Proclamations

So much for courage

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:26:06 GMT

Which is more important: getting re-elected or making sure your state doesn’t go belly up?
Illinois’ elected leaders clearly favor the former.
Gov. Pat Quinn announced his plan this week to deal with a $13 billion budget deficit by cutting $2 billion in expenses ($1.3 billion from education), borrowing $4.7 billion and then simply not paying another $6.3 billion in bills. Those left in the lurch — hospitals, schools, and other providers — are already waiting on funds from the state that are 365-plus days past due.
The “brave” (according to House Speaker Michael Madigan) Plan B is to increase the state income tax from 3 percent to 4 percent, put that money — $2.8 billion — into the education budget and then cut only $700 million in expenses. The borrowing and the deliquency remain the same.
So much for courage.
I know it goes against the conventional campaign manager’s wisdom, but I would have been much more impressed had Quinn called for 10 percent across-the-board cuts like neighboring Iowa Gov. Chet Culver did last year. Quinn calls that tactic “heartless and naive.”
I likely would have cheered if he had proposed a 2 percent hike in income tax going to the general fund. What Quinn called his “realistic” proposal to raise taxes has received little more than an eyebrow raise from legislative leaders polishing up their stump speeches. (Illinois, by the way, has the lowest maximum income tax rate in the country and the fourth-largest budget deficit, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)
My questions to you: Do you think voters are smart enough to realize raising income taxes is crucial to achieving a solvent state? How are borrowing and ignoring billions of dollars in bills less “heartless and naive” than trimming the budget? Are public awareness efforts, like the Rock Island schools’ marquees tallying past-due funds from the state, putting enough pressure on legislators?
Your insights and arguments are welcome below.

Lessons from the high school debate team

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:39:45 GMT

My QCT column from yesterday. -mlc

If only online comment sections could be run like debate tournaments. I do my best to moderate the discussion on qctimes.com and quadsville.com. But what I think our online community needs more is a good debate coach.

After removing some nastier-than-usual exchanges this week, I Googled “debate etiquette” on a lark. I came up with the guidelines for literary debate on Masterpiece Theatre’s American Collection educator’s Web site. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I read the protocol and strategies sections. Here’s a sampling:

-- Questions or challenges should not be personal or insulting.

-- Don’t get mad — get even through use of logic.

-- Use formal language. Slang, name-calling or cursing makes you appear unintelligent and ill-prepared.

-- Choose your experts and sources wisely. One young woman who has had an abortion is not an expert on the subject.

-- Take time to read or quote the literature exactly.

-- Don’t sound patronizing or condescending. It doesn’t come across well.

Call me old-fashioned, but I just love the civility and the logic of it all.

The section on logical fallacies should be required reading for anyone wielding a keyboard. The post hoc, false authority and red herring arguments that permeate our online discussions are too numerous to quantify.

Perhaps it’s time to raise the bar for commenting privileges. Maybe that link in the confirmation e-mail users receive when they sign up for Quadsville should take them to an online crash course in debate tactics and etiquette. Successful completion of the course would activate the user’s account.

Oh, I can dream, can’t I? And I can hope our online exchanges will someday be held to the same standards as the contentions and rebuttals of smartly-dressed 16-year-olds.

Quadsvillagers explore origin, depth of political chasm

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:30:00 GMT

My column for Sunday's Quad-City Times:

