View 292 January 12 - 18, 2004 (original) (raw)
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Adelphia Cable Modem is working again. It wasn't when I went to bed, it was this morning. Thus I don't have to learn how to set up the Netwinder to do dialup, which is just as well since I don't really remember how I did it in the first place.
The moral of this story is not only to keep good logs -- I did that and the information exists somewhere -- but INDEX the darned things so that you can FIND the information again when you need to.
Anyway we are back with cable modem, which works very well. I sure got tired of the latency of that satellite connection.
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Fry's has NEC flat panel 19" monitors at a good sale price, and I am thinking of getting one; it would sure save space here. And text looks great on them even though they are a bit slow with really fast games.
I took the smaller flat screen I've had for years to Niven's for blitzing the book using the TabletPC with that screen and an external keyboard, and that worked just fine, so I think a larger flat screen might work here.
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I have been unable to get to Google for a couple of days. I assumed it was a satellite quirk but it seems to be still operating. What is going on?
Seems to be a DNS problem. [This fixed itself Sunday night.]
BYTE seems to be dead also, and that one I don't know about at all. [It was fine as of Sunday night, and working perfectly Monday. I don't know if the problem was at the site, here, or on the Internet in general.]
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The Pickering Appointment
The Constitution has a number of checks and balances. The Senate has rules allowing for unlimited debate; at one time, anyone could continue to talk on an issue, thus preventing it from coming to a vote, for as long as he wanted to, and a small group could block any legislation if they cared to. This was done to prevent a vote on the Treaty of Versailles, and eventually the rules was changed to allow an extraordinary majority of 2/3 to close debate. Then came the Civil Rights Act debates and over 1/3 of the Senate didn't want those to come to a vote; and the rules were changed in 1975 to 3/5 majority, to impose "cloture" or a limit to debate in the Senate.
Political parties have ingeniously used this as a means to prevent judicial and cabinet appointments they don't like when they don't have the votes to defeat them in an up or down vote. They simply prevent them from coming to a vote by unlimited debate, so that confirmation of a judge or a cabinet officer (or a military officer for that matter) now requires as a practical matter a 60% majority in the Senate.
This is closer to John Caldwell Calhoun's theory of the concurrent majority than to modern constitutional theory. Calhoun was defending slavery, but he was also defending the notion of consent of the governed. It may be no bad idea.
I would argue that with the passage of the Voting Rights Act we can afford a certain degree of states' rights now, and the notion of local authority in most matters is very much in keeping with the founding idea of the US, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The smaller the jurisdiction the more power you can trust the government to have: so long as you can get the hell out of Dodge, it isn't so terribly important that Dodge has laws against spitting on the saloon floor and requiring you to check your firearms at the saloon door. An example I use often is the Blue Belly Baptists, who believe that on Sunday afternoon you must not appear in public unless your belly is exposed and pained blue, and have laws to that effect. Let them. Just let me know in advance, so I either won't be there, or I can muddle my woad on Sunday morning.
Leave that. The point is that the Democrats have said that without a 60% majority in the Senate you will not appoint certain people as judges or other constitutional officers. But of course they also supplied the remedy. Clinton had a man, Bill Lan Lee, who couldn't get a majority vote in the Senate for his appointment to the Civil Rights Commission even though the Democrats held a Senate majority. He would have got few Republican votes, and there were lots of Democrats who wouldn't vote for him either. So: his name wasn't submitted to the Senate. He was given an interim appointment while the Senate wasn't in session. This expired and was renewed. Clinton defended this practice.
Bush hasn't gone that far: He has appointed Pickering in the usual way, submitting his name to the Senate; the Senate is welcome to vote up or down on him. But since the Senate refuses to vote (because 41 Senators will vote against cloture and a few will talk until the cows come home), Pickering was given an interim appointment, good for the life of this Congress. One presumes that next Senate recess his appointment will be renewed. And again, until the Senate votes one way or another.
This wasn't really the way the constitution was supposed to work, but neither was holding appointments in abeyance without a vote the way it was supposed to work.
I would guess that this is a trial balloon and we will soon see at every recess more interim appointments of people whose names have been submitted to the Senate but who can't get hearings or a vote. I would also guess that Madison, Hamilton, and Jay would find this a perfectly acceptable practice.
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Hubble's Death Sentence
I see NASA will let Hubble die. At a billion dollars a shuttle launch they can't service Hubble any longer. Hubble needs a manned mission: there is no robot that can do that work. And there is no manned spacecraft but Shuttle. And Shuttle requires 22,000 people to operate and launch, in addition to another half billion per mission incremental cost above the cost of the standing army.
The standing army will be paid whether there are any Shuttle launches at all, but they can't come up with the other half billion to go rescue Hubble.
You may remember back in 1989 Max Hunter, Dan Graham, and I persuaded then Chairman of the National Space Council Dan Quayle to foster an experimental spacecraft, SSX, a scale model of which was built and flown as DC/X. Most of that story is here on this web site. Had that development continued, we would now have a ship capable of sending two people to the Hubble for a cost of a few tens of millions per mission; but of course that wasn't continued because it was a threat to the standing army of NASA which needs the Shuttle.
Welcome to the wide world of bureaucracy.
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I am pleased to report that due to the generous efforts of Mr. St. Onge, the book of the month page has been brought up to December 2003. You may find it here.