SHAMELESS, RECKLESS, NAGGIN', CROOKED, FORGETFUL HILLARY.

What hasn't she lied about when it comes to her emails and the private server?  Plus a review of the literature from Betsy Newmark.

Two months more to put up with.

SPORTSMANSHIP.

The University of Nebraska's football team honored their late punter Sam Foltz, killed this summer in a car accident, with the football equivalent of the Missing Man formation.

The rules of football do not provide for a Missing Man formation.  It's delay of game, rather than "too few men on the field."

The opposing eleven, Fresno State, declined the penalty.

AT THIS FOR FOURTEEN YEARS.

A relatively modest beginning.  There's been a change in posting style, from the brief to the verbose over the years, but I'm still staying (for better or for worse) on some of the same topics and themes.

NOW THAT THE CAMPAIGN SEASON BEGINS.

Here's why Naggin' Crooked Hillary sounds, half the time, like she's running against eight years of Barack Hoover Obama.  She has to.

That so few counties have recovered from the recession is something that Barack Obama absolutely should have mentioned in his State of the Union addressed. Instead, he provided an overview of what he considers his "accomplishments", and he neglected to seriously talk about our country's still prevalent economic problems as well. It might be unrealistic to expect all of the nation's counties to be fully recovered by this point, but under any President with a competent economic policy, we would be looking at much better numbers.

Many of the counties that have fully recovered, to use Donald Trump's phrase, "struck oil."

RADICAL POLITICS, WITHOUT THE ROOT CAUSE.

Hillary Clinton is Shameless, argues Counter Punch's Norman Pollack.  Yes, she is.  And nagging, crooked, corrupt, and prevaricating.  She sells influence, and Mr Trump buys it.  But if you would reform, you must understand what needs reforming.

Hillary Clinton has no shame. Forget press conferences. Brazen out FBI findings of duplicity, criminality (though the Agency demurs from the charge), inadvertence in destroying evidence, a bottomless well of rotten practice—and this the darling of liberals and so-called progressives. Weighed in the scales of decency and social justice, how is she better than Donald Trump? Both are fascistically-inclined, both have contempt for working people and minorities, both have chauvinistic militarism in their blood. How can there be a choice of the lesser of two evils when each vies for the pinnacle of Evil-ness?

Whore? For $125,000, you get dinner and a meet-the-candidate (some as high as a quarter $M)—and if under 16 years old at the gathering, for $10,000 you can ask the candidate a question. Auction-block politics, except that it is the American people on the slave-block. In this hothouse atmosphere, the host ensures Clinton will not be embarrassed. Why should she be, they’re all bosom buddies, all see eye-to-eye, gatherings of the self-righteous that make a Mafia summit look like a children’s tea party.

What is to be done? Trump is hardly an alternative. The plebeian billionaire is capable of anything. Clinton has disqualified and perjured herself as unworthy of any office. She and her husband, the Bonnie & Clyde of Mammon worship (even Trump, hard to believe, seems to have more character). As for the decisive area of foreign policy, there is little to choose: the sophistication of liberal think-take, national-security genocidal adventurism on one hand, gut-authoritarians, simple-minded zealots on the other. Of the two, the former may well be the more dangerous.

Is the Third Party a valid alternative? To many, yes, but here we still do not have a clean break from the Cold War mentality.

What, comrades, is to be done?  Here's the prescription, according to Herr Doktor Pollak.

CounterPunchers might find incentive in promoting fruitful ways of radicalizing America. Thinking small will not do it, whether the commune or political capture of a single town. Power has been centralized at the bayonet-point of perfection, easily able to absorb when not crushing societal dissidence. But the very least one can ask of any human being is not to support either major-party candidate. Militarism is in the air—the stench, overpowering. Ditto, plutocracy. The two go together, and any alternative must tackle them both, shrink and ultimately destroy the cancer metastasizing in the American body politic.

I'm sorry, Norman, but I think you missed it.  Your essay focuses on the two noxious choices at the top of the ticket, without any reference to what goes on in Congress or in the bureaucracies.  Plutocracy plus process-worship plus faith in Wise Experts plus the Cult of the Presidency produces rent-seeking.  But you have to be alert to those things in order to aid in the emergence of a more modest government in the wake of the failures of social insurance and nation building and Hope and Change and all the rest.

RECKLESS AND DOWNRIGHT DANGEROUS HANDLING OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION.

