- William Galston, writing for Democracy Journal

Lest this seem like concern trolling, I should note that strategically, I’d probably be happy with the results of killing the filibuster, at least in the short term; I don’t think the Democrats will accomplish much even with it gone, and there’s a nice chance that the Republicans, empowered by the nuclear option, will busily undo many of the elements of the Democratic agenda that I disapproved of. It just seems to me that Democrats are making the correct risk-reward calculation here.

I would agree with her assessment. It’s political calculation. Pundits complain about the use of the filibuster these days as a symptom of a corrupt GOP that is completely resistent to change. While I’m in agreement that current Republican opposition to change is mostly rooted in political strategy, it’s also important to remember that a skepticism towards change is sort of what conservatism is all about. I’m also reminded of a recent David Brooks piece that makes the point that no legislation is better than bad legislation.

So when we’re arguing about politics, we should be aware of how policy fits into the larger scheme of cultural and social influences. Bad policy can decimate the social fabric, but good policy can only modestly improve it.

…

Most of the proposals we argue about so ferociously will have only marginal effects on how we live, especially compared with the ethnic, regional and social differences that we so studiously ignore.

McArdle seemed to recognize the same general point at the start of her post:

I’m broadly pro-filibuster, but then I have an aversion to legislative activity, so that’s hardly surprising.

A Washington mostly filled with entrenched Baby Boomers who gave up any pretense of intelligent governing years ago is better left fighting over nothing than enacting bad legislative policy that may do harm long after they are gone.

Dowd notes that Obama was “raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia,” and writes, “Unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience. . . . The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong. Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who … was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.”

I think there’s a lot to this and maybe we should have it coming.  President Obama, to his credit, wants to create an atmosphere that makes it appear he will not tolerate any kind of bad behavior from his administration. As a member of a Cabinet agency, Sherrod fell under this umbrella and it’s why she was ousted so quickly. Now that the whole story is known it’s clear this was an overreaction.  Easy to do when you are walking on eggshells to avoid the perception of racial favoritism.

This even also points to the racially charged under-current that comes with having the first black President. There were always going to be charges of racial preference. This is no different from the way Bush was maligned by some minority voices after Hurricane Katrina (remember Kanye West?) Race still matters to some people but more importantly there is always the belief by some that Presidents and their administrations cannot be impartial. That is a very hard hurdle to overcome.

The converse of this story is that if something like this happens in the future, the administration may under react in an effort to avoid the same mistakes.

I took some pictures this morning to send along to the seed company.

And a close up of the little monsters

For the unfamiliar, this is crabgrass, scourge of the suburbs. I fired off a quick email to Roundstone Seed this morning and apparently our best option is to do nothing for the time being. If the natives achieve a good height this year (8 inches or more) we can spray a herbicide that will hopefully kill the crabgrass and leave the natives intact.

Ugh.

Gardening is never easy.

“When the Man waked up he said, ‘What is Wild Dog doing here?’ And the Woman said, ‘His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always…’

- Rudyard Kipling

I had a very firearm-filled weekend. On Friday night I took a friend out to the farm for some shooting. On the way out my backseat contained 5 guns of various types and ammo for each. If we had been pulled over by a police officer on the way there would have been nothing illegal about our cargo. On Saturday I took two of my rifles to the gunshop for some work to be done.  Again, they rested on the backseat for the trip and there was nothing illegal about it.

Given the casual nature of gun ownership in the U.S. it is extremely hard for me to even get my head around stories like this one from the BBC.

Norma Elizabeth Crowder from Butler Walk was arrested by police investigating rioting in north Belfast last week.

The 49-year-old denied knowing anything about a loaded revolver and ammunition, which police said were found under decking in her back garden.

She was granted bail and will appear again in court next month.

The court was told her home was a short distance from the Ardoyne shop fronts.

There was several nights of serious rioting by republican youths, in the area following an Orange Order parade past the shop fronts on the 12 July.

Police claimed the revolver was found in a hide which formed part of decking in the back garden of her property.

During questioning, a PSNI officer said police believe the decking was either built as a hide or had been adapted for that purpose.

He also confirmed the German revolver contained six live rounds, with a quantity of other ammunition also recovered.

I realize that Northern Ireland is a rough place but stories like this could appear in other Western European nations. In Britain the gun laws are incredibly restrictive in comparison to US law. Very hard for me to even comprehend. What’s interesting is the way that those laws have become so entrenched that the majority of the public sees them as completely normal. What’s even scarier is that there are some folks here in the US that find the European model enviable.

