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Architectural treasure in Groton

Saturday, May 10, 2008

In its endless front page pursuit of the trivial, the Hartford Courant today ran a front page article on the outhouses of Chester, a posh community in Middlesex County. Since this is considered critically newsworthy by so august an institution as the nation’s oldest newspaper can anyone criticize me for taking up the subject. It is, after all, only fitting that I point out that here in Groton, where we’re a bit more downscale, in fact at my very home, we have one of the finest examples of outhouses in the state-nay, I must say, probably in the nation.

Our outhouse must have been a deluxe model in its day.

World\'s classiest outhouse

It may not look like much, but open the door and take a look inside. It’s a genuine four-seater. That’s right, a large percentage of the family could have used it all at the same time. No doubt some historian of the everyday could explain the need for the multiple thrones. Perhaps each family member had an assigned seat. Perhaps it was felt that the family that sat together…..whatever.

I’m sure the Courant will want to follow up on its groundbreaking front page outhouse journalism by delving into the mysteries of our outhouse. The entire subject has “Pulitzer” written all over it, but only if they expand it into a series. It would also save them the trouble of wading through, and possibly printing, all the icky news that tends to clog the front pages of some other newspapers.

In all seriousness, I’m not saying that this story has no place in a newspaper. But on the front page? These front page fluff pieces are becoming an everyday occurrence in the Courant (along with the front page ads). Aren’t you supposed to commit attempted journalism on the front page, and save the human interest stories for the Leisure section? We get the Shoreline edition, by the way, which apparently is defined as covering Middlesex (which includes Chester) and New Haven Counties. The Courant delivers here in the boonies, but we are apparently not worthy of inclusion in the Shoreline communities. I don’t know if the outhouses of Chester made it onto the front page of the Hartford edition.

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Boring convention

Saturday, May 10, 2008

I was a delegate to the State Convention in New Britain this morning, at which we chose members of the DNC and the presidential electors who will cast the formal votes in the Electoral College in December.

Short report: nothing happened.

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Jim Mitchell

Friday, May 9, 2008

My wife and I got an invitation to Jim Mitchell’s retirement party today. Jim, for those of you not from Groton, is our superintendent of schools, who is actually retiring. He was not fired, driven out or caught in a scandal. He did not piss people off by trying to get a free Audi (seasoned Grotonites will know what I mean). It is not unprecedented for a superintendent to leave at a time of his or her own choosing, but it is unusual.

I first met Jim when he was the in charge of Special Education. I don’t remember his precise title. At that time I was handling special ed cases on behalf of students, so Jim was on the other side. Since then, he rose to be superintendent of schools, replacing a disastrous choice the school board found somewhere in Pennsylvania.

Jim had the advantage of knowing the players and understanding our quirky system of government. He did a good job during difficult times, when we finally faced the fact that our aging schools had to be replaced. He’s worked for the system for 38 years, so he’s definitely earned his retirement. He’ll be hard to replace.

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Solidifying the Second

Friday, May 9, 2008

Via Connecticut Local Politics, the Cook Report confirms what we’ve known for a long time, the Second is no longer in play:

The Cook Political Report has changed its rating for Connecticut’s 2nd Congressional District from “Likely Democratic” to “Solid Democratic.” This is stunning, considering that this district saw the closest congressional race in the entire country in 2006.

Not really, all things considered. Joe Courtney foreclosed the only line of attack when he secured funding for the submarines, and the final nail was driven in the GOP coffin when Sean Sullivan was unable to raise any money.

My wife has often remarked how weird this election year will be in this corner of Connecticut. In 2006 we had a Republican Congressman, a Republican State Senator, and a Republican (in our district) state representative. (I moved here in 1976 and I don’t think that state rep seat has been held by a Democrat since then.) We worked our butts off to get Democrats into those positions, and we succeeded. This year two of them have no opponents (so far) and it’s beginning to look like Joe Courtney will face only token opposition. That’s a huge turnaround, leaving us in the position of having very little to do come November. People are enthusiastic, though, and I’m sure there will be lots of people turning out to elect Joe Courtney and Barack Obama in the fall.

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Sound business plan

Friday, May 9, 2008

This is in the beating a dead horse category, but even I am stunned by the monumental stupidity of the folks at General Motors. At least they’re consistent. They just couldn’t see the gas crunch coming, so they just built more and more SUVs. And who would ever have thought that they could go wrong diversifying into a business with this business plan:

That business was residential mortgages, and G.M. went into it in a big way. It bought one of the more aggressive lenders around, Ditech, and came to specialize in the kind of innovative mortgages that flourished in recent years.

By early 2006, most of the mortgage loans that it issued required that borrowers pay only the interest — no principal at all in early years — or allowed them to pay even less than that. Ditech was a pioneer in offering 125 percent loans, in which the borrower could get more than the property was worth. It specialized in low-documentation mortgages, which became known as “liars’ loans” because many borrowers falsified their income.

What could go wrong? Throughout history lending to people who were unable to repay has been a sure fire way to success, hasn’t it? Particularly when you take collateral worth less than the loan amount. And yet, mysteriously, something did go wrong:

The result has been a wave of defaults and foreclosures, bringing on big losses for both the company and for those who bought securities backed by those mortgages.

I am experiencing schadenfreude overload here, particularly because the good folks at Cerberus Partners are majority shareholders in Ditech (GM has a mere 49% stake). This all couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of people.

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McCain’s other pastor

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Among other things, a Through-the-Looking-Glass history lesson. But of course, when it’s a right wing cleric that just makes things up it gets no attention.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXZbIGJrDkg[/youtube]

Not scary because not black. Not offensive because he backs McCain.

