The Bull in Full

A brief comment on the OK Great installation

After a couple of false starts in the the blogger relations category, some folks at a Flywheel Design-related blog called Ok Great dropped me (and I presume other bloggers too) a message asking us to check out an entry about their installation in the "Itsnota Park" where the old Geer building used to stand. 

Now, I generally like the stuff that Flywheel's been involved with, and I'm all for public art downtown, spontaneous and otherwise.  This crew probably has a lot of good work to come from them.  But here's a tip: if you find yourself writing this in a blog entry:

As a city that hails itself as the new cultural capital of the South and at the same time is rarely host to any public art, we figured this simple little tableau might stir up some kind of general reaction or at least spark a bit of curiosity.

Wrong.  I personally lurked in the bushes for an hour or two waiting to secretly photograph passersby only to be let down by the 50 or so folks that walked past only a few feet away from the couch and didn’t even notice (including a City of Durham employee who passed a record four times).  All the while, a Durham Housing Authority truck sat twenty feet away.

. . .

So what have we learned?  The City of Durham is thoroughly indifferent to street art.  The citizens of Durham are either as indifferent or just conditioned not to expect it and don’t think to look.  And some creepy dude lit candles in the dark and chilled hard on an old lady’s couch eating candies.

there may be more going on here than indifference and apathy.  Specifically, if the art installation you put up fails to generate any reaction whatsoever, I'll warrant that it's possible you're dealing with a jaded and artistically diseased populace, but I'd put better odds on you generally failing as an artist in this particular piece.  I have to say, I love me some public art, but had I seen this installation, I probably would have chuckled, shrugged, and kept walking.

And while that's no reason to quit trying, someone who writes that Durham "is rarely host to any public art" needs to have his eyes checked.

The Slow and Subtle Rot* of Tony Rand: Part I

The making of law in North Carolina is an insider game, full of murky corners and byzantine turns to the point that only the obsessive manage to keep track of it all.  While in name all of our representatives wield power in the General Assembly, in reality an enormous amount of the ultimate decision making lies in the hands of a very small number of individuals.  In the state Senate, for instance, Marc Basnight of Manteo has held sway over the body for over 15 years, and has enormous sway over which bills come to the floor and which don't.  While having this much power concentrated in a single individual may be dangerous, to my eyes, Basnight's decisions are on the whole more good than bad.  The second in command in the Senate, however, goes by a name that oddly seems to appear just about every time a worthwhile bill I support dies on procedural maneuvering, an under-the-table slop bucket gets passed to the UNC system (specifically Chapel Hill), or, as is the case today, a particularly odious budget suddenly slams out of the Senate.  That name is Tony Rand, Majority Leader of the Senate.

His influence, however, is subtle enough that it rarely makes the news and is hard to nail down when trying to describe it to others.  There's no smoking gun to pin on him that doesn't involve getting into bureaucratic bilgewater to some extent.  Frankly, though, I'm getting sick of his nonsense, so here's an attempt to start taking note every time Rand shivs a bill, takes writing another into secret conference, or slips questionable powers to some agency in the dark of night.

Our first installment comes from the invaluable NC Policy Watch:

The Senate gave final approval to its version of the state budget Thursday, though even if you happened to be at the Legislative Building in Raleigh, you would have almost certainly missed it.  The Senator who represents you had no opportunity to say anything at all about how the state should address a $4 billion shortfall and balance the budget, much less offer any amendments to protect human services or spare public schools from damaging cuts.

The Senate leadership made sure of that Wednesday when Majority Leader Tony Rand invoked a parliamentary maneuver to end discussion after budget writers described the plan's highlights, a few Republicans complained, and a few amendments were buried.

Under the Senate rules, ending the debate on Wednesday also ended it Thursday before it could begin.

There wasn't much discussion of the amendments either. Rand moved to table each one not long after they were explained and several of his Democratic colleagues enthusiastically vied to second his motion.

If you are tempted to brush all this off as a boring legislative procedure, resist the urge. The process is not only undemocratic and offensive, it is a symbol of the worst of the legislative culture.

For further reading on Tony Rand, while I don't have links handy, other interesting instances are: Rand killing a bill from Mickey Micheaux to give more magistrates and court staff to Durham County's horribly clogged and understaffed judicial system; Rand getting a bill to give all recipients of athletic scholarships at UNC and NCSU (and no other schools) in-state tuition; Rand giving UNC eminent domain power in all of Orange County for the purposes of building another airport.  More to come, I have no doubt.

