HOW OTHERS SEE US. Theo Caldwell of Canada's National Post.

Alongside Hillary Clinton, add Barack Obama's kindergarten essays to an already confused conversation about Dennis Kucinich's UFO sightings, dueling celebrity endorsements and who can be quickest to retreat from America's global conflict and raise taxes on the American people, and it becomes clear that these are profoundly unserious individuals.

To be sure, there has been a fair amount of rubbish and rhubarb on the Republican side (Ron Paul, call your office), but even a cursory review of the legislative and professional records of the leading contenders from each party reveals a disparity akin to adults competing with children.

(Via Janet at SCSU Scholars).

COMPASSION FASCISM. Every so often Instapundit takes a circa-1968 formulation born in hysteria about Barry Goldwater's campaign and sets it in the present: "They told me that if George W. Bush were re-elected, academic freedom would be threatened by the whims of unaccountable bureaucrats. And they were right!"

The threats have become public knowledge, and Inside Higher Ed's University Diaries has a lot of fun with them. Perhaps the best thing to do with these overly earnest functionaries is to make mock of them.

OFFICE TOWER, NO REDEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL. A relatively recent slideshow of the abandoned Michigan Central station and office tower in Detroit.

A GIANT STAGE SET. New York's Pennsylvania Stations comprises three stories although I'll treat it as a single Book Review N^o. 5. The first story, about the construction and "redevelopment" of the 1910 station, surveys much of the same material as Conquering Gotham, reviewed here, albeit from the perspective of an art historian. Thus there's less of the political machinations or lifestyles of the rich and famous than in Conquering Gotham, and more on the architectural influences (Roman ruins, Frankfurt (M), the colonnade at St. Peter's in Rome, the Gare d'Orsay.) The reader who wants train pictures and track plans will find none: those are in Manhattan Gateway and the sources referenced therein. The first chapter will help someone not conversant with architectural forms or engineering understand some of the odd features of the station. From the outside, the trainshed looked a bit clunky, but that was required in order to make the arches imitate Roman vaulting when viewed from the inside. The simpler solution would have been additional horizontal bracing inside. The floor plan had in my view a lot of wasted space (some of which lasted into the modern era where New Jersey Transit was able to add a new set of gates east of the diminished waiting room and south of the old entrance arcade) that principal architect Charles McKim envisioned to provide the well-to-do with a suitably grand passage to a de luxe train that did not involve descending fifty feet all in one go. Mr McKim would probably be disappointed that the bulk of the station's clientele has always been middle-class commuters (Westchester and western Connecticut are the east coast version of Lake Forest and Winnetka, reached from Grand Central) and the de luxe trade quickly decamped to the airliners. He might have been more favorably disposed to the Acela Express, which offers only "businessclass" and "first." That wasted space was for baggage rooms.

The chapter gets into some of the difficulties of adapting classical forms to a railroad station. Thus passengers get a waiting room with more interior space than the nave of a major cathedral and fewer pews than a Russian Orthodox village church, and carriage drives that one might expect the Prussian Guard to goose-step under. But, as David P. Morgan (of Trains) once noted, Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station (a Pennsylvania design) was newer than Cincinnati's Union Station (a New York Central design) but it looked older and it aged better. The attempts to make New York's Pennsylvania Station look newer only made the public less interested in preserving it. And so the upper works went. Perhaps the absence of an office tower in the upper works made it more likely to go, although the pattern of big-city station redevelopments strikes me as a barometer of Rust Belt economics. Call the roll: New York Penn: office tower and (now obsolete) sports center above. New York Grand Central: Pan Am (or whatever it now is) above, great room saved with the intervention of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and other worthies. (The World Trade Center replaced an earlier office tower over the Tube terminal near Battery Park.) Philadelphia Broad: replaced with office tower and suburban station. Philadelphia 30th: too far from city center to redevelop. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and P&LE: both with office towers, office towers now put to other uses. Buffalo Central: despite having an office tower, empty? Detroit Michigan Central: despite having an office tower, empty. Cleveland: office tower above rapid-transit station, the one or two passenger trains call at a lakefront station. Cincinnati: a profligate waste of space with little alternate use. Chicago: existing office block above the Roman bath waiting room at Union Station being coveted for other use; concourse building replaced by office towers, as is also the case at North Western, LaSalle Street, Central, and Randolph Street. (The Dearborn headhouse is listed, and the Grand Central site is cut off from the Loop by Congress Street, which is effectively an expressway almost to State Street.)

The middle chapter is a photo essay on the removal of the upper works. It makes a useful companion to The Destruction of Penn Station. The middle chapter of Stations describes what we're seeing, but not the dates the pictures are taken. Destruction has dates, but not descriptions of what we're seeing. Taken together, a reader can piece together the civil-engineering puzzle that taking down a building while it is still in use is. That's also why we have pictures: when the demolition crews marked off at evenings or weekends, the station remained open to traffic, and several photographers explored the notionally closed parts of the station, sometimes at risks that no contractor's insurer would want trespassers to take these days. The chapter also suggests that some of the offices in the wings that surrounded the public areas of the station remained in use in early stages of demolition. The photographic record revealed something that surprised many people: that Roman Bath waiting room was plaster castings on a steel frame: apart from some column bases, there was no marble or granite or load-bearing stone at all. (I wonder if that's true in Chicago?)

The third chapter is an anticipation of the new New York station, to be built in areas of the Post Office that aren't well suited to current postal operations. I hold off on reviewing that chapter too closely as there's some doubt about that project being completed. (It's probably too much to ask that when the current Madison Square Garden goes, the surviving structural members of the Roman Bath and the trainshed be used to put back a Roman Bath with benches and a proper trainshed). Some of the details of the project are incomplete: there already is a Long Island concourse west of Eighth Avenue, and the current Amtrak loading gates are the 1910 infrastructure, and there are those New Jersey Transit gates in the site of the old southeast baggage court and it's not clear if those will be retained or not.

(Cross-posted at Fifty Book Challenge.)

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE. Destination: Freedom reports on the disappearance of some text from the National Surface Transportation Commission report, including the following indictment of politically correct socialism.

Most of those cities once had electric railways. They lost them, not to the fair market, but to massive government intervention in favor of highways and cars. As early as 1921, government was pouring $1.4 billion into highways. In contrast, the vast majority of electric railways were privately owned, received no government assistance and had to pay taxes. Further, their fares were often controlled by local governments, which did not allow them to rise despite inflation. As a result, by 1919 one-third of the country’s streetcar companies were bankrupt.

The principal author of that section was not a ringer from Portland or an apostate from the Reason Foundation.

National Corridors Initiative has learned that an important pro-light-rail section of the report, written by Commission member Paul Weyrich and adopted by a 9-3 majority vote of the commission, has disappeared from the Commission’s final report.

