Camp is sending out fundraising solicitations just in time for 2008 1961!
A follow-up to this post: Over the AP wire today comes the story of two Iowa women who challenged the ballots of relatives who they believed to be incapable of voting.
Brenda Lyddon said she was upset when staff at a group home in Grinnell took her 26-year-old son, who is developmentally disabled, to vote on Election Day against her wishes…. “I am his mother and he was not allowed to vote,” Lyddon said. “He does not have the mental capacity to choose for himself.” …
[Similarly,] in Council Bluffs, a woman challenged her elderly mother’s absentee ballot, claiming her mother suffered from dementia and was coerced into casting the ballot by Democratic campaign workers who were going door-to-door asking potential voters if they wanted an absentee ballot.
In both cases the challengers supported John McCain, while their relatives voted for Obama. And this is the rub: Who can really say whether such challenges hold merits on their own grounds or whether they are base attempts to support preferred candidates by disenfranchising the electorate of their opponents? No official attempting to ensure elections are fair would dare to make the judgment of who is competent and who is not. Fortunately, in both of these cases, no official did.
At the bottom of a closet, I found a box of postcards and birthday cards that K & I both collected over the years. What to do with them? Eighty percent of me says throw them away; but nostalgia’s pull can be strong.
I highly recommend not going to work!
This Business Week article (which made the rounds a week and a half ago) says that credit card debt will prove the next big financial crisis. Apparently, in the same way that mortgagers were bundling mortgages and selling them to hedge funds, credit card issuers have been bundling credit card debt, almost all of which is unsecured. And those bundles are getting harder to sell, which suggests that the collapse of the credit card market may come sooner than later. I would be surprised if anyone were surprised by that claim.
I do note, however, this paragraph about proposed new rules regarding lending practices:
Under rules proposed by the Federal Reserve, a borrower would have a 21-day grace period before being hit with a late fee, instead of the few days offered by some firms now. A similar plan working its way through Congress would allow banks to increase rates only on consumers’ future purchases—not existing balances. And under both proposals, credit-card companies would have to allocate account holders’ payments equally to balances with different interest rates.
At various times during graduate school and those eighteen months I was only spottily employed we lived off credit. We made our payments, but we watched our total balance creep up slowly, especially when we had some major dental work to pay for. We juggled our payments and our bank account carefully; every once in a while, we would drop one ball or the other, only to get hit by late fees and exorbitant interest-rate hikes because of the short nonexistent grace period. That was a hard time, and it seemed quite unfair—impersonal, anonymous—because we were trying to manage but getting little help managing. We would call to ask for mercy, but we rarely got it. So I say, if it takes law to get the credit card companies to show some grace, then let there be law. Maybe then there will be less of this happening in the depths of the call centers:
Cate Colombo, a former call center staffer at MBNA, the big issuer bought by Bank of America in 2005, says her job was to develop a rapport with credit-card customers and advise them to use more of their available credit. Colleagues would often gather around her chair when she was on the phone with a consumer and chant: “Sell, sell.” “It was like Boiler Room,” says Colombo, referring to the 2000 movie about unscrupulous stock brokers. “I knew that they would probably be in debt for the rest of their lives.”
The Washington Post has a great story about Gene Allen, who servedin the White House as part of the house staff, as a “pantry boy,” a butler, and finally as a maitre d’ for more than thirty years. Now 89, the last White House he served was the Reagan Administration, but he was a behind-the-scenes witness to history:
He couldn’t help notice that blacks were moving closer to the center of power, closer than he could ever have dreamed. He’d tell [his wife] Helene how proud it made him feel.
Few people witness what it means to be so close to power like those who serve the powerful. And the story reminded me of another that asserted as much: In 1868, Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave and servant to Mary Todd Lincoln, published her memoir Behind the Scenes. It’s partly a book of Washington gossip, partly of Lincoln worship, and fascinating for both reasons.
The population of Meeteetse, WY was 350 before Laura moved there!
RIP Studs Terkel.
This story about studying climate in Concord is interesting for its connection to Thoreau, but more important than that is the value gained by years’ worth of observations of the world by amateur and professional naturalists. It’s an interesting kind of scientific research this, that requires diligent wading through archives and interviewing of the sort that historians do.
