Career Suggestions
ArchPundit
Forensic Science is a growth industry. Most states are moving towards DNA tests for most convicts and more will be when the state fiscal problems subside.
September 2003
IKEA in Beijing
Because I keep forgetting, check out Kurt’s pics of the opening of an IKEA in Beijing.
That is cool. BTW, Kurt, what will it take me to get put on the banned site list for China–it seems like a list I want to be on–well except for you not being able to read.
Updated Links
I still have to fix a few, but I’ve added some Illinois Links and I added a bunch of blogs for Democratic Presidential Candidates. A couple might have kinks in them.
For the rest of the blogroll–if you disappeared, it is a temporary thing.
I’m still fixing the rest of the blogroll.
Lotta Lies
The man is a freak. Big Freak. Kevin at Calpundit hits him with the most recent lie. Lott is claiming he never used the Mary Rosh pseudonym in e-mail. How friggen stupid is this guy? That is how Julian Sanchez caught him!
But Kevin points out
Aside from the fact that this does nothing except make Lott look like an obsessive anal retentive anyway, it’s also a baldfaced lie. Lott did use the Mary Rosh pseudonym in emails, including four that he/she sent to me. They’re all sitting right here in my Outlook inbox, including his final one on January 22 titled "Sorry," in which he fessed up to his deception.
Kevin and I have both tried to converse with Lott and it resembles an exercise in nailing jello to the wall.
On the other hand, Tim Lambert shouldn’t send me things I’m likely to read while trying to work. Primarily because everyone around me wonders why I’m laughing so loud while trying to write a paper,
More Carrying, Less Brandishing. Some of the humor is for stat geeks, but is generally accessible to all with a sense of incredulousness.
Hynes and Labor
Reader comment on the Neal Labor column,
For once, it seems, Neal writes a column that required thought, but, unfortunately, he didn’t take it far enough. Does anyone seriously believe that Dan Hynes would have any labor support this early (that James Hoffa would come to town and endorse an Illinois Comptroller not known anywhere outside of IL for the U.S. Senate) were it not that his dad, Tom Hynes, wasn’t a major power-broker on the DNC. At least Obama has a labor voting record to defend; and Hull has a labor history to guide his thinking. What does Hynes bring to the table: his years as a Notre Dame undergrad, as a Loyola law student, his father-greased slide into public office? What? Hynes’s endorsements reflect two things: his father’s power and many peoples’ worry about their city and county livelihoods.
Pretty much. I’m not quite as hard on Hynes, but yeah, the only reason labor is rallying around him is his father. Obama probably is most deserving though Hull and Pappas are good on labor issues. From the union’s perspective, they’ve bought into the inevitability campaign and they want to back a winner.
My problem with Hynes is he isn’t attacking the President’s agenda instead opting for a play it safe campaign–that may cost him in the primary.
How to Attack Obesity
No personal cracks out there, but Linda Armstrong points out that enhancement funding in the highway bill is an effective way to encourage exercise and promote independence. Oh, and reduce air pollution and the such. One of the mistakes of highway funding is ignoring alternatives. This is a relatively cheap program that has great results.
What can you do?
Please take the time to call or fax your congressperson today or tomorrow (http://www.house.gov ). Your call will help restore Enhancements to the 2004 transportation budget and show our representatives how much support there is bicycle-related issues as we move ahead with TEA-21 re-authorization.
Between now and Thurs, Sept 4th, 2003, please forward this alert to any appropriate individuals, groups, or email lists who are concerned with bicycle or pedestrian issues.
More information available at the Bike League. From some listservs it sounds like Congress is getting lots of calls–Akins’ office included.
Neil Pierce also covers the issue in his column, passed on to a listserv by Brian Marston
The federal government’s signature program to promote pedestrian andbikeway transportation alternatives — ways to spare us a 100-percent asphalt future — teeters on the edge of extinction in a U.S. House vote scheduled this Thursday.
The House will have to decide whether to restore funding for the
Transportation Enhancements program, a favorite of environmentalists and
local communities, that its Appropriations Committee left unfunded in favor of still more billions for standard highway projects.Ironically, the moment of decision follows release of major new
research scientifically linking, for the first time ever, the United States’ pattern of highway-driven, sprawling, road-dependent development with the alarming epidemic of rising weight and obesity that the country’s been experiencing.The peer-reviewed study, published in the American Journal of Health Promotion and the American Journal of Public Health, relies on federal Census figures and health data based on 200,000 Americans living in 448 metropolitan area counties. Its finding: Americans who live in spread out, totally auto-dependent communities routinely walk less, weigh more (an average of six pounds), and are more prone to high blood pressure than residents of the most densely populated places.
