Prison Guards Against Outsourcing

California faces a prison overcrowding problem of formidable proportions. Its prison system, designed to handle 100,000, is now home to 174,000. Although, unlike, say, Scooter Libby, I'm not a person with a keen general interest in prison conditions, 174% of capacity strikes me as pretty overcrowded.
When Californians adopted the three strikes law in 1994 [f.n. 1] it did not occur to anyone that the prison population would increase, and California’s prisons were overcrowded even then. The prisons had begun to fill in the 1980’s after a series of get-tough-on-crime efforts, particularly in Los Angeles and San Francisco, began specifically targeting drug dealers and users. An increase in drug-related crime throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s was also associated with an increase in gang-related activity, which becamse the focus of its own anti-crime effort, and at the same time the state ran out of money. Heavy industry was moving out of California to cheaper, cleaner, less litigious places, and tax revenues plummeted. Various governors, including the current one (story here) have proposed building new prisons, but always encounter the same two problems. The first is that there still isn’t any money. Mr. Schwartzenegger was originally elected on a promise of fiscal responsibility but since then has balanced the books only in the most theoretical of senses. The state is financed by a series of bond measures that will be paid off for decades to come. Bond measures require voter approval, and nobody wants to go into debt to build prisons. The second problem is that Californians have a very pronounced NIMBY problem that manifests itself in lots of ways. For example, Californians have more autos per capita than any other place in the world and burn more gas per capita than any other state. Neverhteless they have a pronounced aversion to oil wells off their shore, and oil companies run into stiff local opposition to even to building new wells to exploit known reserves in accessible areas. Sure, the coast near Santa Barbara is beautiful and fragile, but no less so than Southeast Louisiana. The oil that’s burned in California comes from somewhere, they just don’t want it to be there. Similarly, after the energy crisis a few years ago there was a great hue and cry about building additional power generators, and every politician with access to a microphone talked about streamlining the regulatory process and speeding up construction. [f.n. 2] When plans were announced about where the generators were to be built, which was, sensibly, close to the places where it was needed, a multilingual howl arose from all and sundry saying that their particular neighborhood was simply unacceptable.

This, of course, applies in equal measure to prisons. Despite the fact that prisons bring lots of jobs and prisoners escape extremely rarely, nobody seems to like the idea of having a prison in his or her neighborhood.

So, in keeping with the idea of getting its gasoline from Louisiana and its electricity from Washington, faced with a vastly overcrowded prison system, Mr. Schwartzenegger came up with the same idea that IBM and Dell did to combat rising labor costs: outsourcing. He proposed shifting about 5,000 prisoners from California to underutilized prisons in Arizona and Tennessee. At least it wasn’t India.

Like so many political solutions, this one ended up in the courts. The prison guards’ union challenged the measure, and why? Because it was unfair to the prisoners to move them hundreds of miles away from their families and lawyers, thus making it difficult for them to appeal, or to have visits? Because it would be unsafe for the people in all of the states between here and Tennessee to have busloads of murderers cruising through at rush hour? Because there was no practical way for the California Department of Corrections to monitor conditions in these out of state jails? Because it only addressed one-fifteenth of the problem, leaving the prisons still at 169% of capacity? No, no, no, and no. The union sued to halt implementation because nobody consulted them before deciding on the program.

Not only that, but Sacramento Superior Court Judge Gail Ohanesian agreed, and halted the prisoner transfer.

This is silly. I understand the idea behind judicial review as well as the next guy, but the political process was never designed to give every judge in every county the power to interrupt the decision-making process of the governor’s office. According to the California court system’s website, there are 1,580 authorized judgeships in California. Judges are elected by county in California, and no judge was elected by more than a tiny fraction of the population of the state. Nevertheless, any one of them has the power to stop the governor from doing any particular thing he might want to do, on no stronger grounds than the prison guards’ complaint that he needed to get their okay before shipping out one thirty-third of the state’s prisoners to Arizona and Tennessee.

The political system is out of joint. Judges have too much power. It’s not a problem of the activist judges that Tom Delay used to complain about, it’s a problem of a political system that has given the ultimate decision on all political questions to the branch of our government that is most isolated from politics. Some decisions need to be free from politics, but political decisions, by and large, do not.

I was in Judge Terry Hatter’s courtroom in the United States District Court for the Central District of California the day he issued a final decision on what came to be known as the Bus Riders’ Case. The City of Los Angeles decided in the 1980’s that it would, at great expense, and after much campaigning and arguing by elected officials, develop a subway system as an alternative to the public transit systems in place at the time, largely based on buses. All of this was debated in public forums [f.n. 3] To raise the money to build the subway system, taxes were raised, fees were assessed, aid was solicited from the state and federal governments, and other transit programs were cut. One aspect of the public transit system that was cut was the acquisition of new buses. The Bus Riders Federation sued the Rapid Transit District on the basis that the subway discriminated against minorities, reasoning that the bus-riding public included a large minority population, and the RTD’s refusal to buy new buses led to overcrowding on the buses, and since this overcrowding was felt disproportionately by minority bus passengers, the effect of the subway system was to discriminate against minorities.

