FREE WHITEWATER

City, Libertarians, Politics

Offices, Debates, Local Politics

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I get a good amount of mail, with all sorts of topics.

Now and again, people will write to me, and ask if I’d ever run for office. Some ask with simple curiosity, others as a rebuke (as though if one would not run for office, then there’s some lack of public-spiritedness to blame).

I’ve never yearned to run for office, but that doesn’t mean I think that political office is a bad idea for others. It’s just that not everyone has to have the same idea: some are politicians, some reporters, some bureaucrats, others are bloggers, volunteers, or activists, and still others committed to a purely private life. I don’t believe that everyone has to be everything, or even try everything.

My view of running for office is like that of William F. Buckley, when he ran for mayor of New York City as a third-party candidate in the ’60s. When asked what he would do if he actually won, Buckley replied that he’d demand a recount.

There’s a second question that comes my way, often with the first question: would I ever debate someone, in town or elsewhere?

Well, why not? I’ve offered these pages for different debates over the years, and those are still-standing offers. At the same time, I’d debate someone in person, recorded or otherwise, if the topic presented itself. That’s the truth of a debate, though: it’s a topic, not a person, that makes all the difference.

As for those whom one might engage in a typical debate, the best opponent is always the strongest possible one. One looks to make a case, to advocate for something, and the best case and strongest advocacy emerge in a debate with a skillful, accomplished opponent.

Some of the most compelling debates are those with two people, at a table with a moderator, simply responding to each other in a give-and-take format. (The 2000 vice-presidential debate between Cheney and Lieberman was a good format of this kind.)

We probably have too few public debates, especially between candidates for office, than we should. If the League of Women Voters didn’t sponsor local debates, there’d be none. We have reason to be grateful for their efforts.

A debate — print, radio, television — needs an interesting topic, an open and challenging format, and the right timing. The new year will offer presidential primaries, Wisconsin recalls, and general elections at all levels next November. Those topics are necessarily the most important, and candidates involved in such contentious pursuits will — legitimately and reasonably — draw (by far) the most attention. One can do more than one thing during a year, but it would be silly to doubt that the most important debates will be between political candidates.

Along the lines of ideas and topics, I’m thinking about opening up comments on more posts, with the same moderation as now (mostly against profanity or trolls). It’s not concern about contrary points of view, but about the timeliness of my own comment moderation, that leaves me uncertain.

There’s an energy from pondering different possibilities that wait in the year ahead. Just one small reason, on top of many profound ones, to love this time of year.

Tyranny

Communists fabricated documents against Walesa

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Of course they did. In the run of their atrocities, this was a day’s light work:

Polish investigators say communist authorities fabricated documents that suggested Lech Walesa was a communist collaborator, to try to stop the Solidarity founder being awarded Nobel Peace Prize.

It says everything one would ever need to know that even the regime understood that nothing could ruin a reputation so quickly as being suspected of collaboration with the regime.

Via WQOW.

Free Markets

Three cheers for civilization and free markets this festive season

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Happy Christmas:

As you open your gifts this festive season, or tuck into your dinner, take a moment to think about the extent to which free markets have made this possible. Probably, people from all over the globe have been involved in helping you enjoy your day; people you don’t know and don’t need to know, all because of the marvellous workings of free markets.

There is a good chance that some of your gifts travelled by air and sea to reach you; that they were conceived, manufactured and packed by an array of hard-working people in a variety of countries. Other people in several other countries are likely to have worked on providing the raw materials used in making the items you unwrapped. Having all these people from distant countries co-operating to produce goods for your pleasure is one of the great benefits of freer markets and civilisation….

Via Three cheers for civilisation and free markets this festive season – Soapbox | Moneyweb.

Libertarians, Presidential race 2012

Ron Paul Storms Out of CNN Interview Over Newsletter Questions

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Libertarian-leaning Ron Paul made a bush-league mistake when he walked out of an interview with CNN. Years ago, Paul published a newsletter under his name in which some racist stories and articles appeared. Paul contends he didn’t really supervise the publication at all, and that he merely lent his name to the newsletter. Perhaps.