Friday afternoons are for issuing layoff notices and releasing politically inconvenient material.  The Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend is particularly convenient, with people who have a life boarding the early trains home, and only the seriously addicted election junkies chewing over the news on the Saturday and Sunday.  It's all masticated and regurgitated by the time the parades and the opening speeches take place on Monday.  So, too, with the FBI case notes dealing with Naggin' Crooked Forgetful Hillary Clinton.

Clinton told investigators she could not recall getting any briefings on how to handle classified information or comply with laws governing the preservation of federal records, the summary of her interview shows.

"However, in December of 2012, Clinton suffered a concussion and then around the New Year had a blood clot," the FBI's summary said. "Based on her doctor's advice, she could only work at State for a few hours a day and could not recall every briefing she received."

Concussion or not, senior moments or not, managing the details of yoga classes and Chelsea's nuptials or not, selective forgetfulness is a tactic known to all lawyers.

Maybe some lawyers prepare witnesses by telling them if you don’t recall something, you don’t need to answer it, “wink, wink.” Refusing to answer questions may seem to a witness, or her lawyer, to be a show of strength. That tactic is rarely deemed acceptable by a judge. Not recalling in a deposition significantly limits an ability to testify months or years later at trial. Magically returning memory, may look good in the movies, but in real life they are usually the sign of the loser at trial.

Those of us that are old enough to remember the lexicon of American witnesses stricken with convenient amnesia recall the classic examples of Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, who being examined in regard to the Watergate break-in and cover up, inconceivably seemed unable to recall anything when testifying in front of the Senate Watergate Committee. Sometimes I hear so many “I don’t recalls” that I wonder if those came from the prompting of lawyers, or the fact that although lay witnesses don’t know much about depositions, they have somehow, through movies, or whatever, gotten the impression that “I don’t recall” is the magic answer.

Yes, and Naggin' Crooked Forgetful Hillary got herself tossed from the Watergate investigation, but one lesson, about how to not recall and not commit perjury, must have stuck.

And both Clintons have been very good at parsing words, and at ducking questions by strategic forgetfulness.  And behaving badly.  Repeatedly, and with glee.  That's why the locution is "classic Clinton scandal" rather than "classic Kennedy scandal" or "classic Bush scandal."  (And, for all his faults, Mr Obama's behavior is more that of the amateur ideologue than of the grifter.)

Let's refresh your memories, and dip into the usual Clinton playbook, with a story from twenty years ago.

In interviews before her billing records were made public in January 1996, the first lady could not remember anything that was said during the telephone call. Even after the billing records were released, she said she could not remember who she talked to at the securities commission. The purpose of the call was perfunctory, she told lawyers for the RTC: "I was seeking public information as to who in the securities department would handle savings and loan inquiries." She offered a somewhat more detailed version in a Jan. 13, 1996, interview with Scott Simon of National Public Radio:

"Well, my memory about that is that I called the office. I do not believe I ever talked with the commissioner. And the reason I called is that we didn't know – namely, Mr. Massey and the law firm – who in the securities office was to handle this kind of work, because it was something new for Arkansas. Other states had done it, and the idea was to find out whether it was legal under state law. And the securities commissioner under Arkansas law at that time had responsibility for supervising savings and loans. But I never knew who that person was, and so I called to find out."

Later in the interview, she added: ". . . perhaps in retrospect I would never have even picked up the phone to call and say, 'Gee, who handles S&L matters in the securities commission?' I didn't think that was anything that was inappropriate, and then to tell Mr. Massey who he should call and who he should deal with."

Which of the Marx Brothers had it first as farce, then as tragedy.  Note, though, the same, "in retrospect I would" have done it differently.

And a parody song of the era even anticipated a concussion.

We have much to look forward to.

Nine weeks to endure.

LOOK OUT, HERE COME THE LAST FIFTY SPITFIRES AGAIN!

In a totalitarian state, sometimes the only thing you can do with the official line is quote it in an ironic way.  So it was with Luftwaffe pilots being assured by headquarters that the Royal Air Force was finished.  In Tim Clayton and Phil Craig's Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain, a book written as companion to a PBS series (the PBS online store is a typical liberal cock-up, there's no quick link to the videos, if any) that aired a few years ago, that's one of the vignettes.  I'll keep Book Review N^o. 19 as short as a dogfight: this is a collection of recollections from participants in the scrap, many of whom were still living at the time the series was recorded.  I recall the closing line of the series as something like "they couldn't win, but they chose not to lose."  That's the mindset of many of the people interviewed: no matter how hard the Hun hit them, they would not fold.  But in not folding, they won.  Before the summer of 1940, whatever the Führer commanded, someone would bear, often in great pain.  But from the summer on, those threats began to become less credible, and on occasion, there'd be a British raid on Berlin or some other German target, the first rumblings of what was to come.

