Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
May / June / July
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November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2004:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2005:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2006:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2007:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2008:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July

Current entries

Monday, January 27, 2003, 5:22 pm

Political State Report. I have finally made my first post to the new website http://polstate.com/, which follows state politics in all 50 states via reports from volunteer bloggers.

Here's what I wrote:

MI: New Dem State Party Chair?

Michigan Democrats will hold their convention at Cobo Arena in Detroit on February 15. Incumbent state party chair Mark Brewer says he's running for re-election, but Gov. Granholm appears to be supporting Melvin 'Butch' Hollowell instead.

Butch Hollowell is a black Detroit attorney who worked for Al Gore in the 2000 Florida recount and was the Democratic nominee for Michigan Secretary of State in the 2002 election. He is a close ally of Gov. Granholm.

Mark Brewer, who has been party chair since 1995, started in politics with former Congressman David Bonior, who Granholm defeated in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2002. Brewer has strong support from labor groups in the party.

A rumored compromise would be for Hollowell to be elected party chair, but to continue his law practice, with Brewer moving to a new position of party executive director.

Both men have been criticized for ineffectiveness -- Hollowell for his unsuccessful campaign for Secretary of State, and Brewer for the many disasters the party has suffered on his watch. However, it's hard to see that either could have done a lot better under the circumstances.

Hollowell was running for a position which gets little notice in the hubbub of an election year, so that a large percentage of voters made the decision based on nothing more than the names on the ballot. "Melvin" and "Butch" are both names with extremely negative associations; these contrasted sharply with the bright, appealing name of the Republican nominee, Terri Lynn Land, who also had a lot of family money to spend on the race.

Brewer, as party chair, was saddled with the surprise winner of the 1998 gubernatorial primary, Geoffrey Fieger, a flamboyant lawyer best known for representing Jack "Dr. Death" Kevorkian; with Fieger leading the ticket, Michigan Democrats did poorly in a generally Democratic year. Brewer also gets indirect blame for the failures of the Democratic State House and Senate campaign operations, which get outmaneuvered and outgunned by the Republicans in election after election.

A probably overriding consideration is that the Governor is normally entitled to name the state party chair. To make an exception for Gov. Granholm would undermine her authority.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Saturday, January 18, 2003, 9:54 pm

The Eldred defeat. The biggest news of the past week, as far as I am concerned, is the disheartening decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft. In other words, the Supreme Court has ruled that it was within the powers of Congress to extend copyrights again and again -- perpetuity on the installment plan -- despite the words "limited times" in the Constitution.

The vote was seven to two -- the dissenters were Stevens and Breyer. Justice Ginsberg wrote the majority opinion (all PDFs).

Professor Lawrence Lessig, who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs before the Supreme Court, expected the Court majority (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, O'Connor) to apply the Lopez test, which is to say, that any Constitutional grant of power to Congress carries limitations if it is properly interpreted. If the limitations on each grant of power aren't explicit, then they are implicit, say these five justices.

However, to his shock (later restated more calmly), the five conservative justices not only didn't apply the Lopez enumeration principle -- they didn't say a word about it. The other four justices don't believe in this principle, so not surprisingly it isn't mentioned in the opinions three of them wrote (majority opinion and two dissents).

No doubt lawyers and legal scholars will argue about this for a long time, but it looks to me like yet another cynical Bush-v-Gore-quality abandonment of claimed legal principles by the conservative justices. Striking down powers of Congress is mandatory if Congress is enacting liberal programs, but unthinkable if Congress is passing special interest legislation for powerful business interests at the expense of the public.

