Battling Polluting Waste Coal Plants In Western Pennsylvania

Politicians at the state and local level in Pennsylvania believe the residents should roll over and play dead when companies push for waste coal power plants. Some politicians take it for granted that we already have. However, waste coal power plants increase the amount of fly ash and other particulates in the air and the amount of mercury and arsenic the water. We, the people, must care about what happens to the environment, to the air we breathe and the water we drink. People living in Pennsylvania need to paraphrase John Paul Jones and need to constantly remind our elected and appointed officials...

We Have Not Begun to Fight:

Battling Polluting Waste Coal Plants In Western Pennsylvania

Many years of mining in Pennsylvania created large areas of waste coal, called gob piles. This is the Beech Hollow gob pile, just outside of McDonald, as seen from the western side (photo taken winter 2008):



Here's what the Beech Hollow gob pile looks like from space, courtesy of Google Earth (photo taken late summer 2005):



The large glob of gray to the west of 980 (Robinson Highway) is the largest gob pile east of the Mississippi. It's in our backyard. Granted, it's an ugly mess, but in its current state, it isn't adding to the particulate problem in Southwestern Pennsylvania. However, if you live in places like North Fayette Towship, Oakdale, Carnegie, and Mount Lebanon, you live downwind of a proposed coal waste power plant for Beech Hollow, that will make electricity from the waste coal in this gob pile while spewing fly ash into the air.

For many years, Pittsburgh has been at or near the top of cities with the most particulate-polluted air. Yet our local politicians are giving permission for a waste coal power plant to be built just west of the area? This type of plant will only make a bad air quality situation worse, as anyone with asthma or other lung problems in our region already knows.

If you live in the Pittsburgh area, especially in the western and southern suburbs, you should be mad as hell and let your local officials know that you aren't going to take it.

To learn more about this proposed waste coal power plant, attend a public meeting in Mount Lebanon on Thursday, August 27, 7:30pm at the Mt. Lebanon Public Library.

NetRoots Nation Saturday

I left NetRoots Nation Thursday (even missing Bill Clinton's speech, which I would have loved to have heard) completely exhausted. After working my three hour airport shift, I went home and collapsed and missed Friday's events (including my cousin Alice's good friend Howard Dean).

So I returned to NetRoots today, and worked three hours at Registration, went to the Keynote Lunch, spent the afternoon videotaping a couple of panels, and am now at the evening Keynote.

The lunchtime keynote was OK, but not quite as forward-looking as I'd hoped. Most of the discussion was "it's better in Europe" and "we need more unionization." While these things are certainly true, they aren't making any new suggestions about how to handle the situation. Where are Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross, who spoke very interestingly on this very topic at Worldcon, when we need them?

After lunch, I was the videographer for a fascinating panel on DOJ extremes during the Bush years (that the Obama folks haven't fixed yet...*sigh*) and a very interesting panel on getting parents more involved in political organizing. I kept having to ask for help, but, luckily, my room was next door to the video office, so it was pretty easy to run next door and ask another stupid question.

At the evening keynote, State Senator Jim Ferlo gave a good speech, reminding us that peacefui assembly during the upcoming G20 meeting in Pittsburgh is Constitutionally protected - "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin. The city is way overreacting, saying that protests A MILE AWAY from the Convention Center during the G20 are forbidden. Much as I do believe that the G209 should continue unimpeded by disruptions, peaceful assembly is not disruptive. I'm very much opposed to muzzling peaceful protest.

Thursday, August 13 - Live from NetRoots Nation in the 'Burgh!

After spending some time helping run my Dad's 80th birthday, vacationing in Canada, then helping run the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal, I'm back in Pittsburgh. My next "I'm underemployed and I'm bored!" project is working as a local volunteer for NetRoots Nation, which is here in Pittsburgh through Saturday. I've already linked up with "Drinking Liberally" and told them where they should go to drink.

I worked with another woman delivering today's tent cards to various panel rooms this morning, then helped out with Registration for a few hours. I'm now on a break, testing out the Acer WebBook in the exshibit hall.

While I have been fairly inactive on this blog for the last few weeks, due to doing work for Worldcon, I'm a proud liberal blogger and was delighted to hear that NetRoots was coming to Pittsburgh. I hope to make some contacts (beyond the "Drinking Liberally" folks!)

Visitors to dpsinfo.com, June 2009

My Web domain, dpsinfo.com, has been around for years. While the site that gets the most traffic is Dead People Server, I have about a dozen other sites.

The traffic pattern this month was interesting:



It's kind of ironic now that, just over a week ago on alt.obituaries, a number of us were complaining about how quiet "the world of celebrity death" had been. As I said at the time, "Good for celebrities, bad for people tracking deaths."

