Looks like there's a deal on the debt ceiling

Which is fine. Nothing really changes until we:

1) Get rid of baseline budgeting;
2) Get serious about entitlement reform; and
3) Retire a bunch of the current politicians in Washington, St. Paul and elsewhere.

The party is over, kids. If you think our children and grandchildren are going to have the wherewithal or the willingness to pay our bills, you're lying. Especially to yourself.

More Football

They are playing political football in Washington these days and it's not all that interesting, really. The "crisis" over the debt ceiling is likely overblown and really only has meaning in that it's becoming apparent that there are too many people associated with government who just don't give a damn what happens, because they'd rather win elections than solve problems.

NFL news is more interesting right now. So we'll get to that instead.

• We talked about Donovan McNabb coming to Minnesota the other day, but the other news concerning the locals is the departure of Sidney Rice, who decided he'd rather make money in Seattle than stay here. I'm not convinced that losing Rice is that big a deal for the Vikings. He had a great season in 2009 but he's had trouble staying on the field in the other years he was here. I suspect the Vikings can find more cost-effective options someplace else. I'd be looking at Braylon Edwards, although there's another possibility, about which more in a moment.
• I'm not sure if Bill Belichick is a genius or simply has started to believe his own press clippings, but his moves yesterday were certainly worth a raised eyebrow. Chad Ochocinco is an irritant at times, but ultimately he's pretty harmless and has the talent to help the team. Picking up Albert Haynesworth is a different matter. The key for the Pats is that they didn't give up much to get Haynesworth, but from what I can tell the big defensive lineman is the sort of guy who can tear a team apart. I wouldn't hire him under any circumstances.
• As a Packer fan, I'd like to thank the Chicago Bears for jettisoning Greg Olsen. Bears offensive coordinator Mike Martz doesn't like tight ends and that entered into the decision, apparently. I always thought Olsen was the most dangerous guy on the Bears offense. No matter how many ways Martz draws things up, it's going to be easier to defend the Bears now that Olsen is gone.
• As usual, my beloved Packers aren't doing much. The majority of the speculation seems to surround the fate of wide receiver James Jones, a talented guy who has been a key contributor at times for the Packers in recent years, but who also has a habit of dropping passes on really big plays. It's possible that he might end up staying in Green Bay, which Aaron Rodgers would like, or he could easily end up playing for either the Bears or the Vikings. The Packers have always seemed to have a talented receiver who couldn't quite get it together over the years -- three earlier examples of this were Derrick Mayes, Bill Schroeder and Robert Ferguson. All those guys ended up going someplace else and none of them were factors for their new teams. I don't know if Jones would end up the same way, but I suspect that Jones has a better chance of success if he stays in Green Bay. I'm not sure the Packers really want him, though. If rookie Randall Cobb comes through, they may not need him. 

Fox on the Run

You, you talk about just every band
But the names you drop are second hand (second hand)
I've heard it all before

              -- "Fox on the Run," by the Sweet, circa 1975

Sometimes I get the impression that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was a fan of the Sweet. Consider this testy exchange with Ed Henry of Fox News:

Henry asked at the briefing when Obama's plan might be submitted to the Congressional Budget Office.



"Ed, I understand, we can do this again, OK?" Carney said. "Has the speaker of the House shown you the positions he took in detail in the negotiations that were designed actually to achieve a compromise, as opposed to having a show vote?"

I'm sure John Boehner has Henry on the speed dial. But that doesn't answer the question. So Henry persists:

Carney's explanation was once again that these deals have to be worked out in secret. But Henry pressed on -- why not have a senator take up Obama's detailed plan and introduce it as a bill?

"We are six days away," Henry said.

"Chuck -- I mean Ed, you know, the speaker walked away from this deal," Carney said.

"You say it's a great deal so put it out there," Henry said. "Let the American people -- "

"I think I've answered the question," Carney said. "I mean, I know you're creating a thing here for Fox..."

Henry, who hardly pulled punches when he sat a few seats over for CNN, chided Carney, "That's not what I'm doing. You know better than that."

One thing has been evident throughout this whole mess -- the only negotiations that are really going on are the ones between John Boehner and the members of his caucus who are loyal to the Tea Party movement.