Mutual distrust. Dishonest words. Faulty hearing. Lazy thinking.
Those are a few of the reasons Quadsvillagers cited for the communication failure between citizens and government and between politicos of opposing parties.
I expressed my exasperation at the wildly disparate interpretations of the president’s State of the Union address in my Jan. 31 column, “Two parties divided by a common language.” While Quadsvillagers didn’t offer much hope that Republicans, Democrats and independents would see eye-to-eye any time soon, a few of them did try to analyze and explain their reactions to the speech. I appreciate the effort by these thoughtful Quadsvillagers to explore their different interpretations of Obama’s words.
Haley admitted she tunes out Obama when he brings up the Bush administration.
“I feel people are getting sick and tired of him blaming the previous administration for everything that doesn’t pan out in his administration,” Haley wrote. “He should be above all the criticism and talk, but he’s not. He just sounds like he’s a whining kid that is in way over his head.”
Where Haley hears whining and refusal to take responsibility, Wheezy hears Obama setting the record straight:
“I heard him taking a ‘question’ from a Republican congressman yesterday,” Wheezy wrote, “a long rant that included the charge that Obama has ‘tripled the national debt.’ The congressman has to be either completely dishonest or incredibly ignorant to make such a charge, but it is typical of the way the debate on health care has gone this year.”
Disingenuous words and political doublespeak seemed to turn off Quadsvillagers the fastest. Take this exchange:

Wheezy: The President should be a leader for the country, not just for his party, and he made a step in that direction the other night, chastising both Dems and Republicans for their perpetual bickering.
Just a Voice: To scold both parties for not working together and then scolding the Dems for not pushing a particular agenda through because they have the majority and didn’t need the Reps, makes absolutely no sense. If a group doesn’t need the other group, there is no need to work together, which is exactly what happened. When he was scolding both parties as a whole, he was only providing lip service.

Gene Beenk of DeWitt, Iowa, sent me a letter in which he shared a quote from Bernard M. Patten’s book, “Truth, Knowledge or Just Plain Bull.” It sums up his assessment of how — and why — language is twisted by those in power, and why emotion often trumps fact in debate:
“... Most people can’t think. And if they can think, they can’t think right; if they can think right, they don’t care to think right because it is too much work; and if they do think right, frequently they don’t act on their conclusions.”
The 80 comments, e-mails and letters I received on this subject were from folks eager to work through a complicated topic. Let’s keep the discussion going in Quadsville. Maybe we can set an example for those in Washington.

My review of The Loop

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:01:42 GMT

Steve and I rode the Loop bus Friday and Saturday evenings on its inaugural (FREE!) weekend. Overall, it was great and almost all the other passengers we encountered were having a super time and were very excited to have nighttime, weekend public transportation available to them.

On Friday night, we walked from our house to the District and waited about 15 minutes for the clockwise bus. That was a cold experience. It was windy and sleeting. And since we had no schedules at that point, we had no idea when to expect a bus. We were very cozy once on board. It took a little over 15 minutes to make it to our stop in the Village, which is perfectly located by Lagomarcino's. We walked up the block and had dinner at The Bierstube and then saw "Fool For Love" at the Village Theatre. Then we caught the clockwise bus back to the District and walked home. That bus was 10 minutes late, due to a train in downtown Moline (potential problem for the Loop). One lady, who presumably had to wait longer than anticipated at her stop, said "See you next summer" as she exited the bus.

It would have been a quicker trip for us to catch the counter-clockwise bus on the way home, but since we weren't on a schedule, it was fun to see where all the stops were located in Bettendorf and Moline.

On Saturday night, we had one shot to catch a Loop bus and be at the Capitol Theatre on time to see Burlesque Le'Moustache (and not be there ridiculously early). The 7:26 bus was just about on the dot. We got off at the 3rd & Harrison stop, but noticed 3rd and Ripley - right by the theatre - would be a better stop location. The driver even said he'd had problems with male patrons of Shenanigans coming out and pounding on the windows when he stopped at the light at Harrison. Drop off on the east side of Harrison might be convenient for those going drinking, but with the next stop at the Adler Theatre, I think it makes more sense to have a Capitol Theatre stop instead of 3rd & Harrison.

Our bus home was also on time.

And now for my recommendations for making the Loop experience better:

The buses need to say "Clockwise" or "Counter-clockwise" on their outer digital displays. THIS IS CRUCIAL.

