The facts start out simple enough. A black guy in Cambridge came home from a trip and had to force his way into his own house. A neighbor heard the noise and called the cops. One thing led to another, and the cops wound up taking in the man who broke into his own house. The details of the story that led to the arrest? They are incredibly unimportant as the story took on a life of its own. That’s the real story here.
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Economic Powers
One of the many huge bills pending before Congress right now is the financial system overhaul. This is a big complicated mess of a proposal that a lot of people are very skeptical about, and for a good reason – it’s very hard to understand. I’ve been slow to write about it because I was about as confused as anyone when I saw the big chart supposedly explaining it. That’s a pity because now that some of the details have sunk in it looks like it’s not too bad overall. It’s only missing that one thing that Democracy demands – clarity. I happen to believe it’s not as hard to do that as it seems.
Stated Reasoning
State governments have been getting a lot more scrutiny lately for one reason: they’re not doing too well. California has become the best known example, but Ohio, New York, and Illinois lead the list of big state governments that suddenly went from obscure to major crises. The problem with that statement is at both ends – how a Depression wrecks a state budget is obvious, but the relative obscurity of this branch of government is where the real problem lies. Very few people know just what states do anymore.
Failure is Impossible
The list of calls I had to make was numbing, long enough that it settled itself into a simple routine. “Hi, my name is Erik, and I’m calling for Jim Scheibel, your DFL candidate for Mayor of Saint Paul.” The 1989 election was going to be close, so Get Out The Vote (GOTV) calling to loyal Democrats was even more important than usual. But just as I let the routine propel my calls with their own mometum the soft yet gravely voice of an old woman stopped me cold.
“Oh, dear, you don’t have to remind me to vote. I’ve been voting ever since they let us.”
Pedestrian Friendly
Any large building project has the potential to be defined by a detail. It can be for better or worse, but it’s often true that “God is in the details”. A major project here in Saint Paul, still in the planning stages, illustrates this point perfectly. The current plans for the Central Corridor (University Avenue) Lite Rail project are a catastrophe that cannot possibly succeed because they completely miss one important part of the transit experience – a decent sidewalk.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 