If true, these actions could lead to Contempt of Congress charges against the Bush Administration employees found responsible for falsely editing --- in effect, lying about --- the content of the final report of the commission.

Weyrich, who founded the Heritage Foundation and also founded and is chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, has been a leader of the American conservative movement since the days of the Reagan Administration. He is also one of the most knowledgeable and sought after supporters of public transportation especially light rail, in America.

Mr Weyrich's early efforts in political activism focused on saving the North Shore Line.

Also in this week's newsletter, an unanticipated version of digital command control. Years ago, an uncle told me about Californian garage doors opening when Vandenberg tested a missile, and speculating about whether a Californian going on a joyride ever fired a missile.

FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. January 20 was also a Sunday. That was the last full day of operation by the North Shore Line. The last clean-up train delivered empty cars to interchanges and tied up on Friday, January 25. This weekend's weather, while chilly, was not that chilly. Earlier that year, the Badgers lost a Rose Bowl, but the Packers had defeated the Giants at the end of 1962 on the strength of several Jerry Kramer (!) field goals (not Paul Hornung, who was on maneuvers, and not Don Chandler, who signed later) after going 12-1-1 during the regular season.

That extra leap year in 2000 is going to throw calendar calculations off for a while. Although there are only 28 calendars inclusive of all the leap year variations, the normal pattern is for a non-leap year to recur after eleven years.

SENSITIVITY GULAGS. The Perpetually Aggrieved don't like that expression, but how else characterize this?

On one evaluation, a student made derogatory comments about a professor’s sexual orientation. The university hired a handwriting expert to confirm the identity of the culprit so punishment could be administered. The university claims the student broke the code of conduct, but if anonymity was promised, is this investigation ethical?

University Diaries notes,

In this instance, seemingly anonymous forms are handwriting-analyzed by campus speech squads. The identity of the thought-criminal revealed, Orwellian punishments ensue...

Not Orwellian. Stalinist. There's an anecdote in Alexander Dolgun's Story about a conversation between the author and an elderly prisoner in Dzezhkagzan, who is serving effectively a life sentence for writing letters to Stalin. The comrade had trouble squaring Stalin's speeches about the Workers' Paradise with his lived existence in Moscow's tenements (these in the days before the khrushchobas, which were an improvement over the pre-revolutionary housing stock.) Because this comrade suspected that his letters might fall into the hands of corrupt underlings among the nomenklatura, he kept his letters anonymous, and to avoid notice by corrupt secret police in the pay of those underlings, he posted from several different drop boxes. But because he was a pensioner, and somewhat feeble, his radius of operation was small and the Organs were able to, after review of the postmarks, match his handwriting with that on more legitimate correspondence he also posted. His interrogator actually boasted of the effort the Organs went to to identify him. Mr Dolgun noted that the comrade took it as routine that so many investigative resources would be devoted to identifying the man who dared write the truth to Stalin.

SHORTER LONGWORTH.

This Chicago Tribune column identifies several of the principal manifestations of decline that he addresses at greater length in Caught in the Middle. The outline of the problems, and his policy proposals, are relatively straightforward to identify and lay out. Implementation is another matter, and his summation is internally inconsistent.

No real future exists except the one that the Midwest creates for itself. Washington will not come to the rescue of a region with falling population and falling congressional representation.
The Midwest is the traditional spearpoint of the American economy. It was the frontier when the first pioneers moved west. Its mills and factories powered America's Industrial Revolution. Here, commerce boomed and labor wars first raged. The Great Depression began on Midwestern farms; when the nation recovered, the Midwest recovered first. Two decades later, the Midwest felt the first ravages of the Rust Belt and the first sting of Japanese competition. What happens to America happens first to the Midwest.

The argument he makes in the book raises the possibility of the coastal parts of the country going their own way without the Rust Belt. Before it was "flyover country" it was the territory the transcontinental de luxe trains crossed with their headlights on. The observation he makes about "congressional representation" suggests it's politically rational for Washington to do so (although a lot of the flattened world goes on whether the Sunday talking heads can reach consensus or not.)

LOSING TEAMS FIRE THE MANAGER. A similar principle appears to be emerging in print journalism.

The Los Angeles Times fired its top editor after he rejected a management order to cut $4 million from the newsroom budget, 14 months after his predecessor was also ousted in a budget dispute, the newspaper said Sunday.

James O'Shea was fired following a confrontation with Publisher David D. Hiller, the Times reported on its Web site. The story didn't say when the confrontation took place.

Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan said the newspaper would have no comment.

O'Shea's departure comes just a month after the Times' parent, Chicago-based Tribune Co., was taken private in an $8.2 billion buyout by real estate magnate Sam Zell.

The departure also follows that of his predecessor, Dean Baquet, who was forced to resign after he opposed further cuts to the newsroom budget in 2006.

O'Shea, then the Chicago Tribune's managing editor, was brought in to replace him.

Nobody ever said adaptation to the proper scale of an enterprise was easy, which goes a long way toward explaining public resistance to creative destruction at work, whether it be in print journalism, steelmaking, or higher education.

Hiller had joined the Times in 2006 after former Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson was ousted for refusing to carry out budget cuts ordered by corporate headquarters in Chicago.

A month later, Hiller dismissed Baquet and brought in O'Shea to replace him.

There are competing methods of delivering the news, which the print journalists are contending with, and that distinguishes print journalism from higher education (where the University of Phoenix is not as much of a threat to the regional comprehensives and mid-majors as access-assessment-remediation-retention is) as well as from steel, where the response of one old-line leading company (now bankrupt and purchased by some overseas bottom-feeder that put together a portfolio of companies that would make President Taft apoplectic) to a new technology was to commission the engineering staff to write a long report explaining why the method wouldn't work. The competing company, as we say, never got the memo.

THE WINNER MAKES THE NEXT-TO-LAST MISTAKE. So it often is in chess, so it was with the Packers.

Lawrence Tynes made up for his other misses with a 47-yarder to send the Giants to the NFC championship.

Great effort by the Giants, a team much improved from the rather sloppy bunch that began the season, and now on a long road winning streak and a stretch drive that probably inspired them to play for one more shot at the Patriots, which they'll have in El Alamein Arizona after prevailing at Stalingrad Green Bay.

SIBERIAN CONDITIONS, SIBERIAN MOOD. Time to set up a temporary workbench.

PATH DEPENDENCE.

