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Southeast Texas big three options for November
The first couple of weeks of November are two of the best you'll experience on the right side of Texas. Deer and duck seasons are open, and fishing on Sabine Lake for trout and reds under the birds is red hot.
The entire month of November is prime time deer hunting in the Pineywoods. There is one reason why – bucks are in the rut and running does all over the place night and day. It's not easy to get the jump on a mature buck, unless you hunt the rut.
One other way to up your chances of tagging a trophy-class buck right about now is to spend as much time hunting as possible. It's not always easy to sit in a blind for hours at a time. And it's even worse if you are hunting from a tree stand. One option is to move from one stand to another to break the boredom.
If you're into rattling horns to simulate two bucks fighting over a doe, this is the time to do it – all day long. The biggest buck I ever shot in the Pineywoods came to my rattling horns at about 11 a.m. one morning. Usually by that time, most hunters are back at camp. But during the rut, bucks will normally be moving all day long, especially just before a front moves through.
The Texas general gun season on deer opens Nov. 5 and runs through Jan. 1, 2012, in North Texas and Jan. 15, 2012, in South Texas.
The first half of the Texas waterfowl season opens in the North and South zones Nov. 5, 30 minutes before sunrise. The first split will run through Nov. 27. The second half dates are Dec. 10 – Jan. 29 in both zones.
What's the outlook? Well, according to Steve Lightfoot with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, duck hunters might have better luck bringing in birds with a divining rod instead of a duck call this hunting season.
"Wetland habitat conditions throughout waterfowl wintering grounds in Texas have suffered greatly under the drought, and what precious little groceries that remain aren't expected to hold birds for long," said Lightfoot. "Any rainfall prior to the season opener would be a welcome sight for an anticipated banner migration of ducks, but at this point wildlife biologists feel it's too late to repair the damage this year from the drought."
Matt Nelson, Central Coast Wetlands Ecosystem project leader with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, says the bays will see more activity this season than in years past but with little food production, he doesn't think we will hold many birds for any length of time.
"We simply don't have the habitat or food," he said.
The upper coast is fairing a little better but not much, says Port Arthur based Jim Sutherlin, TPWD Upper Coast Wetlands Ecosystem project leader.
"We are 23 inches behind our annual rainfall after ending last year around 13 inches behind," said Sutherlin. "Our soil moisture levels are very low, but we are growing green grass this fall instead of watching grass turn brown as we did in the hot summer. Coastal marsh habitat conditions are dismal; either we have dry marshes, or marshes with very high salinity waters, which produce little wildlife benefit, kill plants and deteriorate organic wetland soils."
"We have very few submerged aquatic plants, but we do have some impressive stands of millet in a few sites," said Sutherlin. "The rice agriculture and coastal prairie range around us is very dry. We likely will have an abundance of ducks for short periods of time during the hunting season due to the overall duck numbers in this fall migration. I do not expect the birds to stay with us for very long due to low waterfowl food availability and marginal seasonal habitat conditions along the Western Gulf Coast."
If you're not into the gunplay for deer and ducks, don't fret. The absolute best time of year to be fishing on Sabine Lake is right now. As of this week, the bird action on Sabine is as good as it gets. Shrimp are well into their fall migration from the marsh to the Gulf, and flocks of gulls are all over them. The only thing you have to do is move from one bunch of gulls to the next, and they are everywhere. I've been on the lake quite a bit lately and there aren't that many boats working the birds. On most days, we easily loaded up with trout and several reds. Best lures are white rat-tailed soft plastics rigged on 1/4-ounce jig heads. Most keeper trout and reds are being caught with jigs bumped on bottom.


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XicanIndie fest gives "Nostalgia for the Light," one of last year's best documentaries, its Denver premiere
If you're not feeling a strong gravitational pull to be at Su Teatro on Santa Fe tonight, you should.
This evening the XicanIndie FilmFest XIV screens "Nostalgia for the Light' one of the wisest, most beautifully rendered, and far-reaching documentaries of 2011. (This is its woefully overdue Denver premiere.)
Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman travels to Atacama, Earths' most arid desert. There he finds astronomers thrilled for crystalline views of galaxies. He also encounters loved ones shifting through the desert's sands for the remains of political prisoners disappeared in Gen. Augusto Pinochet's war against his countrymen.
It is rare to find such a elegiac meeting of the astonishing and the appalling. And Mad Moviegoer wasn't alone in putting it on her 2011's best list.
"Nostalgia for the Light" is easier to follow than Terrence Malick's cosmic tone poem, "The Tree of Life." But each is crafted from a generous embrace of loss and timelessness and each shares a desire to connect the infinite dots. (Su Teatro, 721 Santa Fe Drive, Friday 7:30 p.m.)

subset: commoncrawl


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Think like a physicist
Some physics teachers develop a coding system for their marking comments to reduce their workload.
This not only saves them time, it can actively benefit the pupils themselves.
David Collyer, a physics teacher in Leeds, said, "I often find myself saying the same things over and over again - underline headings, put units in results table headings etc. So I wrote a list of all the things that crop up and put them onto a PowerPoint loop. When marking the reports, I just annotate them using a code e.g. M2 is method point 2, G4 is graphs point 4 and so on. On receiving the books the pupils have to write out the points in full as targets for the next time they write a report. I find they take the comments more seriously if they've written them out themselves."
To read more about marking – and to find some marking coding schemes - join the TalkPhysics discussion "Making marking less of a mountain"


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A Photo a Day
In 2014, I want to publish a photo a day. This is where you'll find them.
The photographs won't have a specific topic. I may publish brand new ones one day and old ones from my archive other days. Some will be digital. Some will be film. I may miss some days when life gets in the way, but I'll try my best to get back into publishing daily.
Most of the photographs are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License unless otherwise noted on the specific image with a © Gabriel Ponzanelli. This basically means you're welcome to use them and share them in your own website as long as it's not for commercial purposes and you provide attribution with a link back to this site.
You can subscribe to follow the Photo a Day.


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The Bible is what God uses to reveal exactly how He thinks.
What does it mean to receive the Holy Spirit?
When we become believers, God begins to do a work in us to make us more like Christ.
Let God direct your decisions
Principles from Peter for healthy spiritual growth
God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.
- 1 John 5:11


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Acclaimed One-Hour Drama Series Starring Michael C. Hall Sets Production for Spring; Fall Premiere
LOS ANGELES, CA (November 2, 2006) �SHOWTIME has ordered a second season of its freshman drama DEXTER, starring Emmy�- and Golden Globe�-nominated actor Michael C. Hall (�Six Feet Under�), it was announced today by Robert Greenblatt, Showtime President of Entertainment. DEXTER premiered last month to widespread critical acclaim and ranks as SHOWTIME�S top-rated series. Production is set to begin on 12 new episodes next spring and will premiere on SHOWTIME later in 2007. The series follows Dexter Morgan (Hall), an incredibly likeable forensics expert for the Miami Police Department who moonlights as a serial killer.
DEXTER has been one of the most talked about and critically lauded new series of the year. Said New York Magazine in its review last month: ��horrifying, intoxicating, seductive and thrilling, all at the same time.� The Boston Globe�s Matthew Gilbert proclaimed, �This fiendishly excellent new Showtime series turns blood splatter into a pop art form, like Jackson Pollock meets Annie Leibovitz.� Additionally, Time and People magazines both named DEXTER one of the best new series of the fall season.
�Dexter is a home run for us, both critically and in popularity. The show was launched at the height of all the broadcast networks� fall premieres yet instantly became our #1 rated show,� Greenblatt said. �People seem fascinated by the moral ambiguity of Dexter, as played by the gifted Michael C. Hall. This character and the world of this show are a welcome addition to our �premium� line-up.� Along with Hall, the series stars Jennifer Carpenter (�The Exorcism of Emily Rose�), Lauren Velez (�New York Undercover�), Julie Benz (�Jawbreaker�), Erik King (�National Treasure�), David Zayas (�The Interpreter�) and James Remar (�Sex and the City�). The series premiered in October 2006 and will air its season finale on Sunday, December 17th. John Goldwyn, Sara Colleton (�Live from Baghdad,� �The Painted Veil�), and Clyde Phillips serve as executive producers for the series. James Manos, Jr. developed the series for television (Emmy� Award for writing "The Sopranos").
DEXTER is based on the compelling novel �Darkly Dreaming Dexter� by Jeff Lindsay, a South Florida native. Orphaned at the age of four and harboring a traumatic secret, Dexter is adopted by a police officer who recognizes Dexter�s homicidal tendencies and guides his son to channel his gruesome passion for human vivisection in a constructive way - by killing those heinous perpetrators who are above the law or who have slipped through the cracks of justice. A respected member of the police force, a perfect gentleman and a man with a soft spot for children, it's hard not to like Dexter. Although his drive to kill is unflinching, he struggles to emulate normal emotions he doesn't feel, and to keep up his appearance as a caring, socially responsible human being.
Showtime Networks Inc. (SNI), a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBS Corporation, owns and operates the premium television networks SHOWTIME�, THE MOVIE CHANNEL� and FLIX�, as well as the multiplex channels SHOWTIME� TOO�, SHOWTIME� SHOWCASE, SHOWTIME EXTREME�, SHOWTIME BEYOND�, SHOWTIME NEXT�, SHOWTIME WOMEN�, SHOWTIME FAMILYZONE� and TMC XTRA. SNI also offers SHOWTIME HD�, THE MOVIE CHANNEL HD�, SHOWTIME ON DEMAND� and THE MOVIE CHANNEL ON DEMAND�. SNI is also an owner and manager of SUNDANCE CHANNEL, a venture of NBC Universal, Robert Redford and SNI. SNI also manages Smithsonian Networks, a joint venture between SNI and the Smithsonian Institution. All SNI feeds provide enhanced sound using Dolby Digital 5.1. SNI markets and distributes sports and entertainment events for exhibition to subscribers on a pay-per-view basis through SHOWTIME� PPV.


