There’s something about Sonia Sotomayor being sworn in as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court that just lightens my spirit.
Whenever I think about all the problems with US society on every level, I find an antidote to my depression at the thought of a chica from the projects in South Bronx following a path not only out but by way of Princeton to the highest court in the land. I mean, what a country!
The Supreme Court is a linchpin in the checks & balances system the Founding Fathers established (well, it really is since Marbury v. Madison). The principle of judicial review is what really restrains the tendencies of the executive & the legislative branches to go cuckoo.
(I once had a conversation with a Brit about checks & balances; she didn’t know what I was talking about. My comment: “You mean, the only redress you have against crack-brained laws are the very whackjobs who enacted them?” Well, yes.)
The spectacle of Sotomayor’s Senate appearances, & the party-line voting on her confirmation just reminded me of how crucial it is to have the Court. Pols whose most important job in their minds is getting re-elected every two or six years should not be entrusted with unrestricted lawmaking power. The ‘Pubs, as could be expected, seized like manic terriers on some speeches Sotomayor had given about that wise Latina & pontificated as only the ‘Pubs can do when they don’t have anything of substance to talk about. (They also focused on three—out of scores—decisions she made while on the Federal bench.)
It will be interesting to see how those in states with high Hispanic populations do in their next election cycle, because, faced with the proverbial two masters, they pandered to the party rather than to the electorate.
Anyhow, Sotomayor was sworn in today, gave her family a tour of the office & then went to a barbecue in Annandale. God bless America.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Friday, August 7, 2009
It's all relative
The big economic news here in the US (aside from that whole cash for clunkers circus) is that the unemployment rate is only 9.4%.
The news part of this is that it’s lower than expected. Job cuts for July were 247,000, which was 78,000 less than anticipated by economists. Of course, that doesn’t even out with June’s losses, which were 467,000, 100,000 more than expected.
Any road, this “improvement” isn’t going to be any comfort if you’re one of the 9.4%, especially if you’re one of the 500,000 whose unemployment benefits will run out by September month’s end.
The news part of this is that it’s lower than expected. Job cuts for July were 247,000, which was 78,000 less than anticipated by economists. Of course, that doesn’t even out with June’s losses, which were 467,000, 100,000 more than expected.
Any road, this “improvement” isn’t going to be any comfort if you’re one of the 9.4%, especially if you’re one of the 500,000 whose unemployment benefits will run out by September month’s end.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Street legal
By the grace of God and lack of automatic weapons, I’ve transferred the last vestiges of Virginia to Washington. Yesterday I registered my car and got a local driver’s license.
You might wonder why I’m doing it now, after I’ve been here for a year. The forcing function was that my Virginia license was going to expire on Monday. While I don’t mind scoffing the “you must get a Washington license/registration within 30 days of moving in” law, I won’t drive with expired plates or license.
(The plates were good until November, but I also won’t drive with a discrepancy in the two things a cop would ask for when you’re stopped for a traffic violation. Which I haven’t had in more than 20 years; but the instant I fell into the “dodgy” category, you know I’d get stopped for driving 36.5 MPH in a 35 zone.)
The Evergreen State made it as difficult and as tedious as possible, of course.
Point 1: You have to go to two separate offices if you want both the DL and the registration. And by “separate offices” I mean “you’re lucky if they’re both in the same town”.
Point 2: You don’t have to prove you have an actual, you know, state residence to register your car, but you do to get a license.
Point 3: Among the documents as proof of residency they’ll accept is a “valid concealed weapon permit issued by a county in Washington”. Or an order to hook up cable TV in your residence.
Point 4: They’ve spent a good deal of time and thought on devising the least efficient system possible for processing people at the drivers license office, which maximizes the customers’ waiting time and frustration. In addition to never having all seven windows staffed at one time, somehow they came up with the idea of running two “take-a-number-&-wait-your-turn” series concurrently.
I have no idea what the criteria were for sending you links or rechts, but there was some arcane and arbitrary method of calling two-digit or three-digit numbers from the various windows. When I got there the woman I sat next to had number 60, and had seen three of the windows steadily calling numbers up to 59; and then a long stall.
Still—she’d only been there a little over 30 minutes before 60 was called. I was there 75 before I got to go up to the golden window with 379.
Naturally there was a computer glitch—the system didn’t like my street address and the bureaucrat had to grill me that what I’d put down was really real before she’d override it. (What the point of bringing in documents with my correct address on them—not a gun permit, though—was when she went ahead and basically manually entered the address, I do not know.)
Then I had to wait in another line to have my photo taken and receive a temporary license. “Your real one will be sent to you in eight to ten days.”
