In Praise of Cartoons
This is going a bit (ok, a lot) from the emphasis of this blog, but hey, it's Saturday, so here goes ....

It's been said that in comedy, you can get away with saying things that you can't say in other situations, and that animated shows (cartoons) get away with what could never be portrayed in sitcoms.

Jonah Goldberg argued a few years ago that The Simpsons is "possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever." It is, he says, a program that is both political and funny--and, surprisingly, is both simultaneously.

Part of the show's attraction is that "its satire spares nothing and no one," taking cracks at Republicans and Democrats alike. This evenhandedness, says Goldberg, is novel, contributing to the show's appeal. (Surely liberal pieties are prone for satirization as well as conservative ones.) He contrasts the show's serious treatment of social topics (immigration, gay rights, fundamentalism) with the nihilism of Seinfeld, which is by some accounts the best comedy ever.

Goldberg, writing for a conservative publication, invokes, of all people, an English professor, to argue that "The Simpsons celebrates many, if not most, of the best conservative principles: the primacy of family, skepticism about political authority, distrust of abstractions."

Meanwhile, Brian Anderson, writing for City Journal, praises South Park for its anti-liberal jabs. Though the show is vulgar, he says that "conservative critics should pay closer attention to what South Park so irreverently jeers at and mocks." He singles out episodes that ridicule" multicultural sentimentality about holistic medicine," multiculturalism in general (in some aspects, life in the third world is inferior to life in America), and "effort to draw the mantle of civil liberties over behavior once deemed criminal, pathological, or immoral" (pedophilia).

Now if I could just find comparable treatment of King of the Hill, we'd have a trio of animated analysis here.
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College Football Traditions

Time for a little diversion. Today's the last day of the regular season for college football season. In honor of that, I wish to highlight some fine stories on "page 2" of ESPN.Com. Various contributors to the site offer their take on the "temples," and traditions of college football.

This is what I like about college football--so many traditions. They provide a rallying point for thousands (and often millions) of people for a relatively harmless interest. (A few people do go off the deep end, as with every activity.) So here's an incomplete roundup of football experience, as reported by ESPN.

One correspondent gets to run with the Buffalo--all 1,300 pounds--at Colorado and goes for a helicopter ride with four Army cadets. They jump out of the chopper and parachute onto the 50 yard line, to present the ball to the refs.

Florida A&M is not known as a football powerhouse, but Kieran Darcy lauds the Marching 100, the university's marching band known for introducing innovations copied by other bands. (One trend I don't find too encouraging: playing more and more pop music.) The story is a good reminder of what you miss by not being in the stands. I often wish that the talking heads during halftime shows on TV would be replaced by a few cameras focused on the band.

Louisiana State University (LSU) features a tiger with a $2 million home. The stadium is known as "Death Valley," which leads to this observation:

If the tiger's future cage isn't a 'Sign of the Apocalypse,' you should be able to see one from the historic, 92,000-seat Tiger Stadium, otherwise known as Death Valley. I know this because there is a 25-yard-long sign that reads, "Welcome to Death Valley'' mounted below the pressbox. Those are the little touches at which LSU excels. Most schools wouldn't even put up such a name. Others would just say, "Death Valley" and leave it at that. But not LSU. Here, it's "Welcome to Death Valley." That's beautiful. It's like descending into Hell and finding a sign that reads, "Satan Invites You to Enjoy Eternal Damnation."

One writer says that
Nebraska fans are uncommonly helpful during pre-game festivities. "This being Nebraska, everyone is invited to stop by, especially opposing fans."

Notre Dame has "Touchdown Jesus," the mural on the library wall that faces the stadium. No wonder, then, that "For a sports fan, visiting Notre Dame for a football weekend is like a pilgrimage."

Ohio State fans cheer the "dotting of the I" in the band's "Script Ohio" at the beginning of each game. "The most famous of the Buckeye rituals is the marching band's spelling of "Ohio" and the dotting of the letter "i" by a carefully-selected sousaphone player. When I got the assignment to come cover the Ohio State experience, the first thing I did was call and ask whether it would be possible to dot the "i" at an upcoming game. Jessica called back right away, excited that I was coming, but firm on the question of the "i."

