At The White House Correspondents Dinner

Tonight is the big deal event of the year in Washington, the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association. It's now a big deal weekend, but once upon a time it was just another, if glitzier, Washington black-tie dinner.

I know, because I used to go some years back.  The first time was when I was with Fairchild Publications.  I was the D.C. editor of their energy newspaper.  I was seated next to Arthur Burns, who was the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board -- the Alan Greenspan of his day.  The only thing I recall about that dinner was that he spent the whole evening calling me, "lad."  I suppose I was a lad to him, but it struck me as an odd word.  Still does.

Some years later, I got to more frequently with Communications Daily, part of the then-TV Digest, now Warren Communications News empire.  The secret back then was that all you had to do in order to get a table was to pay nominal dues and then pay for a table.  You didn't even have to cover the White House.

The fun part about the dinner was that you never knew who you would run into.  One nice evening, the pre-dinner receptions, usually crammed into the meeting rooms on the main floor of the Washington Hilton, where the event takes place, all spilled outside and everyone mingled.  I turned around and there was June Lockhart.  She was known then as the mom from Lost in Space and way before that, the mom in Lassie.  Turns out she was a space junkie.  She loved visiting NASA and talking to people about space exploration.  Guess the show got to her.

One other notable pre-dinner reception conversation I had was with Portia de Rossi.  At the time, she was in a quirky lawyer show called Ally McBeal.  I watched the show and so took the opportunity to ask her about a particular scene which had been on a few weeks earlier.  She was sitting at the counsel's table in court and her hair just stood up on end.  I asked how they filmed that.  It was simple and painful.  The crew had tied a wire to her hair, looped it over something in the ceiling and yanked it on cue.  They had to shoot the scene several times.

Over the years, we had lots of interesting guests.  One year when we had an extra ticket, I invited my favorite morning radio personality, Paul Harris.  He showed up in tux and sneakers and had a good time, I think.

The tradition at TV Digest was to invite the commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to the White House dinner, and invite the chiefs of the FCC bureaus to a similar dinner, the Radio-TV Correspondents Association dinner.  The senior reporter, the legendary Tack Nail (real name Dawson) would do the inviting and they would usually come.  Then other publications discovered the FCC, and the usual dinner plans didn't pan out.

One year I was responsible for inviting guests and as the reporter who covered the telecommunications beat, I went to get the biggest stars in that galaxy, and succeeded.  As I recall, we had the chairmen of three of the then-new Bell companies, Ray Smith from Bell Atlantic, John Clendinin from BellSouth and Del Staley form Nynex.  We also had Andrew C. Barrett, who was about to take his seat on the FCC, and Patricia Worthy, who was the chairman of the D.C. Public Service Commission and chairman of the communications committee of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC).  Trust me, for a telecom wonk table, that was a good as it gets.

No one stayed seated at the dinners.  It was more fun to wander around and see who was there.  You might run into an all-time third baseman (Brooks Robinson), or you might see a movie star (Sylvester Stallone) with his hand on the derriere of a TV personality (Vanna White) guiding her nobly into her chair. Or you might encounter a senator, who had a few drinks too many, who would throw his arm around you and talk about legislation.

When I went, the dinner was just starting to be the celeb fest it is now.  Tourists and others would cluster in the lower lobby of the Hilton to take pix of prominent politicians, sports figures and others.  That was the same way we normal humans also entered and it was fun to think we might be in the background of a photo of someone famous.

Because Comm Daily was such a little fish, we were usually seated on the outer ring of tables.  While that may sound like exile, it had one big advantage.  It was closer to the doors and to the coat check at closing time.  After a long night, that was a big advantage.

An Alternate History For the NRA

The National Rifle Association (NRA), aka the Gun Manufacturers Association, should be feeling pretty good about itself. It blocked approval in the Senate of a provision for expanded background checks that overwhelming numbers of people support -- even in those states of Senate Democrats who voted against the modest bill.

From prominent reporter David Cay Johnston, we learn that thanks to the NRA, law enforcement didn't have at its disposal a crucial tool for tracking down the Boston Marathon bombers. As Johnston wrote: "But for the NRA-backed policy of not putting identifiers known as taggants in gunpowder, law enforcement could have quickly identified the explosives used to make the bombs, tracking them from manufacture to retail sale. That could well have saved the life of Sean Collier, the 26-year-old MIT police officer who was gunned down Thursday night by the fleeing bomb suspects." Of course, thanks to the NRA, guns themselves are hard to trace.

