Crow: It's what's for dinner (for me)

Could it be that these words still carry some weight? Here's hoping.
(Photo: Matt Wade, courtesy of Wikipedia)

One of the benchmarks of truly reaching adulthood, I've learned, is being able to freely admit when you made a mistake. As anyone who has met me can tell you, I still have a long way to go, but hopefully this can at least serve as a positive step in that direction.

Less than two weeks ago, I was so convinced that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the Affordable Care Act — at the very least, its individual mandate provision, but much more likely, the entire damn thing — that I preemptively warned of the dire consequences of such a ruling and excoriated the justices for doing it.

And, indeed, the four dissenters in Thursday's decision — Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy — wanted exactly that to happen. Only Roberts' unpredictable move to join the moderate members of the court prevented it. Thank God.

This is a rare instance in which I'm very happy to have been proven wrong.

I won't repeat the particulars of why Obama's health care reform legislation, flawed though it may be, is so historic and so critical to the well-being of this country. I will note, however, that an opposite high court ruling would have been an unmitigated disaster — one that would have assuredly left us to cope with our calamity of a health care system for the foreseeable future, if not forever.

This is not a sensationalized assessment, either.

The sustainable city: Public transit isn't just for tree-huggers

A couple months ago, I wrote an overview of my vision for the sustainable city, launching a series where I'll explore individual components of the idea in periodic posts. Here's my first installment, covering the importance of municipal public transportation from a slightly different angle. People like me love to talk about transit in the context of how it saves the planet. But why else is it so important? Read on for my thoughts.

*     *     *

The Renaissance Center on Detroit's riverfront
is a case study on how tall, fancy buildings
don't make for sustainable cities.
(The Detroit People Mover is an elevated
rail line that runs from this complex, and is,
incidentally, a case study on how not to do
mass transit, which I'll discuss in the next post.)

Not too long ago, I borrowed a great book from a friend called "The Triumph of the City" by Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University. It's a fascinating read. I highly recommend it for anyone who's interested in urban planning and development. (I'll talk more about it in depth in future entries.)

For the purpose of this post, however, Glaeser makes one key point throughout the book that really stuck with me: Cities are people, not structures.

It seems so obvious, but urban planners seem to forget it all the time. So do I. When I drive into a city that looks impressive from the freeway, like Chicago, I often forget that the skyscrapers and design of the urban landscape mean little without the people who live there and help to create it all.

The health of a city depends first and foremost on the prosperity, opportunity, and overall well-being of its people. You can't hope to build or revitalize a declining urban center with glitzy, glass-and-steel towers, while residents continue to suffer from staggering unemployment, racial tension, and a lack of resources by which to improve their circumstances. It's like giving a fresh paint and wax job to a car that won't even run.

The most dynamic skyline in the world won't create a sustainable city. Only a population that enjoys physical, social, political, and economic health — resources that functioning cities are uniquely positioned to deliver — can do that.

Of course, no single solution will achieve this unilaterally. A city with thriving, educated residents is produced by a combination of various civil and social services and infrastructure — including an established and expanding mass transit system.

Why is transit so important? Simply put, it provides access to the city's aforementioned resources for everyone, regardless of economic or social status. Transit helps bridge the ever-growing gap between those who can afford cars (or other private modes of transportation) and those who cannot.

The path to 270 still favors Obama

If the election were held today, here's how I'd predict the electoral map would look. (This is not a prediction of the actual results in November. It's way too early to do that with any degree of accuracy. Who knows? Five months from now, I might be eating every word I write in this post.) Click on the graphic to create your own version of the map.

Pundits are making a big deal of how Romney is catching up, solidifying the base, and improving his standing with independents. That may be true to some extent, but they make the observation largely based upon recent national polls (and, of course, the fact that they want to make news out of something that really isn't newsworthy).

Problem is, national polls don't mean much. They won't decide the election. Individual states will. And even if Romney is catching up in that regard, too, it's not enough to make him competitive (at least not yet). Let's take a look at the key states. If I don't mention it here, I'm confident enough in its standing on the map above that I needn't discuss it.

You can't have your pills and take them, too

As the Supreme Court prepares to strike down the Affordable Care Act, either in part or in its entirety, there's a point I've made before that bears repeating, over and over again if necessary:

No portion of the law can stand if the individual insurance mandate — which requires all Americans to secure private insurance policies by 2014, or face an annual penalty — is removed. Doing so is like removing the central pillar of a tower: Take out that piece, and the whole structure comes crashing down. This includes, but isn't limited to, the following provisions aimed at insurance providers:

• The ban on denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions, or dropping coverage when a policyholder becomes sick;
• The ban on imposing annual or lifetime caps on essential benefits;
• The ban on imposing co-pays or deductibles on preventive care;
• The stipulation that young adults can stay on their parents' coverage until age 26.