"I'm afraid that would be impossible," she said. "It's a very special honor; it's a sacred thing."

Traditions at Oklahoma [sorry, I forgot to include a link first time around, and now I can't find it] include the Ruf/Neks, a spirit team with shotguns, the Cecil Car, a 1923 Model T driven to every game. Oddly enough, the most tradition that is perhaps most well-known, at least to national TV audiences, the Sooner Schooner (a
covered wagon) is the most recent.

South Carolina has a relatively recent tradition: tailgating in spruced-up railroad cabooses. Might as well do something to add to tradition; the football program doesn't bring much to the table.

Texas A&M has so many different traditions, it is like a parallel universe, incomprehensible to the outsider.

"So what's to make of all these rituals? Aggies preach about the love, loyalty and pride they have for their school. If you're an insider -- a fanatic member of the maroon-clad Aggie clan -- you think the traditions are spectacular. You think it fosters a unique sense of belonging, a feeling of one with the football team, the corps, the student body and the yell leaders. You think this is what college sports is all about.

But if you're an outsider (or a Longhorn), you can't help but think it's overdone. You peek in the bookstore and see children's books titled "Reveille's 12 Days of Christmas," and you grow skeptical. You hear that the Aggies never lose (they were either outscored or ran out of time) and laugh. And you see the yell leaders running around in their auto-mechanic jumpsuits without any skirt-wearing female sidekicks, and you wonder how A&M missed the "21st Century" memo.

The author sums it up with a quote from an Aggie senior: "I guess in order to understand, you have to be an Aggie."

The University of Washington gets credit for having the best pre-game food: fresh salmon, crab, berry cobbler, and a microbrew.

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Drug Reimportation Forum
The Heartland Institute has posted remarks from it forum on the policy and health dangers of drug reimportation.

State Senator Steve Rauschenberger warns against public officials who find that "the solutions to their problems are somehow vested in multimillion-dollar companies that are obeying the law." He points out that Illinois already helps seniors (with a household income of up to $25,000) buy drugs. He calls for tort reform, utilization review, and other alternatives to importing prescription drugs from countries that practice price controls.

Robert Goldberg of the Manhattan Institute warns that all legalizing reimportation "will do is shift the profits of this vast, criminal, illegal, and unsafe enterprise from overseas into the United States." He also argues that many Canadian drugs don't actually come from Canada, and are in fact not regulated by Health Canada.

Steven J. Entin, of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation says that the response to concerns over drug affordability are not to reduce the price of all drugs, but to give income support (much like food stamps) to the poor. "What do you think would happen if we tried to help the poor buy food by telling the grocery stores they would have to sell everything at 30 percent off; or if we told the farmers they would get only half of what they now get for corn and wheat and soybeans? Many farmers would go broke."

State Rep. Chris Lauzen take a contrarian view. "We are here to ask them to sell their drugs to us, their fellow U.S. citizens, for what they are selling to Canadian citizens."

Grace-Marie Turner, of the Galen Institute, emphasizes the safety issue. Do we really want to multiply the security threat to the U.S. drug supply? The FDA has its hands full protecting our domestic drug supply even without opening the border to 26 other countries, including countries we know harbor people who want to do harm to the citizens of the United States."

Joe Bast, of The Heartland Institute, summarizes the various arguments for and against importation.

Other speakers include Sean Heather, of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, David Miller of the Illinois Biotechnology Industry Organization, and John Graham, of the Fraser Institute (Canada).
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Why Political Parties Do Nothing About Affirmative Action
Ward Connerly, head of the American Civil Rights Institute, is leading the charge to place a measure on affirmative action on the Michigan ballot in November 2004. Like ballot questions in Washington, California, and other states, the measure would bar the public use of affirmative action (read: require governments to treat each person equally, regardless of race or color.)