Sound silly? First an arbitrator, then Judge Hatter, ordered the RTD to buy more buses. The RTD said it didn’t have the money. Judge Hatter said find it somewhere. The result was that part of the subway system was delayed and curtailed.

This should not be. The political leaders made a political decision that would involve sacrificing some public goals to achieve others. On the tenuous and slender reed of logic that building a subway discriminated against minorities, Judge Hatter ordered the political leaders to divert from what they had decided, after much public debate and resulting public approval, was the public good.

So. Like I said. This is silly. Things have gone too far. We need to rethink the extent of judicial authority.

Of course, the prisoner transfer program is silly and wrong for all sorts of other reasons, and California’s inability to build adequate prison space is short-sighted and foolish, and Mr. Schwartzenegger ought, if he had any decency, to make good on his campaign promises of fiscal restraint, but the result of the prison guards’ suit is going to be still more court intervention. Overcrowding has reached the point that the courts will soon start requiring the Department of Corrections to release some prisoners to alleviate crowding, if the courts don’t take control of the prison system completely.

Is releasing prisoners outright going to suit the prison guards better than moving them to Tennessee?

This is silly.

---

[1] Full disclosure: I lived there at the time and voted against it. It was presented as one of California’s ballot initiatives, a system that allows those who can get enough signatures to put a proposed new law on any state-wide ballot. It’s not a bad idea—California’s legislature goes through periods of being totally unresponsive to the electorate. The procedure is overused in the extreme, with special interest groups affixing multiple often conflicting initiatives to each ballot. Conflicting measures often pass and the courts have a terrible time figuring out what the law is. My reason for voting against the three strikes law was that it was too inflexible. I think judges should have discretion in sentencing, and they don’t under three strikes.

[2] It’s not clear to me that building new generators was ever actually necessary. Subsequent investigations revealed that the generators, notably Enron, but others as well, were manipulating the market to create artificial shortages to enhance profits. Several generators were shut down unnecessarily or scheduled for unneeded maintenance at peak power periods. There never was a crisis before, and there hasn’t been once since Enron collapsed and power purchasers began watching the generators more carefully.

[3] I know the plural should be “fora” but that just sounds silly.

Your Weekly Horoscope

Aquarius (January 20-February 18): The running dog lackeys are demonstrating once again their infinite ability to talk themselves into believing that you are ever going to develop any kind of sense at all. This latest trick of agreeing to discuss your enriched uranium program while denying it exists is your most profoundly silly one yet, but it’s working like a charm. There is really no need, no need at all, for you to worry that any meaningful sanctions will be imposed. A certain Scorpio and fellow Axis of Evil leader is watching on admiringly, and, hey—you might get a few more boatloads of rice out of the deal.

Pisces (February 19-March 20): People are harder and harder to please. They’ve already stopped talking about the iPod phone and you haven’t even figured out how to make it obsolete yet. Your earnings are heavily dependant on iTunes, so much so that everybody else is starting to crowd your market share, and rumor has it the movie industry is creating a digital library that they will control, so you’re not going to get another bite at that sweet media apple. Rats. But you’ll think of something. You always do.

Aries (March 21-April 19): You had the Oscar wrapped up and sent home until Norbit came out, now it’s anybody’s race. Couldn’t they have held up the release until next week? What were you thinking?

Taurus (April 20-May 20): Next time somebody tells you not to get in bed with a Texan on either a war or a land deal, believe it. When Texans look at the world, all they see is other Texans, and they carry that with them wherever they go. After 9-11 you looked like a calm and articulate spokesman taking his rightful place at the center of the world’s stage. The longer you hang on the more your party resents your leadership and you the more encourage future historians to think of you as America’s cute little lapdog.

Gemini (May 21-June 20): After watching the White House wallow in evangelism for eight years and get itself tangled in a holy war in the process people are going to be reluctant to give Jerry Falwell the keys to the car again so a moderate like you is your party’s best shot for hanging on to the White House. Don’t imitate a certain Virgo former P.O.W. and start moving to the right to pick up the Baptists and home-schoolers—it looks like pandering and they won’t believe you anyway.

Cancer (June 21-July 22): Cancer, lately I’ve been thinking that that the most likely explanation for your failure to perceive what’s going on around you is that for some reason you’re utterly convinced that God is on your side. Some day sit down and think about what it means—aside from stupendous levels of egotism, I mean—to think that God has given you your victories. Wouldn’t that also mean He’s giving you your defeats? And if so, given what’s going on in the world, wouldn’t that that strongly suggest that He doesn’t like you very much any more? That would be terrible, and I don’t mean to suggest it. Isn’t a more logical explanation that God doesn’t pick earthly winners, and doesn’t take sides in earthly contests?

