I’m in California

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw the headline of this article – “San Francisco falls into the abyss,” and it certainly struck home:

Some blame San Francisco’s high cost of living for the exodus. San Francisco housing costs have contributed to this loss, but many of those leaving the city are those with very high incomes who can afford to live in San Francisco. Instead, they are choosing to move to locations, many of which are also expensive, that have much more sensible city governance.

They are moving to destinations that do not have San Francisco’s drug and crime issues, its poorly performing public schools, its homelessness, its extremely high cost of doing business, and other issues that people have tolerated for so long, only because San Francisco was once one of the world’s great cities. As someone who loved San Francisco, it pains me to say it no longer is. And I suspect that those who departed San Francisco, whose exits left the city with 60,000 fewer taxpayers, feel the same way.

I’ve been coming to San Francisco very regularly for over 50 years. I’ve seen the decline firsthand, and it’s huge. I don’t spend much time anymore in a city I used to love, although I still visit several friends and relatives there. But the problems really were brought home to me – at least in a small way – on Tuesday when I flew from Boston to San Francisco.

The Jet Blue flight was great, smooth and on time. But oh, that San Francisco airport has the most bewildering (or absent) signage! The train that takes you to the car rental place is in a strange place with many twistings and turnings to find, and the airport authorities are very sparing with their signs.

Last time I was there, in the fall, car rental lines were so long that it took over an hour to actually get the car. This time? It turns out that reservations there no longer mean much, if anything. They had no cars available at any car rental company, and the room was filled with people sitting around dismally, waiting, after being told that in three hours maybe, maybe, a car would somehow arrive.

I guess if you were staying in San Francisco the situation was sort of okay; you could just Uber or Lyft to your hotel and get around that way until a car materialized (although I think you’d have to go back to the airport and wait again in order to actually receive it). For me it was no solution, since I had to go about 150 miles in that car the next day.

But in what seemed almost miraculous by then, after about two hours I managed to get a car. I don’t actually know how that happened. I’m just glad it did.

I was told this type of situation is a frequent occurrence at the San Francisco airport. The long-suffering clerk, who has to deal with all those frustrated and weary travelers, said that not only do people often keep their cars longer, but that vandals often break the auto windows and the cars have to be repaired. So the turnover is slow. And of course, the lockdowns have wreaked havoc with car rentals all over the country.

But my guess is that it’s worse in San Francisco.

For Gerard

The New Neo Posted on by

I know that most of you have gotten the news that Gerard Vanderleun is in hospice care now. It is inexpressibly sad.

I’ve been wrestling with this for a while. And by “this” I mean: how to say what I’m about to say. Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m a very private person and don’t go in for much disclosure, dramatic or otherwise. But I’m about to write something very personal because detachment doesn’t work right now.

And it’s something Gerard wanted me to write, too, and so I’m doing this at least in part for him as well.

Gerard and I met through our blogging nearly eighteen years ago, became a couple about a year later and have been extremely close ever since. We never lived together but would visit each other for lengthy periods, travel together, and have talked on the phone almost every day for most of the time we’ve been apart. He deferred to my need for privacy by not writing about our relationship, although I appear in some of his writings as the mysterious woman who was there for this or that occasion.

We’ve been in touch every day right through this illness, which came on so quickly and was diagnosed so recently – only this past Wednesday – that it took everyone by surprise. I am the “updater” at American Digest, too.

I’m very distraught, I’m on my way out west to see him, and this will be my only post for today. I’m not planning on giving a running account, but at some point I probably will write more about this.

Spambots of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s bots, plural. These two came in one right after the other.

First we have this charming proposition, from “Zelma” (only the f-word is spelled out):

Waiting patiently for you to come home and f*** me!

It’ll be a long long wait, Zelma.

And then there’s this, from a vitamin company just trying to be of assistance:

Everything published was actually very logical. But, what about this? What if you composed a catchier title? I mean, I don’t wish to tell you how to run your blog, however suppose youadded a title to possibly get people’s attention? I mean “Now let’s look at the state legislatures” [that’s the title of the post on which the bot attempted to place the comment] – The New Neo is kinda plain. You should look at Yahoo’s home page and see how they write article headlines to get viewers to click. You might add a video or a related picture or two to get readers interested about everything’ve written. In my opinion, it might bring your posts a little livelier.

You know, when the bot’s right, the bot’s right. Catchy titles have never been my forte, although now and then I manage to come up with one.

On the likelihood of voting reform, circa 2008

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I happened across this post I wrote in November of 2008 about voting reform, and I thought I’d repost it now just to highlight how clear things were on this score even all those years ago. So here it is.]

After 2000, there were many calls for voting reform. Same in 2004, and now again. Voting fraud—or even the perception of it—can’t help but undermine trust in the legitimacy of the government, and that’s not good. So one would think that fixing the problems would have bipartisan approval.