June 25 was a very busy day in celebrity death, with the long expected death of Farrah Fawcett, and the sudden (but not completely unexpected) death of Michael Jackson, which was a rumor for about two hours before it was confirmed at about 6:15pm that day. dpsinfo.com got nearly 3X as many visitors on that day as it had on its quietest day (on June 13).

That wasn't dpsinfo.com's busiest day ever though.

The busiest day ever was the day in September 2006 when Steve Irwin (aka the Crocodile Hunter) was killed by a stingray. Nearly twice as many people visited that day as visited on June 25.

Remembering Local Boy Billy Mays

At first, I thought the announcement of his death was another hoax. I first saw it on Wikipedia's death page, where hoax deaths can still creep through. It sounded like the recent fake death announcements of Jeff Goldblum (fell off a cliff!) or the one of pitchman John Basedow (Killed in the tsunami!).

Alas, I'm wrong on this one.

Billy was kind of annoying, but kind of enjoyable. I couldn't hate Billy Mays. Pitchmen normally make my skin crawl. His whole undertone always seemed to be "I'm having a good time with this, and I'm making a pile of money." And, heck, that's American. You can't hate making a pile of money. Well, OK, most of us can't.

Billy Mays was from the same very small, very poor town that my husband called his hometown (and boxer Paul Spadafora, former "hair colorist to the stars" Bradley Johns, politician John Kasich, and footballer Chuck Fusina) - McKees Rocks, PA. Billy was two years older than one brother-in-law, and lived near my other brother-in-law (well, where "near" was "the same part of Florida").

Billy Mays was like Farrah Fawcett in that he made the best with what he had, which probably added up to millions of dollars before he died.

In many ways, his death is the most shocking celebrity death of a week filled with celebrity deaths. Ed was old. Farrah was sick. There was something sadly inevitable about Michael Jackson's sudden death at a middle age. But, Billy Mays? So full of life? So into promoting whatever he was selling? This one seems wrong. Is he selling some new product, that a fake death might help promote?

Probably not.

So, after about six weeks of making almost no updates to my Dead People Server site, I've gone and made another one for this week. Kind of sadly. I may not miss him that much, but there's something especially sad about this death.

Brainstorming for the G-20 in Pittsburgh

The local organization leading the organization for the G-20 in Pittsburgh this September is a group called the Allegheny Conference. They decided to have a series of brainstorming sessions and invite the public to them, to generate ideas for further discussion.

On paper, this is a great idea. And, to a degree, it was. There were some incredibly good ideas proposed, including:

• Student ambassadors to observe and report on the proceedings (this from a high school student)


• Welcome banners and audio greetings in all of the languages spoken by members of the G-20


• A whole month of activities around the countries of the G-20, focusing on each of the countries and stressing educational programs


• Various ways to present the arts and music of Pittsburgh


• Stressing Pittsburgh's leadership as a green city


• Name badges for Pittsburghers with the flags representing the country of whatever foreign language the person speaks


• An event featuring foods prepared by foreign-born chefs who cook at Pittsburgh-area restaurants

But, an awful lot of the ideas started off with, "Hi, I'm X my company is Y, we make Z and here's how we can offer Z to the people coming to Pittsburgh for the G-20."

As a result, there was very little actual brainstorming. Almost no one's ideas seemed to spark other people's ideas, and that was somewhat disappointing. During the first brainstorming session at Point Park last week, 57 ideas were generated. At ours, I'm sure it was less than that because it was more about selling than idea generation.

I came up with some ideas, and presented them this way: "Hi, I'm Laurie Mann, I'm a blogger and I have nothing to sell. I just have a couple of ideas." My suggestions were to make sure that the G-20 uses the lovely rooftop terrace at the Convention Center. I'd been going to events there for years before I stumbled over the terrace at one event, which was being used informally that day. It has a great view of the city, the Allegheny River and the bridges. It's basically an unappreciated gem of the city. My other suggestion was to use some of the empty storefronts along Penn and Liberty as art galleries for students, robot makers and filmmakers.

There will be one last public brainstorming at the University of Pittsburgh, Alumni Hall in the Connolly Ballroom from 5:30-7:00 tonight (Tuesday, June 23).

Why You Should Vote Out Bigots Like State Senator John Eichelberger (R-Blair)

One of the people currently reviving the "no gay marriage" fight is John Eichelberger, R (naturally) of Blair county. Recently, he said something particularly heinous in a hearing:



They’re not being punished. We’re allowing them to exist, and do what every American can do. We’re just not rewarding them with any special designation.



I've written the following to Eichelberger to take him to task for his bigotry:




I understand you said the following in reference to homosexuals in a hearing the other day:


They’re not being punished. We’re allowing them to exist, and do what every American can do. We’re just not rewarding them with any special designation.