It's been my karma to grow up in Milwaukee and work in Detroit and Greater DeKalb during an era of great economic change. There was probably no better seat to observe industrial decline than that of a tenure-tracker at Wayne State. Now comes former Chicago Tribune reporter and Chicago Council on Global Affairs senior fellow Richard Longworth with Caught in the Middle, one observer's perspective on those changes. Mr Longworth suggests that Thomas Friedman's world-flattening is manifesting itself in anything but a level manner in what he calls the Midwest but what might more accurately be called the North Central states (if I remember my Census regions correctly). This Book Review N^o. 4 will concur in part and dissent in part with Mr Longworth's findings, interpretations, and recommendations.

PEAS IN TWO PODS. Via Phil Miller, another presidential compatibility calculator. Like the other one, it clusters the Pachs and the Donks, although this one allows users to weight their answers. See Charlie Sykes for the likely outcome.

THEY'LL EARN THEIR PAY SUNDAY.


The forecast does not call for temperatures as cold as the December 1967 Ice Bowl, let alone those of January 20, 1963 when the North Shore Line ended operations. It will be Wisconsin, and it will be cold.

Go Packers.

VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE, OPPORTUNITY COST, COOPERATION. The received way of teaching economics doesn't work terribly well, according to Cornell's Robert H. Frank. In The Economic Naturalist, he notes, (p. 8)

Most introductory economics courses (and my own was no exception in the early days) make little use of narrative. Instead, they inundate students with equations and graphs. Mathematical formalism has been an enormously important source of intellectual progress in economics, but it has not proved an effective vehicle for introducing newcomers to our subject. Except for engineering students and a handful of others with extensive prior training in math, most students who attempt to learn economics primarily through equations and graphs never really grasp that distinctive mind-set known as "thinking like an economist." Most of them spend so much effort trying to make sense of the mathematical details that the intuition behind economic ideas escapes them."

So true, so true. (I survived the first semester of graduate school because I knew the underlying stories well enough to be able to match up the marginal conditions to the stories.)

Professor Frank is not the first economist to recognize the problem, and the related problem of a principles syllabus that includes too much (is it really necessary to do shutdown analysis, monopolistic competition, prisoners' dilemmas, and corrective taxation?) and his known predilection for a more activist government helps rebut some economists' reasonable suspicion that the minimalist approach to introductory economics is a stalking horse for libertarianism (because Armen Alchian and William Allen and Paul Heyne were early advocates of the approach.) This Book Review N^o. 3 notes that Economic Naturalist makes for instructive reading. It collects a variety of student answers to an assignment Professor Frank includes in his survey of economics course at Cornell. (p. 2)

"Your space limit," I wrote, "is 500 words. Many excellent papers are significantly shorter than that. Please do not lard your essay with complex terminology. Imagine yourself talking to a relative who has never had a course in economics. The best papers are ones that would be clearly intelligible to such a person, and typically those papers do not use any algebra or graphs."

The sample essays reproduced -- and a professor would do well to have this book to hand should he or she make the economic naturalist paper part of a course so as to preempt academic misconduct -- include game theoretic and welfare economics problems for which the analytical framework might go beyond exchange, opportunity cost, comparative advantage, and competitive markets.

Another possible use of the book might be in motivating further discussion. The anomaly that Professor Frank presents first is the presence of Braille keypads on drive-up cash dispensers. Presumably any driver would be sighted. But it's cheaper to produce one set of keypads for all cash dispensers, whether they be drive-up or walk-up. A student demurs that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires Braille keypads on all cash dispensers, presumably to protect the taxi or limousine passenger who would otherwise have to ask a stranger to key in an identification code. Professor Frank invokes the useful cost-benefit principle to suggest that the law includes drive-up cash dispensers because compliance is relatively cheap. But a fundamental principle of much public policy is that other social goals often trump allocative efficiency, despite numerous peer-reviewed papers demonstrating the allocative inefficiency of social legislation, including automobile crashworthiness, workplace safety, and mandatory public accommodation.

There's also a lot of potential in one of the imponderables, which may be Professor Frank's own work: why do humanities professors write so unclearly? Sokal, Sokal. Buy it or borrow it, read it, sit down and think.

WHY IT MATTERS. More evidence of excess demand for prestige degrees.

Applications to selective colleges and universities are reaching new heights this year, promising another season of high rejection rates and dashed hopes for many more students.

Perhaps it is as simple as each applicant sending out more applications, and when the music stops, everybody matriculates at no worse than his or her third choice (So don't get excited, and don't get all pale/Instead of going to Harvard, they all went to Yale.)

The reasons for the swelling numbers — not all colleges have reported yet — go beyond the growth in the college age population and the preoccupation with name-brand schools. Recruiting by elite colleges among low- and middle-income students and in new regions are bringing in more applications.

On the other hand, perhaps the onus is on the less-well known institutions to think of themselves as alternate sources of the same experience and the same rigor, rather than as a less-demanding safety option. Or perhaps those economic and geographic diversity initiatives imply some upper-income and legacy students will have the land-grants and mid-majors as their choices. Either way, it makes sense for the land-grants and mid-majors to think of themselves as in the same business as Chicago or Northwestern or Wisconsin.

There is also accumulating evidence that the value of the collegiate credential is slipping.

The rising wage premium, however, is due largely to the sharply falling earnings of high-school graduates and dropouts rather than to higher earnings for college graduates, which means that there is a higher relative demand for college graduates. However, this is often taken to mean that the absolute demand for college graduates is rising, and thus that the economy needs a higher proportion of people to get a college degree. That people with college degrees earn more than people without them says a lot about what is good for individuals and whether education is a good private investment, but it says little about how many and what kind of college graduates the economy and the national job structure demand.

The reward to that high-school diploma perhaps reflects the content-free high school curriculum. Again, though, the market test for the land-grants and mid-majors will be that of producing graduates who can hold their own (which isn't that hard to do) with the holders of comparable degrees from the current crop of selectives. Such a repositioning is likely to do much for the morale of the students and faculty at the land-grants and mid-majors, as well as to lower the stress level for admissions counselors and the spinmeisters hired by overly ambitious parents.

STRANGE LOOP ALERT. A Front Page article chronicles the follies of a Free Speech and Expression Task Force (the existence of such a thing says much) at DePaul. The author, who participated in the project, discovers hegemonic bias.

Hegemonic phrases allegedly exclude the marginalized and oppressed. Among the highlighted phrases were: “free speech and expression,” “exercise of reason,” “competing arguments,” and “immeasurably enriched by exposure to differing points of view.”

It should be obvious to regular readers that the exclusion of "hegemonic phrases" marginalizes and oppresses. Logic is just another social construction. But the quest for hegemonic phrasing makes for interesting projects, to wit.

WHATEVER MAY BE THE LIMITATIONS WHICH TRAMMEL INQUIRY ELSEWHERE, WE BELIEVE THAT THE GREAT STATE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SHOULD EVER ENCOURAGE THAT CONTINUAL AND FEARLESS SIFTING AND WINNOWING BY WHICH ALONE THE TRUTH CAN BE FOUND.