I don't blame Jay Carney for getting mad, since he's being asked to defend a president who has been largely hors de combat throughout this whole thing.

The reason Obama won't submit any plan to the CBO is that if he does, the CBO will have to score it. And since the devil is in the details, the details can't bear much scrutiny.

There is no Obama plan. It's much easier to bash Fox News than it is to deal with the dereliction of duty that the President of the United States is currently providing.

It begins

Football, that is. Much will change in the coming days, but in the wake of the news:

• The Star Tribune reports that the Vikings are pursuing Donovan McNabb in a potential trade from the Redskins, but only if McNabb reworks his contract. I would imagine that McNabb will agree, since his current contract is meaningless if no one is willing to pay for it. It certainly makes sense for the Vikings to find a competent guy to run the show, especially so that their rookie QB Christian Ponder doesn't get killed right away. At this point in McNabb's career, he's not that good a quarterback, but I suspect the Vikings know that and won't ask him to do things he can't do. To put it in terms that Vikings fans would understand, McNabb is better than Gus Frerotte but not as good as Warren Moon. And he's probably better than any other alternative out there.
• The Vikings have also signed the immortal Devin Aromashadu from the Bears. I can only assume that Marty Booker wasn't available. And given their experience with Bernard Berrian, the Vikes have to know that taking wideouts from Chicago is a proven strategy.
• Meanwhile, my beloved Packers cut ties with Nick Barnett. That was pretty much inevitable, since he's had a tough time staying on the field in recent years and they've already committed serious bucks to A. J. Hawk and Desmond Bishop. Barnett was a good Packer, but it's a brutal business. He'll find a job someplace.
• Benster is a teenager and has only infrequently experienced bad Packer football, so it's difficult for him to understand how terrible the Packers were back in the 1970s. I found a fascinating book at the library that features statistics, rosters and the like for the Packers over the years. In 1977, the Packers went 4-10, which was pretty typical in those days. What I found fascinating is that they only managed to score 134 points for the entire season -- less than 10 points a game. We've come a very long way since then.

Moody's Don't Play Kabuki

The debt ceiling is a secondary issue. The amount of debt is the real issue:

Only seven days stand between the U.S. and the effects of a credit default. But a downgrade of the nation’s stellar AAA credit rating seems a lot more likely, and a lot sooner.

The White House had been alerted repeatedly over the past month by rating agencies that without a strong, long-term plan to restructure the country’s debt, they would lower America’s credit rating as soon as this Friday, according to two officials familiar with the process. The White House was warned that the deal would have to be significant—and not a short-term fix over the next few days to avoid a credit drop.

We can't keep spending money we don't have. The party is over.

Just a question

Not a lot of time this morning, so I have a question. Well, maybe two or three questions.

Even though, between ample polling data and my own personal observation, it's become increasingly clear that President Obama is not well-regarded these days, especially where job performance is concerned, it's considered a given that he will be a formidable candidate for reelection because he's such a great fund raiser. I've seen multiple reports that claim Obama's fundraising apparatus will deliver north of a billion dollars for his campaign.

Do you believe that? Who will provide the money? And what do you suppose Obama donors assume they will get for their money?

Same crap, different packaging

I saw it dozens of times over the last few days -- someone pointing out that the murderous dork who blew up Oslo and shot dozens of people at a youth conference was a "conservative Christian." Google it and you get about 102,000 hits this morning. Well, 102,001 after I post this.

As I thought about this, it didn't make much sense. There's nothing especially conservative or Christian in blowing up government buildings or killing young people in cold blood. It makes for a nice narrative, but nice narratives are always suspect.

And while I have no stomach for reading the 1500 page screed that Anders Breivik posted on the internet, other people get paid to do so and we learn things, as in this report (H/T Instapundit)

Parts of the manifesto written by the suspect in Norway's terrorist attack were taken almost word for word from the writings of "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.

The passages copied by Anders Behring Breivik appear in the first few pages of Kaczynski's manifesto. Breivik changed a Kaczynski screed on leftism and what he considered to be leftists' "feelings of inferiority" — mainly by substituting the words "multiculturalism" or "cultural Marxism" for "leftism."

Not only that, he did a little plagiarism:

He used at least one portion verbatim: "Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men."