Thank-you for living out that famous cliche about Pennsylvania: "It's Philadelphia in the East, Pittsburgh in the West and Alabama in the middle."

If anyone ever said "We're allowing them to exist" in reference to, say, white men or fundamentalist Christians, would you have agreed with THAT ATTITUDE too?

I thought Pennsylvanians got rid of that level of state-sanctioned bigotry when we voted out Rick Santorum.

I know people like you will never change your minds about bigotry. I can only hope to help educate your constituency that bigotry in a modern society is unacceptable.

Laurie Mann
McDonald, PA

Hey KDKA Radio - Why Can't You Cover Local News Competently Anymore??

We usually go over to Bocktown Beer and Grill for dinner and the Wednesday beer tasting. After that, the plan was to go out to Friendship to attend a planning meeting for Confluence.

When we got to Bocktown, it was threatening but not raining. By the time we got our beer, we could hear the loud thunder overhead. As we sat in the back, we couldn't see the storm, but it had gotten very dark outside in a hurry.

By about 6:15, we were done eating and went to the front of the bar to try some Abita beer. It was raining so hard that that we couldn't see the parking lot from the front windows. The rain was coming in sideways, and the wind whipped up for a while. Lots of lightning and thunder. The rain and lightning were so heavy that we didn't dare go to our car.

Unfortunately, some of the Bocktown staff were out on the partially covered patio. By the time they got in, they were completely drenched.

We watched the rain for a while. Then, it lightened up slightly and the torrents calmed to mere rain. Even though the storm was going east, and we were going to be following it, we figured it was probably safe to drive to Friendship. According to KDKA radio, there were severe thunderstorms and tornado warnings for our area. While the severe thunderstorms were obvious, the tornadoes weren't as the wind wasn't too bad and we hadn't seen any hail. But, following the standard news/weather check, KDKA went back to its regular talk shows. So KDKA did not view the situation as particularly dangerous. We changed the channel and listened to classical WQED instead of listening what passes for talk.

As we approached the city, we were back in the heavy rain again. Usually, we take Bigelow Blvd. to go to Friendship, but there's a tendency for rockslides in the heavy rain. I chose to go through Oakland. After all, most of the students were gone - how bad could the traffic be?

Oakland had a horrible traffic jam. It took us nearly a half hour to go about a mile. And we couldn't figure out why. We kept switching between "news radio" KDKA and WQED, the classical music station. KDKA had no specifics - their 7:30 "news" show lasted about 30 second before it went back to standard talk radio bloviation.

As we got through the Forbes/Bigelow intersection, we suddenly saw why the traffic was so horrible in Oakland - street flooding in front of Carnegie Hall. I thought I could get through it. Jim insisted that I could not. So, I pulled a U-turn (highly illegal) and got back to the road between the parking lot and the library (going the wrong way briefly; luckily, the PAT bus let me go by). Many cars were stopping, and the sounds of police sirens were louder than the thunder.

There was street flooding on that street too. However, it didn't look as bad, and past that bit of flooding was higher ground. I slowly drove through the flooding and turned left past the library to make the relative safety of Schenley Park. We drove up the hill and parked by Baker Hall at Carnegie Mellon so we could hit a bathroom and consider our options. Running the 50 yards from our car to the hall made us both completely wet.

Several people were standing by the door of Baker Hall, trying to figure out the best thing to do. We visited the bathrooms and waited for the rain/lightning to calm down. After about another ten minutes, it did. The woman who was left said she'd parked her car in Schenley Park and wasn't looking forward to walking to her car. We offered her a ride. There were branches down but it was not as bad as after the tornado in 1998. There was also minor street flooding in Schenley Park - maybe 1-2 inches rather than the 6 inches we saw in Oakland. We dropped the professor off at her car, and decided it was safer to skip the meeting and go home. We drove through Squirrel Hill to get to the parkway.

While KDKA continued favoring talk show crap over actually reporting the news, we felt lucky to find that Squirrel Hill didn't have the flooding of Oakland. The only street flooding we saw was near the parkway entrance. The rest of our trip was uneventful, and we finally got home a little before 9.

KDKA ought to be ashamed of itself for the way its "local breaking news" was so completely useless during this storm. I remember back in 1998, the same station focused on the local wind and rain damage following the Mt. Washington tornado. This time, "news" station KDKA provided almost no local news. So much for helping the public. If stations like KDKA were still reporting local news rather than blathering on, it would have been much more helpful. Luckily, it sounds like no one was seriously injured last night, but there were apparently dozens of cars stuck in flooded areas all over eastern Allegheny county.

The Pew News Survey of Current Events

This is a really fast survey on your current news knowledge.

I scored 12 out of 12, which put me in the 94th percentile.

When you're underemployed, you tend to read the news...a lot!