The FBI had a similarly hard time tracking down explosives used in the 1995 Oklahoma city bombing, because of the NRA-backed ban on making explosives traceable.

To put the wide-ranging influence of the NRA into perspective, let's try an exercise in alternate history. For those of you who don't read this subgenre, alternate history is the use of real people and events with different outcomes, as if what if John Kennedy had not been killed, or what if the South had won the civil war. That type of thing.

For this exercise, we will focus on something more narrow -- the history of the Second Amendment. It's pretty short: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." This one is followed by an amendment no one talks about, the Third Amendment: "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner prescribed by law." http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html

These two amendments have something in common. Both were based, at least in part, on the actions of British troops leading up to, and into, the Revolutionary War. In 1765, for example, Parliament passed the Quartering Act, which required colonists to house British soldiers. And before the war, the British army confiscated ammunition and weapons. So a new country, looking to rectify the abuses of the past, included these two amendments to the Bill of Rights. There is lots of other common law, particularly to the Second Amendment, but the experience was fresh in the minds of the constitutional drafters.

An Alternate History

Let's say, for the sake of alternate history, that the British altered their strategy. Instead of trying to confiscate weapons, they decided to isolate pockets of resistance. The British army set up roadblocks and checkpoints between Charles Town and Williamsburg, between Philadelphia and New York, and between New York and Boston, between Boston and Lexington. The Army closed or closely controlled the taverns along the way, checking everyone in and out.

In that case, all other things being equal, the Second Amendment could have come out quite differently: "A well-functioning system of Transport, being necessary to facilitate commerce and society, the right of the people to travel freely and without restriction, shall not be infringed."

Sounds pretty simple, right? And yet if we adopt the model, as has the NRA, that anything to do with bearing arms, like taggants in explosives or limits on military-style weapons in civilian hands, violates the Constitution, imagine what things would be like with that Alternative Second Amendment.

The founding of the National Transportation Association was a pivotal step in the development of the organization which now is the leading defender of the Second Amendment. Originally started to teach driver safety, (and it still offers classes) the group began in earnest in the earliest 20th century, thwarting Connecticut in 1901 when the state sought to impose the first speed limit on automobiles -- 12 mph. There had been many times since when the states and Federal government wanted for safety reasons, among others, to set a limit on how fast cars can go. The NTA, claiming infringement of the Second Amendment, beat them back. A couple of years later when some states wanted to require licenses for people to drive, complete with vision tests and driving tests, the NTA objected, saying, "You will have to pry the wheel from my cold, dead hands." Sometimes a law was passed, but the group would win in court. Other times through the years, they would bottle up bills in legislatures.

Due to the carnage on the roads (averaging 70,000 deaths annually), some consumer advocates in the 1960s wanted to require seat belts be built into cars. There was quite the struggle then also, but the NTA won out when its then-president uttered the famous, "Cars don't kill people. Bad drivers kill people." That same argument came up in the 1970s when some in Congress wanted to set standards for crash-worthiness. Who can forget the debate over mileage standards for cars and trucks? The NTA had a harder fight but prevailed saying that the Constitution gave Americans the right to drive whatever cars they wanted, and that infringing on engine performance would violate the Constitution.

But the NTA didn't confine itself to cars. In the early 20th century, Congress decided to impose new regulations on railroads, updating the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act through the proposed Hepburn Act in 1906 and Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, each of which would give the government new powers  over railroad rates and elements of the rail system like terminals and bridges. "This bill is a slap in the face to the Founding Fathers. Its like won't be seen again," the NTA said in 1906 as it stuffed the first bill and then the second, claiming violations of the facilitation of commerce language.

Of course, the cars in 1901 went 12 mph. Today's vehicles can exceed 100 mph, but no matter.  That would be like complaining that guns in the 1700s were muskets that fired three rounds per minute, as opposed to today's that fire 1,000 rounds per minute.  Technology doesn't matter.

Since then, the group has chalked up an amazing rate of victories from support from railroads, auto manufacturers, airplane manufacturers and airlines and a daunting grass-roots network any time the government wanted to regulate trains, trucks, buses or airplanes.

Back To Reality

That was a nice little bit of fantasy, wasn't it? It would be nice, of course, if the fantasy didn't exist in our time, that any attempt to curb carnage wrought by guns or explosives was seen as defending the Constitutional value of gun ownership.

