Word out of Springfield this week is that Governor Gonad and the General Assembly leaders agreed to a state budget plan that shifts some monies out of school funding and even more out of pension funding to cover the CTA’s shortfall for the year. My prediction was thus partially successful, I’m actually quite astonished that the fix happened well before we got to the doomsday schedule.
Now, while at some level I’m happy that neither my fares are going up nor my schedule is impacted, I can’t say I’m comfortable with the ’solution’. For one thing, I’ll happily pay a little more to ride the train if that’s the only way to ensure both CTA service and proper funding for other big items like schools and state pensions. Besides, as an Illinois taxpayer I’m on the hook for the (already severly underfunded) pensions in particular no matter what, so isn’t it better to pay a little more now than a lot more later? Yet the worst part of this ’solution’ is that it doesn’t fix anything at the CTA, all it does is paper over the problem for a moment. Barring some major finding during the audit of the CTA’s books, we’ll probably be back in this situation again next year; the CTA in particular and RTA in general need to rethink their revenue, scheduling, and funding formulas, and that’s a fact.
Combined with some of the recent goings-on in Washington, it struck me this week what distiguishes a politician from a statesman. A politician will do what it takes to balance out competing interests and constraints right now, whereas a statesman considers how we got here and tries to include the interests and constraints of future consituencies. Too bad there are so few of the latter among elected officials in this country.
We saw RotS last night, and I think this is the best one of the six movies, hands down. Like the other five the dialogue is still mostly crap—Lucas’s ability to make conversations between would-be lovers seem strained and wooden is almost impressive in a car-wreck sort of way–but I think the actors rose above it better than they did in Eps I and II, and they weren’t hamstrung by as many forehead-slappingly inane lines that plagued the first two. However, what really sets this one apart in my view is the tight storyline. Where Phantom Menace careened wildly from one thing to the next with just a weak connection between Big Scenes, RotS moved quickly but smoothly from one event to the next. Where Attack of the Clones struggled to set up storylines, each event in RotS seemed to evolve naturally from the last. Finally, what sets it above the previous high-water mark, Empire Strikes Back, is that the story has broader scope, more subplots, and a greater range between the triumphs and tragedies–especially for Anakin Skywalker.
The connections and echoes of events in the later movies are also numerous, and they provide a richer context. Some are ironic: Anakin Skywalker wielding a blue light saber to battle a Sith who uses a red one. Some are prophetic: Palpatine turning in his seat near a huge window in a tower to watch his current apprentice, and intended future one, battle with light sabers. Yet most importantly the movie gives new perspective on Darth Vader, both in how tenuously he holds onto life after ceasing to ‘really’ be Anakin Skywalker (which helps explain why losing a hand in Return of the Jedi could be instrumental in his death) and in how he yet clings to some humanity; to see the big meanie who was so threatening when I was a child cry out in rage and pain over the death of someone was certainly novel.
A lot of people have been quick to savage the previous two episodes; I’ll concede that the bad acting of IV-VI is usually preferable to the stiff acting of I and II since it’s at least more earnest, but I think a lot of the disappointment simply resulted from viewing some movies from an adult perspective and comparing them with movies loved as a child–when we couldn’t as easily see the flaws. Yet I think that tendency to belittle might obscure what an amazing job Lucas (or at least his design team) did in smoothly evolving elements–from Naboo fashions to clone-trooper armor to Alderaanian spacecraft design–through episodes I-III into forms that match up with the more familiar ones in episodes IV-VI.
Since a little before its release there has been some hubbub about political overtones in the story, but like racial slurs in Phantom Menace and Zen on mountaintops I think it was a matter of people bringing their own views into the theater and projecting them onto the screen. Really, I was looking for political needling, and all I could find were two lines:
Padme: So this is how liberty dies? With thunderous applause?Could these be commentary on the current administration? Perhaps, but they’re also applicable to various leaders throughout history. This isn’t the first time, and won’t be the last, that an author explores how quickly people will give themselves over to darkness and oppression.
…
Anakin: If you are not with me, you are my enemy.
Outlets across the poltical spectrum, both inside and outside the Beltway, have been quick to point out the following points regarding the bipartisan deal that averted the judicial-nomination filibuster showdown in the Senate:
An interesting provision of the agreement, however, hasn’t garnered much attention so far (even WaPo writers have it well down in their stories) but might prove to be more important for the long-term dynamics among the three branches of government. The gang of fourteen has proposed reviving in some manner an informal list of candidates that the President should consider when choosing judicial nominees. The Constitution says “…with the Advise and Consent of the Senate…” after all, so to move away from the historic practice of the President simply sending unsolicited nominations over to the Capitol shouldn’t be seen as a novel concept; I’ll grant that perhaps the Senate should be less involved with nominations for executive-branch positions (perhaps even defer to the President’s wishes in all but egregious cases), but taking a more active role in judicial appointments would help preserve that branch’s independence. The President need not be confined to selecting from a list dictated by the Senate, but he should at least consult with the more prominent members–of all parties–prior to submitting nominations; shutting out minority-party members, or completely ignoring their concerns, would in my view definitely rise to the level of ‘extraordinary circumstances’ that would allow a filibuster as per this weeks deal.