Tracking Your Medicines

A few years ago, I realized I was already taking a variety of supplements and some prescription drugs. I started tracking what I was taking, so I would always have a quick record for my doctor. Also, I'd always know what drugs did work and what didn't work for me.

I found it easiest to track this information in an Access database. However, I thought I'd share the list with others, and many people don't have Access. So I also created an .rtf table, that can be read in Word and other word processors. You can download the files from the links below and adapt the database or word processing table any way you want.

The drug history, if you maintained this information in Access, would have this general format:

Drug History (pdf)

Tracking Your Medicines in Access

This is a pretty simple Access database. It's written in Access 2003, but uses only tables, queries and reports, so it could probably be read in older versions of Access. The database does not have a forms-based data-entry screen, enter the drug information directly in the data table.

mydruglist.sample.mdb (Access file)

When you open up the database, click on the tables option to display the data tables:

o druglistblank
o druglistsample

druglistblank is an empty database table. You can open it and just start entering drug data. druglistsample is a database table with sample data. The tables are the same; one has sample data and one does not.

Here are the fields in these tables:

ID - an auto-numbered identifier field. You can ignore it.
Date Added - a date field that defaults to the current date
Drug Name - the name of the drug
Type - prescription drug, over the counter drug, supplement
Dose - recommended dosage
How Often You Take It - the possible values are Daily, Occasionally, Post-op, Stopped Taking It. Record how frequently you take the drug.
Date Started Taking It - when you first took the drug
Prescribing Doctor - who prescribed it for you.
Notes - What you're taking the drug for, if you had any side effects, why you stopped taking it (if appropriate)

I think it's best to sort this information so that the drugs you are currently taking always sort to the top of the report. So I've written a query to sort the information in this way. Display the queries:

o drugblank
o drugsample

drugblank is the query that sorts your information from the druglistblank table. drugsample is the query that sorts the sample data in the druglistsample table. The default sort field is the "How Often You Take It" field. When you run the query, the drugs you take every day will sort to the top of the query table, followed by the drugs you take occasionally, followed by the drugs you've taken after surgery or hospitalization, followed by the drugs you've taken in the past but do not take anymore.

Finally, display the reports:

o drugblankreport
o drugsamplereport

drugblankreport creates a report based on your information in the druglistblank table.
drugsamplereport creates a report based on the sample information in the druglistsample table.

Open the drugblankreport to see your information. At the top of the page, you'll see YOUR NAME, BIRTHDATE. Delete those strings and enter your name and your birthdate.

Tracking Your Medicines in a Word Table

Download mydruglist.blank.rtf. After you've downloaded it, you can enter information directly into the table. You should save the modified table under a new name, so you'll always have a blank table available online. Be sure to add your name and your birthdate to the top of the file.

There's a government site with a recommended text file for collecting medical information. AARP also has information on collecting drug and medical information.

On Not Closing Guantanamo - The Fear-Mongering of Republicans Never Ceases to Amaze Me

We have all kinds of dangerous Americans in prison.

And yet...

Republicans have brainwashed people (including, sadly, a bunch of Democrats) into believing that about 200 terrorism suspects can't be housed in American prisons.

These terrorism suspects don't have super-powers. They've not going to jump over the fences, mind-control all the guards or create an atomic bomb out of their tea. So why not house them in American military jails? Didn't we manage Germans and Japanese in American military jails without having them invade America? Maybe Americans were just smarter and braver during World War II.

I suspect the majority of the people remaining in Guantanamo probably do have ties to terrorism. We've released nearly 500 "terrorists" from Guantanamo over the last seven years because there was inadequate evidence (even by Bush administration "standards") to hold them.

What should happen is that the remaining terrorism suspects should be moved to at least two American military prisons and they should be tried. If they're innocent, they should be returned to their countries. If they're guilty, they should serve out their term in an American military prison. Obama has forcefully stated that America won't continue the heinous practices of the Bush administration, including terrorism. But holding terrorism suspects indefinitely in a third-party country has seemed, frankly, as un-American as engaging in torture.

Some Signs of Life in the Pittsburgh Housing Market

The Pittsburgh housing market had a massive crash in the late '70s and early '80s when manufacturing jobs went abroad. I remember coming in from Ohio to visit Jim's family and seeing literally half the houses in some neighborhoods with For Sale signs. As a result of that massive crash, the Pittsburgh housing market has been on the cheap side ever since. So, while parts of the rest of the national housing market have been crashing, Pittsburgh's housing market hasn't lost too much value, though it has been on the quiet side.

We live in the country not too far from Pittsburgh International Airport, in a development of new houses. The oldest house in our development is about six years old, and most of them are in the three-four year range. I generally like it, except for the need to drive everywhere to get anything (*sigh*). But, it's quiet and we finally have the space to shelve all of our books.