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The pudgy Pablo Sandoval spanked lean, mean Justin Verlander during Game 1 of the World Series last night. Fat Ichiro—that's one of his nicknames—hit three home runs. This was improbable. Sandoval hit only 12 all season. Verlander allowed only 19 all year. But Fat Ichiro can do that to you.
Dale Murphy, the wiry, muscular 1980s Braves star with 398 career homers, weighed in on his always entertaining Twitter account:


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I mentioned that you can make your own routes in Google Maps and share them with others, and here's how.
First, you need to have an account, typically done by creating an email account. Once at Google Maps click on "My Maps," then "Create new map." Give it a title and description, and select whether public or unlisted. I recommend leaving it unlisted until you're ready to share it.
You'll work with the three icons in the upper left corner of Google Maps. Select the blue teardrop placemarker to start your route, and give it a name. Select the jaggy line for drawing the route. You can click as often as you like when drawing the route. I recommend selecting "follow roads," if that's your intent.
While this process works well enough, it takes forever, if you have a long route. A way to get around this is to pick a destination and then use the placemarker. The program will choose a route, typically following freeways, if nearby.
You can fine-tune the route by selecting the blue line where it diverges from its intended route and dragging it to the desired road. If you're doing this where there are other roads, you need to be zoomed in and take care in selecting the road segment you want to move.
Another option is to click on "Get Directions," after creating a map name and enter the start and end points. Google Maps will create a route, again using freeways where practical. If you select "Bicycling" route (in the U.S. only), Google Maps will create a route minus the freeways. Once that's done, you can drag the end point back to a place that's closer to where you want to go.
Sometimes it's a hassle to make things work, but I'm no expert.
Google Maps does not always recognize paths — it's better in bicycling mode — so you may have to create sections for places that follow paths.
There are icons you can use for points of interest. Click on the Placemark icon and you'll see the Placemark in the upper right corner of the window. Click on that and you'll see more icons.
If this doesn't make sense, just watch their video.
Here are some of my public routes:
- Santa Clara to Santa Cruz
- Alum Rock Park Silicon Valley ride
- Los Gatos Creek Trail (downtown to Lexington Reservoir)


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Catholic Germans from Russia & Romania
In Memory of Robert Moss
This web site came into being because a group of us were researching our German families from Eastern Europe. Individually, we had purchased roles of microfilm and other records. Each of us studied these, along with records from various municipal and national archives, books of history, and town records. Some of us even paid for private researches of our family's history and were still dissatisfied with our progress.
Gradually, we became aware of one another's existence and decided to pool our information and other resources to form the Catholic Germans from Russia and Romania website. We offer these materials freely for the benefit of all who have descended from or have ties with the Catholic Germans from Russia and Romania.
We are appreciative of the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, at the North Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo, to place these webpages at the GRHC website


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We both had quite the full day today. I met Karin after school and we did some organizing of her classroom so that it'll be more pleasant to come back to after spring break! Karin did most of the work, but I got most of the checkmarks (maintaining the to do list has it's advantages). We dealt with a lot of stuff, and I think that she's going to be really happy when she walks in on that Monday morning 17 days from now. I think we dealt with 5 boxes and two aquariums.
We took a break and had dinner at Red Robin, dinner was nice although they seemed a little understaffed.
We then made a quick trip over to Ikea to see if we could pick up some extra shelf pins for the Ivar shelves that Karin has in her classroom. They didn't have any in the spare parts vending machine, so we looked around a bit then took a number to ask if they had any extra ones that we could buy. They gave us the 20 pins that we needed no charge. So that was nice. Thanks to the nice lady at the returns/exchanges desk.
Back to the school to finish putting the shelves together and deal with a few more things. Then finally heading home.
Oh, also finished the first phase of the eSub System for Abandoned Towers (subject to Karin's final acceptance testing) which allows for contest submissions.


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Nation & World
Why Pakistan is unlikely to crack down on Islamic militants, despite U.S. pressure
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration and its allies are pressing Pakistan to end its support for Afghan insurgents linked to al Qaida, but Pakistani generals are unlikely to be swayed because they increasingly see their interests diverging from those of the United States, U.S. and foreign experts said.
The administration sought to ratchet up the pressure last month by sending top U.S. military and intelligence officials to Pakistan to confront officials there with intelligence linking Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence to the Taliban and other militant Islamist groups.
When that failed to produce the desired response, U.S. officials told news organizations about the visit, and then revealed that the intelligence included an intercepted communication between ISI officers and a pro-Taliban network that carried out a July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
The United States and Britain privately have demanded that Pakistan move against the Taliban's top leadership, which they contend is based near Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan Province, said a State Department official and a senior NATO defense official, who both requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.
Pakistan has been given "a pretty unequivocal message" to end ISI support for the militants and shake up the top ranks of the intelligence agency, the senior NATO defense official said.
On Friday, however, Pakistan vehemently rejected the allegations of ISI involvement in the Indian Embassy blast, which killed 41 and injured 141.
U.S. officials and experts said there's little chance that Pakistan will take any of the actions it's been asked to take.
"There is a limit to what we can do in Pakistan," said the State Department official.
"The fact that we're reduced to trying to send messages to the Pakistanis by putting stories in (newspapers) tells you we don't have any good options," said a former senior intelligence official knowledgeable about South Asia. "It also suggests that the high-level, face-to-face contacts haven't worked so far. The trouble is, these kinds of public threats are likely to backfire."
For one thing, the Taliban and other groups allied with al Qaida could respond to any Pakistani crackdown by stepping up attacks inside Pakistan, which is battling Islamic extremist violence, U.S. officials and experts said.
Furthermore, they said, Pakistan's nearly dysfunctional, feud-riddled civilian government has little power over the Army and the ISI. The latest evidence was a botched attempt under U.S. pressure to put the agency under the Interior Ministry before Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani's three-day visit to Washington this week.
Pakistani generals and other leaders are also infuriated by President Bush's pursuit of a strategic relationship with India, their foe in three wars, as embodied by a U.S.-Indian civilian nuclear cooperation pact that won United Nations approval Friday, the U.S. officials and experts said.
"One thing we never understood is that India has always been the major threat for Pakistan," said former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain, now the president of the Middle East Institute.
Pakistan is alarmed by India's close ties to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and its growing influence in Afghanistan, where a $750 million Indian aid program includes the construction of a strategic highway that will open the landlocked country to Indian goods shipped through ports in Iran.
Pakistan, which refuses to allow Indian products through its port of Karachi, has long coveted Afghanistan as a market, a trade route to central Asia and a rear area for its army in any new conflict with India.
"Pakistan over the last several years has increasingly come to believe that it is being encircled by India and a U.S.-India-Afghan axis," said Seth Jones, an expert with the RAND Corp., a policy institute.
For these reasons, Pakistan's military leaders may have decided to scale back their cooperation with the Bush administration's war against terrorism and boost support for the Taliban and other militant groups.
"We have created a set of perverse incentives for the Pakistanis to continue their support for the Taliban," said a U.S. defense official, who requested anonymity to speak frankly. "Pakistan does not view the United States as a long-term player in the region and certainly doesn't view Pakistan's strategic interests as congruent with ours, and that divergence is getting larger, not smaller."
Without a strategy to allay Pakistan's fears, U.S. officials and experts warned, there's little point in sending more U.S. and NATO troops to Afghanistan as Bush, Democratic candidate Barak Obama and his GOP rival, John McCain, all advocate.
Pakistan vehemently denies backing the Taliban and other insurgents, pointing out that it's lost hundreds of troops in U.S.-funded counter-insurgency offensives.
But many Afghan and U.S. officials scoff at Pakistan's denials, charging that the Taliban leadership operates undisturbed in Quetta and nearby tribal areas with ISI support, guidance, money and weapons.
Bush, anxious to maintain Pakistani support in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other al Qaida leaders, apparently believed that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, the former Army chief, would rein in the ISI.
But that hope has proved to be misplaced. Truces forged by the ISI and the Pakistani army freed Taliban and other fighters to fight in Afghanistan, where the worst violence since the 2001 U.S. intervention is claiming higher U.S. casualties than in Iraq for the first time.
On Friday, five more NATO troops were reported killed in eastern Afghanistan, a sector where U.S. troops are stationed.
Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA Deputy Director Stephen R. Kappes went to Pakistan to confront Prime Minister Gilani, Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kayani and ISI Director Lt. Gen. Naveed Taj with the intelligence linking ISI officers to the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan.
The Americans also documented other support that ISI officers have been giving the Taliban and other militant groups, including advance warnings of U.S. missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal region, said the State Department official and senior NATO defense official.
"There is good evidence that elements of the ISI have re-engaged with the Taliban," said the senior NATO defense official.
Gilani and his delegation heard similar complaints in Washington, according to American and Pakistani officials. Pakistan Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar told a television interviewer that Bush asked during a White House meeting, "Who is in control of ISI?"
More from McClatchy:
Pakistan's intelligence agency 'is like a woman with multiple lovers'
Pakistani leader reproaches Bush for missile strike