Given the recent health problems of Chief Justice Rehnquist, we should know within a couple of years how these play out. Maybe the desire to shore up a positive legacy in the face of second-term political setbacks will nudge Bush to be a statesman (but I’m not counting on it).
The wormhole-for-time-travel argument essentially says that if we can find (or construct) a stable cosmic wormhole, an example of which has never been observed and the theoretical basis for which isn’t exactly ironclad, and we can locate some (also yet-unobserved) ‘exotic matter’, which would violate many well-established laws of physics, and and can somehow get the two together, then maybe we can keep it open long enough to get to another well-defined point in spacetime.
Okay, great…but with all those ifs and conjectures, the proper course–until presented with something approaching actual evidence–is to simply smirk and move along. Aren’t there enough real science problems around to investigate, rather than debunking yet another pie-in-the-sky scenario.
Via Eric I found the nifty Plogress site that allows one to keep tabs on what official business each member of Congress has a hand in. Forget the ballyhoo of recent months about blogospheric sophistry as the vanguard against the excesses of the political/business/media Establishment, I think simpler applications like Progress show the real value of web logs and RSS: the ability to easily collect and keep track of the news that comes out in dribs and drabs, items that can be easily overlooked yet are often more important in toto than individually. Unfortunately, the people most likely to take advantage of something like Plogress don’t need it–we’re already abreast of what happens in Washington, Springfield, and City Hall–while the less attentive are precisely the ones who need to be shown how often their elected officials aren’t acting in their constituents’ interests–despite soaring campaign rhetoric to the contrary.
Thanks be to Mark Prior and Jason Dubois for carrying the Cubs to a 4-3 victory, forestalling a weekend sweep at home by the White Sox. Given that the Cubbies are struggling right now while the Sox are playing the best ball in the majors, that the South Siders took two of three shouldn’t really be surprising. Since these crosstown games are but six of 162 that count in the final standings, I should only be concerned with the wins and losses on their own merits.
However, I certainly found myself dreading a sweep less for its impact in the standings than for the cultural ammunition it would give Sox fans. They’re already pumped up, for good reason, about the way the White Sox are playing and are also piqued (again for good reason, unfortunately) about the relative lack of attention they receive when compared with the scuffling Cubs, so adding a sweep at Wrigley into the mix would have made a number of Sox fans insufferable; for whatever reason, a signficant portion of the White Sox fan base uses the team’s fortunes as a proxy for their own self-esteem in a way that few North Side fans do. Of course, if the Cubs go down to U.S. Cosmiskular ParkField in June and turn the tables, whaddya bet those same Sox fans will go back to griping about how Cubdom is filled with yuppie weenies who aren’t true, knowledgable baseball fans? And so it goes in the annual Red Line rivalry…
Back to this weekend’s games, it didn’t help my mood that the Friday and Sunday telecasts were done by the Sox broadcasters. Now, Hawk Harrelson is a wealth of baseball knowledge, a good interview and commentator, and is passionate about the game…but I have always found his play-by-play style quite irritating. Obviously some of it is pure partisanship stemming from my Cubs loyalties, but there’s always been something more. For a long time I figured it was just his rah-rah, go-home-team mannerisms, yet Ron Santo is just as passionate on the Cubs radio broadcasts and it seems just fine to me. Today I realized an important difference: Santo is the color analyst, so when he opines or rants about how so-and-so should approach a pitch or should have handled a play it’s expected, but since Harrelson is the play-by-play man such exhortations get in the way.
Two Cubs games within 20 hours where the closer blows the lead in the ninth to lose…and for a change the Cubbies were the beneficiaries! However, I swear that these late-game high-wire theatrics are gonna give Ron Santo and a number of fans (me included?) heart attacks before too long. Is it too much to ask the players to focus, take a few pitches, and score a few more runs in support of some fine pitching efforts they’ve been receiving?
The taste of (relative) success that Cubdom has received over the last couple of seasons has ironically taken some of the joy out of watching the games. To see a team stocked with many impressive talents scuffle along with neverending injuries and streaks of losses that should have been easy wins is depressing. That a few players back from the DL and a good winning streak is all that stands between them and getting back in contention is simultaneously tantalizing and exasperating.
Over the weekend I will be moving the URL for RHE to point to its new home, rhebartonia.blogsome.com. Those of you who primarily read via the web will notice little other than some formatting changes. Those using news aggregators should note that the current RSS feed will stop being updated and should pick one of the new ones for RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, or RSS 2.0.
Why am I doing this? Well, after a couple fits and starts at trying to write my own blogging software, I decided there were too many details that needed attention and I had neither the time nor the patience to follow through. The hosting over at Blogsome seems to fit my needs.
Note that now you may search my posts and, importantly, make comments! To do the latter, please register yourself if you want them to show up right away.
(Any permalinks to entries at the previous site probably won’t work any more–hell, they haven’t really ever worked properly–but I will do what I can to redirect some to the new site.)