Excellent Take-Down of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Go read it.

Some News Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

I am pleased to announce that I have been approved to join the Baltimore Examiner as a liberal politics Examiner (commentator). I will be one of maybe twelve such commentators on political matters from different viewpoints throughout Baltimore City and County, as best as I can tell. I look forward to posting my first column there shortly.

Some material from the Examiner may find its way here as well.

Post Retracted Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

I have retracted the post that I had written previously disagreeing with Mark Newgent about "Maryland My Maryland", Maryland's state song. While my disagreements with Mark on this topic are very profound and multi-faceted, I don't feel comfortable with what I wrote. I don't have a more sophisticated explanation for my discomfort than that I am simply uncomfortable with my post. Since this blog is either an enlightened despotism or an unenlightened one, I have made a despotic decision to kill the post.

Personal - The Crab is back (Feb 16) Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Well, after nearly 8 weeks of radio silence, the Crab is back.

A number of factors contributed to my silence online. The biggest was a daisy chain of crazy work hours, punctuated barely by Christmas, New Year's Day & the Inauguration, averaging and occasionally exceeding 60/week. It was a good earn and a good save, since I was too tired to think about spending, let alone actually spending any mone - but what a cost in terms of quality life! In a sense, I have been living in a "time famine."

Additional factors were various projects on my to-do lists including my upcoming divorce filing, and my role as an active hands-on parent of my two autistic sons when they are with me in DC. I have also been focusing on maintaining and improving my real-life, "actual live human being" relationships, a frequent weak spot for men entering divorced life. In short, I attempted to have more of a real life at the cost of online life. People have made more foolish choices in a crunch.

A few personal updates.

1) The Crab will be moving back to Maryland at the end of April or thereabouts. 50 miles away from my boys is too far. My original purpose for moving into DC no longer applies, and if I am going to live in Maryland I should live where I can be a better father to the little fellows by reaching their school in Lochearn, their day care in Reisterstown and their mother and stepfather's apartment easily in Owings Mills. Western Baltimore County or maybe a few neighborhoods in West/NW Baltimore are under consideration. Irvington/Ten Hills, Ashburton, Mount Washington, Cheswolde and basically all of the suburban region between Park Heights Avenue and the MARC station in Halethorpe/Arbutus.

2) In light of the time famine aforementioned, I remain in flux on what to do with my blogging "empire." The empire needs some roads and taverns and ports.

3) I am in transition professionally to work in metro Baltimore, ideally in the western suburbs such as Towson or Pikesville. More to come on this. Specifically, I am considering a major revamp of www.responsivedocuments.com in furtherance of this contemplated move.

4) Good Catch Blog and Palimpsest will get revamped in turn, but mostly cosmetically.

Many thanks to all my readers, all 10 of you who have stayed on during this period of near-monastic silence.

Nice piece by Michael Dresser on Baltimore's Rail Transit Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

I agree with Michael Dresser of the Sun that Howard Street is pretty dismal and that the rail system in Baltimore leaves a great deal to be desired. I am optimistic that the Red Line will make the sorts of connections that visitors and commuters actually want to make, especially if they can put a little bit of the rail underground downtown.

A lot of European cities have hybrid light-rail/subway systems that run at grade for most of their length but burrow underground in the densest parts of town. Baltimore does not need 20 miles of grade-separated elevated/tunnelled rail; it needs 70 miles of dual-tracked rail with maybe 7-8 of it underground. The light rail currently in operation would be much more attractive if it ran underground along Howard Street; there is already a freight rail tunnel there and a crossing by the subway near Baltimore. But a new east-west tunnel from, say, MLK Boulevard to Little Italy, with pedestrian connections underground to a portal at Charles Center and Convention Center, would be great. If it connects to Little Italy, Greektown and Highlandtown, awesome for the future of dining in this city (I can already see it marketed as the "lunch train.")

Daily Record's On the Record: Let The Senator Fail Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Joe Bacchus of On the Record, December 19, 2008:

I understand people have memories attached to the place, but all their praise and all their memories haven’t translated into the dollars needed to keep the theater running these past few years. So now it needs yet another bailout. Seems there’s a lot of that going around in this economy.