If so, why walk away from an interviewer? It’s a bad move: one should never walk out. If anything, one should insist on staying longer, and talking about more things, to compensate for talking about what one contends is a bogus issue.

This was a rookie mistake, from a man whose age and experience leave him anything but a rookie.

(In the end, though, regardless of the day-to-day GOP dramas, I’d be stunned if Gov. Romney were not the GOP nominee.)

Here’s Paul’s unforced error:

Via Hit & Run : Reason Magazine.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.22.11

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Good morning.

For Whitewater, there’s a chance of a dusting of snow this morning, with a daytime high just above freezing.  In Santa Fe, they’re also expecting snow (1-2 inches), and temperatures just below freezing.

On this day in 1864, Pres. Lincoln received a present a few days ahead of the twenty-fifth:

On Dec. 22, 1864, during the Civil War, Union Gen. William T. Sherman sent a message to President Lincoln from Georgia, saying, “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.”

A market may be free, somewhat free, restricted, or (as a limitation on freedom) manipulated: Rachel Ehrenberg writes about suspicions of market manipulation in Smells Like a Bear Raid.

Two extraordinarily large trading days for Citigroup shares in the fall of 2007 hint that someone may have been manipulating the stock, say analysts who mine financial data using powerful computers and mathematical algorithms.

Researchers from the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass., were examining stock trading data for the period January 2007 to January 2009 when they noticed two unusually large spikes in volume and other measures related to Citigroup shares. On November 1, 2007, the team noted, the number of borrowed Citigroup shares jumped by 100 million, reaching a value of almost $6 billion. Six days later, a similar number of borrowed shares were returned on a single day, the team reports online December 14 at arXiv.org. The estimated gain for the investors who made the transactions was at least $640 million.

Such extreme events would be expected only once in a few hundred years, says Yaneer Bar-Yam, coauthor of the work. The likelihood of seeing those events six days apart is once in 4 billion years, the researchers’ calculations show.

Unlikely, yes; manipulation’s still in doubt:

Other researchers aren’t so certain that manipulation was at play. The analysis is an interesting case study, says financial economist Ekkehart Boehmer of the EDHEC Business School in Nice, France. But if the Citigroup trades were truly manipulative, the price should have gone back up after the deal was done.

It didn’t. Citigroup’s price kept falling. In fact, Boehmer says the traders would have made 10 times the money by waiting another two months to sell. “We can’t rule out manipulation, but we don’t have evidence of it either,” says Boehmer, who was director of research at the New York Stock Exchange from 2001 to 2003.

It’s curious, but a curiosity isn’t  proof.

On this day in 1882, the first known use of electric lights on a Christmas tree:

An inventive New Yorker finds a brilliant application for electric lights and becomes the first person to use them as Christmas tree decorations.

Edward H. Johnson, who toiled for Thomas Edison’s Illumination Company and later became a company vice president, used 80 small red, white and blue electric bulbs, strung together along a single power cord, to light the Christmas tree in his New York home. Some sources credit Edison himself with being the first to use electric lights as Christmas decorations, when he strung them around his laboratory in 1880.

Sticking them on the tree was Johnson’s idea, though. It was a mere three years after Edison had demonstrated that light bulbs were practical at all.

The idea of replacing the Christmas tree’s traditional wax candles — which had been around since the mid-17th century — with electric lights didn’t, umm, catch fire right away. Although the stringed lights enjoyed a vogue with the wealthy and were being mass-produced as early as 1890, they didn’t become popular in humbler homes until a couple of decades into the 20th century.

From there, we made the journey to here:

Politics, Recall

Sen. Majority Leader Fitzgerald’s 12.19.11 Open Office

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One should expect a few things of a politician, and among them one would hope to find honesty, commitment to principle, hard work, and a comfort and ease around his or her constituents.

There’s a video of a recall organizer and potential candidate, Lori Compas, at a town hall meeting of the state senator she hopes to replace, Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald.

First the video, then a few comments on the scene:

The video. It’s of below-average quality. Those attending could and should do a better job of recording these meetings. More than one videographer would be a good idea. (It sounds as though Compas has more than one supporter in the audience.)

