PRIVATIZATION BY STEPS. That's one possible interpretation of the direction Northern Illinois University might be taking.

Our problem is that, although the State of Illinois provides a smaller share of the resources, the legislature and the state board of higher education can object to any degree program or center or anything else that suits them. DePaul or Loyola or Northwestern face no such constraint. Otherwise, much of the speech envisions Large New England Private College With Graduate Degrees.

At UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin!) the dean of the Anderson School of Management proposes to go cold turkey on state support.

"The driver here is the decline in state support," said Judy D. Olian, dean of the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. She stressed that she did not view the shift as changing the business school's mission or its connection to the rest of UCLA or the UC system. At this point, she said, state support makes up only about 18 percent of the business school's $96 million annual budget, and she said that percentage overstates the contribution because much of the state support is tuition revenue that must go to the state first now before it is returned to the school. In a new model, that revenue would never leave the business school. In the end, the business school would truly lose less than $6 million a year, Olian said.

It's politically difficult to obtain a divorce from the state.

In discussing the plan, Olian repeatedly talked about "self-sufficiency" and never used the work "privatization" (except in answering this reporter's questions about why she does not view the word as an appropriate description for the shift.)

Olian's choice of words may be politically wise. An article in the journal The Public Interest details the quest by the Darden School at U.Va. to trade away state dollars for more flexibility, and notes that the plan was "almost derailed" when the then-chair of the school's foundation board used the word "privatization" in a 1996 talk to discuss the idea. Only after everyone involved agreed that "self-sufficiency" was a better way to describe the plan did it move ahead.

The article -- by David L. Kirp of the University of California at Berkeley and Patrick S. Roberts of Virginia Tech -- is an early look at the impact of the changes at Darden. In many respects, the article says that Darden and its supporters were correct that the freedom from the state allowed the business school to raise far more money than it was receiving from the state -- helping to boost the business school's prestige and the quality of students it attracted.

The article, however, questions whether it is the role of a public university to make such tradeoffs, and the piece notes that many other parts of U.Va. lack the facilities or funds of the business school. By embracing the idea that those parts of the university that can bring in more money should do so, and be rewarded for doing so, Kirp and Roberts write that the university was placing ideals at risk.

It's a little late to be worrying about incentives affecting choices. Research departments that have pursued grants with indirect cost returns have been receiving rewards for bringing in money for a long time (systematically, certainly, since the creation of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowments.)

I leave the analysis of the effect of the so-called income sports on university ideals to the reader as an exercise.

LESSONS LEARNED. The Packers' January 2004 playoff run ended in Philadelphia, after the Eagles converted on fourth and a country mile late in the game to score and force overtime, and Brett Favre had one of what turned out to be many cases of postseason-ending overexcitement.

The Packers' 2010-2011 season began in Philadelphia, with the Eagles failing to convert on fourth and one late in the game when a touchdown and kick conversion would force overtime.

REMEMBERING AND UNDERSTANDING.

A DROPOUT FACTORY WITH THOUGHT POLICE. The student activities coordinator at Palm Beach State College shut down an information table operated by Young Americans for Freedom, claiming not to remember that the organization had obtained permission to participate in a semester-opening student organization fair, which we used to refer to as Call Out and Palm Beach calls Club Rush.

Young Americans for Freedom have posted their side of the story.

World Net Daily provide links to several videos the Palm Beach chapter posted on You Tube. Reporter Bob Unruh might have reached Palm Beach information officer Grace Truman.

School spokeswoman Grace Truman said, "Club rush at Palm Beach State College is for officially recognized student organizations, and all of the clubs participating in the campus club rush are official student clubs. The process for becoming a recognized campus club applies to all and is published on the college website. This student has been informed of the necessary steps and is encouraged to follow this process."

She denied that there were any clubs recruiting who should not have been there and that Ford-Morris looked at anything on the YAF table.

