The Hayseeds blog, No. 74 for the week starting August 1, 2004.
July 18, 2004
Hayseeds No. 73
August 1, 2004
Hayseeds No. 74
August 8, 2004
Hayseeds No. 74
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So goes the endless speeches, the haggling and give and take (though not much—Kerry/Edwards is the man), and much more that will finally lead to Kerry and Edwards on their mystical trail to the Presidency.
It seems that Hillary Clinton is fully behind Kerry, which is essential if the party wants to win the White House—as some people like Hillary, if not me. She also thinks that Kerry will win without a doubt.
Should you bother watching the convention? Maybe—I'll watch parts of it—Joe Axe of the Journal News polls others on their thoughts.
It seems that at least the early Toyota Prisuses and the alike may have not be cracked up to be a Plymouth Reliant or the alike—they seem to suffer from a slightly higher failure rating then similiar cars of their class. That said, cars are so reliable nowdays, with few exceptions, so the poor reliablity rating of the early hybrids doesn't seem to set them back too far.
The Daily Freeman talks more about the historic barns funds program—who is getting the funds, why it matters, etc.
There is an interesting article with three supertendents of rural southern tier districts on the problem of school funding in the poorest of poor rural areas. People often forget how poor and improverished parts of NY really are.
big news of the day, after getting started out with a real bang (no, not literally—there was no terror attack—I tell you, kids these days ;).
I found the speakers (particularly Carter and surpisingly Gore) were interesting to listen to, with a lot of humor to deal with sometimes tough political issues. There was a lots of enthauism coming from the Fleet Center last night, and people where all rev'd up.
Carter's speech was particularly good, as you could tell he took a passionate stance against our President, and fought for what he truly believed to be an immoral foreign policy, without dignity and respect. While he supports a war on terror to protect human rights, he was appalled by the lack of respect the president gave to them at home and approad. And no, sorry kids, he made it clear that he wasn't going to run for a another term at office. Retirement must be nice.
Gore was funny, particularly when it came to talking about employement, and noting that he was one of the first people to loose a job—and the new jobs just aren't as good as the old ones. Yeah, I guess going from Vice President to nothing to whatever party work you can scrap up, is a bit of a downgrade.
If you missed the show last night, you missed a good one. There were some protests, but they were kept so far away that nobody really noticed them, and moreover being a Democratic Convention trying to upset the Republican Warmonger, protests were pretty small.
It must be great fun to be a delegate. It sounds like a non-stop party for a whole week, extoling the virtues of our next President, John F. Kerry.
Keep watching, and hope that my man, John F. Kerry will make it to the Whitehouse. And then maybe, we have both a half sane foreign and domestic policy.
people have been warned to stay in their houses and avoid the protestors and anything else while the convention is going on.
Environmental Advocates is calling it an Endangered Agency with staff cutbacks, all while the governor attempts to field new tasks for the agency to complete.
...Its report, "Endangered Agency," blames a 1995 state hiring freeze, early retirement incentives and contracting some jobs to nonstate workers for the elimination of about 700 DEC jobs. Today, the agency has about 3,300 employees.
The cutbacks have been felt all over, from the fisheries program to state parks—everybody has noticed it in one way or another. Then again, the DOT has been well mashed up under the Pataki administration, increasingly going to private contractors and cutting jobs left and right, leaving bumpy highways.
I've always wondered what the roots of that Peter, Paul and Mary song are—it's pentatonic scale so it would suggest that it's really old. However, some of the lyrics seem to have a social message, that I do not seem to understand.
All the rain is good for making the grass grow, and making farmers happy about their crops. So maybe the second is good—and the was to mitigate the first is to avoid a much lawn as possible on your property.
At any rate, that's my thoughts on rain for the moment.
He's excited to be our candidate for Vice President of the United States.
I'm pretty excited about him too, and hopefully we will hear more of the speech when the noise dies down.
of the Hands-Free Cellphone law. Figuring that hands-free has been the norm for something like 2 years now, and that almost every cellphone comes with hands-free, it seems that only total idiots wouldn't have a hands free device.
Some people want to see that school funding be carefully reviewed by the AG to ensure compliance.
He's Buffalo News Editorial is good stuff—even if you support the death penality as I do (though I have concerns about it's upstate-downstate parity).
That's what one New York town (Newfield) is considering permitting, at least in a limited fashion that is consistant with V&T Law.
And gets lot of really upset employees who question how much savings will actually occur by this closing—instead contracting out the rebuilding of parts or just tossing them and buying new.
It seems silly that the notion of new parts versus the cost to rebuild parts has changed dramatically over the last 10 years
would demand the closing, as new parts have not really come down that much for buses, afaik. But maybe it's a way to cut corners, like the state is increasing doing by contracting out DOT engineering services, and so forth.
The obvious answer is of course, and it seems rather silly that they want to can a NYC officer for not arresting a homeless person for tresspassing. If the officer felt there was no statutory violation, then he should not be taking complaints from others—civil servants should use sensibility even in bureaucrtatic-rational system that so rejects sensibility.
On the other hand, do we want police officers using discression? Maybe it would be better if they were nuetral arbitators of the law, responding to the complaints regardless of merit. They should record on videotape what they see and experience, and take careful notes (as a last resort), and just send that to the judicary for final arbitration. Let citizens decide what the law says. Yet, that notion is dangerous as most citizens don't understand the full ramifications of the law, and hopefully people enforcing the law in the executive branch have more of a clue.
And gets lot of really upset employees who question how much savings will actually occur by this closing—instead contracting out the rebuilding of parts or just tossing them and buying new.