Fitzgerald’s seating. This is apparently an ‘office hours’ session for Fitzgerald, and he weakly and defensively sits behind a desk. I’d almost think this was a joke, and someone seated him that way to put him at a disadvantage. There should be no table between Fitzgerald and his constituents. He should either be in a chair, or standing and walking among them.

He looks like he’s a principal at a school’s administrative hearing — not at a congenial, relaxed meeting of a legislator and his constituents. These gentlemen need to be comfortable in crowds. (In the same way, Paul Ryan shouldn’t go to a Labor Day parade and expect people to refrain from asking employment-related questions.)

Next to Fitzgerald at the table is an older woman who looks so stern and frumpy one would think that she was an intentional representation of a severe schoolmarm.

Fitzgerald’s attire. There’s nothing wrong with what he’s wearing, but he should speak without his coat – shirt and tie is sufficient. If he wants to wear the coat into the room, then he should take it off once the meeting begins.

Fitzgerald’s manner. He smiles nervously, and speaks without any particular command. There’s no reason for him to have and hold a water bottle. Fine to take a drink, now and then, but he holds it as though it were a teddy bear.

Compas’s Attire. I’m not sure if she thought about what to wear, or this is how she normally dresses – either way, she’s dressed well for the occasion. The black jacket and turtleneck, with hair pulled up, remind viewers that she’s apparently slender and fit. She looks athletic, in a state that offers diverse outdoor adventures (but where only a minority of middle-aged residents seem fit.) A fussier woman would have dressed up for this occasion; she’s dressed appropriately.

Compas is easily a more attractive woman than Fitzgerald a man. Her simple choice of attire only accentuates the difference between them.

Compas’s manner. She holds her own, against an incumbent legislator and a leader of the GOP. She’s persistent, but not overbearing.

I don’t think that Compas can unseat Fitzgerald, but it says much about how rough-around-the-edges the statehouse GOP leaders are that she handles Fitzgerald so well as she does.

Libertarians, Presidential race 2012

POLITICO: Gary Johnson to drop out of GOP primary to run as Libertarian

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As expected, former Gov. Johnson’s preparing  to run as a Libertarian.  If he  gets the party’s nomination, he will be the second GOP politician in a row to run as the LP nominee.  (Bob Barr was a former GOP Congressman who ran as a right-libertarian in ’08, and Johnson’s a former governor who’d run as a left-libertarian.)

It’s a good thing that the party’s able to attract former state or federal officeholders, and a sign that the LP (and not just libertarianism) is becoming more mainstream.

From POLITICO:

Gary Johnson will quit the Republican primaries and seek the Libertarian Party nomination instead, POLITICO has learned.

The former two-term New Mexico governor, whose campaign for the GOP nomination never caught fire, will make the announcement at a press conference in Santa Fe on Dec. 28. Johnson state directors will be informed of his plans on a campaign conference call Tuesday night, a Johnson campaign source told POLITICO.

The move has been expected for weeks — Johnson had run a New Hampshire-centric effort that never got him past a blip in the polls. He appeared at only two nationally televised debates, and only one in which other major candidates took part.

See, Gary Johnson to drop out of GOP primary to run as Libertarian – Reid J. Epstein and Ginger Gibson – POLITICO.com.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.21.11

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Good morning.

There’s a slight chance of rain or snow in Whitewater today, with a high of forty-degrees. In Nashville, there’s also a chance of showers, but with a high temperature of sixty-one.

In 1879, a day of particular, industrial tragedy for Wisconsin, as the Wiscosnin Historical Society recalls:

1879 – Fire Destroys Phillip Brewing Company
On this date fire destroyed the Phillip Brewing Company’s malthouse, grain elevators and office building in Milwaukee. [Source: American Breweriana Association]

We’ve managed to carry on, just fine.

Each year, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas brings a few blockbuster, big-budget films.  Fans learn of these offerings long beforehand, and eagerly await their arrival.  Perhaps Tintin is one of those films this year. It seems the perfect adventure for a holiday film:

Google’s puzzle for today is straightforward: “Which is longer, the largest cruise ship now in service or the largest aircraft carrier now in service?”

