22. March, 2004 - much politics
- As I mentioned yesterday, I hauled out a bunch of carpet. It was chunks, each between two and four feet wide, and between six and twelve feet long. Apparently someone around here really needed some carpet scraps, since all four rolls were gone by the time I finished eating lunch.
- There’s Pressure Mounting to Ensure Ethical Behavior in the House.
Nobody on the outside can bring a complaint, nobody on the inside will bring a complaint, and the ethics committee has abdicated its responsibility.
To me it seems there ought to be some sort of checks and balances thing to deal with this sort of situation. Or maybe we ought to vote them out of office, but that only leads to a different politician in the seat. [nyt]
- There’s A Bush Surprise: Fright-Wing Support from conservative punks and GOPunk. It makes some sense. After all,
punk came out of a frustration with what many urban youths saw as the ineffectualness of hippie-style liberalism.
[nyt]
- Yahoo says that Eisenhower Letters Show Secret Government Plans for setting up a shadow government. I wonder if Ike planned on using black helicopters back then, too (and yes, I know they’re really just very dark green). In any case, it’s the kind of planning that still happens today. [fark!]
- Today, Lileks has a fine Bleat about the protests commemorating the start of the war to remove Saddam Hussein. I liked it, even though it was a trifle over the top. [lileks]
- Here are some Suggestions for Healthy Living in a a world gone insane with statism. Many of the suggestions are generally applicable, like
Don’t Panic.
[endwar]
- There’s some mediation planned for this afternoon in the transit strike. The parties are going to sit down together for the first time at 1pm. Also, since there are no buses running, Minneapolis has decided to allow bicycles on Nicollet Mall beginning at 6am today. Only took them two and a half weeks to do that. Not bad for a government decision, I guess.
- And why don’t people ride the buses more? Many factors have driven bus ridership down, but this article seems to think they can all be solved by throwing more money at the problem. But there are two problems with that. The first is that they never actually show that overall ridership is down, just that the MTC’s ridership is down (the article doesn’t show totals for the suburban commuter buses that gained a lot of ridership during the 1995 strike), and the second is that the transit system here may or may not be a very good value for the dollar. If you were to make it entirely private, fares would be about three times what they were before the strike, and it’s not clear to me that they should be that high. I’d really be interested to find out what kind of prices a private (or semi-public) company would have to charge to make money, but with the government-granted monopoly, there’s no easy way to know. [press-patch]
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Mon, 22 Mar 2004 07:04:05.