The Bull in Full

A very brief post-Thanksgiving rant

There are some traditions that are time-honored and classic, and other traditions that are completely stupid, counter-productive, and need to die.

In the latter category, we find the annual spate of presidents and governors pardoning turkeys.

This all got started when the prize turkey was presented to the president as part of the first family's Thanksgiving meal.  Naturally, the Presidential turkey would be a prime specimen, and the Presdient would have the opportunity to inspect the bird, in one of those somewhat silly rituals.  According to one website I found, the practice of pardoning the turkeys goes back to 1989 and the first President Bush, and both Clinton and Bush 43 have continued the practice.

This would be a sweet gesture, except for two things.  The pardoned turkeys, being almost exclusively Broadbreasted White breeds, are bred to mature quickly and have ridiculously oversized breasts, all of which shortens the life spans of the turkeys.  So, the turkey with a new lease on life generally survives about 2-3 months past Thanksgiving, then dies a natural death.  Secondly, in almost all cases, the President and family actually sit down and eat a turkey for Thanksgiving, so the whole pardon thing is largely a charade. 

Let's make this simple and brief: if you're going to pardon a turkey for Thanksgiving, don't eat turkey for dinner.  If you're going to eat turkey for dinner, accept the prize bird and have someone go chop its head off and prep it for you.  The current state is simply hypocritical and furthers the mental separation of food on the plate and where it comes from.

Quick hits: Creeps, Blogs, and Radio Shows

A few quick things to drop here.  First off, thanks for the lively set of nominations in the Christmas Creep thread.  Believe it or not, I actually looked for a suitably tasteless statue for the Bad Santa award at Morgan Imports, but the best they had was a bare chested beefcake merman with a santa hat on.  A little too expensive, and not quite tasteless enough.  Sometime during the holidays, I'll try to actually post the awards.

Next up, thanks for the help on the Herald-Sun blogs.  No matter how I look at it, I can't figure out how it's supposed to do anything worthwhile.  Oh, well, maybe it will become obvious.

Lastly, I'm going to be appearing on The State of Things with Frank Stasio tomorrow at noon to talk about the economic aspects of food and food access in North Carolina.  The first half-hour will be about the Alston Ave. expansion and how the demolition of Los Primos will impact the neighborhood.  The second half-hour will about about local food and the food economy, wherein I'll be representing Durham Central Market.

Herald-Sun gone to the blogs

So here's an interesting development.  I'm checking out the Herald-Sun website this morning, and there's an ad across the top from the H-S itself, saying, "Tell us what you really think," and providing a link to http://www.heraldsun.com/blogger. Well, having written the H-S in the past asking that they turn their best reporters loose to blog, I was naturally curious. So there, on the blogger page, it said "no blogs posted." With a lure like to that of a freshly poured concrete sidewalk, I was drawn in. Have to do a test post at least, I thought.

Given the prompt, "tell us what you really think," I let loose with my number 1 problem at the Herald-Sun -- the abundantly useless John McCann. So, with my critique summed up into a tidy blog post, I hit submit to see what would happen. And, well, it's not really clear what happens.

For one thing, the "blogger" page (which appears to have little to do with blogger.com) is only accessible to "registered users." As to the fact that I saw no posts there, I don't know if this was because I was the very very first poster, or that only shows things that I've written. If the latter, it's completely unclear as to how anyone, such as myself, might ever read anyone else's blogs. If so, is this a feature that lets me keep my own personal diary that no one else can read on the Herald-Sun website? Gee, thanks, guys!

So, here's a question -- can anyone else see any blogs anywhere on the Herald-Sun website? Can you see anything that might have been written by me? After you take a look there, see if this link (which allegedly goes to my "blog page," exactly what that means I don't know) shows you anything. I'm interested to hear from both users with H-S registrations and those without.

Maybe they're still ironing out the kinks, and maybe their lack of web editor means that it's going to take a while before anything works right. At this point, though, the review that pops into mind is something along the lines of, "Newzpapir blogz -- ur doing it rong."

An Open Letter to Senator-elect Kay Hagan

Dear Senator-Elect Hagan,  (That's a fantastic opening to be able to write!)

