something ought to be done about that

The nuclear option was first proposed by the reps when they had the senate, but some kind of compromise was made and it never happened. The dems when they took control passed some kind of measure where it didn’t apply to appointing judges, but not superior court, something like that. Speaking purely objectively, and by no means approving of it at the current time, it seems like maybe they ought to abolish it because with current polarization it makes the senate impotent. Maybe they could make a bit of a compromise and say that they only needed 55 votes to break a filibuster. But then the senate is not a very balanced institute where North Dakota gets the same number of senators as California. Something should be done about that.

All politicians are well off, but some of them are way richer than others. This has led to the modern rash of really really rich guys running. Mostly they are oddballs and go down in flames, but sometimes they squeak by. This guy, Rauner in Illinois granted almost no interviews and basically just let his carefully crafted commercials do his talking for him, and basically just bought the governorship. That seems wrong that rich guys can buy political office. Something should be done about that.

I think a lot of it is the fame and the power, and some of them probably believe what they are saying and think they are a force for good, but once they achieve office they are settled on the banks of the money river. They can make those deals, once they leave office they can go to work for some lobbying group, they probably make much more money that way than they ever do from their salary. Something should be done about that.

Those commercials, they used to have to have some kernel of truth to their accusations, well maybe they still do, but seems to me that the kernel has shrunk considerably from what it used to be. And there is kind of a formula to them so that you really can’t tell one from another. How is this free speech? I have to wonder how effective they are when it’s about 50/50. But certainly it’s devastating when it’s 90/10. It’s like the arms race, if the Russkies build more warheads so do we. There used to be rules about how much money you could spend on a campaign, and surely things would be better if there still were. As it is now most candidates spend all their time raising money, whereas if we had limits, once they made their limit, they could theoretically do responsible things. Something should be done about that.

Don’t you remember that the reps were going to sue Obama over some Obamacare provision, but after all the bluster they realized they didn’t have a legal leg to stand on they basically dropped it? Nobody but you wants to watch drawn out impeachments etc. 

And the argument that if they spend their time wrapped up in knots they won’t do anything assumes that this country is moving further leftward and more regulated over time when in fact it has moved probably more rightward, and certainly less regulated, over recent times, and this is because of the actions of the gov. Roughly half the laws changed are changed in the way you like them, so this call for gridlock is just nonsense. Something should be done about something.

Why don’t you just hire Dick Cheney to kill your deer for you? That would involve the thrill of wondering whether you would get shot in the face and have to apologize to Dick for blocking his shot.

Money and Politics

I thought the senate already did something about the filibuster. I don't think they totally abolished it, but they changed the rules somewhat. I seem to remember they called it the "nuclear option" or some thing like that, but I don't remember why. The pundits said at the time that the Dems would be sorry someday when the Reps had a majority, and some Dems even voted against it for that reason. Now that I think of it, maybe they didn't pass it, just talked about it.

Funny how money plays such an important role in politics when the jobs don't pay all that much. The president makes a quarter million a year, and the rest of them make substantially less, yet millions are spent getting those people elected. Of course most of that money is donated, but the candidates usually put up some of their own money too. I think you have to be kind of rich to even think about running a successful campaign. Not many regular people could afford to take a year off work and go traipsing around the country shaking hands and kissing babies. Then there's the stress of all that traveling and sleeping in strange beds every night. It's no wonder they occasionally say something stupid, they must get goofy from jet lag. If all they cared about was making money, I think most of these guys could do better in the private sector. I think it's more about fame and power than it is about money, but that's just my opinion.

We usually hit the "mute" button when ads come on the TV, but sometimes we turn the sound on if we are interested in a particular ad. The Dem candidate in that senate race I told you about yesterday kept showing the same ad about how the Rep candidate was responsible for all kinds of industrial pollution in Southern Michigan. I wondered how that was possible, since the only thing she had ever done in her life was sell driver's licenses, so I turned the sound on one day to find out. Turns out she was getting substantial financial support from the Koch brothers who, coincidently, owned all those factories, and that was supposed to mean that the pollution was all her fault. She followed with some ads of her own that revealed her opponent actually owned stock in some of the same companies.  Afterwards, both candidates complained about all the "outside money" that was used to influence the election. Neither of them said they wanted to accept that money, but they had to because their opponent did. So there you go.

