Morning Fog

Kill My Phone. Please!

I was intrigued by this little report from Saturday's paper.  DC Police Chief Lanier points out how many of the crimes local cops deal with involve cell-phone thefts, and suggests a seemingly effective and easy solution:  Phone companies should immediately disable any cell phone that is reported stolen.

Cell phone companies' collective response, via their industry lobby CTIA:  Not interested.  The main argument they offer is that this step wouldn't stop international trade in stolen cell phones.  But that's not what Chief Lanier and other law enforcement officials are trying to stop; it's the frequent phone-focused robberies that are of concern.

I'm not sure why remotely disabling stolen phones would be an issue.  The following advice has been available on the internet for some time:

To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: *#06# . A 15-digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe.  If your phone is stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either. If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.

Does anyone know if this is true?  I've never needed to try it.  If it is, it's harder still to understand CTIA recalcitrance.  If people can disable their phones themselves by calling in, where is the problem?  The only difference is that most people probably won't write down their cell phone identifier beforehand; the phone company could provide it easily.

CTIA members may have some conflicts here:  All those robberies resut in people going out to buy replacements, and probably create a greater demand for cell phone insurance, which not coincidentally, most of the cell phone providers sell.  Meanwhile the stolen phones themselves may generate demand for replacement SIM cards and other parts to make them usable again in their new home.  But their ads claim that the wireless phone industry pretty much invented "freedom" (forget the Magna Carta, Thomas Jefferson and all that), so if enough customers make clear they don't necessarily want the freedom to have their phone stolen and their personal data compromised, they might make some headway.

A Death Worth Noting - Richard Grossman

I had never heard of Richard L. Grossman until I read his obit today in the Washington Post, but it turns out that he was a leader of a number of progressive causes, based in particular on his opposition to the concept of "corporate personhood," which he reportedly found "repugnant and destructive." 

Morning Fog has often expressed the view that corporations are not, and should not be considered, "people" in the sense that they have all the rights of individuals.  Admittedly, there is a longstanding body of law on the other side of this issue, which established early on - and for good reasons - that corporations have certain of the attributes of individuals.  Grossman, it seems, was more radical than I, challenging even those early interpretations. 

In recent years, however, it seems courts, the Roberts Court in particular, have sought to expand the equation of individual and corporate rights far beyond what makes sense.  For that reason, I'd like to draw attention, belatedly, to Grossman's life, and his concerns about the same doctrine.

Your Name In Headlines? Not Necessarily A Good Thing (III: Perry)

Last, and in my mind, least, in this little series, is Rick Perry.

Much has been made in the media of the fact that, in one of those "debates" among the various Republican candidates, Perry stumbled in not being able to remember the third department of government he intended to eliminate. 

Is this really serious?  Give me a break!  This sort of disconnect is so common we even have a well-known colloquialism for it:  Brain freeze.    It happened to me once, 20 years ago in a semi-critical meeting where I opened my mouth to speak and just couldn't connect my tongue to my brain.   ABC news reporter John Berman found a whole bunch of prominent cases.  It happens, especially (as Berman goes on to explain) in cases of pressure or tension.

Perry's candidacy may be in trouble but if so, it's for far more substantial reasons.  Time to stand down on this one, unless Perry repeats the performance several times. 

Your Name In Headlines? Not Necessarily A Good Thing (II: Paterno)

Continuing my look at recent headliners whose mommas might have been disappointed with their current fame, I come to Joe Paterno.

I'm of mixed mind about this one.  Crimes were committed.  But Paterno wasn't the one committing them.  He reported them and those he reported them to (who were also fired after these reports came to light) were the ones who bear the most direct blame for doing nothing.  It would be rare in any university (or for that matter any large corporation, etc.) to expect the football coach to deal directly with such sensitive and explosive matters. 

When they did nothing, we can all agree today that Paterno should have followed up on the matter; yet we should also realize that Paterno's whole code of relationship to authority was formed in an earlier era.   (Sports columnist Joe Litke injects a sense of reality about those who say they would certainly have done more, in Paterno's shoes: if all cases of sexual abuse/predation were reported and appropriate action taken immediately, there wouldn't be any serial abusers.)

I'm not at all a big sports fan.  Unlike Litke and the protesting students of Penn State, I'm not particularly concerned whether Paterno got to finish his last season or not.  I do think he may have been treated unfairly; but perhaps the university's overseers, in looking into the matter, had more information than they've made public.   In any case, they could not have done otherwise now, than to throw Paterno out - the question of his guilt, his responsibility, had become suddenly irrelevant.