Palm Beach is a large college. The president's statement claims an enrollment of 52,000 at four campuses. Although the college began as a community college, and the principal function of the four campuses is conferring associates' degrees and providing general education, it has been adding baccalaureate programs. I was not able to locate institutional data on the college's website. This College View chart appears to apply to the Lake Worth campus, with about half the college's total enrollment. I'm not sure what retention rates of 68% among full-time and 47% among part-time students refer to, or how they square with graduation rates of 27% for men and 34% for women (it being possible to complete general education requirements and transfer to Florida Atlantic or the like without earning a degree). Of the approximately 1100 faculty, there are 28 professors, 19 associate professors, and 29 assistant professors. (If I had any confidence in these numbers I'd stress them as illustrative of the folly of applying the University of Phoenix model to any college or university with aspirations to academic excellence.)

As of this evening, Olivia Morris-Ford remains Student Activities Coordinator.

THE AD POPULUM FALLACY IS NO BASIS FOR PUBLIC POLICY. At first, I suspected the press of putting words in the mouth of State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley when they broadcast the expression "un-American". Apparently not.

“We are conscious that a number of voices have come out and rejected what this pastor and this community have proposed,” Crowley told a news briefing. “We would like to see more Americans stand up and say ‘this is inconsistent with our American values.’ In fact these actions themselves are un-American.”

“Un-American” is not an epithet that trips lightly off the tongue for U.S. government spokespeople, carrying as it does the tang of the 1950’s witchhunt for alleged communist sympathizers spearheaded by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Quite so. Mr Crowley subsequently defended his choice of words.

Crowley defended his choice of the term "un-American" to describe the planned Quran burning, saying it was "a divisive potential act of disrespect to one of the world's great religions."

"While we support (and) defend our freedoms, including freedom of expression, this is an action that has potential serious ramifications," he said.

The use of the expression "un-American" carries ramifications. Will other Obama administration officials, relying on polls framed to show widespread support for government-managed retirement or health care, call critics of those policies un-American? Or will opponents of the administration, relying on polls framed to show support for more rigorous treatment of illegal immigrants or opposition to bailouts or to homosexual marriage, where assertions that amnesty or bailouts or new forms of marriage are inconsistent with their values can easily be extended to the un-American rubric? (The expression "secular progressive" connotes official disrespect to Christian belief systems, doesn't it? Sure you want to go there?)

As of this writing, whether the Koran-burning will take place or not is still unknown. I have discovered a parallel to Forgive them for they know not what they do in Islam.

Dr. Muqtedar Khan counsels his fellow-Muslims, when they see images of the Quran burning, to "recognize this provocation for what it is," to "let Terry Jones enjoy the monopoly on barbarity," to remember the teachings of the Quran: "Forgive them and overlook their misdeeds, for Allah loves those who are kind."

That's tonight's Deep Word.

The Last Word goes to 11-D.

A small town pastor in Florida wants to burn a Koran. Yes, he is a jackass, but in a country with 307 million people, it is rather remarkable that we haven't seen more jackasses. Let's just ignore him. And now let's move onto a story on backyard grills and fall fashions.

Amen.

8.9.10. That's today in the genealogical notation Cold Spring Shops uses for posting dates.

FATSO HERMANN COULDN'T TOUCH DETROIT. The west wind was another matter.

The Detroit Free Press provides detailed coverage. One line in the Accu Weather report summarizes.

At least two dozen homes - many of which were abandoned or unoccupied - were destroyed.

Forty or fifty years of misinterpreting a temporary monopoly in car production and using that misinterpretation to support a school system that failed to prepare knowledge workers, in a city and state whose tax policies didn't discourage the ambitious people from leaving will do that.

THE POSTER GIRL FOR LIBERATING TOLERANCE. With the beginning of the new semester comes recruiting events for student organizations, which at Florida's Palm Beach State College has the name of Club Rush. Because such events use college resources, and the presence of a recruiting table provides a tacit imprimatur from the university, it is common practice that organizations register with student affairs or some other office. One such organization was the Palm Beach State chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, but student activities coordinator Olivia Morris-Ford inconveniently forgot.

The Orlando Political Press elaborates.

Christina Beattie, a student at PBSC has been the lead organizer of a weeklong recruitment event for YAF. Christina saw a need for a conservative club on campus and decided to create a YAF Chapter. Beattie inquired with college Student Activities Coordinator, Ms. Olivia Ford-Morris, via email about being allowed to recruit at the college rush. To Christina’s surprise Ms. Ford-Morris called her and allowed the group to table at the event. Other groups on campus attended the event and tabled, but had not registered with the student activities coordinator. These groups remained untouched and were allowed to recruit even without permission. The Film Club, one of the groups not authorized to participate in the event, declined to comment for fear of reprisal from college administration.