It will take roughly $500,000 to get the 320,000 petition signatures required to place a measure on the ballot. But that's the only way the measure can become law, since both major parties fear putting it to an up-or-down vote. Democrats fear they will lose (up to two-thirds of those residents surveyed say the support putting an end to affirmative action in government policy). Republicans fear that a public vote on the measure will produce a backlash against them at the polls.

Meanwhile, the Detroit News provides a profile of an anti-anti-affirmative action group that hopes to thwart Connerly's plans. It consists of true believers and businesses who hope to stave off attacks from the preferences crowd.
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Where's a Smoke-Filled Room When You Want One?
Busybodies are hard at work throughout Illinois, trying to enact smoking bans. Now, I find smoking to be an obnoxous habit, and I am mildly allergic to cigarette smoke. But if you won't like the smell of smoke in a restaurant, here's a clue: Don't go there, to work or to eat.

But of course such bans are merely an extension of the "rights" culture. "I don't like smoke. I want to control your restaurant, and decide how it will be operated. It's my right to have a smoke-free meal in your establishment."
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You'll Shoot Your Eye Out
Jack Mabley of the Daily Herald reports that police in Glenview, Ill., have responded to 24 reports of kids carrying guns around. (Whether or not they have actually used them against a person is another story.) Actually, these aren't real guns, but "realistic-looking guns," the headline of Mabley's column calls them "toy guns." And they're not "assault rifles," we're talking about either. They're more like BB guns.

Still, that's not enough for Mabley, who says there is "no excuse" for these items to be sold. (A sporting goods story reports they are big sellers.)

So much for gun control being limited to the city of Chicago, when suburbanites are fearful of BB guns. Blame it on paranoia, rooted in the mass public's unfamiliarity with guns.

In the classic film A Christmas Story, a young boy is constantly warned that if he gets his prized BB gun for Christmas, "you'll shoot your eye out." No such thing happens, of course. But the film points out one truth--people are not stupid. They know that even BB guns carry risks. But risk alone is no reason to ban the sale of anything. If that was the case, we wouldn't have cars.
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Michigan House Washes Hands of Detroit Schools
The State of Michigan took over the Detroit Public Schools. Now it's ready to give it back to Detroit--either through an elected board, or to the mayor.

Among the interesting items in this story: "the Health Department and the district will sign a memorandum of understanding to ensure that all school kitchens are up to code."

Now what was that about school breakfasts again? Imagine if this was happening in a privately owned restaurant: how long would it be in business?
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Prices Affect Health Care Decisions. Of Course.
A study in the New England Journal of Medicine, summarized ever-so-briefly in the Chicago Sun-Times, reports that when it comes to health care, prices do make a difference. The study looked at two large companies that went to a tiered co-payment schedule. Under this arrangement, employees have the lowest co-pay for prescription drugs, more for drugs on a company formulary, and even more for drugs not on the formulary. The findings: some people stopped taking some of the drugs altogether.

I suppose this is vindication of sorts, for those who think (as I do) that health care costs ought to be more visible. People do respond to incentives. That's the clear message of this experiment.

This may be spun by opponents of Medical Savings Accounts as a cautionary tale: "See, see, when people have a financial stake in their own health care, they won't take care of themselves as they ought to. They will even stop taking drugs they should be taking."

That would be the wrong lesson. Of course there are financial incentives in health care, and few people get everything they want or even need. But right now, the economic constraints are not visible; rationing is not self-selected by consumers, but done less visibly by government officials, hospital staff, insurance company technicians, corporate benefits managers, and the like. The problem with the companies examined in the study is not that financial incentives were visible to employees (they were--for drugs), but they are not even more clearly seen. It's time to expand the use of low-cost, high-deductible insurance to cover only catastrophic events, as well as things such as Medical Savings Accounts and Health Reimbursement Arrangements to address less costly expenditures.
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Welfare for All!
Attention taxpayers across the country: Chicago alderman Patrick O'Connor wants you to pay for the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to go into the breakfast business.