While I realize you haven't yet even had a chance to get assigned an office on Capitol Hill, there's one question which you'll likely be faced with even before you take the oath of office, and that's the question of what to do about Senator Lieberman and his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee. 

I realize that the internal politics of the US Senate are complex and tricky, but two factors stand out.  The first, and most obvious, is not just that the Senator campaigned against President-elect Obama, but did so in particularly nasty ways.  He spoke at the Republican National Convention, repeatedly campaigned with Senator McCain, and openly and hostilely questioned President-elect Obama's patriotism, intelligence, and preparedness to be President, calling him "dangerously naive" at one point.  It's one thing to support the other party's nominee, which certainly has precedent in the Senate.  It's quite another to do so in such a quarrelsome and mud-slinging manner, particularly for someone such as Senator Lieberman, who claims to be above such ugliness.

Secondly, and more importantly, however, Senator Lieberman utterly failed to fulfill the duties of the chairmanship.  In his role, it was uniquely his responsibility to investigate the failure of the response to Katrina, the rampant corruption and waste in homeland security contracts, and many other issues that Chairman Henry Waxman, Mr. Lieberman's House counterpart, went after aggressively.  Mr. Lieberman declined to do any investigating of the catastrophic Bush administration from his highly important seat atop one of the most important oversight committees in the Senate. 

There is precedent for this.  When Democratic senators endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964, they lost their committee seniority, including chairmanships where applicable.  If Mr. Lieberman chooses to caucus with the Democrats, I see no reason to force him out.  However, elections have consequences, as do our actions during them.  Given that Senator Lieberman has in almost all ways left the Democratic party behind, I ask that you support action in the Senate to deny him another term as chair of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee.

This is not about retribution.  This is about following standard Senate practice and ensuring competence at the Chairs of the Senate's most important committees.

Respectfully yours,
Michael Bacon
Durham, NC

The 2008 Christmas Creep Awards

By popular demand.  From a comment that got posted in the 2007 post a few days ago...

Sorry to be off-topic, but can you do the 2008 Christmas Creep Awards? If there were a clear nomination on the "Other" category, I would happily nominate the Magic Kingdom, a Walt Disney World theme park located an hour away from Brandon, FL. Its Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party kicks off with the first two select nights falling the day before and dead on Veterans Day this year. It sorta makes me laugh because WDW is one of the recent victims to succumb to this Christmas creep malarkey (at least the Magic Kingdom)!

This is about the third comment I've had about the Christmas Creep Awards (a.k.a., the "Bad Santas") this year, which is enough encouragement for me to break them out again. For the third year, I'm putting this blog in the service of fighting back against Christmas Creep and the Creeps that keep creeping it backwards in the calendar. From last year's post:

I happen to like Christmas an awful lot. Without going into the details of how my family observes it, let's just say that I'm awfully fond of the exchanging of gifts, the emphasis on light and the story of light entering the world, the decoration of greenery, (some of) the carols, the piles of sugar and chocolate one inevitably consumes, candlelight services on Christmas Eve, advent services at Church, yes, all that. But I like it in my own way, at its own time, and I don't want to be so saturated with jingly nonsense to the point that by the time Thanksgiving rolls around I'm already getting physically ill at the sound of sleigh bells.

The requests for your help are the same as last year's:

First, I need nominations. I'll suggest a few categories below, but these can be expanded if we have a rush on things. Second, I'd really like to come up with some nice, pretty color awards. In my mind, these feature some sort of image of Santa (quite possibly featuring Billy Bob Thronton, if the copyright police don't become problematic), with the words "Bad Santa!" featured prominently, along with a citation as a Christmas Creep and a detail of the offense. If someone with mad crazy photoshop skills feels like going at this, I'd be appreciative.

We never did the certificates (in fact, I never even posted a list of winners), but hey, maybe this year is the year. (And maybe we could present them with this in lieu of an Oscar statue.) Rules and procedures below the fold -- please hit me with the worst of the worst.