One of the main arguments, and the focus for at least some of the rage, against George Bush was the voting turmoil in 2000. Bush was not responsible for Florida and the butterfly ballot, but he was the beneficiary and it served to channel anger against him and to amplify it, right at the outset. The same is true of Acorn shenanigans in the election of 2008 as they relate to Obama, and his previous connections to Acorn only make the perception worse.

This sort of doubt directed at a President-elect does not bode well for the institution of the Presidency itself, nor for the country. So why wouldn’t both parties do all they could to change it?

“Dream on, neo” you say. And you would be correct. Each party wishes to maximize the number and/or proportion of its own voters, for obvious reasons. For Republicans, this means making rules tougher (or at least keeping them traditionally tough) about who is allowed to vote. No motor voter. Definitely no aliens being able to present a utility bill on voting day. Forget about felons. I happen to agree with these rules, even in the abstract. I think that voting should be restricted to citizens, for example—I’m funny that way. And I am fairly certain I felt that way even back in my liberal Democrat days.

However, Democrats have a strong interest in allowing such people to vote, because they tend to vote Democratic. It’s really not rocket science. As the party encourages expansion of voting rights and winks at fraud that aims to include these voters, and solidifies its power as a result, why would that party ever vote to restrict the practice?…

It is sad but true that few politicians who are favored by certain voting policies would slit their own throats and vote against them, merely for reasons of justice or fairness or ethics. This is why, once this begins, it is unlikely to end—at least, as long as that party continues to be in power. And that party is more likely to stay in power as long as the voting policies that favor it are in place. It is a vicious cycle, or a wonderful cycle—depending on your point of view, and your party.

Another day, another roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The folks at the Babylon Bee are funny: “GoFundMe Page Started To Help Complete MLK Statue.” When I first saw a photo of that statue, it was from an angle that didn’t show the pornographic and/or scatological elements. But still, I wondered where the heads and bodies were. What a vile piece of “art.”

(2) Rat seen leaving sinking ship?

White House chief of staff Ron Klain is reportedly expected to step down from his top position in the coming weeks, marking the most significant resignation the Biden administration has seen since President Joe Biden took office two years ago.

Klain has been privately telling colleagues he plans to resign since the midterm elections, according to the New York Times.

(3) Chauvin’s appeal is likely to fail, but not through lack of merit.

(4) Orchestrating the suppression of the Biden documents story:

The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate…

The discussions on how to deal with the matter, at least at the start, were confined to the husband-and-wife pair of Bob Bauer, the president’s top personal attorney, and Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser; Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime confidant and speechwriter; Mr. Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens; Stuart F. Delery, the White House counsel; and Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer overseeing the response to investigations, according to people familiar with the situation…

Once the discovery of the original batch of documents was revealed, Ms. Dunn was adamant that the White House should keep the public information flow to a trickle and focus instead on how different Mr. Biden’s case was from the broader investigation into his predecessor, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Anita Dunn keeps turning up like a bad penny.

(5) Shellenberger on what he learned about the FBI from the Twitter files. None of it’s anything good:

While the FBI hyped “hack and leak” operations it was itself engaged in “brief and leak” operations. There is strong evidence that FBI agents have repeatedly warned elected officials, including President Donald Trump, of foreign influence with the primary goal of leaking the information to the news media. This is a political dirty trick used to create the perception of criminality…

In response to the Twitter Files revelation of high-level FBI agents at Twitter, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said, “I have concerns about whether the government was running a misinformation operation on We the People.”

Anyone who reads the Twitter Files, regardless of their political orientation, should share those concerns.

And yet a lot of Democrats aren’t reading those files and do not share those concerns, and probably wouldn’t share the concerns even if they did read the files.

Biden’s classified documents as a story

The New Neo Posted on by

Ann Althouse offers an excerpt from this NY Times piece by Jonathan Alter. I haven’t read his essay, but here are some portions of the part Althouse quoted:

[I]t’s hard to exaggerate the level of Democratic exasperation with [Biden] for squandering a huge political advantage on the Mar-a-Lago story and for muddying what may have been the best chance to convict Mr. Trump on federal charges…. Republicans are ferocious attack dogs, especially when they have something to chew on….[Biden] could easily lose or be weakened [n the NH primary], opening the door for other Democrats…. Imagine instead that the president…. And the smiling old gentleman in the Corvette — his shortcomings forgotten and his family protected — would assume his proper place as a bridge between political generations and arguably the most accomplished one-term president in American history.

This qualifies as a good example of the phenomenon I discussed in my post on Mona Charen’s column on a similar theme, which I called the imaginary Biden versus the real one.

Alter’s idea of the Biden he or the reader is imagining – who might have assumed his “proper place as a bridge between political generations and arguably the most accomplished one-term president in American history,” is so far from the real Biden as to be almost laughable.

But I want to add another observation, which is that Alter appears (at least from this excerpt) to see the documents incident mainly as a story. A narrative. It’s not about what really happened, or what it means. It’s about how the public perceives it and how it’s framed. And Republicans? They pounce, those attack dogs.