Obama's Gettysburg Address

How many of you read all of those stories about how President Obama dishonored the Gettysburg battlefield by his presence at the commemoration of the Gettysburg Address, to say nothing of the fact he should be paying attention to fixing Obamacare?

Someone? Anyone? Bueller?

Of course you didn't, because the president wasn't there.

Cue the outrage and idiocy, some of which was summarized in Daily Kos about Obama "snubbing" the occasion.

Of course, he also caught a lot of crap for leaving out the phrase, "under God," even though the text documentary filmmaker Ken Burns gave him didn't have that phrase in it.

Just imagine what would have happened had Obama actually gone to Gettysburg.

Noted historian Newt Gingrich would have tweeted: Who does @obama think he is? That he can share a day with Abraham Lincoln, the #greatest president? #stayhome.

Fox and Friends would have had a field day. Imagine the discussion:

Brian: I can't believe that President Obama went to Gettysburg today. He's got way too much on his plate in Washington to take time out for something like this. He's got to fix that Obamacare mess that is throwing millions of people out of their insurance plans. That should be enough. He's got to figure out what's going on in Afghanistan. He's got to approve that pipeline.

Liz: Just think of all the women who are being hurt by Obamacare. That should be his top priority.

Guest: Ted Cruz. I agree. Obama going to Gettysburg is an insult to the proud history of America. Abraham Lincoln was our greatest president, and for Obama to try to link himself with Lincoln is just unfathomable.

Daily Caller: Obama Is Not Lincoln would be the headline on the story. The text might read something like: President Obama had a lot of nerve going to Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Obama is most certainly not Abraham Lincoln. Where Lincoln united the country, Obama has done nothing but divide it. He should have stayed home.

Washington Times Editorial: Shame On Obama (Again): It's not enough that Obama has wrecked the economy and destroyed our health care system. Now he's out to destroy our heritage. By going to Gettysburg and inserting himself into history, Obama showed his callous disregard for the sacrifice of the brave soldiers on both sides of that terrible conflict.

Statement from Pa. Gov. Tom Corbett: "I was disappointed to see President Obama at the battlefield today. It should have been a day for reflection and remembrance. Instead, his presence made it into a political circus. The president has enough to do in Washington without coming to my state and causing trouble."

With all that criticism, Obama should have just stayed home.

The Tao of Taos

 Around the town of Taos, New Mexico, are two living areas built 1,000 years apart, constructed on similar philosophies. Their attitudes toward outsiders, however, couldn't be more different.

The Taos Pueblo was built 1,000 years ago and was a thriving settlement for centuries. Now about 100 people live there, it attracts lots of tourists and some buildings been retrofitted with electricity.

Earthship is about 15 miles west of Taos. It started in the 1970s by Michael Reynolds, as a way to incorporate the newest technology of recycling and the efficient use of energy, but really got going around 2000. There are now Earthship communities around the world, with the population at the Taos hq about the same as the Taos Pueblo.

You can visit both in the same day and admire the similarities and be appalled at the differences.

The Taos Pueblo has certain rules for visitors. You pay to get in, including a $6 per camera fee. You have to ask permission to take photos of people. There are certain places, like the kiva, a place for holding sacred ceremonies, where tourists can't go. Blue Lake similarly is off limits, although it is a bit far away. Don't feed the dogs. There are lots of mangy dogs running around.

Once you get past those, however, the Pueblo is a joy to visit, mainly because of the people who live there. When we wandered around, we got into a nice conversation with a man who was working in the front yard of one of the adobe houses. Turns out it was Curtis Sandoval, the lieutenant governor of the Pueblo, and the house had been in his family for hundreds of years. We had a great chat about what life was like, and is like, how to keep up the house. We must have talked for about 15 minutes.

At the heart of the Pueblo is the adobe -- a mixture of dirt, water and straw. That's it. It keeps houses warm in the winter and cool in the summer. You can build small houses, or multi-level houses. The material is phenomenal, which is why you see it all over the southwest.