Leo (July 23-August 22): Well, I have to say that not having your boss show up to testify in your favor didn’t help you much, but that’s how Aquarians are. On the other hand, crying during closing was a nice touch, and the charges against you are pure Taurus crap and everybody knows it.

Virgo (August 23-September 22): Picking on rich boys from Duke isn’t like the defendants you’re used to prosecuting—they can hit back. Nobody believes for a heartbeat that you voluntarily gave the case over to the attorney general, but the best thing that could happen for you is for him to dismiss all charges, then you can go around to all the black churches and indignantly say you never would have done that. It might be enough to get you another term. Don’t worry about those ethics charges the state bar has brought against you. They don’t have the nerve to suspend or disbar you, and they’ll all think twice about pissing off a sitting D.A.

Libra (September 23-October 22): Your recent job change isn’t agreeing with you, is it? Now you have to fight this war with a certain Scorpio four-star who was hand-picked by your boss because he agreed with the party line, and you knew the party line was stupid even before you took the job. The peace and quiet of A&M is looking better and better in the rear view mirror. Oh, well. At least everyone knows you didn’t make this mess.

Scorpio (October 23-November 21): This was supposed to be your turn. Now, just because a wet-behind-the-ears first term Leo from your home state looks good on camera, you’re in a horse race. The problem for the your party, though, Scorpio, is that the Leo from Illinois can win the election and you can’t. We know you’re qualified, and smart, and a great senator. You have great ideas. But you’re the only candidate in the race that will motivate people to come out to vote against you. The right-wing might not have a vast conspiracy (or they might, who knows?) but they have a long memory, and they’ve always hated you.

Sagittarius (November 22-December 21): Whoever said that all publicity is good publicity obviously never met you. Really, babe. If you wanted to keep on drinking you shouldn’t have shaved your head. Oscar parties at detox clinics generally aren’t much fun, but you’ve got a good chance to meet your next ex-husband there.

Capricorn (December 22-January 19): If you hadn’t turned down the lead in Ray, you might have gotten that Oscar instead of the Sagittarius who accepted both the role and the Oscar, and then the buzz would have all been about you and there would have been no way they’d have made Dreamgirls without you. Oh, well.

Hang In There, Scooter

Somehow it seems wrong that someone named Scooter should be on trial for obstruction of justice. For one thing, “Scooter” just isn’t the right name for a powerful man, or even a grown man. Scooter is a second grade kid up the street or a redneck who has friends named Spider and Bubba. And how did a nickname like that follow a man all the way to the office of Chief of Staff for the Vice President of the United States. Why didn’t he tell people to stop calling him that? What if he’d been nicknamed Stinky in grammar school?

“Scooter” is also such a friendly-sounding name. It’s hard to imagine a guy named Scooter firing anyone, or yelling at subordinates, or calling high-ranking CIA officials out of important meetings to find out silly details about who arranged for a certain former ambassador to go on a hush-hush boondoggle to Niger. Nevertheless, in the second Bush administration, a guy named Scooter made it to one of the top jobs, and appears to have handled it in a pretty hard-nosed way. Whatever you think about the merits of the case against him, it’s clear that he worked very hard to keep people focused on the ideas the administration favored, and if that meant making off-the-record insinuations about people who disagreed, well, Washington is a tough town. If you can’t stand the heat, etc.

So, when a certain former diplomat wrote in the New York Times that a then-popular story about a certain Iraqi dictator sniffing around Niger for yellowcake uranium was contrived and fanciful and that he had reported as much to a certain American administration well before its well-meaning but sadly misinformed Secretary of State delivered an urgent-sounding but nearly completely inaccurate address to the United Nations, it was Scooter who doggedly sought and obtained information with which to discredit the diplomat by planting adverse-sounding information with friendly reporters on condition of anonymity. The diplomat, Joe Wilson, was married to an attractive CIA employee named Valerie Plame. Exactly what Ms. Plame did for the CIA is now in question, but she claims to have been a covert agent of some sort until her cover was blown by newspaper stories planted by Bush administration sources seeking to suggest that there was something nepotistic about the way Wilson got the Niger assignment.

There are several things about this story that bear discussion, not the least being the crime with which Scooter is charged. He’s not charged with “outing” Ms. Plame, but rather obstructing justice by either lying about dates on which he learned facts about her. The Special Prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, says Scooter did this on purpose, and Scooter says he just forgot. He had a lot of other stuff going on that week. So—since Fitzgerald can’t nab him on the crime he thinks Scooter really committed, he charged him with lying to the police, more or less.