When we moved out here three years ago, there were about 100 houses built, in an area where, maybe, something like 220 houses could be built total. While there was a fair amount of building activity for the first year, the last two years have only seen one or two houses being built at a time.

I took a longer walk than usual today, and walked up into the newest street. Where about six weeks ago, there were, maybe, two houses being built, there are five new houses framed-in and two cellars. A surprising increase in activity.

The builder builds big but not "luxury" homes, so they are fairly affordable. And there's maybe only about 10 existing houses in the neighborhood that are on the market. But that upswing in new construction is interesting and is probably some good economic news.

Bach Choir of Pittsburgh Presents the American Premiere of David Chesky's The Agnostic

The Bach Choir of Pittsburgh has been performing a challenging selection of pieces over the last year. Each piece is tied to the overall theme "Journeys of Courage, Conviction and Conscience."

Last November, we performed Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, a vocal score to the famous silent movie classic The Passion of Joan of Arc. This event was part of the Three Rivers Film Festival.

In December, we sang Handel's Israel in Egypt.

In early April, we're performing the American Premiere of a very unusual piece, David Chesky's The Agnostic in collaboration with the Carnegie Mellon Wind Ensemble. It's challenging both musically and thematically. If you'd like to hear a truly unique work, we're performing it at Carnegie Hall in Oakland on Wednesday, April 1 at 8pm. On Saturday, April 4, at 8pm, we'll be performing it at the Richard E. Rauh Theater, Shady Side Academy, Fox Chapel. See the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh Web site for more information. You can buy tickets for the concerts from ProArts (412-394-3353) or at the door.

PARSEC Field Trip to the Warhol for The Vader Project

At the March meeting, Gary came up with a good idea - visiting The Vader Project exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum. A bunch of us said we thought that sounded like fun, so we met up on Sunday March 22 and toured the museum.

The Vader Project (http://www.thevaderproject.com/) was the brainchild of the founders of DKE Toys, Dov Kelemer & Sarah Jo Marks. They worked with 100 artists from America, England and Japan to envision a full-scale Darth Vader mask in a variety of ways. Sadly, random museum visitors were not allowed to photograph the renderings of the Darth Vader masks, but some artists have put photos of them online (http://www.toycyte.com/darth-vader-meets-andy-warhol).

The one I thought was the most creative and the most subversive was "Carmen Mirandarth" (http://girlsdrawingirls.blogspot.com/2007/07/carmen-mirandarth-gdg-and-vader-project.html), created by Melody Severns, Anne Walker, and Debbie Bruce of GirlsDrawinGirls. While many of the Vader helmets had a heavy metal or military theme, Carmen Mirandarth was a big blast of color and plastic fruit.

While most of the Vader masks were plastic, at least one person created a plushie.

Another artist built a Tatooine action figure display around a sand-colored Vader mask (http://www.suckadelic.com/Art.html).

Sometimes, the simplest mask was the most interesting. One Vader mask and was painted "Candy Cobalt Blue," a rich shiny blue with some subtle gray designs faded in the background.

One big disappointment about the exhibit for me (beyond not being allowed to take photos) was that none of the artists who were invited to submit were science fiction artists. I believe most of the artists involved in this project were either toy designers or comic artists. A shame. I would love to have seen what someone like Bob Eggleton would have done to a Vader mask!

If you like Star Wars or have an interest in toy design, this exhibit is definitely worth the trip. If you are a member of the Carnegie Museums, you can visit the Warhol for free. Check the Warhol Web site (http://www.warhol.org/museum_info/planning_a_visit.asp) for admission information. The Vader Project is due to be at the Warhol until May 3.

Now, what about the rest of the Warhol, you may ask?

It's an odd mixture of good news and bad.

The seventh floor was a particular waste of time. There was a loud video running constantly, and there was a strikingly bad exhibit called The End. So, if you go, do yourself a favor and skip the seventh floor.

Much of the museum displayed a small portion of Warhol's massive collection of celebrity ephemera. Some of the photos of celebrities might have been a bit more revealing than the subject intended. While his photo of OJ Simpson was taken in 1977, it looked oddly like the profile view of a mug shot.

There are also a few interactive exhibits, including a room with large fans and big silver balloons you can bounce off the ceiling.

After our trip through the Warhol, we went over to Soho (at the Marriott Springhill Suites) and had a late lunch. I walked into downtown to take photos of a large metal work at the corner of 7th & Ft. Duquesne Boulevard - It was a huge Transformer-ish sculpture comprised of the bridges of Pittsburgh:



We enjoyed our field trip, and hope there will be more in the future.

2009 Oscars - What Should Win, What Will Win

My annual thoughts on the Oscars.

I'll probably be Facebooking/Twittering during the Oscars.