I broke out Eric Hoffer yesterday for a reason. Hoffer wrote the seminal work The True Believer some 50 years ago now, in which he detailed the habits of mind of the fanatic. One of the key points that Hoffer makes is that the cause espoused is less important than the striving for the cause. The habits of mind are what drive the fanatic. Or, to let Hoffer speak for himself:

However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.

And the people who die at the hands of a fanatic die for the same reason.

Norway

We try, we always try, to figure out What It All Means, when we face something like the two-stage rampage of death that one man unleashed on Norway the other day.

I have no idea what it all means. And neither does anyone else, really. I can hazard a guess or two, but that's all they would be.

I suppose that one could read through the 1500 page manifesto/screed/diary of a madman that Anders Breivik apparently posted on the Web. It wouldn't be any more edifying than reading the screeds of the Unabomber.

I could suggest that one consider the words of Eric Hoffer, who said:

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.

And who also said:

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

But in the end, that doesn't tell you What It All Means, either. There is something inside Anders Breivik that drove him to commit horrific crimes, in the same way that there was something inside Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski. We ascribe whatever meaning we see fit, mostly in the service of flattering our own worldview. Inevitably, it's simultaneously more simple and more complicated than that. Which is why I can't tell you What It All Means.

Vikings to Arden Hills? XII -- Your Move, Zygi

The special session has come and gone and now the Minnesota state government is slowly grinding back into operation. The potential legislation authorizing a new Vikings stadium got nowhere, which isn't particularly surprising. And thus begins the game of chicken.

For his part, Gov. Mark Dayton said that the current proposal was "incomplete and unsatisfactory," which is the same thing a lot of us said about Dayton's budget proposal, but we'll leave that aside. As a practical matter, what it means is that the Vikings are now going to be free to leave at the end of this season. Would they?

I'd wager they'd prefer not to move, but they won't hesitate if they don't see some movement soon. At this point Dayton would have to call another special session to deal with the issue and it's unlikely that will happen. The Vikings won't stay in the Metrodome any longer than they have to and have said as much.

Most of the speculation concerning a potential move surrounds developments in Los Angeles, which has not had an NFL team since the 1990s. At this time the two most likely teams to move to the market are the San Diego Chargers or the Jacksonville Jaguars. The Chargers play in a decrepit stadium and there's little chance that the team will get a new stadium. The Jaguars play in a nice stadium, but there simply aren't enough people in the Jacksonville market to maintain a team there for the long term. Both teams have a better reason to move than the Vikings do.

Still, there's no assurance that the Vikings won't be able to get there first. From a financial perspective, the Vikings look much like the Cleveland Browns did in 1995. As anyone in Northeast Ohio can tell you, that didn't work out so well. And while I'm as skeptical as anyone about the benefits of giving Zygi Wilf a new billion dollar playground, he's going to get one someplace. Minnesotans have a decision to make. And if the Vikings don't get what they want, there will be a lot of fans who will find autumn Sundays to be "incomplete and unsatisfactory."

Baseball

Benster has been playing some form of organized youth baseball since he was very little. He's been a Met, Angel, Giant, Phillie, and Brewer (twice). That was Little League. Since then he's been a member of Shoreview Red, Shoreview Cardinal and Shoreview Green.

If you count that up, that's 9 seasons of baseball. And we always count things up in baseball. Going to practices and games have been a central part of our lives for a very long time now. And with the season now over, that's done, as the offerings for youth baseball after the age of 15 are desultory, especially for kids who aren't going to play high school ball.

I've been an assistant coach for most of Benster's teams. We've had some wonderful coaches over the years and a few really awful ones. As it happens, most of these teams didn't have very good won/loss records, but no one really remembers that. What I hope that the Benster does remember is that he had a chance to play, to make friends and to have some fun. Youth sports are supposed to be fun, although you'd have a tough time convincing hockey families of that when they are driving to Bemidji for a weekend tournament in the teeth of a snowstorm, or sitting at a rink at 5 a.m. for practice time.

I also hope that Benster got more out of the experience than a bunch of hats with a big S on the front. I suspect he did, though. And while I won't miss scrambling to get from my office in Burnsville to get Benster to a 6 p.m. game in Forest Lake, we'll remember that once we got there, it was worth the trip.

This just in

The shutdown is over. The spin is beginning.

Headaches

Migraine headaches are an awful thing, but they can be controlled. Apparently Michele Bachmann has trouble with them from time to time and the Daily Caller has taken note:

The Minnesota Republican frequently suffers from stress-induced medical episodes that she has characterized as severe headaches. These episodes, say witnesses, occur once a week on average and can “incapacitate” her for days at time. On at least three occasions, Bachmann has landed in the hospital as a result.

“She has terrible migraine headaches. And they put her out of commission for a day or more at a time. They come out of nowhere, and they’re unpredictable,” says an adviser to Bachmann who was involved in her 2010 congressional campaign. “They level her. They put her down. It’s actually sad. It’s very painful.”

Sounds bad. But is it true? There's a lot of nonsense in these paragraphs. First, and I know this because I dealt with severe headaches for many years, stress doesn't, in and of itself, trigger headaches. In fact, some of the worst headaches I had were on low-stress days. I had many high-stress days that were headache-free.

Second, if it were really true that Bachmann was having weekly episodes that can incapacitate her for days at a time, she'd be on disability, not a member of Congress.

Third, how would the "adviser to Bachmann who was involved in her 2010 congressional campaign" know specifically what Bachmann was feeling?

Fourth, it would be a matter of public record if Bachmann had a propensity for missing public events unexpectedly, which would be true if she were truly incapacitated. Eventually that sort of thing gets around. The article cites four events, including one that goes back to 2006.

You need to understand two things about severe headaches. First, because they are multifactorial, there's a lot of trial and error in diagnosing the cause. I tried about a dozen medications and regimens in the 15+ years I dealt with the matter before we discovered the real cause -- a pituitary tumor.

Second, because of the trial and error involved, you do end up trying a lot of medicines. Stopping a migraine before it gets out of hand is key and it's hardly surprising that Bachmann would have to carry a number of different medications with her. You don't always have the luxury of dealing with one at onset.

Bachmann may or may not be a good candidate for president. She seems to deal with her headaches just fine, though, including the one the Daily Caller tried to administer.

Blogito ergo sum - Part One

If there's anything bloggers like, it's a bit of navel-gazing. And John Hawkins has prophesied the slow death of the right-wing blogosphere.

Hawkins blogs for a living. Most bloggers don't, of course. Even for a guy like Mitch Berg, who has a pretty substantial daily audience, a day job is required. Personally, I've been at this for 5 1/2 years and I've never once had a day where I merited more than 300 page views. My top traffic day remains the time, 3 years ago now, when I made a mildly disparaging reference regarding the solo career of Eric Carmen.

Steve Eggleston, the excellent Milwaukee-based blogger who holds court at No Runny Eggs, has a smart take on the matter:

Honestly, what we’re seeing is quite similar to the consolidation the left side has seen. Indeed, William Jacobson noted that in his piece.

How much of that is consolidation at the top, how much is just more voices out there, and how much of that is social media sucking the life out of everybody is up for grabs. Way back in the day, Charlie Sykes established the Rule of Five, saying that one couldn’t really follow more than 5 blogs very closely. While he was way off on the 5 number, especially with the advent of RSS feeds, there is a very-real limit to how many blogs one can follow. Trust me on this one; I can’t keep up with all 400+ feeds I try to.

I certainly think there is consolidation -- even a guy who is as prolific as Mitch has made room at his place for smart local bloggers who don't have a lot of time to write, including my friend and former Truth vs. the Machine colleague First Ringer. And Steve is right -- there just isn't enough time in the day to follow everyone.

But does that mean the right wing blogosphere is dying? I don't think so. We'll come back to the reasons anon.

Dog Days

There's really not a lot going on right now. The state shutdown is still on, but will be resolved eventually. The NFL labor dispute is still on, but will be resolved eventually. The big debt ceiling debate in Washington is still on, but will be resolved before August 2. There's no lurid "Trial of the Century" going on for me to ignore.

So go ahead and talk about what interests you. The thread is open.

