Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:58:57 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Patrick McIlheran :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Patrick+McIlheran istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/is-clean-clean-enough/86665/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST On some day in December, as the clock passes midnight, air that was fresh and clean in scores of places will become, in an instant, unconscionably filthy. Millions of people will sleep on unaware of the harm done them. The harm done by federal air regulators, that is. The regulators mean well. What the Environmental Protection Agency expects to do in December is to declare definitively which counties do not meet the new rules on how much soot — fine particulate matter, as it's called — can be... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/norquist-eyes-mccain/85752/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST You'd have thought conservative godfather Grover Norquist would have been subdued, even glum the day after the Republican National Convention. He had to get up very early to catch a flight, it's supposed to be the liberals' year, and his party had just nominated for president a guy known for annoying conservatives. Three years ago, Mr. Norquist had called John McCain "the nut job from Arizona" and later told a reporter, "I meant to say gun-grabbing, tax-increasing Bolshevik." Mere history. Now... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/going-out-of-business-pay-up/84916/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Marc Bold spent 35 years working in hardware before giving it up this summer. He sold his building, liquidated his stock, and closed up T&M True Value on the south side of Milwaukee. For which the City of Milwaukee hit him with a $510 fee. Don't try telling him we're a society that underregulates business. Mr. Bold stumbled into something that lurks in quite a few municipal codes. The day after he hung up a banner announcing the sale — he'd carefully obtained a permit for the sign — a city... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/chicago-studies-beijing/83980/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST One of the more ardent competitors in Beijing last week was Chicago's mayor, Richard Daley. His city's bidding for the 2016 Olympics, and he was in China to brush up. He took a short ride on Beijing's subway, largely built since 2002. News accounts say he was befuddled by a ticket kiosk. "We really have a lot to learn," he said. Got that right. Actually, Chicago, which is up against Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, already possesses some of Beijing's building blocks of Olympic success. Let's... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/booming-business/83057/ Fri, 1 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST We were eating frozen custard, Mrs. McIlheran and I, and all around us people were incongruously happy. I suppose they had their superficial reasons: We were in a pleasant garden outside the custard stand, the night was warm yet not sultry, a fountain splashed, children played, the flavor of the day had almonds. June's endless rain was over, the Brewers were on a tear, and summer in my hometown, Milwaukee, is one long string of festivals. Still, didn't us fools understand? This is not the year... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/commute-of-the-future-the-bus/82185/ Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST So in Chicago, a city that thinks big, a would-be Olympic host with an extensive rail transit system, its newest line just 15 years old — in Chicago, what is the latest idea for transit? Buses. The Chicago Transit Authority is going to try the spiffed-up kind of express service called "bus rapid transit" sometime next year. It's merely the latest American city to do so. This is good news for liberty. What Chicago proposes is bus-only lanes on four major streets. With limited stops and on-board... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/let-em-rip/81218/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST There's a little legal rigmarole, probably useless, endured by all the people pushing shopping carts full of shells, cones, sparklers, fountains, firecrackers, and honking big mortar tubes to the checkout at Phantom Fireworks in the Wisconsin countryside. Before buying, they must apply for a permit to possess fireworks. For $4, the town of Addison in Washington County says they're legit. This doesn't matter. In Milwaukee, my city, the fireworks laws are so tight, you violate them by... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/children-of-the-corn/80395/ Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST When Iowa flooded, your future dinner got soaked. Console yourself with a snack of schadenfreude. Experts say the soggy state could produce less than two-thirds the usual corn harvest. Wet weather kept some 4 million cornfield acres, out of 86 million total, unplanted. Now, floods have killed many already-sprouted stalks. What bitter timing for farmers. Corn prices are already record-high because demand is, too. Part of the demand is stoked by the distilling of corn into ethanol, something... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/fatherhood-what-have-i-done/79951/ Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Once, as best man at my best friend's wedding, it was my duty to start a boom box that played Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime." This selection naturally baffled the congregants, especially the line, "This is not my beautiful wife." Yet that song became crystalline to me a few years later as I held my daughter hours after her birth. "You may tell yourself," David Byrne warns, "'My God, what have I done?'" That's exactly what nine pounds of baby can make you say. I only had a dim sense of what... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/obamas-us-vs-them/79462/ Fri, 6 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Senator Obama's victory speech this week, delivered in friendly Minnesota surroundings, was full of "we" and "us" and unity. As he woos the neighboring swing states, listen for him slipping in a different message: some use of "them" and their comeuppance. Minnesota is thought of as a battleground. That's why Mr. Obama picked St. Paul to declare himself winner over Senator Clinton. That and the theatrics of using the very arena Republicans will convene in. But Mr. Obama is double-digits ahead of... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/eating-too-much/77398/ Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Barack Obama blundered on Saturday in saying Americans "can't eat as much as we want" any more. His adulatory crowds may never get it, but he disclosed something every other voter needs to know about him. Senator Obama told a crowd in Oregon last week, "We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees all the time, whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the tundra, and then just expect every other country is going to say OK... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/where-water-and-politics-reign/76188/ Fri, 9 May 2008 00:00:00 EST MILWAUKEE, Wisc. — Barack Obama wasn't entirely accurate on what we're clinging to here in the embittered heartland. Guns, God, and xenophobia? Nah. Around the Great Lakes, it's our water and a bad attitude. Now that Atlanta's suffering a drought and Las Vegas is paying people to rip up lawns, Great Lakes states are seized both by a fear that the Sunbelt will take that water away and a gleeful hope that our supply will be what at last brings Sunbelters, thirstily chastened, back to live here... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/indianas-voter-id-model/75925/ Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 EST MILWAUKEE, WIS. — A friend of mine thought our state, Wisconsin, was lackadaisical about voting fraud. So he used to play a little game. When poll workers asked him his name, he'd whip out his driver's license, something the law refused to require. It made him feel subversive. You can get the same thrill of superfluous obedience in at least 23 states, including New York. If you're lucky, the pollworker might say, as one did to my friend, "Oh, we don't need to see that" and you can say back... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/back-to-the-future-in-madison/75310/ Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST MADISON, Wis. — Remember squeegee men? Fare jumpers? Times Square squalor? What New York was like before Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton started fixing the broken windows and stopping all the horrors that crawled in through them? It's been 15 years, and not only has New York changed, but so has the rest of America. What was once its premier urban disaster has become as safe as Boise, Idaho. Out here, we noticed. So deeply has the lesson sunk in that even Madison, Wis., the Midwest's most... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/pilgrimage-to-new-york/74971/ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST My children are envious, thanks to Pope Benedict XVI. Some classmates are driving to New York with their family to see the pope. My children wish they could go, too. It's the first time they have ever clamored to sit in a car 12 hours each way. I'll remind them of this at some useful future moment. Brigid, my child's classmates' mother, happened to get hold of tickets to Sunday's Mass at Yankee Stadium. She tells me she was planning to give them to others who could use them when it occurred to... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/seeing-the-invisible-hand/74534/ Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Lucky Chicago: It has for a moment the power to see the unseen. In case you were wondering, the unseen looks like a full parking lot outside a Best Buy just over the Indiana line, where sales-tax refugees go. Chicago already has some of the highest sales taxes in the country. On July 1, it will be at the top of the heap with a combined rate of 10.25%. Some of that is because of Cook County, which contains the city and many of its suburbs. Its board voted during the wee hours of February 29 to... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/lights-out-in-america/74216/ Fri, 4 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST There are plans to rebuild an old power plant along the Mississippi River by a Wisconsin utility. It boasts "clean coal," dramatic cuts in pollution, and the way it'll be able to burn local farm waste. Greedy, filthy swine, say environmentalists: Alliant Energy is using "the worst of the worst available technologies," as one big group, Clean Wisconsin, put it to supporters. So what is it, heaven or hell? The answer may help the nation stay out of power limbo. Alliant's plan to rebuild its power... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/public-boarding-schools/73893/ Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Like a slow-mo fender-bender on ice, I could see the bad-dad moment coming. My son had stomach pains, and the pediatrician was querying him: "What did you have for breakfast?" A sausage patty, my offspring said, indicting me for second-degree cholesterol. "I've had one every day this week," he volunteered. It was no good explaining about how oatmeal has been on the outs lately and how at least we'd found a breakfast he'd eat. It could be worse, seriously, grimly worse. My boy eats. I manage to... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/tapping-the-taxpayers/73381/ Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Shelley Ross sees with both eyes now. This was accomplished, in part, with her own money, which wasn't supposed to be possible. Ms. Ross, 40, a community college instructor and a divorced mother of two, by chance was the first to test drive how her state, Indiana, now covers uninsured adults. She signed up in December. She soon had a cataract excised and got the mammogram she'd been putting off. "It has taken a huge weight off me," she says. This was the result of something that looks like a... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/his-city-of-scandal/72941/ Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Some pundits I know were doing pop-psych analysis on Eliot Spitzer the other day. Obvious risk-taker, they said, a player-with-fire who'd naturally patronize high-end prostitutes. Sorry, I couldn't see it coming. Hypothesize, though: Suppose the tangential mentions of Senator Obama in the trial of Chicago money man Tony Rezko turn into, well, something. Saw it a mile away, people will say. Yeah, sure. If they could, they'd ask why Democrats longing for a new kind of politics are about to... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/airing-dirty-socks/72483/ Fri, 7 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Here's what I want you to do for the good of the country: Go pay $12.50 for a pair of Wigwam hiking socks. I hear they're really good. If enough of you splurge, then maybe Wigwam's boss will stop urging the government to make cheaper socks more expensive for everyone else. Consider it a targeted bribe to promote the general welfare. It would be timely. Free-trade arguments are the tussle of benefits for particular interests against benefits for all. Unfortunately, the particular seems to be... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/youve-been-warned/72075/ Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST MILWAUKEE, WIS. — Milwaukee may well be the nation's swing town this year — the biggest city in what seems likely again to be one of the nation's most evenly divided states. This may be where your next president is made. Milwaukee's police say the factory's dirty. A police task force this week at last released its report on the 2004 election, a monumental bungle here in which votes outnumbered voters by the thousands. The reaction of the Democratic bien-pensant has been to snarl, to say the... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/let-skywalks-reign/71690/ Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST MILWAUKEE, Wis. — The last time I was in New York, I was on foot and grateful for sidewalk sheds. I understand why New Yorkers don't like them: It's dingy under scaffolds. With some 3,300 of them around Manhattan alone, wooden tunnels get tedious. But it was raining, my head was wet, my shoes were sodden, and I was wishing the sheds could cover crosswalks, too. What I really wished for was a skywalk. These are an anathema in New York, I know. There are apparently some at Hunter College, but... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/undecided-in-wisconsin/71350/ Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST MILWAUKEE, WISC. — John McCain is not showing up in Wisconsin until today, four days before the primary and two days after Mike Huckabee. Not that conservatives are clamoring. But they might soften eventually, given what Barack Obama's been saying here. They're for Mr. McCain, if he's the candidate — maybe. So went the very restrained enthusiasm last weekend at a state convention of 400 conservative activists, politicians, young bloggers, and old lit-droppers. One prominent state lawmaker... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/your-obama-button/70719/ Tue, 5 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST MILWAUKEE, Wis. — Half the country votes today, including California, New York, and Illinois. So what was Senator Obama doing in Minnesota the weekend right before Super Tuesday? Packing people into an arena like a rock band for a moment of group identity — 20,000 recruits to the Obama Nation filled the Target Center to cheer the Illinois senator when he showed up in Minneapolis on Saturday. This was a day after Mr. Obama drew 14,000 to an arena in Boise — about thrice as many as those who... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/stern-challenge-from-milwaukee/70596/ Fri, 1 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST MILWAUKEE, WIS. — It's disorienting to read whither-school-choice think pieces in national magazines and to see lines about there being "no Milwaukee miracle," to see my town offered as evidence that choice is a flop. You mean the Milwaukee in Wisconsin? The one with all the beer? Because school choice doesn't look like a failure here — not to the CEOs boasting about it, nor to the legislative enemies still trying to figure out how to lame it. Certainly not to 17,795 children learning by it. As... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/staving-off-transit-doomsday/70173/ Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Chicago last week staved off yet another looming transit doomsday, and for a mere half billion dollars in new taxes. So guess what big Illinois city needs more money for transit already? As far as El-pocalypses go, this would have been a doozy. Saying they were out of money, transit authorities in Chicago were prepared to cut 160 bus routes and idle about a third of their buses. They'd have raised some cash fares to more than $3, and they were guessing they'd lose 250,000 or so daily riders... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/teaching-marriage/69767/ Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST You'd think LeHavre Buck was teaching at Comedy College. He was rolling out one story after another, laughing at himself through his teeth with the sound of a radiator just turning on. Half a dozen young people in desk-chairs at a Milwaukee YMCA chuckled along. They were learning, all right. Mr. Buck is a pastor and he was teaching three couples how not to put asunder what God was going to join together. He was teaching them how to be married. You can do that, says Mr. Buck, and he's not the... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/manipulated-in-michigan/69342/ Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST What a fine, unpredictable year for spectator politics. Someone asked me for a prediction on Michigan's Republican primary next Tuesday. I haven't a clue. Exciting, isn't it? I'm not even sure what'll happen when Mike Huckabee speaks today, Friday, at the Detroit Economic Club. That's a power-elite audience — the guys who laid you off, so to speak. Maybe the Huck will impulsively reach over and snatch away some CEO's lunch, a two-fer gesture about weight loss and fighting the power. That... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/stripped-of-pleasure/68937/ Fri, 4 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Such amity reigned in this soon-to-be-outlaw joint in Chicago. A trio of women chatted over a laptop and drinks. Others WiFi'd while sipping juice Some read. I did, with coffee. And nearly everyone was lighting up supposedly so unsocial an act that Illinois two days later banned it pretty much any public place indoors. Actually, you're still able to smoke in this convivial little lounge, Marshall McGearty's, even though it's now 2008 and the smoking ban is in effect. Opened about two years ago... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/price-is-not-right/68680/ Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST We had fog across the Midwest the day before Christmas, so TV news was full of airport interviews with families camping between flights in this concourse or that. It's unscientific, but I can't help but get a little depressed about how the flying-in crowd seemed to skew about 20 years younger than the flying-outs. It's the look of a regional brain drain temporarily sloshing back for a harried little Christmas. If I did have numbers on it, though, I don't think it would make a difference... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/forced-into-the-alley/68496/ Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST I dreamed of a white Christmas and woke up disillusioned with New Urbanism. We've had 23 inches of white so far this month in Milwaukee. By itself, this is nice. My days have not been merry and bright, however, and it's because of my alley. When we bought our house in an old neighborhood, we bought into the idea of alleys, or I did and I persuaded Mrs. McIlheran to go along. An alley meant a safer sidewalk, since cars wouldn't back out of driveways and run over our kids as they rode Big Wheels... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/its-virtual-war/68078/ Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST The Wisconsin Virtual Academy has grown in its four years to about 850 students, all there by choice. The online public charter school gets good results on state tests, equivalent to small-town districts from which it draws students. Parents rave about it. So, naturally, the state's biggest teachers union got a court to order it closed. If you wonder why, that just shows what you don't know about schools, you amateur. "My daughter has the most wonderful, hardest-working teachers in the world... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/wal-mart-myth/67538/ Wed, 5 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST The gateway to Cudahy, Wis., just east of Milwaukee's airport, is a vacated industrial plot with the ribs of a half-built, now-abandoned hockey arena rusting in back. Wal-Mart wants to replace it with one of its supercenters, a store with a full supermarket. Not without a fight, according to residents who showed up at a meeting last month with frowny-face placards. Low prices, economic vitality, the benefits of free trade — no thank you, sir! So Cudahy, a classic industrial suburb named after... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/its-time-to-give-a-dam/67137/ Wed, 28 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST A bunch of Midwestern governors, fretting about global warming, made some silly promises to each other about energy this month. But on the upside, they seem ready to give a dam. The 11 governors signed what they term a "platform," pledging to make people be more efficient, to subsidize ethanol, and to use less power — an improbable thing. A big part is a pledge to use more "renewable" electricity. The booklet heralding this has lots of pictures of windmills. And some pictures of dams, which is... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/milwaukee-message/66922/ Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Mary Budiac, who teaches third grade in Wisconsin, mentions the time one student's father called up her cell phone. His daughter had an unusually poor score on a test — some little, twice-weekly low-stakes test, but he was fretting. Needlessly, it turns out: The girl just filled in the wrong set of circles. Next quiz, she wouldn't. Crisis averted, but Ms. Budiac says that's the kind of attention to academics she sees out of her students' parents. Ninety-nine percent of whom are low-income... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/new-twist/66437/ Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Given her common surname, Katharine Ann Olson's murder will probably be best known as the Craigslist killing. That's the twist that gave the tragic story legs outside the Twin Cities — a young nanny pursuing a job lead from the online marketplace was lured by a 19-year-old who killed her. But it's worthwhile to remember that Craigslist was just a place put to evil use. The new angles fascinate gawkers, but the core of the matter is straightforward and very old. Still, this story is a new thing... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/make-room-for-wiccans/65996/ Wed, 7 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST As it was Halloween, the witches were out last week around the Midwest. I mean the kind who call the holiday "Samhain" and spell magic with a K and take it all seriously. Which, I'd argue, is a hearteningly old-fashioned American thing. This is a society with room for practically everybody because there is, literally, room for practically everybody. There's room for witches. Those who style themselves as modern-day pagans sometimes speak of trepidation about what the neighbors might throw if... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/smoking-gun/65679/ Thu, 1 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST This, at last, was the smoking gun, the think-tank plastique that could finish off school choice. Except it wasn't. A report last week from a Milwaukee-area free-market institute didn't prove that "choice may not improve schools," as one headline put it. The report didn't even involve private-school vouchers. Not that it matters. Evidence means little in the nation's longest fight about school choice. Milwaukee's 17-year experiment will educate 18,000 poor children this year, but the program's... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/what-miller-is-brewing/65163/ Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST One reason it would be tragic if Miller Brewing moved its headquarters out of Milwaukee would be the break-up of the campus of fun on the city's west side. Literally across Highland Boulevard from Miller is the home of Harley-Davidson. All you'd need is a pool-cue factory up the street, and our roadhouse synergies would be complete. On the other hand, the mere possibility of losing Miller could be a salutary scare for another old Great Lakes city still arguing over where the glory days went... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/water-as-a-weapon/64715/ Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Bill Richardson, running for president, lost a couple million potential votes around the Great Lakes this month by mentioning the Idea That Must Not Be Named. The New Mexico governor told a Las Vegas newspaper that there's lots of water up north — "states like Wisconsin are awash in water," he said — and that it could get shared. This wouldn't be so panic-inducing if the Great Lakes' supposed friends could tell the difference between New Mexico and their own neighbors. Anyhow, Mr. Richardson... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/laboratory-of-democracy/64285/ Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Ah, federalism, laboratory of democracy, in which states learn from each other. For instance, take two Midwestern lab partners, each with state budget standoffs. Taking its cure, Michigan collapsed, convulsed, foamed a bit, then sprang back up with steamed citizens and a $1.5 billion tax increase. To which some Wisconsinites, 13 weeks into their slo-mo crisis, said, "We want some of that!" The governor of Wisconsin, Jim Doyle, is one of them. He's been beating the drum for some $1.74 billion in... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/fields-of-dreams/63849/ Wed, 3 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST More than 250 people made noise outside a Chicago department store a few Saturdays ago because its owners aren't willing to supply their demand. This started a year ago, when Federated Department Stores replaced all its brand names with Macy's. This seemed to sting the most in Chicago, where the obliterated name was Marshall Field's. The protesters wanted this reversed. In a sense, this was a market failure: Customers who wanted Field's got Macy's instead. It shows that you can't always get... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/bright-innovators/63415/ Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Hillary Clinton's got a health care plan. Barack Obama does, too. John Edwards has a pretty little one. They're apparently all about the same, making your boss pay more, subsidizing this, managing that. Each of the Democratic presidential front-runners offers all the policy plumbing you could want — insurance connectors and SCHIP valves and careful soldering of every detail. By contrast, all that conservative reformers have is a bunch of people like Mark Fisher. And they don't even know who he... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/fretting-over-health-care/63077/ Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST It's funny how furrow-browed are the arguments in favor of tax-paid health care for all. We are talking about restoring the high noon of wellness. Where's the exuberance? Yet state-scheme dreams seem bound by sobriety. From Pennsylvania to California, their backers tout first their cost-containment. Senator Hillary Clinton's elect-me health plan announced this week is all about what you'll have to buy. It seems tailored to sound cautious and spinachy. Everywhere, the very appeal seems to be... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/liberty-on-a-leash/62433/ Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST My family celebrated International Walk to School Month early — it's in October, if you didn't know, and I didn't — by buying a car. Now, it's Daddy Drives the Kids Home from School Month. We're not trying to be contrary. Walking to school is healthy. It would be nice if my kids could do it. But that would take more than improving sidewalks or slowing down traffic, the usual prescriptions. Maybe taking away women's career options would help, or demoting the middle class. I don't favor either... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/spineless-disaster-relief/61912/ Wed, 5 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Some of the people flooded out of the Wisconsin hamlet of Gays Mills aren't ready to give up. Their homes are ruined, their keepsakes gone, their town needs dousing with bleach. Yet one woman whose house was still submerged said, "More than ever, I want to live here." Does this sound familiar — like, say, the devotion inspired by a certain half-empty Southern city ruined by Hurricane Katrina? Much differs between the ongoing political totem that is New Orleans and a soon-again-to-be-obscure... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/labor-reconsidered-a-matter-of-culture/61684/ Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Labor Day impends, bringing the sobering juxtaposition of the two Americas. I refer, of course, to the well-off and often privileged America that will spend the weekend at the lake house, maybe popping the kayak into the water to get a look at the egrets in the marsh grass. Then there's the other America, also reasonably well-off and privileged to have been up since 6 a.m. riding Jet-Skis round the same lake. This noisy-fun America thoroughly ticks off the other America that regards non-quiet... PATRICK McILHERAN http://www.nysun.com/opinion/visiting-cheesemongers/61212/ Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST We should all stick to local food, this fellow was saying. Someone had asked what was on his mind, and it was dietary danger: tainted Chinese this and salmonella oozing out of that. "Maybe we should be eating more like Grandma did," he said. He seemed bright: a computer analyst. You'd suspect he'd be up on a couple of realities. One is that the state he and I live in, Wisconsin, has a winter. Gardens don't grow here in the winter. Tough to eat a salad for about six months of the year unless you...