LCRC Meeting Twitter
I’m at the LCRC meeting tonite. I’ll be (trying) to Twitter it and you can check that out at the Twitter link over there on the right.
And I had such high hopes for him, too…
Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit talking about a boxed set of DVD’s on Amazon:
“I WAS NEVER THAT INTO STARGATE SG-1, but even after the deep discount this seems kind of expensive for a boxed set.”
(Sigh.) Philistine.
Sterling Town Hall Meeting on Gang Violence tomorrow, July 1 2009
Just to make sure as many people as possible are aware of this, there will be a Town Hall Meeting in Sterling, VA tomorrow, July 1 2009, on the matter of Gang Violence here in northern Virginia. From the web site of VA Delegate Tom Rust:
Delegate Tom Rust cordially invites you to attend the Sterling Town Hall Meeting on Gang ViolenceWednesday, July 1, 2009
7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.Park View High School Auditorium
400 W Laurel Avenue
Sterling, VA 20164 [see map here]Attendants and Speakers to include:
Congressman Frank Wolf
Delegate Tom Rust
Chairman Scott York
Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio
Representatives from the Gang Response Intervention TeamFor more information, please call (703) 437-9400 or email trust@tomrust.org.
This is an important matter for those of us in this area and I urge you to attend if you can so you can be advised as to facts and the methods being proposed to handle this problem.
(Special thanks to Mick Bransfield and Greg Stone for bringing this to my attention.)
Finally moved in.
In working on an upcoming post I decided to include a reference to something I’d written on before and was quite surprised when my search for the item came up zero. I was sure I’d used some very specific terms in the post so I started to search for them individually. Still no dice. Finally, I just filtered my posts to a specific time frame in late 2007 and figured I’d troll for it manually until I found it.
I selected November 2007. Number of posts for that month? Zero.
Ummmm….. No. That’s not right. In digging around further, I found that my import of posts from my Wordpress.com post managed to drop an entire year of posts, from January 2007 through January 2008. After spending a couple of hours isolating the posts from that year, I just finished importing them here at the new place and have verified that they are, in fact, present and accounted for. My apologies for the oversight. If you’ve been searching for something you just knew I’d said but couldn’t find it, try it again. You might find it now.
Lynndie England says she’s “still haunted”
More than two years since leaving her prison cell, the woman who became the grinning face of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal spends most of her days confined to the four walls of her home.
Former Army reservist Lynndie England hasn’t landed a job in numerous tries: When one restaurant manager considered hiring her, other employees threatened to quit.
She doesn’t like to travel: Strangers point and whisper, “That’s her!”
In fact, she doesn’t leave the house much at all, limiting her outings mostly to grocery runs.
England tries to play the “I was just a pawn!” card. So did the guards on trial at Nuremberg and I have every bit as much sympathy for England as I do for them. That she tries to beg off on any responsibility by claiming her responsibility on this amounted to a few seconds of time that just so happened to be photographed is just so much more smoke she’s trying to blow into the air. I’m not buying it
“Between them and us, there isn’t enough runway…”
“Between them and us, there isn’t enough runway…”
– Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
There are, it’s said, 3 useless things in aviation. Altitude above you, runway behind you, and fuel sitting in the truck. A pilot at Leesburg Municipal Airport got to see the truth of that second maxim yesterday, although the details of why this happened remain rather slim.
The incident occurred around 11:30 a.m. on Sunday while attempting to take off. No one was injured and no property was damaged during the incident. The airport was reopened after an hour, during which airport staff assisted in removing the private plane from the runway and moving it to a safe area.
The NTSB will investigate, of course, but I doubt this one will make the papers. It looks like the pilot went a little long and probably dinged up the landing gear and the paint job. If I hear more, I’ll post on it.
SCOTUS proceedings
Today is the end of the latest term of the Supreme Court and there are 3 major decisions to be decided:
- Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
- Cuomo v. The Clearing House Association LLC
- Ricci, et al. v. DeStefano, et al.
(Links to case write-up are courtesy of SCOTUSblog, who was running a live blog of today’s end-of-term session.)
