It's Simple to Raise the Debt Ceiling.

The US debt ceiling can be raised by a simple vote of Congress. It is a single issue and does not need to be tied to spending cuts. It's been done countless times--eight times under George W. Bush--and most of the public were not even aware it happened.

However, Republican and especially Tea Party Republicans will not agree to vote for an increase in the debt limit unless it is tied to spending cuts. They are holding the vote to approve a debt ceiling increase hostage to getting their way.

They are ideologists, and they won't bend--even if it means dealing a reproach to Speaker of the House John Boehner. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin (D) said, "The so-called Tea Party is unreasonable, and if we wait on them I'm afraid it's going to have a bad outcome."

As I said in a recent posting, the fact that enough voters sent these Right-Wing extremists to Congress is the reason for this present debt-ceiling mess.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

On Police Misconduct, Yet Again

There was a news item yesterday about (if I have all my facts right--could not find the item today to verify everything) police who tasered and pepper-sprayed an arrest suspect--while he was handcuffed.

There have been similar stories in the past. Regular readers of this blog know that I have often written about abuses of police power. It disturbs me greatly.

It seems, also, that in many of the cases that come to public attention, the policemen involved are not disciplined by their respective police forces. Many times they are put on leave--with pay, which amounts to additional paid vacation--pending an investigation. When they are brought to trial for criminal charges, they are very often acquitted or given a meaningless sentence, like probation. (The infamous Chicago police officer Joseph Abbatte, whose beating of a female bartender half his size was caught on video and seen around the world, was convicted--and then given probation!) Police show legendary solidarity with their fellow officers and often give false testimony in court.

I think prosecutors and judges are too prone to somehow completely excuse police misconduct. A professor of criminology has said that prosecutors are more inclined to believe the police. Juries might believe the police are more likely to be telling the truth and presume the truth cannot be on the side of someone accused if that person was arrested. Also, I wonder if police unions exert pressure on judges and juries in these criminal cases.

Even more disturbing, perhaps, is that police often shoot people. Here in Chicago, so far this year the rate of police shootings is running much higher than last year. In these cases the police often say that the shooting victim pointed a gun at them; but often the families of the victim, and even witnesses, say that the victim had no gun. These shooting victims are African Americans in a large percentage of cases.

I try to be fair-minded, so I'll say that I hope that bad cops constitute a small minority. But I also fear that the recruiting of candidates for police forces does not employ adequate testing that would exclude people with very aggressive or violent tendencies.

So, improved psychological screening of police in advance of their hiring is one thing that could be done. Another thing to be done might be a change in attitudes of prosecutors, juries, and judges whose views might be skewed such as to be too sympathetic to police who pretty plainly have done wrong.

Update, September 24, 2011
There have been two recent news items, one in Colorado and one in Fullerton, California. In one of these cases, a homeless man died after being beaten by police. In the other, I believe, a teen-age boy who was part of a demonstration was tasered by police. The sad record just goes on and on.

Update, November 17, 2012
Further to the case of officer (or actually, now, former police officer) Joseph Abbate, who was convicted of beating bartender Carolyn Obrycka and then given probation: Obrycka sued Abbate and the City of Chicago in a civil suit in which she alleged basically a police coverup. She prevailed in her case and was awarded $850,000.

The criminal case of the police officer in Chicago who allegedly was driving drunk and caused a car accident that killed two young men is just coming to trial.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

My Newest Target: Golf

I guess I am a lot like Don Quixote, always tilting at windmills.

Well, my latest "windmill" is—golf!

I don't have anything against golf in and of itself. In fact, time was when I used to play it (very badly). It can be good exercise, as long as you walk around the course, instead of riding around in one of those electric carts which, as far as I'm concerned, somewhat defeat the purpose (assuming that the purpose of the game is exercise).

My real gripe is against golf courses. First, they consume a tremendous amount of water for their maintenance, often in areas where water is scarce. Not to mention causing environmental damage from runoff of the fertilizers used on their grass.

But here's a rather surprising harm that golf can cause. Those who know me know that I like birds; and I just learned that sandhill cranes in Florida frequently get their legs broken by being struck by golf balls. When their legs are thus broken, they can't walk. Sandhill cranes are a large and very beautiful bird and, while not classed as endangered, they are a declining species, so I find it quite saddening when they are subject to yet another human-caused peril (they also get struck by cars).