Or something like that.

YOU'RE ON THE WRONG BLOCK. You won't find this here. Try there.

GRAFFITI AND SANITATION.

The presence of the first, and the absence of the second, are clear indicators of a blighted neighborhood, and that pattern influences migration patterns among the near-poor. Although the observation is staggeringly obvious, works such as There Goes The Neighborhood, the effort of William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub with able assistance by numerous University of Chicago graduate students are useful in understanding the dynamics at work by which some neighborhoods may have a change in ethnic composition with no change in quality of life, while others either change little or become blighted. The organizing framework for the research is Albert Hirschman's "exit" and "voice" options: in some neighborhoods, people simply leave, while in others they get organized. That organization can be a force for good (keeping up appearances) or ill (keeping out those who don't fit). The research focuses on four Chicago neighborhoods.

This Book Review N^o. 2 provides a bit of background for readers who aren't as familiar with Chicago as I. Many observers refer to Chicago as a "city of neighborhoods." That's probably true of all cities (one can go from a well-to-do neighborhood to a blighted one simply by crossing a street) although the Chicago locution includes references to "Pilsen" and various "Parks" and various "villages" and often the character of a neighborhood is an artifact of when the houses were built. The cover of the book provides some clues as to the identities of the neighborhoods studied (which the authors masked in order to allow the individuals they interviewed freedom to speak more freely). The commercial district illustrated in the upper-left corner is likely in "Archer Park", a formerly Bohemian neighborhood that now serves as a port of entry, if not necessarily a home, for people migrating from Latin America. The tract houses in upper right probably characterize "Beltway," which the book describes as isolated from most of the city by Midway Airport and popular with city workers of European extraction (Chicago, in common with many cities, conditions employment on residency) who are relatively successful at maintaining the existing economic and ethnic composition of their neighborhood. It's not as obvious that the brick triple-deckers at right center or the row of bungalows at bottom represent either of the remaining neighborhoods, all of which are on the southwest side (the direction "east" taking on meaning once one gets south of 63rd Street). "Groveland" is also a popular neighborhood for city workers, these of African extraction, and like their "Beltway" counterparts, keen to maintain or improve the economic condition. The fourth neighborhood, "Dover," has remained Catholic in religious outlook while evolving ethnically from Eastern European to Latin American, with the migrants keen to upgrade their economic condition.

The book notes multiple sources of ethnic tension, which cannot easily be fitted into the hierarchy of oppression framework popular with culture-studies types. One common theme in all neighborhoods, including the least-established "Archer Park," is Don't send our kids to a bad school. A bad school is one where the bad habits of the poor and ineffective aren't corrected. To a large extent, that correlates with "underclass blacks" and in some ways the upwardly mobile residents of "Groveland" are the most aggressive in keeping that element out. (It brings to mind a quip about Hyde Park - a real Chicago neighborhood, containing the University of Chicago and the Museum of Science and Industry - being the neighborhood where black and white stand shoulder to shoulder against the poor). Parents were able to put aside other differences or other fears in order to protect their children from being sent to the worst schools.

The book works better as analysis than as policy framework. The authors are of the view that urban poverty can be solved by throwing more federal money at it. More money, however, cannot inculcate the Habits of Highly Effective People, and it is the absence of those habits that the research suggests is behind much of the urban migration. What is more disturbing is that the allegedly better common schools are becoming less effective at inculcating those habits. I noted numerous complaints, particularly among adult residents of "Beltway" and "Groveland", about the bad behavior of the youngsters. Those are your own children, people. Yes, a more middle-class milieu in the schools will help, but the schools have to be reinforced at home. Many of the parents appear to be struggling with how best to do that. It's tougher in "Groveland," where ethnic "authenticity" has a lot of street baggage in it. An academic study has to contemplate directions for future research, perhaps that is one direction that research will take.

(Cross-posted, pending moderation, at the Fifty Book Challenge)

ADJUSTING TO EXCESS CAPACITY. University Diaries relays a story that is unlikely to make me reconsider my position that there are inefficiently many state-subsidized safety schools.

You could make a case that public universities like [Eastern Oregon], which don’t attract many students and aren’t very high quality, shouldn’t exist… And some in Oregon make that case. They point out the sad circularity by which a not very attractive school can’t attract very good presidents, so that they risk hiring people who will make matters far worse….

Including offering LaGrande (at one time an engine terminal on the Union Pacific) a Dilbert moment.

Officials this month released a “repositioning” plan that will pare staff, eliminate physics and German language programs, and consolidate departments in an attempt to save $4.1 million over three years and stabilize the finances at the La Grande-based college.

In all, the school will eliminate the equivalent of 18 full-time jobs.

Don't you love that "repositioning"? We don't need no steenkin' trivium. But we can offer the administrative equivalent of tenure to yet another nest-feathering president.

Ignoring state projections of faltering enrollment and resulting funding cuts, [trade consultant and past president Khosrow] Fatemi hired new administrators, doled out additional scholarships and spent $65,000 to remodel a former fish biology lab into a new president’s suite.

He's now attempting to keep the excess capacity active.

Fatemi is helping develop federal legislation that would steer additional money to rural colleges, much like the government does now for specialized schools that serve minorities, [current chancellor George] Pernsteiner said. If successful, such a program could be a life preserver for rural campuses across the nation, he said.

I doubt that's the most productive use of tax money. Oregon might do better to reduce capacity, tighten admission standards, and redirect the resources to tuition subsidies (we could call 'em merit scholarships if that would be expedient) in order that east-state students might be able to manage four years in Corvallis or Eugene, perhaps with a commissary job, rather than put together a patched-up degree (no physics, what other languages will go next?) in LaGrande.

OPTIMIZATION AT THE MARGIN. Charlie Sykes is not surprised with the current dust-up among Democrats.

Democrats, after all, are a party shaped and obsessed with identity and grievance politics, so the clash between sensitivities of race and gender will inevitably be magnified. Who is more offended? Women or Blacks?

The dust-up does not escape the attention of the New York Times.

“I never thought we would see the day when an African-American and a woman were competing for the presidency of the United States,” [Senator Clinton] told black parishioners at a Presbyterian church in Columbia, S.C. “Many of you in this sanctuary were born before African-Americans could vote. So this is not a piece of history that is happening to someone else; this is happening to us.”

Mr. Obama, reflecting the different way he has talked about race during his own campaigns, took pains in speaking at a church service here on Sunday to avoid portraying his election as historic because of the possibility of putting an African-American in the White House.

“We’re on the brink or cusp of doing something important; we can make history,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to a few hundred worshipers at the Pentecostal Temple Church of God. “I know everybody is focused on racial history. That’s not what I’m talking about. We can make history by being, the first time in a very long time, a grass-roots movement of people of all colors.”

