Is DC ready?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Your Nation’s Capital has been scrambling to prepare for Tuesday’s inauguration day. Restaurants are getting ready for crowds, the homeless have been swept under the rug, and Metro is issuing more expensive fare cards and telling people to walk.

Nope. This is what the Farragut West Metro platform looked like on Thursday night, without the crush of people who will be in town today through Tuesday. And those are just people waiting to get on a westbound train heading out of the district at 6:00 p.m.

Earlier that day, I picked up Metro’s guide to getting around during the inauguration. Tips included looking for alternate means of transportation – including walking.

In a December WTOP interview, Metro’s head conductor, General Manager John Catoe, said the system can move up to 1 million people but that “a million and a half is not a number we can physically move.” Metrorail handles about 750,000 commuters daily, and the disctrict is expecting an influx in the millions. So do the math: Metro cannot handle the crowds they know are coming.

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Racism at the University of California

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

On the eve of an historic event marking progress in Washington, D.C., some corners of the country are clinging to the past. This week, Jay Schalin of Human Events chronicled the effort to bring racial preferences back to the University of California.

Barack Obama’s election was the result of a creative, forward-thinking campaign that employed innovative strategies. Faced with doubt that racial tension would drag down his campaign (especially in the South), Obama and his team won southern states that hadn’t been taken by Democrats in a Presidential election in a generation. Obama will become the first black President on Tuesday because he and his team looked forward. The same philosophy apparently doesn’t permeate the University of California, which is trying to turn back the clock to a time when their student body could be constructed according to the students’ race.

As Schalin notes, UC has treated all students equally since 1996, when California voters decided that race shouldn’t matter to their state government. Yet faculty and administration boards and committees are considering steps to make the admission process “fairer” – which includes reducing the importance of standardized tests and placing more emphasis on “holistic” analysis of an application.

It sounds warm and fuzzy, but this plan would place lots of power in the hands of a person sitting in an admissions office reading over a high school student’s submission. Given the political agendas of many in the ivory tower, this should make high schoolers and their parents uncomfortable. Like the racial preferences policies of the 60s and 70s the faculty and administration want to mimic, this plan strips the applicant of the power to prove himself or herself worthy of admission to the University.

The post-Civil War South passed to Jim Crow laws to create segregation and preserve the social ends that slavery had established; now, with direct quotas off the table, proponents of identity politics are looking for new ways to create systems of racial preferences.

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Imagine no possessions

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

As I alluded to previously, YouTube is cracking down on videos that use copyrighted tracks. This has led to some backlash. Rick Hodgin at TGDaily posed the question, “What if intellectual property laws were rolled back – so there were no copyrights, patents, or digital rights management (DRM) software?”

In discussing the upside of this ideal, Hodgin paints the same picture as John Lennon’s “Imagine“: “Imagine all the people / sharing all the world.” The problem is that taking away the financial incentive for creativity will, because of human nature, reduce the number of people who attempt to be creative. And where financial interests are concerned, a no-intellectual-property policy favors those with money. Hodgin illustrates this with a flawed example:

“Suppose you’re into model airplanes and would like to build and sell those craft for a living, but don’t know as much as you should about design? Why not take someone else’s design, copy it and sell it? They have just as much opportunity to sell it as you do.”

In this scenario, the “Big Corporation” is more likely to be the party that takes someone else’s design, copies it, and sells it. An independent engineer may come up with a good design, but may could not finance mass production as easily as Boeing or some Lockheed-Martin.

There are reasons that companies who own the rights to music should want their music to appear – even unlicensed – on YouTube. And there are many creative ways that music is used.

You can’t force someone to give up his or her property for others to use, even if it’s in the owner’s best interest. (Well, sometimes you can, but you shouldn’t be able to.) The good news, though, is that an owner’s best interest is usually a good enough selling point. It’s happening in the music world, where companies like Amazon and eMusic have become extraordinarily successful selling DRM-free music. Even Apple’s iTunes – for years a symbol of limiting the use of downloaded music – has relaxed its DRM policies.

So it’s that financial incentive for creativity which will spur more creativity for distribution – which, in the digital world, will eventually mean more materials available for wider use.

Imagine that. I wonder if you can.

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PelosiRoll’d

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

To celebrate the launch of the Congressional YouTube channels, Nancy Pelosi Rickroll’d Your Nation’s Capital this week. Here’s the video that has Washington talking:

You may not be able to see it by the time this post is up – YouTube has been cracking down on the use of copyrighted music, and it has already been removed once from Pelosi’s official YouTube channel. But it doesn’t matter. The video – which started with a couple of cats frolicking in the Capitol before launching into Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” – has already made a media splash.

