Tag: Personal stuff

Preview

Just some items I’m planning on, for your reading pleasure. Aside from a simple Thanksgiving greeting I’m taking tomorrow off.

I’m finishing up the 2011 version of the monoblogue Accountability Project. All the vote tallying is done, so all I need to do is the little writeup as to why I would vote for or against a certain bill. I’m shooting for Monday to release this.

Later in December, baseball fans who are warming themselves discussing the Hot Stove League will get to enjoy the newest induction, honoring players now eligible for the Shorebird of the Week Hall of Fame. I have a lot of new members this year!

If all goes well I’ll have a couple new Weekend of local rock posts and perhaps bring back Friday Night Videos.

And of course I will have plenty of political news to comment on. Remember, the Iowa caucuses are now less than six weeks away.

I’ve noticed readership is back on the upswing, so it’s up to me to keep you coming back as I close in on monoblogue’s sixth anniversary. Hopefully you’ll agree there’s a lot to look forward to, even in a slow news time of year.

Checking in

Well, day one of the Maryland Republican Party convention is just about in the books. On the bylaw amendment front, it looks like there’s a decent chance change is a-comin’.

In case you were wondering (and I’ll have much more on this tomorrow or Sunday, depending on the time this wraps up) there were suites for both Herman Cain and Mitt Romney here, while Ron Paul has a table as well. Both Dan Bongino and Rich Douglas had spaces, although Bongino had a ballroom.

So I’m giving you this quick update at the end of a whirlwind day and week for me. I already have plenty to write about, including my Red Maryland Radio debut. (That’s called a tease.)

Back with more tomorrow…

An open letter to the Maryland GOP

Just in case the recipient doesn’t get their e-mail, I’m reprinting it here. Those interested should also make their local Central Committee members aware that you have a vested interest in the adoption of this proposal.

To my fellow Central Committee members:

On Saturday, you will be asked to consider a change to our bylaws. Obviously our last get-together was full of acrimony and angst over a proposed revamping of the document and voting system just a few years after we had done this exercise to modernize and streamline it. So you may have received this news and said, “oh no, not again.”

Well, this time it’s different. Rather than cosmetic changes or creating committees out of whole cloth, the proposal co-authored by Heather Olsen and I has two very simple purposes: one, to strengthen the neutrality section of the bylaws by placing it in its own article; and two, to prevent the Rule 11 fiasco of 2010 from being repeated.

It’s our belief that the party should not be putting its finger on the scale in a contested primary situation. The paragraph on neutrality (5.4) already in the bylaws didn’t seem very strong as it was buried among other items, so this proposal moves it to lead the new Article 7. That’s probably not very controversial.

The more contentious aspect of our proposal is where we require our representatives to the national Republican Party to get permission from the state’s Central Committee before asking for a waiver of Rule 11, as they asked the national party in 2010 for Bob Ehrlich and Andy Harris. Both were in contested primaries at the time. The timing of the deal is what rankled me and inspired the creation of this proposal, since there was ample opportunity to bring this piece of business before the 2010 Spring Convention in Ocean City; however, the Chair at that time chose not to. Doing business behind closed doors is what we associate with the other party!

We originally made this proposal before the Spring 2011 convention in Ocean City, but the unfortunate aspect of a strict time limit meant a lot of business – including this particular bylaw change and many others proposed – went unfinished. However, this is the only bylaw change I’m aware of going before this convention.

In the meantime, Heather and I discussed the proposal more based on feedback we both received. In addition to integrating the neutrality aspect in general, we also decided to lower the threshold for waiving this prohibition from a 3 / 4 to a 2 / 3 majority and added the option of having the counties vote on it separately when the situation dictates, at the discretion of the Chair.

There has been more recent feedback concerning the voting method in the proposal, which was written as a “one man, one vote” balloting. This was my idea, and the reason I decided to do it this way was to balance the two situations: if a vote is taken in a non-convention setting, I reckoned it would be tallied as one man, one vote so I thought the two scenarios should be equal. But I’m willing to allow a change to the standard weighted convention voting (if a vote is held there) if it helps to pass the measure through.

I believe the time has come to end the politics of the proverbial smoke-filled room and allow the candidates the most level playing field possible to get their message out to the voters. The Maryland Republican Party must have a extremely good reason to take a stance during the primary season, and perceived electability is not good enough.

It’s time to take a stand for good government, and not politics as usual.

Michael Swartz

Secretary
Wicomico County Republican Central Committee

Much ado about little

Our Special Session ended yesterday, and all of the bluster was, well, just talk.

