Talkin' That Trash

Meanwhile, in the world that is the college football offseason, we break from actual analysis and win-loss predictions to delve into the world of smack talk. Really insightful, inflammatory, and closer-to-the-mark-than-the-author-realizes smack talk. Like when the "you might be a redneck" jokes started describing your own family.

One o' dem Michigan fans be tryin' to play SEC fans, ya hearrd meh?

(HT: T Kyle King at Dawg Sports, who posts his own hilarious retort.)

Though, after reading all this, my heart aches for a real Chik-fil-a. Guess I'll be driving to Mandeville this weekend.

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Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

TV contracts will allow for more SEC night games this fall. The consequences?

"LSU fans everywhere are rejoicing while Mike Adams and Athens Law Enforcement Agencies weep openly."

True, true.

For me personally? Now I have a chance to get stuff done on Saturday mornings in New Orleans without having to wake up at the @$$crack of dawn. There will doubtless be some 11am CST kickoffs where I'll be mixin' Jameson in with my coffee & chicory, but less of those would be a welcome change.

And it means more than two hours sleep if I get a chance to commute to Athens for a big game.

Woof.

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You Have Died of Dysentery

"If you went to school in the 80's..."

Slate reviews the only reason I would ever get an I-Phone. Ever.

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Genius

If they could promote (and bother to try to pass) conservative legislation as well as they can attack opposing legislation more Republicans would still hold office. As soon as I saw this chart on Drudge I backed off my opinion that a public option health insurance program is inevitable. This could be big if they play it right. Pat is probably grumbling right now that the current model isn't much less complicated and he would be right. But that doesn't really matter. Big scary chart wins. Nothing strikes fear in the heart of the general populace like having to deal with a bureaucracy. They just charted out two (government and insurance companies).

There's really no defensive maneuver here. You could show the current system on a similar chart and it would be a mess, but it can't be as complicated because at best it's a subset of this chart. You could clean up this chart considerably but it would still be complicated so it wouldn't really accomplish anything. A good followup for Republicans would be to propose a plan that is less complicated and chart it. It would have no chance of passage even if it got to a vote but it would seriously impact the odds of the current health care reform passing.

I'm still not convinced the public option can be stopped but at least Republicans are working their defense and doing it well.

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GOP for Nagin

Yes, yes!! This is exactly what the GOP needs right now.

Defending the new (38 Years) Young Republican president from charges of racism by demonstrating that "she led the GOP effort to re-elect Ray Nagin (sic) over Mitch Landrieu, "Chocolate City" comments notwithstanding."

Way to put your party at the crossroads where racism meets really shitty government.

I guess now I have a very specific answer to the "how in the world did y'all re-elect Nagin?" question I always get when I visit the home state.

(Y'all remember us folks from Georgia, right? We're the ones who loudly and roundly booed both UGA President Michael Adams AND New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin at the 2008 Sugar Bowl.)

That I can quote a respected conservative writer from a very respected (and majority conservative) Georgia political website ain't nothin' but gravy.

And everybody loves gravy.

Tip of the hat to Oyster, the "whiny liberal" who has been a leading illuminator of GOP support for Nagin all along.


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Family Dollar Values

You want to know why people in this country don't trust the government to do the right thing? A Georgia court has a man jailed for not paying thousands of dollars in child support, even though they know the kid isn't his.

But don't think this has a thing to do with political philosophy. In this case, the judge who signed off on it is a heavy contributor to Georgia Republicans. I wonder where this activity lands on the scale of family values, government invasiveness, and judicial activism.



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Six More Panels

on Health Care.

"We're here to help you help us."

Yup.


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Phase One: Prep

How to Remove I-10 from N. Claiborne Avenue as Painlessly As Possible (And Get a Bunch of Roadwork We Already Need In the Process)

While commentary and debate about the overall idea can be found at Adrastos and Library Chronicles (thanks for the links, guys), I just can't get over mapping everything I've thought about concerning New Orleans' highway infrastructure over the last few years.

