By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Feb 9, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
A true Fish Tale.
I don’t have a “Bucket list” just yet (I’m still not conceding death is an inevitable option) but do have a “Parent list,” a list of about 10 things I want to do with my children before they leave home.
This happened 7 years ago when my son, Johnny, was 10 years old. I had recently checked off “Flying kites” and “Going fishing” was on deck.
We decided on a Sunday afternoon and immediately started by packing a picnic basket. True, I had never really been fishing and only imagined what I should do…but a picnic basket seemed like a no brainer. My daughter made ham sandwiches and packed them for us.
On the way out the door I shrewdly remembered we’d be sitting in grass and grabbed a throw blanket for us to sit on while fishing.
We went to WalMart and bought fishing poles. We found a public lake nearby and set up our gear and lay down the throw blanket.
I tried to demonstrate casting for Johnny. “Watch me, honey. This is how you want to do it.” I shanked it into the marshy grass.
After untangling it I realized in addition to a flubbing the cast I had not baited the hook. I had forgotten to buy bait and had to improvise.
What to do?
Those ham sandwiches had stringy, soggy slivers of ham that I reasoned could be confused for a worm by a fish that wasn’t paying attention or had below average intelligence.
So, we baited our lines with ham and cast like two men who had never before had to eat what they killed. Our lines intertwined and as we tried to unravel them it began to rain…..
A Fish and Wild Life officer pulled into our lake and walked toward us and barked, “Excuse me. Do you have a fishing license?” I said, “Oh no! I didn’t know we needed a license officer.”
He looked at the intertwined fishing lines with soggy ham hanging from the hooks and then at the throw blanket we were standing on and said in an almost whisper,
“You don’t fish much do you, sir?”
There was really no point in me responding. It was what is called a rhetorical question—a questioning device that is rarely used by law enforcement unless the person being questioned has failed so badly at something that further evidence isn’t necessary.
He let us off with a warning and we packed our belongings and sat in the car waiting for the rain to let up and split the second ham sandwich.
My son noted, “I’ve never been arrested before, Dad.” I explained this whole episode would help with his “street cred” at school but not not give too much detail about the cause of our brush with the law.
We both seemed to like the idea of feeling a little like outlaws, especially if it meant not having to fish.
Afterwards we drove to a more modern place for fathers and sons– where we played video games and miniature golf and raced go carts.
None of which were on my “Parent’s List,” which I have since thrown away.
By Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Thu Feb 9, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
The Politics of Pigskin
Well folks, another year, another Super Bowl in the books. In Super Bowl 46 the Giants of New York bested the New England Patriots to win their second Super Bowl in four years. Eli Manning took home the MVP trophy to set next to his other Super Bowl MVP from 2007. [ESPN]
Who were the best and the worst players in the Super Bowl? Here are the answers using advanced statistics. [Football Outsiders]
As I suspected, Nevada sportsbooks didn’t lose on Giants win. They made $5.06 million off of $93.8M in bets. [@coversports]
As tradition demands, the city of New York threw a giant-sized celebratory parade for the champion Giants. [CBS Sports]
In the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl Patriots WR Wes Welker dropped a pass that could have set up the Pats for a win. Unfortunately that made Welker one of the most convenient scapegoats for the loss. On Tuesday 8,000 Butterfinger bars were dropped in Copley Square in Boston in honor of Welker’s mistake. [Yahoo! Sports]
Who are your favorite NFL commentators? Here is Sports Illustrated ranking of all of the announcing teams. [Sports Illustrated]
By Patrick Derocher, on Thu Feb 9, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET
Hawker Beechcraft, one of the nation’s largest producers of personal jets and other aircraft, announced that it was hiring a turnaround specialist as its new CEO. Normally this story would not make its way past business pages, although Hawker Beechcraft is a major economic force in the Midwest. The new CEO, however, is named Steve Miller, and the Steve Miller Band is of course known for the song “Jet Airliner.” (You can watch its appearance in a great West Wing scene here.) [Wichita Eagle]
In some alternate universe, President Obama follows up on his reform of healthcare and financial regulations by pivoting to an overhaul of public education in the United States. Instead of spending 2011 on the predictable, partisan ground of raising upper income taxes while growth is weak, Obama might have spent the year making a case that a vibrant economy demands a skilled, advanced workforce and that our outdated method of educating our children is inadequate to the challenge.
Alas, that is not the reality we live in. Obama’s signature plan of incentivizing states to embrace their own reforms, The Race to The Top, is being nibbled to irrelevance; rather than spending political capital to revamp No Child Left Behind, the administration is following the easy course of killing it softly with waivers; charter schools have gone two straight State of the Union addresses without being mentioned; and if the president believes that the stratification in the quality of our schools from one zip code to another is a major contributor to income inequality, he has scarcely said so.