Authors Clayton and Craig steer clear of the high strategy.  They note that it's unlikely a successful German air campaign would have lead to an invasion of the British Isles, for reasons noted here.  (As if Rhine barges were going to get across the Channel in anything resembling an orderly fashion, but I digress.) Was a Stuka as good as an SBD at bombing ships?  But the SBD was most effective against aircraft carriers.  On the other hand, had Britain sued for a separate peace, how many more fire hoses would be forthcoming from the United States?

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.)

LANDING ON HER FEET.

Heat Street reports that dishonorably discharged Missouri assistant communications professor Melissa Click has hired out at a basketball school in Spokane.  It's not a tenure-line hire, and the coverage does not report if her family will also be moving to Washington State, or if the list of academic two-body separations has just grown.

The university website describes her work thus:  "Melissa A. Click's research interests center on popular culture texts and audiences, particularly texts and audiences disdained in mainstream culture. Her work in this area is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy."  I've expressed skepticism of such potted social science previously.  The folks at The Daily Caller have also had their fun.

But in her coauthored "Saving Food: Food Preservation as Alternative Food Activism," published in Environmental Communication, there's concrete evidence for my skepticism.  In three-plus pages of literature review, there's little by way of identifying hypotheses, let alone providing ways by which previous research fails to test them adequately; the method section is a description of the surveys administered, and the six pages of results do nothing by way of empirically validating the various claims survey respondents made.  Nonetheless, the paper gives the authors cause to offer a policy implication.

Future work should interrogate the impact of gender, race, and class on food preservation and its practitioners. Future studies should also examine the growing efforts to make food preservation, canning specifically, more communal. Yes We Can in San Francisco and Canning Across America are interesting examples. The use of the World Wide Web to spread information about food preservation, particularlythrough blogs, is another fruitful avenue for study.

I've always been skeptical about this use of "interrogate," and I was educated to understand that in order to torture the data to elicit a confession, you might want to know a few tools of statistical inference.

But if it's food-blogging you want, here you are!

Four quarts of Roma tomatoes put up, 15 September 2013.  The first batch for this year is up as of late last night.  Interrogate that.

THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS IS EVIL.

The presidential "binary choice" so many chin-pullers of the political class think we must make do with is one between an angry incoherent parody of the opening act at a cheap improv club and a screechy continuation of the failed fatal conceits of the past ninety years.

The editorial board at Richmond, Virginia's Times-Dispatch has had enough.

Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton meets the fundamental moral and professional standards we have every right to expect of an American president. Fortunately, there is a reasonable — and formidable — alternative.

Gary Johnson is a former, two-term governor of New Mexico and a man who built from scratch a construction company that eventually employed more than 1,000 people before he sold it in 1999. He possesses substantial executive experience in both the private and the public sectors.

This endorsement is not one the authors entered into lightly.

ohnson’s clear and consistent support for limited government, free enterprise, social tolerance and individual freedom appeals to our own philosophical leanings. An examination of his policy positions revealed that they often match our longstanding editorial creed. (Nearby, you’ll find an analysis of how the candidates fare when judged by the standards of that creed, as well as a look at the history of editorial endorsements by The Times-Dispatch.)

But our final decision to endorse the Johnson/Weld ticket, and to do so with great confidence and enthusiasm, came only after Johnson met with the editorial board last Monday morning. We found him to be knowledgeable but unscripted, reasonable and good-humored, self-assured but free from arrogance, willing and able to address every question, consistent in his beliefs without being dogmatic, even-tempered, curious — and in all respects optimistically, realistically presidential.

The endorsement is a call for the rent-seekers in charge of the so-called presidential debates to give Mr Johnson, and, on the vice-presidential forum, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, a platform.

In a separate statement explaining their choice, the board rendered my judgement, in a manner more like Admiral Leahy than like Admiral King.  "Trump’s temperament is not first-class; there is no evidence of an intellect. Clinton’s ethical lapses are disabling. Johnson enjoys a decisive edge."

Nine weeks to run.

I DON'T CARE WHO GETS THE CREDIT.

For years, I've brought to readers' attention the work others have done identifying and describing what goes on in "higher" education's subprime party schools and dropout factories, and sharing the outrage I've seen about the ways in which such institutions shortchange young people already behind in the positional rat race.

Earlier this summer, I brought to your attention a report from Third Way asserting that three-quarters of the private non-profit colleges and universities rated as dropout factories.