Heat lamps at the stops would be greatly appreciated. A bar in the District close to the Loop stop has one out for the smokers that we stood under while waiting. Made the experience much more pleasant.

Change the 3rd & Harrison stop to Ripley & Harrison.

Add the Loop buses to Metrolink's GPS system that allows you to text the code for your stop and find out when the next bus will arrive.

I think that's all, but I'll add others if I think of them. Did you ride the Loop? Do you have any suggestions?

Two parties divided by a common language

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:05:56 GMT

I raced home from a meeting Wednesday night to watch the State of the Union address. I carried three State of the Union BINGO cards in crossed fingers, hoping the digital TV converter box would function properly for the entire speech. (It did.)
My 8-year-old got to stay up late to watch and was very excited to get the first BINGO. As she crossed out phrases like “tuition” and “middle class,” I wondered if the word “Web site” had ever been used in a State of the Union address before.
I asked Miss G afterward what stood out to her. She pointed at the word “Haiti” on her BINGO board. “He talked about that,” she said.
Ha. Well, they are raising money for Haiti at school and we’ve talked about that more often at home, I suppose, than about financial regulation or nuclear power.
It seemed to me that the speech contained a lot of good sentiments and ideas that both parties could get behind. Republicans did stand, after all, during some of the ovations. Then I read the comments online on Thursday and reviewed the transcript of the live chat hosted by Times reporter Ed Tibbetts during the address.
Are there separate dictionaries for Republicans and Democrats now? I really have a difficult time figuring out how people can interpret the same words so extremely differently, even allowing for differences on issues, in belief systems and in personal experience. For example, Obama’s reminder to members of Congress that they were sent to Washington “to solve problems, not serve ambitions,” sparked this interpretation: “In other words, he wants his own way. To heck with what is fiscally possible.”
I’m at a loss. What’s your take on the great divide in this nation? Does it seem better or worse than it was a year ago? Do you think our elected officials can get past politics to get things done? Or is Election 2010 going to send Washington into gridlock for the rest of the year?
Drop me a line in the comments below.

Sledding - what a workout!

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:18:11 GMT

Yesterday, Gwen, Steve and I spent the last 90 minutes of daylight sledding at Lincoln Park in Rock Island. I haven't been sledding in years and those hills are doozies! But what a great time.

It was pretty good exercise, too. Our original plan for yesterday evening was to go to the YMCA, as we rededicate ourselves to exercising regularly. But Gwen lobbied for sledding, and with the warm weather melting the snow quickly, we figured tromping around in the white stuff would be a decent workout replacement.

It was. You think those hills are steep when you're flying down them, but wait till you're trying to get back to the top. "Did I just drop off a cliff?" comes to mind when you look up at those intimidating slopes. I decided to run up most times. I don't think there was a time where I wasn't breathing hard, either from the rush of flying down the hill or the effort of getting back up. Miraculously, I'm not sore today.

Have you been sledding this year? What are the other great sledding spots in the QC?

Google 1, China 0

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:41:48 GMT

Don't mess with da Google.

That's the message the company is sending to China after it discovered one of the objectives of an attack on its servers originating in China was to try to access the Gmail accounts of human rights activists.

Google has now decided it will no longer censor search results on Google.cn. The censored search results had been controversial to begin with, but were a condition of operating in the country, which Google has done since 2006. It seems Google's philosophy was that it would get its foot in the door and as China's population continued to rise out of poverty, it would continue to push for less censorship and more freedom of expression.

Well, push has come to shove, and I am glad to see at least one company stand up to China on a human rights issue. It speaks volumes about where true power lies in the 21st century that Google is the one to threaten to pull its business out of China if it doesn't agree to allow freedom of speech, when hundreds of other companies and COUNTRIES have not even seriously considered sanctions to pressure China to amend human rights abuses.

Some people find Google's power to be a little scary and Big Brotherish in and of itself (anyone been following the crocs in 'Pearls Before Swine?'). But I'm rooting for Google on this.

What do you think?