Had Obama adopted education reform as an agenda item, he would have profited from the Republican inertia on the subject. Whether it was Rick Perry on the days he remembered his pledge to abolish the Department of Education, or Newt Gingrich promising to downsize the department to a clipping service for inventorying data, or Mitt Romney trotting out old rhetoric about “local control”, the GOP presidential field has been one long yawn on the notion of education as a public priority.
It’s a bipartisan omission that signifies the power of each party’s political base. For Obama, bold action on educational accountability seems to be a casualty of a post debt-ceiling reelection strategy that is base reinforcement all the time. On the right, denigrating the public sector is easier work than laying out a foundation to make its elements, including education, more productive.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Obama’s Education Downfall
People who don’t realize they are reading a satirical news story from the Onion – classic. This story got a lot of play from people with poor observational skills. [Facebook screenshot]
By Stephanie Doctrow, RP Staff, on Wed Feb 8, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
Why the Obama administration’s contraception ruling might mean more to the 2012 election than you think: [Time]
Karen Handel, one of the top officials of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, stepped down Tuesday after the organization’s controversial decision to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood was reversed. [NY Times]
Online dating might make it easier to meet people, but does it make it harder to find The One? [CNN]
Good news, frequent flyers. New evidence shows there’s not a greater risk of blood clots when flying economy class versus first class (but it’s still a good idea to walk around mid-flight). [USA Today]
Double dipping might be a germaphobe’s biggest party nightmare, but how bad is it for you really? [Wall Street Journal]
Race has played an underlying role in most national elections since former President Martin Van Buren ran on the Free-Soil ticket in 1848, splitting Democratic candidate Lewis Cass’s vote in New York State and helping facilitate the victory of pro-states rights Whig General Zachary Taylor.
The role of race receded briefly in the post-Reconstruction era, as the Democratic Party snubbed blacks and the Republicans essentially ignored them for decades, in the wake of the Compromise of 1877.
FDR had an interest in suppressing Democratic divisions on race throughout the 1930s in order to push his New Deal agenda. But race came roaring back in the 1940s, as Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats split from incumbent Democrat Harry Truman in 1948 to form a third (actually, fourth) party that year. Since then, racial issues have been salient in nearly every election.
In 1960, JFK’s call to Coretta Scott King helped him win approximately two-thirds of the black vote, despite that fact that there was no real difference between his position and Nixon’s on civil rights. In 1964, civil rights was perhaps the primary issue cleavage, as Goldwater was staunchly opposed to the 1964 CRA pushed by LBJ, and consequently carried only his home state + the Deep South. In 1968 and 1972, Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was premised on the white backlash against the civil rights movement. In 1980, Reagan went to Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1963, to kick off his 1980 general election bid and proclaimed that “the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in this year’s Republican Party platform.” In 1988, Wille Horton became a household name. In 1992, Clinton successfully walked the racial tightrope: he signaled that he would not be co-opted by Jesse Jackson and, by proxy, the party’s African-American base by dissing Jackson via Sister Souljah at the Rainbow Coalition convention, but reassured blacks that he would “mend, not end” affirmative action. In 2000, Bush deftly alluded to race in his bid for suburban women (and perhaps a sprinkling of blacks) by decrying the “soft bigotry of low expectations that plagued urban schools. And in 2008…well, you know.
Read the rest of… Jeff Smith: Race Has Always Been An Election Issue
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Feb 7, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
I love big ideas and the one I’m about to share may be the biggest idea of 2011!
What if I told you I had devised a way that would reduce personal debt by 8-9% each year (yet there would be zero loss to our quality of life or reduction in things we want to purchase)?
In addition to personal debt reduction, we could eat away at the international trade imbalance by an equivalent annual amount.
And finally, the “generalized frustration” each American feels daily would be moderately and noticeably reduced.
Would you be interested?
Of course, you would.
Here’s my idea. Ban all “up-selling”–the annoying practice of enticing Americans, a group who already can’t shop responsibly, to buy stuff we neither need nor want with money we don’t have!
The only thing we would miss is the stuff we bring home that we neither want nor need….and keep it available for those who truly need these items (yet another economic efficiency).
But–and here’s the brilliant part–only ban upselling domestically. For all international sales we will “require” companies to up-sell. This means every time we transact for a major export—e.g. sell aircraft, soybeans, semi-conductors, etc to a foreign country– we require that the US company ask if they’d like fries, an extra muffin, stamps, batteries, or to open a new bank account (in the US).
Of course, individually no single upsell will make much of a dent. But over time the US trade imbalance will be rectified, we won’t need another bailout from DC, we’ll walk around less antsy becuase we’ll feel competent to shop for ourselves, and for the first time in a long time we’ll be a model of personal fiscal restraint for the rest of the world.
A true Fish Tale.