We can't keep these birds from alighting on golf courses, obviously, since they fly. And you can't ask golfers to "watch out" for them, since anyone familiar with golf knows that your ball might not go where you intend it to!

But maybe golf, or golf courses, should be regulated on environmental grounds. I'd go so far as to say that, in areas where golf courses are very numerous and water is also scarce, the number of golf courses should be restricted.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Help Prevent an Extreme Right-Winger from Being the Next US President

First, I don't really aspire to being a political pundit—but I do have this one thought to share. It occurred to me that the presidential election is next year, and candidates are already preparing.

Now, it's conventional wisdom in politics that an incumbent has every advantage, not the least of which is that he (or she) has the necessary fund-raising machinery in place.

However, as to recent presidents of the US: we are used to the idea of presidents serving two terms, but in the last few decades there have been several that failed to get elected to a second term. There was Jimmy Carter, who lost to Richard Nixon in 1968. There was George H.W. Bush, who lost to Bill Clinton. And, if you want to count him, there was Lyndon Johnson, who, before the 1968 election made the famous speech, "I will not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for President of the United States."

I think that Barack Obama is by no means a shoe-in for a second term. Again political wisdom is that the economy is always the primary issue—at least if it is not doing well. And the US economy, and the jobs situation—rightly or wrongly—is perceived as unsatisfactory, and Mr. Obama (again rightly or wrongly) gets the blame.

Not to mention all the sentiment against him stirred up by the Tea Partiers and other far–Right Wing types. Even many of those who supported him at one point have become disillusioned.

I'd say Obama has less than an even chance. Given that, I suggest to liberals that they consider voting in the Republican primary election, next year, to help advance the candidacy of whichever Republican presidential candidate is the most moderate or centrist. If many people did this, it might help prevent a very far-Right candidate from being the next president.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Linguistic Stupidity

I just read, in an online article about the space shuttle Atlantis docking with the International Space Station for its final time:

Every landmark, or rather spacemark, of this final two-week shuttle mission is being savored.

In saying "spacemark," probably the writer of that was just being cute. We don't normally open up and look inside a compound word like landmark and don't even think about the meanings of its component elements, like land and mark in this case.

In fact, to do so is incorrect and fallacious. Landmark is one "lexical unit" (as one linguist called it) or one meme (in more modern terminology), and is not (or is no longer) the sum of its parts. (In fact, spelling reflects this: once a compound word becomes a single unit rather than the sum of its parts, then it comes to be spelled "solid"--that is, with no internal space.)

But I've seen this same mistaken and misguided practice of "looking inside" (as I put it) a compound word and saying, "Hey, we can't call it this. . . ."

My examples (collected over some years):

• We used to have a term butterfat, which meant the fat component in milk. Then the federal government (probably the FDA, I'd guess) said to its collective self, "Hey, it's not just found in butter, and it ultimately comes from milk, so we're going to decree that it should be called milkfat."
• The City of Chicago (or its parks, to be more exact) had a structure we all knew as a bandshell. Fine old word. Then someone said, "Hey, we have orchestral concerts there, not bands, so we can't call it a bandshell." Thus they started calling it by the nonexistent word "music shell." I am sure anybody encountering that word says to him/her self, "Oh, they mean bandshell," and quite possibly they figure out why the new word was felt to be necessary.
• The most recent—again with dubious thanks to a governmental agency in the Chicago area—is "rush period." That, to mere mortals, is rush hour, but presumably they said to their wise and collective selves, "Well, it lasts longer than an hour these days, so we can't call it rush hour anymore."

As I said, these changes are totally wrong-headed. You just don't "open up" these words and look inside--except that we might do so in humor, to make a joke. (People will realize that they don't usually look inside and consider the meaning of the phrase's constituents.)  They are understood as single units. Get your stupid, meddling, bureaucratic hands off the language.

Updates:
Another example of the what I call, above, misguided tampering with the language: My bank's web site uses a "passcode." Once I stopped to think about that term, I realized, it's a password but they didn't want to call it that because it doesn't have to be a word--so, a perfect example, just like the three above.