The story has already been circulated by Gateway Pundit and Instalanched. With the recession stimulating enrollment at regional universities and teaching colleges, it is important that academic gulags such as Palm Beach State be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny and attention, pour encourager les autres. Politically conscious students at Dartmouth or Duke or Wisconsin or Northern Illinois know how to take care of themselves. Their counterparts at less well-known institutions deserve no less.

THEIR FINEST HOUR. Fatso Hermann's blitz on London began seventy years ago, and one air raid warden had some colour film in his camera. The pictures have been stored in a London attic and became available only recently.

WINTER COMES AGAIN. Walter Russell Mead contemplates the Fourth Turning.

Generation after generation of Americans has feared that the dream was coming to an end — and generation after generation of Americans found new ways to keep hope alive, reinvented the dream, and passed it on, strengthened and enhanced, for the future.

There is no guarantee that the United States will master our current challenges — but neither is there any guarantee that we will fail. The problems may be more complex, the pace of change faster, and the world more tumultuous than it used to be — but no generation of Americans has been as free of racism, as open to the talents of women as we are today. No generation has had the scientific and technical knowledge, the computer hardware and software, the means of education and communication that we have now.

And there’s something else.

The problems we face today are urgent and complex, but they are not the problems of failure. We are suffering the consequences of success.

We are not like Pakistan, Egypt, Russia, or dozens of other countries who are struggling with the consequences of decades and even centuries of failures to keep up with a changing world. America’s failures are the failures of a country on the cutting edge.

Countries like China and India are doing some amazing things, but they are playing catch-up. They are trying to get where we are, while the United States is moving forward into unexplored terrain. They are building industrial societies; we are seeing what comes next. They have a clear idea of the target in mind: a country where people are as rich as Americans. Our quest is different — harder, but perhaps also more rewarding.

We aren’t trying to recreate somebody else’s achievement or to replicate an already existing model. We are trying to do something new and different — we are making up a new kind of society as we go along. The challenges of America’s today are the challenges of everyone else’s tomorrow.

The essay is not Panglossian; it is a useful corrective to pessimism and decline. Read, understand, enjoy.

SPEEDWAY TO THE SUN. The Florida East Coast Railway (that's one of the names of longer standing in North American railroading, to my knowledge only Union Pacific, Canadian Pacific, and possibly Kansas City Southern have been in use longer, confining the discussion to major railroads, because I don't want to debate Escanaba and Lake Superior or Marinette Tomahawk and Western). The railroad came into being as a way to get northerners to the beachfront property they bought in Florida and Atlantic Coast Line's trains to Miami switched to Florida East Coast at Jacksonville. In the aftermath of a strike those trains moved to Seaboard Air Line: the railroads were already contemplating a merger under the redundant name Seaboard Coast Line (Atlantic Seaboard Line would be more descriptive as well as more railroady). Now there's a possibility the passenger trains will return.

Amtrak and the Florida DOT are moving at record speed in getting the job done and getting Amtrak to run Amtrak trains from Jacksonville to Miami via the Florida East Coast Ry. Two round-trip trains would pass along the route under current plans, and would cost about $250 million to prepare the freight line for passenger trains, including stations – and all that could take three years.

The railroad, which handles several expedited intermodal trains daily, is effectively passenger train ready (I swiped my post title from some advertising copy of years ago). Why does it take three years (keeping in mind that Central Pacific built from Sacramento to Utah in six years, hampered by the Southern Rebellion, a supply chain on the high seas, the Sierra Nevada, and the desert)?

Charlie Crocker, meet Michael Busha, Executive Director of the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Center.

"Working together between May and July, Florida DOT, the RPCs, Amtrak, local governments, and agencies conducted 34 public hearings including, public information workshops, design sessions to develop station plans, and presentations to city councils and commissions. Hundreds of citizens and property owners participated in the workshops. Multiple station locations were reviewed in the eight cities, concept plans were developed, and due diligence conducted. In the six weeks between June and mid-July, all eight cities adopted resolutions that confirmed the recommended station locations. These resolutions indicating ‘locally preferred alternatives’ for stations are another required piece of the application.”