Setting aside the answer, wouldn’t one want a world where the cruise ship was larger? Wouldn’t one prefer a world where one wouldn’t need aircraft carriers at all? That’s not the world we have, but wouldn’t it be the world for which one would hope? more >>

Foreign Affairs, Religion

The Continuing Global Growth of Christianity

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There’s a distinction between separation of church & state and secularization, although the distinction isn’t always grasped. America and France both have a separation of church from state, but France is the more secular society. Religion is more visible in American civil society, compared with France (if anything, that’s a considerable understatement).

There’s much worry among the religious about secularization in America, but I’d guess it’s unnecessary worry: America is and will remain a predominantly religious country.

Beyond America, this is even more true: religion, and particularly Christianity (yes, Christianity), is flourishing. Historians and demographers have noted this trend, among them Philip Jenkins, and Walter Russell Mead writes about it today in his fine blog:

A new report from the invaluable Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the most important source for information on religion in today’s world, will make a lot of people unhappy. The report looks at religious belief worldwide and finds that Christianity in the last one hundred years grew to become the world’s most widespread and diverse religion as well as the largest. Roughly one third of the world’s almost seven billion people are (or at least say they are) Christian. The second largest religion, Islam, claims about one fourth of the world’s population.

The demographic trends favor Christian expansion in Asia and Africa, and Mead speculates on the influence that expansion may have on democratization and human rights.

See Walter Russell Mead’s Via Meadia Blog.

For the report, see Global Christianity – A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’ s Christian Population.

City, Poverty

Whitewater’s Decade of Child Poverty

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The only way to make an ill person truly and permanently better is to see her condition for what it is; genuine recovery requires an honest diagnosis. Despite my doubts about their program, I respect Roosevelt’s New Dealers’ for their willingness to call a problem a problem. If they had lived to see contemporary Whitewater, they would have been shocked and furious. (See, along these lines, On the Upcoming 2011 Whitewater, Wisconsin Municipal Budget.)

From 2003 to 2010, the Whitewater area has grown poorer, a decline in economic health that threatens personal health, and brings us yet closer to a permanent underclass.

This truth is inescapable, and has hit already-vulnerable residents hardest. In 2003, 9.2% of the children in the Whitewater area lived in poverty. In 2007, that number was 9.9%, and in 2010, the number of impoverished children had soared to 16.6%. (See, data in spreadsheet format.)

These are children, aged five to seventeen, who face hardship each day. One of every six children in the Whitewater area lives this way. This proportion might be even worse if one were to add children under five.

Far from economic gains, the actual circumstances of young residents in our community are worse than earlier in the decade.

Hundreds of Wisconsin communities are doing better than we are.

In fact, local child poverty increased even from 2003 to 2007, a time of economic growth for America. While America was gaining, long before the Great Recession, Whitewater was already slipping behind.

There’s a way to reverse this dark trend, one that will produce greater opportunity for all our residents.

Drastically cut or eliminate restrictions and fees on businesses, cut sharply from so-called leadership posts, and return the money to taxpayers or as services in emergency poverty assistance. At a minimum, hundreds of thousands should be cut or transferred this way, each year, until government is properly limited and responsible to actual needs.

We will not be made prosperous — and for some, the problem isn’t unrealized prosperity but actual hunger — in the myriad empty ways Whitewater’s bureaucrats have tried repetitively.

We’ve grown poorer despite (often because of) big-ticket federal grants, Tech Parks, government-run renewal schemes, ersatz national and international awards, showy celebrations, dishonest and dodgy community surveys, the slanted use of statistics, special breaks and exceptions for insiders, rights violations against workers new to the community, and frequent bumbling through silly project after project.

These problems are not the fault of the many thousands of common people of the area; a few selfish and self-promoting municipal bureaucrats and their apologists have held Whitewater back, and have made her poorer than she would have otherwise been.

Yet, for it all, they will have a legacy, those who strutted about so proudly during these recent years. Prosperity will remember them as the feckless and fumbling clique that presided over a seventy-seven percent increase in child poverty — to one-in-six Whitewater-area children — in just seven years.