Here's the reasoning.
1. It's bad for to be fat.
2. Lots of kids in the CPS fat. They're fat because they snack throughout the school day.
3. They snack because they don't eat breakfast. (Often implied in calls for free meals at schools: families are too poor to feed their kids. So where do the kids get money for vending machine food?)
4. The CPS does serve breakfast to some kids, but it ought to expand that task to everyone.

Says the Chicago Sun-Times [ellipses in original] "A lot of children don't participate because . . . there's a stigma attached or they're not there in time," O'Connor said, arguing that much of the tab for an expanded breakfast program would be picked up by the federal government."

But the story also contains this interesting comment from a pediatrician: ""Thirty years ago, 66 percent of children walked to school. Today, only 3 percent do." Wonder if government policy has anything to do with that. Ya think?
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Illinois Business Climate: Fair or Foul?
So how has Gov. Rod Blagojevich been as an overseer of the Illinois Economy? The president of the state's Chamber of Commerce finds at least one thing to praise: "I can't recall any previous administration actually putting out an agenda they can be held accountable for. I think that's positive. Now we've got to reserve judgment on whether it's image and PR or whether it's real."

To his credit, the governor has not raised sales or income taxes. But he has been part of an effort (successful) to raise the minimum wage, a job-killing action. And he has also "raised scores of business fees and increased taxes for some industries." Remember the principle: you get more of what you subsidize, and less of what you tax. More business taxes, less business.

The governor's staff defends his record, arguing, as this AP story in the Daily Herald summarizes them , "taxes and fees are comparable to other large, industrial states."

Perhaps. But have they noticed that jobs and people have been moving to lower-taxed states such as Colorado and Nevada, and that they are fighting a decades-long population shift to the sunbelt?

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Laboratories of Democracy
You've heard the expression that the states are "laboratories of democracy." A couple of years ago, Michael S. Greve explored the origin of that phrase. As coined by Justice Louis D. Brandeis, it "had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism." Rather than encourage experimentation in the states, the view of jurisprudence inherent in Brandeis' remarks hinders it.

(Thanks to Ramesh Ponnuru who mentioned this in "The Corner" of National Review during an ongoing debate over a federal marriage amendment.]
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Right Hand, Left Hand
Writing in the Weekly Standard, Irwin M. Stelzer provides a quick review of the legal and business challenges of obesity. Companies such as McDonalds and PepsiCo are under fire from trial lawyers, and the FDA may step in to require more extensive product labeling. State legislatures are considering a number of regulations. But Stelzer ends the article with a reminder of how government policy works at cross-purposes.

"Whether FDA regulation will stem the tide of legislation--150 bills are now in the hoppers of state legislatures, most of them to control foods distributed in schools--is uncertain. But no matter what the regulators or the states do, the federal government is unlikely to stop subsidizing the production of sugar, corn, and other fattening food products. After all, it has always subsidized tobacco growers."
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Dumping on Michigan
Some Michigan residents feel dumped on--literally. Some 20 percent of landfill trash last year came from "foreign" sources--other states, as well as Canada.

"Because of free trade agreements and interstate commerce rules, lawmakers can't ban trash from Canada or other states," the Freep says.
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Create Your Own Job
Steve Lowe was a supervisor in Snap-on tool factory in the southeastern Illinois town of Mr. Carmel. The factory closed, and declined an offer to take a similar job at another company site out of state. With few employers in this town of 8,000, he decided to become his own boss, and opened up a car wash.

As the Daily Herald puts it, "He'll have to polish a lot more to replace the $68,000 salary he lost when he was laid off in October, but he's not complaining." Lowe is now alone, of course. "[The] picture isn't all bleak, experts agree. Smaller manufacturers are growing," in downstate Illinois and elsewhere.

This story provides a small example of a broader trend: a greater number of people are taking on self-employment. In an article published yesterday, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) observed that "The Self-Employed Boost
U.S. Economic Recovery."

According to the WSJ, self-employment has risen by 400,000 in the last year, though "it has been hard to tell whether these new self-employed workers were really profiting from their ventures, or whether they were just biding their time during a period of painful unemployment."