A less-noticed, companion piece of research, published
simultaneously by the American Journal of Public Health, suggests there is a public policy solution to the dilemma of spread-out development that makes us ever more auto-reliant sedentary, fatter, and unfit.Tested for several decades in Europe, the alternative stresses
serious government investments in expanded walkways and bikeways, making
intersections safer for pedestrians, establishing physical barriers to fast city and town auto traffic and planning villages and communities friendlier to pedestrians.The Dutch more than doubled their already massive network of bike
paths and lanes between the ’70s and ’90s, while the Germans almost tripled the extent of their bikeway network. Almost all paths were connected with practical destinations for everyday travel — town centers, schools, parks, office complexes, light rail stops — rather than the recreation attractions most popular for bike paths in the U.S.Companion traffic-calming measures — first reported in this column from Delft, the Netherlands, in 1978 — feature zigzag curves, speed bumps and artificial dead ends that give pedestrians, cyclists and playing children as much use to residential streets as motor vehicles.
The results, report John Pucher of Rutgers University and Lewis
Dijkstra of the European Commission in Brussels, are spectacular. With a
more hospitable environment for non-auto travel, walking and cycling account for 34 percent of urban trips in Germany, 46 percent in the Netherlands.By contrast, only 10 percent of Americans used foot or bike for urban trips in the ’70s, and by 1995 the figure was down to a mere 6 percent. Even Canada, more like us geographically, now registers almost twice our number of walking and biking trips.
Walking and cycling have yielded the Europeans the health results
you’d expect — much lower rates of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension than the United States. With that come healthy life expectancies 2.5 to 4.4 years longer than the U.S., even though European per capita health expenditures are only half ours.With U.S. obesity levels rising rapidly and our gigantic baby boom
generation soon to reach its retirement years, sensible federal policy would be to emulate the European practices and make walking, cycling and transit options at least the equal of outlays for standard roads and bridges.Instead, the Republican majority on the House Appropriations
Committee wants to decapitate the enhancements program, which amounts to
just 10 percent of federal transportation funding anyway.The decision clearly doesn’t sit well with Democrats, who are almost unanimous for the enhancements. Nor, it turns out, with Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.), chair of the Transportation subcommittee considering renewal of TEA-21, the country’s basic transportation law, which expires Sept. 30. Petri warns that if enhancements are killed, the broad coalition of interests that now favor the entire TEA-21 renewal package may collapse.
There’s little doubt most Americans favor transportation choices. A nationwide poll last spring, for example, showed 53 percent favor increased federal spending on bicycle facilities — new paths, reserved lanes, better signals — even if it means that less collected in gas taxes goes to new road construction.
Check Europe again and you see the massive potential payoff. We
have hostile main arteries, fewer sidewalks and strip malls hazardous to
unmotorized visitors. On a per-mile basis, an American pedestrian is threetimes more likely to get killed and a cyclist two times more likely to get killed than his German counterpart.Provide safe environments and peoples’ behavior does change. Germans and Dutch 75 and older, for example, make half their trips on foot or bike, compared to 6 percent of Americans 65 or older. Result: valuable physical exercise, independence, socializing, enhanced quality of life.
Please, Congress, think again!
Pappas Late Entry Is Tactics
Lynn Sweet covers the Pappas’ strategy and it seems clear she is making a run. I’m not so convinced a late entry helps, but it might work with some momentum building polls right after announcement. Her hope has to be that Obama and Hull don’t start raising their name recognition enough in the mean time to drag down her numbers.
Also, Mellisa Bean is taking another crack at Phil Crane.
Eating Your Own
Ideological Purity becomes the 2004 Theme for the Illinois Circular Firing Squad Team (AKA Republican Party) as Joe Weigand targets Dave Wirsing. It would appear that the right wing of the Republican Party thinks they live in Alabama and not Illinois. The winner in such challenges may not be a Democrat specifically, but it will certainly be the Illinois Democratic Party.
Unless, of course, someone wants to demonstrate that Anthony Downs and the Median Voter Theorem were incorrect.
Editing, Illinois Leader, Editing
While a good stream of conscious rant is great for a blog, couldn’t the Illinois Leader bother forcing Joyce to have a thesis statement?
Just a suggestion.
Cheeky Leader Article of the Day
Just so no one forgets, they remind us all that General John Borling is pro-choice, the Leader’s Headline is General aborts Windy City announcement.
All-in-all Borling sounds interesting, but others have noted his poor speaking ability. In addition, he has a giant target on his head from social conservatives. I have to admire the article though, it paints a hysterical picture of a campaign trying to stage a photo-op.