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|Rear Thread
|ø: 2.1 x L: 1.4" / ø: 53.4 x L: 34.6 mm
|5 oz / 141 g
|Package Weight
|0.65 lb
|Box Dimensions (LxWxH)
|11.9 x 10.5 x 8.4"
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We have been dealing with the Authorized manufactures' in Australia for over 25 years and only offer Local warranty and no "GREY" imports! We also provide an EXTRA 12 months warranty on all our products for your peace of mind. This means if the manufacturer is 12 months, you will have 2 years , if the manufacturer is 2 years, you will have 3 years! We only use the Authorized Manufacturer's service centres!
In keeping with our mantra of exceptional customer service, we offer FREE freight and next day delivery* for all Leederville Cameras purchases made online, to any address in Australia! You also have peace of mind knowing that all items shipped are insured against loss or damage.
*Subject to courier and stock availability. Next day delivery may vary for remote & regional areas and excludes bulky items.
At Leederville Cameras, we love our local community and regular customers. That's why when you purchase a camera or lens valued at over $200 from us, you will automatically become a VIP member of our store! This VIP status will allow you to receive great discounts on accessories like filters, batteries, tripods, cases, etc (excluding cameras, flashes or lenses). You will also get special discounts in our photo café on print enlargements, canvas, aluminium, frames, albums and more!
Have you got a question that only our dedicated team of camera professionals can answer? Ask us on Live chat! We endeavour to be available as much as possible to answer any questions our valued customers might have. We are also very active on Facebook, running regular photo competitions and remaining constantly engaged with our account whilst in the store, so you can alternatively ask us a question on Facebook and we will answer this as soon as possible.
Conveniently located at 201 Oxford Street in Leederville, the prices you see online are the same as those in our two storey superstore! We have the biggest range of cameras, lenses, accessories and binoculars in Perth. Leederville Cameras is the one stop shop for camera and photography enthusiasts. We even have a dedicated printing café, where our expert staff can create amazing prints from your camera, creating canvas images, aluminum images, photo books, calendars, mugs, shirts and much more!
At Leederville Cameras, we take our knowledge of cameras very seriously – all in the name of providing exceptional customer service and the most innovative and high quality products to our customers. In our two storey superstore, we have 7 trained camera experts, who can answer your every question. In our unique print café on the first floor we have a further 3 expert imaging consultants to assist with any of your imaging and printing needs, including digital prints, canvas prints, aluminum prints, framing, books, calendars and more! Want to learn more about your camera? Why not take one of our courses?
With over 27 years experience in the photographic industry, the Fiore's know a thing or two about customer service! Being a family business, we understand how important our customers are, and consistently strive to go over and above. The business owner and store manager, Lidio Fiore is regularly on the shop floor assisting customers with their every photographic need or question.