Mrs. Clinton said Sunday, in an interview on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” that she was hopeful race and gender would not be an issue in this contest.

Still, supporters of Mr. Obama said in interviews Sunday that they were concerned Mrs. Clinton and her allies might be deliberately raising the issue of race at the very time that Mr. Obama had shown signs of taking off.

Perhaps, given how close on matters of substance the Democrats are, differentiation would inevitably involve racial and sexual politics. The explosive potential had been recognized sometime last year.

LEARNING TO WIN. When you have a ten point lead, stretch it to twenty. When you have a twenty point lead, stretch it to thirty.


It's a young team, with the players beginning to work together and stay aware of where their teammates are on the floor. More assists than turnovers, 23 points off turnovers, 24 points from the reserves. For the first time this season, a team that employed full-court pressure opted to stop it once the bunnies started hopping.

ON THE MOVE. This year's Fifty Book Challenge highballs with Harry Bedwell's The Boomer: A Story of the Rails running as Book Review N^o. 1. Mr. Bedwell's manifest lists numerous short stories for inter alia Railroad, The Saturday Evening Post, and Argosy. The Boomer is his only book. It reads very much like serialized short stories, which makes sense given that the protagonist, telegrapher Eddie Sand, is a boomer (itinerant railroader) uninterested in taking on either the routine of a supervisory post (whether that be dispatcher or superintendent of transportation) or of getting roped into "the upkeep of a blonde." It's thus straightforward to start a new chapter (or monthly installment?) with Mr Sand, either alone, or with frequent colleague (sometimes sidekick, sometimes antagonist) Hi Wheeler [ouch!] deadheading to a new assignment, generally somewhere West. (The British might speak, correctly, of the coal district of northeast England as the 'spiritual home' of the railway, but the railroad's soul resides on a Rocky Mountain pass, with twenty degrees of frost and the snow falling.) The book will not satisfy a reader looking for a lot of character development and the ending is more than a bit contrived, but it does offer insights into the challenges of keeping a spatially separated enterprise with lots of autonomous individuals attempting to work together to get things done. It's not clear exactly when the story takes place. Most of the action involves heavy agricultural traffic along with massive infrastructure improvements, suggesting the mid-1920s, but a postscript conjectures the reaction at the roundhouse to news of Pearl Harbor. Some of the details of timetable-and-train-order railroading (by telegraphy) are instructive, although the propensity of a dispatcher to keep his railroad fluid by wrong-maining a passenger train within yard limits thereby setting up collisions strains credulity. Yes, a westbound train with proper timetable or train order authority can occupy the westbound main track without having to worry about a passenger train that is using the eastbound main track, but that westbound train ought not be leaving the yard without first obtaining a clearance form from the operator ("I have no orders for your train"), or, within interlocking limits, without having received a clear signal from the jack at the end of the yard lead.

If you are having trouble with my use of the English language, The Boomer has a helpful glossary of steam-era railroad terminology, although "jack" is Northeastern for what the rules refer to as a "dwarf signal."

SATURDAY, SUNDAY. A Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist discovers the meaning of Wisconsin football.

It covers the entire state and is especially noticeable here -- Green Bay is an NFL city with a decidedly college atmosphere. I'm looking for the proper words to describe it, and two come to mind: "very" and "cool."

Exactly.

During training camp, kids take their bikes to the Don Hutson Center, and their favorite players pedal the bikes to practice. In the offseason at the two-day Packers Fan Fest, fans can meet coaches and players and get their autographs.

Sticking with the collegiate theme, the Packers have a fight song titled "Go, You Packers, Go!" and the Wisconsin marching band will perform at halftime of Saturday's game.

The mutual hug continues Friday night. When was the last time a pro team held its own "pep rally"? They'll have one at Lambeau Field, and it should be a good time, 15,000 people gathering in the north end zone to listen to the Johnny Wad Band and former Packers stars such as Jerry Kramer and James Lofton.

Some commenters on the Packer radio network were talking about the fans' reluctance to leave after Saturday's win. Some of it might have been anticipating (incorrectly, fortunately) a conference title game on the road. But some of it might have been people sticking around for Fifth Quarter. (I did hear the Bud Song during the TV coverage, and I doubt that the Wisconsin Band would be in a football stadium and NOT perform a Fifth Quarter.)

Any New Yorkers bound for the title game: if somebody offers you a brat, ENJOY!

The next day at thousands of tailgates, fans will chill their beers and grill their brats, and if you want one or the other, they're yours. At Champion's Sports Bar and Grill, a band called Da Wurst is expected to be playing "The Bears Still Suck."

But bring your blankets, seat cushions, and portable seat backs: all bowl seating is on aluminum benches.

SECURITY UPDATE. The police have been investigating the shooting threat that disrupted exam week at Northern Illinois, with information being tightly held.

University Police were unable to comment on the investigation’s status, explaining that any materials pertaining to the threat would have to be obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request.

The official reaction has been very low-key, with this chronology showing very little of the identity-politics hysteria that has accompanied such messages at other universities. An editorial in the back to classes edition of the Northern Star commends everybody's response.

INFORMING YOUR DECISION. There's a candidate compatibility chart that matches voters with presidential aspirants on 44 dimensions, although, according to Daniel Drezner and James Joyner and numerous commenters at both posts, with large margins of error. The chart suggests that both the Democratic field and the Republican field are as peas in two pods, which probably makes a choice among the echoes more difficult.

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR. Destination: Freedom.

Incidents like these are extremely stressful for railroad employees, particularly the train engineers who often observe the fatalities and are unable to stop the train in time to save the trespasser.

[Emphasis in original]. And who are subject to drug testing and occasionally ignorant questioning from the police. "Sir, what evasive action did you take?"

SHOCK AND AWE. In a sports bar in Seattle, fans watch America's Team prevail.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer photo by Joshua Trujillo (photo 6).

Seahawk coach Mike "I'm Too Busy Negotiating With Paul Allen To Prepare For The 'Niners" Holmgren takes some stick from the home fans.

Green Bay would've scored 50 points. Or maybe 60. Brett Favre would've been engaging in snowball fights the entire second half instead of during snippets of the fourth quarter. Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren would've sent his defensive players down Holmgren Way, the street here that honors him, to take down his signs.

Rarely should a team lose 42-20 and feel fortunate. But that's an appropriate sentiment considering how inexplicably absent the Seahawks were. At the end of another season that will go down as unsatisfying, the Seahawks finished with the worst defensive effort in the franchise's postseason history. And it's not like Seattle has the defensive tradition of, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The bar was only ankle high, and the Seahawks stumbled over it with the clumsiness of a clown on skis. They gave up more points than they ever have in a playoff game. More rushing yards, too. They had never allowed more than four touchdowns in a postseason game. They surrendered four in the first half to Green Bay.