The market doesn’t want the Senator. It doesn’t care how many single-screen theaters are left in the U.S. It only cares about businesses that can sustain themselves — not those that can only tug on heartstrings every couple of years in order to eke out a little more time on the ventilator.

Even non-profit organizations participate in "the free market," engage in marketing, cope with competition and market realities, etc. The dichotomy between "free market" and "non-profit cultural institution" is a false one.

But I think that Bacchus has a good point generally. A great deal of Baltimore's local cultural and historical heritage is observed in the breach and in the past/present perfect tense. Baltimoreans (and though I live in DC now I don't exclude myself from the label) are among the most parochial people on the planet at times, but not in ways that provide the sorts of support to local institutions and points of heritage.

Everybody remembers the Senator Theater, right? But the annoying multiplexes fill up. Why? Because we have no streetcars any more to take people to the Senator from downtown. Why? Because we ripped them up and replaced them with lower-grade buses that we can barely keep safe. Plus, without the streetcars, without the urban and near-suburban industrial and commercial base, most Baltimoreans live outside the Beltway now. Folks in Columbia or in Hunt Valley aren't driving to Govans to questionable parking and the risk of getting attacked or their car vandalized.

Washington, DC is not a particularly safe city by any stretch; there have been a lot of stabbings and shootings here of late. But the idea that the city is just doomed and is giving up, the sense of "Teh Fail" from so many things in Baltimore from transit to crime to open-air dope dealing rendering almost entire ZIP codes into combat zones, just doesn't dominate DC, even the nastier parts of the city. Even in beleaguered Anacostia, one sees signs of hope, discussions of new development, etc.

Unfortunately, Baltimore cannot just say "we fouled up" and get a federal bailout because, unfortunately, Baltimore is neither Wall Street nor Detroit's feudal industrial base (whose workers are often from Detroit and maybe Dearborn and the executives are from Grosse Pointe, never Detroit.) To quote Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.

What Mark Newgent Said About Che Guevara Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Today seems to be the day for grudging praise. My only disagreement with Mark Newgent's approach is that he didn't take down more targets than Ernesto Guevara when he had the opportunity in his post. I am no cheerleader for Red Maryland after the last election but Newgent hit this one right. The entirety of hammer-and-sickle kitsch is hideous, not just the one with the Castro's pal's face on it.

Not all communist governments have been the same historically of course. Vietnam was a far less vicious place than neighboring Cambodia. Yugoslavia managed to avoid the wholesale persecution of religion (and some of the worst inefficiencies of top-down economic inefficiency) that characterized neighboring states such as Albania and Romania. The Indian state of Kerala has repeatedly elected a Communist party over many years, and through its policies has achieved the longest life expectancies and literacy levels in all of India (though at considerable costs in other economic indicators.) Of course, residents of Kerala are free to leave Kerala and to leave India and to criticize the government loudly and publicly without state sanction, unlike residents of Soviet-bloc or other unfree societies have been or, in the case of Belarus, still are.

But let's face the facts: there is (extremely appropriately) a memorial museum in Washington for the many millions of murders of the Holocaust, but none for the victims of reckless and intentional killing by communists either by bullets, by death in prison or by starvation through famines inflicted with either depraved indifference or specific intent. Stalin's liquidation of private farm land and command economics on food inflicted a hideous death toll on Ukraine, long known as the "breadbasket of Europe" for its fertile soil and fairly favorable weather for wheat and livestock raising. The murders during the Cultural Revolution in China, Ceaucescu's torture chambers and secret police, the killing fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot, the communist efforts to destroy local cultures in favor of granite and concrete Communist temples, shrines and "iconography" - these outrages have no memorial monument in DC. Not one.

Stalin's policies killed perhaps 3 million in Ukraine in the 1930's; it is speculated that Stalin inflicted this famine as a tool against Ukrainian nationalism, under the theory that dead and starving people cannot easily rebel. There's not even an outhouse or fire hydrant in DC dedicated to these victims, nor to those who survived. We think that the Great Depression was bad here, and it was in many ways, but outright starvation was rare. Kansas didn't starve, didn't lose 25% of its people in between 1929 and 1933 as large sections of central Ukraine's breadbasket did from starvation and the effort to escape that starvation. And this is only one facet of one atrocity; there are many, many more.