* I want to note that I spent a good while with the thesaurus trying to come up with the right word here.  "Corruption" is a tad too strong for Rand, and I worry that "rot" is too.  Rand is bad for North Carolina, capricious in his decision making, and infuriating in his politics, but I have no evidence that he takes kick-backs or bribes.  (At least, no more than the standard campaign contribution racket.)

Friday's deep thought

I regret that security considerations in the present day logistically prevent me from throwing a pie at Michelle Bachmann.

April 1 Round-up

My day started off with the clock-radio playing NPR, with Frank Deford talking about lawsuits against teams like the Detroit Lions for defaming the good names of actual lions by being so bad.  I then managed to drop a decent one on my co-workers with a fake techie e-mail (for those who care, I said I was giving up and installing the new version of Exchange for Solaris.  It's kind of an inside joke...)  The News and Observer got into the act with a sports blog entry about how the Chapel Hill police were regulating the sale of light blue paint in order to prevent fans from defacing too much (and yes, I had to try to be the smart ass in the comments). 

Gary Kueber over at Endangered Durham goes for the comedy-at-the-extremes approach and takes on some of his favorite punching bags, including NIS, the Human Services parking lot, DOT, and a few new ones, including electronic billboards.  (And also ribs some fellow bloggers.)

Google's offering this year is, to my eye, highly disappointing compared to past efforts (particularly the sublime Google Romance) and features a supposed new artificial intelligence, which appears to be some kind of split parody between the Terminator franchise and bad personal websites.  

That's all I've found so far.  Anyone else find anything good?

Update: A couple more.  A new product to make your Kindle smell like a real book, and I totally walked right into this.

Jim Webb proposes prison reform commission

This is fantastic news:

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., wants a "top-to-bottom review" by Congress of the nation's criminal-justice system with an eye toward reducing the growing prison population.

With the support of the White House and some Senate Republicans, Webb is proposing a blue-ribbon commission spend 1½ years looking at law-and-order issues.

Webb's office says the panel should take a sweeping look at the way the nation controls crime, metes out punishment and returns felons to society.

A background document says of the commission: "Its task will be to propose concrete, wide-ranging reforms to responsibly reduce the overall incarceration rate; improve federal and local responses to international and domestic gang violence; restructure our approach to drug policy; improve the treatment of mental illness; improve prison administration, and establish a system for reintegrating ex-offenders."

Naturally, this is just one of those "blue ribbon commissions" and won't do anything on its own, but at least the conversation is starting at high levels. 

Yep Roc "Stimulus Package" sale

Heads-up: Yep Roc is having a clearance sale of sorts, with single CDs going for $5 and doubles going for $10, on what looks like a whole lot of their back catalog stuff.  I'd try to summarize some of the finds they've got on sale there, but there's more than I want to try to cut through, so suffice to say that, at least from my perspective, any time is a good time to buy a new Gourds album, but when it's only $5 is a particularly good time.

Go look.  It'll be fun.

Best Song Ever

This may turn into a showdown of sorts with Barry. 

Apparently they're back together and touring this spring.  They're in DC on the 18th of March, and dammit, I. Am. Not. Missing. Them. Again.  The Pogues top my list of bands that I want to see in my lifetime and haven't seen.  I don't care if Shane McGowan is overweight and on his 26th stint out of rehab.

Best Song Ever

I can't believe I've let Barry draw me into this...

Mass transit and rail funding survive stimulus cuts

I'm breathing a sigh of relief today.  As the details of the conference stimulus package start to trickle out, it's looking like both rail and transit pieces of the stimulus made it through conference with at least some significant amount of money attached, as Elana Schor at TPM reports:

The House's original stimulus bill, as we've reported for several weeks, gave mass transit the short end of the stick in favor of $30 billion for highways with no requirement that repairs be prioritized over new road-building.

But according to a confidential summary of the final stimulus deal that we've just been passed (view it here), mass transit got some more attention in the end. Amtrak and high-speed rail programs got $9.3 billion, an increase of about $6 billion from the Senate's version of the stimulus.