In sum, there were three bills passed. Of course, the new Congressional gerrymandering was just one of the three, with the other two being changes to board of education districts in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

And as I predicted without knowing the results until today, the local Democrats don’t mind gerrymandering as long as it’s not applied to them. The trio of Rudy Cane, Norm “Five Dollar” Conway, and Jim Mathias all dutifully supported the governor’s plan. On the other hand, while the Republicans were united against the bill I salute Delegate McDermott (and 11 others) for even voting against the suspension of the rules to allow two readings in one day – heel dragging as necessary.

So we had three days of peace and love or however the old song goes, but no huge jobs bill or tax increases yet. We had quite the buildup on this session, didn’t we? But in the end there wasn’t much to it.

What this also means is that I can complete my monoblogue Accountability Project for 2011 and simply add the redistricting vote into the mix. In theory I could add some of the floor amendments but those votes were by and large reasonably the same. Look for that in the coming weeks.

And since an opportunity has presented itself for a couple days off, I’m going to take advantage. It’s not often that I spend time away from my site, but this weekend will be one such time. I may moderate comments but don’t count on it.

Come Monday it will be back into the fray. Now that the Special Session has reached sine die, we can expect a few political moves from would-be Congressional candidates I’m sure. As predicted, Rob Garagiola wasted no time getting into the Sixth District race now that he has a friendlier voter composition. Don’t you love ambition?

The 99 percent solution

You know, I haven’t been following this whole “Occupy Wall Street” protest all that closely because, to be perfectly honest, I work for a living (unlike them.)

It must be nice to be able to go protest all day without a visible means of support, since one has to assume that for them to hang out at Wall Street for days on end they must not have jobs, unless they’re selling their bodies or some such act. Judging by what many say they must be getting a government check of some sort, probably unemployment benefits.

On the other hand, I have two jobs outside the home and writing clients I do work for inside the home, plus I run this website, volunteer in my community, and try to spend a little quality time with someone special when I can. Now, would that make me a member of the REAL 99 percent?

Perhaps those playing anarchist in various cities around the country don’t understand that demands like a “free” education or forgiveness of debt would make Atlas shrug in a heartbeat. I was reading their idea of a “fair” salary for everyone and saw that many millions of Americans would take a tremendous pay cut. Do you REALLY think union employees would agree to that? And why would you start a business in order to take a $10,000 salary when you have to pay your hired laborers twice that much?

I guess the first thing not being taught in schools is basic economics, because it’s obvious whoever came up with this redistribution scheme has flunked the course. Nor do they understand human nature.

Continue reading “The 99 percent solution”

Remarks on an elected Wicomico County Board of Education

ICYMI – these were the remarks I delivered at tonight’s County Council meeting regarding the prospect of an elected Wicomico County Board of Education. You might catch this on PAC-14 over the next week or so, but trust me: it’s best delivered here.

To the members of County Council and those assembled here for this meeting, good evening.

I’m speaking to you on a subject that, had the original plan been taken to completion, would be on its way to a decision by the voters of Wicomico County. But a funny thing happened on the way to that forum – there was some double dealing perpetrated in Annapolis by opponents of a common-sense proposal to allow we, the citizens of Wicomico County, to decide whether to adopt an elected school board or not.

Instead, they gummed up the works by insisting other questions such as whether we wanted to maintain an appointed school board be included. As it was, the answer would have been obvious – if voters wanted an appointed school board they would simply vote “no” to the question presented. To me, this was simply an attempt at obfuscation dreamed up by opponents who want to maintain the status quo for political purposes. It’s those opponents who I came up here to address this evening.

Continue reading “Remarks on an elected Wicomico County Board of Education”

Are you being served?

After this post, my readers will either think I’m crazy or revel in my genius. I guess that’s all up to you.

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day when the subject turned to some local news topics. My friend was very adamant that certain points of view weren’t getting out and the conversation turned in a direction I’ll share in a little bit.

But first, let me preface this with a little history lesson. How about winding the clock back to around 1980? Ah yes, the Reagan vs. Carter “are you better off than you were four years ago?” election. I can paraphrase that and ask the question “Are you more informed about local news than you were thirty years ago?”

You see, I don’t know what the situation on the ground was here on Delmarva – apparently WMDT-TV was still in its infancy but WBOC-TV and the Daily Times were already here. It’s similar to what I grew up with in rural northwest Ohio – three local television stations with news at noon, 6, and 11, the one Toledo daily newspaper, and a weekly paper in the closest town. In other words, local news wasn’t that easy to come by because there was only a few minutes devoted to it on television and the newspapers gave it to you a day (or even a week for hyperlocal news) later.