Gutting Money for Scientific Research from the Stimulus

Shawn Otto, one of the organizers of Science Debate 2008, just send around some depressing E-mail - there's a move to remove money for the National Science Foundation and other science/energy-related appropriations from the stimulus package.

These are areas that can use more money, so to hear that some additional funding is being deleted is frustrating.

I sent the following E-mail to my senators, as well as a somewhat edited version to Senator Nelson and Collins:


I was shocked that Ben Nelson and Susan Collins are calling for gutting funding completely for NSF and for the DOE office of science and reducing funding for other science and energy-related areas from the Senate American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. We've suffered through eight years of scientific illiterates running the federal government. We need to keep funding up for the National Science Foundation, which leads in getting more research money to colleges and universities. We need to do more research into renewable and clean energy. Must our research infrastructure be in as bad shape as our roads, bridges and public schools?

Economics Isn't Physics - What Politicians Don't Get About Recovering from a Severe Recession

While I am not an economist, it's clear that we're in a severe recession. We're in this recession for many reasons.

• Economic Cycles. No matter what we do, the economy will always have some down times. A wise government would have had adequate controls in place so that the economy wouldn't crash and burn very much. However, we haven't had a wise, forward-thinking government in years


• Unfettered Greed. We've been in a period of economic irrational exuberance that encouraged massive greed


• Lack of Oversight. Companies and individuals have engaged in massive fraud and just plain stupid behavior on a scale we haven't seen since the '20s since there was very little governmental oversight (the Republicans were also in control of the federal government for eight years before the Great Depression, another time of little governmental oversight over companies)

Unfortunately, we're dealing with "fundamentalist economists" - people who will always tell you that there is only one way to do something, regardless of empirical evidence. Conservative economists will insist the trickle-down effect of lowering taxes on the rich is the way to go. This may have worked in the early '80s and early '00s, but it clearly hasn't worked in a few years [2012 update - Actually, I'm wrong about this - there's evidence that "trickle down" did not work in the '80s either]. If anything, this may have sent the economy more into the tank. Liberal economists will insist that massive spending programs are the only way to bolster the economy. That might have worked some in the late '30s and the late '60s, but it doesn't work for very long and can lead to additional years of recession.

Different times call for different solutions.

Much as I abhor federal deficits, we need massive but targeted federal spending and that taxes must be raised on people making more than $100,000 a year. This is not the time for trickle-down - this is the time for building up. Our infrastructure is in horrible shape after years of governmental neglect. How many more bridge collapses are we going to have to have before people wake up and see how badly we need another big roads bill? Our government should also be employing more modern methods, such as green energy plans, online medical records and modernizing public education.

Economic isn't physics. Physics describes laws that are consistent. Economics is a much softer science than its practitioners would care to admit. If I drop a ball from the Empire State Building and one from a 737, it's going to always fall at the same rate of speed. Gravity is a constant. But economies do not fall or rise at a constant rate. Psychology plays heavily into economics. After years of irrational exuberance, we seem to in a state of near-irrational economic despair.

Americans deserve some of that despair. Both the investing market and the housing market went completely bonkers over the last few years, because there was almost no oversight. Common sense by governments, institutions and individuals went completely out the window.

My husband and I have been doing pretty well over the last few years. While I have been unable to remain reliably employed, my husband has a good job and we've always been careful about spending. We have savings and a diversified portfolio of investments.

We bought our first house in 1987 and our second in 1993. We put 5% down on the first house and 20% down on the second. We had good a good credit rating. Of course we sweated getting our first mortgage a little, but we knew we'd get it.

We sold our first house during a housing downturn in 1994 and lost money. We had a lasting lesson that housing prices don't just go up. And, this was in Massachusetts, a place where the housing market, after 1994, went from being expensive to being extremely expensive.

In 2006, we decided to buy a new house. As my husband manages his group from home and I was unemployed, we could have moved anywhere. After looking at housing prices in several areas, we decided to stay in Pittsburgh, where we have family and friends and could buy much more home for the money. For the same money that bought a largish, new house in rural Western Pennsylvania would have bought a 50 year old ranch in eastern Massachusetts or a one car garage in the Bay area of California. We wanted the space and the quiet, so we stayed here. We're very glad we did!

We put 20% down on our new home. Our mortgage broker tried to talk us out of putting that much down. We were stunned by this attitude, but put 20% down anyway, and later paid most of the money from the sale of our old house (which took nearly six months to sell) against the principal of the new. We also worked to keep the costs of our mortgage as low as possible. Selling stock to buy a house in early 2006 turned out to be a very good move, and staying in the Pittsburgh area was a real win. While the housing prices peaked around then, our house has lost much less value than our stocks have. Since the Pittsburgh housing market had a huge bust back in 1980-1981, it's lost very little value during this housing bust.