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In anticipation of the destruction the winds of Hurricane Sandy would bring to the East Coast in late October, electrical contracting firms around the country hired additional hands and dispatched teams to prepare to work alongside electric utility workers in order to bring power back to the area. Parker City, Ind.-based Townsend Corp. sent 510 employees in 194 crews from branch offices in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Louisiana, the Carolinas, and Georgia to support line clearance and construction work. John Pequet, a member of electrical workers' union Local 17 in Southfield, Mich., said that when he dispatched his crew on October 28, he was told to "keep going until you get to the ocean."
In addition, despite having to manage their own disaster preparedness, several New York-based firms pitched in with the effort (Disaster Planning Works for New York Electrical Firm). For example, Victor, N.Y.-based O'Connell Electric Co. dispatched 116 workers and 68 pieces of equipment and vehicles to help in Long Island and Brewster, N.Y. According to CEO Victor E. Salerno, the firm's linemen first focused on getting customers back online, which, because of the extent of the damage, took much time and resources.
E-J Electric Installation Co., Long Island, N.Y., began mobilizing union electrical workers, most coming from IBEW Local 3 and 42, and equipment as the threat of Sandy increased. In all, it hired an additional 200 workers. With divisions that include transmission and distribution (T&D) and electrical construction, the firm was in a unique position to offer its services to the New York City area. The firm deployed around 40 linemen to help with power restoration efforts in Long Island, along with First Call, its emergency response team. Its field staff — from project management to engineering — worked around the clock, even through the weekends.
Fortunately, the firm's headquarters were untouched by the rising waters, and the building never lost power. "Our entire neighborhood was flooded, literally right up to 10 feet from our steps," says Anthony E. Mann, president and CEO, E-J Electric Installation Co., Long Island City, N.Y. "We were lucky, and that enabled us to respond very quickly."
Still, the company wasn't completely unaffected. Its warehouse, located two blocks from headquarters, had 10 inches of water in it. Furthermore, many of the company's employees lost their homes. "A lot of our employees had challenges," says Mann.
Some had to take time off to relocate or rebuild. Still, the firm responded to the emergency situation. "We've had situations where we needed up to 25 electricians in the facility for an emergency, and they've come and worked through the night," says Mann. "A lot of them have their own problems, but were working around the clock to help other people. It was amazing to see how everybody stepped up with the whole organization working 24/7."
Up and running
In the immediate aftermath of the storm, ongoing construction projects were postponed in order to respond to emergency situations. "The clients had to be back up and running," says Mann. "Critical care, housing, even commercial facilities, had to have power restored."
For instance, E-J Electric responded to an emergency call by New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to survey and repair 29 public housing buildings on Coney Island. All locations experienced some type of damage due to flooding from Hurricane Sandy, including some of the switchgear rooms being submerged by ocean water that left the buildings without power. Through a coordinated effort with multidisciplined construction management, engineering, and architecture firms, the LiRo Group and HAKS, as well as NYCHA, Army Corp of Engineers, and E-J Electric, generators were located to get the buildings on temporary power and re-energize the resident apartments, boilers, elevators, trash compactors, and other life safety systems.
"These people couldn't afford to leave or go to a hotel," says Mann. "They didn't have any place to go. So we needed to get the power back up because these people were really dependent on living there."
In the time before the storm, E-J Electric had been working for Turner Construction to build a new energy building at NYU Langone Medical Center, a private hospital. Turner Construction was able to use that relationship to quickly hire E-J Electric for the post-storm recovery. Under the design/build process, E-J Electric brought power up in three weeks, with the cooperation of a national electrical manufacturer, which produced switchgear in six days instead of the normal 12- to 18-week turnaround time.
At the entertainment and sports facility Chelsea Piers, the entire first floor, which contained the electrical infrastructure, was under water. E-J Electric Installation Co. crews were able to get the place opened in three weeks — in time to be open for its busy holiday season.
In order to do that, the firm cleaned and put back in service two 4,000A service switchboards, while simultaneously evaluating and ordering replacement electrical equipment for four major electrical distribution rooms throughout the complex. Three of these rooms were completely rebuilt, including the complete relocation of one electric room to the second floor to limit the facility's exposure in the event of another flood event in the future.
In a second location, a replacement 500kVA transformer was installed on a 16-foot-high steel platform, and the remaining equipment was raised by 12 inches. In addition, E-J Electric helped determine a location for a replacement main service switchgear room on the second floor that is currently in design by the consulting engineers. Work will commence once plans are completed.
"Short-term, there was a lot of activity," says Mann. "But most of the work finished rather quickly. New construction is ongoing again. It was a short-term postponement, and everybody's back to the normal processes."
Additionally, such as in the next phase for Wall Street commercial buildings, there are opportunities for further projects in the future to meet revised building codes. "There will be some long-term infrastructure work that comes out of it," continues Mann. "Also, the people building new buildings are already making changes to what they're doing. They're moving their switchgear upstairs. They're putting in retaining walls to keep water out."
Toward resilience
Flooding in lower levels where mechanical and electrical infrastructure were located destroyed fuel pumps, transfer switches, and other systems. "The water ran right through the parking lots and took out the switchgear in the basements," says Mann, who explains that many commercial buildings in the area have moved their electrical and mechanical infrastructure to an upper floor. "They're looking at relocating their infrastructure to be ready if there's another big storm. That's a second phase. The upper floors were all fine. It wasn't wind, and there was very little rain. It was all water damage from flooding."
Moreover, some owners are considering more long-term changes. According to Mann, the market for commercial buildings will drive the changes. Power independence has now become a necessary quality for attracting tenants. Co-generation will power buildings independently in case of emergency. "Class A buildings are going to take measures that their tenants are going to want them to take," says Mann. "If you're a tenant in a Class A building, you're going to want to make sure your critical systems are above where any water would come. So that will naturally happen for those types of buildings."
Nonetheless, New York intends to make some of these changes official. On Nov. 15, 2012, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo convened the NYS 2100 Commission in response to the recent severe weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Irene, and Tropical Storm Lee. The commission was asked to recommend actions to be taken to prepare New York to more effectively respond to, and bounce back from, future storms and other disasters. On January 11, the Commission issued its first report, "Building Resilience in New York."
The recommendations are categorized by transportation, energy, land use, insurance, and infrastructure finance. The report also highlights nine major cross-cutting recommendations that are relevant to multiple sectors and systems: protect, upgrade, and strengthen existing systems; rebuild smarter; ensure replacement with better options and alternatives; encourage the use of green and natural infrastructure; create shared equipment and resource reserves; promote integrated planning and develop criteria for integrated decision-making for capital investments; enhance institutional coordination; improve data, mapping, visualization, and communication systems; create new incentive programs to encourage resilient behaviors and reduce vulnerabilities; and expand education, job training, and workforce development opportunities.
"We're looking at what the city needs to do for buildings," says Mann, who was appointed co-chair of the electrical and IT working group on the New York City Building Resiliency Task Force, convened by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. "We're right in the middle and hope to conclude by May, coming out with new regulations on what needs to be done to prevent what happened with Sandy. Each building type is different, each location is different, and it's something that the city is looking at closely."
Economic impact
Estimates put the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy at $50 billion. On January 29, President Obama signed into law the Hurricane Sandy Supplemental bill, which appropriates roughly $50.5 billion to various agencies for Hurricane Sandy relief and recovery efforts. The bill provides funding to the Federal Transit Administration for transportation-related projects, the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control and construction projects, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for community development programs. In addition, the bill provides more than $11 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to replenish and expand the Disaster Relief Fund. Combined with the $9.7 billion in aid President Obama signed into law January 6, federal aid for recovery from Hurricane Sandy now totals $60.4 billion.
This funding has led some observers to believe the recovery work from the storm's damage will create a surge in construction spending. But according to the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC), the overall impact is likely to be negative. The funding to replace these structures in many cases will be taken from other construction budgets, says the AGC. Meanwhile, businesses that had planned to build, or to occupy new space that developers put up, will defer or cancel those projects. State and local governments will experience lower income, sales, and property tax receipts, forcing further budget cuts.
Stephen Sandherr, CEO for the construction trade association, urged Congress and the administration to make infrastructure investment a top priority in 2013. "Congress and the president have provided some tax certainty that provides a foundation for economic growth," Sandherr said. "But their jobs are far from completed. It is vital that the states devastated by Hurricane Sandy receive funding immediately for recovery work. In addition, lawmakers should not target construction spending for further cuts when they turn to spending decisions in the next two months."
SIDEBAR: Disaster Planning Works for New York Electrical Firm
MTA/NYCT, the largest U.S. public-transit service, suffered $5 billion in damage and lost revenue as a result of Hurricane Sandy.
N.J. Transit, the United States' second largest transit system, sustained $400 million in damage. RailWorks, North America's leading provider of track and transit and systems construction and maintenance services, weathered Hurricane Sandy with minimal disruption due to contingency plans in place along with the extraordinary response by its employees, and was able to help get New York's transportation services running again. This is the timeline of the company's proactive action and responses:
Three days before Sandy made landfall, RailWorks' Information Technology (IT) Department, led by Chief Information Officer Bob Cummings, verified that contingency plans developed more than a year ago were in place. The department began the first of 10 consecutive daily morning and evening calls to monitor the storm, its impact on critical business functions, and related IT support activities. Field and project offices in Sewell, N.J.; Worcester, Mass.; and throughout the Greater New York area, secured equipment in their yards, repositioned equipment and materials out of low-lying areas, and confirmed access to generators.
On October 27, Salvatore DeMatteo, general superintendent for RailWorks subsidiary L.K. Comstock, monitored flood zones and began sending alerts to project managers and general foremen on the status of project operations over the next five days.
On October 28 — a Sunday — Payroll Manager Fabi Mayor, Finance Manager/Payroll Controller Tom Lealand, and Controller Judy DelGizzo decided to begin running payroll early using available data. Mayor contacted Assistant Payroll Manager Linda Horan and Payroll Associates Kathy Calvente, Michelle King, Louanne Wilson, and Susana Wong, who immediately started processing payroll from their homes.
On October 29, the corporate and Farmingdale offices were without power and Internet. Services were out or intermittent over the next few days. MTA/NYCT construction managers advised N.Y. Transit that all project sites were shut down. N.Y. Transit leadership initiated ongoing communications with field personnel to coordinate Farmingdale office and project startup activities. The IT department maintained contact with departments throughout the week to support essential activities and to help coordinate getting employees set up to work from home. Telecommunications Manager John Barry and Director of Infrastructure Services Bob Hickey monitored and addressed infrastructure, network, and power problems and worked with the IT team to resolve them throughout the week.
Payroll employees continued processing payroll from their homes. Power outages began hitting one payroll employee after another throughout the afternoon. They used landlines and cell phones to notify each other when the power went out or was restored. Using a tag-team approach, they kept work progressing wherever they could find power. This effort continued the next day. Payroll Operations Analyst Fred Omar charged his mobile phone in his car so he could respond to calls from the field about the automated time-collection system.
On October 30, winds, rains, and flooding pounded New Jersey and New York throughout the night and through three cycles of tides, crippling transportation networks, downing overhead power lines, and flooding eight NYCT subway tunnels, as well as the Hugh L. Carey and the Queens Midtown tunnels. The Metro-North Railroad lost power in sections, and the Long Island Rail Road sustained flooding. As the day progressed, Sandy weakened as it moved inland over Pennsylvania.
N.Y. Transit personnel resumed limited work at some project sites. With all mass transit still shut down in New York, Staff Accountant Kevin Evangelista caught a ride from his apartment in Queens into the Manhattan office so he could get his computer. He returned home where he used his Wi-Fi to transmit the file of electronic ACH payments to vendors. He continued this effort throughout the week.
Corporate Cash Manager Trisha O'Donohue maintained banking throughout the storm by working off available hot spots in Westchester County, N.Y.
On October 31, the payroll department met at the Farmingdale, N.Y., office. They traveled with John Barry to an emergency back-up office on Long Island, where the IT and payroll departments had power and Internet connections to perform their work.
Work resumed at all N.Y. Transit project sites, including CBTC Flushing and the No. 7 Line Extension, which were flooded and had the most damage. The CBTC Flushing project office in Long Island City ran with a back-up generator for the next two weeks.
On November 1, the IT and payroll departments resumed operations in the Farmingdale office, even though most employees' homes were without power and some were taking on water.
On November 2, Accounts Payable Manager Melissa Quinones used Wi-Fi at her home to transmit the file for check runs.
During the week of November 5, N.Y. Transit began restoration services for NYCT at South Ferry, to clean up and restore the station, and at Coney Island Yard, to overhaul water-damaged switch and stop machines. Work continued into December.