A little farther north, in Mesa Verde in Colorado, are lots of structures made from adobe, some built under the cover of cliffs. During a tour, a Park Ranger said that a few years ago, the structures needed some work, and the "modern" engineers thought they could do better than adobe, so they used Portland cement. Now, after just a few years, the cement needs work, while some of the adobe structures have endured for 1,000 years or more.

In the Pueblo, the residents and others have little tables set up to sell jewelry, and some sell their wares in little houses. What they offer is of good quality and at reasonable prices. Volunteers give little lectures about the place, but the best stories come from the residents. All in all, it's a great place to visit.

The philosophy there is to use the materials available to build what you need, and it has worked out well. Fifteen miles away, over the famous Grand Canyon bridge, sits a newer community with a similar vision. Earthship has about the same number of residents as the Pueblo and a similar philosophy of using materials that are available. In their case, those happen to be old tires filled with dirt, old aluminum cans and glass bottles. Those make up the walls and other supporting elements of the buildings.

Combine that with water recapture, solar electricity generation and buildings mostly situated underground, and you have a recipe for a new type of lifestyle. The houses are built to be made from available materials so that mostly anyone could construct one. There are Earthship communities around the world.

The houses vary in size, and, by New Mexico standards, can be pricey -- $300k is a lot for that market. You can even stay in one overnight.

What you can't do, however, is get a feel for the place. Visitors can take a two-minute walk through the visitor's center, ending in a gift shop, of course, see a little video and look at the training building across the dirt path outside.

But you can't wander through the neighborhood. There is no "model" home, as in a normal real estate development. There are no residents to talk to about their experiences living off the grid. Outside of the inadequate visitor's center -- a blatant ripoff if there ever was one -- is a no trespassing sign.

It's just a tease. It's an intriguing tease as you drive by, but until Earthship allows people a closer look inside, it's wasting its most precious resource and losing opportunities to spread its message.

MoCo Council E-Book Resolution Is About Libraries -- Not Authors

The Montgomery County Council July 23 approved a resolution putting the County on record as saying that patrons of County libraries "should have equitable access to e-books at fair prices."   The vote was 8-0-1.

One Councilmember abstained from the vote. Nancy Floreen, whose husband, David O. Stewart, is an author, said the issue of e-book pricing was "complicated," and said from the bench she didn't think the Council should get into the issue because it didn't have jurisdiction. Rather than raise a fuss, she said she would abstain and let the resolution go through. She, and Stewart, are concerned about how authors make money in the digital age.

That's a reasonable attitude for authors to take, but it is irrelevant to the discussion and the resolution. The Council first and foremost is speaking about an issue that impacts the County library budgets and the services it provides to the two-thirds of County residents who use the libraries.

If the County has to pay $50 or $80 to lease one e-book, it will lease fewer copies from the companies which supply the e-books. This fact has a couple of implications. First, it hurts the libraries because patrons will have to wait much longer for materials they request. Obviously there are limits, but some can be prevented.

Second, the high prices hurt authors. Instead of spending $80 on one e-book, the library could spend the same money on four if the book were reasonably priced. That means four times the number of people will have access to the author's work, leading to greater chances that he or she might find a reader willing to buy a book, to say nothing of the greater satisfaction of library patrons.

It's in the nature of e-books to present more challenges to authors and publishers than do printed books. Then again, as with digital music, publishers have been able to abolish through computer code that part of the law that allows for resale of any normal good. It's called the First Sale doctrine. If you buy a physical book, you can do what you want -- give it away, donate it, sell it to someone else. You can't do that with e-books. Every e-book is a new e-book. Authors should factor that into their equations also.

The E-Book Saga Continues: On Defending Libraries From An Author

Noted author David O. Stewart has submitted a statement to the Montgomery County Council opposing a resolution asking for libraries to have equitable access to e-books at reasonable prices. While I respect Mr. Stewart's work (and that of his wife, Councilmember Nancy Floreen), I am deeply disappointed that he appears to misunderstand the role of libraries in our society.

Libraries do not exist for the benefit of authors. That's what bookstores are for. Libraries exist for the benefit of everyone. Access to books should not depend on whether you can afford one. Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough said, "The most readily available resource for all of life is our public library system." Consider the experience of a youthful Robert Redford: "I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book."