On the other hand--examples of how lexical units should work: Perhaps strangely, considering how the powers-that-be in Chicago have usually handled these things, Chicago's "Grant Park Concerts" are no longer held in Grant Park and yet they're still called the Grant Park Concerts.

And, today I heard on TV mention, in the narrative script, of "cutting-edge surgical techniques." Shows that the writer of that comment had no thought at all of the original or literal meaning of "cutting edge," and only used it in its "lexical unit" meaning of 'very new' or 'up-to-date'." Otherwise it might be redundant!

An example of this I've recently thought about: No one thinks it odd to talk about "old New York." I think that shows that we are definitely not thinking about the constituent elements of "New York," so we don't see any contradiction between old and new.

I was working for a publishing company where a guy who was in a supervisory capacity very often used the expression "to be on the same page." He never thought about the literal meaning of the individual words as opposed to the meaning of the lexical unit, and clearly was not thinking of any physical page of any of the books we were working on; he was treating it as a lexical unit, which is correct.

 


Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

How Three Republican Presidents Got Elected

Perhaps arguably, three of the last four Republican presidents to be elected--Nixon, Reagan, and G. W. Bush--stole their elections.

First, Richard Nixon. A week before the presidential election of 1968, Hubert Humphrey achieved a big lead over his opponent, Nixon, by finally distancing himself from President Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War policies. Peace talks between the North Vietnamese and the Americans were underway in Paris at the time.

Then, on the very eve of the election, Richard Nixon persuaded the premier of South Vietnam to withdraw from the peace talks by promising him a better deal if he, Nixon, got elected.

This act on Nixon's part might have constituted treason, and Nixon had no standing to interfere in such talks. As a result, Nixon won, very narrowly--by half a percentage of the vote, the smallest margin of victory ever.

And, as a result of Nixon winning and the peace talks having come to an end, the war went on for another seven years and thousands more Americans were killed.

Of course that is not the only wrongdoing that Nixon ever did. Much earlier, when he was running for Congress, he accused his opponent of being a Communist. When a journalist said to him, "But Mr. Nixon, you know that [your opponent] is not a Communist," Nixon said, "Yes, but I wanted to win." That should speak for itself.

And, for those who know history or can remember back 40 years, Nixon gave us the Watergate scandal, which would have gotten him impeached if he had not resigned to avoid it. Mr. "I Am Not a Crook" was indeed a crook.

Okay, now Reagan, who did something similar. University students in Iran, during that country's revolution which ousted the Shah and brought in the current "Islamic Republic," had captured a number of Americans from the US embassy and were holding them hostage. Then US President Jimmy Carter had been powerless to get those hostages released.

Behind the scenes, and again illegally, Reagan (then candidate for US President) got the Iranians to promise NOT to release the American hostages until after the US presidential election was over. That helped continue the image of Carter as helpless in the face of the hostage "crisis" and helped Reagan get elected. Not coincidentally, the hostages were released on the very day that Reagan was inaugurated.

And--again parallel with Nixon--once in office Reagan continued his illegal acts. In the scandal called "Irangate," Reagan's staffers were illegally selling arms to Iran in order to get money to aid the so-called Contras in Nicaragua, in defiance of the US Congress, which had voted that no aid should be given to the Contras. (The Contras were right-wing forces trying to overthrow the Leftist government in Nicaragua. Seems that rebels whom our government wants to support are "freedom fighters," but when we are not on their side, they're rebels or some such.)

And last but not least, George W. Bush. (Hopefully you remember this one.) In the election of 2000, the results of voting were very close and the outcome depended on the vote count in Florida. There were a lot of ambiguous ballots, which were being manually examined. (Remember "hanging chads"?)

The matter at one point was under the control of the (Republican) Florida Secretary of State. Plus, the governor of Florida just happened to be George W. Bush's brother!

Many ballots--from areas which might have favored Gore--were not recounted because the recount was halted by the Secretary of State. And then, the US Supreme Court, with a Conservative majority, ruled that Bush should be President. Many Americans were very angry at that, and considered that Bush had stolen the election.

