Isaac Laquedem

Isaac greets 2012 in rhyme

January marks the time
To greet the coming year in rhyme,
This easy task I can't abate,
For I last did it in '08.
Let's cast a final look behind
At what the old year brought to mind.
Korea lost its Kim Jong Il
Who left some awkward shoes to fill.
None know much of Kim Jong Un,
Who is for now the rising son.
We note the loyal opposition;
To defeat Obama is its mission.
Its candidates, though, don't seem to last,
Gaffes from the present and the past
Tore through the field, raising Cain
Just to knock him down again.
Paul and Bachmann had their say,
And took their chances out of play.
One candidate escaped unhit,
The one the rightists won't adMitt.
Obama still remains on track
To bring the troops home from Iraq.
His critics said he'd let them stay
Too long.  But as we near the day
For their return, the critics same
Gleefully assign him blame
For bringing them back home too soon;
Peculiar how they've changed their tune.
Close to home, a House seat came
Up for grabs.  We're going to name
Bonamici or Cornilles
To fill it.  I believe Suzanne is who
Will win the votes to follow Wu.
In Portland, one event astounds:
The Sellwood Bridge has broken ground!
Dow Walker, may he rest in peace,
Would rue that this time no one's fleeced.
From City Council two depart,
I wish you well with all my heart.
R. Leonard, thanks for stopping by
And for your thoughts concerning my
Escapist fancies on the law;
Sometime we ought to sit and jaw.
And to the people of our nation
I wish from war a long vacation,
With no military operations
And no news from K. Kardashians.

Do you have to pay the leaf removal fee if you have no trees?

A friend of a Laquedem sibling queries whether he can avoid paying the roundly-scorned City of Portland leaf removal fee.  He missed the deadline for applying for an exemption, and asks if he has to pay the fee anyway.  His reason for not wanting to pay the fee is not that he will remove the leaves himself, nor that he objects to the City charging the fee on constitutional or statutory grounds.  He points out - reasonably, I think -- that his street has no street trees and his front yard has no trees, so he isn't contributing any leaves to the street.

If he does get stuck paying the leaf removal fee despite having no leaves to remove, I've wondered if I can bring him some of my leaves.  It seems a shame to pay the fee and not get the service.

Boxing Day (United States version)

I've always liked Boxing Day (December 26), because it exemplifies how the New World has adapted a tradition from the Old.  In England, householders mark Boxing Day by giving small boxed presents to the people who have served them through the year: originally to their household servants (back from the days when households had live-in servants) and then to the dustman, mail carrier, and so on.

We've adapted that tradition in the United States, with our own mercantile twist: on Boxing Day we do not give boxed presents to our servants (for most of us have none); rather, we box up our unliked Christmas presents and take them back to the mall to exchange for something that we do like.  Or, in verse:

On Yule, the English eat and drink their fill,
Next morn, they give to those who do their will.
They think our Stateside customs rather strange,
One day we give; the next we all exchange.

Macy's offends Venerable Mom for Christmas, but saves her 30%

The centerpiece of the Laquedem Christmas celebration is only nominally the dinner (two dinners today, actually).  Most years the stage is stolen by Venerable Mom Laquedem's recital of her recent correspondence.  Today VM was in rare form as she griped, in good humor, about being turned down for a credit card.

When VM approached the register at Macy's this month, the clerk told her that if she applied for a Macy's credit card, she could save 30% on that day's purchases.  VM revels in thrift and signed up at once.  Last week she received the bad news that Macy's had turned her down, giving the reasons as her high level of installment debt and her history of delinquent credit accounts.  This puzzled her, as her installment debts total $576 -- not per month, but her total balance, which she pays off every month -- and her most recent late payment was in the Eisenhower or possibly the Truman era.

"Could it be her credit score?" I wondered.  Venerable Mom showed me her score, which was well above 780.  So it's not that either.  Perhaps, Mrs. Laquedem suggested, Macy's simply doesn't like issuing cards to customers with perfect credit and no debts . . . if they're octogenarians.