For me, the main point of interest here is the grip that athletic programs - football in particular - have on many of our institutions of higher learning.   In my estimation, both the failure of university officials to pursue the matter back in 2002, and the absolute need for the overseers to conduct a Wednesday night massacre, stem from the same cause:  Successful football programs bring in money.   They didn't want to rock the boat in 2002 and risk the loss of income that such a scandal might produce; but once the story was broken in 2011, they couldn't risk seeming the least bit indulgent of anyone who might have been involved.

It will be interesting to see if they made the right call.  Will football alums/fans with the big bucks accept the belated crackdown, or might they consider why nothing happened nine years ago?  Will broadcasters be less avid to cover the Nittany Lions' games?  Meanwhile, if some want to think of Paterno as a sacrificial lamb, I believe he was sacrificed on the altar of the Almighty Buck.  Absent that influence, he might still be coaching, at least to the end of the season. 

Your Name In Headlines? Not Necessarily A Good Thing (I: Cain)

Mothers, I presume, still dream that their sons and daughters will grow up to be famous, and see their names in the headlines.   Yet sometimes the dream can become a nightmare - 15 seconds of the wrong kind of fame can wreak havoc with an entire life of sterling public record, or derail a Presidential candidate's chances.

Right now there is a wealth of examples but our media often seem to treat each one as if it were the most serious infraction possible.  Cain, Paterno, Perry - each story is different. If I were to rank them in order of seriousness ... well, gosh, it seems I just did.  Let's look first at: 

Herman Cain, after four charges of sexual harassment, some of them very specific, continues to deny them all.  Is he lying?  The best case that can be made is that perhaps he really does NOT remember; often the sort of offense we're talking about is so common as to become insignificant in the minds of those who commit them.  Kathleen Parker has been through the exercise of putting herself in Cain's shoes, and found them uncomfortable. 

But even if we concede Cain just doesn't recall, then even his fans ought to be thinking he may not be Presidential timber; certainly they would think so if similar charges surfaced involving some Democrat?  Most observers, however, might suppose that one anonymous charge is vindictiveness, but when they see three or four, they're more likely to think, "Iceberg ahead! Man the lifeboats."

Also stirring doubts are Cain's rather desperate attempts to deflect attention from the issue.   
(a) He says he is being persecuted by some cabal who just don't like him.   There may be some such people; could it be that his name alone stirs a sense of unease among the religiously literate?   E.g., the Rick Perry crowd? 
(b) He suggests there is a conspiracy in the land to keep a "businessman" out of the White House.  Really?  In a nation whose constitution reveres property rights above all else, and whose political practice tends to leave more power to business than to any other entity?  Actually businessmen have been elected.  Never a pizza king, but George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Warren Harding and maybe Herbert Hoover.  Come to think of it, if voters consider that record, maybe they DO have a bias against businessmen. 
(c) Finally, there is Cain's protest that he won't let "politics" sway him from pursuing the Presidency;  but from where I sit, it seems that in running for President, "politics" is not an incidental factor.

The Cain story hasn't been fully told yet but when it is, in the coming months, I suspect he'll end up politically Abel. 

Plenty Of Targets For Occupy Wrath

Alec MacGillis's essay ("Occupy what ...") in Sunday's Washington Post  was clever and thought-provoking.  Indeed there are many places legitimately to lay blame for the current state of our affairs ... some that might not occur to us immediately, or that may even seem counterintuitive.  I dare say there are others that could be added to the list too.

I particularly like "Occupy Tysons Corner," for the movement toward contracting out government functions has always been a foolish indulgence of small minds who thought that it didn't matter what you were paying to get a job done so long as it was off budget. It also debunks the myth that private enterprise is always cheaper and more efficient.  (Or does it perhaps "bunk" the reality that the complexity of many government jobs is often considerably higher than supposedly equivalent jobs in the private sector?  If not, why do contractors have to pay double the government rate to find employees to do them?) 

As for adding to this list, how about "Occupy the 99 Percent."?   The entire housing bubble could only have occurred in a market full of people ignoring reality, deceiving themselves about values, and far too focused on get-rich-quick schemes.

Nothing is quite as simple as it seems.  In a complex, interconnected global economy, no single factor or person can be identified as the only cause of a trend or phenomenon.   

The Shared Nuttiness Of Right And Left

If the feature story for news cameras last year was angry, shouting right-wingers disrupting politicians' home-district town hall meetings, this year's equivalent may well be angry, shouting left-wingers occupying Wall Street and other urban premises. 

Both groups propose extremist solutions for remedying (their perceptions of) our social and political ills.  For the right, the enemy is government, even though it is dominated by their party these days; for the left, the enemy is private enterprise, especially its more gigantic, global manifestations.  One of the deceptive conventions of political science is that we posit the system as a "spectrum," but a spectrum is really a continuum:  its right and left "ends" eventually meet.  There is some evidence that's happening now, as tea-party faithful ventured out to mingle with the occupiers last week, and found that their complaints aren't all that different, even if their solutions are.