In fact, libraries benefit authors in their work. Samuel Johnson wrote long ago, "The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book." I wonder what it would cost an historian if he or she had to buy each book used for research. Quite a bit, I would think. Wander through the Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress some time. I suggest you will find quite a few scholars working on books of their own, using this largest of public libraries to do research.

Libraries do not exist through the goodwill of authors, who, in Stewart's words have a "largely sentimental wish" to support libraries, even though through the goodness of their heart they are foregoing the income they are giving up by having someone borrow the book the author has written. Authors labor under the misapprehension that any loan of a library book is a lost sale. Maybe yes, maybe no. If an author wants to expose his or her writing to the public, the library is the best place to do that. People can sample works and then buy that book or another by the same author, if they like what they read. Research shows that happens.

Libraries exist as a benefit to their communities. They are a social good, like public schools which don't charge students for books. For the record, libraries do not, as Stewart put it, "give away" books. They loan books. Physical books are returned to the library. E-books simply disappear from a library customer's e-reader when the loan is up. I don't see where "the lending of e-books for free" is a problem.

Instead, the problem might be the nature of e-books themselves. Writers are harmed, we are led to believe, by e-books that never degrade. First, they never degrade if someone buys them, so that's no different from a library. Second, books degrade at different rates. Wander through a library, particularly the hardbacks, and you will find any number of volumes that are in fine shape. Not all books become "too tattered" to loan. Some do, some don't.

But publishers have taken it upon themselves to set arbitrary standards and policies for e-books than for physical books that have nothing to do with authors. In that case, those representing authors might be best served by signing contracts barring their works from being distributed in electronic form rather than charge libraries five or six times the cost of a physical book or limiting the number of check-outs. Those policies hurt libraries by inflating their budgets, which in turn hurts authors by limiting the distribution of their work.

Finally, Stewart's article lands us in the Constitution, but he leaves out a crucial phrase. In quoting Article 1, Section 8, clause 8 which provides for a system of copyright protection, he left out the part about securing rights to authors and inventors only "for limited times," as Framers recognized that ideas and discoveries should pass at some point into the public domain. That part of the Constitution was not written to protect authors; the goal was "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Instead, that part of the Constitution has been stretched to unrecognizable dimensions through copyright extensions which benefit authors, something Stewart also doesn't mention.

If the fate of the book culture is to "shrivel and die," as Stewart puts it, the cause won't be libraries. Just the opposite. If anything, it will be our libraries which keep "the book culture" alive.

MoCo To Take Stand For Libraries on E-Books

The Montgomery County Council yesterday voiced support for equitable treatment of e-books for library users.

Seven of the nine Council members supported a resolution putting the Council on record as recognizing that libraries pay more for e-books than do consumers and that it's time for Maryland and the Federal government to recognize the problem.

The resolution was sponsored by Council Vice President Craig Rice, the lead member for libraries, and cosponsored by six of his colleagues, including Council President Nancy Navarro and Councilmember George Leventhal, who is chairman of the committee that oversees libraries.  During the introduction, Rice said it was "extremely important" to highlight the issue of inequitable pricing.  Leventhal agreed that e-books should be "more accessible."

Here is the text of the resolution:

COUNTY COUNCIL FOR MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MARYLAND

By: Council Vice President Rice, Councilmember Leventhal, Council President Navarro, and
Councilmembers Andrews and Ervin