Yet these hideously ignorant or indifferent children even today, decades after the Soviet Union has fallen and most of Eastern Europe is economically and politically free, wear gear with red stars and hammer-and-sickle logos to look "cool." They may as well wear swastikas as well and give all of the totalitarian murderers equal time. I dare them to wear that garbage on the streets of Tallinn or Riga after dark; if they do, they should bring friends built like bricklayers, not scrawny-assed coffee-shop effetes.

Congratulations to Paul Foer on a Good Scoop Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Paul Foer of Annapolis Capital Punishment and I don't see eye-to-eye generally. We differ both in substance and style on the best way to deal with conservative opposition, and we have some significant differences on policy, he being a much stronger supporter of regulation and critic of development than I. We have scrapped a few times.

But no one can deny the level of detail and effort that he puts into work covering transportation issues, crime and local politics the City of Annapolis and to a lesser extent Anne Arundel County.

Foer scored a mention in the Baltimore Sun today for breaking the story that the acting Annapolis city attorney Stephen Kling's law license had been suspended for, reportedly, 2 years for failing to report his pro bono hours as an attorney.

To clarify the matter (as Foer does pretty well in his links), attorneys must do three things to stay certified: they have to pay annual dues to the Maryland Client Protection Fund, they have to submit a report regarding their escrow accounts' status and they have to report the total number of pro bono hours that they have performed. There is no pro bono requirement in Maryland; though the rules of professional conduct do indicate that an attorney "should" render pro bono professional service, it's a "should", not a "must." Reporting the hours done, however, is mandatory (even if zero, "zero" needs to be reported.) The escrow and pro bono forms can be done on paper or online; takes maybe 5-6 minutes. As Foer noted, "You'd think this would be pretty easy to do" and he's right: it is. The only mitigating factor is that the CPF dues form, the escrow filing and the pro bono filing are not done the same way; the latter two can be done online and are due on a different annual schedule from the green-enveloped dues form, which currently cannot be completed online, only by dead-tree check.

I will neither endorse nor criticize any other comments that Foer made in his long posts on this topic, as most of the other material reflects either his personal experiences with Kling or his detailed knowledge of local politics far exceeding mine as a non-resident. But congratulations to Paul Foer on the sort of good scoop that local bloggers can do best.

Football Agony of Defeat Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

What's worse: losing a meaningless game that you bloody well should have won (Skins losing to the now 2-692 Bengals) or losing a critical game that you bloody well could have won (Ravens losing in the last minute at home to the division-leading Steelers)? Despondent, grieving minds actually don't want to know, just to drink week 14 away or throw themselves. I was just grateful for the company of old friends from work who met me at the Olney Ale House last night to keep my eyes off of the television set that, otherwise, surely would have ruined my entire night.

Those who remember the opening montage of the old ABC Wild World of Sports with Jim McKay, where McKay intones "...and the agony of defeat" while a skier takes one unforgettable hideous tumbling bail off of the slope? If you have seen it, you don't forget it. Ray Lewis and Jason Campbell probably envied that poor bastard when they got up this morning.

Greg Kline: Christmas is a Time for Slapping Heretics Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

I respect Greg Kline for his work ethic and professional acumen as an attorney. I have a harder time seeing the merits of a call to slap heretics, even metaphorically, however. Then again, even a lapsed-with-extreme-prejudice (ex-)Catholic like me still looks at Lutherans as heretics (though there has been some irenic effort along that line of thinking), and at Luther as an abomination, so a call from a Lutheran minister to slap heretics does not resonate well here at Good Catch Media.