Update, October 11, 2011
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens says this, in a recently published memoir, about the Bush campaign's petition to the Supreme Court to stop the Florida vote recount:

By a five-to-four vote, the court granted the stay [that is, stopping the recount]. "What I still regard as a frivolous stay application kept the court extremely busy for four days," he writes. He adds that no justice has ever cited the opinions that provided the basis for their ruling.

Kinda of makes it sound like it was politically and partisanly motivated, doesn't it?

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

Price of Gasoline in 1975

Hunting for something in my desk drawer, I found a very old credit card receipt, for gas--from 1975.

I bought 5.8 gallons of Amoco gas. The price? $3.75. That was the charge total. (That comes to about 65 cents a gallon.) Here and now, that won't even buy 1 gallon!

I remember that, when I was in high school and the local gas stations were having a price war, gas would be less than 20 cents a gallon.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein

A Word Does Not Mean Just One Thing

Even if you've never given it much thought, you're probably aware that word can have multiple meanings. Occasionally, that's the cause of some misunderstandings, and such multiple meanings make much of our humor possible.

Here are some sentences that illustrate some of the meanings the word bar can have (and this is definitely not even the most striking example possible:

• We went into the bar.
• He walked up to the bar.
• A large number of gold bars are stored at Fort Knox.
• She might not have found a mate because she sets the bar too high.
• At one time, one's religion could have been a bar to membership in some clubs.
• She was admitted to the bar a few months ago.
• The lab experiment was conducted at a pressure of 0.8 bars.
• She spent 18 months behind bars.
  

And there are words with even more meanings than bar.

People who have learned only a certain amount of a foreign language—say, French—and then go to France, may be astonished to find that words are used differently from what they are used to. This can be a case of multiple meanings of the word, or sometimes the word being used with a slang sense.

This happened to me in France. I was riding a train, and one of the others in my compartment (all French people) asked me if I had gotten my bottle of water at the boite. Well, I knew boite only in the sense of 'box'. Turns out it also means a snack bar. (Typically, you don't learn slang terms in school.)

This phenomenon of polysemy, as it's called, gives the lie to anyone who thinks that interpretation a written text (such as the Bible or the law) is simple and straightforward. How many times do you hear, "It means what it says"? If only it were that simple.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Fourth Freedoms

Today is Independence Day in the United States—almost always referred to as "The Fourth of July."

Fireworks are traditionally associated with celebrating the Fourth of July. However, the law in some places is that fireworks can only be used by designated organizations, like municipal governments.

This state, Illinois, is one of those where shooting off and even possession of fireworks by individuals is illegal. (As to the reasons for such a law: Yes, it might be a case of the government trying to protect you and your children from your own poor judgment; but also, your fireworks might set your neighbor's roof on fire. It does happen.)

However, this illegality does not stop an awful lot of people. In this area, it's easy to drive to the next state and purchase fireworks, and then bring them home and shoot them off in your back yard, in front of your house (which might seem a bit more of a flagrant violation of the law), etc. The law seems to be very laxly enforced.

I suspect that many people consider it their God-given right to celebrate the Fourth of July with their own fireworks. Here, fireworks are going off right now and it's not even noon. And fireworks were going off last night and even the previous day—neither of which, of course, was the Fourth of July.

This made me reflect on who considers what to be their right.

Conservatives consider the following, among others, to be their right:

• To cheat other people by means of financial chicanery (if you are a Wall Street firm) or to deceive the public with false advertising, false product labeling, etc. (if you are a manufacturer).
• To not pay their fair share of taxes.
• To pollute or otherwise destroy the environment (again this applies to corporate entities).
• To own a gun.
• To drive as fast as they like, and without wearing seat belts.
  
• To impose their own religious and moral notions on others by banning books, forbidding mosques being built, banning abortion, and denying equal rights to gay people.

And here are some rights that many progressives ("liberals," if you will, although conservatives use the term as if it were a dirty word) feel they have, or should have:

• To be free from government spying.
• To have an abortion.
• To marry one's partner of the same sex.
• To be free from government-sponsored or –supported religious exercises.
• To read whatever they want.
  

Now I ask you, which group of rights causes more harm to the general welfare?

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein