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I set up this blog as an experiment to see what I could incorporate for my main site, www.cbrookskurtz.com. The experiment ended sometime back, so if you wish to read my work, go to my site. --C. Brooks Kurtz

Shrugging...

Disincorporation - dig it. 

Most talk of disincorporation appears to be exploratory, and some public-finance experts say towns may not have that option if it is being used to unload financial obligations. "This is somewhat of a legal gray area, because disincorporation was not designed to allow cities to escape financial hardship," said John Knox, a public-finance consultant with the San Francisco office of law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

Mr. Knox, a bankruptcy consultant to Vallejo, said shifting oversight of a city's services to a county or state during the current economic environment would be a tall order. In California and many other states, the county or state must approve such a move, he said. Most counties are ailing as badly as cities, and are unlikely to readily approve a disincorporation, he said.

That isn't stopping some towns from checking into the possibility. In Mountain View, a Denver suburb with about 500 residents, sales-tax revenue has shriveled with the departure of four businesses last year, undermining its ability to pay city-government employees or to afford police and sewage service.

This is fun...

I do love the Great One, and was surprised to see how many retorts he offers in the comments.

Excellent Mem-Day post

There are several types of pieces writers publish on days like Memorial Day. As I noted on my FB feed, like most Americans, I spent a weekend with friends/family grilling/eating/drinking/catching up, but Memorial Day is an observance, not a celebration like July 4th. 

One interesting thing I didn't know about Memorial Day is disclosed here, in a good piece by Kurt Schlichter over at Big Hollywood:

At the risk of being presumptuous, those who gave their lives for our country would want you to gather your buddies and drink beers and eat barbecue (Resolved:  Barbecued beef ribs are superior in every way to pork ribs.  Discuss.).   I plan to.  There is a reason that on Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff only until noon, when it is raised to the top of the pole again.  It symbolizes that we honor our dead by going forward with our lives.

Honor our fallen by remembering them, and just as importantly, what they did.  We can do that best by confronting the nonsense that surrounds us by telling the stories of these brave American men and women.  When little Jimmy comes home confused because the teacher said that America is irremediably racist, you tell him about the Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg.  When your daughter tells you her textbook says that World War II was really instigated by war profiteers, pop in the disc of the Band of Brothers episode where Easy Company stumbles onto a Nazi death camp.  When your son asks what that bumper sticker saying “End the War” means, you tell him about what the cops and firefighters had to do on 9/11.  Let the truth be your tribute.

More Cheney love here, and more to come

Hey-O! I like the phrasing in this excerpt, but it's an excellent piece. For someone who was going to put aside the old ways of politics, it sure does take someone special to rehab the image of Dick Cheney - the defenses keep coming:

Think about that. Back in those heady days after the 2008 election, anyone who suggested that Mr. Obama might find himself playing defense to Dick Cheney on Guantanamo would have been hauled off as barking mad. Yet that's exactly what Mr. Cheney has pulled off, leaving a desperate White House to try to drown him out by adding an Obama speech the same day Mr. Cheney was slated to address the American Enterprise Institute.

Great piece by RS McCain

I was not home-schooled but have long been an advocate of it. I don't buy the absence of "socialization" in home-schooled kids because it is a false argument on two fronts: home-schooled children are more likely to be involved in any number of religious, civic and charitable organizations than students of the public schools, and when we speak of socialization, we need to examine what it is, exactly that we're talking about. 

Here is a wonderful piece from The Other McCain about his daughter, and within it you'll find yet another piece from a prominent LP. What is understandable from parents who resist homeschooling is the peer-pressure and sense of "they're kooks" from friends, and that's not a trivial concern. Yet, I would recommend any parent who is considering sending their children to a public school to get qualified as a substitute teacher and spend a few weeks in one, then see if this is really the kind of socialization you want your children exposed to:

Bragging on one's children is an especial joy when the kids are home-schooled, since Kennedy's achievements reflect credit on her mother, who spent seven years teaching our daughter at the kitchen table.

The success of home-schoolers is a refutation to the arrogance of a government education bureaucracy that is prone to assert, with the self-righteeous authority of official expertise, that my kids and theestimated 1.5 million other home-schooled students in America are being deprived of something useful. My only regret is that more children are not similarly deprived.

Steyn's latest

Back from Memorial Day Weekend fun and observation, and back to the real world, which continues to crash about us. It took Rome a bit to fall - it's going to take The United States much less time. What a shame:

S

EVCA serves two rural counties with a combined total of a little over 40,000 households. If you wanted to stimulate the economy, you’d take every dime allocated to Windsor and Windham counties under ARRA and divide it between those households. But, if you want to stimulate bureaucracy, dependency, and the metastasization of approved quasi-governmental interest-group monopolies as the defining features of American life, then ARRA is the way to go. Oh, you scoff: ARRA, go on, you’re only joking. I wish I were. We’re spending trillions we don’t have to create government programs to coordinate the application for funds to create more programs to spend even more trillions we don’t have.

The stimulus will do nothing for the economy, but it will dramatically advance the cause of statism (as Mark Levin rightly calls it). Last week’s vote in California is a snapshot of where this leads: The gangster regime in Sacramento is an alliance between a corrupt and/or craven political class wholly owned by a public-sector union-bureaucracy extortion racket. So what if the formerly Golden State goes belly up? They’ll pass the buck to Washington, and those of us in non-profligate jurisdictions will get stuck with the tab. At some point, the dwindling band of citizens still foolish enough to earn a living by making things, selling things, or providing services other than government-funded program coordination will have to vote against not just taxes but specific agencies and programs — hundreds and thousands of them.