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Yet another modest proposal

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Hillary is pointing out that, while Obama is winning elections, he has to make do with fewer white votes than she is getting. This is a common complaint of many politicians and pundits, who often point out that an election would have turned out quite differently but not for the fact that black voters have this pesky tendency to vote in their own best interests. In fact, to the dismay of Republicans particularly, they often seem to have a better idea of where their interests lie than white voters, who tend to worry about things like flag pins. This is not good in a country that counts on delusional voters to keep the entrenched entrenched.

Still, as a white person, I can’t help feeling some sympathy for Hillary and the position she is espousing. What were they thinking when they let a black vote (assuming the black person in question was allowed to vote) count as much as a white vote? Surely there is a better way.

In fact there is. Why not follow the lead of the exalted Founding Fathers? We needn’t deprive black people of the vote altogether, though certainly there’s merit in that suggestion. We should simply count their vote as worth three-fifths of a white vote, just as the Founders would have done, had they let them vote at all. The Democrats should lead on this, and make the rule retroactive for this primary season, so Hillary can get the nomination to which she is surely entitled.

Some might argue that this solution is not so simple as it might seem. How, for instance, do we count the vote of a person who has, for instance, a white mother and a black father? Someone like Obama, for example. Not to put too fine a point on it, how much black blood qualifies a person for three-fifths status? Again, let’s look to the Founders, original intent and American custom for the answer: One drop will do.

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Hiatus

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

This blog probably goes silent tomorrow. I have to go to New Jersey for work related reasons, and I don’t expect to get back until late tomorrow night.

In the meantime, a few predictions: tomorrow we will learn from the Clintonites that North Carolina doesn’t count, since it is a red state, unlike Indiana which is a …ummm.. well, a red state, but a red state that matters because Hillary won it. We will also hear from almost no one in the mainstream media that today’s results make it almost mathematically impossible for Hillary to win the nomination. They want this horse race to continue, and they refuse to euthanize the filly.

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Talking about comments at the Day

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

I spent this afternoon at the New London Day. Greg Stone invited me to participate in a roundtable discussion. The subject was comments on articles on newspaper websites. Apparently, they can get wild and wooly sometimes, and issues arise about the extent to which the papers should reject offensive comments. For legal reasons they can either publish them in full or not publish them at all, so editing is not an option, which it shouldn’t be, in my opinion.

I have to confess that I felt like a bit of an imposter, in that I know almost nothing about the subject. I read the comments on this blog, since it’s my job, and I do appreciate the people who comment here. However, as anyone who spends much time here knows, it doesn’t take a lot of my time and in the more than three years I’ve been doing this, I’ve gotten maybe two posts that might have been considered offensive to some people. (I’m not counting those critical of me, all of which I find deeply offensive, but being a good liberal, I let that pass). Most of my comment related activity consists of rejecting spam comments.

I read the comments on some blogs, where the level of discourse is particularly good, but generally I don’t, primarily because I just don’t have the time. My own opinion is that, aside from overtly racist, sexist or obscene comments, anything goes. To be honest, I’m not even sure I would screen that stuff out. My own opinion is that people who spew that stuff are merely exposing their ideas for what they are. I think most people are capable of critical reading, and will automatically reject or ignore a comment from someone who expresses their ideas in crude, rude or nasty language.

That being said, it also seems that for a newspaper, there are times when you shouldn’t allow comments at all. Apparently there are folks who take delight in posting rude comments on wedding announcements and obituaries. Better to allow no comments than to expose people to gratuitous insults to no purpose.

The entire thing will be on Comcast (I don’t know when) and possibly on Thames Valley. It was actually pretty interesting. I give the Day credit for trying to grapple with this issue.

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On to Iran, helped once again by the New York Times

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

This is something I feel the need to pass on. The New York Times was instrumental in the run up to the Iraq war. It served as a both a conduit and a legitimizer of the war. The administration would feed information to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, who would dutifully print it, and then would cite the Times to support their assertions.

It’s happening again, sans Miller. Gordon is going it alone. This morning he served up a dish of uncorroborated talking points designed to spur a war with Iran. According to the Bushies, the Iranians are training Iraqi Shiite militias. But as Kevin Drum points out, they get a bit vague about precisely which militias the Iranians are training:

However, Laura Rozen points out something that also tickled my brain cells when I first read Gordon’s article. Picking up on a comment at Abu Muqawama, she notes that “the Gordon piece strikingly doesn’t tell us WHICH militia the captured Shiite militants who had trained in Iran belonged to.” That’s true. Here are the descriptions scattered throughout Gordon’s piece:

Iraqi militia fighters….four Shiite militia members….Iraqi militia fighters….Iranian assistance to the militias….militia groups….Iraqi militias….small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants….other groups of Iraqi militants….Shiite militias.

That’s nine separate references, all of them purposefully vague. We’re obviously meant to believe that Iran is exclusively training and supplying Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, not the Badr militia associated with the Iraqi government, but if that’s the case then why not just say so? There hardly seems to be any reason to leave this detail out unless it’s not actually true.

You see, the Iranians have maintained relations with all the Shiite militia, but they appear to be leaning toward Maliki’s militia. That means there is a good possibility that they are training the militia aligned with the government that we are supporting.

Imagine being an American soldier in the midst of this mess, required to prop up a government that is propping up a militia that is being propped up by Iran, a country that is supposedly a member of the Axis of Evil, determined to destroy the United States and all that is good and true.

It looks like Bush is determined to manufacture a pretext for war in time for the election. It would be in the interest of either Bush or Clinton to call them out early and often on this, because only be warning against it can they stop it. The odds are not good that either of them will do so.

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