While I understand that mortgage brokers and banks were trying hard to get people to buy houses a few years back, their "you don't need to put money down" attitude was incredibly short-sighted. Many people don't understand the importance of paying principal on houses and other investments. While laws should encourage home ownership, they also need to encourage people to put money down, to actually own a percentage of the property.

We could have probably gotten a million dollar mortgage in California or New York, but we would have had barely invested 5% in a house in one of those markets. Living that far beyond our means was completely unacceptable to us. Unfortunately, it wasn't unacceptable to many Americans who did just that over the last 10 years or so.

And that goes for government spending too. The federal government has been mortgaging our children's and grandchildren's future without making the rich pay more taxes. Over the last few years, the number of yachts and luxury mansions owned by Americans skyrocketed. Why do you think that happened? Because the super-rich were the biggest beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts. Wealthy Americans who can afford to pay more taxes should be paying more taxes. Much as I respect President Obama, his refusal to kill the Bush tax cuts for the rich and give the rich yet more tax breaks was a horrible way to start off his administration.

So what we need is a rational tax/stimulus package includes:

• having genuine governmental oversight (laws with teeth) over industries and over any stimulus money that goes to companies


• spending to improve our infrastructure (and education is infrastructure)


• training everyone, from children through adults, on responsible decision-making about money


• gradually reducing the number of troops abroad


• a small tax cuts for households making less than $60,000 a year


• a small tax increase for households making $100,000-$200,000 a year


• a larger tax increase on income over $200,000 a year (and maybe even an additional tax bracket for people who make over $200,000 a year)

We need to look at new, logical ways to manage the economy, without being rigidly bound to the theories of the past. And by "economy," I don't mean merely at the government/industry level - I mean the economy of individual families too. In the case of families, returning to the old theories of living within their means, saving for the future and avoiding using credit cards may help prevent another mega-recession in the forseeable future.

Many individuals are in the midst of personal financial failure. They've lost their houses and their jobs. In some cases, it really wasn't their fault. People who did their best to live within their means and made reasonable choices deserve society's compassion and support. They deserve the chance to refinance and not be foreclosed upon, if there's any hope they might be able to manage the payments.

But let's take a look at some outstanding cases where individuals need to take some responsibility for their incredibly illogical choices:

• Anyone who put all their financial eggs in one basket, from the folks at Enron to the folks who turned over all their money to people like Bernie Madoff. Diversification has been the primary rule of investing for generations. That's one thing that hasn't changed.


• People who support others no matter how ludicrously they behave. Sorry, the woman in California who went bankrupt helping her daughter have 14 children is as certifiable as her daughter is. (I have a bad feeling some cable channel will launch a reality show around these folks, but the proliferation of "reality" shows that do nothing but promote irresponsibility is a wholly separate rant.) People need to make rational choices. Parents need to tell their children "NO" sometimes.

We need a country that was once generally based in common-sense behavior and personal accountability from the individual, through businesses and up to the very highest reaches of the government. I hope that will happen again, but, unfortunately, we have a very long way to go.

Sing-a-long in the Hay-Adams Bar: My Trip to the 2009 Inauguration

Why I Went to Washington

In the 1960s, I grew up in a lily-white, mostly middle class small town in New England. About the only black people I ever saw where ones on TV, being hit by water from fire hoses and being attacked by dogs on the evening news. Those scenes made me dislike white southerners in power, and made me feel something was really unfair about the way some people in our country were being treated. I remember hearing Dr. Martin Luther King speak on TV. When he said, "I hope that one day my four little children will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," I understood why he said what he did. I was six years old, and that made complete sense to me. It was possible to understand a little bit about racism without having experienced it personally. When I was nine, I went to summer camp. Robin slept in the bunk over me. I wrote to my parents, "A Negro girl named Robin is in my cabin. No one is making fun of her." At camp we learned that we could all live in the same cabin without any problem. At about the same time, riots broke out and cities burned. I didn't understand poverty and hopelessness could drive people to such lengths. I have to say, It didn't make any more sense to me than the white policemen setting fire hoses on teenagers, or some nut bombing a church. Most of America has made great strides in race relations since the '60s. It's not perfect. but it is getting better. To paraphrase Rev. Theodore Parker and Dr. Martin Luther King, "The arc of a civilized society is a long one, but it bends towards justice." The election of Barack Obama was one of the most civilized things our society has done. As an American and an Obama supporter, I wanted to be in Washington to help celebrate his Inauguration. I drove to DC from Pittsburgh on Sunday morning. It was snowy over half the way down, so it took nearly six hours to get there (usually, it takes about four and a half). I got to my brother and sister-in-law's house in Silver Spring. I dropped off my stuff, and my brother took me to the Metro. I went to town to watch the Inaugural Concert at the Lincoln Memorial. I walked towards the Lincoln Memorial, but the line into the concert wasn't moving much. I walked up the hill to the Washington Monument. There was a crowd on the Lincoln Memorial side of the Washington Monument, but there was still plenty of space. Some of the Jumbotrons were set up on the Lincoln Memorial side of the Washington Monument, along with an odd police vehicle that looked like a viewing booth atop a huge scissor-lift. The Jefferson Memorial was pretty dead during the weekend. More About My Inaugural Trip

Milk: The Best Movie of 2008

It's possible I might see a better movie in the next two weeks, but I doubt it.