Investment guru Kenneth Safian ran some numbers, and found that proprietor income was up 8.6 percent, compared with only 2.3 percent for people on company payrolls. His conclusion: we are "becoming more entrepreneurial." The political implication of this growth: unemployment may not be as big of a problem as official statistics indicate, since there is a lag between business formation and employment surveys.

The Journal suggests that one reason for the surge in self-employment income is the continued practice of outsourcing: what was once done by employees is now farmed out to freelancers, some of whom used to be employees of the same firm.

This isn't the first recovery in which self-employment income has outpaced corporate income. But it's a good sign--not only could it be a leading indicator of an economic uptick, but there could be significant implications for public policy. It could, for example, lead to greater acceptance of the inevitable--using market-based investments to shore up Social Security--as well as market-friendly policy in general. While large businesses can saddle up to big government to squash the competition, smaller firms are generally more favorably disposed to economic freedom. A push for that from a growing number of self-employed would be good for all of us.
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In a TIF over funding
Tax-increment financing (TIF) is one of those policies that sounds good, but is problematic. It offers tax relief for a specific area, for a period of time, for certain purposes. Tax cuts are great. We should have more. But TIFs are subject to the problem of hypotheticals--would this development, here, happen without this particular tax cut? They are also prone to political favoritism and abuse of eminent domain. This article about a proposed TIF in Springfield, Illinois, offers a quick intro to the topic.
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Sunday: Two Temples, Same God
Ever see a football player point a finger to the sky after a touchdown, as if to draw attention to God? The Detroit News has a story on religious athletes.

Best quote: Jason Hanson, kicker (and a very good one at that) for the Detroit Lions: "In the context of who God roots for, I have no idea."

(OK, so this isn't exactly policy-related, but still, interesting, given the role of the two temples--church, and the sports stadium--in American life.)
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Are Social Studies Neglected?
Barely one quarter of Michigan students meet the bar on standardized tests of social studies. According to the Freep, social studies teachers cite the emphasis on reading and math--through the No Child Left Behind Act--as the culprit.

They also cite the fact that social studies tests are not required to win Michigan Merit Award scholarships for college. Students aren't dumb: they follow the incentives (money).

But the neglect of social studies is nothing new. Social studies was my favorite subject in K-12, but with one or two exceptions, the teachers I had were mediocre. Junior-year history was simply a rehash of an 8th-grade class: a waste of time.
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Lost Inventory
A writer to the Detroit Free Press asks about the distances used on road signs ("33 miles to Pontiac: does that mean to the city limits, or to the center of the city?"). Columnist Matt Helms says "the Michigan Department of Transportation didn't immediately have available a list of signs to check out and see exactly which spot in Pontiac was used for the 33-miles sign."

This is not the most pressing policy issue, by any means, but it points out what may be a management problem. Shouldn't the Department of Transportation know where all of its signs are? With bar coding placed on every item in a supermarket, and the growth of radio ID tags and GPS technology, it would seem that the state ought to know where its property is "immediately."
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Slippery Slopes
The Ironwood Daily Globe, in the Lake Superior snowbelt area, reports that Wisconsin has cut the hours its road-clearing crews will operate. The result could be a "long, accident-filled winter."

I may be guilty of special pleading--I would, after all, like to do some driving in Wisconsin this season. But shouldn't clearing the roads be one of the primary responsibilities of the government? Granted, it may not be exempt from some cost-cutting measures, but with the state poised to take on any number of other projects--including a $3 million "Hmong cultural center"--there are still yet other ways to balance the budget.

(Governor Doyle vetoed the appropriation for the Hmong center, but apparently he objected only to the procedure used to bring about the funding, not actually having state taxpayers pick up the tab.)
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Post-Thanksgiving Thoughts
Hope you all had a fine Thanksgiving holiday, as I did.

It's a cliche to "give thanks." But to whom? I read once that a child came home from school, announcing that Thanksgiving Day occurred for the first time when the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians.

If you look into the history of the day, it's obvious that there is a strong element of gratitude to God. That's still appropriate. But giving thanks to other people is not wrong, either, for the Lord works in many ways, including through the institutions of good government, family, and fellowship.
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