Jail – the Liberal Paradise?

My friend Nola “Fanny” Guay is ticked off this morning. Someone sent her this poster by email:

Jail - The Liberal Paradise

“I hate it when people send stuff like this around that just isn’t true,” she said.

Me, too.

Especially when the truth is worse.

No liberal really wants to put the rest of us in jail. Not really. Not even the farthest green protester whose mantra is that the Earth would be sooooo much better without humans.

The poster should read,

Projects — The Liberal Paradise.
A little history of public housing in the United States: The first “model tenements” begin to appear in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1870s. Alfred Tredway White, a great believer in progressive reform efforts, built a series of buildings for the people known in the nineteenth century as the “deserving poor.”

The working poor, those hardworking people who couldn’t make enough to live in the nineteenth century were called the deserving poor.

Those first public housing residents were carefully screened. Only employed families with two parents were allowed. Alcoholics and those with social problems were banned.

There were other similar efforts but Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the first permanent, federally funded housing in the United States. His 1933 New Deal program, the National Industrial Recovery Act, directed the Public Works Administration to undertake the “construction, reconstruction, alteration, or repair under public regulation or control of low-cost housing and slum-clearance projects…” Liberal program.

Harry Truman’s Fair Deal dramatically expanded the role of the federal government in public and private housing with the Housing Act of 1949. Liberal program.

All the discontent with “Urban Renewal” led to Lyndon Johnson’s Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965. Liberal program.

Over those years the rules morphed from allowing only employed families and banning addicts to, in many cases, banning employed families and recruiting addicts. Poor, but maybe not so deserving. Still, the ways of keeping the poor, poor, do match the liberal mantra:

  • Each resident is exactly the same as everyone else.
  • Meals are provided free, along with exercise equipment, library services, television, and more.
  • Free healthcare is to be available on site.
  • Weapons are forbidden even for self-defense.

Now that I’ve done my Liberal pounding for the day, it is worth noting that the Conservative Banker approach to public housing is simpler: “indenture ’em with a mortgage.”


Join us next week when we wonder why under Obamacare (“Free healthcare is to be available to everyone”), a Key West family with insurance received two denial letters this past week for their 2-year old son’s Lymphoma treatment.

 

Outrage!

The Post-Tribune reported on a murder and nobody cared.

Other than the fringe bloggers, no one is outraged that three men choked and shot 24-year-old Jacqueline Gardner to death and stole the tip money she earned as a waitress.

Jacqueline Gardner85 Dollars.

Ms. Gardner suffered and died right outside her Hidden Lake apartment. Her 8-month-old daughter, Alessandra, will never know her mother. Her 4-year-old daughter, Bobbie, will remember her mother and wonder why no one cared.

They killed her for $85.

No one held vigils. There were no demonstrations. Social media was silent.

Where was the NAACP after that 2012 murder in Schererville, Indiana? After all, they were outraged in Florida over Trayvon Martin’s death. Where was Bill Moyers? He, too, was in Florida to deplore the George Zimmerman verdict. Where was Alec Baldwin? OK. Alec Baldwin was making another commercial; no one cares what plane he was on.

Where were the 47,800 outraged tweets per minute, tweets that surpassed the peak for the Sandy Hook massacre?

Where was Ellen Page (@EllenPage) who tweeted “If u really believe racism isnt a massive problem, that the oppression of minorities is not a horrific and systemic issue. U R in denial.”

Where was Dwyane Wade who asked, “How do I explain this to my young boys????”

Where was QTip who wrote “Can’t be surprised… Black life has no value in this country,” in a tweet that was shared more than 2,000 times?

Where was Barack Obama who could have adopted this young woman from his own Chicago metropolitan area “who could have been [his daughter]”?

I know where they were. They were nowhere to be found.

They were nowhere to be found because Jacqueline Gardner was a woman. Women get killed sometimes.

They were nowhere to be found because Jacqueline Gardner was white. Whites aren’t victims.

They were nowhere to be found because Stephen Lee Henderson, Michael A. Craig, and William Blasingame III, all charged with the murder of Jacqueline Gardner, are all black. In the universe of the 47,800 outraged tweeters per minute, even black murderers are the victims and “it’s not fair to play the race card.”

Even Google is nearly silent about Ms. Gardner’s fate.

 

Do Not Feed the Bears

Vermont lawmakers passed only 89 new statutes this year, and dozens of them took effect with the start of the new fiscal year last Monday.

Among the new laws, Act 200 replaced the state’s criminal penalties for possessing marijuana with civil fines. Another gave local and state officials the authority to inspect home-based breeders of dogs, cats and wolf-hybrids. A third instructed employers to “consider in good faith” requests for flexible work schedules.

The State of Vermont also made it illegal to feed bears.

Legislators did go a little overboard again this year but that one strikes me as one of those are you Nuts? rules. After all, is anyone reading this actually out there in the dooryard singing “here beary, beary, beary” and whistling?

Lordy Lordy™.

“You’ll starve!” Liz Arden said.

I know!!! I AM™ soooooooooo worried.

I want to know if the law targets only gay bears or if it is every man who might be furrier than me.

Oh.

Forrest Hammond, the state wildlife biologist, reports that bears are looking for food at bird feeders, bee hives, chicken coops, cookie jars, and the like all across Vermont.