Let me be clear: the reasons to remove the elevated interstate over N. Claiborne must be rooted in return on investment, economic development and transportation efficiencies. Removal will not automatically turn the area into an urban paradise, but it will remove one very significant artificial barrier to economic development in a previously dynamic, historic and strategically located neighborhood.

It should also be noted that this section of I-10 will need serious maintenance in the next few years, and like all major southern cities with internal interstates, the costs and disruptions will already be astronomical.

Third, there is no shortage of infrastructure projects needed around the city. We can set all of these up to support a removal of I-10 over N. Claiborne or we can set them all up as if they were not part of an American city's transportation network. Having an actual plan and strategy for urban transportation will save enormous amounts of money in the long run.

Having said that, if a plan to remove I-10 from N. Claiborne were to be adopted, here is a list of both major necessary and minor optional projects that might come along with a Phase One of implementation. The three major projects are separated from each other, and most of the minor projects feed directly in support of the major projects. The focus of this phase would be to ready I-610 to handle increased traffic during both the process and the eventual removal of I-10 over N. Claiborne.

If phase one took place in eastern or northern Georgia, I would expect it to take two years. It could be done here in that time if people who live here begin to demand and expect such things.


View Phase One: Prep in a larger map

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Marketing Fear

One thing I think of when I hear people discussing Health Care Reform is an old quote by Richard Jeni. He was musing about the capabilities of cigarette marketers when he said "these guys are so good at what they do, they now have the balls to tell you NOT to buy what they're selling."

That's what I thought of while reading Richard Cohen's op-ed in the Washington Post. (HT: Jmac at Beyond the Trestle) Those who don't want reform try to scare us with descriptions of the system we currently have. No wonder they're experts on what will happen. It ain't too far removed from what is already happening.

The money quote:

This means that whenever someone says something about "government bureaucrats," I smile because I was once a non-government bureaucrat. It is not government bureaucrats who say that certain treatments will not be covered, and it is not the government that purges insurance rolls of the sick or the old, and it is not the government that makes money -- lots of money -- on health insurance. It is private enterprise.

And you can leave the "If you think health care is bad now, just wait until the government controls it!1!" argument at the door. Especially over the half-measure that is the public option.

If da gubb'ment can't run anything effectively, why are you scared of competing with them?

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Hegemonic Behaviors

Bear with me.

You all know I've been a fan of Hip-Hop music since I started listening to music. You also all know that I believe most of today's 'Rap' music (with a few notable exceptions) destroyed the Hip-Hop genre I grew up on.

Furthermore, anyone who's read this blog for more than a month knows that the thing I compare most right-wing politicians (like Sarah "Media Hate Me" Palin)& outrage-as-news-radio and TV hosts (Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, O'Reilly) to is gangsta rappers manufacturing controversy just to sell records (or books, advertising for the radio show, political donations, etc).

Lastly, you all know that I try and view International Relations through the lens of realpolitik, and despise the methodology and belief systems of neoconservative thinkers who (IMHO) have done nothing for the past 20 years besides weaken the United States internationally and play off the politics of fear to acheive their ends.

Rarely, do these three interests of mine ever intersect. But now I have something for the middle of the Venn diagram: "Jay Z vs. The Game: Lessons for the American Policy Debate."

You don't even have to know the music to understand why this makes sense.

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Talk About High Stakes

I'd heard about the CRCT cheating scandal affecting 4 Georgia elementary schools (including one in Glynn County), but arresting school administrators? Really? I know we have to come down hard on cheating, but arrests?

What ever happened to just firing people for doing bad jobs or lying at work? Oversight = good; overreaction = bad.

CRCT is Georgia's version of the LEAP tests, and I think this is a good example of terrible overreaction in defense of these tests. And what I mean is this: if you are arresting people because of a 5th grade test, then the test itself has become more important than education.