This is a trend in American jurisprudence over the last twenty years that’s silly. Kenneth Starr used this trick extensively on people that worked or had sex with Bill Clinton, and it’s just as stupid when used on republicans with silly nicknames as it was on democrats with cigars. If you want to charge somebody with a crime, do it. Otherwise leave them alone. The investigators’ goal now is not to develop evidence that a crime was committed, but to trip up a witness, then force him or her to talk on pain of imprisonment. Following that path allowed Kenneth Starr to start an investigation at a small bank in Little Rock and end up, $47 million later, proving that Monica Lewinsky fellated Bill Clinton. Not our country’s finest hour, but it wasn’t worth $47 million and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Clintons’ involvement in the Whitewater development, which is what he was hired to investigate. Were it not for the trick of tripping up witnesses and threatening to charge them for their mistakes, he wouldn’t even have gotten that.

Note that this trick can be used even when nature of the lie doesn’t matter at all. If Monica Lewinsky had lied about how many traffic tickets she had rather than what parts of the president’s person she had placed in her mouth, the obstruction threat still works. If you forgot but they think you were lying you could be looking at the same charge Scooter is.

It’s not just mean, though. It also makes the prosecutor’s job easier than it ought to be. If the prosecutor thinks Scooter broke the law by outing Ms. Plame, he should try Scooter on that charge and take his lumps, win or lose. Charging him with obstruction allows Mr. Fitzgerald to put Scooter on trail anyway even though he doesn’t have the evidence of the real crime. It’s the reaction of a spoiled child, not of an organized and fair government.

The argument on the other side is that Al Capone spent seven years in Alcatraz not for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre but for tax evasion. He had been dodging and bribing his way out of jail for years, then the federal prosecutor put Capone’s accountant Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik on the stand, who testified about all the money Capone made in his various endeavors and that he paid no tax on it. The argument is that Al Capone was a bad man and when they couldn’t put him away for murder and bootlegging only an inventive federal prosecutor got him in jail where he belongs. Having Capone off the streets was a good thing, so what does it matter how he got there?

But it does matter. The government should go about its business in a straightforward way, not trick us into jail.

My favorite example of tricking people into jail is Tennessee’s narcotics tax. Tennessee (and a lot of other states) at one time had laws saying that all owners of illegal drugs had to go down to city hall and buy illegal narcotics tax stamps and affix the stamps to their illegal drugs. Failure to do so was a felony, just as possessing the narcotics was. No one was surprised that not a single stamp was sold, since as soon as you bought one a warrant for your arrest would have been issued. The state just found it far easier to prove that narcotics users had failed to buy their stamp than that they’d possessed drugs with the intent to re-sell them.

So—I think prosecutors should be required to go about their investigations in a more straightforward way. If it was against the law for Scooter to have outed Valerie Plame and he did so, he should have been tried for that. Otherwise, they should leave him alone. Much as I dislike about this administration, I don’t think Scooter should be on trial for this crime.

The second thing the whole mess shows to me is just how badly the Bush people wanted to go to war. Joe Wilson is a retired ambassador, a career foreign service officer who was posted to various missions in Africa and Iraq during the first Bush administration. He was apparently very highly thought of in Bush I’s day, and his experience made him uniquely well qualified to go to Niger to investigate the stories about Hussein attempting to buy yellowcake uranium to make one of those nuclear devices the administration was so sure he had. Wilson’s conclusion, borne out by subsequent events, was that the documents that this story was based on were almost certainly forged and that there was no other evidence to support the story. You can’t just buy yellowcake at the local 7-11, and Wilson concluded that there was no evidence that Hussein’s people had approached any Nigerians who actually had any about buying it. He reported this to the administration well before Secretary Powell made his speech to the United Nations, yet Mr. Powell’s speech still relied on the bogus Niger story.

The bottom line is that they had evidence that their story was inaccurate, and they ignored it, despite the fact that Joe Wilson is exactly the sort of guy they should have trusted. He’d worked for the first father, and had exactly the kind of experience you’d ask for to go on exactly that type of errand. He was one of their guys, and he was well-qualified.

Not only did they not listen to him, though, they turned on him in a pretty spiteful way for having the nerve to point out the error. One appropriate response might have been “Oops, sorry, it looks like we were wrong but we really believed it at the time, we’ll institute procedures to make sure this kind of thing never happens again” but they don’t seem to have considered doing that for a minute. Instead, they start digging up dirt on Wilson to try to make him look bad. And he was one of their guys.

So. It certainly looks like they were determined to go to war with Iraq, for reasons I still can’t fathom, and that they were unwilling to look at any evidence that cast doubt on that conclusion, that they interpreted all of the facts they could find as being consistent with that position (remember the aluminum tubes, mobile anthrax breweries, and aerial photos of nuclear labs?) and allowed no dissent. Why? What was so important about starting a war?

And these are the guys who are in charge of our government.

Best of luck to Scooter. I hope he beats the charge. In this respect his chances are pretty good, by the way. Of the 21 Special Prosecutors appointed since the special prosecutor act was adopted, only seven have obtained convictions. So hang in there, Scooter.

His Lips Are Moving

Last week, following Jim Black’s[1] guilty plea to federal bribery charges (snappily described in the statute as “accepting things of value in connection with the business of a state government receiving federal funds”) his lawyer told the press that they shouldn’t expect any more charges or pleas, in effect saying that Mr. Black had just pled guilty to the only crime he had ever committed.

