Ebony and... Walnut

Clinton's victory in Nevada reinforces the split between the Hispanic and black wings of the Democratic party that I mentioned last week.

For as long as I've been paying attention--which would be about 1988 anyway--the Democrats have, with a few exceptions, been the masters of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Clinton's victory in 1992 was real, but over-reaching (especially by the current candidate) led to the 1994 Contract with America, which forced Clinton to chart a course ninety degrees to the right of where he started. The 1996 government shutdown put an end to Gingrich's insurgency, but it would still be ten years before his spoiled children finally defaulted on the mortgage and had to turn the house back to the Democracts. Impeachment might have been a mess, but considering that two years later the GOP was in control of the White House and Congress, it's a stretch to call it a major failure for the Republicans. Gore botched 2000 by losing his home state, and Kerry just botched the whole thing. Since winning congress back in '06, the Democrats have passed every bill Bush has asked them to, and now have a lower approval rating than he does.

With Hillary, I feel like they just may be about to do it again.

The conventional wisdom is that after eight years of Bush and his cabal of cowboy-booted, pork-barreling Texan buddies, the country is just waiting to a vote a Democrat into office. The Iraq war is still going badly enough that everyone remembers what a !@#$&*% it was, but well enough that people just might feel OK voting a candy-ass liberal into office. A tipsy economy would at the moment also seem to favor the people who emote their concern for the working class most shamelessly. Anyway, the conventional wisdom is precisely that because it's obvious, and to be sure, it's also often right.

There are, as Donald Rumsfeld liked to call them, unknown unknowns in the event that Obama wins the nomination. He is very black, and very liberal, and very inexperienced, none of which have been strong positives in past races. But he sparks something in people far to the right of him--a grudging admiration, a sense of genuine engagement with big ideas, a hope that we might be ready to put at least some of the partiskan mudwrestling that started in the early 90s behind us. Imagining Mitt, John, or Rudy against Obama fills me with a sense of overwhelming dread at how long it might take to undo the damage of fighting and losing a battle of grey clouds against the sunshine.

But Hillary, dear, divisive Hillary! She is as predictable and conventional as Obama is sui generis, and if Obama's optimism is contagious enough to keep dispirited GOP voters at home, Hillary's history virtually guarantees high turnout in all of Karl Rove's favorite zip codes. Giuliani could divorce wife #3 and announce that he's experimenting with the gay lifestyle and the evangelicals would still show up to vote against Hillary. So by all means, if you are voting on Super Tuesday, please be sure to vote for her.

Huck and Jive

I never thought I'd say it, but Mitt Romney has now been soundly beaten in the flip-flop game. Aside from abortion, Mitt hasn't flipped that far on that many big issues--you might make a case on gay marriage--though when he said in 1994 that he would be "better than Ted Kennedy on gay rights" ("better" being in Massachusettensian terms, I'm quoting from memory), gay marriage was simply not being talked about.

Meanwhile, Huckabee has flipped a full 180 degrees on:

• Treatment of illegal aliens: as governor he preached about Christian charity, now he wants to round them up and bus them out
• A national smoking ban: for it, before he was against it
• The Confederate flag: NRO's David Sanders recalls Huck's nobler anti-racism stand as governor of Arkansas here

For all of the Mittster's alleged evil mastermind skillz, he is right now looking a lot more Dr. Evil than Dr. No as he gets repeatedly and resoundingly pwned by a fellow former governor--from Arkansas no less:

• Mitt is a plastic CEO action figure, while Huck is a genuine Joe-next-door type
• Mitt's slippery for changing his mind once in a decade on one big issue; Huck changes his on everything depending on which state's primary is next
• The press rides Mitt like a rented mule, while treating Huckabee like an amusing human-interest story

As I see it, there are two possible explanations for Huckabee's constant changes of opinion: either he is a scatterbrained semi-moron who changes his mind every time his alarm clock goes off, or he is really that shameless a pander bear to think he can get away with making shit up as he goes along.

Just as Ron Paul's crypto-crackpot newsletter (written by no less than Lew Rockwell) has deservedly left a few libertarians with that "went to bed at 2 with a 10" feeling, I am now starting to hope that some similar gotterdammerung is in store for the evangelicals throwing themselves behind this slick-talking preacher-man.

Musical Interlude

My favorite musical discovery of 2007 was Shiny Toy Guns, who love the 80s with that complete lack of irony that could only come from having been in diapers at the time. You know you're getting older when the latest fresh musical strawberries start hurling your own nostalgia back at you. It's sort of like seeing a bunch of BU coeds on the Green Line heading off to an 80s party dressed in their best version of Madonna circa "Like a Prayer" and thinking, "you know, I dressed like that once, and back then it wasn't a costume." Well, OK, not exactly that, in my case, I don't have Madonna's legs, though I think more men have Madonna's legs than women. I take solace in the fact that we have a few years to go before Nirvana starts showing up on Classic Rock radio.