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Messin' With Texas

Commute to comedy at Hey, Jenny Slater!


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Tear Down this ... Wall

The front page on the local newspaper's website* discusses the urban renewal plan to tear down the section of Interstate 10 through New Orleans that is elevated above N. Claiborne Avenue. They want to tear it down from Elysian Fields in the east to the Pontchartrain Expressway in the west, and restore N. Claiborne Avenue to an oak-lined boulevard, possibly with streetcars.

I think this would be a welcome change, as the current atmosphere under the I-10 elevation is one of the most blighted and non-commercial neighborhoods in the city, despite the fact that it should be the major east west corridor through the city.

Though it seems counterintuitive, these types of projects have met with success in other cities.

This kind of stuff is what I think about while driving around the city (I do my honest best never to take the interstate from one side of the city to another), and this idea has been banged around the blogosphere and at the bars in the past.

So I came up with a quick list of common sense things that would/have to change should New Orleans remove its I-10 over North Claiborne Avenue. At least, these are what I think are common sense things. Then I put them on a map. You can check them out below.


View New Orleans Interstates in a larger map

* (I'm going to try not to send any traffic to the local paper's website until they get some sort of handle on all the racist comments that follow every single article online.)


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Fight of the Narrator

We already know what narrative will be told next week over the airwaves of outrage radio and outrage pundit TV: "Frank Ricci will testify in front of the Senate to prove Sonia Sotomayor is racist!!" This has been repeated since even before Sotomayor was nominated for SCOTUS (when the GOP was attacking any possible Obama nomination to the court), it was repeated after she was nominated (Newt who?), was repeated yet again when SCOTUS ruled on Ricci just weeks ago (Overruled!!11!1! A win for poor, oppressed white people everywhere...), and will now fill the airwaves even more - especially now that MJ, McNair and Palin have been laid to rest in their previous incarnations.

Ricci does cut a sympathetic figure, as someone who works through adversity just to have the system keep him down. The narrative takes this a step further, lionizing him as the normal joe that the ebil affirmative action and race conscious left just lined up to poo upon. This narrative holds water right up until you read about several things:

1. The lawsuit-ridden and race-conscious history of the New Haven fire department.

2. The history of the case in SCOTUS' official opinion (thanks, Dante). Even the majority opinion points to the test as causing adverse impact, combined with additional departmental factors (the rule of three) that magnified that impact.

3. Ricci's own history of litigating against his employers. Author Dahlia Lithwick sums it up thusly:

Ultimately, there are two ways to frame Frank Ricci's penchant for filing employment discrimination complaints: Perhaps he was repeatedly victimized by a cruel cadre of employers, first for his dyslexia, then again for his role as a whistle-blower, and then a third time for just being white. If that is so, we should all be deeply grateful for the robust civil rights laws that protect Americans from unfair discrimination in the workplace. I look forward to hearing Republican Sen. John Cornyn's version of that speech next week.

The other way to look at Frank Ricci is as a serial plaintiff—one who reacts to professional slights and setbacks by filing suit, threatening to file suit, and more or less complaining his way up the chain of command. That's not the typical GOP heartthrob, but I look forward to hearing Sen. Cornyn's version of that speech next week as well.

(Emphasis added, -HR)

Any wagers on which frame either side is going to take next week on television? I didn't think so. If I was running the show to guide the nomination of Sotomayor into SCOTUS, however, I would completely avoid the latter and I wouldn't let even the designated attack dog use that line of reasoning.

What I would use, again and again, is the quote from the SCOTUS majority opinion that overruled the Appellate Court decision the right wishes to highlight with their "reverse racism" narrative:

Courts often confront cases in which statutes and principles point in different directions. Our task is to provide guidance to employers and courts for situations when these two prohibitions could be in conflict absent a rule to reconcile them. Page 20

Emphaisis again added, -HR


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