Gov. Christie = awesome

OMG look at all of this!

I do most of my grocery shopping at the Food Lion in Lisbon. Food Lion is an adequate grocery store with great service. No one will go hungry with Food Lion in the neighborhood. However, I visited the Safeway in Ellicott City today and when comparing the selection of products between the two stores, Safeway makes Food Lion look like it's run by the government.

For every one brand that Food Lion carries, Safeway seems to carry at least five if not ten. One of my complaints about Food Lion even prior to my visit to Safeway is that Food Lion's selection of Ben and Jerry's ice cream is extremely limited. Not so at Safeway. I was in heaven.

Food Lion is in a much smaller building, so naturally the selection is limited by available space. With Safeway to the east and the Mount Airy SuperFresh to the west, it could be that the market does not support a larger store in between. Or it could be that zoning regulations limit the size of the grocery store allowed in Lisbon. Whatever the reason, I probably looked like someone from a third world country marveling at the vast selection of products available at Safeway.

fat and happy, anyway

Both Wordbones and HoCoRising are down on a TPI spokesperson (Ken Aldrich) for referring to voters as "fat, dumb and happy".

That is a common expression that was probably made off the cuff so I don't think it should be over analyzed, but I'll ignore my own advice and over analyze it anyway. I think this is just a crude way of saying that voters are rationally ignorant. Therefore, the "dumb" part is not applicable to voters, because the emphasis on "rationally ignorant" should be placed on the "rational". When you have a complex system in which it is costly to learn about the issues and your influence on those issues is so small, it does not make sense to pay attention. As a result, if you are a voter the smart thing to do is be uninformed because the costs of being informed exceeded the benefits. This is one of the well known problems of democracy (I know, we live in a republic. But it still has democratic elements.)

So while Mr. Aldrich fails in the marketing department, I think his statement is reflective of voting reality.

Public sector unions

The State of California must be in great fiscal condition. Firefighters there can make $200K a year, retire at age 50 and collect a pension of $180K. In Oakland recently there were 2,000 applicants for 23 firefighter positions. Here is a fascinating indictment of public sector labor unions. It's mostly focused on California, but obviously there are parallels with Howard County given the strength of local unions here. Oh, another parallel is that public pension plans are not fully funded, meaning there is a huge bill lying in wait for the next generation of taxpayers.

We're from the government, and we will make you safe

Wordbones recently noted that he was interviewed by Dana Priest of the Washington Post for a piece called "Top Secret America".

I have not yet had a chance to check out the Washington Post piece, but the Atlantic Wire posted a summary of it and the some of the information is quite alarming if you are least bit concerned about your tax dollars being spent in a competent manner:

Why we should be concerned:

"When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked - with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it. ... Within a responsible framework, our objective is to provide as much information as possible, so readers gain a real, granular understanding of the scale and breadth of the top-secret world we are describing."

This 'spy industry' is massive:

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. (2) An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. (3) In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space. (4) Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. (5) Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored."

It is far from clear as to how much safer we are as a result of all of this:

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.
"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."
The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

The economy in Howard County greatly benefits from all of this spending (and I am sure this redistribution to our region played no small part in why Columbia/Ellicott City is the #2 place to live in the country), but for the rest of the nation, this is a very large expense. It's far from clear how the rest of the nation will benefit from all of this.

The Fair is coming

This is the first year I can remember yard signs advertising the Howard County Fair, which is coming in August. I've seen quite a few of these around town. Given the over-regulated nature of Howard County I am sure these signs are illegal.

Inmate Rehab Program Ends

Awhile ago there was an article in Explore Howard about a program at Days End Farm, a local horse rescue. The program enabled female inmates to work with rescued horses while gaining responsibility and other skills essential for re-entry into society as productive members.

This sounded like a win-win arrangement to me. The inmates were toward the end of their sentences but were nevertheless supervised by correctional officers at all times. Sadly, many neighbors were uncomfortable with female offenders in the area and the plug on program was pulled a week later.

State Del. Warren Miller, a Woodbine Republican who represents Lisbon, said he received between 10 and 20 complaints from the farm’s neighbors and parents of the children who volunteer there.

Many were upset that community input was not sought before the program began, Miller said.

Miller said he is not taking a position on whether the inmate program is a good one, but he is concerned that some of the women working on the farm have been convicted of crimes such as assault.

“That for me is different than someone serving time for a DUI or a white collar crime,” he said. “... I know they’re nearing their release from prison and they’ve done their time but that’s just not appropriate for a rural-residential area.”

Prisoners are out in the community performing work on road crews and other duties regularly, Binetti said.

“Every single day we have inmates who are in the pre-release system ... it’s part of the transition back into the community.”

Those selected to work on the farm were nearing the end of their sentence and committed to rehabilitation, he said.

I'd much rather have a program like this in my backyard than the Centennial North Skate Park with its inner-city graffiti. It's pretty sad that the neighbors couldn't have given the program a chance.

Beat and repeat

It seems like there's not a week that goes by in which the Howard County Police don't shoot a family pet or wear someone's ass out. The latest is that an officer punched a 54 year old drunk lady unconscious. This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. How much longer will it be before this comes back to bite taxpayers?

Beam me up

HoCoRising gets the scoop that Greg Fox has Democratic challenger for his District 5 Council seat. His challenger is Dr. Zaneb Beams. This quote from Dr. Beams shows that she is quite the central planner, and she likes government as long as government is comprised of people who agree with her:

DR. ZANEB BEAMS: Government by the wrong people can be problematic. Government by the right people can be very well done.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: She's also willing to make less money if a public plan becomes reality.

DR. ZANEB BEAMS: A 10 percent reduction in most physicians' salaries, while it's difficult for a lot of us primary care physicians out here to make payroll at the end of every couple of weeks, a 10 percent reduction in our income is really not going to be that painful for us. And most of us, if you ask, most of us would be willing to make a teeny bit less in order to provide our patients with better care.

Since she has this health care thing all figured out, I'm sure she'll be able to organize our lives much better than we can ourselves. Of course, Greg Fox voted to mandate sprinklers in all new homes so I guess it's six in one, half a dozen in the other.

Dangers of vegetable gardening

The Montgomery County School System has a ban on gardens on school property. I don't know how useful gardens are as an educational tool since most of the harvest occurs during the summer when school is out, but at any rate that is not the objection that the Montgomery County School System has to gardens. Their objection is that plants have blooms which attract insects that sting, and some people have food allergies. Wow.