It seems silly that the notion of new parts versus the cost to rebuild parts has changed dramatically over the last 10 years
would demand the closing, as new parts have not really come down that much for buses, afaik. But maybe it's a way to cut corners, like the state is increasing doing by contracting out DOT engineering services, and so forth.
The obvious answer is of course, and it seems rather silly that they want to can a NYC officer for not arresting a homeless person for tresspassing. If the officer felt there was no statutory violation, then he should not be taking complaints from others—civil servants should use sensibility even in bureaucrtatic-rational system that so rejects sensibility.
On the other hand, do we want police officers using discression? Maybe it would be better if they were nuetral arbitators of the law, responding to the complaints regardless of merit. They should record on videotape what they see and experience, and take careful notes (as a last resort), and just send that to the judicary for final arbitration. Let citizens decide what the law says. Yet, that notion is dangerous as most citizens don't understand the full ramifications of the law, and hopefully people enforcing the law in the executive branch have more of a clue.
I guess there maybe some legal problems with the GOP's dumping of Hartmat for Mike Conners—they did it too late for the November elections.
My former advisor at SUNYA had this to say about it (I would have come to exactly the same conclusions):
The use of election law challenges to eliminate challengers is a common tactic in state politics, said Joseph Zimmerman, a political science professor at the University at Albany's Rockefeller College.
"New York state has the most complex set of election laws in the country,"' Zimmerman said. "It benefits the two major political parties to knock off challengers. The law is in need of reform. It shouldn't be manipulated to keep people who are otherwise qualified off the ballot."
And it's even more great when some of the finest NY election lawyers are the members of the Senate and Assembly that write election law.
It turns out the final decision of the special master won't be worked on until the middle of the day on August 2nd, so there is still a really small chance NYC will get funding from the legislature, instead of the court—but Karen Dewitt and I think that's rather unlikely. Democracy decided by special master.
And NY's legislature as now offically accomplished nothing of significance of this year—besides half a dozen local bills. It's great we are paying our legislature and their staff more money then any other state legislature, and getting less work out of them.
I know, it's not pay for preformance or pay per diem in NYS, but still when you get paid a certain amount, you'd think they'd come to some kind of agreement on major issues. The big party in Albany continues no matter the outcome.
That is rather strange, in his vetoing of a bill he felt was so neccessary it had to be rushed through the legislature.
Which means one of the following things is true (probably the second more then the first):
on why the governor might have vetoed the minimum wage bill is:
The city and some it's businesses are working with NYSERDA to try to figure out how to save a little bit of power—or in some cases a lot of power, by using more efficent fixatures. Saving power is always good...
And the students and taxpayers are losing out with unknown school funding coming in—unless the legislature acts on short order in early August.
Some people are sighting Wolverenes in the Adirondacks though the DEC claims they are just really big Fishers. Somehow, I'm more tempted to believe the people of the North Country over the DEC, even if the chances of their being Wolerenes in the North Country are rare.
They've sent over Bill Bruce of Albany DGS to Bulgaria to explain how to run a modern sanitary landfil—just kind of like Albany's program. It will include instructions on how to:
Albany really is the expert on those things.
That said, the trash shreading project started around the time that ANSWERS plant ended, and ceased a while afterwords, did make some significant steps in landfill space reduction, and encourage anarobic breaking down of some of the MSW. The good news is the city is reinvesting in trash shreading equipment, hopefully minus the chromium material from the hammers getting ground up with the trash, which should encourage further breaking down of the MSW and compression in the landfill.
They said it would never be done, but it looks like the legislature is going override the governor's minimum wage bill, assuming the rumors are right, and the Republicans can gather enough support in the Senate to do it—the Assembly will probably have it easy in the override.
will likely create a bigger ruckus
then the DNC convention, as the Repubs are the ones currently in power. Which is not particularly surpising, but hopefully the NYC police will use some discression with the crowds, and not make a mess out of the convention ('the whole world is watching!').
That's an interesting question brought up by this TU article.
It seems that AG John Ashcroft's numbers are not as good as they first appear, and often are a reflection of aggressive procecutions for minor non-terror related offenses under new blanket terror statues.
It seems to some that living near the PCB dewatering site will be a bit like living near Rapp Road, with various demucking smells and the constant danger of PCB emissions into the air.
At least the project is temporary, and the feds have promised to clean up the area when they are done. So after a few short years it will be done, and life will be able to return to normal (after the scars finally heal back up).
Which I think is a terrible policy, particularly in light of recent events (yes, I'm citing everybody's favorite focusing event over in that school that you see at the Rt 43/I-90 interchange), but some want to reduce high school drop outs at the cost of school safety and the denial of liberty to young adults.
Warning, I'm grumpy again.
It seems as though somehow one of the nice people I emailed back gots a virsus on their computer, and now my email address is being taken up by the virsus sending stuff from all over the web. As I keep my email address in relative privacy, that is the only way I can see a virsus getting ahold of it.
So I'm really not happy about this all, though I do have decent spam filtering set up to cut through much of the crap—but it ain't perfect and sometimes puts good mail in the SPAM folder.
It's too bad that SPAM can not be easily limited from the email box and that anybody can generate plenty of ads or virsus emails by just sending some packets over the internet. But, alas, I guess that's life and I guess we all have to live with it all.
That name was pretty well known in the Hilltowns, a legend of yesteryear that almost all around here was familiar with. He was an intellectual and a farmer, skilled in eastern and western philosophy, and a regular contributor to a number of local papers.
While I never met him in person, and had only seen a few of his columns, his stature and knowledge seemed rather impressive. The hilltowns lost an asset with his passing at 96 years of age.