As I was beginning to write this post, I was notified via Twitter than the Court has issued a ruling in the Ricci case and has overturned the 2nd Court of Appeals, a ruling that was decided partly by current SCOTUS nominee Sotamayor. The case deals with the matter of a group of New Have, CT firefighters who were taking a test for advancement. The City threw out the test completely because the white firefighters all scored higher than the black ones. Rather than let the results of the test stand, the City simply tossed the results with the result that none of the white firefighters advanced, either. The City’s contention was that they were afraid they’d get sued for using the test results. The white firefighters used exactly the law the City cited to sue them for not using them. The Court agreed with the firefighters that this was illegal. The decision can be found here in PDF format.
I recommend heading over to SCOTUSblog if you’re interested in this kind of stuff. They’ve got good people who are all over this!
Update: As I was writing this the decision in Cuomo was announced. Again by 5-4 the Court rules in favor of the States’ right to police discrimination in mortgage lending. The opinion is here.
New laws in Virginia to take effect on Wednesday, July 1
The Loudoun Scoop points out one of many stories about the new laws going into effect here in Virginia effective Wednesday, July 1. The one that’s drawn the most attention is our new ban on texting while driving.
Seriously.
Drivers used to getting some work done or making plans while in their cars will have to find another way to communicate beginning next week. A law championed by Loudoun representative Del. JoeT. May (R-33) now will prohibit drivers from composing or sending electronic messages while in a moving vehicle.
The bill, which passed the House by an overwhelming majority, makes it illegal for drivers to “manually enter multiple letters or text in the device as a means of communicating with another person” or “read any e-mail or text message transmitted to the device or stored within the device.” Citing concerns for safety and calling texting and e-mailing the most dangerous things a driver could do, May championed the legislation for three years before it was signed into law by Gov. Tim Kaine March 30.
I certainly don’t agree with Delegate May that reading a text message qualifies in the class of “the most dangerous things a driver could do” considering the behaviors I’ve seen on the road but it’s clearly one of those obviously avoidable issues. Frankly it’s one of those things I never thought we needed to make a law banning since it’s just common sense that if you’re poking at your Blackberry you’re not watching the road you’re eating up at 65+ mph. But, we all know that unless there’s a law banning it there’ll be people who do it to dangerous excess. I don’t really have a problem with the law especially since there’s a clause in there stating that it only applies to moving vehicles. When you’re stopped at that red-light-that-takes-forever on your commute, you’re allowed to read that text message thread that’s been pinging you. Just stay aware of your surroundings so you’re not the guy holding up the turn lane with the green arrow on the traffic light finally comes up for you.
My biggest surprise in reading this was the fact that it wasn’t already in effect. I thought it was effective back when it was passed. Oh well.
Other laws include more serious penalties for teen drivers, including for issues that don’t have a damned thing to do with driving. Example: a minor with a driver’s license can have that license suspended for having 10 or more unexcused absences from school, and that license can be suspended until he or she is 18. I understand what they’re trying to do, here, but the notion that a person can have their license suspended for offenses that didn’t even involve riding in a car, let alone driving it, sets a bad precedent in my mind.
One of the new laws, in fact, restricts the types of violations that a school can cite in support of a suspension or expulsion of a student. The law explicitly denies the school the ability to suspend a student over issues of truancy or tardiness. So, let’s get this straight: the school is not permitted to suspend a student from school for multiple unexcused absences, but they can suspend his driver’s license.
Other laws deal with issues of bullying and harrassment, particularly in cyberspace. The assessing of fees to students for damage or loss of school property (read: textbooks) is also being permitted for the 1st time.
Drunk driving penalties are also becoming more serious and the requirements to compel the installation of an ignition interlock have been lowered.
Another Obama pledge out the window
Of the various campaign promises made by Barak Obama before becoming President there is little doubt that his “sunshine before signing” pledge ranks at or very near the top of the list of those promises that he held the complete power to keep. The pledge he made was simple: when Congress passed a bill and sent it to the White House for his signature, Obama would post the entire bill on the White House web site and permit the public to view and comment on it for five (5) days. That’s 5 days from the moment of passage to the moment of signing. Two dozen bills later, the President has almost never kept his promise and now his administration is openly backing away from the clearly-stated pledge.