On this, I find myself in agreement with Glenn Reynolds, who commented:

The majority opinion by Justice Ginsburg largely ignored those questions, leaving such issues to Congress's discretion. (Though the influence of Big Media money on Congress suggests that the Framers were on to something where the corruption angle is concerned.) More strikingly, all the Justices who have stood for limiting Congress's powers in other recent cases (such as United States v. Lopez and United States v. Morrison) sided with her, calling their commitment to limited government into question. It was left to the unlikely duo of Justice John Paul Stevens and Justice Stephen Breyer to write, in dissent, about the importance of limited Congressional power. While many people are unhappy with the Intellectual Property implications of this decision, its most striking aspect is the strict constructionists' abandonment of the principles of limited government. I predict that this will come back to haunt them in future cases.

There is one hopeful idea which has emerged in the days since the decision: the proposed Eric Eldred Act, which would move unused old copyrighted material into the public domain after about fifty years, by way of charging a small tax (maybe $1 per work) and creating a database of owners of old copyrights. Works unclaimed by their copyright holders would be released to the public domain.

The principle is the same as the Michigan state law which eliminated the problem of surface ownership and mineral rights getting hopelessly separated across centuries of land title transfers: mineral owners have to file some papers every forty years or so to show they're still interested in keeping them, or those rights revert to the surface owners.

At the same time, the Eldred Act would create an easily searched record of validly held copyrights, which would make it MUCH easier to arrange publication of older copyrighted works.

Just for example, one of the things I'd love to do with my Political Graveyard web site would be to scan and include portraits of old-time political figures from my large collection of state legislative manuals. Most of these are copyrighted in the names of people or entities that no longer exist. To trace the current copyright ownership, which may have gone to hundreds of heirs or successor entities, would be ruinously expensive (per book!) and might not turn up anyone with the authority to grant or sell permission.

But let's say I go ahead and, say, scan a bunch of pictures from the 1929 New York Red Book (copyright 1929 by the J. B. Lyon Company), and put them on my web site. If somebody figures out that I have infringed on a copyright he inherited from his great-grandfather's estate, it doesn't make any difference that he wasn't using it. It doesn't make any difference if it would have been impossible for me to find him. It doesn't make any difference that I put the images up as a public service, and it is no longer relevant whether I made any money from them. Nor am I entitled to any notice or any opportunity to make restitution. The aggrieved copyright holder can swoop down out of nowhere, seize my computers, my books and papers, my bank accounts, and maybe even my house. Certainly it would be the end of my web site. And there would be criminal liability, too, so theoretically I could also be fined or sent to prison -- just for republishing forgotten pictures of a bunch of long-dead state senators.

My library includes at least tens of thousands of published photos of individuals listed on the web site, and all but the ones from before 1920 are at least potentially under some kind of copyright that could put me at risk for horrific consequences.

Under the new law just upheld by the Supreme Court, these copyrights now extend 95 years. And before they expire, they will surely be extended again.

The media companies that own lucrative copyrights practically own the Congress. Moreover, those companies and their lobbyists are in no mood to be reasonable. Under these circumstances, I don't expect the "Eric Eldred Act" to be taken seriously, let alone enacted. If anything, we need to prepare for a probably losing battle to keep Congress from passing even worse new laws -- not to mention extending the terms of all existing copyrights again and again and again into eternity.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Wednesday, January 8, 2003, 12:22 am

My wife is a clinical psychologist, so she receives monthly issues of the Monitor, magazine of the American Psychological Association. I don't normally give it a second glance, but the January 2003 issue has a number of interesting items:

