The Daily Parker

NPR's Morning Edition has a story today on a "tea party" rally in Nevada. Listening to the people interviewed, the only thing preventing me from recommending that no one be allowed to protest against the government without having taken a basic civics class is that I have taken a basic civics class.

Now, I know many people with center-right leanings who can make coherent arguments in favor of or against various policies. I enjoy those debates immensely. The people who spoke to NPR, though? Each had some different reason for yelling at their Congressman, ranging from self-interested fear to abject panic, while seeming immune to the basics of what the state actually does in this country.

Item: A woman complained that the EPA has wants to close a public road near her house for unspecified environmental reasons, which will prevent her "three little children" from riding all over the place on all-terrain vehicles. What gives the government the right to close a public road, she asks?

Item: A man rants that "people" (i.e., "you people") are telling him what to do because "Obama won, and they think that gives them the right, like everyone wants to do this, and I'm not 'everyone.'"

Item: Another man believes the government wants to "take over the Internet" in an emergency, and he doesn't want "the government" telling him what to do.

OK. Let's review.

The "government," in a republic like the U.S., is us. "Government" also means many, many different things: Federal, state, county, township, city, water reclamation district, parks authority, and on and on. So, when the "government" wants to close a "public" road (meaning, a road the "government" built in the first place), who gave "them" the right? Well, you did.

You see—and here we need less a civics class than a good Kindergarten teacher—we can't have everything we want. So, every so often, you get to go and vote for the person you think best represents you in "government." Your neighbors vote too. Sometimes they want things you don't; sometimes they do. If the "government" wants to close a road instead of allowing your children to risk death while tearing up the landscape and polluting the air and scaring the bejeebus out of your neighbor's livestock, my bet is that you need to take up the matter with your neighbors, not with the President. And, ma'am, sometimes you lose.

As for the third guy, this presents a trickier problem. Ignorance of basic technical matters often complicates debate. But to discuss the difficulties in "taking over" the Internet, we first have to close our eyes to the subtext of his comment, which involves U.N. troops in black helicopters keeping him under constant surveillance as part of their nefarious plot to control our children with fluoride in the drinking water.

It bothers me that saying we need rational debate between people who have passing acquaintance with the Constitution angers people. But come on. We have serious problems and we need serious discussions to solve them. Let's stop wasting time with the cranks.

The U.S. Postal Service finally plans to sell the Old Post Office building in Chicago, which they abandoned more than 10 years ago:

One of the biggest real estate auctions in the city’s history is slated for Thursday, when the U.S. Postal Service is to sell the Old Main Post Office.

And even though the postal service is planning an "absolute auction" — meaning the building is to be sold regardless of price, with a suggested opening bid of just $300,000 — the question remains who will step up for the roughly 279,000 m² building at 433 W. Van Buren St., which straddles the Congress Parkway and has been vacant for more than a decade.

This is the same building into which the Postmaster for Chicago ploughed $1 million to renovate his own office—about 6 months before the USPS moved out.

The Chicago Tribune reported this afternoon that the Red, Yellow, and Orange Lines have gotten approval for long-overdue extensions—or, in the case of the Yellow Line, restoration:

The Red Line extension, some 40 years in the making, would use Union Pacific Railroad right of way. The new train service would improve mobility for low-income residents in communities under-served by mass transit on Chicago's South Side, as well as provide a new transit option for commuters from the southern suburbs who either drive downtown or drive to Metra stations.

In addition, the Orange Line would be expanded from Midway Airport to near the Ford City shopping center. The extension is intended to improve bus-to-train connections for numerous CTA and Pace bus routes along Cicero Avenue and other nearby parts of the Chicago area where there has been significant growth. ... In the north suburbs, the Yellow Line would be extended several miles to near the Old Orchard shopping center in Skokie, from the current terminal on Dempster Street.

I say "restoration" for the Yellow Line because, until 1963 when the North Shore Line went bankrupt, the line ran a bit farther than Dempster Street. Actually, it ran all the way to Milwaukee. But because public preference and policy favored private cars over all other forms of transportation, the northern suburbs expanded through road construction, to the detriment of the existing interurban rail lines that covered the area. The Yellow and Purple Lines run over the North Shore Line's tracks, in fact.

That the CTA now wants to restore 5 km of track that existed for 60 of the past 100 years was predictable when the track was removed in the 1960s. I wonder how long it will take before the Yellow Line goes up to Northbrook Court. Again.

Journalist Robert Wright weighs in on the (ridiculous, I think) question of whether dogs are parasites:

I suspect the historical relationship between dogs and humans has been mutualistic, not parasitic; humans have probably been pragmatic in choosing what kinds of dogs to associate with during dog-human co-evolution, thus keeping wantonly exploitative tendencies out of the canine gene pool. (If anything, the parasitism has probably worked in the other direction.)