In case anybody wonders why U.S. News sells those rankings, the answer is in the first sentence of the excerpt.  Dip into the Third Way report, and you see that inter alia Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia offer students of modest means good value for money, if they get in.  For many of the students on the margins of educational success, that's not an option, and there's the intake of Distressed Material for the dropout factories.

Now comes their latest report (via Ed Driscoll on Insta Pundit,) this time detailing the public colleges and universities, and it's not for the faint of heart.  "A shocking 85% of four-year public colleges and universities would be considered dropout factories if they were held to the same standards as our nation’s high schools."

Let us count the ways in which things go wrong.

1. Low Graduation Rates for First-Time, Full-Time Students.
2. Poor Wage Outcomes for Loan-Holding Students.
3. Not all Public Schools are Created Equal.
4. Pell Students Tend to Be Concentrated at the Schools with the Worst Outcomes.
5. Price has Little Relationship to Outcomes. 

Unfortunately, the policy recommendations are thin gruel.  "The reauthorization of the Higher Education Act provides an opportunity for our leaders to ensure that taxpayer investments in higher education are accompanied by a renewed promise from institutions that students who enter their campuses will leave with a diploma in hand and the skills they need to secure a well-paying job in today’s modern economy."

Until somebody, whether of Third Way, or one of the legacy political parties, or of the pantheon of action figures, does something about the ways in which the vulgar common culture render young people as incapable of college long before they leave middle school, beating up on the colleges and universities for not doing more with the Distressed Material will make the beaters-up feel better, to little good effect.

PRICES FUNCTION TO ALLOCATE DEMAND.

Yesterday, we had occasion to note a Donald Trump operative stepping into it on the matter of taco trucks.  Yesterday, Mr Trump continued his outreach, visiting a church in Detroit.  Where a taco truck had opportunity to do business.  Good business.  "The truck did brisk business this morning — so much so that a form of surge pricing kicked in, raising the price for a steak, pork, or chicken taco from $1.50 to $2.50, [Michigan Public Radio correspondent Rick] Pluta reports."  Surge pricing happens to be a valid term of art in price theory, as is peak load pricing.  But there's another term of art describing the same phenomenon, and when the hurricane surge approaches, you hear it.  "With a hurricane comes the reality of price-gouging for essentials. State Attorney General Pam Bondi activated Florida's emergency anti-price-gouging regulations, barring retailers from raising prices on gasoline, water, lumber and other necessities."  Ms Bondi, who has appeared as a talking head on behalf of Mr Trump, is a long-time crusader against surge pricing.

As Hurricane Hermine exits Florida and life begins to return to normal, Floridians should still remain vigilant about price gouging and storm related scams. Unfortunately, unscrupulous individuals will use any threat as an opportunity to take advantage of those in distress — and that is why Wednesday, immediately following the state of emergency declaration, I activated Florida’s Price Gouging Hotline.

Floridians need to know it is illegal for businesses to grossly inflate the price of any essential items just because a disaster has occurred. My Price Gouging Hotline will continue to operate for all affected counties throughout the emergency declaration to assist any consumers who have concerns.

And she'd likely be scornful of any flack for a big-box store describing the higher price of plywood or nails as surge pricing.  But it's unlikely she, or any of the other Guardians of Public Morals who support my right, far from the hurricane zone, to pay the normal price for 3/4" CA plywood to keep on working on my railroad, to have a coherent defense to that claim.  Michael Giberson at The Knowledge Problem speaks truth to power.  " If you’re looking for substance on price gouging, you won’t find it in this interview."  He provides the substance in a later post.

Over the years, I've had occasion to analyze the phenomenon of surge pricing, as have others -- and yes, dear reader, Thanksgiving approaches, and Wisconsin continues to protect retailers against the Black Friday dumping of frozen turkeys, just wait and see!

There are carefully controlled circumstances under which limitations on surge pricing increase economic welfare, but those, yet another Michael Giberson post notes, do not include protecting my right to buy plywood at the customary price during hurricane season, or a Trump protestor's right to virtue-signal with a taco-truck taco at the non-surge price.

NEVER GIVE THE OTHER TEAM BULLETIN BOARD MATERIAL.

Did somebody tell Western Michigan coach P. J. Fleck, a graduate of Northern Illinois, that Margaret "No football peccadillo too trivial, no Hillary tax-syphon too scummy" Soltan went to Northwestern?

FIGHTING THE AXIS -- AND MACARTHUR.