But that's today's reality. The right to own weapons trumps the right not to be killed or maimed by one, or to help law enforcement catch the person responsible. We set speed limits and require seat belts and set standards for how cars behave in a crash. The results speak for themselves as auto crash deaths have gone down over the years. We wouldn't put up with the carnage guns cause in any other part of our lives, and shouldn't in this one, either.

Here Comes The Sun -- A Post For Earth Day

It's an interesting feeling to be able to flip on a light switch, look outside and see the source of the power.

I suppose that would still be true if you lived within sight of Montgomery Burns' Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, or near a coal field. Neither happens to be the case here. I just look outside at the sun and think about the photovoltaic panels on the roof.

As with most things, the story of how those panels came to be there is somewhat roundabout. They weren't really what I was looking for, but what I found.

If you live in the Washington, D.C. area, or for that matter in lots of places in the East, you are undoubtedly familiar with power outages. Whether summer storms or winter storms, our utilities seem incapable of keeping the power on for everyone in nasty weather. Perhaps this had something to do with the deregulation of electric power by the state, after which the power company sold its power plants for almost $3 billion and cut maintenance and workers.

So when we here in D.C. learned a new word last summer, derecho, we learned how bad those cuts were. A derecho is like a stretched-out hurricane. While a hurricane is a rapidly spinning mass of air that moves along a path, the derecho is like a freight train moving through at the same hellacious speed. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power around here, including us. It wasn't the first time, but it got me thinking about how to compensate for when the power goes out.

There are outside gasoline generators, but those are really noisy and disruptive. The most elegant solution, I thought at the time, would be to have solar panels which not only generated electricity during sunny days but also could store it in a battery backup system. I knew some people who had solar panels, and knew they could cost upwards of $40,000, not an attractive option.

The more I looked into it, however, I found there was a newer business model emerging. Rather than buy photovoltaic (PV) panels, you lease them. The tradeoff is that they cost less than buying, but the leasing company, not you, gets the accompanying tax breaks. Some further looking, including on local message boards, led to Sungevity, a company based on Oakland. Seemed like a good alternative to putting up $40k or so.

After talking with a local representative of the company, we signed up. That was last June. We brought our panels online, finally, this March. There are many reasons for the delays. Sungevity uses local companies to do their work, and it took some time to get someone over to inspect our house to make sure it would support panels on the roof. We live in a split level, and the original plan called for one set of panels on the larger section, over the bedrooms. I asked what about the other part -- over the family room. Sungevity was thinking the same thing, so another set was added to the plan.

The permitting process is the most opaque to the customer. There are state permits and county permits and dealings with the local electrical utility to go through, and that all took months.

And there was the one thing I wanted, but couldn't get -- the backup system. Although I was told it's technically possible, and not that hard to do, Sungevity wouldn't authorize a battery backup to be attached to the system, which was originally the point of this endeavor.

It took some weeks to get an answer, and some pleading on my part, but it basically came down to the fact that Sungevity's financing arrangements with their suppliers don't allow anything to be connected to the system. One of their regional engineers told me as well that batteries aren't that well developed, need maintenance and can be expensive. He recommended a generator powered by natural gas, which our house uses for heating. We may yet do that, but Sungevity and its local installers are well aware that people back east are clamoring for the backup system. At some point, they and their finance people are going to have to rewrite the terms of their agreements to allow for the connections.

We decided to go ahead anyway, thinking that most of the benefits would come in the summer, when we use a lot of electricity for air conditioning.

Aside from that one issue of the backup, working with Sungevity was a great experience. The sales people answered our questions. The project manager was wonderfully responsive and the local company that did the install was professional and the crew knew their stuff.

Since we turned the system on in mid-March, we have monitored it closely. Sungevity provides a Web link so that we can look at the system production. I also asked for an external link so that others could see it as well. Apparently they used to have it, but the feature dropped out along the way. They should bring it back.

Looking at our electric bills from the past, we can see that we use about 30 kWh per day. So far, our highest production from the panels has been 47 kWh. The excess gets sold back to Pepco. We paid up front to lower our monthly leasing costs. It's hard to determine the exact payback time, due to the fluctuations of solar production.

In the meantime, we can track our power production on an hourly basis. You can see the difference between sunny days and cloudy days, even sunny parts of the day and cloudy or rainy parts of the day. So far, the system is doing great -- we have produced 986 kWh since we turned on the system. And, by the Sungevity site calculations, we have offset about 1,500 pounds of carbon emissions. That's not too shabby.

Solar has a bright future, pun intended. It's not hard to be part of it.