The early weather forecast for next Sunday in Green Bay will be a high of 7^o(F). That's relevant, because the Packers will host the title game.

The Cowboys just wasted a 13-3 season, which matched the best in team history. They're the first No. 1 seed in the NFC to lose in this round since the NFL went to the 12-team playoff format in 1990. They also became the seventh team to lose a playoff game against a team they'd beaten twice in the regular season - joining Dallas' 1998 club.

Worst of all is the extension of all the skids: Romo now 0-2 in the playoffs, coach Wade Phillips 0-4 and the team 0-for-the-postseason since winning a wild-card game in 1996. The Cowboys have dropped five games since then.

The Cowboys first acquired a "choker" label losing title games to Vince Lombardi's Packers in the 1960s.

CATCHING UP ON THE BOOK-KEEPING. The move and a busy fall semester kept me from making the half-century in the 2007 Fifty Book Challenge. That said, I managed to add a few more in the second half of the year. This summary includes both the third and fourth quarters of 2007.

21. Boomsday, 7 July 2007.
22. Brothers: The Hidden History, 18 July 2007.
23. Dresden: Tuesday 12 February 1945, 19 July 2007.
24. Masters of the Air, 20 July 2007.
25. Countdown to Victory, 22 July 2007.
26. Yob Nation, 26 July 2007.
27. Freedomnomics, 1 August 2007.
28. Workington: Iron and Steel, 19 August 2007.
29. Secrets of the Code, 28 August 2007.
30. The Affluent Society, 2 September 2007.
31. June 1941: Hitler and Stalin, 4 September 2007. (we now pause to trade real estate)
32. Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game ..., 10 November 2007. (go to grading jail)
33. Conquering Gotham, 18 December 2007.
34. The Squandering of America, 19 December 2007.
35. Day of Reckoning, 20 December 2007.
36. Supercapitalism, 21 December 2007.
37. Boom, 22 December 2007.
38. Never Out of Season, 31 December 2007. (particularly timely reading for a bear market)

Follow any of these links for prior book reviews.
At Cold Spring Shops, the first and second quarter reports.
At European Tribune, the first and second quarter reports.
At the Fifty Book Challenge, the first and second quarter reports.

The 2007 bookworm has 38 segments, and today's come-from-behind Packer victory means a lot of green and gold segments.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Crossposted at European Tribune and the Fifty Book Challenge.

JUST ANOTHER SUNNY DAY IN PARADISE. For mid-January, again, it's more like early March, with sunshine and temperatures above freezing in DeKalb. Inside, the Huskies established a largish lead on Ball State only to have the visitors make the last run. Ouch.

In Green Bay, the snows began shortly after the Packers spotted Seattle an early fourteen point lead. By the end of the first quarter, the game was tied, with the Packers outscoring the Seahawks 42 to 6 after the initial Seattle scores. Better to have your bad winter game for the learning experience when the stakes are relatively low.

HEH. Did somebody mention the Packers?

NO SAVIOUR FROM ON HIGH DELIVERS. Thus the third stanza of The Internationale distinguishes self-styled revolutionaries from self-styled progressives, characterized by James Lewis at The American Thinker as the "childish left".

The childish Left constantly needs someone to adore -- FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton before the Fall. Even Hillary during her New York senatorial run.

The article is a bit harsh, but it does capture one essential truth: true believers in the Democratic Party are more likely to have high hopes for their nominees, particularly for the presidency, than are true believers in the Republican Party. True believers in the Democratic Party tend to place more confidence in expertise, for which the American Question exists.

ACES UP YOUR SLEEVES. There's an instructive pair of delegate scorecards helpfully maintained by CNN. Although there is supposed to be a preference primary in Illinois on February 5, favorite son Barack Obama already has 15 delegates (please, no wisecracks about the Mt. Carmel vote) and Nash heir Mitt Romney already has one. The footnotes to both scorecards are instructive.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. A recent Investor's Business Daily article runs the numbers on catalog content in the colleges of education.

To determine just how unbalanced teacher preparation is at ed schools, we counted the number of course titles and descriptions that contained the words "multiculturalism," "diversity," "inclusion" and variants thereof, and then compared those with the number that used variants of the word "math." We then computed a "multiculturalism-to-math ratio" — a rough indicator of the relative importance of social goals to academic skills in ed schools. A ratio of greater than 1 indicates a greater emphasis on multiculturalism; a ratio of less than 1 means that math courses predominate.

That may not be the best way to tease out the underlying preferences, as there is no common property resource more aggressively fought over than ownership of a core course. Thus the college of education might -- by default? [Stop snarking] -- have ownership over the methods courses, many of which will have variants on "teaching in the multicultural classroom" (Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses?) or on "inclusion" (much of which is mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act and its ilk) and which need not necessarily be fifth-rate Paulo Freires bent on perpetuating the cycle of poverty by making ignorance strength. Meanwhile, the mathematics department might have enough allies in the curriculum committee (I am not making this up) to maintain ownership of the math methods course, and the aspiring teacher of mathematics might also do some learning by doing such as, oh, suffering with the engineers to prove the Mean Value Theorem and other great hits. (Check this out!) The article does not note whether, for example, Missouri-Columbia or Penn State's math departments lost ownership of the math courses while Pennsylvania's math department kept them.

The article also fails to recognize one reality of state-supported education.

On the demand side, prospective teachers haven't cried out for more math courses because such courses tend to be harder than those involving multiculturalism. And the teachers know that their future employers — public school districts — don't find an accent on multiculturalism troubling. Because public schools are assured of ever-increasing funding, regardless of how they do in math, they can indulge their enthusiasm for multiculturalism, and prospective teachers can, too.

I'll never lack for work. School superintendents continue to plead poverty, and school superintendents in districts that lose students often lose their jobs. (I'm not sure, at the margin, how many parents moved into the Milwaukee Hamilton district when they learned the school would have a planetarium, but I suggest that a district's performance in math matters.)

There well might be deficiencies in teacher preparation, particularly in rigorous fields including algebra (that's what "math" is in the common schools; "mathematics" properly construed comprises algebra, analysis, and logic) and the laboratory sciences. To lay it all off on faddish curricula, however, is unlikely to convince many people to revise their priors.

MAKING THE ARGUMENT FOR SCHOOL CHOICE? Some common schools have already outsourced driver ed.

One of those options is needed if the [Waukesha] School Board wants to avoid subsidizing driver's education any further, said Mark Hansen, the district's executive director of curriculum and instruction.

"We're going to have to increase the fee or get out of the business of driver's education," Hansen said. "It's the board's decision."