I know that the president has the power to issue executive orders, but I'm sure that, like all other government powers, there must be some kind of limitations. I think it would be interesting to see what the courts have to say about that, and maybe we will. Impeachment proceedings would be even more fun. I don't care who wins or loses, but I'd like to see them waste a lot of time arguing about it like they did with Bill Clinton. The more time they spend on stuff like that, the less time they have for "reforming" things, which means "making them worse".

You know, I could have been rich and famous, but I chose not to because I'm basically lazy. I'd much rather spend my time and energy on more important things like hunting and fishing. In my younger days, I used to walk around a lot more than I do now when deer hunting but, over time, I found that sitting on my ass in a heated blind was not only more comfortable, but also more productive. It's possible to walk right up on a deer if you're careful and you know how, but then all you've got to shoot at is a white tail bounding off into the woods. That's a difficult target to hit, and it ruins a lot of meat if you do. A standing broadside shot through the rib cage is much more humane and efficient.

I still have about a quarter mile walk out to my blind, and then I make a loop and come home a different way. I have never gotten a shot doing that, but I might someday, so I'm always on the alert. One day years ago, my hypothetical wife watched a nice buck eating apples under a tree not 20 feet from the house while I was out in my blind. If I had been coming home at that moment, I might have gotten a shot at him. When we first moved here, I tried to negotiate an agreement that I could hunt from the roof of the house, or maybe from inside the garage if I opened the window and removed the screen first, but no deal. You think those Republicans are averse to compromise, you should try it with a woman!

hedge fund billionaires

The repubs taking the senate doesn’t look good, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference because as long as the senate has a party with less than sixty members of one party it can never do anything. I was all for getting rid of the fillibuster when the dems had the lead, but now that the reps have the lead, not so much. I suppose the reps could still get rid of the filibuster, but then they still have the presidential veto to contend with.

They say it will be a nicer sweeter GOP now that the tea partiers have been shunted to the margins, and maybe Obama, bowing to the necessary, will play nice with them, but even as I’m writing that sentence I don’t believe it.

Yes indeed we Illinoisans are used to seeing our govs go from the big house to the other big house. Quinn, the incumbent dem, had to deal with the sorry mess Blago left us, and was doing a soso job, but then along game hedge fund billionaire Rauner, one of those money guys who hang around making deals with the politicos. He ran in the primaries as all reps do, as a right wing nut job, and in the primary posed as a gentle moderate. He put a pile of his own money into the campaign, and pretty much bought the governorship.

You know one of the biggest lies going around about these self-funded billionaires is that they can be trusted because they can’t be bought because they are already rich, but the fact is that the only thing that really rich people are motivated by is becoming even richer. He may well be hustled off to the big house in a few years, though maybe not because he is pretty slick. Slickness is admired in Illinois.

I don’t know about that constitutional crisis. Remember the big deal about how the reps were going to sue Obama? You don’t hear much about that anymore. I’m all for Obama doing what he can.

We’ve talked about hunting before. I suppose it would be a lot of fun if you got together with a bunch of your beer drinking buddies and traipsed around the woods, and ran the manly risk of shooting each other, but sitting around in that blind and dozing off from time to time, you might as well be playing video games.  

Don't Take it so Hard

I thought the election went well this time but, truth be known, I doubt that anything substantial will come of it. There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth by the losers, and the winners will strut and crow like banty roosters, generally making fools of themselves. We will have gridlock for two more years, and then everybody gets to try again. It could be worse, you know. We could live in one of those third world countries where the election is only the opening ceremony for the civil war that is sure to follow.