So maybe “feeding” the bears means leaving a bird feeder out or letting them eat the chickens in your coop.

Next year, Act 1999 will make it illegal to feed burglars by leaving your jewelry on the bureau. And to feed car thieves by leaving the keys…

 

Charge It!

A small law office client of mine needs a new main office printer and has been hemming and hawing over leasing one that cooks dinner and takes out the trash (and keeping it for the next 11 years) versus buying one that they can afford to throw away when the warranty expires.

Meanwhile, every car dealer in the known universe trumpets cars for as little as $169/month [with “$3,499.00 due at signing” in very very small print]. Still, I was gratified to see that the re-designed Mercedes SL550 has lost some weight, gained some size, has great mirrors, and will now cost you a little more than it used to. $895.00 per month with $0 down on a low mileage 30 month lease. “Low mileage” means about 63 miles/month in car land.

Huh. For that I can get a Hyundai Equus!

Leases are often more expensive than we expect. The regular special offer for the Mercedes is $1,299/month for 24 months with $7,093 due at signing.

That’s just the intro.

Miami-Dade wants to assure that every student in their school district has a digital device. They’re not talking about cellphones or pocket Pacmen.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho plans to lease more than 100,000 devices — it isn’t quite exactly clear what they will get — through Bank of America Public Capital for $63 or so million. That’s about $12 million a year which the schools will pay off over the next six.

I’m thinking they have laptops and iPads in mind for students from kindergarten through 12th grade who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford them.

“It’s unprecedented in the United States, this type of purchase,” Justin Bathon of the University of Kentucky’s CASTLE center on school technology leadership told the Miami Herald.

I love the idea of putting technology in student hands. My class at Stevens was the last the institute required to buy slide rules. Now college students are expected to own laptops and PDAs. The next gen will have implants.

There are just a couple of issues Miami-Dade needs to overcome.

  • Students need current technology. The first iPad was released on April 3, 2010. There have been five generations in those three years. Six years from now there may not even be an iPad.
  • A lease in which you own the product at the end ain’t a lease. It’s a purchase.
  • All taxpayers deserve equal treatment. If the kids in the back rows get freebies, it’s not fair to make the kids in the front rows pay the full freight. That’s an extra tax.

Mr. Carvalho is working wonders in Miami-Dade. He has cut $400 million from the nearly $4.3 billion budget and built the district’s reserves to more than $70 million. He cut the administrative staff by almost 600 people, pushing the most of them back into the classroom. Still there are 53,100 employees for over 400,000 students.

He can work wonders in technology this fall as well. Here’s how.

  • Call it a purchase.
  • Understand that, just like textbooks, electronic devices have finite lives. Unlike textbooks, electronic devices have far shorter lives.
  • Make a plan to buy and deploy 400,000 devices and replace them every 1-2 school years.
  • Replace all textbooks and all library books with electronic editions.

Surprisingly, that’s likely to cost [only] about twice as much as the current $63 million initiative and it makes a lot more sense.

 

Fungible Fotographers Fired

Fungible Fotographers Fired

“There’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said last month.


The image is an Associated Press photograph that won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news. It was taken by Nick Ut on June 8, 1972.

Ms. Mayer immediately called her comment a “misstatement” that was taken “out of context.” She even tweeted an apology. But that’s what she said and apparently that’s what the morons in Chicago believe.

The Chicago Sun-Times fired Pulitzer Prize winning photographer John H. White and 28 other top pros this month.

Oh.

Wait.

There’s no such thing as a professional photographer anymore.

In a statement, the “news”paper said: “The Sun-Times business is changing rapidly and our audiences are consistently seeking more video content with their news. We have made great progress in meeting this demand and are focused on bolstering our reporting capabilities with video and other multimedia elements. The Chicago Sun-Times continues to evolve with our digitally savvy customers, and as a result, we have had to restructure the way we manage multimedia, including photography, across the network.”

There’s no such thing as a professional photographer anymore.

The Sun-Times will let its reporters shoot more video and photos. In fact, they are training the reporters to use iPhones to do it.

According to a leaked staff memo the training will include “iPhone photography basics,” as well as capturing and editing video on iOS, and uploading it to the appropriate social sites.

There’s no such thing as a professional photographer anymore.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a professional race car driver. We could round up 43 soccer moms, teach them to turn left, load them into stock cars at Daytona or Indy cars for the 500, and have the reporters record it all with their iPhones.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a board certified ophthalmologist. We could create an iPhone app and simply refract our own eyes. And train our neighbors to suck out cataracts with teeny tiny vacuum cleaners.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as a professional football referee. We could round up a platoon of ex-high school jocks-turned Realtors™, train them in football basics, and turn them loose in September. Oops. Never mind.

Back to the Sun-Times.

You think they’ll get this picture with an iPhone?


Crash at LeMans

Do you really think any of the reporters in this famous photograph even thought to take the picture that won the Pulitzer .6 seconds later? Do you think any of them even saw Jack Ruby? The Pulitzer Prize winner is here.


Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald

If the Sun-Times reckons theirs is good journalism, it will never publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph again.

Chicago has long been okay with mediocre. I’m not. I hope you aren’t either.