With V-J Day fresh in our memories, perhaps this is a good time to return to the Fifty Book Challenge.  Book Review N^o. 18 is Walter R. Borneman's The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King -- The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War At Sea.  The post's title borrows from a chapter title -- apparently interservice rivalries do not go away, even if total war against powers that pose an existential threat is in progress.  And fighting total war, as a reader will see, is not without moral challenges, even among a command authority committed to victory.

The Admirals focuses on the lives of the fleet admirals and their interactions with civilian authority and their colleagues in the Navy and the other services.  If you're interested in the specifics of, for example Midway, read this or this or this; or the complexities of Leyte Gulf,  see this or this or read this or this.

Who, then, are these admirals, each of whom now has a building bearing his name at Annapolis?

FIND AN AMERICA TO BUY INTO.

Reason's Steve Chapman suggests that ethnic diversity is not producing ethnic tension.

The biggest source of racial tension is also the oldest one—the divide between whites and blacks, manifested in economic disparities and broadly different views of law enforcement. Most whites express confidence in police, but only 30 percent of African-Americans share that trust. Though blacks continue to feel they face discrimination, most whites believe they don't.

Other groups, though, have integrated themselves into American society more fully than could have been expected. Asian-Americans, who once faced intense prejudice, are likelier than any other group to intermarry and to live in racially mixed neighborhoods. Their households also have a higher median income than white households.

In a society dominated by racial animosity, you'd see different groups segregating themselves, or being segregated, from others. That's not what is happening.

Scholars John Logan of Brown University and Wenquan Zhang of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater found that compared with 1980, in the 20 most diverse metropolitan areas, people of every race are likelier to live in "global neighborhoods" inhabited by whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans. In these cities, half of whites now live in such areas.

If multicultural societies were prone to intergroup violence, a growing immigrant population would generate more disorder. In fact, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has documented, the rise in immigration has produced a sharp decline in crime rates. "The transformed vitality of cities was most visible in the places that had seen the greatest increases in immigration," he wrote in The American Prospect.

Achieving vitality through diversity? In America, that's not a naive dream. It's a solid reality.

It's the isolated poverty pockets where there's the most violence, and those places aren't particularly conducive to in-migration.  Or taco trucks.  Some things you just can't make up, such as a Trump spokesman of Latin American roots with an interesting twist on cultural imperialism.  Let Doug Mataconis reinforce a point I've frequently made.  By all means read and understand the essay and follow the links.

[Marco] Guitterez’s (in the Trump universe, does he get a nickname distinct from little? -- ed.) appeal to the idea of “taco trucks on every corner” reflects the long standing fear of the xenophobe that immigrants will change American culture. The answer to that fear, of course, is that yes, they will change American culture. This is how immigration has always worked in the United States. From the founding of the nation, and even prior to ratification of the Constitution, waves of immigrants from different parts of Europe influenced American culture in countless ways that have enriched and changed what it means to be an American. They’ve impacted everything from our customs (many of the Christmas traditions we now see as common came from German immigrants), our language (pretty much every large scale group of immigrants has helped add words to the what we consider common English), and even the kinds of food we eat (need I mention pizza, sushi, hamburgers, Chinese food, and, of course, tacos?) Newer immigrant groups are also adding their own flavor to the American stew, which is why you can find restaurants serving food from India, Ethopia, Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, the Middle East, and Central and South America in most major American cities and their suburbs. This is what the idea of the “melting pot,” which isn’t really an accurate description of what happens when American and immigrant cultures meet, is all about. Immigrants become American and, at the same time, they influence and add their own flavors to what it means to be American. It’s why pizza, sushi, hamburgers, hot dogs, and, yes, tacos, are as much “American” food as the things Americans ate in 1776.

Assimilation is messy. And socially necessary. "[T]he day we stop being willing to adapt to immigrants as much as they adapt to us is the day what it means to be American dies." Indeed, and I have some proper German beer set aside to open after the tomato-canning is done for the day.

THE NOBILITY REJECT THE VASSALS.

During the Democrat convention, vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine and Our President both appealed to Republican (perhaps more generally, traditionally patriotic) voters during their speeches.  Of course, Naggin' Crooked Hillary telepromptly screeched all over that message, delivering her usual talking points in her usual tone at the culmination of the convention.

But the presence of disenchanted Republican voters, put off by a Trump presidency at the same time that they're put off by the Democrats enabling their vassals without making their conditions better, is leading to some agony in the vassal constituency. Jake Johnson calls it courting the right, smearing the left.

