The Kudzu Files

Kudzu poetry

At You Live Your Life As If It's Real.

The Irresponsibility Of Partisanship

Here's the deal - whether it's local government, county, state, or national, we elect the various officials to represent us in the decisions of government. Because we long ago, except in small towns and for very local issues, outgrew the town-meeting style of government, we have to send people off to deliberate, legislate, and administrate our wants, needs, and tolerances of the body politic. We vote for conservatives, liberals, Republicans, Democrats, even on rare occasions an Independent, Libertarian, or in the case of certain ultra-liberal communities, a Socialist. But the common thread is that we're sending these people off to do something. And mostly, historically, this has worked well enough to create a pretty remarkable society.

Until recently, anyway. The past 20 years - the past 10 years, actually - has seen a determined partisanship make itself evident. I see no point in rehashing the episodes that got us here. The point is, we're now at a place where politics resembles professional wrestling more than anything else. The actions, reactions, and counter-actions are so predictable that our politicians look like actors reading from a poorly-written script. All that's missing are the masks and absurd tights. Nationally, we've seen this with the debate over the war in Iraq and it's aftermath, in the budget debate, in almost every policy debate. Republicans have watched the deficit pile higher and higher, something that would have been anathema to them at one time, and continue to adhere to the rhetoric of "tax cut, tax cut, tax cut", while being unwilling to make any substantive spending reductions, yet party discipline and the unwillingness to concede that Democrats may have a point about fiscal responsibility prevent any from taking a stand against the party leadership. Democrats are so opposed to Bush's Iraq adventure that they can't bring themselves to acknowledge any real accomplishments in the Middle East. The extremists have taken over the respective party dialogue, and those who might be willing to work with the other side are so concerned about retribution from their own side that they remain seated and silent.

We're seeing a classic case of this at the state level in Mississippi. The state budget is, quite simply, a sinkhole. A $3.7 billion budget with a $900 million deficit. 25% of the budget. And unlike the national government, states can't run a deficit. Medicaid is the part that's really wrecking the budget. A $270 million deficit in the current year complicates a similar situation looming in the next fiscal year. The House Of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, wants to enact a tax increase on cigarettes, currently 18 cents a pack, to 50 cents or even $1 per pack. Governor Haley Barbour and the Republican-controlled Senate oppose any tax increase for any reason. They want to take $200 million from the Tobacco Health Care Trust Fund, the result of the lawsuit against Big Tobacco by former Attorney General Mike Moore, to cover the current year's deficit, and then figure out what to do about next year's problem. But the House won't consider taking the Trust Fund money unless the Senate passes the tax increase, and the Senate won't consider the tax increase at all. So we have this intense gridlock, Medicaid is about to shut down in Mississippi because the agency's funds are used up, and the rest of the state budget hasn't received much attention at all, except that education, which makes up about one half of the budget, is essentially off-limits. On this one, Governor Barbour is right - or half-right. There's no alternative to taking the $200 million from the Trust Fund. The House can go on about protecting the future, Mike Moore can attack the governor - but the reality is that the money has already been spent, and it's been spent because the Mississippi legislature over the past 3-4 years approved Medicaid expansion apparently believing that sacks of gold would shortly begin falling from the skies. And if the legislature is not willing to cut back significantly on the program, finding new revenue (that's such a gentile way of saying "tax increase") is just as unavoidable. But we're locked in a similar logjam over tax increases.

Here's the crux of the matter - none of these people are doing what we sent them to do. While we've had this stalemate over Medicaid, they've passed a bill to make the alligator the state reptile; they're debating a bill that would enshrine the Ten Commandments in state buildings (if displaying the Ten Commandments has such a powerful impact, why are our churches full of sinners?); they passed a bill to construct a new state Arts Center (hey, Faith Hill showed up to ask for it, how can you turn down Faith?); and bolstered by the complete and utter failure of the beef plan fiasco, which will cost the state $50 million, they've authorized $25 million plus loan guarantees to a potential steel mill project. What they're not doing is passing a state budget. And they're not passing a budget because Democrats would rather blame Haley Barbour and the Republicans, and because Haley and the Republicans would rather blame Democrats.

