Great Blog! Friends of Irony

A whole bunch of sometimes amusing, sometimes hysterically funny photos.  (I presume since they provided a copy and paste code block explicitly to include all of these on one's blog, that they intend for people to do so.)  Like this one, showing a tattoo that qualifies as self-refuting. 


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And a news story about some Polish neo-Nazis who make a horrifying discovery about their ancestry.


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And a pro-life message on a remarkably inappropriate dry cleaning item.


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(If you don't see the irony on this one--coat hangers used to be used for another purpose besides hanging up clothes.)

And this tragic attempt by a public school system to tell everyone about the virtues of the local public school system...but which demonstrates a serious spelling error that I fear might turn out to be an accurate description.


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Or this unfortunate juxtaposition of someone's cute piglet and a T-shirt expressing a culinary preference.


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Reporting The News, Or Making It?

Reporters with the Anchorage CBS news affiliate called the Joe Miller for Senate campaign and left a voice mail.  Then they hung up--or thought that they had hung up.  Then they had a conversation about ways to smear the Miller for Senate campaign--and that ended up on the voice mail.  It makes you wonder how much liberals do like this that doesn't end up accidentally on voice mail.

Whee! Jury Summons!

Boise County has given me three days on which I may be called for jury duty.  Unfortunately, they are all in Idaho City--which is 39.7 miles by the most direct route--but according to Google maps, more than two hours away.  (Bad road?  You have no idea.)  The fastest route is 62.9 miles, but about 90 minutes, because it involves going through Boise (which is not in Boise County).

I am hoping that I call in the night before and discover that they have managed to resolve these matters without a jury.  I do not mind doing my duty as a citizen.  I do mind that we have such crummy roads between here and the county seat.

Idaho Initiatives

While generally ignoring the last minute hit pieces, I use the last weekend to study initiatives on the ballot.

Here in Idaho, there are four initiatives on the statewide ballot.

S.J.R. 101 authorizes the Board of Regents of the University of Idaho to impose tuition on students.  What?  You didn't realize that they did not charge tuition to students?  Much like the University of California used to pretend that we were paying "fees," not tuition, the University of Idaho, apparently because of its land grant university origins, pretends not to be charging tuition.  Other state universities and colleges are allowed to charge tuition. 

The argument for allowing this is to make it consistent across the state.  I suspect that the real goal is to allow the University of Idaho to get more of its operating costs from students, and less from the state government.  While I do believe that there is a virtue to making public university education readily available, I also know that there are a lot of people who get pretty useless degrees because they are not paying even a significant fraction of the costs.  Perhaps if there was a bit more connection between actual costs and student payments, some students would think through whether their education is worth anything.  Of course, since this only affects University of Idaho--which educates only a relatively small fraction of Idaho's college students, I rather doubt that this is going to be a big net change.

The opponents argue that "the state could provide the additional funding to cover the costs of classroom instruction at the University of Idaho."  Yeah, like Idaho has lots of money laying about with nothing better to spend it on than the University of Idaho.  Why should U. of I. get advantages that Boise State does not?

I think (unless someone can convince me otherwise), that I am going to vote YES on this.

H.J.R. 4, 5, and 7 all seem to be slight variants on the same basic theme: authorizing, respectively, public hospitals, airports, and municipal electric utilities, "to incur indebtedness or liability to purchase, contract, lease or construct or otherwise acquire facilities, equipment, technology and real property for health care operations, provided that no ad valorem tax revenues shall be used for such activities?"  That's the language from H.J.R. 4, and 5 and 7 are similar, although not identical.

What does this really mean?  It appears that each of these categories of local public institutions are currently required to get a 2/3 approval of the voters before incurring any long-term debt.  This change to the state constitution would eliminate that requirement, allowing these institutions to borrow money, as long as the repayment costs were paid other than from property taxes.  In short, hospitals, airports, and municipal electric utilities could float such bonds if they were to be repaid from user fees--but not from property taxes.

At first glance, this does not seem like a bad thing.  This won't simplify raising property taxes at all, and it does make it easier to borrow money for public improvements.  I do worry a bit, however, about how allowing these public institutions to increase their total indebtedness without a vote of the people might increase the risk of these institutions getting in over their heads in debt.  Remember that these are not temporary tax increases, which can be turned off at the next election--these are public institutions floating municipal bonds, which are usually 30 year duration.

I am not generally partial to allowing governments to get into long-term debt without substantial public agreement that it is necessary and makes sense.   As a result, I'm planning to vote no on all three of these.

Last Minute Ads

I tend to wait until the last minute to read initiatives, and this election is no different.  I use this time because the most vicious, and generally least accurate campaign ads come out on the last weekend before the election.  Why?  Because if Mr. A says something really vile about Mr. B--there is not time to produce anything in print, or a radio or television commercial, that refutes it.  The television ads and robocalls from Walt Minnick are making the claim that Raul Labrador intentionally and knowingly worked with one of Labrador's clients to flee justice. 

That is a claim that I believe actually qualifies as libelous--asserting that an attorney intentionally conspired to help a criminal escape justice.  Making such a claim three days before the election--instead of two weeks ago, when there could have been a response, if Labrador had a response--is generally the mark of someone who does not dare allow enough time for a response. 

Minnick is probably toast--and I sure hope so.  A few months back, my reasons to back Labrador were primarily, "Remove the Wicked Witch of the West from Speaker of the House" and secondarily that Labrador seemed to be a serious conservative.  I was not particularly hostile to Minnick.  Watching these sleazy, manipulative, dishonest ads from Minnick have made me really, really hostile to him.  I look forward to seeing Minnick join the rest of the Democrats who seem to be prepared to do anything to hold onto power.

Syphilis & The New World

For a very long time, it was believed that Columbus's crew brought syphilis back from the New World, because it is frequently identified as a new disease shortly after his return.  This theory of a New World origin was the subject of considerable investigation.  Lewis & Clark's expedition asked questions everywhere they saw evidence of syphilis: how long has this disease been present?  When was it introduced?  Even in places where the Indians had not ever seen a white man before, but had not even heard of white men, syphilis had always been present.  This was one of the many pieces of evidence that seemed to suggest a New World origin.

I have been reading for the last twenty years or so evidence suggesting that what may have been New World was not syphilis, but a particularly virulent strain of it.  Yet more evidence is discussed in this October 25, 2010 Fox News article reports on a recent excavation of skulls in England that are clearly before Columbus, and have clear signs of syphilitic lesions.

Really Depressing Documentary

It's about the Trail of Tears.  I assigned it to my students, and it is worth watching.  To PBS's credit, they did a very good job of presenting the complexity of why this happened, and why one unrepresentative group of Cherokees signed the treaty that ceded the Cherokee lands.  Was it a bad decision on their part?  Would trying to fight have been a better decision?  Almost certainly not--and President Jackson's famous words, "The Supreme Court has made their decision.  Let them enforce it" are a reminder that the whole system of a rule of law only works as long as those responsible for enforcing the laws obey them.