Still, environmentally sustainable transportation didn't completely win the day. A $5.5 billion transit-modernizing grant program eagerly anticipated by environmental advocates, which senators at first wanted to open up to highways, was removed entirely from the final stimulus deal. 

Congress did agree on $8.4 billion for general public transportation grants, however. Vice President Biden (D-Amtrak), if you had any role in this: thanks.

At this point it's sounding like around $18 billion for rail and transit combined, which is still only a little over half of what went to highways, but that's way, way better than what I was afraid was going to happen. 

If you want mass transit in the Triangle, call Hagan and Burr now

I'd love to write more about this, but time is short, and the time to act is now.

The stimulus package moving its way through Washington is, to be fair, a bit of an ugly monster.  However, there's a lot of good programs in it, many of which are unfortunately the ones that are on the chopping block right now.  Energy efficiency upgrades for government buildings, which one would think would fall into the duh-obvious category for good stimulus, are among those at risk of cuts.  However, what's worse is mass transit funding is at risk too, while both Houses of Congress seem intent on stuffing more and more highway funding into it.

I hate to say I told you so, but a year ago when Bush's stimulus bill was making it's way through Congress, I spilled a bunch of electronic ink on this subject.  Sadly, in one of those, "damn, I wish I'd been wrong" moments, sure enough, huge amounts of new tax breaks did absolutely nothing to stimulate the economy, and just set the stage for the economic collapse of 2008.  With massive government funds getting shipped overseas, the public treasury turned upside down by Bush's tax cuts, and major backlogs in infrastructure left wanting by the crony capitalism of the previous administration, it was no surprise that simply dumping more tax cuts into the economy was about as effective as pushing on a string.

What we needed then, just as now, was infrastructure investment as stimulus.  Early on in the process, it sounded like what this was what the stimulus bill was going to be about.  However, the rotting corpse of the Reagan/Goldwater orthodoxy (which Reagan himself might have even blanched at today) brought out the bellicose GOP and the nervous Nellies from the Democrats, and of course we had to have some largely useless tax cuts in the bill. 

Regardless, while there is a fair amount of infrastructure spending in the bill, what those in Washington seem to be failing at realizing is that, as per Shellenberger and Nordhaus, this is exactly the time we need to be thinking about how to restructure our economy to be less dependent on fossil fuels and more ready to make cuts in our carbon emissions.  Government spending has an enormous effect on shaping the economy, and despite the stammerings from policy mouthpieces of the Right's political machine, nobody in the GOP is doing anything to lessen that impact.  Massive federal spending on highways simply continues to push our economy towards a single passenger vehicle-focused transportation system, when either the absence of federal spending, or less disastrously, greater balance in transportation dollars, would allow for a correction towards less polluting forms of transportation.

The bill from the House originally had $30 billion in road projects and just $10 billion for all mass transit and rail projects.  Thankfully Rep. Oberstar from Minnesota lead a revolt that got a little over $3 billion added in funding.  It's hard to keep everything straight in the swirl of information coming out of Capitol Hill today, but it sounds like the GOP is trying to strip out some of that mass transit funding as part of the "centrist" compromise.  From the reports of the STAC committe, to complete the biggest transit dreams of the Triangle, including passenger rail improvements, local bus expansion, para-transit, and some form of regional rail, whether heavy or light, we'd need about $1 billion in federal dollars to match a combined $1 billion from state and local sources.  (I'll also note that for most highway projects, the Feds pay about %80 of the tab -- yet another way in which highway funding is ridiculously skewed and unproductive.)  Given that we have at least 3/4 complete plans sitting around right now, we'd very likely be excellent candidates to receive this money, which would not only provide jobs in planning and construction of the system, but would likely trigger a building boom near the planned stations, we've got a vested interest in keeping that money in the bill.  But if the hand-wringers among the Democrats and the pro-highway wing of the GOP (including our friends at the John Locke Foundation) get their way, what chance do you think that money has in coming out in the next few years.

An excellent diary at Daily Kos made a fantastic point.  Obama's best campaign slogan, by my lights, was, "We are the ones we've been waiting for," with a close second being, "I'm not asking you to believe in my power to change government, I'm asking you to believe in yours."  If you want transit in the Triangle, now is the time to call.  Here are the office numbers.  The lines are understandably a bit busy, so keep trying:

Kay Hagan
202-224-6342

Richard Burr
202-224-3154

Because rail and transit are STILL stimulus where we need it.