Another interesting phenomenon of the iPhone and iPad era is that we are being transformed from producers of content into consumers. With my BlackBerry, I probably created as much data as I consumed. It was easy to thumb-type long explanations, directions, and even jokes and observations. With my iPhone, I try to avoid creating any message that are over one sentence long. But I use the iPhone browser to consume information a hundred times more than I did with the BlackBerry. I wonder if this will change people over time, in some subtle way that isn’t predictable. What happens when people become trained to think of information and entertainment as something they receive and not something they create? I think this could be a fork in the road for human evolution. Perhaps in a million years, humans will feel no conversational obligation to entertain or provide useful information. That will be the function of the Internet. Someday a scientist will identify the introduction of the iPhone as the point where evolution began to remove conversation from the list of human capabilities. And when the scientist forms this realization, he won’t tell his spouse because conversation won’t exist. He’ll put it on the Internet.

Although Adams takes his point to the extreme it’s interesting to note this divergence in the purpose of our electronic gadgets, with one being consumption and the other being creation.  The industry seems to have noted that by streamlining electronics to meet only the needs we require of them, they can produce amazingly compact items devoid of unneccessary bells and whistles. For the person that just needs 30 minutes of music for their daily jog, an iPod Shuffle is a lot wiser purchase than a full 80 GB iPod.  The same can be said with an iPad versus a laptop for those who mostly just consume material on the internet.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with simply using the internet for consumption. We all use TV, books and newspapers in exactly the same way.  I worry that Adams’ post comes across as slamming those who aren’t creating original content on the internet as some sort of leeches on the rest of us that do. That’s unfair. Like all other goods, the internet is a two-way relationship. Somebody creates and somebody buys.

On social interaction:

But suburban residents express a stronger sense of identity and civic involvement than city dwellers. A recent study by Jan Brueckner, a University of California at Irvine economist, found that density does not, as is often assumed, increase social contact between neighbors or raise overall social involvement; compared with residents of high-density urban cores, people in low-density suburbs were 7 percent more likely to talk to their neighbors and 24 percent more likely to belong to a local club.

On culture:

Suburbs epitomize much of what constitutes the American dream for many people. Minorities, once largely associated with cities, tend to live in the suburbs; in 2008 they were a majority of residents in Texas, New Mexico, California and Hawaii. Nationwide, about 25 percent of suburbanites are minorities; by 2050 immigrants, their children and native-born minorities will become an even more dominant force in shaping suburbia.

Kotkin also writes a lot about changing trends in housing and the importance of suburban locales. I though this comment was insightful:

A new landscape may emerge, one that resembles the network of smaller towns characteristic of 19th-century America. The nation’s landmass is large enough—about 3 percent is currently urbanized—to accommodate this growth, while still husbanding critical farmland and open space.

I’ve noticed this trend a bit in recent years since my wife and I got married and we bought a house on the edge of our city.  The peripheral areas in our county still identify strongly with Louisville as our hometown and there’s a serious allegiance there, but I also see community-based identities forming that focus on a smaller area and promote a small town image. Some of this originates in an artificial way with planned communities and heavily regulated neighborhoods popping up here and there, but the attitude that grows out of these seems to be organic. The only complaint I have is that I wish there were more opportunities for interaction between these small communities and their rural neighbors.

Kotkin also points out that a few things are going to have to change, namely the over-consumption of fuel by suburban commuters. He optimistically points out that this should be mitigated at least in part by the shift to working from home that solid internet connections is bringing about. Since I hope to be on that train at some point, I of course also love to hear it’s a growing trend.

The project started by marking off a 3-foot perimeter around the yard and killing the grass off with Roundup. You can see here what it looked like after 2 weeks.

I actually thought it looked kind of cool like this if only we could have the same look but about 3 feet high. Anyway, after three weeks the grass had thinned out more as seen below. Murphy is also pictured here in one of his favorite spots.

Our next step was to remove as much of the dead grass as possible. I borrowed a gas-powered weed eater from a friend and spent a couple of hours attacking the grass. The end result was pretty close to what the seed company told me I needed. Nearly bare, compacted soil.

Planting day arrived and we had our seed mix ready, courtesy of the folks at Roundstone Seed in Upton, KY. The mix contains about 30 plants and 3 lbs only costed about $19. A real bargain and I’m happy to be supporting Kentucky growers.