I was happy to hear that the GOP won control of the senate, but disappointed to hear that it was no thanks to Michigan. We had an old Democratic senator retire, only to be replaced by another Democrat. The GOP fielded a weak candidate with no legislative experience, all she had ever done was sell driver's licenses as Michigan Secretary of State. I suppose she was the best they could come up with because she ran unopposed in the primaries. Michigan hasn't elected a Republican senator in 20 years, so I guess nobody else thought it was worth the effort. I was surprised that our RINO governor was re-elected because he had made enemies on both sides. I suppose he won by appealing to those wishy-washy moderates who, in my opinion, have entirely too much influence in this country.

Just before the election, I read one of those newspaper pundits who said that everybody was watching the governor's race in Illinois. How did that turn out? Is it true that four out of your last nine governors ended up in prison? Sounds like a risky job to me! I suppose, though, that a gambling man might consider those to be good odds: five to four that you won't get caught.

Another pundit, this one on TV, said that Obama would now try to do everything by executive order, which he has been doing somewhat already. With a hostile congress, this could lead to a full blown constitutional crisis, which might be a lot of fun to watch. (I said that, not the pundit.)

Meanwhile, Michigan's firearm deer season is fast approaching. Opening Day, November 15, used to be a big deal around here, but not so much anymore. For some time they have had a bow season that runs from October 1 to December 31. Gun hunters still take more deer than bow hunters, but the long bow season kind of took the magic away from November 15. It's like if they started Christmas season right after Halloween. Oh wait, they already do that! Maybe that's why Christmas is not nearly as exciting to us as it was when we were kids.

bleak morning

You don’t remember those, oh let’s call them thingamabobs between the sidewalk and the front lawn? They weren’t everywhere. Our house didn’t have one of them. We did have a sticker bush right by the sidewalk, and the threat among the neighborhood kids was not, I’ll kick your ass, but I’ll push you into the sticker bush. But further on south, towards Tonti, they had them. I don’t know where else they were, or if, for some reason, like those rare newts that live only in some isolated valley and therefore the golf course cannot be built, the only place in the whole world they existed was on the east side of Homan Avenue between 56th and 57th street. How do you do internet research on ‘thingamabob’?

But you know, that was our world when we were tots, the sidewalk. The grownups walked along it, and they even watered the lawns and tended to the gardens, but they never explored it the way we did, never knew every inch of the land, didn’t notice the way the leaves dappled the sidewalks in shifting shadows all summer long, or the way the snow, piled up on the parkways and front part of the front yards, was a rough mountainous terrain complete with peaks and river valleys.

Well I wax poetic and nostalgic because I do not want to face the world this morning. Last night I had hurried through my supper and poured myself a beer in eager anticipation of watching the returns turn in, because I knew it couldn’t possibly be as bad as all the pundits were saying it was going to be.

Oh they’ll never take the senate I thought, the American people are too smart to fall for that republican boogie joogie. They are too kind to want to treat their fellow Americans down on their luck in such a harsh and unforgiving way. They are too perceptive to see kindly uncle Obama as some kind of boogeyman taking this country to ruin.

But right off, right off the bat at seven when I tuned into CNN, there was Mitch McConnell, Mr Turtle Wax, sitting pretty, not even close, his bloody talons outstretched, ready to pluck the senate leadership like a ripe apple. Oh there were a few good moments, a few little hopeful blossoms, rising from the wintry ground, only to be crushed, utterly crushed, beneath the broad hooves of the pachyderm.

Oh somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright, Beagles is going wherever he gets his news and when he finds it his heart will be light. Well not all that light, because, though he favors the republicans, the republicans that won were not of that tea party ilk that he favors. He holds the whole thing a bit at a distance, it is all the business of them, who is everybody but him, and they seldom come up to his ideal standards, so he smiles a bit, whistles perhaps, but he doesn’t do like back flips in the rye field for example.

But Uncle Ken weeps this morning. He knows the dems can be an unsavory crowd, but he feels a kinship with them, likes to think of himself as a face in the democratic crowd, smells always that whiff of brimstone from the tailored suits and high silk hats of the repubs.

But this happens right? Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. We had eight years of Mr Blarney and eight more years of the dimwit, and still the world more or less goes on.