Johnathon Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy cites a report in the New York Times where the White House is playing fast and loose with the clock. From that story:
Now, in a tacit acknowledgment that the campaign pledge was easier to make than to fulfill, the White House is changing its terms. Instead of starting the five-day clock when Congress passes a bill, administration officials say they intend to start it earlier and post the bills sooner.
“In order to continue providing the American people more transparency in government, once it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online,” said Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman. “This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law.”
For a man who claims not to have a crystal ball his office appears to be saying they can tell the future with precision. With all due respect to pundits from both sides of the aisle, it’s only “clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk” when the votes in Congress are tallied and the bill passes. Also, bills have a nasty tendency to be amended in the final hours of their passage so whatever bill the White House posts could be significantly different from what actually passes and gets sent to Obama’s desk. Adler highlights some of the arguments used to justify this latest reneging and calls them into question:
One argument for modifying (abandoning) the “Sunlight before Signing” policy is that the public no longer has any meaningful opportunity to influence prospective laws once legislation has passed Congress. Yet this is only true if the White House does not intend to be responsive to public concerns. Further, the original pledge was about ensuring that the executive branch did its part to ensure transparency and accountability in government, and was never pitched as a substitute for actions Congressional leaders could take to increase legislative transparency.
The explanation of the policy change also presupposes that there is meaningful opportunity for public involvement while legislation is still pending and subject to revision. Yet as the debate over the Waxman-Markey climate change bill illustrates, this is not a fair assumption. As Jim notes below, the House is preparing to vote on an 1,000-plus-page bill that was subject to a 300-page amendment last night — an amendment that was not even available to many members of Congress until today. Most members of Congress have had no meaningful opportunity to read, let alone digest, the bill. The same is true for most legislative staff. Forget the public.
The Waxman-Markey travesty isn’t the first bill that’s followed this “make-it-public-hours-before-the-vote” trajectory and I’ve got no faith that it’ll be the last. Like the so-called “stimulus bill” there’s no way even the members of Congress who are charged with the responsibility of reviewing and voting on proposed laws actually read this monstrosity in the time that was allowed. Their staffs certainly didn’t. The public would have been 3rd in line for this so there’s little chance any of us could have even made it halfway through, let alone formed reasonable responses, in the time that was allowed.
There is no authority in the United States that forces a President to sign a bill the second it lands on his desk. In fact, the Constitution is clear about the interval the President is permitted to sign and return a bill sent to him by Congress: 10 days. (Article 1, Section 7.) It is completely within President Obama’s authority to delay the signing and return of any bill for any period of time up to that 10-day limit and there is no one and no agency that can compel him to do so sooner. In short, this was a promise he could have kept at will. All he had to do was want to keep it. He’s decided he doesn’t need to keep his word on something that he’s completely in control of and would do no harm to keep. He just doesn’t think it’s worth it.
You, fellow citizens, aren’t worth it.
The President’s can’t be trusted to keep his word on matters of transparency and that goes double for the vast majority of his stated agenda.
Class dismissed. Now, what about Windows 7?
Well the class is done now that the week’s over. I did both far worse than was required and far better than I’d hoped after my long hiatus from the actual, day-to-day hands-on work. Actually, today’s lab exercise was pretty blasted good, considering, and I definitely scored the top test in the class for today’s run.
I have many weeks of practice labs ahead of me as I prepare for the real thing in a few months. More to come on that later on but it’s good to be able to actually look at blogs and news reports again!
Update: Oh, yes! Almost forgot this report from the End User blog at Amazon. Microsoft is looking to prime the pump for later this year by offering discounts and upgrade specials on their new O/S, Windows 7. From the blog:
Microsoft, trying to revive its flagship PC operating system in the middle of a recession, said today that it will price the primary edition of Windows 7 for home users 17 percent below the retail price of its predecessor.
The unusual move was one of a series of Windows 7 pricing announcements made by the company Thursday morning in preparation for the scheduled Oct. 22 launch. Under the plan, Windows 7 Home Premium will be available for $199.99 in stores, $40 less than Windows Vista Home Premium.
Even before adjusting for inflation, that matches the original price of Windows XP Home — which was released in 2001.
Given the reports I’m hearing, Windows 7 will be worth the upgrade price. I’ll post more on that as the date approaches. (And no, I’m not going to be one of the early adopters. I’ve been in this industry long enough to know better than that.)
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