Point 5: Both car and license offices do not take debit or credit cards. What’s up with that?
In Virginia, not a place one would consider a hotbed of innovation, especially in government, you go to a single office to take care of any motor vehicle-related business. You can pay your fees with cash, checks and about every type of plastic known to mankind (and the fees were much lower than the ones I’ve paid here, for both registration and license). The person who processes your application also takes your photo and you walk out of the place with your real, laminated driver’s license.
Point 6: To replace my personalized plates, I have to wait 30 days to apply for the new plates. If they graciously deign to grant them to me (for way more money than I was paying in the Old Dominion), I wait another eight weeks. On the application form you put down what you want on the plates. Then you have to tell them what it means.
Only there's no room for sock puppets.
Really, I hate turning in my Virginia persona, especially for this lame, ersatz, overpriced lot. But it had to be done.
And maybe I should look into the concealed weapons permit.
You might wonder why I’m doing it now, after I’ve been here for a year. The forcing function was that my Virginia license was going to expire on Monday. While I don’t mind scoffing the “you must get a Washington license/registration within 30 days of moving in” law, I won’t drive with expired plates or license.
(The plates were good until November, but I also won’t drive with a discrepancy in the two things a cop would ask for when you’re stopped for a traffic violation. Which I haven’t had in more than 20 years; but the instant I fell into the “dodgy” category, you know I’d get stopped for driving 36.5 MPH in a 35 zone.)
The Evergreen State made it as difficult and as tedious as possible, of course.
Point 1: You have to go to two separate offices if you want both the DL and the registration. And by “separate offices” I mean “you’re lucky if they’re both in the same town”.
Point 2: You don’t have to prove you have an actual, you know, state residence to register your car, but you do to get a license.
Point 3: Among the documents as proof of residency they’ll accept is a “valid concealed weapon permit issued by a county in Washington”. Or an order to hook up cable TV in your residence.
Point 4: They’ve spent a good deal of time and thought on devising the least efficient system possible for processing people at the drivers license office, which maximizes the customers’ waiting time and frustration. In addition to never having all seven windows staffed at one time, somehow they came up with the idea of running two “take-a-number-&-wait-your-turn” series concurrently.
I have no idea what the criteria were for sending you links or rechts, but there was some arcane and arbitrary method of calling two-digit or three-digit numbers from the various windows. When I got there the woman I sat next to had number 60, and had seen three of the windows steadily calling numbers up to 59; and then a long stall.
Still—she’d only been there a little over 30 minutes before 60 was called. I was there 75 before I got to go up to the golden window with 379.
Naturally there was a computer glitch—the system didn’t like my street address and the bureaucrat had to grill me that what I’d put down was really real before she’d override it. (What the point of bringing in documents with my correct address on them—not a gun permit, though—was when she went ahead and basically manually entered the address, I do not know.)
Then I had to wait in another line to have my photo taken and receive a temporary license. “Your real one will be sent to you in eight to ten days.”
Point 5: Both car and license offices do not take debit or credit cards. What’s up with that?
In Virginia, not a place one would consider a hotbed of innovation, especially in government, you go to a single office to take care of any motor vehicle-related business. You can pay your fees with cash, checks and about every type of plastic known to mankind (and the fees were much lower than the ones I’ve paid here, for both registration and license). The person who processes your application also takes your photo and you walk out of the place with your real, laminated driver’s license.
Point 6: To replace my personalized plates, I have to wait 30 days to apply for the new plates. If they graciously deign to grant them to me (for way more money than I was paying in the Old Dominion), I wait another eight weeks. On the application form you put down what you want on the plates. Then you have to tell them what it means.
Only there's no room for sock puppets.
Really, I hate turning in my Virginia persona, especially for this lame, ersatz, overpriced lot. But it had to be done.
And maybe I should look into the concealed weapons permit.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Revisionist cookery
Well, William “Mel” Wallace must be rolling in his several graves: there’s evidence that haggis might have originated in England, not Scotland.
A Scottish food historian (why did I go for military history instead of food history?) says she found reference to the sheep-guts-&-oatmeal dish in an English cookery book dated 1615; the first mention of it in Scottish cook books is 1747.
Naturally the Scots—a race with an inherent inferiority complex dating way back before 1615—are waxing wroth & foaming at the mouth over the suggestion. Some clown named Robert Patrick has been making the rounds of the news services, drawing all sorts of lame conclusions about how this travesty might be: a well-travelled Scot might have dropped his cook book in England; maybe the English did originate it, but it’s now Scottish because…well, because; etc.