SUBJECT: Equitable access to e-books for Montgomery County Public Libraries
Background
1. Montgomery County Public Libraries (MCPL) serve 721,385 (as of the end ofFY 2012) cardholders from all parts ofa large, diverse county.
2. MCPL strives to deliver materials in all available formats to meet the interests and requirements of those patrons.
3. The demand for e-books in Montgomery County is increasing exponentially. There was an 88% growth in e-book checkouts between 2010 and 2011, and an 87% growth in demand between 2011 and 2012. The trend shows no signs of slowing down.
4. Through actions of the County and its budget process, the Council approved an additional $300,000 in the Fiscal Year 2014 MCPL operating budget to address customer demand for e-books. This budget item supports the MCPL's Strategic Goal #1: "Strengthening Our Communities' Passion for Reading, Viewing and Listening by diversifying our collection to meet the evolving needs of our residents."
5. The needs of Montgomery County library users, as with users of libraries around the country, are being severely hampered by the actions of the book publishing industry. According to the March 4, 2013 pricing comparison from the Douglas County, Colo., library, which compiles such statistics monthly, the top book on the New York Times fiction best seller list is unavailable to libraries in e-book format. Nine of the top 15 books on the fiction list are not available to libraries as they are to consumers. The #5 fiction book, A Week in Winter, by Maeve Binchy, costs libraries $80.85 to license, while consumers pay $12.99 to license use of the same book. These prices place a strain on the MCPL budget and limit the access ofe-books to library patrons.
6. The American Library Association, of which MCPL is a member, has consistently protested this discriminatory behavior by publishers.

Action

The County Council for Montgomery County, Maryland approves the following resolution:
The Council believes that patrons ofthe Montgomery County Public Libraries should have equitable access to e-books at fair prices.

Therefore, the Council urges the General Assembly, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission to examine this issue and seek any appropriate remedy so that County library users will have the access to materials in a reasonable and non-discriminatory manner.
This is a correct copy of Council action.

Campaign To Lower E-Book Prices For Libraries Gets Started in Connecticut

While the e-book world takes a minute to digest the court ruling finding Apple conspired with book publishers to jack up the price of e-books to consumers, it's worth noting that there is another e-book pricing battle going on.

Consumers are the ultimate victims here, also, but those most directly affected are public libraries. Some book publishers don't lease e-books to libraries at all, depriving library customers of versions of popular best-sellers. Others set the lease rates exorbitantly high, squeezing the already squeezed library budget.

The American Library Association (ALA), and particularly former President Maureen Sullivan, have raised the issue loudly and persistently, but the publishers haven't been terribly responsive. Now, state and local governments are just starting to become involved on behalf of their libraries and the library patrons.

Connecticut appears to be the first state to go on record as recognizing the problem, while Montgomery County, Md., is poised to become the first local government to weigh in.

In Connecticut, Gov. Dan Malloy (D) on June 6 signed a bill requiring the state attorney general and the state librarian to conduct a study on the availability of e-books to public library customers. The study will have a broad mandate, taking in such topics as surveying current practices used by publishers and distributors (companies like Overdrive or Baker & Taylor, which supply the software to make the e-books available to libraries), to determine if there are any problems with those practices and if so, what to do about them.

The requirement of a study was the last compromise in the legislative process, which started out with a bill by State Rep. Brian Sear (D) "to require publishers of electronic books to offer such books for sale to public and academic libraries at the same rates as offered to the general public." That bill would mean the publishers couldn't charge the public $12.99 for an e-book and charge libraries $85 for the same e-book, which is the practice now.

Richard Conroy, head of the Connecticut Library Association, (CLA) said he got interested in a legislative campaign when Random House raised the prices on e-books for the 26 libraries in the south central part of the state. "The tripling of prices was the last straw," Conroy said in an interview, adding that CLA lobbyist Bob Shea said there should be some way to pass legislation to "hold the publishers feet to the fire." State Rep. Brian Sear (D), whose wife worked for the Connecticut Library Consortium, agreed to sponsor a bill.

The first version of the bill required publishers to "offer e-books for sale to public and academic libraries at the same rates as offered to the general public." That bill got the attention of publishers, who fought the bill in the statehouse and carried their complaints to Connecticut legislators in Congress. Conroy said the publishers calls the bill unconstitutional, said it abridged their First Amendment rights and generally "raised a big stink." The publisher team was formidable -- the biggest print publishers, plus Apple and Amazon. Even with that lineup opposing it, the bill gained momentum and cosponsors.

Conroy said he plans to keep working on the issue, and that he hoped the Connecticut bill could be a model for other states. That's a great idea. States should study the pricing of e-books, and pass on to Congress and Federal agencies their findings.

