I’m going to the nation’s capital today. I’ll try to have things cleaned up by Sunday.

Update
Getting wisdom from Albert Einstein:

Update 2 – Friday was an enjoyable day despite any number of errors, missteps, and other speed bumps that could have been aggravating had we been towing along cranky children. The flight itself was decent – just about one hour from wheels up to wheels down. Before the flight, I went to the newsstand for a newspaper, but couldn’t help myself and got a backpacking magazine. This is being a little cruel to myself since it shows pictures of places I won’t get to for at least another year.

Anyway, once we got to Dulles, however, we found out that it sucks as an airport. The baggage handling was ponderous. The wait for baggage took just about as long as the flight itself. Then the wait to get to the rental car took quite awhile. Then we checked into the hotel – and got a nice surprise. We’re here for a wedding, and the bride and groom had a nice gift basket with cookies and metro fare in it. I made a navigation error getting to the park & ride that took us into some snarled traffic at 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. Finally, we got to the park & ride – the Metro system in D.C. is pretty slick once you get to it.

Our first destination was a pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial.I like to gauge my level of jadedness by my emotional reaction to the Memorial. I still get a little choked up there, so there is still some humanity left.

After that, we got a little tripped up by the paucity of dining opportunities in the mall area. I would have been happy with a hot dog cart, but my dear wife was looking for something just a little more upscale (not much, just a little). After some wanderings (and discovering that I had “T”s phone number misprogrammed into my phone when I was calling to ask about the whereabouts of a Thai restaurant he’d mentioned near Foggy Bottom. Ultimately, we went to a little burger place near George Washington where I had an excellent burger topped with corned beef, kraut, and russian dressing.

Then we tried to walk to the Jefferson Memorial from the Smithsonian Metro station. Either it can’t be done or we took the wrong approach; because the sidewalk ended at the Treasury building and didn’t appear to go over the bridge to the Jefferson Memorial Island. At that point, we’d walked a number of miles and were just ready to get back to the hotel.
[To be continued]

Update 3
When we got back to the hotel, we thought swimming in the pool would be just the thing. But, as it turns out, the pool was kind of small and unremarkable and, in any case, was filled with about 8 teens playing volleyball with a beach ball. The elevator had mentioned they had a comedy club attached with shows beginning at 8. We had just enough time to make it, but when we went in the greeters said that the sign was wrong – it didn’t start until 9. So, we returned at 9. The audience consisted of ourselves and 10 other people. A dozen patrons at a comedy club. That’s pretty unfortunate for those comics who like to interact with the audience. It got even more pathetic — the first two comics were the greeters we’d met when we came at 8. Fortunately, the headliner was funny. My favorite bit was about Mel Gibson – “I mean, I’ve been drunk; but I’ve never been Nazi drunk.

This morning was a little slice of heaven, however. The kids being absent, Amy and I slept until a little after 9. That’s pretty much unheard of these days. So, the whole cleaning up D.C. thing has taken a back burner, but overall the trip has been enjoyable.

StrangeMaps brings us a map of federal land ownership in the United States. The federal government owns about 2% of land in Indiana. That’s toward the low end of things. In Nevada, the federal government owns about 84.5% of the land.

From the nice neighbor, didn’t make much noise file:

THE remains of a woman have been found sitting in front of her TV – 42 years after she was reported missing.

Hedviga Golik, who was born in 1924, had apparently made herself a cup of tea before sitting in her favourite armchair in front of her black and white television.

Croatian police said she was last seen by neighbours in 1966, when she would have been 42 years old.

Her neighbours thought she had moved out of her flat in the capital, Zagreb.

But she was found by police and bailiffs who had broken in to help the authorities establish who owned the flat.
. . .
“When officers went there, they said it was like stepping into a place frozen in time.

“The cup she had been drinking tea from was still on a table next to the chair she had been sitting in and the house was full of things no one had seen for decades. Nothing had been disturbed for decades, even though there were more than a few cobwebs in there.”

I just caught a bit of Chuck Todd on “Morning Joe.” He mentioned that, politically, he keeps thinking about the family who moved out of the city into the exurbs. They moved for a bigger house and better schools. Now their house isn’t worth what it used to be, their property taxes have increased because the counties they live in have raised the fees and assessments without changing the services much and now they’re not getting any benefit out of the lower assessed value of their house, and their commute is costing them $100 per month where it used to cost them $50.

Pretty much.

Now we’re in for a lot of pain as we readjust. I wonder if higher gas prices will reduce the incentive for sprawl — if you think of urban areas as a bubble, the higher energy prices may serve as sort of external pressure inward that, to one extent or another, counteracts the internal pressure outward. Just a thought.

The Evansville Courier Press has a good opinion on the Supreme Court’s recent decision affirming the Bush administration’s obligation to abide by the Constitution which sets forth very specific conditions for the suspension of habeas corpus (rebellion or invasion), none of which are currently in effect. The opinion also calls out Justice Scalia for his fear mongering.

Habeas corpus, the Great Writ, is a legal principle first articulated in medieval England that gives a prisoner the right to be brought before a judge to hear the charges and challenge his imprisonment. It is one of the rights the Founding Fathers extended to the accused in the Constitution. Years ago, the Supreme Court observed that “habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.”
. . .
What the decision won’t do — as Justice Antonin Scalia asserted it would — is to “almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” This is the kind of fear mongering that got us into this predicament in the first place.

(emphasis added).

My view is that there is no state action outside of the Constitution. As soon as government officials act in an extra-constitutional manner, they are simply acting as individuals. That’s not necessarily a recognized legal view.

Happy Father’s Day to the Dads out there. I got a nice “Happy Father’s Day Card” from Cole. (It was a picture of a pirate.) Then the family went out to breakfast at the Triple XXX Family Restaurant where I had their awesome corned-beef hash. Then we went to the playground.

Me being a Dad back during football season:

Angela Mapes Turner, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, reports that Indiana ranks 6th in the nation in terms of locking up kids.

Indiana ranks sixth among states with the most juveniles locked up, a grade that should prompt the state to re-examine its youth justice system, a report released today said.

The latest Kids Count Data Book shows an estimated 2,616 youths were in custody in Indiana on any given day in 2006, the latest year U.S. census data were available.

We average 183 kids locked up per 100,000 in the population. The average is 125.

I don’t know how much it’s related or how much it’s even true, but on a couple of occasions, my family law and criminal law lawyer friends have mentioned their feeling that we now use the legal system to deal with kids’ transgressions that used to be dealt with in a much less formal manner. Kids pull a prank and they’re facing charges instead of some sort of ad hoc discipline.

The report also suggests that once a kid gets into the system, he or she tends to remain in the system. Recidivism is apparently quite high.