The plus side of getting a little older is that you find yourself a little more at peace with your own tastes, and damn what anyone else thinks. At the top of that "!@#$ the tastemakers" list for me was the Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, which was as overrated as their debut album Funeral was unexpected. One of the reasons I am really looking forward to Bush leaving the White House is that maybe we will get a brief respite from critics praising mediocre pop entertainers for foisting yet another scoop of protest dreck on us. When the Arcade Fire sang "I don't wanna live in America no more," all I could think was, "you're a fucking Canadian, jackass, stop bitching and go back to Montreal." Big majestic serious orchestral rock is getting into Spinal Tap territory, and in those immortal words, "There's a fine line between genius and stupidity." It's as though all of the stupidity and dreary earnestness that AF somehow eluded on Funeral got remaindered onto Neon Bible.

Speaking of poppy trends I didn't get in 2007, I am still mystified by Lily Allen's popularity. For the real thing, my money is on Kate Nash. "Foundations" is a terribly clever and well-constructed little confection of a song, light years ahead of the confused and cartoonish hodgepodge of sounds coming from Allen. It is the difference between a chickadee and a big honking goose. Then again, perhaps the public will tire of nice upper-middle class English girls singing in their equivalent of Jive, but that's almost surely expecting too much of the public.

On a brighter note, Editors delivered a blast of dense, large, and dark rock redolent with notes of Joy Division and the malevolent grandeur of Jim Morrison. It received far less radio play than it deserved, especially compared to Interpol's execrable The Heimrich Maneuver, the popularity of which causes me to seriously question the intelligence of today's young'uns. The title track is so dreadful that even Fred Durst could learn new techniques in retardedness from it.

As for the present, my latest acquisition is Soulsavers, whose new release might best be described as dark Christian electronica done by an English atheist. OK, maybe not the best description, but I suppose that goes a long way towards explaining why I find it a bit fetching. What I haven't figured out yet is how well it will stand up after the initial novelty of their sound wears off.

Save the World with a High-Fiber Diet

I've been thinking lately about the Green Line Extension, which would no doubt improve the quality of life for those in Inman, Union Square, and the rest of Indian country between the Red and Orange lines. Given that the current price tag is well into the hundreds of millions--and that's before they've even written the final plan--it's laughable to think the project could be completed for less than a billion. Oh, and then there's the fact that this will add a sizable ongoing operating cost to an MBTA that is still nowhere near making ends meet.

Mass transit, especially rail, has been the "Parkay" of the environmental movement for decades now. Gas taxes make driving too costly for working families? Take the train. Highways congested all day long? Build more subways. But this project is the wrong idea at the wrong time. Our highways (and transit lines) are built to handle the roughly 6-8 hours of the week when half of the metropolitan population is trying to drive to roughly the same place at the same time. But is that the only way?

Every car gets the same gas mileage when it's parked. One way to accomplish that is to get people to ride the train from their house to the office downtown. Another way is to reduce the need for Joe Officeworker to go to the office in the first place. 10+ years ago, work-at-home was a rare privilege afforded to the elite few, and even then it was largely a pseudo-paid-time off. While still a privilege, it's no longer reserved for the expense-account crowd, and it's certainly not seen as a vacation. There is one solitary reason for this: broadband Internet access.

At best, the Green Line extension will serve a couple hundred thousand people. For those currently dragging ass on the bus, it will improve their quality of life. How many cars will it remove from the Central Artery at rush hour? Hundreds? A few thousand? It certainly won't do squat for the hundreds of thousands of commuters who live more than walking distance north of the line's terminus.

Meanwhile, though I live in a densely-populated area not more than five miles from where the Internet was very literally invented, the best connection I can get is a cable modem from Comcast. Don't even ask me about my office building downtown--it's far worse.

How many homes could be wired for a billion dollars? How many tax credits and incentives to support telecommuting could the cost of operating what will no doubt be another money-losing line support? How many day- and elder-care problems could be alleviated with people working from home even part of the time? Against this, and all the possibility offered by bringing truly high-speed fiber-optic connections to every home, one or two miles of subway sound like a glorious future in which a network of pneumatic tubes would carry the mail below the streets at up to 35 miles per hour. 16 miles of such tubes were laid in Boston, in fact.

Burnin' Down the House

It's a day ending in Y, so that must mean that Menino and the firefighters' union are at it again.