Ultimately, supporters of Hillary Clinton refuse to take at face value the core argument of many leftists: That Hillary Clinton's record warrants, at the very least, fierce and persistent criticism. Instead, they are content to fish for ulterior motives, painting those who fight against corporate money in politics, American imperialism, and income inequality as Trumpism's useful idiots.

Meanwhile, Democrats have increasingly positioned themselves as the bulwark against anti-establishment sentiment, as the defenders of the status quo, as "the cosmopolitan elite party." Implicit in such a party is hostility to any agenda that threatens the established order.

That established order hasn't turned out so well: whether it's the rent seeking or the corrupt bargain by which the cosmopolitans give lip service to the lumpenproletariat whilst doing nothing substantive to improve their conditions (and the Republicans are complicit in this, doing relatively little to make a case for entrepreneurship and bourgeois conventions, preferring to wage the culture wars.)  But Trevor Timm frets that in reaching out to those disaffected Republicans, the Hillary pivot will hurt Democrats down the ballot.

Clinton may think that a shift toward the right is her best way to defeat Trump. But given that it’s likely Trump will go down in flames anyway, it should be a cause of concern to all candidates who are attempting to defeat other Republicans along the way.

Divided government is a feature, not a bug, whose values will continue to be clear as the House and the Senate protect their constituents from the worst executive excesses, no matter whether it's Mr Trump or Mrs Clinton pushing them.  But the kind of ward-heeler politicians who enjoy the most enthusiasm with the Common Dreams crowd are likely to remain in office, failing to serve their vassals, no matter what sort of ticket-splitting goes on in the remnants of mainstream America.

But there's discontent with Hillary's outreach on the right as well, in that in seeking to pry the remnant away from Mr Trump, the resulting Democrat governance or divided governance will do little for the remnant, who, after having the relatively mannerly Tea Party and the moderately transgressive Trumpening dismissed, might emerge in a more vigorous form next cycle.  Plus an intriguing echo of the complaints on the left from Jonah Goldberg.

If I were a down-ballot Democrat, I’d be chagrined. By exonerating the GOP from the stain of the alt-right, Clinton has made it harder for Democratic candidates to tar their opponents with it. What’s truly extraordinary, though, is that Clinton is doing work many conservatives won’t.

Two more months to go.

PRODUCTIVITY PRESSURES.

Downsizing is a false economy.  But the road from the featherbedded blue industrial relations model to whatever comes next is long and winding.  And here, sorting through the stack of posts racked to revisit some day, comes one that got started around exam week in 2007, when Cold Spring Shops was recently relocated.  Here's a lament from The American Prospect's Paul Waldman, as the financial markets were teetering and the era of Hope and Change was about to dawn.  (There is a research opportunity, perhaps in a few more years when the passions cool, to identify precisely the role of such things as the 2005 transportation bill and the 2006 change of majorities in the House and Senate in fostering the financial crash that came.)

The lament starts in a predictable way.

Real wages are lower today than they were before the recession of 2001, and barely higher than they were thirty-five years ago. Health insurance is more expensive and harder to obtain than ever before. Manufacturing jobs continue to move overseas. The unions whose efforts might arrest these trends continue to struggle under a sustained assault that began when Ronald Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers in 1981, in effect declaring war on the labor movement.

It was easy, back in the day, for self-styled progressives to blame all of labor's difficulties on Ronald Reagan. That employment of steel mill workers, to use one example, fell from 450 thousand to around 150 thousand at the height of the Treaty of Pittsburgh suggests something more was at work.  And if you thought health insurance was expensive and hard to obtain, well, just wait for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  So it always is with false prophets.

SIXTY YEARS.

Britain's Gauge O Guild are the Go-To people for all things O Scale in the UK.  (Over there, it's 1:43.5, over here it's 1:48, and yet we manage.)

This year, the Guild celebrates sixty years of bringing order to the messy world of model railroading.

This weekend comes their big annual show, Guildex at Telford (sampler here.)

The Stewards have called on modellers to bring their Pacific locomotives for a display on Sunday.

I'm not making the trip this year, but the Roundhouse Foreman has rolled out a few to show the flag, as it were.

Left to right:  Boston and Maine 3710 Peter Cooper (Lima 1934); Boston and Maine 3630 (Schenectady 1911); State of Maine Northern 231 (Alco 1924).

On British metals, the Pacific was the top-link passenger locomotive, a duty that went to Hudsons, or some classes of Northerns, (or to diesels) in the States.  The Pacific made a pretty good medium-duty passenger locomotive.  Medium duty, however, was pretty stressful.  Peter Cooper has more oomph than a Duchess or a Gresley Streak, although it might be unsporting for me to put a stoker- and booster-equipped locomotive up against a hand-bomber.  And the British set those steam speed and endurance records with hand-fired locomotives.