How To Play The Washington Scandal Game

It's no shame to admit that sports can be confusing. Some baseball fans don't know what the infield fly rule is. Some basketball fans may not recognize the difference between a blocking foul and a charge. At least there are game officials and broadcasters who can help to clarify matters as they take place.

Unfortunately, for one of Washington's biggest spectator sports, not only are the rules not clear, the game itself is always out of focus. So in the public interest, herewith is a primer to "Scandal." Not the TV show, but the Congressional show. Some seasons there are lots of scandals, some seasons there are few. There always is at least one for members of Congress to perform. We happen to be in a busy Scandal season of which Kerry Washington and cast-mates are not a part. This is reality TV.

The first basic fact to understanding what constitutes a scandal might be called the Gerald Ford Rule. When Ford (R-Mich.) was a member of the House, he said, on a related topic, "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." That's right. It's a game without rules. For some people, a scandal might mean a president trying to get one government agency to quash the investigation being conducted by another, or a president paying hush money. For others, it might be a president selling weapons to one group and funneling the money to another group to conduct a war that Congress has expressly forbidden.

And yet, for some people, a scandal might mean an obscure land deal in which participants lost money or, heaven forbid, a dalliance with a woman not a prominent politician's wife. Not like that could happen.

For still others, an overwhelmed bureaucracy trying to get a handle on an increasing workload by taking short cuts could be a scandal, particularly if there is a handy political angle to exploit. Or some might try to make a tragic, swiftly moving situation half a world away into a scandal based on normal bureaucratic review processes of talk-show talking points. Sigh.

Scandal Strategies

Simply because there are no rules doesn't mean there are no strategies and tactics. Some are fairly basic, to wit:

Box Out Your Opponents: What matters is making your opponent look bad. Take the controversy over looking into journalists' phone records after a mole in Al Qaeda could have been exposed. There are lots of ways the issue could have been played. Position 1: This is outrageous that Obama is tracking journalists. Position 2: Look how lax they are on national security not to track down a leak like this. The Republicans could have used either one to make Obama look bad.

Or take the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) controversy: Position 1: Obama and his people in Washington were controlling the Cincinnati office. Position 2: The President didn't interfere, but that's because he is out of the loop is he with his own government.

Be A Victim: It helps to be seen as a victim of some government alleged malfeasance. Let's go back to the IRS thing again. The outrage on the part of Republicans and the right wing groups could have been rehearsed, and it was.

In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on "Rightwing Extremism," saying that the downturn in the economy could boost recruiting for rightwing groups, particularly as organizations play up opposition to immigration and fear of tighter gun controls.

The Great Noise Machine geared up and denounced the report, although we note they didn't say a word about a report on Leftwing extremism that had been issued a couple of months earlier. Then-Minority Leader John Boehner called it "offensive and unacceptable," and every blogger, columnist, commentator and radio personality dumped on the report, calling it a "hit job," among other crass characterizations. The new Obama Administration quickly withdrew the report, and decimated the DHS section which produced it.

If this sounds familiar, the victimization story is the same script now being followed by the poor Tea Partiers who wailed of their cruel treatment at the hands of an oppressive government. There's one other element to this story, which leads to the next tactic:

Know Your Opponents: In the 2009 DHS "scandal," Democrats played along and denounced the report, just as today's Democrats are playing along and denouncing what the IRS did. Their alternative course would have been to defend the Obama Administration, but that would require some backbone, which Democrats are notoriously lacking. Just as with the panicked reaction to a right-wing hit job film on an Agriculture Dept. employee, Democrats acted in fear first. They fired Shirley Sherrod before the whole truth of the edited video came out, just as they tossed out IRS officials who were trying to make their way through a deluge of applications with few people and unclear legal landscape. The reason that Republicans and their winger opponents can get away with this is the fundamental truth of scandal-mongering:

Facts Don't Matter.

In the case of the 2009 DHS report, it was true that right-wing extremism was on the rise. In the case of the IRS report, it is true that some right wing groups were abusing their tax privileges by engaging in political activity prohibited by the tax status they claimed, that the damning Inspector General report was sloppy, and that left-wing groups like Progress Texas were also questioned as they should have been by the IRS. Speech is a protected right; a tax exemption isn't. Even so, what isn't true is that the groups had their tax exemptions denied.