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On a kitchen floor in Tokyo, Japanese photographer Haruhiko Kawaguchi spends 10-20 seconds photographing couples that he meets in nightclubs. He arranges them like pieces of meat inside bags meant to store futons and blankets. He then seals their conjoined bodies inside the bag using a household vacuum that sucks out all of the air.
For this project, Flesh Love, he's photographed over 80 couples. Kawaguchi says the men panic more often than the women. A few have struggled for air while in the bag and one man ended up pissing himself. The women just want to look good, he says.
via Oddity Central


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As a kid, I was well acquainted with the grandeur of Arizona. Each year, during my family's annual drive from southern California to my grandpa's home in Texas, I would gaze out the car window at soaring desert mesas, distant mountaintops crowned with snow, and endless vistas punctuated by sagebrush and cacti. An Arizona sunset, I thought, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Lately, it saddens me that the news from the Grand Canyon State is so ugly. In April, Gov. Jan Brewer signed the most stringent immigration law in the country. In May, the state banned ethnic studies in public schools and began investigating teachers with accents. Now the Arizona legislature may take aim at the children of illegal immigrants.
This fall, state Sen. Russell Pearce plans to introduce legislation that would end birthright citizenship for so-called "anchor babies." Although the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on anyone born in the US, Senator Pearce says that illegal aliens have "hijacked" the law. "There is an orchestrated effort by them to come here and have children to gain access to the great welfare state we've created," he told Time magazine.
Yet these kids are largely Americans. The Pew Center estimates that there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US. Most of their children – 73 percent – are American-born. That's 4 million kids, according to a 2009 Pew report. They are citizens, like you and me.
I take exception to the whole concept of "anchor babies." It is based on the false notion that illegal immigrants have children in this country to serve as a legal "anchor" for the entire family. In fact, illegal aliens who have children here can still be deported. Elvira Arellano, who received national attention for seeking sanctuary in a Chicago church, was deported in 2007, despite having an American-born son.
Under Pearce's proposal, Arizona would refuse to issue a birth certificate to any child without at least one parent who could prove legality. Not only is this impractical and unconstitutional, I find it abhorrent that anyone would punish children on account of their parents. Law enforcement should be more concerned with trafficking and drugs, rather than new parents and babies.
The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1868 to ensure that states did not deny former slaves the full rights of citizenship. Its language is simple: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
The next section is crystal clear: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." It seems pretty obvious that our post-civil war political leaders foresaw the possibility of states devising their own citizenship criteria, and specifically forbade it.
The Supreme Court has consistently upheld birthright citizenship, going as far back as 1898, in US v. Wong Kim Ark. This landmark case recognized a US-born son of Chinese immigrants as an American citizen.
Pearce maintains that public opinion is on his side, and he's right. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 58 percent of Americans don't believe that children of illegal immigrants should receive citizenship. However, this is a constitutional guarantee, not an issue to be decided by demagoguery or popular sentiment. Besides, if anything "anchors" undocumented workers to the US, it is jobs. Wouldn't it be a better use of Arizona's resources to go after employers that hire illegal workers?
I agree that our immigration system is broken, but Pearce's plan is not going to fix anything. Ending birthright citizenship would create a two-tiered system of Americans, which was exactly what the 14th Amendment sought to prevent. It would increase the number of people living and working in the shadows. Ironically, Pearce was one of the driving forces behind Arizona's infamous "Papers, please" law. His new idea would deprive people of their papers – permanently.
All reasonable Americans ought to be concerned by Arizona's proposed legislation, as similar measures are in the works in Texas and Oklahoma. I hope that President Obama will speak out against Pearce's plan.
On his website, Russell Pearce notes that he is "For faith, family, and freedom above all else." But is he really? He does not appear to have faith that the Constitution means what it plainly says. He is willing to divide families with restrictive immigration policies. He has compromised the freedom of Latinos by infringing on our civil rights.
Most troubling of all, his proposal to end birthright citizenship is a threat to one of the cornerstone principles of our democracy – that all men are created equal.
Raul A. Reyes is an attorney and columnist in New York City.
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text:
It is written in an elegant, clerical hand, on four sheets of parchment, each two feet wide and a bit more than two feet high, about the size of an eighteenth-century newspaper but finer, and made not from the pulp of plants but from the hide of an animal. Some of the ideas it contains reach across ages and oceans, to antiquity; more were, at the time, newfangled. "We the People," the first three words of the preamble, are giant and Gothic: they slant left, and, because most of the rest of the words slant right, the writing zigzags. It took four months to debate and to draft, including two weeks to polish the prose, neat work done by a committee of style. By Monday, September 17, 1787, it was ready. That afternoon, the Constitution of the United States of America was read out loud in a chamber on the first floor of Pennsylvania's State House, where the delegates to the Federal Convention had assembled to subscribe their names to a new system of government, "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
Then Benjamin Franklin rose from his chair, wishing to be heard. At eighty-one, he was too tired to make another speech, but he had written down what he wanted to say, and James Wilson, decades Franklin's junior, read his remarks, which were addressed to George Washington, presiding. "Mr. President," he began, "I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them." Franklin liked to swaddle argument with affability, as if an argument were a colicky baby; the more forceful his argument, the more tightly he swaddled it. What he offered was a well-bundled statement about changeability. I find that there are errors here, he explained, but, who knows, someday I might change my mind; I often do. "For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better Information, or fuller Consideration, to change Opinions even on important Subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise." That people so often believe themselves to be right is no proof that they are; the only difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England is that the former is infallible while the latter is never wrong. He hoped "that every member of the Convention who may still have Objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own Infallibility, and to make manifest our Unanimity, put his name to this Instrument." Although the document had its faults, he doubted that any other assembly would, at just that moment, have been able to draft a better one. "Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best."
Three delegates refused to sign, but at the bottom of the fourth page appear the signatures of the rest. What was written on parchment was then made public, printed in newspapers and broadsheets, often with "We the People" set off in extra-large type. Meanwhile, the secretary of the convention carried the original to New York to present it to Congress, which met, at the time, at City Hall. Without either endorsing or opposing it, Congress agreed to forward the Constitution to the states, for ratification. The original Constitution was simply filed away and, later, shuffled from one place to another. When City Hall underwent renovations, the Constitution was transferred to the Department of State. The following year, it moved with Congress to Philadelphia and, in 1800, to Washington, where it was stored at the Treasury Department until it was shifted to the War Office. In 1814, three clerks stuffed it into a linen sack and carried it to a gristmill in Virginia, which was fortunate, because the British burned Washington down. In the eighteen-twenties, when someone asked James Madison where it was, he had no idea.
In 1875, the Constitution found a home in a tin box in the bottom of a closet in a new building that housed the Departments of State, War, and Navy. In 1894, it was sealed between glass plates and locked in a safe in the basement. In 1921, Herbert Putnam, a librarian, drove it across town in his Model T. In 1924, it was put on display in the Library of Congress, for the first time ever. Before then, no one had thought of that. It spent the Second World War at Fort Knox. In 1952, it was driven in an armored tank under military guard to the National Archives, where it remains, in a shrine in the rotunda, alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
Ours is one of the oldest written constitutions in the world and the first, anywhere, to be submitted to the people for their approval. As Madison explained, the Constitution is "of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed . . . THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES." Lately, some say, it's been thrown in the trash. "Stop Shredding Our Constitution!" Tea Party signs read. "FOUND in a DUMPSTER behind the Capitol," read another, on which was pasted the kind of faux-parchment Constitution you can buy in the souvenir shop at any history-for-profit heritage site. I bought mine at Bunker Hill years back. It is printed on a single sheet of foolscap, and the writing is so small that it's illegible; then again, the knickknack Constitution isn't meant to be read. The National Archives sells a poster-size scroll, twenty-two inches by twenty-nine inches, that is a readable facsimile of the first page, for twelve dollars and ninety-five cents. This item is currently out of stock.
Parchment is beautiful. As an object, the Constitution has more in common with the Dead Sea Scrolls than with what we now think of as writing: pixels floating on a screen, words suspended in a digital cloud, bubbles of text. R we the ppl? Our words are vaporous. Not so the Constitution. "I have this crazy idea that the Constitution actually means something," one bumper sticker reads. Ye olde parchment serves as shorthand for everything old, real, durable, American, and true—a talisman held up against the uncertainties and abstractions of a meaningless, changeable, paperless age.
You can keep a constitution in your pocket, as Thomas Paine once pointed out. Pocket constitutions have been around since the seventeen-nineties. The Cato Institute prints a handsome Constitution, the size and appearance of a passport, available for four dollars and ninety-five cents. The National Center for Constitutional Studies, founded by W. Cleon Skousen, a rogue Mormon, John Bircher, and all-purpose conspiracy theorist, prints a stapled paper version, the dimensions of a datebook, thirty cents if you order a gross. I got mine, free, at a Tea Party meeting in Boston. Andrew Johnson, our first impeached President, was said to have waved around his pocket constitution so often that he resembled a newsboy hawking the daily paper. Crying constitution is a minor American art form. "This is my copy of the Constitution," John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said at a Tea Party rally in Ohio last year, holding up a pocket-size pamphlet. "And I'm going to stand here with the Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' " Not to nitpick, but this is not the preamble to the Constitution. It is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
At some forty-four hundred words, not counting amendments, our Constitution is one of the shortest in the world, but few Americans have read it. A national survey taken this summer reported that seventy-two per cent of about a thousand people polled had never once read all forty-four hundred words. This proves no obstacle to cherishing it; eighty-six per cent of respondents said that the Constitution has "an impact on their daily lives." The point of such surveys is that if more of us read the Constitution all of us would be better off, because we would demand that our elected officials abide by it, and we'd be able to tell when they weren't doing so and punish them accordingly. "This is what happens when our Constitution starts shaking her fist," Sarah Palin tweeted in October, about calls for an end to federal funding for National Public Radio, which she charged with violating the First Amendment by firing the commentator Juan Williams. "The American people's voice was heard at the ballot box," Boehner said on Election Night, and what the American people want is "a government that honors the Constitution." Rand Paul thanked his parents, in his victory speech, "for teaching me to respect our Constitution." Michelle Bachmann told ABC News that she plans to offer Constitution classes in the House. Glenn Beck asked his listeners to urge their representatives to join Bachmann's constitutional caucus. Sharron Angle said that she took comfort in the knowledge that Harry Reid carries a copy of the Constitution in his breast pocket: "We want our senator to remember our Constitution, to read our Constitution, and to consider every bill that he votes for in light of that Constitution." The Tea Party's triumph, she said, amounts to this: "We've inspired a nation to take a look at that document and begin to read it." Last week, when new lawmakers were sworn in, the Constitution was read out loud in the House of Representatives. It is the first time this has ever happened.
If you haven't read the Constitution lately, do. Chances are you'll find that it doesn't exactly explain itself. Consider Article III, Section 3: "The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted." This is simply put—hats off to the committee of style—but what does it mean? A legal education helps. Lawyers won't stumble over "attainder," even if the rest of us will. Part of the problem might appear to be the distance between our locution and theirs. "Corruption of Blood"? The document's learnedness and the changing meaning of words isn't the whole problem, though, because the charge that the Constitution is too difficult for ordinary people to understand—not because of its vocabulary but because of the complexity of its ideas—was brought nearly the minute it was made public. Anti-Federalists charged that the Constitution was so difficult to read that it amounted to a conspiracy against the understanding of a plain man, that it was willfully incomprehensible. "The constitution of a wise and free people, ought to be as evident to simple reason, as the letters of our alphabet," an Anti-Federalist wrote. "A constitution ought to be, like a beacon, held up to the public eye, so as to be understood by every man," Patrick Henry argued. He believed that what was drafted in Philadelphia was "of such an intricate and complicated nature, that no man on this earth can know its real operation." Anti-Federalists had more complaints, too, which is why ratification—a process wonderfully recounted by Pauline Maier in "Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788"—was touch and go. Rhode Island, the only state to hold a popular referendum on the Constitution, rejected it. Elsewhere, in state ratifying conventions, the Constitution passed by the narrowest of margins: eighty-nine to seventy-nine in Virginia, thirty to twenty-seven in New York, a hundred and eighty-seven to a hundred and sixty-eight in Massachusetts.
Nor were complaints that the Constitution is obscure silenced by ratification. In a 1798 essay called "The Key of Libberty," William Manning, the plainest of men—a New England farmer, a Revolutionary veteran, and the father of thirteen children—expressed a view widely held by Jeffersonian Republicans: "The Federal Constitution by a fair construction is a good one prinsapaly, but I have no dout but that the Convention who made it intended to destroy our free governments by it, or they neaver would have spent 4 Months in making such an inexpliset thing." Franklin called the Constitution an "instrument"; he meant that it was a legal instrument, like a will. Manning thought that it was another kind of instrument: "It was made like a Fiddle, with but few Strings, but so that the ruling Majority could play any tune upon it they please."
For all the charges that the Constitution was difficult to understand, between 1789 and 1860 only one state, California, required that it be taught in school. The first textbooks examining the Constitution weren't printed until the eighteen-twenties, and they were for law students. Three volumes of "Commentaries on the Constitution," written by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, appeared in 1833. The next year, Story published an abridgment for schools, explaining that the Constitution "is the language of the People, to be judged of according to the common sense, and not by mere theoretical reasoning." That may be, but Story's schoolbook is a hundred and sixty-six pages of close legal argument.
You can't explain a thing without interpreting it. Story, a Northerner and a nationalist, emphasized the Supreme Court's role in arbitrating disputes between the federal government and the states. In those years, the disputes mainly had to do with slavery; Southerners who glossed the Constitution stressed state sovereignty. In 1846, William Hickey published a constitutional concordance. He got the idea from Polk's Vice-President, George Dallas, who believed the Constitution prohibited Congress from interfering with the extension of slavery into Western territories. The U.S. Senate, over which Dallas presided, ordered twelve thousand copies of Hickey's pro-slavery vade mecum. It does not appear to have elevated congressional conversation. In 1847, the governor of New York, Silas Wright, observed, "No one familiar with the affairs of our government, can have failed to notice how large a proportion of our statesmen appear never to have read the Constitution of the United States with a careful reference to its precise language and exact provisions, but rather, as occasion presents, seem to exercise their ingenuity . . . to stretch both to the line of what they, at the moment, consider expedient."
By the middle of the nineteenth century, nearly all white men could vote. Not all of them could read, and not all of them owned a copy of the Constitution, but Daniel Webster insisted, "Almost every man in the country is capable of reading it." Whether they did or not is hard to say. Some did more than read it. William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution at an abolitionist rally in Massachusetts, calling it a "covenant with death, an agreement with hell." John Brown wrote his own constitution, replacing "We the people" with "We, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people . . . who have no rights." It was found on Brown's body when he was captured at Harpers Ferry. William Grimes, a fugitive slave, had a different idea about what to do with the Constitution: "If it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while I was a slave, I would in my will leave my skin as a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment and then bind the Constitution of glorious, happy and free America." And then the American people went to war, over their different ways of reading letters inked on parchment and wounds cut into the skin of a black man's back.
"Find It in the Constitution*,*" the Tea Party rally signs read. Forty-four hundred words and "God" is not one of them, as Benjamin Rush complained to John Adams, hoping for an emendation: "Perhaps an acknowledgement might be made of his goodness or of his providence in the proposed amendments." It was not. "White" isn't in the Constitution, but Senator Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, was still sure that the federal government was "made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever." What about black men? "They are not included, and were not intended to be included," the Supreme Court ruled, in 1857. Railroads, slavery, banks, women, free markets, privacy, health care, wiretapping: not there. "There is nothing in the United States Constitution that gives the Congress, the President, or the Supreme Court the right to declare that white and colored children must attend the same public schools," Senator James Eastland, of Mississippi, said, after Brown v. Board of Education. "Have You Ever Seen the Words Forced Busing in the Constitution?" read a sign carried in Boston in 1975. "Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" Christine O'Donnell asked Chris Coons during a debate in October. When Coons quoted the First Amendment, O'Donnell was flabbergasted: "That's in the First Amendment?" Left-wing bloggers slapped their thighs; Coons won the election in a landslide. But the phrase "separation of church and state" really isn't in the Constitution or in any of the amendments.
A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out. Felix Frankfurter once wrote that the Constitution "is most significantly not a document but a stream of history." The difference between forty-four hundred words and a stream of history goes a long way toward accounting for the panics, every few decades or so, that the Constitution is in crisis, and that America must return to constitutional principles through constitutional education. The two sides in this debate are always charging each other with not knowing the Constitution, but they are talking about different kinds of knowledge.
"We'll keep clinging to our Constitution, our guns, and our religion," Palin said last spring, "and you can keep the change." Behind the word "change" is the word "evolution." In 1913, Woodrow Wilson insisted, "All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is a recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing." Conservatives called for a rejection of this nonsense about the "living Constitution." In 1916, the Sons of the American Revolution campaigned for Constitution Day. In 1919, the National Association for Constitutional Government published some fifty thousand copies of a pocket edition of the Constitution. (The association's other publications included an investigation into the influence of socialists in American colleges.) In 1921, Warren Harding called the Constitution divinely inspired; it was Harding who ordered the Librarian of Congress to take the parchment out of storage and put it into a shrine. Soon, the National Security League was distributing free copies of reactionary books written by "Mr. Constitution," James Montgomery Beck, who was Harding's solicitor general. "The Constitution is in graver danger today than at any other time in the history of America," Beck warned.
By 1923, twenty-three states required constitutional instruction and, by 1931, forty-three. Studying Middletown's high school in 1929, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd found these classes worrying: "70 percent of the boys and 75 percent of the girls answered 'false' to the statement 'A citizen of the United States should be allowed to say anything he pleases, even to advocate violent revolution, if he does no violent act himself.' " Still, such instruction was by no means uniformly conservative. The author of an elementary-school textbook published in 1930 wrote, "This Constitution is yours, boys and girls of America, to cherish and to obey, to preserve and, if need be, to better."
The New Deal intensified debate over the nature of the Constitution, a debate whose cramped terms we've inherited. "Hopeful people today wave the flag," Thurman Arnold, later F.D.R.'s assistant attorney general, wrote in 1935. "Timid people wave the Constitution . . . the only bulwark against change." Obama supporters wore "HOPE" and "CHANGE" T-shirts; Tea Partiers carry the Constitution. Liberals argue for progress; conservatives argue for a return to the nation's founding principles. Change is a founding principle, too, but people divided by schism are blind to what they share: one half, infallible; the other, never wrong.
Pop quiz, from a test administered by the Hearst Corporation in 1987.
True or False: The following phrases are found in the U.S. Constitution:
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
"The consent of the governed."
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
"All men are created equal."
"Of the people, by the people, for the people."
This is what's known as a trick question. None of these phrases are in the Constitution. Eight in ten Americans believed, like Boehner, that "all men are created equal" was in the Constitution. Even more thought that "of the people, by the people, for the people" was in the Constitution. (Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, 1863.) Nearly five in ten thought "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was written in Philadelphia in 1787. (Karl Marx, 1875.)
