but they do at least make these things less noticeable. Acne was never a huge problem with me, but I did envy girls their makeup when the pimples came. And on a couple of instances I tried to do something about it. But the stigma is enough that even if you use makeup, you have to apply so little that nobody could possibly notice. The closest I came to something working was peach-colored anti-acne cream. At least then I had an excuse because anti-acne stuff wasn’t verboten… but if someone with more social influence than you said it was makeup you were doomed.

It’s sort of the inverse of the yin-yang involving who-asks-out-whom. On the one hand, ladies are more likely to have guys coming to them. On the other hand, if the guys aren’t coming, they are much more limited in what they can do in response. A guy, on the other hand, has the ability to muster up the courage to ask out a thousand girls, learn from his mistakes, get better at it (both the approach and the marks), and overcome it. It’s our responsibility, but also our power.

Back on the makeup thing, on the whole I think that guys have the better end of the deal. Of course, I think we do on the who-asks-out-whom deal, too. So maybe I am just the guy from the Chinese proverb picking my problems right back out of the pile. But I do like the fact that there is much less expectation that I am going to spend a whole lot of time and effort on my looks. I additionally benefit from being a nerd wherein by dressing up to the top of the curve gave me a significant advantage in a group that is notoriously cool for hanging out on the left end of it. And it takes a lot of decisions out of my hands, which given my indecisiveness and the fashion errors I make (consciously and unconsciously) is likely to my benefit.

Half Sigma was able to pick up on the fact that Anna Torv (the star of “Fringe”) is faking an American accent. I had actually picked up on the fact that her inflections were… odd… but I think I discovered that she was Australian the way that I uncover a lot of foreign actors. Namely I wonder what part of the country they are from because I can’t regionalize the accent and sounds something other than generic.

Some in the comment section have suggested that American accents are easy to fake because they grow up watching a fair number of American TV shows that are sold abroad. I think this is true, but I also think it’s true that there’s more flexibility in the American English idiom than in others. Britain has 60 million on an island. Australia has twenty million or so on an island continent. That’s not to say that there aren’t some regional and class distinctions, but I don’t think they compare to the multitude that come from the 300 million people in the United States accompanied by 30 million in neighboring Canada covering huge swaths of land with large spaces in between.

So for instance, I went my entire life until I moved to Arapaho without hearing (or noticing that I am hearing) the words bag and flag rhyme with “vague” despite knowing vaguely (no pun intended) that some people pronounce it that way. There are a lot of ways you can sound a little off-normal and people still kind of shrug it off as not-odd because we’re used to significant degrees of variation. Compare this variation to the relative lack of variation in the south, and it’s much, much easier to point out a bad southern accent (to those that are familiar with it) compared to a bad American one. That’s not because southern accents are monolithic (says the guy who gets frustrated with accents and says to the TV “people from Georgia do not sound like they are from Texas!”), but because the range is more limited and therefore it’s easier to spot (or hear) an actor who hasn’t nailed it.

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.

Kelsey: Here is the cookie dough Bill ordered from Sadie’s cookie sales.

Mom: Bill ordered cookie dough?

Mom: Bill, Kelsey dropped off the cookie dough you ordered for Sadie’s preschool. I didn’t know you ordered cookie dough. You want me to make cookies?

Dad: {shrug} I thought I was ordering cookies. But mostly, I was just ordering what Sadie was supposed to be selling.

Me: I think I am going to get myself some of that cookie dough.

Mom: You can’t. It’s in the freezer and I don’t make cookies on demand.

Me: I was just going to have some dough.

Mom: You can’t eat dough without the cookies.

Me: Why not?

Mom: You’re not supposed to. It’s bad for you.

Me: I don’t think it’s any worse for you than cookies. And it tastes good. Ice cream companies spent lots of money replicating the taste for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

Mom: Yeah, but that’s not actual cookie dough. Besides, I have plans for that dough.

Me: Plans? You didn’t even know you were getting it until fifteen minutes ago!

Mom: Yeah, but I’m going to make cookies. Besides, we’re eating dinner shortly.

Me: You really just don’t want me to eat any of that cookie dough, do you?

Mom: Cookie dough was meant to be cooked.

We’re moving closer to performers getting royalties on radio airplay. I’m of a bit of a mixed mind on this. On one hand, it doesn’t strike me as fair that they get a pass that Internet and Satellite Radio do not and I am not entirely unsympathetic to artists wanting a piece of the pie. On the other hand, in the fact of the alternatives (CDs, MP3s, etc) I have to start wondering how much more music radio can take. The number of commercials they have to run to support dwindling listenership and a weaker ad-market is already enough to make listening to the radio no longer worth it. Will radio be left with nothing else but talk and sporting events?