Curiously, even opponents of the law don't seem to deny this. The health insurance industry — who has a major stake in the debate — certainly isn't. You can't have benefits in place like the ones mentioned above without a sustainable way to pay for them.

The art of locally-brewed craft ale

I came upon this fascinating map a couple days ago — click on the image to have a closer look and interact with it. I'll be consulting it regularly in advance of future trips across the United States.

Right now, I'm in northern Michigan visiting my parents' summer home and have already visited one local brewery — Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. On the way back to Chicago, I plan to hit up at least one more — New Holland Brewing Company in Holland. (Humor me, if you would. While others may boast about, say, their professional or academic accomplishments, I nurse my fragile ego by bragging about where I've gone to drink beer.)

On that note, I've adapted a personal policy of only drinking local ales wherever I visit. In the same way that I wouldn't visit Omaha for fresh salmon — or Seattle for fresh corn-on-the-cob — I won't drink Sam Adams or Redhook when I'm in the Upper Midwest.

Sound a bit pretentious? Maybe so. But it's worth noting that if I were to visit San Francisco, I'd first be sure to hit up all of the must-see tourist spots: Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman's Wharf, the Mission District, etc. Immediately thereafter, however, I'd be headed off to visit the most intriguing microbreweries in the area that, of course, I would have researched in advance — location, hours, tours, standard taps, seasonals, specials.

To me, locally brewed craft beer is every bit as important to a sense of place as any tourist attraction.

Public sector unions: Not an all-or-nothing debate

You might be surprised, but I don't, in fact, think these people
are completely right…

Listening to the controversy over the past year regarding the role of public sector unions, one might be tempted to conclude that there are only two possible outcomes to the debate:

• Let the unions continue operating exactly as they are now, without any additional checks whatsoever on their power or influence; or
• Destroy them entirely, Scott Walker style, by depriving them of their ability to function.

As I've mentioned before, it's human nature to reduce complex issues to simple, opposing, rigid absolutes that force us to pick one side and accuse the other of being Satan. That's pretty much exactly what's happened here, and it's eliminated any possibility for reasoned, rationale, informed discourse — or middle ground.

Progressives argue that Walker's agenda is a thinly veiled siege by the rich and powerful (a la Koch brothers) in their continuing war against the middle class.

Conservatives and libertarians say that public sector unions are bankrupting states and squandering taxpayer money by wielding the financial and political muscle they've amassed over the decades to achieve self-serving ends at the expense of everyone else.

Any time that two opposing sides begin to think in such extreme, absolute terms, there's a good chance that neither is entirely correct or above reproach in their line of reasoning. That's certainly the case here.

What's lost in the discussion about acts of mass murder

Too often, people afflicted by mental and emotional
disorders who need these don't have access
to them — or don't take them.

In the wake of last week's tragic shooting spree in Seattle that left five dead — plus the lone gunman, who turned the weapon on himself when confronted by police — there will be lots of conversation about why this happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

Leaders in this liberal city have already pointed out that we live in a culture where there are too many guns, and it's too easy for bad people to get them. They're right on both counts, even if they are making the argument that every progressive makes as though reading from a script.

But one topic that will scarcely be mentioned is equally consequential in cases like these: the condition of mental health care in our society.

A few weeks ago, I was reading about the 1966 case of Charles Whitman, the gunman who opened fire from atop a tower at the University of Texas that year, killing or wounding dozens. Just prior to the attack, he wrote a revealing suicide letter in which he noted that he didn't "really understand [himself]" and had "been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts." He finished the note by requesting that his life insurance policy be donated to a mental health foundation for research to "prevent further tragedies of this type."

That was 46 years ago. Today, we still face the same kind of tragedy, over and over again.

Charles Whitman clearly knew that he was mentally ill. In the same suicide note, he lamented that he was "supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man."

But he did nothing about his troubled state. He sought no help. Why is that?

This leads me to the first of several observations I'll make about the state of mental health care in this country.

Wisconsin's recall election results: A foregone conclusion?

With numbers like these, the voice of the voters today is arguably a mere footnote.

Democracy does not decide our elections. Money does. Wisconsin is a case study in that.

I'm afraid the writing is on the wall — and has been since long before the ink dried on the first recall petition signature.

Anyone disagree?

Check out my original thoughts on today's elections here if you haven't already.