The communality of the two extreme groups is not in their solutions, but in their inchoate dissatisfaction with what is (or isn't) happening at the center of the political stage.  They share the view that "things" generally are terribly wrong and need correction.  Although they propound extremist, one-sided ideas as solutions, they are  - so far -  just as blind as the traditional politicians they rail against in perceiving the real need:   A return to the center.  Or as columnist Dana Milbank lately put it in a piece otherwise devoted to the resurgence of the birther paranoia, "The higher prominence of loons of all stripes is a natural consequence of a political system that has lost every last vestige of a political center." 

I suspect that both extremist groups realize this intuitively, if only subconsciously at the moment.  Unable to figure out how we got so far out of balance, they're still seeking to place blame somewhere - on the "others" - for what went wrong, and that only exacerbates polarization.  With a little more seasoning, they may come to realize that their respective one-sided platforms are impossible, and that only a blend of both is attainable.

 We've always had two basic streams of political thought in the U.S.  There's no reason to think they will disappear.  But for most of our political history, with a few exceptions, we have learned heuristically that for political reasons, if not practical ones, the best course is a mix of the two fundamentally different concepts.  Our unity depends on a pragmatic mix of both government and private enterprise that can attract the support of a large majority -- something that works, even if we're all a little uneasy about one or another aspect of it.   This is why our two main parties have tended historically toward the center, often with only very nuanced differences between them.  This natural tendency to the center got off course in the mid-1990s.  It's time to get it back.  

Moderation isn't just for moderates any more.    

 

 

 

Notice for Subscribers!

Due to some changes beyond our control, readers who subscribe, either by e-mail or feed, may need to re-subscribe (top of the right-hand column), to continue receiving Morning Fog.

South California

One Republican in California has proposed that some southern counties of the state secede, forming a new state of "South California."

I think this guy is onto something!  Surely everybody can see, reviewing the news today, that what we need in this country is still more self-sorting by political preference.   It's not enough for us just to live in neighborhoods of like-minded people; not enough for Congress to sort itself out into walled communities of left and right, with a no-man's land in between.  No, in order to assure complete paralysis, clearly we need to be able to be able to divide ourselves into entire states by politics, too.  And the bonus is that we could re-form new states every ten years or so, obviating the much less efficient method by which we just apportion a couple of representatives this way or that!

Actually there are a number of places that have already thought of this, so this "Republican pharmacist," whatever that may be, will have to get in line.  My own neck of the woods, northern Virginia, had an active if small new-state movement at least ten years ago, when I first researched the question, and every now and then it gets a little publicity.

 

 

Should North Dakotans Be Represented In The Senate?

It was only a week ago that I commented about our skewed system of political representation, in which a state like North Dakota, which has only a fraction of one percent of the country's population, nevertheless can become the tail that wags the dog in the U.S. Senate.

In several previous posts, I have also criticized the continuing failure of Congress (and of the American people as a whole) to permit citizens of the District of Columbia a voting representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, or any representation at all in the Senate.  Opponents of DC voting rights have usually suggested that the District is just too small to have Senators. 

But if North Dakota, with 672,000 people, has two Senators; and Wyoming, whose population is 563,000, also has two, I think we have to ask why, in the 21st century, the District, with 601,000, should not be a state or should not have two Senators to represent its population.  

Other objections opponents have raised include that the District's special status, as defined in the Constitution, precludes such representation.  Of course, it's recognized that some special arrangements - mostly involving local government and the jurisdiction over federal facilities in the District -- would need to be made for the nation's capital.  However, the Constitution can be amended, and given the fundamental question of unequal representation here, all our states ought to be lined up to set about doing so.  That they are not reflects shame on the political leaders of every state in the union, and on the people of the U.S. who allow them to drag their feet on this simple question of justice. 

The real objection of politicos, of course, is political.  The District of Columbia typically votes heavily Democratic.  Sometimes they suggest a new House seat for the District should be counterbalanced by creating a new seat in some Republican stronghold, but that's poppycock.   DC is already balanced... by tiny North Dakota and Wyoming, among others.  This is not, should not be, a political question.  It's an issue of basic fairness.  How can we preach democracy to the benighted lands of the Middle East, when at home we disenfranchise 600,000 citizens?

What Republican political candidate will pledge to push through an amendment for statehood for the District of Columbia?  Now that might actually shift quite a few of those DC votes onto the Republican side of the ledger.

A side note:  I don't mean to pick on poor North Dakota, by the way, especially when they're currently suffering the terrible effects of our latest weather disaster.  Have you donated to North Dakota flood disaster assistance yet?  Relief is just a click away, at www.american.redcross.org.