Obviously the game has changed in the three decades since. Another phenomenon just barely started in 1980 was the 24/7 news cycle brought on by cable news networks. Add to that the advent of the internet as a news source – but not just a static source like print, because we can feature audio, video, or both. We even have some real-time aspects and most likely the advances in technology will soon make on-the-spot live video reporting possible for even technophobes like us. (For all I know, maybe that’s available. I just write this stuff and place the jump in an appropriate place.)

Continue reading “Are you being served?”

New advertiser

If you’ll notice in the right-hand sidebar, there’s a new advertiser here at monoblogue.

But it’s much more than an ad. I was asked by the publisher of Salisbury4Rent to contribute content, and the first issue is my print magazine debut. Each quarter you’ll be able to read an editorial piece I’ll write on “anything from politics to sports to music to whatever else strikes me as the publishing deadline approaches.” I share billing in this issue with Salisbury City Council member Laura Mitchell (the subject of the magazine’s first interview) and national political observer Lew Rockwell.

While the magazine is advertiser-supported (thus, free for the taking at a number of local distribution points) its success depends on patronizing these advertisers and spreading the word. It’s not a coffee-table glossy full of fluff pieces about the advertisers like Metropolitan, but reading one can sink their teeth into. Once you get your hands on the issue, you’ll wish it came out more than once a quarter.

Running a magazine is a tough business, but Salisbury4Rent has some solid backers and well-written commentary. I encourage you to give it a try. As a special treat for those outside Salisbury, I’ll link to my article once the content portion of the magazine goes online in the next few days.

Picks and pans from a Shorebird fan – 2011 edition

You know, it’s funny. Due to a number of factors, I didn’t get to nearly the number of Shorebirds games I had the previous few seasons but I think I have a better understanding of how things are because, one, I could step back a bit and see things from without, and, two, I had some long and interesting talks with Shorebirds management regarding suggestions I’d made in previous years.

And in all honesty, the problem may run deeper than a few cosmetic changes. Let’s look at some numbers for comparison’s sake – I actually found numbers for the entire 16-year history of the club but for simplicity I’ll just put up years 1, 6, 11, and 16.

  • Year 1 (1996): 315,011 – 4,846 per game
  • Year 6 (2001): 268,143 – 3,886 per game
  • Year 11 (2006): 217,980 – 3,406 per game
  • Year 16 (2011): 211,993 – 3,072 per game

In both actual attendance and average (not to mention on-field performance) this year was the worst in Shorebirds history. Having said that, though, the Shorebirds still ranked sixth in the league in average attendance and once again was tops among the three 7th Inning Stretch (the LLC which owns the Shorebirds and two other minor league clubs) teams in both average and actual attendance. This is the fifth season the Shorebirds have been owned by the group but the eighth straight year attendance has settled into a narrow range between this year’s low and the 2008 peak of 226,754. That edition happens to be the last team which was good on the field, as they compiled a 78-61 record that summer.

With that in mind, I think I can make an assumption that having a good team would improve attendance perhaps 10 percent. It’s probably not in the cards that we’ll see another attendance record like 1997’s 324,412 (the all-time record here) unless the overall economy improves and the area begins to grow again. True, we won the SAL title in 1997 but we did so again three seasons later and attendance wasn’t markedly better than the previous two campaigns.

Continue reading “Picks and pans from a Shorebird fan – 2011 edition”

Surviving Irene

This is where I normally park my car. Luckily, I moved my car up by the garage.

Well, we survived Irene. In all honesty, I think it’s blowing harder now at 11:00 in the morning than it did for a good chunk of last night.

By the way, that branch was the largest limb that fell in our yard. That’s important because normally I park my car there! Luckily, I had decided to move it right up by the garage to keep it out of the wind – and away from the row of pine trees.

It seems to me that this hurricane was very unusual insofar as I would expect hurricanes to be. I was expecting conditions to deteriorate as the eye drew closer, but it seems like the worst time of it was yesterday afternoon and early evening, several hours before the center of the storm came by. On the back side, the wind is howling outside at about the same amount of time after the eye of the hurricane passed. Granted, the closest experience I had to a storm before this was Ernesto a few years back. Aside from the duration of the event, Irene’s effects seemed comparable to me.