And as for the question of whether, evolutionary history aside, the average dog is now parasitic upon its owner: Well, these days we own dogs mainly for the joy they bring us, not to warn us about wild animals. So the question is simple: Does your dog bring you more joy than pain?

Yes, I can say about my own dog, which I feel even more acutely right at this moment owing to Parker's absence. I'm off to the Land of Uk tomorrow, so Parker is with a friend until I get back. I have to say, coming home to an empty apartment—I even took his bed up to the friend's house—really sucks.

Via The Daily Dish, the results of the American Time Use Survey, in very cool form.

Background:

Sunday Business analyzed new data from the American Time Use Survey to compare the 2008 weekday activities of the employed and unemployed. ... The annual time use survey, which asks thousands of residents to recall every minute of a single day, is important to economists trying to value the time spent by those not bringing home a paycheck.

The chart, though, is wicked cool.

After Illinois passed a tough anti-corruption law in the wake of Rod Blagojevich's implosion, the Federal Highway Administration found it ran counter to U.S. law:

[T]he General Assembly passed a bill making it illegal for the governor or any agency he controls, like the Illinois Department of Transportation, to award a contract to any person or entity that donated more than $50,000 to the governor's campaign fund.

[S]tate Sen. Don Harmon (D-Oak Park) and the House sponsor of [a second bill that lifted the cap on IDOT projects], Rep. John Fritchey (D-Chicago), say they had no choice but to weaken the anti-corruption law because the feds told them they had to or Illinois could lose zillions in federal highway funds.

"However laudable the goals of such state laws, they have the effect of limiting competition in the awarding of federal-aid highway contracts," says the May 9 letter from FHWA Acting Deputy Administrator Jeffrey Paniati. Putting a brick on the proposals in Illinois and Jersey — which arguably is just as corrupt as Illinois — was "necessary to ensure compliance with federal law," the letter said.

Now, wouldn't it be an interesting twist, and typically Illinois, if the legislature passed the $50,000 cap to throw contracts to friends of the legislature instead of friends of the governor....

Nah, they're not that sophisticated, are they?

Via Talking Points Memo, the founder of the company that paid a $1.7 billion fine for defrauding Medicare—also the same guy leading the effort to derail health insurance reform—answered some questions on CNN today:

First, on the 45th anniversary of President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act into law, Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Second, John Hughes died this afternoon. He was 59.

Third, Britain has had unusually squishy summer, which only matters because I'm spending the entire last half of August there. Oh, it also matters to anyone trying to fly out of the U.K.

A Wisconsin jury has convicted a couple of murder after they allowed their 11-year-old daughter to die right in front of them:

Dale Neumann, 47, was convicted in the March 23, 2008, death of his daughter, Madeline, from undiagnosed diabetes. Prosecutors contended he should have rushed the girl to a hospital because she couldn't walk, talk, eat or speak. Instead, Madeline died on the floor of the family's rural Weston home as people surrounded her and prayed. Someone called 911 when she stopped breathing.

Neumann, who once studied to be a Pentecostal minister, testified Thursday that he believed God would heal his daughter and he never expected her to die. God promises in the Bible to heal, he said.

"If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God," Neumann testified. "I am not believing what he said he would do."

No, if you go to the doctor, you're saving your daughter's life. Or put another way, Proverbs 16:18.

Seriously: praying is fine, especially if it makes the supplicant or sick person feel better. I believe this even though I think prayer acts through a placebo effect (when it works at all, which is usually no more often than random chance). Praying for someone's recovery at her hospital bed is positively admirable, as it combines a demonstrated placebo effect with actual medical care.

What is not acceptable, what is actually kind of depraved, what I hope outrages my Christian, Jewish, and Muslim friends as much as it does me, is to have a prayer group stand around watching your own child die in agony on the floor of your house.

I find it odd that Wisconsin Public Radio's report used the word "unrepentant." I'm absolutely sure he fully repents his sins within his understanding of his religion. He just doesn't think letting his daughter die horribly while he and his friends watched qualifies. Fortunately for the last glowing embers of the Enlightenment, the people of Wisconsin think it does.

Leave it to Krugman:

The essence is really quite simple: regulation of insurers, so that they can't cherry-pick only the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance.

...[W]hat it means for the individual will be that insurers can’t reject you, and if your income is relatively low, the government will help pay your premiums.

That's it. Any commentator who whines that he just doesn't understand it is basically saying that he doesn’t want to understand it.

The article he's reacting to is also worth reading.