When the board chose to increase the fee for drivers education to $395 in the 2004-'05 school year and move the program outside the school day, it did so out of a desire to keep the program cost neutral, he said. Since then, enrollment has dropped from 660 students to 61 in the last school year, according to district figures. Costs have not decreased as much, however.

There is already a market.

In order to keep the program without affecting the budget, district officials estimate they would have to increase its fees to $425 a student. That compares with between $325 and $335 charged by private driver's ed providers in the area.

Does the argument generalize to, say, teaching writing?

PROFITS ATTRACT ENTRY. And markets equilibrate, although there's not a good dynamic model.

Starbucks has struggled in recent months as consumers have cut back on spending amid declining home values and higher fuel prices. Meanwhile, competitors like Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's Corp. have cut into Starbucks' customer base by launching their own lines of gourmet coffee.

The Wall Street Journal, citing internal McDonald's documents, reported Monday that the world's biggest fast food chain plans to add coffee bars with baristas serving cappuccinos and iced coffees at its nearly 14,000 locations.

The article goes on to note that Starbucks' expansion left some in management dissatisfied with the company's ability to replicate its "experience." That's called the principle of increasing opportunity cost.

LIVING AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS. Don't tax you, don't tax me.

Plans for a Milwaukee-area commuter rail line have been put on hold, amid continuing disagreement over how to fund the trains and the region's public buses.

The deadlock has highlighted a split between the area's business leaders and their usual Republican allies. Major business groups have been pushing for public transit improvements to ensure workers can reach jobs, but GOP legislators and county executives have balked at adding or raising taxes.

Because federal matching funds presuppose funds to match, there will be no application going to Washington.

But reaching the 2010 target is unlikely now. With no deal in sight on how to pay for the trains, the [transit authority] voted last month to put its application for federal aid on hold.

One reason for no deal is no agreement on the designated source of taxes.

Nationwide, sales taxes are the most common way of paying for commuter rail and light rail lines. But when the [transit authority] ran into political opposition to a local sales tax for both trains and buses, it asked the Legislature to authorize a $13-a-car increase in the three-county rental car tax, from $2 to $15, for trains alone. Lawmakers refused.

The rental car tax drew opposition from Milwaukee aldermen and county supervisors, who wanted a revenue source that also could rescue the troubled Milwaukee County Transit System from a funding crisis that threatens to trigger a 35% service cut by 2010.

Business leaders support both the [commuter rail] and improved bus funding. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce's board supports a transit sales tax that would be tied to a property tax cut.

Researchers who estimate the incidence of taxes, let alone their progressivity or regressivity, will never lack for work. By default, however, the State Line continues the cycle of traffic delayed by road construction that will simply attract more traffic to the widened roads.

RESHAPING THE KETTLE MORAINE? A Russian climate scientist (via American Thinker) says "expect change."

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

That real cold, however, is not the same thing as an ice age.

What can’t be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.

That will put some real dampers on any future Napoleon or Hitler. In the United States, there is evidence of glaciation as far south as Cincinnati, with some well-preserved glacial formations in Wisconsin's Kettle Moraine. Does "much worse than previous" imply terminal moraines in north Florida (South Florida would probably be dragged under water by the additional weight of the ice cap)?

FATAL CONCEITS. Is this a great country or what?

Hillary Rodham Clinton's eyes welled up and her voice broke repeatedly Monday as she talked with voters in a restaurant about her campaign for the presidency.

The former first lady was making a last-minute pitch for support as she spoke on the eve of the state's primary, with polls showing her trailing Democratic rival Barack Obama.

Asked by a sympathetic voter how she keeps going in the grueling campaign, she replied, "It's not easy. It's not easy."

"And I couldn't do it if I just didn't, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do," she said, her voice catching.

Yeah, promise us utopia.

"You know, I've had so many opportunities from this country, I just don't want to see us fall backwards," she said, her voice trailing off. The voters crowded into the restaurant applauded encouragingly.

"So," she continued, then paused, seemingly to control her voice as her listeners applauded again. "You know, this is very personal for me. It's not just political. It's not just public. I see what's happening, and we have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game. They think it's like who's up or who's down.

"It's about our country. It's about our kids' futures. It's really about all of us together. You know some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some pretty difficult odds. And we do it, each one of us, because we care about our country. But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not."

She concluded, "And so when we look at the array of problems we have and the potential for it getting - really spinning out of control, this is one of the most important elections America's ever faced. So as tired as I am - and I am - and as difficult as it is to kind of keep up with what I try to do on the road like occasionally exercise and try to eat right - it's tough when the easiest food is pizza - I just believe so strongly in who we are as a nation so I'm going to do everything I can to make my case and, you know, then the voters get to decide."

The one choice voters aren't being offered by any of the leading candidates is the choice to take more control over their lives. Perhaps there is no vast Leave Us Alone coalition. That's a shame, because Senator Clinton is not the only candidate laboring under the misapprehension that "problems" can somehow be "controlled" -- let alone "change" be legislated -- with the right platforms, programs, and pliable Members of Congress.

Professor Bainbridge offers a reflection.

Hillary’s trouble is that some of us don’t want to be moulded. We don’t want our kids raised by a village, especially one headed by a moulder like Hillary. And since her passion to mould the country is what scares me the most, I’ll be very glad if she loses. But while we Wodehouse fans share a sigh of relief with Bertie Wooster when he escapes Honoria’s clutches, the more sentimenal of us also feel a pang for poor Honoria. Just so with Hillary. Oddly enough, I find myself feeling a bit sorry for her. To have strived for the brass ring all those years, just to have it snatched away when it seemed to finally be in her grasp must be wrenching.

It's easier to be gracious from a position of relative safety from overweeningly ambitious moulders.

RUNNING EXTRA. Ouch.

On foreign policy matters -- and that's the primary issue area I care about in this election -- there are ways in which I trust Clinton's experience more than Obama's. That second point, however, scares the ever-living crap out of me. That kind of belief bears a strong resemblance to the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvaia Avenue.

Screw the politics of fear and, frankly, screw the politics of hope. I want the politics of doubt. I want a president who, in these complex times, has the capacity to admit error before all is lost.

I get absolutely no whiff of that from Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It makes for some creative multimedia. And here's a Wisconsin take.

CURIOUS START TO THE SPRING SEMESTER. All the snow has melted, century-old high temperature records exceeded by close to ten degrees, ... tornadoes?

SECOND SECTION: Television news reports of cars in a Union Pacific train (on the Janesville line) blown off the tracks near Harvard. More tomorrow.

FORTY YEARS AGO.