I should also add at this point that I cannot recommend Roundstone any more highly. The product was shipped quickly and packaged neatly. The thing that impressed me the most was the time my contact at Roundstone spent with me via email and phone answering my questions. I’ve never done seeding at this micro-level and my questions were probably a bit silly, but if you don’t ask you won’t know. They were patient with me and I learned a lot.

To hear a bit more about their operation, download this podcast from WFPL’s HomeGrown and head to the 8:30 mark.

Because the seed is so light it has to be mixed with a heavier material to make it broadcast better. Roundstone recommended using cat litter with a mix of 4 parts litter to 1 part seed. Here’s what that looked like.

My youngest daughter did most of the broadcasting after some brief instructions. I supervised and took pictures. I love the concentration that is clearly evident in this picture. She covered the entire area we cleared for planting and then I walked back over it broadcasting a second time in a perpendicular path.

The cat litter also helps to get a visual on where the seed is falling. This is what it looked like after the first pass.

Our next step was to dress the area so as to encourage good seed-to-soil contact. In a large-scale operation this would be done with a culti-packer but in our backyard we had to do this by hand. We used some chicken wire with bricks on the end. My daughter is demonstrating here. Unfortunately this was a bit too heavy for her so I was the one that actually did the pulling. Quite a workout.

Not pictured here is the good watering I gave the area the following morning. We should have some green shoots breaking through the soil in a week or two. It can take up to two years for the plot to be fully established but we should see some interesting plants as early as September. This has been a fun project so far. Also good for the environment. The grasses will reduce water consumption for over 600 sq feet of our yard which means more rain water will make it into local streams.  Wildlife will find seed and new pollens which will help both birds and bees. Lastly I will not be using the electricity I normally take up with weed-eating the area every couple of weeks. We’ll let this grow and the area will be maintenance free.

So, I’ve never really like DOMA for a few of reasons. The first is that I don’t think it was necessary. By passing the law Congress implied that the state laws were vague on just who could get married and therefore the federal clarification was important. I would dispute the necessity of that. While I would agree that some states never specified heterosexual-only marriage I don’t think any reasonable judge would assume those who framed the law were allowing for it.  This sort of goes to the age-old question surrounding the Constitution. Are rights only available when they are spelled out or do we assume any rights not specifically forbidden?

The second more important point on DOMA is that it codified discrimination. By its very passage DOMA recognized gays and lesbians as a group of people and not just a bunch of individuals with a particular sexual preference. After recognizing them, it then specifically excluded them from marriage. I have a problem with that. This is along the same lines as the various state bans on gay marriage. I don’t like the idea of our laws being used to specifically exclude members of the population. Now, before readers go thinking this means I am endorsing SSM, I would caution you to reconsider. My position is that sexual orientation has yet to be recognized as a protected class so therefore it would be incorrect to say that removing DOMA equals legal SSM. I just believe we shouldn’t write laws to keep people out of certain institutions. The positive criteria for participation should be spelled out when the institution is created.

Looking beyond this ruling I think it’s clear that the future of gay marriage lies with two very clear paths, each with their own pitfalls and potential for success. The first path is the state legislatures. With the right tactics minorities can hold a lot of power over these bodies as was proved a century ago when Prohibition passed. SSM supporters had great success in Vermont and elsewhere and you will notice a significant lack of serious complaint from the Right. Conservatives can usually be counted on to support states’ rights and if various states want to allow for SSM I think most of us are willing to accept it regardless of our personal feelings. So I think we could see maybe 50% of the country accepting SSM within ten years if momentum keeps building on their side. Of course the negative side of this is that it still leaves a portion of the gay population residing in states that will not allow them to marry. On that subject I think I am firming up my belief that we need to allow for a few basic privileges for same-sex partners, such as health benefits and medical decision-making, but if they are unhappy about no marriage in their states, it’s time to move. This seems harsh but state and local governments legislate morality all the time. Many residents of my state deal with blue laws in their home counties and choose to stay or go depending on how much it bothers them. No one is forcing them to leave but if they stay there are certain rules they have to abide by.

The second path is obviously the courts. As we’ve seen Supreme Court isn’t vital to the allowance of gay marriage in some states but it is the only way to force it in on states that would never allow it on their own. I see the next presidential election as pretty critical to the future of the judicial strategy. There are several justices poised to retire and whomever is President in the next term may control the political leanings of the Court for a generation. I expect this battle to be a hot one in 2011 and 2012. And of course, I’ll be watching with great interest.