Al's Opinions

I recently spent a pleasant week in a cottage on a lake in Michigan. The lake is near Traverse City. The cottage is jointly owned by members of the family of my late sister's husband. He has a 1/7 share of the cottage and the property. The other six children of his parents each inherited a similar share. By now most of the original heirs have died and bequeathed their shares in the cottage to their children. Some of the children have 1/21 share each of the property.

At first all the heirs shared in the upkeep of the cottage. They still share in paying the property taxes owed each year to the county and the township in which the cottage is situated. However, many of the heirs now live in distant States: California and Nebraska and others. These distant heirs rarely if ever visit the cottage and are annoyed at the prospect of having to share in paying the utility bills, let alone painting and other repairs needed on a regular basis because of the harsh winters in Michigan. The task of maintenance falls on the two heirs who still live in Michigan.

Sooner or later the time will come when the family will decide collectively that maintaining the cottage is too much bother for a family and will decide to sell the cottage and the land it occupies. I suspect the new owner will raze the cottage and replace it with a more modern dwelling.

A similar fate seems to overtake newspapers that are owned privately. The original creator of the paper started with a small weekly and gradually expanded it into a daily paper. He or she worked hard to build up a news staff and a business staff to solicit advertising. Eventually the paper became one of the leading news sources in the nation.

Meanwhile, the original owner died and bequeathed the newspaper to his children. They in turn bequeathed it to their children, and so on. The newspaper was a good source of revenue for the family, and excess money was invested in other enterprises. The family became wealthy.

Finally, the family found that they could no longer agree on how to manage the newspaper. They decided to convert it to a publicly held corporation and sold shares of stock. For a while members of the family retained ownership of a majority of the shares, but eventually they decided to invest their money in something more profitable. Another news corporation took over the paper and discovered that the return on the investment was lower than the average return on other shares traded on Wall Street. The new owners undertook to cut costs by getting rid of some of the members of the news gathering staff. This started a downhill path for the paper. Less news meant fewer readers. Fewer readers meant fewer advertisers. Fewer advertisers meant less money. Costs were cut again by laying off more news staff. And so it went.

By now you may have guessed that the newspaper in question is the Los Angeles Times. It has been acquired by the Tribune Company and is experiencing the decline described above.

The moral is, family ownership of a cottage or a newspaper is fine as long as the family is interested in maintaining the cottage or newspaper. When the family loses interest, the property is sold and the new owners demolish the property (cottage or newspaper) and sell the remainder (the lot or the building and equipment of the newspaper).

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Labels: family ownership, Los Angeles Times, Michigan, Tribune Company

Republicans and other conservatives often prattle about agendas: the homosexual agenda, the liberal elite agenda and the like. I picked up two stories today, one in the newspaper and the other on the internet, that illustrate an important item in the Republican Agenda. The basic goal of the Republican Party is to win elections and stay in office. That's proper. Some of the means of accomplishing that goal are not so proper.

Here is the first story:

The League of Women Voters reports that: Senator Mitch McConnell (R KY) has offered an amendment to the immigration bill pending in the Senate that would require every voter in the 2008 election to provide government-issued, current and valid photo identification before being allowed to vote at a polling place. This amendment would disenfranchise large numbers of legal voters and create administrative problems at the polls in the next federal election.

The second story comes from the front page of the Los Angeles Times:

Minnesota case fits pattern in U.S. attorneys flap
A prosecutor apparently targeted for firing had supported Native American voters' rights.
By Tom Hamburger, Times Staff WriterMay 31, 2007

WASHINGTON — For more than 15 years, clean-cut, square-jawed Tom Heffelfinger was the embodiment of a tough Republican prosecutor. Named U.S. attorney for Minnesota in 1991, he won a series of high-profile white-collar crime and gun and explosives cases. By the time Heffelfinger resigned last year, his office had collected a string of awards and commendations from the Justice epartment.

So it came as a surprise — and something of a mystery — when he turned up on a list of U.S. attorneys who had been targeted for firing.

Part of the reason, government documents and other evidence suggest, is that he tried to protect voting rights for Native Americans.

At a time when GOP activists wanted U.S. attorneys to concentrate on pursuing voter fraud cases, Heffelfinger's office was expressing deep concern about the effect of a state directive that could have the effect of discouraging Indians in Minnesota from casting ballots.

Citing requirements in a new state election law, Republican Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer directed that tribal ID cards could not be used for voter identification by Native Americans living off reservations. Heffelfinger and his staff feared that the ruling could result in discrimination against Indian voters. Many do not have driver's licenses or forms of identification other than the tribes' photo IDs.

Kiffmeyer said she was only following the law.

The issue was politically sensitive because the Indian vote can be pivotal in close elections in Minnesota. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area has one of the largest urban Native American populations in the United States. Its members turn out in relatively large numbers and are predominantly Democratic.

Heffelfinger resigned last year for personal reasons and says he had no idea he was being targeted for possible firing. But his stance fits a pattern that has emerged in the cases of several U.S. attorneys fired last year in states where Republicans wanted more vigorous efforts to legally challenge questionable voters.

There are many other stories that carry the same implication: some Republicans set a high priority on preventing or discouraging certain classes of people from voting. They say that these are people who have committed felonies (Florida) or people who are not citizens (immigrants; Senator McConnell) or people otherwise not qualified to vote. Is it surprising to learn that the majority of people in these classes tend to vote for Democrats?

Enough said.

Labels: immigration bill, League of Women Voters, Los Angeles Times, Minnesota, minority voting rights, Mitch McConnell, Republican agenda, Tom Hamburger, Tom Heffelfinger