Hostility leads to heart disease? Hostility, as measured in a standard personality test, is defined as "a stable tendency to interpret the world and other people in a cynical and negative manner." (Bloggers take note!) According to a three-year study of 774 white men, hostility is a better predictor of heart attacks or angina than smoking, drinking, overeating, or cholesterol levels. They're working on a fifteen-year followup.
Psychologist politicians. There are now five members of Congress with PhD's in psychology (though one of them "doesn't consider himself a psychologist"), and eleven members of state legislatures. Fourteen of the sixteen are Democrats. The pioneer in this was Ted Strickland (D-Ohio), who used to raise money among APA members as "the only psychologist in Congress." Aha, more data for The Political Graveyard!
The perils of profiling for the media. During the Washington-area sniper investigation, the media featured "experts" (some identified as psychologists) who stated confidently that the killer was a single white male. The perpetrators turned out to be a pair of African-American men. Seven forensic psychologists speak out on lessons learned in this case.
The unexpected benefits of basic science. In 1965, the designers of the World Trade Center wanted to find out how much a tall building could sway in the wind before occupants of the uppermost floors would notice. Researchers in Oregon set up a motion chamber disguised as an optometrist's office, so that unwitting subjects could be exposed to "horizontal acceleration" -- i.e., the room would move. They found that the threshold for noticing horizontal acceleration was ten times lower then the WTC engineers had thought. (In response to this startling news, architect Minoru Yamasaki himself came out to Oregon and took a ride in the device.) The study was replicated in New York; the findings were the same. As a result, the twin towers were redesigned to strengthen the exterior columns and reduce sway. On September 11, this strengthening is thought to be the reason the buildings stayed up long enough for most of the occupants to escape safely.

Belated update: The APA pages were relocated, so I fixed the links.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Saturday, January 4, 2003, 2:10 am

Gregory Hlatky, my politically conservative mentor in blogging, writes about the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He blames "politicians at work" for a couple of awkward transitions between the Turnpike and other highways, which involve traffic lights and congestion. That seems just a tad unfair, given that politicians brought about the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Interstate system in the first place.

(His examples do remind me of the state of affairs that existed for years on the route from southern Michigan to Chicago: I-94 stopped at the Indiana state line, where its extremely heavy traffic was shunted onto Indiana 39, a winding two-lane road, for the dozen or so miles to the Indiana Turnpike. It was obvious that Indiana didn't feel like spending millions of dollars building a freeway link that would be used almost exclusively by out-of-state traffic.)

The more interesting historical point, though, is something he mentions only in passing: "the original road followed the right-of-way of an abandoned railway." Calling the route a "railway" both overstates and understates the case, like referring to Mickey Mouse as a rodent, or Craig Shergold as a cancer victim, or Piltdown Man as a fossil.

There don't seem to be any web sites which discuss this in any detail, but the South Pennsylvania Railroad was a phantom, a Potemkin railway, a skirmish between rival robber barons, and incidentally a stock swindle.

It happened in 1883-85. Col. William Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroad was under threat from a parallel track called the "West Shore" (New York, West Shore & Buffalo Railroad), financed by some of his rivals. This led to a "murderous rate war" (i.e., competition).

In retaliation, and as part of his effort to extinguish the West Shore, "Billy" Vanderbilt picked up the South Pennsylvania Railroad, a seemingly hopeless project to build a parallel railway across Pennsylvania in competition with the Pennsylvania Railroad. For Vanderbilt, it was a "blackmail railroad": he didn't really intend to build or operate it. He just wanted to put pressure on the "Pennsy" to drop its support for the West Shore.

But for the feint to be taken seriously, he had to pretend that he was serious about it. He hired some of the country's foremost engineers to plan a state-of-the-art rail line through the daunting mountains of central Pennsylvania. As George Wheeler writes in Pierpont Morgan and Friends:

But during the summer of 1884, some money was spent on showing the sincere purpose of the South Pennsylvania entrepreneurs. Forests were leveled for roadbed, tunnels were bored, piers for bridges to nowhere were built. Lives were lost, some said as many as two thousand.

That's not implausible -- construction work was dangerous in those days. But another account sets the death toll at only 27.

Then, in July 1885, J. P. Morgan (a Vanderbilt ally) arranged a meeting of the rival rail barons aboard his yacht, the Corsair. After a day of negotiations, the shutdown of the West Shore and of the South Pennsylvania was agreed to. Wheeler continues:

But all work on the blackmail railroad had ceased by July 1885. A violent clamor arose from all the investors in the $15 million operation, ranging from the widows and orphans right up to the master steelmaker, [Andrew] Carnegie, who went on railing against the fate of the South Pennsylvania for another four years.