What isn't true in the IRS "scandal" is that Bush Administration appointee Douglas Shulman went to the White House 157 times to coordinate attacks on the right wing, as conservative commentators have screamed. He went 11 times, and mostly to meet on health care-related issues.

What isn't true about Bengazi is that the standard, if intense, interagency process to clear public talking points for national TV shows while protecting national security and adhering to the best information the government had at the time, is a cover up.

Scandal As Means, Not End

For all the fussing, the scandal game isn't an end in itself. The scandals are a distraction.  The scandal-mongers know all they have to do is scream loud enough, and the media will jump on it, regardless of the merits or the facts.

It's easier, to throw unsubstantiated charges around than to do work through the hard, detailed process of a real budget resolution. It's more fun to drag bureaucrats before a committee than it is to look at the economic situation and come up with a way to get people back to work.

It's more appealing to the "base" to nullify an election result through phony charges posturing, and procedural roadblocks than to accept that the country needs a functioning legislative body -- something we don't now have.

A Sad and Odd Day

The other evening early last week, we got a call from a friend that the father of one of another friend had died. He was 81, had been having some health issues. At the end, a kidney transplant didn't take and he didn't make it.

Visitors were welcome to see the family at a funeral home in Ellicott City later in the week. When the time came to go, I wasn't sure what the name of the funeral home was, so I looked on the Google machine for all funeral homes in Ellicott City and found one that sounded like the one I had been told. It was Witzke's, which was close to the name I had hastily scribbled down.

Not being familiar with Ellicott City, I decided to go to the Witzke Web site to get directions.  There, in the right hand column, was the name of our friend's father, Hoffman, William H. And right below him, was another name, Krainak, Danielle M.

I went to high school with a Danielle Krainak. There couldn't be two people with that name. When I clicked on the listing on the funeral home's web site, the birth date was certainly in the range. I called the funeral home to inquire about where she went to high school, and was told they didn't have that information. As it turns out, the viewings for William Hoffman, father of our friend Kay Gold, and for Danielle Krainak, were at the same time. Before going up, I posted something on Facebook on our Wheaton High School class page.

When we got to the funeral home, my wife Liz went straight and to the left, to Kay's father's viewing. I turned right to the Krainak gathering. I had hoped to see someone familiar, perhaps someone from Wheaton. No such luck. As I stood looking around, a staff member from the funeral home came up to me and asked, politely, if I was in the correct room. I told her my story of knowing the Golds and of knowing Danielle. She was somewhat taken aback. It doesn't happen every day. I asked to speak with a family member and was directed to Danielle's sister, Maryann.

She was talking with two neighbors. I introduced myself and told her how I came to be there. We had a very nice conversation. In inquired, as politely as I could, what Danielle had been doing the last 40 years (she was a physical therapist) and how she died (kidney cancer). Her neighbors said Danielle had helped them even though they weren't official patients. After a few minutes, I excused myself, signed the guest book (WHS 70) and left, but not before taking a peek at the coffin.

Just for the record, I am not a fan of open coffins. It's one of the things I like about Jewish funerals -- we don't have them. But I looked for a second at Danielle, and realized this was the first time I had attended the death of a classmate. A few of the people in my high school class have died already, but I wasn't nearby. This was different.

Then I walked out and across the hall, where Kay's brother was speaking of their father's life and accomplishments. I was startled by another open casket, forgetting Kay's father wasn't Jewish. He was, Kay's brother said, agnostic on religion. I told some people why I was late coming in. They couldn't believe it either.

The Lost Lessons of Albany, via Boston and Pakistan

At the end of the week before the Boston Marathon bombing, a little story started making waves out of Albany, NY. Under normal circumstances, the story would have provided lots of raw material for the cable news noise factory.