A LEGACY OF THE BERLIN AIRLIFT.

With the partition of Germany after V-E Day, and the subsequent establishment of rail and air corridors for transportation to and from Berlin, a direct rail route linking Berlin with Munich didn't exist.

People who travel between between Berlin and Munich these days have to grapple with the impossible decision of choosing between an expensive flight, a cheap but crowded bus, or a pricey and slow train journey.

The current train route wanders all the way over to Frankfurt am Main before cutting back into northern Bavaria and down to Munich. It takes about six hours and ten minutes, hardly value for a ticket that costs somewhere between €75 and €120.

Since a bus normally costs around €20 and only takes an hour more, many people choose to stick to the road.

At least the expensive flight is no longer at risk of being harassed by MiGs.  But the absence of a faster rail link between Germany's two most famous party cities is an opportunity for the rail network, on the wish list since reunification.  And it will be capable of handling the fast trains.

It is quite a feat of construction though - trains will cross over 29 bridges and go through 22 tunnels. In fact, during the roughly half hour spent on the new piece of track, trains will be inside tunnels for ten minutes.

Note: it's not necessary to build an entirely new rail line; rather, a strategically positioned cutoff does the job.  But the connecting lines will have to handle more trains.

The line that it will be connected with also needs to be beefed up to include four adjacent sets of track.

Then at long last people travelling between Germany’s two most important cities won’t need to spend hours deciding whether to take the bus or the plane - and they’ll save time travelling too.

I've got to check on the options for Berlin to Hamburg, another stretch that involved the border crossing until 1990.

Meanwhile, in the States, Amtrak's hopes of replacing the Acela Expresses with a state-of-the-art fast electric train provoke only scorn.

Amtrak's announcement that it plans to spend $2.4 billion upgrading its fleet of Acela trains is a little bit like a guy who plans to buy a new Ferrari to use on his daily commute and nothing else.

Sure, you've got a flashy new toy that can outrun anything else on the road—but if the roads are clogged and you can't put the pedal down to really make that baby hum, then what's the point?

There's money being spent on faster diesels and new coaches for the rest of the country, and an upgrade of the Cold Spring Shops "Free Rein to 110" campaign to give the diesel trains free rein to 125 or 140 mph might be in order, particularly as positive train control is cut in on the main lines.

But the carping focuses on the current electrically-operated portions of the Amtrak network, and it perpetuates the canard that the United States is not thickly settled enough to warrant German-style electrified fast-train networks.

Those grand plans to reshape how Americans travel keep running into some pesky facts of life in the 21st Century: like the fact that most of America is not densely populated enough to make high speed rail work the way it does in Japan or Germany, or the fact that there's a limited amount of space on train lines in the northeast.

There's actually potential for such a fast train network south of Washington, D. C. Likewise, there are missing parts of the Chicago area regional rail network, as far east as Cleveland or Buffalo, southeast to Cincinnati and Louisville, and west to Kansas City.  The midwestern routes might be better suited to fast diesel trains, however.

Finally, the skeptics suggest there's no room to build the upgraded tracks required to speed up the trains.

A European-style high speed rail system would have to operate on its own right-of-way, but thats a problem too. There's simply not enough available space in the densely populated northeast. Acquiring a new railroad right-of-way by buying up some of the most expensive real estate in the country is simply unaffordable even for the federal government, and relying on a massive application of eminent domain would uproot untold hundreds of families and businesses while still being prohibitively expensive.

Actually, there is. The same people who carp about wasteful public spending on rail at Reason and the like are frequently advocates of increased public spending on highways.  But there's a precedent for building rail capacity and a widened road at the same time.

That's a blurry picture from a dirty interurban window of a South Shore Freight billboard placed for the edification of motorists and truckers on the Indiana Toll Road.  The South Shore Line bought land to get their tracks out of the streets of East Chicago, Indiana, but never had the money to build the tracks.  Then came the Indiana Toll Road, coveting the land.  Which the South Shore was happy to sell, with the provision that their tracks be built alongside.  Thus, commuters can board a train for the Loop, rather than stew in traffic on the Toll Road.  (And how different the wisdom of the South Shore from the New Haven, which sold similar real estate to the Connecticut Turnpike Authority, without a provision to build new tracks.)

Why not, the next time someone proposes widening an interstate, request that the plans provide for rail tracks in the median, or elevated with the supports in the median?

FORESHADOWING.