This will be the year for reminiscing about Tet, King, Kennedy, Chicago, Wallace, and Nixon in the United States, about inter alia Paris, Prague, and Mexico City internationally, and about the Moon. Tom Brokaw started last year. Now Todd Gitlin has gone on record, to the dismay of University Diaries.

We note here that one of the more notorious excesses of that year has long-since been corrected.


"Mating worms" logo courtesy Penn Central tribute page. Penn Central, which became the most spectacular business failure of the age (would that be the last time a railroad was in a position to be a spectacular business failure) after two years of squabbling between its New York Central and Pennsylvania managers (the green and red teams, and there will never be an alternation of colors, as will be the case with this year's electoral map), began in early 1968. After bankruptcy came nationalization, privatization, and ultimately divestiture, with Norfolk and Western (itself having swelled into something called Norfolk Southern) getting essentially the Pennsylvania, and Chesapeake and Ohio (trading under the infelicitous name CSX) getting much of the New York Central, these both being the outcomes they could have had in 1958 had investors and policymakers been more sensible.

WHAT'S PASHTO FOR "GRASSY KNOLL?" Pakistan is now seeking outside help to investigate Benazir Bhutto's assassination.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Wednesday that he had requested a team of investigators from Britain's Scotland Yard to assist in the investigation into the killing of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

"We decided to request a team from Scotland Yard to come. I sent the request to (British) Prime Minister (Gordon) Brown, and he accepted the request," Musharraf said, adding that the British team would assist local investigators.

"We would like to know what were the reasons that led to the martyrdom of Benazir Bhutto. I would also like to look into it," Musharraf said in a nationally televised address.

There is skepticism about the official story.

Opposition officials have rejected the government's version of events
surrounding Bhutto's killing in a suicide attack after a rally Thursday and
demanded an international investigation.

I was somewhat annoyed to hear some news reader drawing parallels between the Pakistani inquiry and our Warren Commission. Any such commentary is nonsense. The Dallas police department cleared the Kennedy assassination by midnight on November 22, and the Warren Commission got the investigation just about right.

Let me remind readers that the most reviled President of the United States held the Constitutionally-mandated elections in the middle of a rebellion. No postponements for Abraham Lincoln.

Musharraf also said he had wanted to hold parliamentary elections as scheduled on Jan. 8, but he deferred to the decision of the election commission earlier in the day to postpone them for six weeks due to the violence.

It makes all the Iowa Caucus hype, even the very early scheduling of the event, something to affirm.

HUMBUG? I owe Tom a tag-back, so here goes ...

1. Wrapping, or gift bags? Wrapping, although not expertly.
2. Real or artificial tree? It's plastic, with a $5 set of battery-powered light emitting diodes.
3. When do you put up the tree? As a break from composing exams.
4. When do you take the tree down? After Twelfth Night.
5. Do you like egg nog? Yes. Tom and Jerrys too.
6. Favorite gift received as a child? That Boston and Maine freight train set.
7. Do you have a nativity scene? On an ornament.
8. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? Pass.
9. Mail or email Christmas cards? All postal, all the time.
10. Favorite Christmas movie? Does "Charlie Brown Christmas" count?
11. When do you start shopping for Christmas? Summertime, especially if I'm in someplace exotic. One year I had almost everything on hand at the May Bank Holiday.
12. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Lasagna. (There's a great story about the Christmas the oven failed ...)
13. Clear lights or colored on the tree? Colored light emitting diodes.
14. Favorite Christmas songs? Adeste Fideles, Stille Nacht, We Three Kings.
15. Travel at Christmas? Often. It's less painful now that the job meetings are early in the new year.
16. Can you name all of Santa's reindeer? You know Dasher, and Dancer, and Prancer, and Vixen/Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen/But do you recall the most famous reindeer of all...
17. Angel on the tree top, or a star? A flashing red light, in case any tiny aeroplanes are nearby.
18. Open the presents Christmas Eve or Christmas Morning? Sometimes it's midday Christmas, depending on travel schedules. One learns patience.
19. Most annoying thing about this time of year? Self-indulgent advertisements from car companies that target the noveaux riches.
20. Do you decorate your tree in any specific theme or color? It has to have a train under it.
21. What do you leave for Santa? Nothing. (No fireplace, in fact, no chimney!)
22. Least favorite holiday song? That Lexus jingle (see 19 infra).
23. Favorite ornament? A 1955 lantern.
24. Family tradition? It must involve chocolate.
25. Ever been to Midnight Mass or late-night Christmas Eve services? Only on-screen in the living room. The early evening one, yes, I even had the "Myrrh is mine ..." Magi part one year.

I suppose there's a purpose in limiting the items to 25, but there's an obvious one missing.

26. Lionel or American Flyer? Lionel, definitely.

COOLING OFF FOR THE SUMMER? It sounds like Dan Drezner is in New Zealand, which can be a fun place to visit even when there isn't an America's Cup regatta in progress.

1 January 2000.

Seven years ago, I had to go south for winter (there was no snow on the ground in DeKalb when I left, just before the New Year, and none on the ground when I returned, as planned -- no Y2K hassles at all.) Summer in New Zealand, however, is an interesting proposition -- imagine a snowfall on Rib Mountain (near Wausau, Wisconsin) on the Fourth of July. Queenstown reported snow above 500 meters (do the math) early in January of that year. There's a seriously chilly lake that you wouldn't want to swim in for long there.

MODEL RAILROAD DISEASE. This is how it starts.


Here is some of the same equipment, today, tiding me over until the new layout is ready.


The British will be celebrating the 70th anniversary of Mallard's supposed steam speed record this year. I'll give the Vanderbilt a little extra juice to start the year off right.

WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE. It's not an externality argument, according to The Right Coast.

The idea seems to be that if you have been bad, smoking, drinking, getting fat, well then, you go to the bottom of the queue for those who get treatment. Too fat? No help on fertility for you, dearie? Smoker? Somebody else gets the cancer care first. When waits are long already, this is as good as saying, no care for you.

That a service is provided by the government does not make it a public good, in the sense economists use the expression. Consumption is rivalrous, exclusive, and must be rationed in some way.

Creating formal conditions for treatment would build on recent controversial developments in health policy.

Despite the NHS commitment to provide free universal care, it is already common for doctors to set conditions on patients seeking treatment.

Free? Universal? Isn't there a corollary to Friedman's First Theorem that applies here?

THE ONION HAS IT ABOUT RIGHT. What The Hell Just Happened? Writing for Madison's other free tabloid, Charlie Sykes covers similar ground.

SOMETIMES THE CLOCK RUNS OUT ON YOU. (Lombardi's second theorem.) But it's a bit disappointing when your team is in the red zone, twice, with the opportunity to score the go-ahead touchdown, only to fail to convert a third down, followed by a fourth down incompletion, and on the next series to have an interception in the end zone with 20 seconds to go.