Anyway, the issue that totally haunts and distorts the education funding debate in NC is the damnable “North Carolina Education Lottery.”  When this lottery was passed, it was quite controversial.  Conservatives opposed it because they are uptight moralists and many progressives opposed it because, heck, it’s just bad public policy (a tax on the statistically illiterate, who are least able to afford it).  As for me, given that all the surrounding states have a lottery, adding NC to the process seemed like not a horrible policy, but I’d rather none of us have a lottery.  Anyway, to help sell it, supporters decided that the revenues would be earmarked for education spending and we’d call it the “education lottery.”  Presumably, that was enough to get just enough support to pass it (then Lt. Governor Perdue cast the tie-breaking vote).

Anyway, the horrible unintended consequence of this is that many North Carolinians seem to think that the “Education Lottery” should have solved all of school funding problems.  So not true.  They wonder, why should we raise taxes even a tiny bit, when we’ve already got the lottery to pay for education.  What they don’t realize is that the scale of state spending on education absolutely dwarfs.  If I got the numbers right after a fair amount of googling last night, in the most recent fiscal year, the lottery contributed $400 million to education funding.  Sounds good, until you realize that NC spent $20 billion on education.  In short, for you non-math majors, that’s a whopping 2% of state spending on education.

Thus, it seems like the lottery supporters have done some real long-term harm to education in NC by actually convincing many voters that we don’t need to do anymore to fund education when, in fact, we desperately need to.  I swear, if only we had the “North Carolina Lottery” things on this score would actually be much better.

Probably a good thing for NC Republican legislator, Larry Pittman.  Laura Leslie was working on a story about his absurd call for medieval use of the death penalty when the Perdue story broke.  Matthew Burns finished it off, so here it is:

A Cabarrus County lawmaker wants to bring back public hangings in North Carolina as a deterrent to crime, and he says doctors who perform abortions should be in the line to the gallows.

Republican Rep. Larry Pittman, who was appointed to the District 82 House seat in October, expressed his views in an email sent Wednesday to every member of the General Assembly…

“We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner,” Pittman wrote in the email. “If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well.”

Um, wow.  It’s one thing for the nutty, uninformed guy yelling at the tv to think so facilely about politics.  Now, that nutty guy is the sort of state legislator Republicans think should be deciding important issues in this state.  Yikes!  As we know, of course, everybody ever put on death row is obviously guilty.  Why waste time on even a single appeal?!  It’s not like anybody on death row has ever been exonerated.

Rafael Nadal of Spain sits under a shade during a break in between games during his men’s singles match agianst Feliciano Lopez of Spain at the Australian Open, on January 22, 2012. (Reuters/Vivek Prakash) 

Should also mention, that for a long time, my post on “soft core tennis porn?” was far and away my most popular.  It’s long since been replaced by my post on Great Tits (the bird– get your mind out of the gutter).

Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

Now go read the whole thing!  (I’ll be checking my click-through stats– don’t let me down).

“[S]ociety’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not — and indeed, in the main, simply could not — secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period,” Justice Alito wrote. “In this case, for four weeks, law enforcement agents tracked every movement that respondent made in the vehicle he was driving.” This breach of the “expectation of privacy,” Justice Alito suggested, exists whether the police attach a GPS device or use the car’s own technology. In either case, police would be wise to obtain a court order before beginning extended use of GPS to track a suspect, he concluded.

Justice Alito’s approach should be the law of the land, but the court will have to wait for another case before that becomes a possibility.

Not often I get to quote an Alito opinion approvingly.

I listened to a radio interview about this last week, and the Gallup guy mentioned that Americans just really don’t seem to like “big” whether it is “big business” or “big government” whereas we love “small.”  Anyway, that decline is both, certainly is interesting.  And, I suspect, largely a degree of overall unhappiness with the state of politics and the economy.

What bothers me about it, though, is this: Big Government may go too far, be inefficient, do stupid things, but at heart, it is government by the people and, at least, intended to make things better for all Americans.  Big Business, in contrast, is intended to make money.  Seems like the former should be more popular than the latter.