I set out the workshopping and due diligence. It's detailed in the article, and not for the faint of heart. Process, nuance, failure. Can't have the shade of Henry Flagler imposing his will, without benefit of eminent domain, on the good folk of Cocoa Beach or greater Cape Canaveral, without a hearing.

DURABLE GOOD PURCHASES ARE POSTPONABLE. You saw it here first. (With fifteen more minutes of fame.) Subsequent events give me no reason to reconsider.

DETROIT — When August auto sales come out Wednesday, it isn't going to be pretty.

The year-over-year sales decline for the month will look terrible — down an estimated 30% — because the comparison will be with the buying frenzy fueled last August by the government's cash-for-clunkers program.

That's just the facts. Jeff Jacoby (via Betsy's Page) piles on.

But an even bigger part of the answer is that the supply of used cars is artificially low, because your Uncle Sam decided last year to destroy hundreds of thousands of perfectly good automobiles as part of its hare-brained Car Allowance Rebate System — or, as most of us called it, Cash for Clunkers. That was the program under which the government paid consumers up to $4,500 when they traded in an old car and bought a new one with better gas mileage. The traded-in cars — which had to be in drivable condition to qualify for the rebate — were then demolished: Dealers were required to chemically wreck each car’s engine, and send the car to be crushed or shredded.

Congress and the Obama administration trumpeted Cash for Clunkers as a triumph — the president pronounced it “successful beyond anybody’s imagination.’’ Which it was, if you define success as getting people to take “free’’ money to make a purchase most of them are going to make anyway, while simultaneously wiping out productive assets that could provide value to many other consumers for years to come. By any rational standard, however, this program was sheer folly.

Thirty years ago, a temporary increase in gasoline prices induced vehicle replacements that cascaded older guzzlers and polluters into the secondhand market, where the biggest cars, there being relatively few passenger trucks those days, became bargain used cars for poorer people, less likely to maintain their cars. Cash for clunkers prevented that cascade.

To be sure, Cash for Clunkers gave a powerful jolt to car sales in July and August of 2009. But it did so mostly by delaying sales that would otherwise have occurred in April, May, and June, or by accelerating those that would have taken place in September, October, or later. “Influencing the timing of consumers’ durable purchases is easy,’’ Edmunds CEO Jeremy Anwyl wrote a few days ago in a blog post looking back at the program. “Creating new purchases is not.’’ Of the 700,000 cars purchased during the clunkers frenzy, the estimated net increase in sales was only 125,000. Each incremental sale thus ended up costing the taxpayers a profligate $24,000.

Even on environmental grounds, Cash for Clunkers was an exorbitant dud. Researchers at the University of California-Davis calculated that the reduction of carbon dioxide attributable to the program cost no less than $237 per ton. In contrast, carbon emissions credits cost about $20 per ton in international markets.

Tell us what you really think, Jeff.

When all is said and done, Cash for Clunkers was a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy. Other than that, it was a screaming success.

There is a doctoral dissertation in here somewhere, although its title will be something along the lines of The Welfare Effects of Subsidizing Durable Goods Replacement. Sensitivity analysis of different policies for returning some clunkers to market will be difficult.

AT IT FOR EIGHT YEARS. That's people years. How long is that in blog years? My focus has shifted over time; thanks for your continued interest.

LET'S GET THE OBJECTIVES RIGHT. The editors of the DeKalb Daily Chronicle weigh in on the choice of an Amtrak route to Dubuque.

Two separate studies, one by Amtrak the other by the Illinois Department of Transportation, found that going through Genoa was the better route, for a number of reasons. Rather than leading the way to get Amtrak back to Rockford through the studies’ determined best route, [several local officials'] priority was making sure it went through Belvidere.

Granted, they threw their support behind the [Genoa] route once IDOT had rejected their arguments and chosen what was termed the Direct Route, through Genoa. But that support was tepid at best after months and years of dismissing the studies that [state senator Brad] Burzynski now calls “faulty” and says might have been politically skewed.

So now, Burzynski, [Belvidere mayor Fred] Brereton and other Rockford area officials are waiting for the results of yet another study, and they’re confident this one will be neither faulty nor skewed. In the meantime, they seem to wish DeKalb County officials simply would get on board with Belvidere, lest they jeopardize the project altogether.

