S. Neil Fujita, RIP

I didn't know his name until today, but I love his work. New York Times: "S. Neil Fujita, a graphic designer who used avant-garde painting and photography to create some of the most striking album covers of the 1950s, and who designed the visually arresting book jackets for “In Cold Blood” and “The Godfather,” died on Saturday in Greenport, on the North Fork of Long Island. He was 89."

Philadelphia Needs to be More Business-Friendly

It's become apparent to me in two years of living in Philly that starting a new business is a regulatory nightmare: I spent this year watching an acquaintance delay the opening of a new coffee shop from the beginning of the summer to the end largely because of the runaround he got from the Licenses & Inspection Department. There's also the oppressive tax situation: When bloggers get hit with a hefty business tax because they earned a few dollars in Google AdSense revenues, you know the situation's out of whack.

So Robert McNamara's op-ed in today's Inky rings true to me: This city really is strangling entrepreneurship:

All too often, city rules and regulations boil down to the whim of the inspector or official an entrepreneur is dealing with. All too often, their whim is simply to say "no." Instead of giving new businesses the time and space they need to grow, the city immediately hits them with an array of taxes, fees, and demands that are simply implausible, like requiring a start-up business to waste precious and often limited financial capital renting commercial office space instead of operating out of an entrepreneur's home.

The city's rampant overregulation, tremendous burdens placed on would-be entrepreneurs, and, above all, the pervasive culture of "no" are putting a stranglehold on entrepreneurial activity. Wracked by a budget crisis, the city inexplicably continues to expend extraordinary resources making it more difficult to start businesses, which could be expanding the city's tax base.

There are some solutions out there! Council members Bill Green and Maria Quinones-Sanchez have introduced a bill that, among other things, would exempt a new business' first $100,000 in sales from the city's business tax. I don't know all the fiscal implications of this -- Philadelphia, like other cities, has had its share of budget problems in recent years -- and I'm generally not a believer that reducing taxes results in increased tax revenues. But I suspect that making it easier for entrepreneurs to get started in Philadelphia can only help the city's tax base over time. What we're doing right now isn't working.

Whoa, Inky, Slow Down!

I think I get some of the processes involved here, but it's still weird to see the Philadelphia Inquirer's "Too Bad the Phillies Lost" editorial a whopping four days after the season ended. Not everybody has moved on, I understand, but it still seems less than real timely. If you can't say it within two days, Inky, maybe you want to move on quietly. This just makes you look old and slow.

Enough With The Rand Paul Stomping Already

I was shocked at the video of a Rand Paul supporter stomping on a MoveOn supporter -- but, weirdly, I think we're making too big a deal of it. If there was a small army of Rand Paul supporters marching through Kentucky, stomping on the necks of sign-holding liberals, I'd be concerned. But one incident doesn't tell us anything, really, about the underlying dynamics of a candidate or the ideology he shares with his followers. I got tired of conservatives smearing "SEIU thugs" based on one incident last year; I'm already tired of this.

My Small, Car-less World

I took a train the the Philly suburbs on Saturday to watch the (damnit) concluding game of the NLCS, passing by a lot of interesting little Philadelphia sub-communities that I probably would've explored by now ... if I had a car. So I relate to Atrios' thoughts on what car-lessness does to your world:

"Obviously cars are useful things in that they let you basically go 'anywhere' at relatively low perceived marginal cost (one problem with the way we pay for cars is that a lot of things which are really marginal costs are perceived as fixed costs by people). I think I've been car free for about 6 years now, and where I can go reasonably is dictated by where I can walk, where there's decent public transportation access, where is accessible by a cab ride I'm willing to pay for, or what's accessible by a carshare car that I'm willing to pay for. While there isn't a perfect mapping, carshare costs make perceived fixed costs (insurance, maintenance, car payments) into marginal costs to some degree. All that makes the accessible world quite a bit smaller."

This is all true. I live in Center City, and 95 percent of what I do in town is generally in Center City. That's not all bad: There's lots to do in Center City! I like my neighborhood, and I like the neighborhoods that I can walk to in 20 minutes or less -- which is quite a huge chunk of town. But it is limited. I mostly enjoy living without the car -- and I really appreciate not having the expenses -- but the limits of my travel sometimes make me wonder if living in a big East Coast city has made me more provincial than when I was living in Kansas.

SEIU Thugs in Action!

Sorry. Wrong thugs!

Victor Davis Hanson is Wrong About Wikileaks

Hanson: "We are engaged in a great experiment to see whether the U.S. military can still persist in a conflict when it knows that any and all of its private communications can become public — and will be selectively aired and hyped by people with a preconceived bias against it. Had the public known in real time from periodic media leaks about operational disasters surrounding the planning for the D-Day landings, intelligence failures at the Bulge or Okinawa, or G.I. treatment of some German and Japanese prisoners, the story of World War II might have been somewhat different."

Perhaps, but the release of the the Afghanistan and Iraq documents by Wikileaks has been done in something less than real time. Is there a D-Day operation that has been compromised by the leaks? Not that's been publicly demonstrated, at least. Learning about things years later is not the same as "real time."

And the United States at least had a clearly defined mission in World War II. We knew who we were fighting, what a victory would mean and what a loss would mean. We're nearly a decade post-9/11, having meandered through a pair of quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, the only thing we really know is that we're supposed to keep fighting. The Wikileaks documents bring some clarity, at least, to the question of the results of that fighting.