Carnegie and the other investors were not the only ones who felt betrayed. I don't have a source for this handy, but I understand that the civil engineering profession in this country, inspired the dream of the brilliantly designed "tunnel route," nursed a grievance over it for decades. It was as if someone had set out to build the Taggart railway described in Atlas Shrugged -- and then when things were well along, suddenly said, "Never mind!"

At least by some accounts, the "tunnel route" became the Pennsylvania Turnpike, fifty years later, because the engineers never forgot about it.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Friday, January 3, 2003, 9:37 pm

Tolkien's Birthday. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien would have been eleventy-one years old today.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Wednesday, January 1, 2003, 10:39 pm

Out of office. As of the New Year, when my term expired, I'm no longer a Washtenaw County Commissioner. Redistricting put me in the same seat as another Democratic incumbent -- someone considerably better known than me -- so I chose not to seek re-election.

I was appointed commissioner in 2000 to fill a vacancy created by my predecessor's resignation. I ran for a full term that year, and was unopposed in the primary and general election.

County commissioners in Michigan are elected by districts to two-year terms. The elections are partisan. The County Board of Commissioners is a legislative body with mostly financial powers: to equalize tax assessments, to set the tax rates, to enact the county budget, to approve contracts for the county, and so on. There are many other power centers in county government, including elected administrators (sheriff, prosecuting attorney, county clerk/register of deeds, drain commissioner, treasurer), elected judges (circuit court, probate court, district court), and independent boards (road commission, parks commission, and others). The Board of Commissioners has varying degrees of authority over the different county departments, and very little authority to make laws or ordinances.

I represented the 4th District in southwestern Ann Arbor. The district has about 20,000 people, most of them in owner-occupied single family homes built in the decades following WWII, the rest in small apartment complexes. Within its boundaries are the University of Michigan football stadium, and nearby Crisler Arena, but on the whole, it's the part of the city that is least influenced by the university.

The district (which expired along with my term) wraps around the south, southwest, and west edges of Ann Arbor, along I-94. Its creators hoped it would elect a Republican, but that never happened. It's anchored by the Lansdowne neighborhood, once regarded as the local epicenter of ideological conservatism -- it was home to many executives and engineers for Bechtel Corporation. Local media used to illustrate Ann Arbor's range by contrasting conservative, pro-business Lansdowne with the liberal, academic Burns Park neighborhood.

But Bechtel relocated long ago, and Ann Arbor Republicans have been in decline for thirty years. Today Lansdowne usually votes for Democrats; the 4th District as a whole (considered a Republican area just ten years ago) voted for Al Gore in 2000 by a more than 2 to 1 margin.

The Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners, while I was on it, had had fifteen members (in that photo, I'm the bearded guy at the right end of the front row; one member was absent when the picture was taken). The new board, starting today, has eleven members.

Previously, in 1983-88, I served three terms as county commissioner in Ingham County, the Lansing-East Lansing area. In many ways, Ingham County and Washtenaw County are very similar -- they have almost the same population, similar demographics (they're the two most highly educated counties in Michigan), similar politics (they're the two most liberal counties in Michigan), and so on. But the county governments are very different.

Ingham County is like most Michigan counties in that it has no central executive figure. As a direct result, the county commissioner's job is very hands-on. We worked through the county budget in excrutiating detail, during weeks of long committee hearings. Each commissioner served on two of the five standing committees, not to mention other board and committee assignments. I was chair of the Personnel Committee, which among other things was the internal court of last resort for employee grievances. Full board meetings usually had an agenda of 60 to 80 items, each one to be reported on, argued, and voted on. All told, it was very typical for county meetings to take up 20 hours a week.

Washtenaw County's board, by contrast, has a strong county administrator (analogous to a city manager), and no committee structure. It's a lot like a corporate board of directors. The meetings are much less frequent than Ingham's, and relatively short, because so much authority is delegated to the administrator.

