Political Cliques in Austin, Texas, and the US Congress

We voted early in the Austin city council election today. The city's taxpayers paid for an additional election because a majority of council members thought that Brigid Shea had a better chance of unseating incumbent Mayor Lee Leffingwell if the election was not moved to November, at which time the election costs would be shared. This is a non-trivial waste of money. There is no party affiliation in city elections, but you can see that there are presently cliques on the city council that work in their own interest and in this instance waste taxpayer dollars instead of sharing election costs with other governmental entities by scheduling county and city elections together, for example.

No doubt every council member could be labeled a liberal, given that this is Austin, Texas, but the polarization on the council which led to this waste of taxpayer dollars brought to mind this video of the spectrum from liberal to conservative in the 1st through 112th US Congress. Enjoy!

President Obama's Job Program

When Congress returns, President Obama will submit a new jobs program based on Georgia Work$. Annie Lowery writes of this in Slate, and I have abstracted her quote:

 "For one, retraining programs work better if they are on the job rather than in the classroom."

Employers' present expectations seem to be that the people they hire will fit right into the empty slot in their companies. This is untrue to varying degrees and results in jobs that remain unfilled for long periods of time. Classroom job training doesn't overcome this barrier to employment, and evidently federally-subsidized on-the-job training has done so, notably in Georgia and Mississippi.

Austin Public Library Collection: Triumph of the City by Edward L. Glaeser

I am happy to find that the Austin Public Library collection now includes one copy of Edward L. Glaeser's Triumph of the City. This must have happened since I requested it by interlibrary loan last May, or my ILL request would have been rejected.

When it was published, this book elicited many comments in the blogosphere. One discussion of particular interest to me was per capita representation in the US Congress - how many people are represented by each representative and senator in various districts and states. This has a lot to do with representation of urban versus rural interests going back in time to the compromises made in drafting the US constitution and forward to how the present Congress functions.