Kline's citation is perhaps a capstone of Maryland right-blogosphere theological (?) discussion on whether people who say something other than "Merry Christmas", or perhaps fail to utter that phrase or any at all, should be suffered politely. As usual, Brian Griffiths has his common-sense eye on the bottom line, which is why he is catching hell from the social conservatives on his side with whom he has an uneasy alliance. One need not accept "separation of church and state" as a logical jurisprudential conclusion to accept "separation of theology department and political party" as a way to stop losing elections. But here at Team Blue, I say proudly: Onward Christian Soldiers, marching off the cliff!

A Big Thank-You to Isaac Smith Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Isaac Smith of Free State Politics has been arguably the best liberal blogger in Maryland or at a minimum a bona fide competitor for the title. Isaac kept Free State Politics going as long as he could as a labor of love, but the demands of life as a public policy grad student at Maryland gave way to the challenges of securing employment in this hideous economy where Wall Street and Detroit are competing for multi-billions in corporate welfare for survival.

Isaac has hung it up, at least for now - disappointing news but entirely understandable and worthy of respect. I have taken breaks from blogging for far less serious grounds.

Isaac's apparent/imminent departure leaves a hole in the Maryland blogosphere. Technically I am not part of the Maryland blogosphere; I live in DC and do not blog as heavily about Maryland-specific issues as I used to, though the Maryland Blogger Alliance has generously kept me in "expat" status.

There are some fissures and differences among conservative bloggers in Maryland. Brian Griffiths, for example, takes a noticeably less socially-conservative approach from, say, Greg Kline (check out Greg's piece on Christmas for an example of his social conservatism.) And Team Red in the Maryland blogosphere has had a few squabbles amongst themselves along the way, though more about personalities and inside baseball than about ideology. On the whole, though, they have had a stronger identity, presence and output than Team Blue in MD.

I have certainly had my differences with some liberal bloggers in MD, some about ideology (I am more sympathetic to free-market economics than most liberals) and some about style and approach. I don't feel like rehashing old boring blog-flames here, but I don't feel a sense of identity with Team Blue here. But I always respected Isaac's approach, staunch advocacy for progressive policy positions (even when I disagreed on details) and his cautious decency when suffering the occasional wingnut troll on his site (as opposed to bona fide conservative critiques which he also handled extremely well.)

Whither the liberal blogosphere in Maryland? A question not quickly answered, in my view.

Ravens Beat Redskins 24-10 Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Headline says it all. I enjoyed the game with an old college friend at RFD in Chinatown. Very good defense and pretty decent quarterbacking from Joe Flacco, with few major mistakes. This put Washington in a bad spot for the NFC Wild Card and certainly helps Baltimore stay competitive in the AFC North. Next week: the division-leading Steelers playing in Baltimore at 4:15 PM.

Baltimore City To Start Non-Profit Car-Sharing Service Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun, November 29, 2008:

Baltimore officials are preparing to launch a nonprofit car-sharing service, hoping that the initiative will reduce the overall number of cars used in the city.

The idea is to create a service similar to that provided by the for-profit firm ZipCar, which allows subscribers to reserve a car via a Web site for a short time. Subscribers pay a monthly fee for the service, in addition to a per-mile or per-hour usage fee.

...

In 2006, Little had hoped that ZipCar or Flexcar - then the country's two largest car-sharing companies - would expand in Baltimore. Flexcar initially showed interest, but when the two firms merged last fall, the resulting company decided not to commit more cars to Baltimore. ZipCar, the merged company, still has a handful of vehicles at the Johns Hopkins University.

A few points.

1) Baltimore's public transit system is quite weak and parking is pretty plentiful in almost every neighborhood, at least compared with Washington where many residents simply view occasional parking tickets as a condition, not a problem to solve or avoid. Very good public transit is what makes DC livable as a car-free city; even the maligned bus service here is "Swiss-run" compared with Baltimore's MTA.

2) DC is a wealthier city with a lot of single-occupant households who like to go out to eat and travel a lot. Baltimore had one of the lowest frequencies of dining out in the country recently and is generally a poorer city. A ZipCar can act as a cab substitute on dates, out of town travel and the like. If you have ever held two preschoolers' hands on a moving bus, you understand the appeal of the car. I would go so far to say that a public transit system that can figure out how to handle the preschool problem deserved the Nobel Prize.