In recognition of V-J Day, here is a transcript of President Franklin Roosevelt's June 5, 1944 fireside chat.

You think Hillary's cough brought out the gossip-mongers?  Mr Roosevelt's first fireside chat of 1944 is this one, which is announcing the liberation of Rome.  "One up and two to go!"

Read on, and Mr Roosevelt is actually letting his listeners in on something.

Our victory comes at an excellent time, while our Allied forces are poised for another strike at western Europe -- and while the armies of other Nazi soldiers nervously await our assault. And in the meantime our gallant Russian Allies continue to make their power felt more and more.

"Poised" is not a state secret.  "Airborne" (as the first units of OVERLORD were) still was.  But still there was the deception that the coup de main was headed for Calais.  All the same, there was work to be done.

Germany has not yet been driven to surrender. Germany has not yet been driven to the point where she will be unable to recommence world conquest a generation hence.

Therefore, the victory still lies some distance ahead. That distance will be covered in due time -- have no fear of that. But it will be tough and it will be costly, as I have told you many, many times.

Tough enough that Gen^l Eisenhower had in his pocket the statement announcing a withdrawal of OVERLORD forces, a statement he never had to issue.

Then comes a passage that might be anticipating the Marshall Plan, as well as stating principles that perhaps the managers of the current actions against Jihadistan might study to some benefit.

Our troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education and lowered public health -- all by-products of the Fascist misrule.

The task of the Allies in occupation has been stupendous. We have had to start at the very bottom, assisting local governments to reform on democratic lines. We have had to give them bread to replace that which was stolen out of their mouths by the Germans. We have had to make it possible for the Italians to raise and use their own local crops. We have to help them cleanse their schools of Fascist trappings.

I think the American people as a whole approve the salvage of these human beings, who are only now learning to walk in a new atmosphere of freedom.

Some of us may let our thoughts run to the financial cost of it. Essentially it is what we can call a form of relief. And at the same time, we hope that this relief will be an investment for the future -- an investment that will pay dividends by eliminating Fascism, by (and) ending any Italian desires to start another war of aggression in the future. And that means that they are dividends which justify such an investment, because they are additional supports for world peace.

The Italian people are capable of self-government. We do not lose sight of their virtues as a peace-loving nation.

Thus, nation-building might not have been an issue then in the same way as it might be now-a-days.

Toward the end comes a passage that contemporary thought leaders might contemplate.

Italians have come by the millions into (to) the United States. They have been welcomed, they have prospered, they have become good citizens, community and governmental leaders. They are not Italian-Americans. They are Americans -- Americans of Italian descent.

The Italians have gone in great numbers to the other Americas -- Brazil and the Argentine, for example -- hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them. They have gone (and) to many other nations in every continent of the world, giving of their industry and their talents, and achieving success and the comfort of good living, and good citizenship.

The melting pot, not the fruit salad.

STARBUCKS PRIVILEGE.

It takes a village to raise a child, but sometimes what the village does defies parody.

Julie Koehler was driving her three girls, 8, 5, and 4, to a bouncy house in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. She needed coffee, so she pulled up in front of a Starbucks, opened the minivan's windows and even its sliding door to let the air in, and left the kids watching a video. She was gone for three minutes.

Thus began her ordeal with the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services.

Everyone, particularly local law enforcement, is sensitive to the hazards of unattended kids in hot cars.  But the police officer who checked the kids out evidently couldn't believe that mom had put a video in the player and run into the Starbucks.  (I can.  Getting quick service at a Starbucks is often a crapshoot.  When they ask for a name to put on my order, I've been saying "Claude Rains.")

Koehler, it so happens, is no ordinary mom: She's a public defender in the homicide division, which means she isn't easily intimidated by the police, and she asks a lot of questions. When she asked her kids what the officer had said to them, the 5-year-old said, "He asked where our mother was and I told him you were standing right there in Starbucks."

Had the officer heeded the girl and turned around, he would have seen Koehler waving, she said. Instead, he barged into the nail salon next door and demanded to know if the mother who had "abandoned" her kids was in there. (That's what the manicurist told Koehler afterward.) The answer was, of course, was no, so he returned to grill the kids some more, and that's when they started crying.

After Koehler joined the fray and refused to back down, the officer threatened to have her children taken away.

I've long maintained that nail salons, particularly when accompanied by a tanning salon, a tobacconist, and a check cashing service, are markers of Downscale U.S.A.  Didn't know that such enterprises were the first place to check for neglectful moms.  The authorities are keeping a file on Mrs Koehler, but she's seeking to have a reprimand added to the officer's permanent record.