It was an incredible statement when made[2] and was proved wrong yesterday when Black pleaded guilty to state charges for paying the serendipitously-named Michael Decker $50,000 to switch party allegiance immediately following the 2002 election so Black could retain the speakership, a deal that was stunningly crooked even without the cash bribe.

Riding a tide of evangelical Republicanism in 2002, the Republicans won a paper thin two-seat majority in the North Carolina House and were anticipating taking control. Black approached Decker[3] and convinced him to switch parties, creating a 60-60 tie in the House. In exchange for this shell-game trick on the voters from Decker’s district in Forsythe County, who had elected a Republican, Black and Decker would become co-speakers, and Black made an expedient but odorous deal with Republican Richard Moore that gave him 61 votes, enough to hang on to the speakership.

It surprised no one to discover that such a crooked idea had a cash component, or that the players were capable of bribing and being bribed. Corruption investigators eventually discovered that in addition to the co-speakership and the pleasure of doling out important appointments to his friends, Decker wanted $50,000 and a job for his son. Black had both on hand and gave them easily. The $50,000 was itself obtained illegally—Black’s optometrist pals had given him checks with the payee blank so that he could direct the money as he saw fit. Decker pleaded guilty last year to federal and state corruption charges for taking the money from Black.

It was therefore hardly surprising that Black had to stand at a defendant’s table once again, lawyer at his side, and plead guilty to state charges arising out of his transaction with Decker. Ever claiming that Black would not have to do so was fanciful and silly, but I think lawyers sometimes just get in the habit of saying a particular thing as though they mean it, and then when it’s no longer appropriate to repeat it, they have a hard time switching gears. A kind of Pavlovian response, only the stimulus isn't a bell but a question: "Just how guilty is your client?"and the dog is wearing a pin-striped suit.

Everyone’s saying that Black is going to do jail time for this. I hope so. Democracy is a good thing, overall, and bending it to the will of whoever offers cash makes it morally no more defensible and much less predictable than the oligarchies, monarchies, dictatorships and theocracies with which it competes in the contest of how we'll govern our territory. Perhaps complete fairness in our legislatures is an ideal we can never actually attain, but it should remain our ideal, and those who corrupt it should be punished harshly and publicly, both to demonstrate to the voting, governed public that corruption is not tolerated, and to discourage legislators from such conduct in the future.

I’m sure Mr. Black will try to trade all of the dirt he knows for the most lenient sentencing possible, but now two judges will have a crack at sentencing him. I think schaedenfreude is unattractive and unappealing. This isn’t about enjoying the fall of the powerful and arrogant, it’s about vindicating the disenfranchised. When Jim Black began selling his vote to the highest bidder and suborning will of the electorate of Forsythe County, he disenfranchised all of the people he represented. They didn’t have a voice in the House any more, the man with the money had it. Mr. Black needs to go to jail for a nice long stretch to demonstrate that we understand as a society that voting has to count for democracy to work.

---

[1] For those of you outside North Carolina, Mr. Black was a member of our State House of Representatives for many years, representing a district near Charlotte. He resigned in disgrace last week.

[2] “Incredible” in the sense that it lacked any credibility whatsoever.

[3] There have been lots of Black & Decker headlines. James, Taranto (link to his blog to the right) provided a link to one story with the title “You Know the Drill.”

To Spend More Time With My Family

Jim Black, the former speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, resigned his House seat yesterday. The letter of resignation, addressed to the current speaker, his former protegee and supporter, Joe Hackney, sounded as though he had intended to resign for some time, but stayed on in the House to make help with the transition to Hackney's speakership: "It was important for me to help create a smooth transition during the last several months, which has occurred. Now it is time for me to move forward with my life and attend to the health and welfare of my family."

This is, of course utter hogwash. He is pleading guilty today to the felony charge of "accepting gratuities," a euphemism for taking bribes. Last November he ran a hotly contested campaign for his Mecklenburg County (near Charlotte) seat and won it by just nine votes. During that campaign he denied that he would ever resign his seat or that there would ever be reason for him to do so, denied that the state and federal investigations into his unseemly relationships with donors and lobbyists and special interests posed any threat, and denied that he had ever done anything improper. Although he was reduced to asking for handouts from fellow legislators to fund his own campaign and pay his legal bills, despite the fact that increasing numbers of his friends and associates were convicted of or plead guilty to crimes involving him, after re-election he said he would stand for speaker again, and it took two months for him to realize that to do so would be pointless. His motives throughout were entirely selfish. His main reason for wanting to retain the speakership was to intimidate potential witnesses against him and the only reasonon he ran for re-election was to give him something to resign, a bargaining chip in his negotiations with prosecutors. One of his former associates had already been convicted of taking $50,000 from Jim Black to change parties after his election, an utterly corrupt move that deprived a fairly-elected Republican majority from taking control of the House. That kind of bribery is a crime for both the giver and the taker, so it's been apparent for a long time that Black would eventually be charged with something. Since not one of his former associates who got charged was ever found not guilty, his chances of avoiding a conviction were not high, so he began working on what he always works on--a deal, made out of the public eye. Running for re-election when he knew these charges were imminent was a fraud on the people of Mecklenburg County, but we shouldn't be surprised at that. He's been defrauding voters for years.

