“Being PC” is the pejorative used to describe those who would endeavor to arm themselves with knowledge about some of the real and perceived  differences among us, be they concerning race, politics, creed, geography or, in the case of the Foot Hood tragedy, religion. The man accused of carrying out the rampage is a Muslim.

My view, based on what’s been reported about the officer’s outlandish conduct and beliefs, is that more awareness would have helped, not hindered, the suspect’s peers and superiors in branding his  beliefs and conduct as aberrant and actionable.  As letter-writer Ed Krauss of Scarsdale notes in a letter to be published later this week, “PC” wasn’t to blame for these deaths; it was a failure to act on “CS” or common sense.

Here’s the column.

Steiner and King join the Editorial Board at 3 p.m. today to discuss their vision for public education. You can watch the Editorial Spotlight interview LIVE online.

The well-informed voter, the ones who know their neighbors and where all of the bodies are buried, will probably find less utility in our assessments than the voter who is more detached from it all. My colleagues on the Editorial Board don’t profess to know more about your community than you do. However, because we have been at this for some time, we do have some sense of who actually knows of what s/he speaks and who simply takes up ballot space. We simply recommend; mercifully, you decide.

In a good number of elections—we do this for school board, local, state and federal campaigns—our recommendations and voters’ choices align quite a bit; in a recent vote, our views and voters’ were in accord in roughly 85 percent of the races.  In another election, that figure dropped to just under 70 percent. Sometimes, as it turns out, we’ve picked too many Democrats; other times, it’s too many Republicans; still other times, we’ve gone with challengers when voters weren’t yet through with the incumbents. We check afterward because we’re curious, but we have no “dog” in these fights, as a famous politician from Chappaqua said once or 20 times. Our sole interest is in picking better candidates, not winners.

It used to be that the Editorial Board would spend weeks interviewing candidates behind closed doors, where we would be treated to a steady barrage of cliches about “giving back to the community” or “going line by line through the budget” or “thinking outside the box.” Days before the election, we would make our selections known, usually in short, unsatisfying bursts of “we think.” Then it would all be over.

That dynamic changed several elections back, when we started streaming candidate interviews live on the Internet and, using blogging technology, allowing voters to ask questions of their own. Doubtless the candidates  get more out of the new form, as they get to speak directly to voters; a few make plain that they could not care less what we actually think. We’re just happy that they’ve participated .

Frankly, if readers/viewers did nothing else, I’d rather that they watched at least snippets of the candidate interviews, which are available in short form here and in long form here. It is not scintillating “television,” by any stretch of the imagination; but it is democracy, and often the messy sort. We are grateful for it.

Yet everybody knows that our tax bills are an outrage. I thought about this last night while watching the baseball playoffs. Every other commercial featured a politician blaming a politician for the sorry state of our financial affairs. How confusing this must be to voters: year in and year out,  their tax bills creep higher and higher, defying all the expensive campaign advertising. If only there were some correlation between the ads and reality.

There would be less room for false promises if the media (who else?) did a better job of fact-checking and providing voters the basic  information they need to separate the campaign bunk from the real dollars and cents. But in most places, even before the recession claims scores of newsroom jobs, that kind of watchdog campaign coverage was more the exception than the rule.

Hence, even casual baseball fans know A-Rod’s batting “record” in the playoffs or Ryan Howard’s RBI record in post-season play, but when it comes to truths about politics and governance, they mostly have to rely on those grainy advertisements sandwiched in between innings and men’s “bedroom” ads.  Sorry about that.

Here is today’s schedule of Editorial Board interviews with November candidates:

• 2 p.m. North Castle

•  3:15 p.m. Somers

• 4:30 p.m. Putnam County Sheriff

You can watch online at LoHud.com/editorialspotlight.

Many readers are applauding the actions of the rifle-wielding homeowner, who struck one of the alleged assailants in the arm and the other in the rear end. They also opened up a wider discussion about gun rights.

Here’s a sampling of the comment, creative spellings included:

“the owner need more range time, arm and butt shot not that good, but what if he didnt have his rifle, what could have been the outcome, maybe a homicide in havastraw?”

“Shoot first ask questions later? Of course i dont comply with this method of thought, however i do believe that these two criminals got their just deserts. I’m not promoting that everyone should go out and buy themselves a gun for protection, but i do think this event taking place is good in the sense that it sends out a message to other criminals like these two clowns that they better second think their actions.”