The day Obama won I sat on my balcony and watched the crowds trundle happily home across the Michigan Avenue bridge. It would be a long walk, and they could have taken a train, or a bus, or a cab, but they wanted to continue walking, walking in comradeship with their fellow celebrants because it would be a new day, all the crap of the past would be swept away.

Stupid animals we humans, we Americans, every two years we think the whole world will change, when we win, we will save it, when we lose, we are all doomed.

I’ll have a better perspective in the morrow.

Lawns and Parkways

I remember the gutters and the parkways, but I don't remember ever seeing those other two cement things that you talked about. I would think you would have to maintain them or the sod from the lawn or parkway would eventually creep out and cover them up. We used to cut out a narrow strip of sod between our lawn and the sidewalk in our yard every few years, but I don't remember ever doing that between the parkway and the city sidewalk. I remember that most people raked up their leaves and burned them in the gutter, but we just ground ours up with the power mower. We had a double lot, so our yard was bigger than most and we didn't have time for all that foolishness. We had lots of paper and cardboard trash from the store, and we used to burn that in a square cage that my dad made out of some old fence panels. That was located out on the parkway, which was probably illegal, but nobody ever complained about it.

I used to wonder about those parkways too, but I came to understand the concept years later when I read about something like that in our local Cheboygan paper. I have never lived in the city limits, so it was no concern of mine, but I read it with interest anyway because I had always wondered about stuff like that. They argue about sidewalks more in Cheboygan than they do about parkways, but I think the concept is the same. In most jurisdictions, you technically own everything to the middle of the street or road, but the city, county, or whoever has an easement for the roadway, the width of which varies from one jurisdiction to the other. For a county road in Michigan, the easement is 66 feet wide, 33 feet coming out of your property and 33 feet coming out of your neighbor across the road. A typical two lane county road is only 24 feet wide, but the county can use the rest of the easement for shoulders, ditches, sidewalks, or whatever. In rural areas, the county generally mows the grassy parts of its easement only once a year. You can mow it more often if you want to, but it's not required.

In the city, they have an ordinance that makes the property owner responsible for the sidewalk and parkway in front of his land. This ordinance is not uniformly enforced, which is why people argue about it. Some sidewalks were installed by the city in the ages lost to memory. The city claims they don't do that anymore, if indeed they ever did. Some neighborhoods don't even have sidewalks but, if they do, you're supposed to take care of them. If the city decides they want a sidewalk where there never was one, or a deteriorated sidewalk rebuilt, they will try to get the property owner to do it at his own expense. If he refuses to do it, the city sometimes does it and then adds the expense to his tax bill, prorated over several years. Sometimes, though, they just argue about it for awhile and then drop the matter. I don't know if anybody has ever taken them to court for that, but it seems like somebody should.

Anyway, the theory behind making you shovel snow and mow in front of your property is that, if the city did it, they would have to raise your taxes to pay for it, and most people would rather do it themselves than let that happen. Sometimes, though, they tell the city to just do it and send them the bill. Our downtown section is like that. There is no parkway and precious little sidewalk because that part of the city was originally designed for horses, not cars. You're not supposed to shovel snow out into the street, but there is no place else to put it, so the city or a private contractor comes down the sidewalk with a snow blower and blows it into the street. Then the city trucks plow it all to the center, where it sits for days until they get caught up with their plowing. Eventually, if it doesn't melt first, they come down the center with a big auger thing and blow it into dump trucks that haul it out of town and dump it in a field.

They don't let people burn leaves and brush in town either. What they do is announce a spring and a fall pickup time. Everybody piles all that stuff on the edge of the street, where the gutters would be if they had gutters, and the city trucks pick it up and haul it to the stump dump. If you have stuff any other time of the year, you have to haul it to the stump dump yourself. The stump dump is not for regular garbage, just natural organic stuff. Of course, we don't have to worry about that in Beaglesonia, the whole property is our own personal stump dump.