“If the federal government or IDOT is looking for an excuse [not to fund a rail project], tonight we’re giving it,” Brereton said Wednesday.

Yet when the federal government and IDOT wanted to go through Genoa, Brereton and his allies raised a ruckus, and by his line of thinking, cost the state the $60 million it could have received in federal dollars.

Now it’s state money that’s on the line, and he wants DeKalb County to go quietly. Don’t do it. DeKalb County officials need to keep the pressure on IDOT and Amtrak to choose the route that’s best for Amtrak and best for Illinois taxpayers.

Brereton wants all of northern Illinois to speak with one voice; as long as that voice is his. DeKalb County has a voice, too. Now is the time to use it.

The better reason there will be no train is if the train project isn't well thought out. Without a twice-daily frequency and some regard for day trippers in both directions, including commuting workers, there's no point.

It's not obvious that the wrangling over the route cost the State Line the $60 million. The national government stopped funding new Amtrak routes during the Bush administration, and the stimulus money for high-speed trains probably didn't envision a Talgo in the mountain regions of the North West Frontier.

THAT NEW ECONOMIC POWER. With neither stack trains nor the Powder River Line?

The traffic jams are part of continuing congestion along the Beijing-Tibet highway that began escalating in mid-August -- fueled by road construction on the nearby Beijing-Xinjiang highway and the opening up of coal mines in the northwest.

Trucks hauling coal from regions like Inner Mongolia to industrial and urban centers on the coast are a major contributor to China's overloaded highway system. Most of the country's power plants are fueled by coal, vital for the booming economy that recently surpassed Japan's in size and now second only to that of the U.S.

Although the Chinese railroads have purchased some big General Electric freight diesels, and they run honest-to-Daniel Willard wagon-top cabooses behind freight trains that actually look like freight trains, apparently they're neither set up for stack trains nor for unit coal trains. From the smog over their cities, they could probably keep several Norfolk and Westerns going.

SOMETHING ELSE WE DON'T HAVE IN MOSCOW. In Dr. Zhivago's time, it was starvation. Today, it's vendors on suburban trains.

A group of vendors waiting for a train to depart at the Yaroslavsky train station in Moscow warned an AP reporter not to ask too many questions.

"Watch where you stick your nose," said a middle-aged woman selling pocket fans.

The Moscow railways company denied the vendors operated on its trains.

"We do not have sales on the elektrichkas, God forbid," said one press officer. Another press officer said asking whether vendors operated legally on the electric trains was like asking "Will you marry me?" She said there was no simple answer.

Both press officers refused to give their names.

Russian Railways, a state-owned monopoly, has hired some vendors to sell ice cream and other snacks on the trains, and outfitted them with blue smocks. Some of the vendors selling ice cream wear the smocks, but most do not.

Tatyana Matyushina, an analyst with a market research consultancy, said she suspects the sales are an organized operation. Police condone the sales, most likely after taking their cut, she said.

"It's like a corporation," Matyushina said. She estimated the business could be worth several million dollars annually.

I wonder if Patrick McGinnis, who took a cut from flips of Boston and Maine real estate and sales of coaches (and, because New England is not Russia, served some prison time) ever shook down the Union News Company. There has to be an opportunity for an underpaid railroad official in Moscow to sell blue aprons out of his office ...

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR WORK. Wisconsin's minimum gas markup law reinstated.

A federal appeals court Friday revived Wisconsin's controversial minimum markup law on gasoline sales after a lower court last year blocked enforcement of it.

The decision by a three-judge panel means the state can once again enforce the 1939 law aimed at protecting small-time gas station operators. Many mom-and-pop operators have said the law prevents them from being run out of business by companies that could sell gas at or below cost.

Distinguish protecting competitors from protecting competition. Evaluate the sustainability of a business model that involves selling below cost.

WORKING TO CROSS PURPOSES? Genoa's chamber of commerce hosted an open forum Wednesday night at Kishwaukee College to offer local government officials an opportunity to present their positions and take questions from citizens about the possible resumption of Amtrak service to the North West Frontier. Passenger Train Journal editor Mike Schafer and I attended, and this post might be a first draft of a joint essay on the meeting and the continuing wrangle over routing, although any published essay will present material without the Cold Spring Shops insider talk. The DeKalb Daily Chronicle has a brief summary of the meeting, and the Northern Star report refers cryptically to what presenters call Route C (to ferroequinologists, the Illinois Central's Land O'Corn line but entering the south throat of Chicago Union Station rather than proceeding to the lakefront) as the heart of the controversy.