The Joy of a Working Sump Pump

We've been having computer issues and it's made it difficult to get posts done, but we got another reminder of how petty most of my complaints typically are when we turned on the local news last night. The video attached to that KARE report shows a flooded parking lot in an apartment complex in New Brighton. That apartment complex is about five blocks from where I live. Another news report showed residents in a St. Anthony townhome complex called Mirror Lake Manor who were dealing with about a foot of water in their units. Mirror Lake Manor is directly behind our home.

So how much water did we get in our basement? Not a drop. In fact, we didn't even realize the carnage that happened all around us until we watched the news. As it turned out, the torrential thunderstorm that hit us on Friday night and Saturday morning dumped about 5 inches of rain in about a 2 hour period in our area. 35W, which runs about a mile to the east of our home, was closed at the 694 interchange. Valentine Park in Arden Hills was transformed into a lake and the little league field there, where both our kids have played was under about 2 feet of water.

I don't know how it can happen that you can remain dry when there is flooding all around you. Our house sits about 20-30 feet higher than the affected part of Mirror Lake Manor, so I'm certain some of the water that landed on us made its way down there. To my knowledge, none of my neighbors on our street had any flooding at all. We don't sit on particularly high ground, but when you get that kind of water, there's not much you can do. Water will find its level and it will show no mercy when it does.

We're now in for a week in which the weather will be more like Jakarta than Minnesota. I'm really going to try not to complain that much about it, considering how fortunate we were on Saturday morning.

The Big Payback

There's limited utility in reading comments on the internet (except here, where all our commenters are erudite and regularly offer genius level insights on the passsing scene). As I read the various accounts of the apparent resolution to the government shutdown here in Minnesota, it became evident that many of our moral tutors on the Left are convinced that the voters are going to punish the Republicans at the polls in 2012 for refusing to accept whatever the hell it was that Mark Dayton was offering, other than tax increases.




Do you believe that? I don't. We are now 16 months away from November 2012. At a comparable point four years ago, most people had no idea that the economy would go into a gigantic tailspin and it was certain that John McCain's presidential campaign was doomed. Well, the second part turned out to be true. I'd be willing to wager that the economy will be the issue in 2012, but it's going to be difficult to pin everything that's gone wrong in the last 3+ years on the Republicans.

Do you think the Republicans are going to get hammered in 2012? Or is it more likely that the Democrats will suffer the wrath of the electorate, starting with Barack Obama? Now remember, you're the most erudite commenters on the World Wide Web. Make us proud.

Meanwhile, somewhere in New Jersey

Zygi Wilf is tapping his foot.

High Life and Low Comedy

In the end, even though the state government shutdown is apparently close to resolution, the citizenry of Minnesota is learning some important things about how state government typically operates.

Yesterday's drama is a classic in the annals of boneheadedness:

The MillerCoors brewing company landed in the cross hairs of Minnesota's government shutdown Wednesday when state officials said it would have to stop selling its beer in the state because of expired licenses.

The Department of Public Safety told the brewer it must stop distribution in Minnesota and devise a plan to pull its product from the shelves, including Coors, Coors Lite, Miller Lite, Miller High Life and 35 other name-brand beers. That would decimate choices for consumers. MillerCoors supplies 38 percent of the beer sold in Minnesota, and the state is one of the top five markets in the country for the brewing giant.

So why did this happen?

The problem stems from brand label registrations that brewers must renew with the state every three years, showing the label on each brand of beer. MillerCoors attempted to renew in mid-June, but, according to company officials, sent the state a check for more than the required amount. Green said the company followed up with a new check, which the state received June 27.

But on June 30, one day before the government shutdown, the company received a letter from the state that its brand licenses had expired. State employees who would typically renew those licenses have been deemed noncritical during the shutdown and laid off.

There's some astonishing stuff in those two seemingly mundane paragraphs. Let's think about this:

• “MillerCoors attempted to renew in mid-June, but, according to company officials, sent the state a check for more than the required amount.”  If someone overpaid you, would you send the check back? Or would you cash it and let the sender know about the overpayment? A normal operation would cash the check and then (a) either send a refund check back, or (b) offer the check writer the option of having a credit on its account. Not the State of Minnesota, though. Accounts receivable really isn't that difficult to master.
• “Green said the company followed up with a new check, which the state received June 27.”  June 27 was a Monday. The shutdown actually took effect at the end of that week. I don't know about you, but where I work the expected level of service for handling a routine administrative task would be to handle it within a day, especially if it involved money coming into the organization. Of course, a normal organization with a multi-billion dollar scope would offer the option of electronic payment and wouldn't bother with paper checks, but we can leave that aside.