The alleged issue is random drug and alcohol testing, but the real issue is the Quinn Bill, which gave cops instant pay raises for earning college degrees. The region's surplus of higher education institutions smelled gold and programs to earn degrees for "life experience" sprang up like mushrooms on a manure pile after a rainstorm.

I haven't run the numbers but my sense is that in the past decade we've seen a roughly equal number of cops and firefighters killed on the job. True or not, the public's feeling is that both jobs are pretty dangerous, though the latter perhaps not so much as it used to be, and so no one begrudges these noble public servants their turn at the trough. It's not like they work at the IT department in City Hall. Lacking the subtleties of crime-fighting to hang a Quinn-style payday upon, the firefighters have little choice but to go straight for the pocketbook and ask for an across-the-board raise.

Left to their own devices, the police and firefighters' unions would gleefully bankrupt every department in the city but their own. Run the game theory scenarios and it always ends up this way. So, the mayor has to find some lever with which to hold them off, regardless of whether it has anything to do with the real issue. Firefighters drink and do drugs? I'm shocked, shocked!

ACLU4GOP

The ACLU has filed a brief (huh huh) supporting Larry Craig by citing a 1969 Minnesota court decision holding that people having sex in bathroom stalls have "a reasonable expectation of privacy." Apparently the swingin' 60s did not completely pass by America's breadbasket. Needless to say, this is tailor-made for promoting the notion that the ACLU is a bunch of pinko commie queers opposed to mainstream American values.

Not knowing the particulars of the original court case, I can't say whether it's reaching or not, but here's where I think the average American would come down on the issue:

1. Sex in your bedroom: private
2. Sex in your car, parked in a secluded corner by the beach late at night: not private, but understandable
3. Sex in your girlfriend's bedroom: private
4. Sex in your car, parked under the Southeast expressway: Dude!
4. Sex in your girlfriend's bedroom, with her mother: questionable, but private
5. Sex involving chains, wetsuits, imaginary meth labs, and several dozen of your most recent friends in some dude's loft on Congress street: very Andy Warhol, but private nonetheless
6. Getting busy in a Burger King bathroom: not private

Who needs solutions when we have Menino?

While we can all still disagree on whether RomneyCare is enough, too much, or not enough to solve the nation's ongoing healthcare crisis, you'd think people would by now be open to trying anything that promised to provide better access to basic services to everyone and reduce the load on ERs, all without sucking one dime from the public treasury.

Well, everyone except Tom Menino, that is.

Responding to a decision by the Boston Public Health Commission to allow CVS to open limited-service, low-cost clinics in their Boston stores, hizzoner sez,

Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit corporations will
seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene. Allowing retailers to make
money off of sick people is wrong.

Leaving aside the quality of writing that recalls the sort of things a third grader would write in purple crayon on pink construction paper underneath a barely-discernible but charming tableau of a unicorn prancing in a field of daisies, shouldn't we, by the same logic, declare a fatwa on grocers for demanding that hungry people pay them for food?

I've been struggling to explain in concrete terms why Menino's time, if it ever was, now needs desperately to come to an end. Leaving aside a few problems with snowplows and ballots, Mumbles has avoided the sort of bid-rigging or ballot-stuffing shenanigans that doom many a mayor, but other than avoiding own goals for a surprisingly long period of time, it's hard to name a signature achievement. Menino had the good fortune to enter office just as violent crime was disappearing from the daily news, and demographic changes (i.e. dinks and poofs) were heralding the renaissance of big-city life, and has been in office nearly fifteen years, having won most of his elections with margins that Hugo Chavez would kill for. No one can say he hasn't had the time or the mandate.

Sure, he has the seven dwarfs of the city council to contend with (though as the heirs apparent, they've probably done more than anyone to encourage people to vote for Menino), the Pike and Massport are as they have always been, and the BRA still manages to meld the competence of FEMA with the transparency of the Federal Reserve Bank, but look--Mitt Romney (remember him?) managed to get a major health care bill passed and to put Billy Bulger out to pasture, all while infected with political leprosy, and he was only here four years.

It's fine for the mayor to jabber about "knuckleheads" when the subject is drunk Huskies or Southie parking spaces, but when we start talking about affordable healthcare and his office responds with some boilerplate about hygiene and damn-those-top-hatted-bankers, you begin to get the sense that we're living on a chess board, but Menino's still playing checkers. The plan to move City Hall might have been good had he started five or eight years ago, when the residential real estate bubble was at its start rather than its end, and a thousand-foot downtown tower is the sort of thing you expect from a bunch of noveau-riche third-world capitols (excuse me, "emerging economies"), kind of like a kid right out of school leasing the cheapest sled BMW offers to show off his entry-level job in the purchasing department at Fidelity.