About a quarter of American voters are what political scientists call, impoliticly, "know nothings," meaning that they possess almost no general knowledge of the workings of their government, at least according to studies conducted by the American National Election Survey since 1948, during which time the know-nothing rate has barely budged. Critics, including James L. Gibson and Gregory A. Caldeira, have charged that these studies systemically overestimate political ignorance. A 2000 survey asked interviewees to identify William Rehnquist's job. The only correct answer was "the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court." Answers like "Chief Justice," "Justice," "Chief Justice of the Court," and anything breezier ("a Supreme Court judge who is the head honcho") were marked incorrect. Why the ability to name Rehnquist's job is necessary to good citizenship is never made clear. Those surveys seem to have had a point to prove—they have been used to argue, for instance, that the public ought not to play a role in electing or selecting judges—as did surveys conducted during the Cold War which appear to have been designed to elicit the headline-generating news that Americans are so ignorant of the Constitution that they can be gulled into confusing it with Marxism. "Americans have known the Constitution best when they have revered it least," Michael Kammen wrote, in an extraordinarily rich and rewarding history of the Constitution, published in 1986. The Hearst report reached quite a different conclusion: "Those Americans who are most knowledgeable about the Constitution are the least likely to support changes." In 1985 and 1986, Reagan's Attorney General, Edwin Meese, made a series of speeches advocating originalism. Reagan nominated Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court in June of 1986. The Hearst survey was conducted that fall and released in February of 1987. That May, Thurgood Marshall said, in a bicentennial address, "I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia Convention." That July, Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Court, and, despite the failure of Bork's nomination, originalism never looked back.
Last February, Meese and a coalition of prominent conservatives, including leaders of the Heritage Foundation, The National Review, and the Federalist Society, met in Virginia to sign "The Mount Vernon Statement." It calls for a coalition of social, economic, and national-security conservatives to return the nation to the principles stated in its founding documents, now "under sustained attack" in "our culture, our universities and our politics": "The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant." The Mount Vernon Statement was modelled on the Sharon Statement, signed in 1960. The threat to the Constitution, in the Sharon Statement, was a "menace," and it came from "the forces of international Communism." In the Mount Vernon version, the threat is "change": change is "an empty promise" and "a dangerous deception," and it comes from the American people—that is, from those of us who are to be found in the nation's universities and the federal government. The Sharon Statement was signed in William F. Buckley, Jr.,'s home, in Sharon, Connecticut. The organizers of the Mount Vernon Statement wanted to meet at Mount Vernon, but the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association turned them down. Still, the statement was printed on fake parchment, and a guy dressed up as George Washington handed out Sharpies.
Originalists argue that originalism is the only faithfully democratic mode of constitutional interpretation. Laws are passed by the elected representatives of the people; the courts protect the will of the people by making sure those laws adhere to the Constitution, as originally drafted and popularly ratified. Any other mode of jurisprudence is overstepping, and amounts to an abuse of judicial power because it favors the rulings of unelected judges—the caprice of contemporary courts—against the will of the people, as embodied by the Constitution.
Liberal legal scholars have tried different approaches in countering this argument. One has been to point out that the American people whose will originalism protects are dead, and that, even if they weren't, they aren't us. "If democratic legitimacy is the measure of a sound constitutional interpretive practice," the Columbia law professor Jamal Greene has written, "then Justice Scalia needs to give an account of why and how rote obedience to the commitments of voters two centuries distant and wildly different in racial, ethnic, sexual, and cultural composition can be justified on democratic grounds."
Another approach has been to argue that originalism, so far from being original, in the sense of being the same age as those four sheets of parchment in the National Archives, is quite modern. Consider the Second Amendment: "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." Historical evidence can be marshalled to support different interpretations of these words, and it certainly has been. But the Yale law professor Reva Siegel has argued that, for much of the twentieth century, legal scholars, judges, and politicians, both conservative and liberal, commonly understood the Second Amendment as protecting the right of citizens to form militias—as narrow a right as the protection provided by the Third Amendment against the government's forcing you to quarter troops in your house. Beginning in the early nineteen-seventies, lawyers for the National Rifle Association, concerned about gun-control laws passed in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, argued that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms—and that this represented not a changing interpretation but a restoration of its original meaning. The N.R.A., which had never before backed a Presidential candidate, backed Ronald Reagan in 1980. As late as 1989, even Bork could argue that the Second Amendment works "to guarantee the right of states to form militias, not for individuals to bear arms." In an interview in 1991, the former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the N.R.A.'s interpretation of the Second Amendment was "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
The individual-rights argument warrants serious debate. But, instead, on the political stage, people who disagreed with it were accused of failing to respect the Constitution, or of being too stupid to understand it. In 1995, Newt Gingrich wrote, "Liberals neither understand nor believe in the Constitutional right to bear arms." Who are the know-nothings now? Liberal scholars and jurists. In 2005, Mark Levin, a talk-radio host who worked under Meese in the Reagan Justice Department, wrote that Thurgood Marshall, who had challenged originalism, "couldn't have had a weaker grasp of the Constitution." In 2008, the N.R.A.'s argument about the Second Amendment was made law in the District of Columbia v. Heller, which ruled as unconstitutional a gun-control law passed in D.C. in 1968. This decision, Siegel argues, has more to do with Charlton Heston than with James Madison.
In 2004, Larry D. Kramer, the dean of Stanford Law School, argued not against originalism but against judicial review (a power wielded, in recent years, by an originalist Court). Kramer offered another jurisprudence, based on different historical claims: popular constitutionalism. "The Supreme Court is not the highest authority in the land on constitutional law," Kramer wrote. "We are." Critics charge that it's unclear how popular constitutionalism works, but the opposition of white activists to school desegregation, the N.R.A.'s interpretation of the Second Amendment, and Iowans voting out of office judges who supported same-sex marriage would all seem to fit into this category; and if recent legislation is overturned by an incoming Congress elected by people who believe that legislation to be unconstitutional, that will be popular constitutionalism, too.
Originalism is popular. Four in ten Americans favor it. Not all Tea Partiers are originalists, but the movement is fairly described as a populist movement inclined toward originalism. The populist appeal of originalism overlaps with that of heritage tourism: both collapse the distance between past and present and locate virtue in an imaginary eighteenth century where "the people" and "the élite" are perfectly aligned in unity of purpose. Originalism, which has no purchase anywhere but here, has a natural affinity with some varieties of Protestantism, and the United States differs from all other Western democracies in the far greater proportion of its citizens who believe in the literal truth of the Bible. Although originalism is a serious and influential mode of constitutional interpretation, Greene has argued that it is also a political product manufactured by the New Right and marketed to the public by talk radio, cable television, and the Internet, where it enjoys a competitive advantage over other varieties of constitutional interpretation, partly because it's the easiest.
An unexamined question at the heart of this debate, then, is how people actually read the Constitution. Many people are now reading it, with earnestness and dedication, often in reading groups modelled on Bible study groups. The Tea Party Express endorses "The Constitution Made Easy," a translation into colloquial English made by Michael Holler, and available on Holler's Web site for eight dollars and ninety-five cents. Holler studied at Biola University, a Christian college offering a Biblically centered education. Much of his translation, which appears side by side with the original, is forthright. His Article III, Section 3, reads, "Congress will have Power to declare the punishment for treason, but the penalty may not include confiscating a person's property after that person is executed," and, in an end note, he supplies the helpful information that "Corruption of Blood" refers to the common-law confiscation of the property of executed traitors, which "had the effect of punishing the traitor's heirs, or bloodline." Holler's Second Amendment is less straightforward; he inverts the language of the original, so that it reads, "The people have the right to own and carry firearms, and it may not be violated because a well-equipped Militia is necessary for a State to remain secure and free." Holler is an N.R.A.-certified handgun instructor who, in addition to offering courses on the Constitution, sells classes in how to obtain a concealed-handgun permit.
"U.S. Constitution for Dummies," published in 2009, was written by Michael Arnheim, an English barrister. The book includes a foreword by Ted Cruz, a nationally prominent defender of the death penalty and a former solicitor general of Texas who successfully defended a monument to the Ten Commandments at the Texas State Capitol. More recently, Cruz authored an amicus brief, on behalf of thirty-one states, supporting the anti-gun-control argument in the District of Columbia v. Heller. Arnheim's "plain-English guide" translates portions of the Constitution (e.g., "Due process is really just an old-fashioned way of saying 'proper procedure' "), with an emphasis on contemporary controversies, which he frames as battles between "judge-made law" and the proper workings of democracy; the right to privacy, for instance, is an example of judge-made law. Arnheim is not stinting with his views. "In my opinion," he writes, "same-sex marriage in Massachusetts is unconstitutional, and the other states therefore don't have to recognize such unions. I am available if anyone wants to take this issue to the U.S. Supreme Court!"
Two more new guides include both scholarly annotations and historical essays. Jack Rakove, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from Stanford, has prepared "The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence." Rakove wrote an amicus brief in Heller, opposing the position argued by Cruz, but here he goes no farther than to call the evidence for Cruz's position "tenuous." Richard Beeman, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the editor of a small-trim, twelve-dollar paperback, "The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution." In his commentary on Heller, the laudably equable Beeman summarizes the arguments; shrugs ("The meaning of the Second Amendment is subject to varying interpretations"); and moves on. Both of these excellent guides are valuable and judicious. Neither defines "Corruption of Blood."
"I never knew what the Constitution really is until I read Mr. Beck's book," a sly critic of James Montgomery Beck once wrote. "You can read it without thinking." Critics of originalism are in a bind. When ideas are reduced to icons, which, unfortunately, is the ordinary state of affairs, constitutionalism and originalism look exactly the same: the faux parchment stands for both. But originalism and constitutionalism are not the same, and the opposite of original is not unconstitutional. Originalism is one method of constitutional interpretation. Popular originalism is originalism scrawled with Magic Markers, on poster board. The N.R.A. opposed gun-control laws. It argued, at length, and over years, that those laws violated the Second Amendment. Eventually, the Supreme Court agreed. So far, the Tea Party's passions ignite faster and are stated more simply. A sign at a Tea Party rally in Temecula, California: "Impeach Obama: He's Unconstitutional."
The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone's. It is the rule of law, the opinions of the Court, the stripes on William Grimes's back, a shrine in the National Archives, a sign carried on the Washington Mall, and the noise all of us make when we disagree. If the Constitution is a fiddle, it is also all the music that has ever been played on it. Some of that music is beautiful; much of it is humdrum; some of it sounds like hell. ♦