The thing that's really maddening about the episode is that, while the bureaucracy is apparently incapable of letting MillerCoors comply with the law, the enforcement apparatus is ready to pounce, although it's not clear what they would do to enforce the law. Would they come into every point of sale with guns blazing and confiscate all the MillerCoors products? Would they waylay beverage trucks on the highways, forcing them to stand and deliver? Would they set up checkpoints on the border? And where would the financial resources come from to execute such a plan?

To sum up, what we have here is a government that (a) cannot get out of its own way and (b) has no compunction about getting in the way of people who are conducting a legitimate business, for utterly arbitrary reasons. I think we call this sort of thing a Teaching Moment.

Overtaken by events

I had a post about the shutdown that I started this morning that I was hoping to finish over the lunch hour, but it may be moot:

Gov. Mark Dayton said Thursday morning that he is willing to accept Republicans' June 30 budget offer, which would close a $1.4 billion budget difference by delaying payment of school funds and borrowing against the state's tobacco settlement.

"This is the only viable option that's potentially available," Dayton said.

Not surprisingly, the lefties are pissed. Jeff Rosenberg, writing at MNpublius, says the following:

In a speech just a little while ago, Governor Dayton announced that given the MNGOP’s stunning intransigence and his own desire not to extend the pain of the shutdown, he will accept the GOP’s June 30th offer. He did, however, insist that they drop their social-policy poison pills from the bill.


What’s stunning about this to me is what really allowed the Republicans to achieve such a victory. The polling clearly indicated that the public sided with the governor; politically, Dayton could have held out longer than the MNGOP. But this is all about trying to end the shutdown vs. trying to “win.”

Well, yeah. You play to win. A few observations:

• The problem Dayton has faced from the get-go is that his only leverage was to hold a knife to his own throat. The government workers he laid off are his foot soldiers and had the most to lose from a shutdown. The effects of the shutdown to this point are mostly annoyances to those outside the public sector. If you weren't planning a trip to a state park, or trying to get a driver's license, you weren't likely affected that much.
• The GOP could argue, and has argued, that they had funded the government with the budget bills they passed. Even if the evil, heartless Republicans were inclined to change the bills, they were powerless to do so as long as the governor refused to call them back into special session. While the reportage of the event has largely sidestepped that reality, anyone who has been paying attention knew it anyway.
• One of the dangers about public polling, especially of the sort that is regularly offered as a substitute for news, is believing it too much. My guess is that the more detailed internal polling that all politicians do was decidedly less positive than Jeff would care to admit. I'd also guess that the trendline was getting worse by the day.
• The MillerCoors contretemps that emerged yesterday was probably the most ridiculous example of why the shutdown is going wrong for Dayton. Dayton's friends in the press had to report the reason that the license had expired. It wasn't corporate malfeasance on the part of the hegemonic beverage company, but rather it was bureaucratic stupidity of the most banal variety. The idea that a company would have to remove its products from thousands of store shelves in Minnesota, because the state couldn't figure out how to cash a check with an overpayment, is deeply embarrassing for all involved. If you're an average person, do you want to pay for more of that level of service? It's the sort of attention the government can't afford. The entire justification for the licensing regimen that the state undertakes was becoming the subject of ridicule. As Machiavelli pointed out, if you're a politician, you can survive being hated so long as you are feared. If you become a figure of mockery, your prospects aren't as good.

Well, yeah

In regard to government workers, for whom I expressed "a modicum of sympathy" yesterday, our friend Gino says:

hold on a minute...


the unions have put these people into power and driven states to this economic brink, in no small part due to the bennies the unions demanded in exchange for their votes.

its no too much a stretch to say they've shat their own bed, and now they can lay in it.

And that's true, of course.

I think you can decry the abuses of the public sector, while at the same understanding that most people who work for the government are honorable. The unions that represent government workers are quite often less than honorable, which is where things get sticky. Someone quite near and dear to me is a member of ASFCME, mostly because she has to be. I would wager that her local spends a lot more time and resources on politics than on representing its members in the workplace.