Modernist, Utilitarian, Opulent: The provocative Nasher

I know that I have a bad habit of apologizing for blog entries, but there's some part of me which somehow feels that if I'm going to go on about something I know very little about in a sphere as public as the internet, I ought to at least be a little ashamed of it.  With about five other topics pending some writing on things that I actually have a bit of a clue over, I'm going to go off on something completely different here: architecture. (and I'm sorry if this comes off as totally daft -- there, I said it)

Last week I managed to get myself down to the Nasher for the El Greco to Velazquez exhibit, which among students of art appears to be thought of as one of the most significant shows ever to go up in North Carolina. Seeing an art exhibit as both an exhibition and a thesis with arguments is something I've only recently come to appreciate. I must say, while I enjoyed the show, I'm afraid a lot of the significance of it was lost on me. Going home, while a few paintings like Saint Francis Embracing the Crucified Christ stayed with me, I spent a lot more time thinking about the actual building the show was housed in.

Yes to the Prepared Meals Tax

Just as I try to get a rusty and dusty blog to creak back to life here, there is an explosion of stories I want to cover and comment on.  Most of these can wait until after tomorrow brings a close to the hubbub, but I did want to get at least a short piece out on this first.

Most attention is, naturally, focused on the bigger races tomorrow, with perhaps the most major contested races in North Carolina in a single election in my lifetime.  In addition to the every four year presidential and gubernatorial races, this is a US Senate race as well, plus the whole council of state.  And unlike in past years, all three of the top line races look to come down to the wire (at least for NC's 15 electoral votes, but perhaps not the Presidential race as a whole).

Locally, there's not much doing on the ballot.  The County Commissioners' race has five names for five slots -- I voted for four, just to give Joe Bowser a lower vote total.  But the one issue which has caused a stir is the Prepared Meals Tax (or Prepared Foods Tax -- I forget its official billing). 

Two Saturdays ago I voted for this tax for a few simple reasons -- ultimately it comes down to the worthiness of the projects and who pays.

The project list, on the whole, contains a large number of extremely worthwhile public expenditures, most notably funding for a long-sought Durham History Museum, job training programs, renovations to the Hayti Heritage Center, continued arts funding for the renowned African American Dance Ensemble lead by Chuck Davis, the Parrish St. "museum without walls," help for the Carolina Theatre and Museum of Life and Science, and a number of greenway trails that have been planned for over a decade but never built.

The most controversial project on the list is the Minor League Baseball museum and awfully named "fan experience."  (Please, oh please, change the name at the end of that thing.)  I'm on record at balking (no pun intended) at the price of the museum initially, particularlly when it looked like the city was going to be asked to fund $25 million of the $50 million construction cost.  That was an error in reporting, as it turns out, and the city's contribution is now down to $14 million, or slightly over 1/4 of the cost of the museum.  For a pretty good cultural amentity that builds on one of Durham's most recognizable features, I think that's not a bad deal.  (Full disclosure: yes, I'm doing a lot of work on a grocery store to open near where the baseball museum is headed.  That said, this definitely won't benefit me in any personal way, and probably mostly impacts the store by making rents in the area go up a little.)

As to who pays, there's been a lot of noise about this recently, with a lot of it focused on calling this a regressive tax.  This gets incredibly frustrating after a while, mainly for one reason: with the funding options available to Durham, it is very, very difficult to find funding sources that aren't regressive.

Here's a table from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that's making the rounds (this one pulled from the Indy's endorsement of the tax):

Lowest 20%---5.2% of income on food away from home
Next 20%-----5.5%
Middle 20%---5.8%
Next 20%-----5.9%
Highest 20%--5.4%

Looking at the BLS site, I've had a hard time recreating these numbers.  However, in muddling around with their numbers on property taxes, it's clear that property tax isn't much better.  As incomes increase, the percentage of income paid into property taxes decreases.  In fact, if the numbers presented above hold, they're a sight more progressive than the property tax distribution, and that's even before the differential in the income tax deduction.  (Deductions are more valuable for earners in higher tax brackets.)

Ultimately, it's very easy to get lost in the numbers games here.  But this basic synopsis holds, I think: If you think the projects are worthwhile, the prepared foods tax is among the best possible and most progressive ways to pay for it.  For those who don't believe it's a beneficial project list, I can respect a "no" vote, but there's hardly any water at all in the regressive tax argument, at least from a practical standpoint.