The same thing is happening nationally. Each side is engaged in a game of gotcha, carefully introducing bills that have no chance of passage because of line items that the opposing side simply won't agree to. But it lets each side store up "gotchas" like squirrels store acorns, to be pulled out at the next election. The process of legislating and governing has taken a back seat to the politics of division, the needs and desires of the people be damned. And unless and until the voters make some incumbents pay the price for this irresponsibility, it will continue. I don't want to see the social security system become a lab experiment for Republican ideas of retirement plan privatization. I don't want to see oil drilling in ANWR. At the state level, I don't want to see broad cutbacks in state programs. But I do want to see problems being dealt with. If government is costing more than revenues, then the solution is simple: either raise taxes or cut services. Stop the brinksmanship, stop the showboating, stop the partisanship, and do something. And if you're not willing or able to make the hard choices, then step down and let someone else give it a try.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears

BS&T was a band either ahead of, or behind, their time. They hit the scene in as 1967 was turning into 1968, with the release of "Child Is Father To The Man". Al Kooper was the lead singer, and the group and sound was born out of his experimentation with early jazz-rock fusion. Many rock historians consider this to be one of the great albums of the '60s. I'm not so sure - it's good, but there's only a couple of memorable songs - "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know", and "I Can't Quit Her". The album seems to consist of a bunch of lab experiments by Kooper, and if he and the band had hung together, the result might have been very, very interesting. But Kooper split, and was replaced by David Clayton-Thomas (they also gave Stephen Stills and Laura Nyro a shot). DCT's voice is probably what 95% of the general public who even remembers BS&T thinks of. The second album, "Blood Sweat and Tears", was a monster hit, with Top 40 material all over it. But BS&T was now sounding more like a lounge group (although a very polished one) than a jazz-rock fusion band. They followed this album, and it's success, with a wierd State Department-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe in 1970, which, given the mood among the rock public at the time, was apostasy. And the tour was followed by the release of "Blood Sweat and Tears 3", which started hot but then saw falling sales as music fans just didn't find much to hang on to. The album had little original material - they covered "Fire And Rain", "Symphony For The Devil", and "40,000 Headmen" - and only "Lucretia MacEvil" and "Hi-De-Ho" got any notice. "BS&T 4" was better, actually pretty listenable, but few people were paying attention, and David Clayton-Thomas left soon after it was released.

So, where is all this going? To the album that was released by the next rendition of BS&T. Jerry Fisher was the new lead singer, there were some new horn players and more guitar presence. And the album that they released, "New Blood", was very different from the earlier albums. It was jazzier, funkier, and not nearly so smooth and commercial-sounding. Unfortunately, it wasn't a big seller. It's apparently no longer in print, and was never released on CD as far as I can tell. And that's a shame, because in some ways it's my favorite BS&T album. People who hated the post-Kooper BS&T would have liked this album, I think, if they'd listened to it. And one song, "Alone" was covered by Stan Kenton on "Stan Kenton Plays Chicago", a version that is simply amazing. I dug my recorded cassette of "New Blood" out yesterday, and realized I had forgotten just how good it was. If you like jazz-rock horn groups, and haven't heard this one, it's worth checking the used record stores.

Oracle un-tarred

In my early days of Unix, 1985 or thereabouts, when I needed to create an archive I used cpio. I don't really remember why I used cpio instead of tar. Tar seemed to be the ubiquitous Unix archiving command. I ran across few fellow cpio-ers. So at some point, I gave in and started using tar. I rarely use cpio now, and almost never run across a reference to it. So I find it curious that Oracle, in the midst of distributing their patchsets for Oracle 9i (9.2), suddenly switched from distributing as tarballs, to distributing as cpio archives. It's like a flashback to the Reagan Administration.

Archive by category

I've added archiving by category, which mainly reveals how lopsided my posting has been towards Politics. I guess coming out of an election year, that isn't too surprising. I suspect it will begin to even out a bit. Meanwhile, if you use Moveable Type, and want to learn how to do it, there's a nice, simple tutorial here.

Why I Like Unix

The UPS on my production server has flaked out; it's still giving surge protection, but the battery backup is gone. So, while I'm waiting on a new UPS, I need to monitor the box so I know it's still up. But I don't want to hang around the office all weekend. The solution lay in 5 lines of Bourne shell code:

while ping server
do
sleep 3600
done
/usr/lib/sendmail hboswell@kudzufiles.com < mail_msg

This will ping the server every hour; if it's up, it just goes back to sleep. If it's down, it exits the while loop and fires off an email. Simple and effective.