Yet the sizzle didn’t match the steak. I’ve been glued to the Weather Channel for a couple days trying to see what would happen, but all they seemed to talk about was North Carolina (naturally, since the hurricane was supposed to make landfall there) and New Jersey/New York City. Okay, that’s a major center of population. But they didn’t send anyone to Ocean City and didn’t make much of an effort to pinpoint when Irene would affect us. I got more information from our local news than the channel which is supposed to be “the hurricane experts.”

Hopefully everyone within the reach of my words had a similar story to mine – other than a little water in the basement, the few branches down, and a bit of a flashing failure on my chimney (we had water running down the front of our fireplace, which faces east into the wind) we got through this just fine. My significant other even went to a wedding yesterday afternoon and we never lost our power.

So now I guess I can dump the pot of water we left on the stove, drain the bathtub we filled in case we needed to flush the toilet, and place the dozen or so plastic ice bags we made into the garage freezer. Oh, and eventually move my car back now that I dragged that branch out of the driveway and take the basement furniture off the blocks. So it’s another busy day about these parts.

Ridin’ the storm out

Because of the weather conditions and the prospect I’m not going to have power, you probably won’t see new posts here until Monday.

As of right now, the Salisbury area is expecting the peak of the storm to hit about 2 a.m. Sunday, with sustained winds of 54 miles per hour. We could get 6″ of rain or more as well. Over in Ocean City, their sustained winds would be 67 m.p.h. – just short of hurricane strength, but certainly enough to do plenty of damage (not to mention the 6′ storm surge.) From my days in the architectural field, I recall that now mechanical and electrical units have to be set at 8′ above sea level, so it’s going to be very likely buildings may see significant damage in that regard too if the surge is just a bit higher.

We are pretty much as prepared as we will be; luckily it seems that the storm is weakening a bit more than first thought. Still, it’s going to be awhile (if ever) that we will be back to ‘normal.’

Oh, one other piece of good news: it’s likely we’ll never have to go through a Hurricane Irene again. Major hurricanes which affect large areas have their names retired, so the next cycle will have a new female “I” name. But what is it about “I” hurricanes? Isabel, Ike, and now Irene have been very damaging storms the last few years.

By the way, I have no clue why my website has been down from time to time. I’ve asked my server company to investigate but it’s one of those sporadic outages which drive me nuts.

This generation’s ‘New Coke’

Rarely has a product fallen so far, so fast, as the HP TouchPad. Last Thursday the company said they were discontinuing the product barely a month after pulling out all the stops to introduce it.

This was interesting to me not because I own a TouchPad, but because the company I work for as my outside job was responsible for setting up TouchPad displays in a number of stores, including Staples, Office Max, and Office Depot among others. So HP’s decision cut a few hours from my schedule as I would audit the displays to verify if units were working properly as part of my regular chores. (Fortunately, I still get to check all the other HP products there.)

Yet what may have been most stunning is the speed in which HP pulled the plug. Apparently the units weren’t exactly flying off the shelves at Best Buy and the retailer’s desire to return unsold units to HP prompted the decision.

I will cheerfully admit I am not a technical sort of person when it comes to electronics. As long as I could get the units to run a demo loop in my rounds I was a happy guy, and that was the extent I played with the TouchPads. (One of my stores did have a balky unit, though. Maybe they weren’t the only one.) I leave computer repair to the experts, which is why I’m typing this post on my PC keyboard – my laptop is in capable hands as it gets the failing hard drive replaced and memory added.

For those of you who aren’t a certain age as I am, the reference at the top was to the drink Coca-Cola introduced in the mid-1980’s as a replacement for the original formula of Coca-Cola. In the annals of corporate decisions, that was the epic fail of my generation, much as the Edsel was the punchline of my parents’ peers.

But look at the timelines involved. The Edsel lasted about three years before Ford decided enough was enough, while New Coke went about three months before Coca-Cola realized they made a horrible marketing mistake and brought back the original formula. This episode lasted barely a month – heck, a poorly received television series sometimes gets a longer run than that.

Yet TouchPads aren’t unpopular when sold at $99. That was a way to eliminate the backstock to be sure, although one can be sure that HP was losing a ton on each unit. (Apparently they’re refunding the price difference to certain buyers as well so more money lost.)

It’s not unusual for new businesses to fail, but when an established company makes a blunder this large there are lessons to be learned for another generation. The question is whether HP can recover from this gaffe, as rumors are swirling that they may leave the PC business or otherwise downsize operations. The HP TouchPad tagline “Everybody On” apparently was a pipe dream, but how much long-term prospects are injured by the failure remains to be seen.