One odd thing about all of this is that everyone, even including the press, seems to be expecting very different things from the new speaker, Joe Hackney. Why anyone expects a cleaner and more honest legislature out of a Hackney-led House is not clear and may be no more than wishful thinking. While the various investigations of Black over the last few years do not appear to have turned up any dirt on Hackney, he was Jim Black's close associate for many years and supported him consistently until the last few weeks. My expectation is for more of the same, albeit without Mr. Black's heavy-handedness. Time will tell.

Some Things I like About My Girlfriend (Cleaned Up For Publication)

1. Her intelligence
2. Her wit
3. Her sense of humor
4. Her personal style and taste, including (but not limited to)
1. Choice in clothes
2. Ability to look put together and stylish at all times
3. Choice in music
4. Interior decoration abilities
   
5. Her catholic interest in the world around her
6. The way she smells
7. The way she looks first thing in the morning
8. Her insight and interpretive abilities, including (but not limited to)
1. Social situations
2. Movies
3. Books
9. The way she looks in candlelight
10. The way her hand feels in mine
11. Her inate sense of modesty
    
12. The way she feels in the dark
13. Her beautiful, perfect body, including perfectly curved lines everywhere you look (further details omitted in deference to item 11)
    
14. Her beautiful smile
15. Her wonderful hazel eyes that flash green
16. Her lovely, graceful hands
17. The way item 13 feels to the touch
18. The way she responds when touched or kissed
19. The way she cooks
20. Her laugh
21. The way she tells stories
22. Her awareness of and appreciation of subtleties
23. Discussing things with her
24. The way she looks in:
1. Slacks
2. Dresses
3. Skirts
4. Shorts
5. Pajamas
6. Tank tops
   
7. Jeans
8. Very little
9. Red
25. Her views on:
1. Politics
2. Morals
3. Ethics
4. History
5. Philosophy
6. The law
7. Movies
8. Fiction
9. Television
26. Her handwriting
27. Her attention to and appreciation for detail
28. Holding her hand
1. While walking
2. In movie theaters
3. While driving
4. Sitting on the couch
29. Her extraordinary color perception
30. Her very nice teeth
31. Her wonderful grace of movement
32. Going out to eat with her
33. Her proofreading abilities
34. Her interest in travel
35. Her focus on doing right even when it is extremely difficult to do so

Lincoln's Birthday

Abraham Lincoln was born 198 years ago today. When I was a child, we got the day off from school and the banks were closed. According to the North Carolina State Website, we aren't celebrating it this year, although we celebrate Martin Luther King's Birthday and Good Friday, two other men who were killed for being eloquent advocates of now-accepted ideas. According to the website of the U.S. Department of Personnel Management today is not a Federal holiday either. (Note that the Department of Personnel Management still refers to February 19 as Washington's Birthday. A footnote indicates while they're aware that everybody else now calls it Presidents Day, its official name is still Washington's Birthday and they're sticking with it, by God.)

If you're going to have a holiday for just one of our presidents, I suppose it makes sense to pick Washington. Historians say that Washington's prestige and support made the formation of our constitutional government possible.

If we were to observe the birthday of a second president, though, it would have to be Lincoln. If Washington was necessary for the founding of our nation, Lincoln made possible its continued existence. His leadership through the Civil War, dealing with a contentious congress and a public that was not unified in its support of the war, as well as his recognition that slavery was an unconscionable institution, made deep and lasting impacts on what our country was to become in the ensuing years. I am aware that historians debate the extent to which Lincoln actually believed that all men are created equal, but to expect a historical figure to have seen the world with our sensibilities is silly. We know enough of what he thought to know that he was a remarkable and insightful man. Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation himself in ink on letter paper. His handwritten draft is still available. The Emancipation Proclamation was his idea, and he issued it during his first term, knowing he would face stiff opposition if he ran for a second term. "And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God."

Lincoln was also a very adroit politician. One example: the Emancipation Proclamation states that any state that sends representatives to Congress will not be treated as a state in rebellion. This deft definition helped keep the border states from seceding. Kentucky, for example, had never seceded from the Union and continued to elect representatives to Congress, although some Kentuckians served in Confederate armies, and Kentuckians owned slaves. Defining rebellion as he did made it easier for all of the border states to stay in the Union.