When history is known (like, say, with the upcoming WWII movie Valkyrie about a plot to assassinate Hitler), a movie can loose its dramatic tension since "we know what happens." A good director, screenwriter and cast can compensate by dynamic direction, an intelligent script and spot-on acting. Milk succeeds on all points. Director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black have created a compelling movie. And Sean Penn gives the most joyful, winning performance I've ever seen from him.

Milk is the story of an unlikely political activist. Harvey Milk was a closeted gay guy in New York City until his very late 30s. The early scenes of Milk remind you what a bad old time the '50s and '60s were for gay men, with old footage of police raids on gay bars.

By the early '70s, Harvey had met Scott, a much younger man. They ran off to San Francisco together where they opened a camera store. They had a very affectionate relationship. If this movie had been about a heterosexual couple and not a homosexual couple, it would have been rated PG-13 instead of R. Still, I've heard reports of some audience members leaving during the early kissing scenes (there are some sex scenes, but they are extremely discreet). Why would you go to a movie about a gay man coming out of the closet if watching two men kissing was going to upset you? I didn't leave when the hate-mongers in the movie spewed homophobia; this is truly disgusting compared to two men (or two women) kissing.

As a business owner, Harvey understood the importance of being out and being organized. He became a frequently unsuccessful candidate for local office, while becoming more politically able and building a network of young men to support neighborhood causes. In these scenes, some of the actors are actually old friends of Harvey's from the '70s. In at least five different scenes, you see the writer Frank Robinson, a man who was Harvey's contemporary. While I wish they'd mentioned who Frank was, it was nice to see he was involved in the movie.

Harvey became an expert at working the crowd and working the press. While Scott had served as Harvey's campaign manager, he was disillusioned by politics and the pair split up. Harvey went on to win the 1977 election for city supervisor. Harvey became involved with a volatile Hispanic man named Jack, and became close friends with Cleve Jones.

Even though Harvey had a local victory, he got very involved fighting California's Proposition 6, a measure to fire gay teachers and their supporters. It was promoted by Anita Bryant (who only appears in this movie in old clips - a nice touch to reinforce how passe she should be) and John Briggs, a California state senator. After months of pushing, Harvey got to debate John several times. In the run-up to the statewide vote on Prop 6, Jack committed suicide which left Harvey fairly depressed. However, after pollsters and early results made it look like Prop 6 would pass, it wound up failing by a large margin.

While he was fighting against Prop 6, Harvey tried to cultivate positive relationships with the other city supervisors. The relationship between he and newly-elected conservative supervisor Dan White was fairly contentious. After months of not getting any legislation passed, Dan resigned from the city supervisors and tried to get his job back. When he didn't get it, he smuggled himself in the city office building, and assassinated both Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk.

The movie certainly captured the grief of San Francisco following these assassinations. But these impact of these murders went way beyond San Francisco. I was 21, married, and living in Pittsburgh when I heard about them. To this day, I can't watch that famous tape of Diane Feinstein informing the public of the murders without weeping. And I had the same reaction today, at the beginning and ending of Milk. But most of Milk is one of the most vivid recreations of the '70s I've ever seen, with a performance that should win Sean Penn his second Oscar (and, maybe an supporting actor Oscar nomination for James Franco's fine performance as Scott). Emile Hirsch was good as Cleve Jones, who later went on to be an AIDS activist and create the Names Project (the AIDS Quilt).

This movie must be seen by the people least likely to see it - the people who think things like Proposition 8 are a good idea. Consenting adults deserve to live their lives as they choose, without fear of retribution.

My Vision for American Change

The Obama change.gov site has invited Americans to submit their vision for changing the country. Here's what I sent them:


The Obama campaign tapped into the power of distributing information and encouraging volunteerism by its great Web outreach. The Obama administration could do much more of the same.

There are people all over this country who would love to work for the Obama administration. We aren't interested in big jobs or living in Washington. We interesting in helping to coordinate federal resources and local needs. The Web can be a powerful tool in decentralizing and accomplishing more on the local level.

For many years, the Federal government has been portrayed as being completely out of touch with the varied types of communities across this country. To some degree, this has been true, in Republican as well as Democratic administrations. As President-elect Obama well knows, being a community organizer should be a high calling in this society.