The story about a high school writing assignment then dropped out of sight in the aftermath of the tragic events of the week of April 15. After watching the HBO documentary, "Manhunt: The Search for bin Laden,"  it's worth revisiting the story because of the lessons that could be learned. It's worth revisiting because of the importance to America if we don't learn them.

On the surface, the story appeared to be another in the series of High School Administrations Gone Crazy,  like the recent story of a girl getting arrested, charged with a felony and expelled from school for mixing some chemicals and popped the top off of an 8 oz. bottle and created a little smoke.

But what happened in Albany is more serious because you can draw a direct line from there to the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing via Baghdad and Pakistan. The story broke on April 12, about a high-school teacher who gave his/her 10th grade class an assignment in persuasive writing. What touched off the furor that led to the teacher's unfortunate suspension and an apology from the Albany school superintendent was the subject matter of the assignment: Nazi Germany.

The Controversial Assignment

Here is the assignment for three sophomore honors English classes: "For the following assignment you need to pretend that I am a member of the government of Nazi Germany, and you are being challenged to convince me that you are loyal to the Nazis by writing an essay convincing me that Jews are evil and the source of our problems." The as-yet-unnamed teacher also included this admonition: "You do not have a choice in your position -- you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich." Part of the assignment was to incorporate Aristotle's elements of argument -- reason, emotional appeal and passion.

The reaction was incendiary. One of the three classes declined to do the assignment, with one student quoted as saying she didn't want to say anything bad about Jewish people. Letters to the Albany Times-Union and comments on the paper's Web site said the teacher should be fired. Some, but not all, Jewish groups and assorted rabbis condemned the assignment.

Two points of context are also in order. One: The school district admitted the assignment was part of a more rigorous curriculum requiring sophisticated writing. Two: The assignment was in preparation for reading Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel's book, "Night," which told of his experiences as a child in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Clearly, there was a context to the assignment.

Even more important, however, is the other skill being taught, and that's the link to Boston. The students in Albany had they done the assignment, would have had to think like a Nazi would have thought. That skill, call it critical thinking or whatever term of art you like, is the most important of all. What was important about the Albany assignment was that it was hard and even offensive. While students and others had alternative proposals, none would have been so valuable as to make a person think as someone to be despised.

All through the Boston investigation, law enforcement officials were trying to make up profiles of the bombers. Every day, stories are in the newspapers trying to figure out what made the Tsarnaev brothers do what they did. To get to the why, you have to get into the head of the person.

Know Thine Enemy

This process is not new. Sun Tzu advised generals to "know thine enemy" 2,500 years ago. In the HBO documentary, the theme that pops up time and again is how ignorant we are as Americans and how important it is to under the other side's mindset.

Susan Hasler, who edited CIA daily report to the president said, speaking of terrorists: "Most people don't understand why they hate us." Stanley McChrystal, commander special operations units: "I'm not sure America has made the effort that it needs to to understand what it is we just went through. The really key part is not how to do these operations. The thing to understand is why are the people we are fighting are doing what they are doing? Why is the enemy the enemy? If you don't understand why they are doing it, it's very difficult to stop it. We don't speak the language enough. We don't understand the culture enough. We haven't taken the time to not be blind, deaf and dumb in the areas of the world that matter to us."

The Albany assignment was a first step to showing students how to think about the "why" by thinking as someone else would think. That doesn't mean they have to agree with the Nazi philosophy. This was not a case of Miss Jean Brodie trying to indoctrinate her students into the glories of Depression-era fascism.

This was nothing like the other mindless "similar" stories appended to most news reports, of teachers using devices like the number of lashes a slave would receive to teach math.  Albany was an unfortunate case of extreme and unwarranted sensitivity to something abhorrent. No one asked the students to agree with the Nazis, only to think as they might have, just as CIA analysts must think as terrorists think, just as FBI agents are thinking as the Tsarnaev brothers did.

Everyone involved should see the loss of passing up an opportunity for a valuable teachable moment on the importance of being able to put yourself into the mind of even the most disreputable person with an abhorrent ideology. That's an important skill -- the kind of skill that later in life could help students with any kind of situation, from figuring out where a wandering child might go to tracking down the world's most notorious terrorist.

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.