Law, Laws/Regulations, Wisconsin

The Journal Sentinel on Justice Gableman’s Receipt of Free Legal Services (and a bit about the story, itself)

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Over the the Journal Sentinel, there’s a story about Justice Gableman’s deciding votes on cases in which the Michael Best & Friedrich firm represented the victorious party, despite his receipt of free legal services from that firm:

State Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman in two cases cast the deciding vote in favor of parties represented by a law firm that gave him tens of thousands of dollars of free legal services, a review of state records shows.

One of those was a high-stakes case this June that allowed Gov. Scott Walker to implement a law that all but eliminates collective bargaining for most public workers. Gableman was in the 4-3 majority that allowed Walker to prevail. Michael Best & Friedrich – the firm that defended Gableman for free in an ethics case – worked for the state and Walker’s administration in the collective bargaining case.

In addition to the collective bargaining case, Gableman supplied the deciding vote in an opinion he wrote this March that sided with a Michael Best client against the City of Milwaukee over tax assessments.

The Wisconsin Democracy campaign has filed a complaint against Gableman with the state Judicial Commission over the receipt of these free services.

That’s the part of the story about Gableman, but there’s a funny part of the story that’s a story, itself: the use of Rick Esenberg as one of Marley’s sources on the ethics of Gableman’s acceptance of these free services:

Rick Esenberg, president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative public interest law firm, said that determining whether a judge must recuse after receiving legal service depends on several factors, including whether he had recused himself from some past cases, how long ago the law firm had represented him and what the work involved.

“That’s a judgment call,” Esenberg said.

Esenberg’s being evasive when he refers to recusal as a judgment call. Broadly, any decision under these circumstances is — one hopes — an exercise of judgment. If by judgment call Esenberg means that in Gableman’s circumstances there’s no ethically preferable decision between recusal and participation, he should say as much, plainly.

(Two prominent ethicists do say as much: “But two well-known legal ethics experts contacted last week – New York University law professor Stephen Gillers and Indiana University law professor Charles Geyh – said they believed Gableman should not be participating in cases involving Michael Best.”)

Unlike the two legal ethicists who question Gableman’s conduct, Esenberg’s hardly an arms-length evaluator of judicial politics in Wisconsin. He’s an advocate and polemicist. Capable, but not so much as he might think, or want others to think. (I’ve yet to see, for example, someone like the very solid Edward Fallone not get the better of Esenberg.)

Freedom of Speech

New York Civil Liberties Union: Accommodate Christmas Prayer Vigil in Zuccotti Park

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The NYCLU ( a chapter of the ACLU) is advocating on behalf of a group of religious Occupy protesters in New York.  They’re right to do so.  I have decidedly mixed feelings about the Occupy movement’s economic agenda, but speech like this in a park – whether political or religious – should be allowed in a free society.

NEW YORK — The New York Civil Liberties Union today wrote to New York City officials and Brookfield Properties asking them to accommodate a Christmas prayer vigil at Zuccotti Park.

Occupy Faith, which is composed of members of an Occupy Wall Street Christian interest group, is planning to hold a 24-prayer vigil in Zuccotti Park to begin at midnight on Christmas Eve and continue to midnight Christmas Day.

“The city has enabled religious events in parks in the past, including a 1995 mass in Central Park led by Pope John Paul II ,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. “It is entirely appropriate for the city to allow these folks to pray together in the park. It should do so without restricting any items the group believes are necessary to express its faith.”

Via NYCLU press release.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.20.11

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Good morning.

If you were in Whitewater today, you’d be in a small Midwestern town with a high temperature of thirty-seven, and partly sunny skies.  In New Orleans, you’d walk through a city during a day of scattered showers and mid-seventies temperatures.

There’s an Urban Forestry Commission meeting at 4:15 PM, and a  Common Council session at 6:30 PM, in Whitewater today.

I see that the Occupy movement has found its heroine.  In this, they’ve done a better job than the Tea Party, Move On, etc.  Although Sarah Palin is a Tea Party favorite, Occupy has an advocate, it seems, who’s as famous and even more captivating.

For those who wondered how Anne Hathaway would play Catwoman, now you know. For those who doubted that Christopher Nolan would keep the next (and final) installment of the Batman series relevant, doubt no more. more >>