3) Washington is much more of a residential college town; unlike Baltimore with its many regional schools, Catholic, GWU, Georgetown and American are all national or international in scope. It is, after all, the nation's capital; people come here to go to school from every time zone. Baltimore's college students are more likely to live with Mom and Dad in the suburbs, and have no need for a ZipCar or its municipally branded equivalent.

That said, maybe this is a situation where the City can do the market some good by treating this program as a broad-based market test, ideally to be supplanted later by private market players for new pump-primed market. I don't generally favor the use of public resources for market catalyzing purposes but in this case, there may be positive externalities to come from this as an experiment. Particularly if the City is smart about how it marks its vehicles both to discourage theft AND to encourage visibility of the vehicles in hipster nodes like Canton and Fells Point, this could be a winner for getting folks to own 1.2 cars, so to speak, rather than 2. For something as daunting as giving up a vehicle and going car-less, nothing short of live proof of concept will get people to give up the vehicle mode that they know (if dislike) and replace it with a ZipCar style vehicle.

Soccer Dad on the Death Penalty Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Soccer Dad has a good post on the state of Maryland's death penalty. I don't know that his piece makes the sale for me for the death penalty itself, but it does a great job of debunking a lot of the theoretical, practical and political opposition to it in Maryland.

I am not sold that the death penalty is administered in a racially discriminatory manner in Maryland; like Soccer Dad, I don't see a large enough sample size. It appears to be the case that the racial balance of the jury pool correlates to the frequency of the pursuit of the death penalty in Maryland's different jurisdictions. In my view, the quality of evidence may also come into play; the "stop snitching" culture of Baltimore crime makes it a lot harder than elsewhere to pursue all criminal prosecutions both at trial and on appeal. Add in the extreme cost of a death penalty case, and it's easier to respect the Baltimore City State's Attorney's choice never (or nearly never) to pursue the death penalty.

Turkey Bowl: Loyola Pounds Calvert Hall 35-0 Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun, November 26, 2008:

A recent transplant from North Dakota, Loyola quarterback Connor Bruns didn't know quite what to expect in his first start against archrival Calvert Hall in today's 89th Turkey Bowl.

...

The strong-armed junior threw fourth-down touchdown passes on his team's first two possessions, and teammate Terence Garvin added a career-high 190 rushing yards as the No. 2 Dons polished off a perfect season with a 35-0 win before an announced 12,347 at M&T Bank Stadium.

...

Loyola (11-0) has won six straight and 20 of 24 in the series, which it leads 48-33-8. It was the largest margin of victory for either team since Calvert Hall won by the same score in 1976.

Roll, Dons, Roll. Ah, to spend a day again in the spring of 1987....

Pikesville McDonald's Goes All Starbucks On Us?? Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Dining@Large Blog, Baltimore Sun, November 19, 2008:

McDonald's seems to have turned into a -- gasp -- stylish coffee house with cozy nooks, custom furniture, limestone countertops, limited edition artwork, wi-fi and flat screen TVs. (OK, a coffee house wouldn't have flat screen TVs.) ...

Check out the pictures in the original.

For non-locals, the 500 block of Reisterstown Road in Pikesville is not where I would expect a McDonald's to "go Gucci" with a flat screen TV, dark paneling and comfy-butt couches. Pikesville is a diverse community; this part of Pikesville is maybe 3/4 mile north of the city line at Milford Mill Road. There are some wealthy families in Pikesville but for the most part this end of Pikesville/Milford Mill is pretty much middle class, with a fairly nearby Orthodox Jewish community that would not be particularly likely to patronize a non-kosher restaurant. It's not near a college or particularly near a morning transit node, though there's a Metro station maybe 1 mile away or less. There's a kosher bagel shop perhaps 3 blocks north of it, probably aiming at a different market segment, and to my knowledge no Starbucks or Caribou Coffee within 1 mile (though a struggling Seattle's Best is less than a mile away.)

I have eaten quite a few times in that McDonald's, back when I lived in NW Baltimore and would sneak a newspaper and a greasy meal on a Sunday during a nearby Jiffy Lube run or whatnot. Now it's McLatte? McSpresso? How about just McNuggets?


