Stupidfool.org

Side benefits

My favorite San Francisco politics story from the last week: eight months ago, San Francisco decided to save money by cleaning certain streets only once every other week, rather than every week. The program was supposed to save $1 million per year in cleaning costs.

Unfortunately, the city government neglected to appreciate the auxiliary benefits of regular street cleaning: massive fees in parking tickets. So, how's it working out?

When city officials cut street sweeping in more than 20 neighborhoods in August to save cash, they knew that the change would lead to a loss in revenue from parking tickets. ... They probably didn't anticipate that the city would lose four times more money than it saved ... Street-sweeping tickets, at $50 a pop, dropped 26 percent on the affected routes from October to December, compared with the previous year, according to city figures.

"That was weeks ago, motherfucker!"

The New Yorker article about Rahm Emanuel was fascinating, but as with most things, my favorite parts are about our president.

Obama's managerial instincts tend toward a looser operation, with lots of staff and outside input. ... [But] early in his Senate career Obama also learned the perils of not having one strong manager in charge. When he arrived in Washington, in 2005, he told one of his senior aides, "My vision of this is having six smart people sitting around the table batting ideas around." A month and a half later, tensions erupted between Obama's Chicago staff and his Washington staff, making it difficult for them to agree on his schedule. Obama was frustrated that no single person was able to make decisions. The aide reminded him, "Don't you remember: 'six smart people sitting around the table'?" Obama replied, "Oh, that was six weeks ago. I'm not on that now."

When Obama Won

Oh, and we have a new president, too! I like that, a lot.

In the days preceding the election, I--like a lot of people, I suspect--realized that it was starting to seem pretty real; that we may actually, you know, have a president that we can believe in, yes, but also one who broke through some pretty fundamental (historically) barriers. That's really enough to make you tear up, honestly.

But so anyway, there are so many fantastic photos of President Obama (that sounds good, doesn't it?), but here's my favorite of all of them, because at heart, I'm a total sap, and I really like his family, and damn, don't they all look pretty happy to see each other?

Ordinary firmness

McCain supporters in North Carolina heckle early Obama voters:

That's classy.

It also kind of reminds me of Jill Lepore's recent New Yorker article about how we used to vote:

Voting in America, it's fair to say, used to be different. "Are you not a man in the full vigor of manhood and strength?" a member of the House Committee on Elections asked another Harrison supporter who, like Kyle, went to the polls but turned back without voting (and who happened to stand six feet and weigh more than two hundred pounds). The hearings established a precedent. "To vacate an election," an election-law textbook subsequently advised, "it must clearly appear that there was such a display of force as ought to have intimidated men of ordinary firmness."

Parsing words

The New Yorker on the Republican demonization of words:

Literary theorists used to say that their most abstruse prose was "writing the difficulty"--that the sentences were tortuous because there was no briskly commonsensical way of representing a complex issue. Sarah Palin, alas, talks the difficulty. She may claim, as she did in last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate, that "Americans are cravin' that straight talk," but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor--not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home...

Change

The New Yorker editors have made their choice re: their endorsement for President. They've chosen (spoiler alert!) Obama.

The whole article's worthwhile, but I like this particular quote:

The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one--something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s "mere" speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

The article spends a paragraph or two on a bunch of the major failures of the current administration: the economy, foreign policy/war in Iraq, the environment, &c. Condensed into a short article like this one, it's even more depressing to think about how our current government has done its best to ruin this country.