Is Steve Jobs right about Android? Is it really a case of fragmented/integrated rather than open/closed? For the general market, he could well be. That depresses me a good deal. Fragmentation sucks, but if you don’t want from a smartphone what Steve Jobs wants to give you, you’re really SOL. A lot of people, it would seem, don’t mind being told what they should want.

Speaking of Smartphones, it’s my hope that when Windows Phone 7 comes out, that it will eat into iPhone sales since that’s what they’re trying to emulate. It’s my fear that it will eat into Android, the only platform that resembles Windows Mobile, my smartphone OS of choice.

Yet another reason to hate the Comic Sans font. Actually, I don’t personally hate the font. Or, at least, I haven’t until people got the message to stop using it for everything. Even so, the results of the research paper are kind of weird.

How a San Fransisco lawyer is making a career out of abusing the Americans with Disabilities Act. Of course, the law is the law and so maybe it’s not “abuse”, per se, but it’s not unlike a former State Representative in Delosa who would find “no guns allowed” signs that didn’t meet with the most precise of regulations (such as the font-size being two-points too small or the word “allowed” being left off or the strikethrough circle (that thingie on the Ghostbusters insignia) touching the lettering. Anyhow, the state rep used to do it to get arrested and then cry fowl. At least he was working off principle, though, however retarded he was about it.

The secret to having happy employees is to fire the unhappy ones. This goes beyond simply manipulating the numbers. Unhappy employees can really be rather toxic. I’ve seen it myself.

John Robb on how Facebook and its kin may be undermining the future of software developers.

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.

Windows 8 should be coming out in a couple of years, bringing to light the question of whether its release will be all that relevant. In one sense it will be relevant because the Windows OS is the current standard and that’s unlikely to change. But will the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 be a relevant one?

But here’s the thing: I’m sure that Windows 8 will be an improvement over Windows 7 but can’t imagine who’s going to rush out to buy it. We’re long past the days when a new Windows meant a massive change in the user experience. Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was a sea change. Since then, however, it’s been pretty ho hum. Windows 98 was mostly a tweak. Windows XP was a pretty noticeable improvement, although most of us just waited until we bought a new box to get it. Vista was widely panned. Windows 7 was what Vista should have been.

Joyner passes right over Windows 2000, which I would also mark as a sea change. Yeah, the interface wasn’t all that different, but the changes on the backend were enormous as they switched to the NT-based platform. This caused problems with compatibility, but also produced the first really stable Windows. The Blue Screen of Death became, if not a thing of the past, more “What the hell” rather than “not again. XP was a mild upgrade, but only became really worth it when hardware caught up to the point that it wasn’t taking a hit on resources. Vista was relevant only to the extent that it was Microsoft’s first widespread disaster (Windows ME was a disaster, but not a widespread one).

The Windows 2000 oversight aside, I think that Joyner is essentially correct. Windows 8 will matter only insofar as it will be installed on new computers from that point forward. That makes it worth keeping an eye on, but not much more than that since Vista has demonstrated that if it’s really bad then Microsoft can be forced to go back to the drawing board. Ultimately, though, Windows is where it needs to be. It’s perhaps not as good as it should be, but it’s good enough. So I agree with those questioning whether they should be taking so long to try to knock our socks off. Windows doesn’t really do “wow” anymore and I am of the mind that they should shift gears towards a more evolutionary rather than revolutionary track.

Despite its many flaws, Windows Vista did some things quite right. The thing is, all of the things that I really like about Vista are either superficial or really small tweaks. For example, I likt e the fact that I can click on a directory at the top of an explorer window and it will backtrack to that directory. I like that if I place a shortcut to a folder that it shows the folder structure on the left side of the window. I like that if I have extensions showing and click to rename a file that it doesn’t highlight the extension. I like the increased control in copying/moving files. These are all really small things that I really miss whenever I go back to XP.

I would much prefer it if this was the kind of thing that Microsoft focused on with future OSes. Annual releases of mostly tweaks with an attractively-priced upgrade package would probably have me upgrading every year. It would have me looking forward to what they’re doing next. It would make each change to the OS more apparent. There are so many differences between Vista and XP that a lot of them end up going unnoticed. And often, rather than being a benefit, they’re a pain because you have to learn all of these changes at once. There’s also the hefty price tag, both in terms of cost and hardware requirements.