The forum was moderated by my colleague John Lewis of the Center for Governmental Studies. Because the Genoa Chamber is the organizer, a number of participants put in Genoa's case. Briefly, a 2006 cost study for Amtrak by the Illinois Department of Transportation identified the Illinois Central routing as least costly to construct and to operate, but Illinois governor Pat Quinn authorized development of a routing via Belvidere using tracks of several railroads as a state-funded project after the Illinois Central routing failed to qualify for federal funding in the same competition that might bring Talgo trains to Madison. DeKalb residents take an interest in this routing as some train advocates hope the Amtrak service will benefit Northern Illinois University students, a point not lost on Genoa city manager Joe Misurelli. Mr Misurelli was at the forum, with slides of his Thunen rings showing the ridership potential along the Illinois Central, including most of the residents of Belvidere with little change in drive time to the stations. The mayor of Genoa, Todd Walker, also spoke briefly in favor of the Illinois Central line, wondering why there is controversy over what the 2006 study identified as the least costly option, and Belvidere mayor Fred Brereton attended, more to express his fear that there would be no train service to northwestern Illinois than to make the case for the routing through his city.

State Representative Bob Pritchard, who took no position on the choice of route, also noted that reaching agreement on a route (perhaps with a final determination from the Illinois Department of Transportation) is more important than which cities east of Rockford are on the train line. State Senator Bradley Burzynski, a supporter of the Belvidere route, concurred on that point, but reiterated his support for that route as the first step toward extending Metra commuter trains to Belvidere and ultimately Rockford.

Several times during the meeting, speakers attempted to draw a distinction between an intercity train (Amtrak) and a commuter train (Metra). The expectations advocates of both routes offered, however, blur the distinction. A train that brings Belvidere residents to the Fox Valley or Bensenville for O'Hare and Schaumburg in time for work and brings them home after work is a commuter train, no matter who operates it, no matter how many tourists are going antiquing in Galena, no matter how many Huskies are headed to Freeport or Lena, no matter that Carson's and Marshall Field open just after the train arrives.

For students at Northern Illinois, the shuttle to Elburn is the preferable option for anybody headed to Chicago or riding Amtrak anywhere but northwest of Rockford (a speaker mentioned a student headed to Pittsburgh, that's pretty rare) until Metra gets to DeKalb and it's probably no longer a ride than a shuttle to Genoa (getting around Sycamore is more like getting around Naperville despite the recession). For the corridor to work, a schedule with a morning and an evening train in each direction has much more promise than a reprise of the morning-up, evening-down Black Hawk that expired in 1981. The commuter train advocates will have a stronger case if Amtrak schedules permit easy transfer to Metra, and they'd have a stronger case still if Amtrak and Metra could get their act together on interline ticketing, something I discovered a year ago Labor Day is still the case in England.

MAKING A VIRTUE OUT OF A NECESSITY.

Northern Illinois president John Peters presented an early State of the University address on Thursday. (In recent years, this speech occurred in late September or sometime in October.)

Apparently one strategic plan is not enough, giving us Vision 2020 ("NIU to set goal of most student-centeredpublic research university in Midwest") We're relatively late to hail this hackney, which to the American Physical Therapy Association is the provision of physical therapist diagnostitians, to the Drexel College of Medicine is tying the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to proportional representation of women in sciences, or to trashing Sarah Palin. Texas A&M appears to have stolen a march on us, launching a Vision 2020 strategic plan in 1999.

Another initiative calls for another presidential task force. Some of my now-retired colleagues would no doubt see another end run around shared governance. I'm too radioactive for such a task force (Consensus? Collegiality?)

AN INSTRUCTIVE COMMERCIAL MESSAGE. Bimbo Bakeries, a division of a Mexican corporation that owns several United States labels, have been running radio commercials giving the spelling and correct pronunciation of the name of the company's flagship brand of bread, information that is useful to northerners.

In California I found some wicked good corn chips with the Bimbo label. These have not made their way here yet.