Ironically, Washtenaw's board is paid about twice as much as Ingham's. The salary is $15,500, plus "per diems" of $25/meeting, and mileage. Early on, I decided not to accept any per diems or mileage. I did this for a number of reasons: it was a lot of paperwork for a small amount of money; it was legally questionable for a salaried official to also receive per diems; and hell, we were already being well compensated. The county's corporation counsel (unnecessarily) wrote a provision into the board rules explicitly providing that a member could "opt out" of receiving these payments. The Ann Arbor News noticed this, figured out what was going on, and embarrassed me with a big editorial which noisily commended me as having "better ethics" than the other commissioners.

I turned 18 in September 1973, just over 29 years ago, and I have spent 20 of those 29 years as an elected or appointed official in local government. I don't have a politician personality, to say the least, so this is a startling record. Why wasn't I shouldered aside by more gregarious individuals?

It comes down to the shortage of candidates, first noticed in the late 1970s, and growing ever more severe since then. Fewer and fewer people (with the requisite background and qualities and mainstream views) are willing to run for and serve in elected and appointed policy positions at all levels, both parties, all regions. There are fewer activists, fewer volunteers, fewer people with the patience for committee work.

I will have more to say about this later.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Wednesday, January 1, 2003, 1:37 pm

Spam in your referer log. Most webmasters who have looked at their http logs -- or presumably the output of log analysis software -- know that each hit usually comes with a "referer" URL, typically the address of the previous site visited by that browser.

Often, it's a search engine address, usually showing the search term that was used. Or, it's the address of a page which has a link to your site.

Naturally, we webmasters are interested in finding out who links to us, so we try out those URL's to see what's there. Sometimes, the listing is just a fluke -- a site that someone happened to be at when they typed in our site address. But sometimes these "flukes" are pages of advertising. Could it be that those URLs were put into my http log deliberately?

Yup! It's called neural marketing. The promoters write:

We use our proprietary web robot technology to access a rotating list of 200,000 websites over a period of 5 days to leave a trail in each logfile. We touch more than one million unique webmasters per month. Our state-of-the-art statistical algorithms designed by Vincent Granville, Ph.D. simulate real browsing activity...

How 'bout that: a robot that pretends to be a human web visitor! Presumably that means it ignores the usual rules that apply to robots, like obeying the exclusions in your robots.txt file -- since checking that file would give away the game.

As the target website owner checks his daily site statistics, he will find a clickable link to your website in his report... The technique is not percieved as advertising by the recipient.

That will change as this gets to be better known!

Q. What are the products/services most suitable for this kind of advertising? A. Services marketed to website owners. More and more people have their personal website with access to daily site statistics. Typically, internet services of any kind are good candidates for this type of advertising. You can advertise two or more URLs that redirect to the same domain. We also rent a few domain names for this purpose. Contact us for details.

(You can ask to have your site excluded from the spidering -- but why bother? It would only reduce your traffic stats!)

I'm reminded of a telemarketing call I get occasionally for a carpet cleaning service. As you pick up the phone, there's a moment of chaos as the caller seemingly drops the phone or is interrupted. In other words, while you say "Hello?" or "Who is this?" he's got the phone away from his ear, saying "oops--hold on." When he comes back, he starts right in, somewhat apologetically, something very personal-sounding like, "I've had your name and number for a while and I'd been meaning to call you..."

The first time you get one of these calls, you might not realize that it's all a recording. We expect recordings to be perfectly enunciated by radio voices, not a guy sounding like an average Shmo who drops the phone. And the phone-dropping exempts the machine from having to make an appropriately timed response to the reicipient's greeting. It's extremely clever.

Of course, the carpet cleaner could probably get even better results per call by making the calls himself. But the machine can make thousands of calls with very little effort on his part.

We're going to see more and more of this: automated marketing campaigns that simulate human contact in order to get our attention.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December