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Half of Baltimore Light Rail Service Halted Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun, November 18, 2008:

Thousands of Baltimore-area commuters were forced to abandon trains and board buses yesterday, the first workday disrupted by a light rail shutdown that closed the northern half of the system. State officials were unable to say how long service would be curtailed by a problem caused in part by the fall of autumn leaves.

Commuters attempting to take light rail between North Avenue and Hunt Valley were diverted to shuttle buses, which passengers said added as much as 90 minutes to the trip.

Of course. It's Baltimore. What the heck did you expect from public transit - administratie competence or efficiency?


Longer portion of post goes here.

Quadruple Shooting Kills 2 in Odenton Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Baltimore Sun, November 16, 2008:

Two men were killed during a quadruple shooting in the parking lot of an Odenton shopping center early this morning, according to Anne Arundel County police.

Police responded to the North Odenton Plaza, in the 1600 block of Annapolis road, about 1:30 a.m. to find the two men dead, apparently of gun shot wounds.

Odenton is a strange sort of suburb in a lot of ways. It stretches NW-SE along Annapolis Road at almost the exact midpoint between downtown Baltimore and downtown DC. The MARC trains passing through and stopping at Odenton reach Baltimore and Washington in almost exactly 30 minutes in each case.

In and near Odenton lies an amazing mix of housing stock, from upper-income ego palaces to blue-collar off-base housing for adjacent Ft. Meade to section 8 nastiness in Pioneer City. My ex and I lived at the very edge of Pioneer City for about a year when I had a law practice in Upper Marlboro and she worked north of Baltimore City. It was not as bad where we were as its reputation but the police presence was pretty thick, and the local pizza parlors would NOT deliver to us even though they would deliver to points further away.

The shopping center at 1600 Annapolis Road is not one that I remember very well. I think I recall an Asian restaurant, maybe Chinese, one with a liquor license. But that's all I remember.

I do not ordinarily post about local crime reports, but this area is scheduled for massive BRAC development over the next 10 years. It would be great if BRAC could result in the clean-up of this area's crime problem, ideally through increased attention to the area as a population center, rather than as a distant "no-man's land" 15 miles from Anne Arundel's county seat.

Odenton and the surrounding communities have a lot of history, and some measure of local pride, but the political dynamics of the area are a little weird. NSA is next door, so there are a lot of people who "work with computers" or "work near the airport" but won't say where they get their paychecks. The military presence puts an element of transience or of focus outside of local dynamics. Odenton is a long-distance call from Baltimore and Washington both; while in the age of cell phones this probably matters less, it's indicative of the ambiguous identity of the region. There are multiple county borders quite nearby, especially if one counts nearby Laurel that sits essentially in four different counties.

In short, it's harder for this area to produce political influence than some others; the political geography and demographics make political power harder to organize and focus.

UPDATE: many thanks to sharp-eyed reader RCH again for his editorial acumen.

MD Court of Appeals Overturns 1st Degree Murder Conviction Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Daily Record, November 12, 2008:

A unanimous Court of Appeals has overturned a first-degree murder conviction, saying the prosecutor violated the defendant’s attorney-client privilege by asking him about the timing and content of his pre-trial discussions with defense counsel.

...

"The state has every right to challenge a criminal defendant’s credibility through vigorous cross-examination," [Judge Mary Ellen] Barbera wrote. "The state has no right, however, to effect that goal through improper means. In this case, the state undermined petitioner’s credibility by the improper means of invading his attorney-client privilege."

...

On cross-examination, the prosecutor sought to undermine [Defendant] Blanks’ credibility by asking when he and his attorney had first discussed his testimony that he had had an affair with the victim.

After the defense attorney’s objection was overruled, Blanks responded that he had discussed his testimony only briefly with his lawyer.

The Court of Appeals said the objection should have been sustained.

No Mercy from the Ravens Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Good. I think we need to inflict a good old-fashioned beat-down another team. We are doing that now with I think 6 minutes to go, three four touchdowns up. Poor Texans, they look like last year's Ravens.


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