I love his assurance that the new claim is “not going down very well at all.” Kind of like…haggis, eh? (& yes, I have actually eaten it, so just back off.)
Patrick is allegedly a “world champion haggis maker”. You have to wonder how tough the competition is for that?
Of course, the crux of the matter might just be that the Scots were illiterate long after the English took up their letters: they could have been making haggis for decades, but just not be capable of putting pen to parchment to actually, you know, write it down.
& then there’s the real issue: who cares?
A Scottish food historian (why did I go for military history instead of food history?) says she found reference to the sheep-guts-&-oatmeal dish in an English cookery book dated 1615; the first mention of it in Scottish cook books is 1747.
Naturally the Scots—a race with an inherent inferiority complex dating way back before 1615—are waxing wroth & foaming at the mouth over the suggestion. Some clown named Robert Patrick has been making the rounds of the news services, drawing all sorts of lame conclusions about how this travesty might be: a well-travelled Scot might have dropped his cook book in England; maybe the English did originate it, but it’s now Scottish because…well, because; etc.
I love his assurance that the new claim is “not going down very well at all.” Kind of like…haggis, eh? (& yes, I have actually eaten it, so just back off.)
Patrick is allegedly a “world champion haggis maker”. You have to wonder how tough the competition is for that?
Of course, the crux of the matter might just be that the Scots were illiterate long after the English took up their letters: they could have been making haggis for decades, but just not be capable of putting pen to parchment to actually, you know, write it down.
& then there’s the real issue: who cares?
Remembering the Guns of August
Ninety-five years ago the chain of events begun in a farce-like assassination ground into a series of declarations of war ending with that of Great Britain on Germany on 4 August 1914.
And the stage was set for more than four years of horror Europe hadn’t seen since the Thirty Years War. In fact, take the carnage of that imperial conflict, freeze it primarily over Northern France/Belgium like a stalled weather system, add in such vastly improved killing technology as machine guns and rifled artillery and you have a recipe for 20,000,000 dead, billions in war debt and dragons’ teeth sown for the next conflagration 20 years down the road.
Between the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his consort Sophie by Bosnian dupes of the Serbs on 28 June and the final diplomatic gloved slaps (and the immediate invasion by Germany of Belgium without a declaration of war) there were Byzantine machinations and all manner of monarchical posturing (largely by Wilhelm II).
But really—once the partial and general mobilizations had been ordered in the various empires the rest was just filling in the gaps.
Anyhow—this is a good occasion to consider how momentum builds for something like this when there are testosterone-clouded minds in charge of states.
And the stage was set for more than four years of horror Europe hadn’t seen since the Thirty Years War. In fact, take the carnage of that imperial conflict, freeze it primarily over Northern France/Belgium like a stalled weather system, add in such vastly improved killing technology as machine guns and rifled artillery and you have a recipe for 20,000,000 dead, billions in war debt and dragons’ teeth sown for the next conflagration 20 years down the road.
Between the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his consort Sophie by Bosnian dupes of the Serbs on 28 June and the final diplomatic gloved slaps (and the immediate invasion by Germany of Belgium without a declaration of war) there were Byzantine machinations and all manner of monarchical posturing (largely by Wilhelm II).
But really—once the partial and general mobilizations had been ordered in the various empires the rest was just filling in the gaps.
Anyhow—this is a good occasion to consider how momentum builds for something like this when there are testosterone-clouded minds in charge of states.
Monday, August 3, 2009
The rich are different
From the NY Times comes word that celeb photog Annie Leibovitz is experiencing the sort of financial woes you’d not expect from someone who starts out with a $3M salary from Vanity Fair & adds commissions in the hundreds of thousands on top of that.
You sort of wonder how someone can go through a line of credit of $24M in a year—that’s a lot of Hasselblads.
Her friends insist that she’s not blowing it on Ferraris or Modiglianis (since she can get her clients to fork over for whatever she wants in that line), but that’s all the story we’re getting from her side. Meanwhile the company that lent her the $24M is suing her for repayment & may start selling her NY properties or take over the rights to her photographs, since that’s what she used to secure the loan.
Don’t know what moral to read into this. Except with her kind of income she might have considered hiring money managers.
You sort of wonder how someone can go through a line of credit of $24M in a year—that’s a lot of Hasselblads.
Her friends insist that she’s not blowing it on Ferraris or Modiglianis (since she can get her clients to fork over for whatever she wants in that line), but that’s all the story we’re getting from her side. Meanwhile the company that lent her the $24M is suing her for repayment & may start selling her NY properties or take over the rights to her photographs, since that’s what she used to secure the loan.
Don’t know what moral to read into this. Except with her kind of income she might have considered hiring money managers.