Lincoln also had a canny knack for spotting talent. After frustratingly slow progress on the battlefield and the ever-increasing demands of General George McClellan and several other favorites of the military establishment, Lincoln noticed that no matter what the circumstances, Ulysses Grant could be counted on to fight. He put Grant in charge, and the whole nature of the war changed. The cat-and-mouse of the Shenandoah Valley and constant skirmishing with Lee became the grinding Overland Campaign, a brutal war of attrition that was many things, but most of all it was effective. It was Lincoln who was responsible for Grant's rise through the ranks, and it was Lincoln who left him alone to win the war. No other Union general could have been as effective.

Lincoln's story was also quintessentially American. He was born on the frontier (or something very like it), educated himself, worked hard, split rails, got trained as a lawyer, became a respected orator and debater, and eventually became president.

Then he was murdered by a fool who shot him from the back in the dark.

Lincoln was a great man.

We don't have politicians like Lincoln any more, at least not in national office. Fundraising may not be the only talent required of a presidential candidate, but without it, a serious candidacy is impossible. A man like Lincoln, with no a proven track record of accomplishment as a legislator or an executive, would find it difficult to sell his candidacy to large donors regardless of the ideas he espoused. A man who suffered from periodic bouts of depression, a man with a highly eccentric wife, would attract the attention of the press into irrelevant details about his life. He wasn't photogenic.

Do the politics of our era mark an improvement over Lincoln?

More Barbaro Silliness

Yesterday's Parade magazine included the following item in the "Personality Parade" section:

Q: What's the latest on Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, who shattered a leg in the Preakness?

A: "The fractured right hind leg healed so well, he was out of his cast and walking daily," says Dr. Dean Richardson of the University of Pennsylvania, Barbaro's chief surgeon. "But he developed a condition in his left hind hoof requiring surgery on Jan. 13. Since then, his comfort has improved, and he's stable."

Well, I guess they're technically right. Barbaro's condition is stable. It's certainly not going to get better or worse, since he was euthanized on January 29.

I read parts of Parade most Sundays. It's always seemed a little out of sync with current events, and I've wondered how much in advance of publication Parade was prepared. It appears it's at least two weeks.

A link to an apology from the editors of Parade is here.

Simple Human Resources Rules

If you are managing professional employees, or, God forbid, lawyers, these rules are for you.

Rule No. 1
All people perceive their own actions to be reasonable.

Comment on Rule No. 1
Rule No. 1 is true no matter how wrong those actions appear to others.

Rule No. 2
It is never possible to predict the actions of a crazy person.

Comment on Rule No. 2
Rule No. 2 applies to zealots, humorless people, manipulative people, and eccentrics under stress. Note that since you can never predict the actions of a crazy person, you can't even rely on them acting crazy. As soon as you do, they'll act sane.

Rule No. 3
Trust people until they give you a reason not to.

Comment on Rule No. 3
Outward appearance is a valid reason for ceasing to trust someone.

Rule No. 4
Don't trust people after they've given you a reason not to.

Comment on Rule No. 4
Rule No. 4 is true no matter what they've done to make amends.

Rule No. 5
All rules have unintended consequences.

Corollary to Rule No. 5
Many of those unintended consequences will conflict with the original purpose of the rule.

Rule No. 6
Decisions based on what you see are generally more reliable than than those based on what you hear.

Warning Regarding Rule No. 6
Many people, but especially your spouse and boss, will assume that what you hear from them is more reliable than what you see with your own eyes.

Rule No. 7
Don't bargain with the devil.

Comment on Rule No. 7
If you negotiate standards with problem employees you're managing them to their own standards, not yours. Set standards and enforce them.

Rule No. 8
With any problem, deal with everything you do understand before you deal with anything you don't understand.

Observation About Rule No. 8
This is harder to do than it sounds. Most people want to fix a problem by dealing with what seems like the most important issue first. If you deal with the easy parts first, you'll find what remains is simpler to solve, and you'll be much more familiar with the terrain when you address the most difficult issues.

Rule No 9.
If clients or employers implement or propose foolish ideas, it is often a good idea to let them discover the flaws for themselves.

Corollaries to Rule No. 9:
A. Express your misgivings in the form of well-meaning questions at the outset, then keep your peace.
B. Have your solutions ready but keep them to yourself until asked for.
C. Never express your reservations or solutions as criticism of the original idea.

Rule No. 10
Most people are loyal.

Limitation of Rule No. 10
The objects of their allegiance vary, generally cannot be accurately perceived (even by themselves) and are at best approximate.

Rule No. 11
Schmoozers tend to schmooze themselves.

Extrapolation of Rule No. 11
Don't rely anything you hear from a salesman, especially when they're talking about themselves.

Rule No. 12
Never let fear make decisions. It only has one answer.

Advice Regarding Rule 12
If your solution involves running away or hiding something, you have allowed fear to make a decision.


Rule No. 13
Most people want to behave well.