Far from feeling discriminated against because of her age, however, Venerable Mom was oddly pleased.  It means that next year she can again shop at Macy's, apply for a card, and get a 30% discount, and repeat that money-saving effort year after year -- as long as Macy's continues to turn her down for credit.

Get a buck from Jack today for a good cause

Professor Bogdanski renews his annual celebration of the seasion with another Buck-A-Hit celebration: he and supporters will donate to charity $1 for each unique visitor to his blog, up to $5000 total.  Go see him here and score a dollar for charity.

It's back! The Republicans want to nominate anyone but the front-runner

One perplexing thing about the run-up to the Republican nomination for the presidency is that the stalwarts of the Grand Old Party have a disconcerting pattern of uniting to think of reasons not to nominate whoever their front-runner may be.  At the moment, it's the "Anyone but Romney" movement; in 1988 it was the "Anyone but Bush" movement; and in 1980 the country-club set had their "Anyone but Reagan" moment in the dappled shade of the magnolias.  I sometimes have the feeling that the Republicans would not be able to revivify George Washington to run him again (the 22nd Amendment notwithstanding) without simultaneously organizing an "Anyone but Washington" movement to spread the word about his expense accounts.

Why all college athletic departments are failures

In the last few years there have been calls -- not only by lawyers -- to reduce the number of law schools in America, because too many law school graduates can't find jobs as lawyers.  Here's an example from 2009, by Professor Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA.  Law schools that can't place a large portion of their graduates -- at least half to two-thirds -- at a law firm, with government, or in a judicial clerkship are scorned as being failures.

So:  why is it that a law school that places only (say) 50% of its graduates in law jobs is a failure, but a football program that places only 5% of its graduates in football jobs is a success?   Maybe it's because only 1.7% of NCAA college football seniors even get drafted by an NFL team, a remarkably dismal placement record that would get any non-athletic department laughed off campus.

Why Britishers wear poppies on November 11

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

-- John McCrae (1872-1918)

"Peace Department" would be the really Orwellian name

The last time the United States was attacked by another nation was in 1941.  A purist might include the Iranian takeover of the United States embassy in Teheran as a second time.  Since the end of the Second World War, we have invaded or attacked Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Iraq (twice), Iran, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya, and Lebanon.  I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.

We used to have an honestly-named Department of War.  In 1947 it was renamed the Department of the Army and put under the aegis of the newly-created Department of Defense.  In the last 20 years we've been doing a lot of war and not very much defense.  It's time to change the name back to the unOrwellian War Department.

First District voters identify three major candidates, or six, but not four

From time to time during the First District primary, I chided the Oregonian for anointing four of the thirteen candidates as the "major candidates," based apparently on their fundraising ability or their support for the $4 billion Columbia River Crossing project.  The Portland Tribune and Pacific University, by contrast, identified six of the thirteen candidates as major candidates, which the Oregonian later picked up on, only to backslide and later say that the 8-person Democratic race included only three candidates, period.

So how did the Whimperer do in identifying the major candidates?  Not so well, actually, if you look at the election results as one group rather than in two separate party groups.  Here's the current tally, which is unofficial but unlikely to change much:

Suzanne Bonamici        48,404    37.7%
Rob Cornilles                39,500    30.7%
Brad Avakian                16,415    12.8%
Jim Greenfield                 6,222      4.8%
Brad Witt                         5,870      4.6%
Lisa Michaels                  5,597      4.4%
Pavel Goberman             1,629      1.3%  
Dan Strite                        1,176      0.9%
Write-in votes                     961     0.7%
Dominic Hammon                889     0.7%
D.R. Delgado-Morgan         831     0.6%
Todd Lee Ritter                   632     0.5%
Saba Ahmed                      231     0.2%
Robert E. Lettin                    91     0.1%

Surprise!  I thought Brad Witt was the most engaging candidate in the race, and the Whimperer identified him as one of the four major candidates, but he finished behind Jim Greenfield and barely ahead of Lisa Michaels.  Judging by the election results, there were either three major candidates, or six, but not four.