Aside from being funny and a good media hook, it shows the Speaker’s office understands the folks who use modern media – Rickrolling is an older prank, but new enough to be relevant (it’s no Dancing Jesus) and wholly unexpected from a federal officeholder. Kudos to Pelosi for running with what was probably the suggestion of a younger staffer.

That said, it’s telling that the Democrats in Congress are harnessing the awesome power of online video to bring us images of kittens and Rick Astley.

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Socialism is bad right?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

AOL Political Machine Blogger Matt Lewis was on Fox News today squaring off with former Mondale campaign manager Bob Beckel. The quote that stuck with Lewis coming away from the segment was Beckel’s defense of socialism: “What is wrong with some form of socialism in certain areas?” Here’s the video:

Beckel poses a valid question. And with the Obama administration less than a week from taking the controls, it’s a question that needs to be answered by opponents of a government controlled economy. If people are struggling to make ends meet, a scheme to nationalize industries will sound more appealing – and without a viable answer, could become a reality.

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Well Excuuuuuuuuse Me!

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

President Bush’s original pick for Secretary of Labor, Linda Chavez, had to withdraw her nomination when it was revealed that she hired an illegal immigrant to help around the house.

Timothy Geithner, President-elect Obama’s Treasury Secretary-designee, was found to have the same issue plus a possible $42,000 unpaid tax bill (never a good qualification for running the IRS). Luckily for Geithner, he has a much better PR team that apparently draws inspiration from Steve Martin, circa 1978:

“You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes!… First, get a million dollars. Now you say, ‘Steve, what do I say when the tax man comes to my door and says, “You have never paid taxes”?’ Two simple words. Two simple words in the English language: I forgot.”

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Meet your new cabinet

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The Obama team was wise to send two nominees to Capitol Hill today. Clearly, the focus will be on Hillary Clinton’s quest to become Secretary of State – which should be smooth, despite questions about her involvement in issues concerning foreign donors to Bill Clinton’s Presidential library. (That’s a pretty big deal for a Secretary of State, but at this point a Clinton scandal barely moves the needle. Plus most conservatives seem to think this is a spot where the erstwhile Senator from New York can do the least damage.)

But Secretary of Energy nominee Steven Chu has already pledged to shake down energy companies with a cap-and-trade scheme that would force them to pay extra for carbon emissions – and thus raise energy rates. Common sense dictates that these extra charges will only make utility bills more expensive – thus hurting the people who pay them. I’ll add this as an winnable issues conservatives should press in the Obama administration.

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You have a standing army, but will they march?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Normally, I’d be happy to see a sign at the end of a DC Metro escalator that says “Move On,” because my fellow commuters sometimes need help with that concept. This evening, though, I spied this ad at the Farragut West station:

The key message was clear based on the tagline:

MoveOn.org is clearly ready to mobilize a standing army to support Barack Obama. (And that’s before President Obama taps into his own 13 million-person list.)

I saw this just hours after I saw Craig Colgan’s post on TechRepublican that suggested that the legions of left-wing “netroots” activists may be somewhat… shall we say, open to suggestion? MoveOn certainly seems to think they can mobilize their list at the drop of a hat to support the Obama Agenda. Without the pressure of a campaign, I’ll be curious to see if they take action – and, if they do, how effective that action is.

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Merchandising! Merchandising!

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 3 Comments

The countdown to the Obama inauguration is in its final week. Your nation’s capital is getting more excited by the day about the opportunity this presents to make a few extra bucks.

It started after the election with street vendors selling random items – t-shirts, prints of Obama and his family, and things like that. Then, while Christmas shopping, I started to notice that stores in the Pentagon City Mall are selling cardboard cutouts and other Obama-themed novelties. Metro is even offering a commemorative fare card that is twice the price of a normal fare card.

Now businesses are getting into it who would otherwise not comment on politics – the picture here is from the Farragut North Metro station, which is currently awash in Ikea ads touching on the theme of “change.” (Apparently, the historic events of the next week should inspire us all to look to a future with brand new bedroom furniture.)

Of course, none of these money-making efforts are commissioned by the Obama transition team, which offers an important lesson for discussion of stimulus packages and other economic policies. The Obama White House should similarly recognize the innovation and opportunism of business owners.

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