I think the way that "bravery" thing goes is: If you like the guy, he's brave. If you don't like him, he's reckless.

kicking along the curb

What the Mexicans, and most Spanish cultures, as I understand, do is stack up maiden names so that I, for example, would be Kenneth Janovsky-Schadt, actually Kenneth Something-Something-Something-Janovsky-Schadt, those Somethings going back to whenever they started giving out last names. In actual practice you have to cut it off somewhere or you’ll never get done signing your name on your Target receipt and bringing home that new microwave.

I’ll leave it to you to research Gus.

I’ve never heard about this elsewhere. Whatever happens on Earth happens here, folks on Mars don’t know about it for nine minutes later, but it still happens on Earth. England surrendered to the US somewhere in the East but Andy Jackson didn’t find out a week or so after he defeated the British in New Orleans but the surrender didn’t happen elsewhere. I don’t know where this elsewhere comes from.

There is Schrodinger's cat, and wouldn’t you think if somebody was going to invent a famous thought experiment, they would changer their name to something easy to spell, like Gus? And wouldn’t you think they would avoid harming a cuddly creature like a cat? Anyway that’s where the cat is in a sealed container with a vial of poison gas which might or might not be broken and the cat would might be dead or alive, and it wouldn’t be just that we wouldn’t know, but it actually wouldn’t be either, until we open the container. In a sense, nothing exists until it is observed, which settles that question about the tree falling in the forest, but is pretty vague about who or what is an observer.

Big hoopla about Nik. All the preparation was cool, and all the lights shining at night, and the mob of folks on the sidewalk. All cool. I watched it from the big tv in our meeting room and it was not so cool, mainly because it was all hoopla, and interviewing boring people, one of the worst of whom was a tv evangelist who has somehow jumped on Nik’s bandwagon, and then the total time on the tightrope was less than ten minutes, and he didn’t do any stunts up there, and he didn’t slip just a bit to make the crowd gasp, you might have just watched a kid trying not to step on a crack on the way to school, or me walking down to Walgreens for a six pack of PBR.

You know talking about that crack in the sidewalk suddenly took me back in time to when I was a little kid and closer to the sidewalk and paid attention to these things. OK, there was the street, then there was a little area between the street and the curb where the asphalt ran out and it was cement, and it was called the gutter, and one of the great things about growing up in Gage Park in the 50s was that in the fall people would rake their leaves into the area and set them on fire. How cool. Sometimes if there was a big pile of leaves and the burners had kids there would be a marshmallow roast. And the sweet smell would drift across the neighborhood all fall long. How cool.

And speaking of cool, if you were maybe twelve years old, and therefore deemed responsible, you could take a, oh what were they called, a garbage can made of like chicken wire where the family tossed all their burnable garbage, out to the alley and set it on fire. And you even had some kind of metal stick you could poke it with. How very very cool.

Anyway, after the curb, there was a little width of cement, maybe a foot between the parkway and the curb, where I guess you could walk to the car door without stepping on the lawn. If you wanted to do a really good job on shoveling the sidewalk, like if you were getting paid, you might shovel that too, but if you were doing it under duress from your parents you probably wouldn’t bother.

Then there was that mysterious parkway, it really belonged to the city, but you were expected to keep it up, seemed like some great injustice.

Then there was the sidewalk, the cool thing about the sidewalk was that it would have these stamps in it, like from the guys who paved it, and some of them were so worn away that it was a puzzlement figuring out what they said, pretty cool.

And then there was strange area that not everybody had. After the sidewalk there was a little dip down, maybe an inch or two, and then there was another curb in front of the front lawn. That little curb was something you would try to walk on, on the way back from school, which is what made me think of tightrope walking.

But that area between the front lawn curb and the sidewalk, maybe eight inches wide, which was lined with cement where worms would go to drown after a rain, and maybe if you were a real little kid you would try to save them, but when you got older you would squash them, what was it for? What was it called?

I was going to go on with a discussion of bravery. Is it really a virtue? Where is the dividing line between timidity and wise prudence? Seems we have a penchant for calling anybody we don’t like a coward, even if what they did might have been very brave, though evil. So what’s with that?

But the talk of sidewalks has taken up all my time today