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The biggest mistake I witnessed was the right brain and left brain problem. Simply the liberals are more right brain and they don't need facts to vote on. When you look back, Obama will be the worst president we ever had.
After the election results were in, it struck me as kind of funny for many reasons. It is fun to see everyone attacking each other, but in the end they all had the wiggle room excuse to say that it depends on who shows up to vote. And let's face it, no one really knows who will show up. Most folks thought that there would be less Democrats showing up and more Republicans would be showing up. In the end they were all wrong. There were less Republicans and Democrats showing up for the most important election of their lives!
When you look back, Obama will be the worst president we ever had. But he is in good company. Clinton was a bad lot and he was re-elected just to be impeached and he gave Bin Laden a free pass and pardon instead of a bullet where the sun don't shine. And FDR would still be president if he was alive today. And he was the worse. I guess they all can't be the worse. Thank God/Allah for Obama!
These folks pay millions of dollars to their experts to win elections. Send me the check next time and let me help you out or in, whichever you prefer.
I have been a marketer for a long time. And an election is all about marketing. And the folks running these campaigns have to understand who they are marketing to. And most businesses that succeed, they succeed because they know their market and they know how to deliver the goods and the message. It is that simple.
The biggest mistake I witnessed was the right brain and left brain problem. Simply the liberals are more right brain and they don't need facts to vote on. All they need is some unfounded without facts emotion. The Republicans for the most part are left sided. They only need the facts for the most part. Don't waste your money on emotion.
When you look at the ads the Democrats painted this picture as Romney being this angry white guy and Obama has fixed everything, just give him some more time and everything will be like… Somewhere over the Rainbow.
The Republicans spoke of the deficit. And how they were going to get good jobs for Americans.
First off the major mistake that the Republicans made was speaking badly of President W. Bush. President Bush was a great president and he should have been used to help the election. I don't think I have heard any one say during the campaign how great President Bush was. So when the Democrats and Obama claimed they inherited this mess from President Bush and Clinton, what was the rebuttal?
Let me see how that argument would go: Now President Bush was a lousy president but if we invoke the Bush Principles then the economy would turn around. We would cut spending and cut taxes for everyone. So it wouldn't take a genius to figure that an anti-Bush argument was a bad strategy. You may have forgotten that President Bush won 2 terms. Some people complain because he raised the deficit about $1.5 trillion in 8 years ( applying the proper credits and paybacks).
Some argue he spent too much money. Not really! He had to deal with 911, Homeland Security, gave the old people a prescription plan and throw in 2 wars and Katrina… The guy deserves a medal, instead like the SEALS the Republicans wanted him court marshaled! And the Democrats wanted him arrested by the international courts for his war crimes.
So the bottom line is if you don't praise President Bush, you still want the American voter to buy into his policies? Good luck with that one!
Most people are not aware that Clinton's economy crashed and burned about a year before he left office. President Bush inherited Clinton's mess and turned it around. Compared to Obama's economy, President Bush had prosperity for many years until Pelosi, Dodd and Frank tanked the real estate market in order to win the 2008 election. Well if the Republicans really want to win by hawking lower taxes and less government spending then they must praise President Bush. Instead they tried to bury Caesar. I don't think you can have it both ways.
Romney spoke about providing jobs. To the tune of 12 million in 4 years! Again you need to paint a picture for the left brained individuals that this would happen. Its seems that the young folks didn't buy into it. But there is another problem, the 47% of the folks that vote for Obama don't really want a good job. And they are not smart enough to consider the fact that if others had a good job, then the system suckers will receive more FREE money. Instead under the Obama failed policies they will see more cuts in the next 4 years. And they were expecting the same from Romney. so why not vote for Obama.
The other problem is there are a bunch of people out there on disability and the like. Some live on a mere 6 or 7 hundred dollars a month. They do get their utilities paid for. They get healthcare and food stamps… They are happy, why would they vote for Romney? Dennis Miller is wrong, the amount is much less than $40,000.
The deficit was another joke. Most people don't understand where the deficit comes from. And most people don't realize that it has to be paid back…maybe. So ads talking about the deficit really don't paint any real picture to the average person to internalize. The deficit has been there since forever. Since Carter it has grown in leaps and bounds. Even under the alleged great Clinton economy, he raised the debt $1.5 trillion dollars. But it took a super star like Obama to raise it maybe $6 trillion dollars in 4 years while he lost our pristine credit rating. I guess some could argue that its the deficit that is actually hurting the economy. Please don't waste your money talking about it during the campaign to right brained individuals.
The question to be answered is what is in it for me. JFK would have you ask today, what can your country do for you.
Arguments concerning Immigration and woman's issues are basically stupid to say the least. Obama has never paid for contraceptives for any women. He has not paid for any abortions. Obama has not granted amnesty to any illegal immigrants.
So instead of arguing the issues, remember most of the youths are taught by right brain teachers. The youths' right side brains are more developed than their left sides. Only 25% can do math well. That figure may be a bit high.
So you need to campaign to the right side of the brain. Promise the women twice as many contraceptives. You can use one and give it to a friend who doesn't have healthcare… Because she refuses to pay a higher premium for the added cost of contraceptives. And promise the Latinos amnesty. Obama promised it and didn't deliver. The idiots still voted for him!
The most important part of the equation is never get caught saying stupid things like we wouldn't give you amnesty until the border is secure. You see that is an affront to Latinos as a group. Most Latinos do not want Amnesty just like most women do not want an abortion, But if the Republicans are perceived as someone against the entire group of Blacks, Latinos and ovulating and lactating women, it is very difficult to win them back by left brain rhetoric. (It is actually impossible!)
When in doubt lie like Obama. The worse case scenario is if you promised twice as many contraceptives, at least the liberal media would have to address the issue. Obama didn't give anyone contraceptives. Instead, Obama licensed the insurance companies to raise the premiums so you will pay for the contraceptives whether you need them or not. Just like cable TV or real estate taxes for education. There was a time when TV was free. It always helps when the government gets involved…Not!
So it is important when you are dealing with right brain individuals which are probably the majority, change the way you deliver the message. No need to change what you are doing. If you think you can tax your way to prosperity like a Democrat, than become a Democrat! If not stay a Republican but speak to the left side of the brain… If you want to win the Big Brass Ring!