Of course, sometimes you have to make sweeping changes. For instance, one big change that Vista/Win7 do that needed to be done is to allow for greater RAM capacity. The transition from 32-bit to 64-bit was also necessary. So I do recognize that you do need revolutionary changes every now and again even if they mean that people are going to have to spend more on hardware and deal with compatibility issues. I don’t know what big changes Win8 will require, though I am open to being convinced. In the meantime, though, I think that they should be working on relatively small upgrades and do like they did with Windows 98 Second Edition. If nothing else, it will give them a good feel for which changes are positively received and which ones are not so that Microsoft doesn’t spend too much time developing something that proves initially to be very unpopular.

Is Internet {stuff} worse than crack? I find it interesting how crack becomes the benchmark for such things. As to the question, the Internet certainly makes it easier to take {stuff}ography into excess. Hit Coffee reader David Alexander remains the strongest anti-{stuff} case study I have ever seen.

On the other hand, it may prevent rape. This presents some uncomfortable questions with regard to child {stuff}. The ostensible reason against it is that it requires minors to partake, but we have to admit that’s only part of the reason. The other part is that we consider suck things sick. However, what do we do if digitally produced, widely available erotic pictures of eight year olds helps satiate pedophiles and prevents them from acting on their instincts and prevents them from obtaining {stuff}ography that involved the exploitation of minors… what then? Others, though, argue that it generally desensitizes us to rape as a criminal offense and so the same effect would apply to minors (presumably).

Charlie Sheen has never been a paragon of adult behavior, but it’s still sad to watch the descent. The producers of Two and a Half Men are looking at the positive, though at some point jail time may seriously get in the way of production. It’s interesting when you look at Sheen and his brother Emilio Estevez. Estevez has a couple of kids out of wedlock and is a product of Hollywood, but by and large seems to be a decent enough guy despite coming up in the same atmosphere that Charlie did.

If you major in English, like Vin Diesel did, you are embracing a life of uncertainty.

Rapper Ice Cube, unlike Vin Diesel, studied architectural design, and unlike Charlie Sheen and despite his anti-establishmentarianism appears to have lead a rather traditional life with four kids by a wife of nearly twenty years.

Still waiting for that {stuff}-only domain name. Some people think it’s stupid because the {stuff}-makers won’t abide by it. Quite the contrary, I think the biggest danger is that a lot of sites that have nothing to do with {stuff}ography are going to have a pretty straightforward way to goad people to their sites. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive.

The Chinese have an interesting approach to naming streets.

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.

-{HypoThursday is a latent series dedicated to your take on hypothetical scenarios. This one is for a subplot of a novel that has been bouncing around in my mind. After I get some answers, I’ll explain why it matters.}-

Bob Gaines is a two-term congressman. He got his position on a bit of a fluke, the default opponent in a year where his party had a really good showing. He also unseated his incumbent with a torrent of negative attacks on ethics violations going back to when his opponent was a criminal court judge. Prior to becoming a congressman, Gaines was a prosecutor working his way up from petty misdemeanors to sex crimes (forcible rape, mostly).

Congressman Gaines has a secret. One of those secrets out in the open for anyone that does the math. Finally, his third opponent, Jim Stevens, did. Gaines met his wife when he was 18 and she was 15. They are three years and two months apart, meaning that if they had sex at any point prior to her turning 17 (they were not married up to that point) then he was guilty of statutory rape. He doesn’t need to take the 5th because the Statue of Limitations has passed (beyond which, obviously his wife is not going to press for charges nor are her parents, who always liked him), but he’s not saying one way or the other whether he had premarital sex with his wife.

The Stevens campaign is saying that this is highly relevant because, as a prosecutor, Gaines handled sex crimes and if he was a sex criminal than that goes towards his character. The Gaines campaign responds that even that weak reasoning doesn’t work because Gaines never actually prosecuted any statutory rape cases and beyond which regardless of what happened Gaines was obviously not in violation of the spirit of the law. Stevens says the law is the law. The Gaines campaign say that whatever may or may not have happened is in the past is irrelevant because there is no legal standing for charges to be filed. Stevens says this is about character, not criminal charges.

Now, assume that you find both Gaines and Stevens to be equally good or bad on the issues. Would this (probable) revelation about Gaines’s past make you less likely to vote for him? If so, how much less likely? Does the fact that Gaines married her make his alleged crime irrelevant or is the law the law? Does the fact that it was over a decade ago make it irrelevant or is the law the law? Does the fact that Gaines prosecuted rapists make his own statutory rape relevant? Despite the fact that Gaines is not denying it, do you simply give him the benefit of the doubt and say it’s irrelevant because nothing has been proved or do you assume guilt? Does the fact that Gaines got his job on the basis of negative campaigning mean that all’s fair? Do you resent the fact that Stevens is focusing on this rather than more substantive things?