Cautionary Note Regarding Rule 13
A small but important percentage of the population lacks a conscience. For these people, the concept of behaving well has no meaning. If you are unlucky enough to meet such a person, get rid of him or her quickly or move out of his or her orbit. Trying to understand why such people behave the way they do is difficult and pointless. For most others, the challenge is simply creating surroundings in which they can do well.

Train Wrecks

The news this week was dominated by stories about the strange journey and subsequent arrest of Lisa Nowak and the premature and thus far unexplained death of Anna Nicole Smith. Why are we so interested in these tragedies? One because she conformed to a stereotype, the other because she didn't.

Ms. Smith became famous for acting like a stereotypical gold digger, and once she was famous, continued to entertain us with her enormous capacity for self-centered cluelessness. When she appeared on television or radio her behavior was so consistently out of control that it was impossible to tell when she was intoxicated and when she wasn't. There was never a normal moment to which any outrageous thing she said or did could be compared. So we watched her, giving in to the same voyeuristic weakness that allows us listen to our neighbors arguing about the intimate details of our lives. We know we shouldn't, but sometimes it's hard not to.

With Ms. Smith, though, it wasn't like we were eavesdropping. She displayed herself in all phases of her life in all available media at every opportunity, not only making herself available but encouraging us to watch her at her most undignified and incoherent. Moments that most of us would hope to keep private she had recorded and played back on cable television. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that someone who took off her clothes for money lacked a strong sense of privacy, but the weird collection of quotes and images that runs through your mind when her name comes up weren't mistakes or aberrations--that was her. Even when she knew the cameras were running, there was no evidence that she ever attempted to exercise any semblance of self-control, and the broadcast product shows no evidence of any attempt to edit out the parts that would embarrass most people. Her life was a one-woman Jerry Springer show with no moderator.

Lisa Nowak's story was the opposite of Ms. Smith's. While she occupied a prominent and occasionally public position, she was not in the public eye the way Ms. Smith was. People didn't recognize her on the street. She became famous inadvertently. If Ms. Smith's notoriety was based on her conforming to our expectations of how strippers who wed ancient billionaires will act, Cmdr. Nowak's speedy descent to notoriety happened because she failed to conform to our expectations. Regardless of what goes on in movies, we expect astronauts to be calm, capable, intelligent and in control. We expect no less of any pilot of any aircraft, and she knew flew the most expensive aircraft in the world. Military officers are disciplined and accustomed to making decisions under stress. Cmdr. Nowak blew up like a grenade.

Stories from friends and neighbors describe her as a nice person, a woman who was well-trained and sensible, in control and reliable, but who had been under a lot of stress recently. Her marriage had just broken up. Apparently she'd formed a strong attachment to another astronaut, Cmdr. Bill Oefilein, whose affections may have been directed elsewhere. Cmdr. Oefilein has thus far wisely refrained from talking to the press, an approach we can all applaud and hope he maintains. Her comment that their relationship was more than professional but less than romantic is all we know, and given her emotional state, you have to wonder how accurate her perceptions are. It still doesn't add up, though. Even if you double or triple the stress level, this would be hard to understand. Assume Cmdr. Nowak was in love with Cmdr. Oefelein and had ended her marriage to pursue him only to discover that he was two-timing her with Capt. Shipman. That would be hard to bear and might sandpaper the nerves of the steeliest astronaut. But pepper spray and attempted murder? Responsible people under stress might fray a little, but they don't completely explode. So--with Cmdr. Nowak, part of the fascination in the story is that somebody who seemed sane all along really wasn't sane at all. Something was wrong.

That, plus the diaper. Why wear a diaper? She was going to have to stop for gas every now and then anyway. Weird.

Cmdr. Nowak isn't like Ms. Smith in the most important respect, though. She never invited us to look at her life. So unlike our viewing of the ever-displayed Anna Nicole Smith, our observations of Lisa Nowak are decidedly voyeuristic and so are morally wrong.

This is not to say that her story isn't newsworthy. Crimes are newsworthy in and of themselves, and crimes committed by military personnel are probably doubly so. Add that an officer who has used deadly weapons in the past and operates expensive and powerful machinery now appears to be dangerously unstable and you have a story worth reporting on any news day. But that's not why we're watching. We're interested for the same reason that we watch reality television and watched Anna Nicole Smith. We are indulging a prurient interest in the lurid misfortunes of others.

To take such interest in the misfortunes of others, to be fascinated by the spectacle of watching strangers at their most vulnerable, to be entertained by watching people we'll never know live through the pitiful low points of their lives coarsens us as a people. It desensitizes us to the nature of misfortune and tragedy and cheapens our notion of privacy. None of us would want the effects of our own mistakes and poor judgment to be played out before millions. We have no right to expect to keep our own lives private if we cannot respect the privacy of others.

Anna Nicole Smith is dead, and Lisa Nowak has been released on bail. The newsworthy parts of both stories are over. It's time for us all to move on to something else.

Statement of Purpose

On this blog I will post thoughts about:

• Politics
• Religion
• Current events
• History
• Strange goings-on in my life
• Movies