Clackamas County's voters do the right thing on urban renewal

Voters in Clackamas County faced two competing urban renewal measures on today's ballot.  Measure 3-386, proposed by citizen petitioners, would require a countywide vote before a new urban renewal area (URA) could be established or an existing URA significantly changed.  Measure 3-388, proposed by the county commission, would also require a vote, but only from voters within the proposed URA. Both measures are passing;  at this writing 3-386 is passing by a wider margin than 3-388 and will be the one to take effect.

The voters made the right decision.  As I wrote on October 18, (and picked up by Professor Bogdanski the next day -- thank you, Jack) because a URA has the effect of transferring future property tax dollars from entire taxing districts to construct improvements in only a portion of those districts, it's fair to allow everyone who's being asked to subsidize the proposed URA to vote on it, as Measure 3-386 does.  Allowing URAs to be formed with the approval of only the recipients(as Measure 3-388 would have allowed) without concern for the opinions of those who would have to bear the cost is, in a modest way, rather like allowing the price of military equipment to be set by a panel composed entirely of defense contractors.

The new and improved protest movement: Preoccupy Wall Street

The Occupy Wall Street movement has attracted some public attention but hasn't really done anything to achieve its goals.  (Actually, it's not clear to me what its goals are, or even if it has any particular goals.)  Its activities seem designed to get the attention of local government but not to have much effect on the people and institutions it's complaining about.

Although I'm on the outskirts of the group against which Occupy Wall Street is protesting, I like to see protests done right -- call it an artistic sensibility if you wish.  In that vein, I'd like to propose a change in approach.

The problem with occupying Wall Street is that Wall Street, in the sense against which Occupy Wall Street is protesting, is a concept -- a network of people and relationships -- and not a physical place.  Yet all they are doing is occupying the physical place.  Instead of occupying Wall Street, they should preoccupy Wall Street.

Preoccupy Wall Street?  Yes!   The PWS movement, as yet unstaffed (I'm inventing it, not joining it), will take as its mission to distract from its tasks those parts of the financial world that got us into this mess, and the senators and representatives who stood by and enabled it, by preoccupying them with responding to the citizens whose lives they've upended.  Here are some ways that the PWS movement can preoccupy Wall Street:

1.    Call up Phil Gramm at UBS AG and ask him if he still thinks that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was a good idea.  (That's the act that legitimized incest between banks and investment banks.)  If your senator or representative was in office in 1999 and voted for Gramm-Leach-Bliley, call him or her and ask the same question.

2.    Leave a message for your favorite bank president, asking if he or she favors deregulating deposit insurance and letting the marketplace set the rates for deposit insurance so that bad banks have to pay more or go without deposit insurance.

3.   Buy a large supply of old Zimbabwean bank notes (the ones that have denominations as high as $100,000,000,000,000 because of hyperinflation and economic collapse).  Then pick a day and hire every bike messenger in lower Manhattan to deliver them to the offices of investment bankers, one at a time throughout the day.

4.    Call your least favorite bank and ask what rate it will charge you to lend you money to speculate in the stock market.  Then ask if that's the same rate it would have offered MF Global before it collapsed on Hallowe'en.  (Trick or treat!)

5.    Send a note to the offices of some of the 61 members of the House Committee on Financial Services, and ask them if they'll forswear contributions from officers and directors of the institutions they regulate until the mess has been cleaned up and banks have stopped going under.  Its members include Michael Capuano and Brad Miller, about whom I've written before.  You can even ask Michelle Bachmann what she thinks -- she's a member also! 

6.    Participants away from Washington and New York can visit the district offices of the nearest members of the Committee, and explain their feelings on their elected representatives accepting gifts from the culprits.

7.    Get a thousand or two people together at Wall Street (or its functional equivalent) and have everyone place cell phone calls at the same time, right before the stock market opens.  See if everyone can get through.

Many other ways exist to creatively annoy Wall Street that don't require a tent and a portable toilet, and that will get attention of the industry and its regulators more effectively.  Don't occupy Wall Street -- preoccupy it!