“They’ll have to pry my cold, dead hands off my gun before I give it up. Look at where the politicians, who want to take away the honest citizen’s gun rights, live – estates and gated communities with armed guards. If that’s what it takes, then consider me an armed guard – guarding my family and what is rightfully mine. Let some lazy, ignorant, non-english speaking punk just try and take that away and I promise you they will die of lead poisoning. I know where center-of-mass is and I’m trained NOT to miss.”

“2ND AMMENDMENT “THE RIGHTS TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS” NEXT TIME YOU HEAR A POLITICIAN TALKING ABOUT “GUN CONTROL” IT ALWAYS MEANS TAKING THE GUNS AWAY FROM THE LAW ABIDING CITIZENS.
WE ALREADY HAVE GUN LAWS THAT ARE NOT ENFORCED AND THE CRIMINALS CAN GET BETTER, FASTER AND CHEAPER GUNS THAN WE CAN.”

The shooting comes as gun sales have been skyrocketing nationwide. Here’s a link to a story published Monday on the trend in New York, as reported by our Albany Bureau.

Our view is reflected in an editorial today, “Bigger threats to home safety.” It offers some food for thought to those who think the biggest threats to home security are home invaders, the Supreme Court and the Obama administration.

The Editorial Board favored the agreement for pragmatic, fairness and dollars-and-good sense reasons. A judge already ruled that the county had failed to discharge it duty to foster fair housing opportunities; the only question left for trial was whether the county knew it was telling tales when it made certain representations to Washington in applying for federal Housing and Urban Development funds. A boatload of lawyers and others agreed that the county stood to lose far more — in money as well as prestige — if it continued the legal fight. Besides, under the settlement, the county will essentially do what it does anyway — that is, help build affordable housing. The difference under the settlement: more communities will get to share in that housing, and the county will have to ensure that racial minorities get a fair shot at the housing, along with everyone else.

That said, legislators are getting it from all sides — for voting for the settlement, for voting against it, for voting for it and then apologizing as if they had just OK’d a new smelting plant.  (We’re printing more letters on the topic this week.)

It’s another case where legislators, since they are going to take some lumps anyway, ought to do what they think is right . . . and stick with it.

I  saw it Wednesday in the city. It was vintage MM—  lots of ironic humor, great cameos, the usual performance art stalkings of corporate bosses. (As you doubtless know by now, these scenes always end at corporate America’s revolving doors, at the unyielding stiff arm of security personnel, who are wiser these days, having seen this act in every other MM film.) Capitalism drew applause when the credits rolled, but I think it was Moore’s laziest work, especially given the target-rich environment.

In compelling fashion, MM strings together lots of disparate vignettes from history (especially from that unheralded “socialist” FDR—who knew?) and our modern-day troubles, to skewer an easy and flawed target—capitalism. That, however, is child’s play in the waning days of the Great Recession; who couldn’t do the same with one arm tied behind her back and a camcorder in the other?

Where Moore falls short is, in getting at the causes of our latest meltdown and how to prevent the next. Really, he doesn’t even try—at least not in a way that might advance anyone’s understanding of the problem. Instead, Moore pretty much goes with the mob mentality—the same one that almost doomed the bailout of the financial system (medicine without which the rest of the economy would have gone the way of Lehman Brothers); the same one that surely would have killed off the last of the auto workers for whom Moore has such uncritical affection and allegiance; the same one that might well doom health-care reform, the subject of another Moore treatment.

How lazy was Moore? He lets more than one member of Congress go on about secret and mysterious doings in Washington aimed at stealing our collective bacon, while ignoring a good bit of the public policy mistakes—committed IN THE OPEN—that most thoughtful analysts point to as catalysts for our misery. This work has already been done for Moore, but he opts for the vague conspiracy. The trouble with that: we can target and fix public policy mistakes—and we have a responsibility to do so—but when the focus is on mysterious conspiracies and unseen forces, well, that’s just an invitation to chase our tails. That lets us—and the policy-makers—off the hook.

If you really want to learn something about the economic mess, there’s a better alternative this weekend. Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life has a follow-up piece on last year’s The Giant Pool of Money, perhaps the best explanatory journalism on what went wrong. Here’s the link to Return to the Giant Pool of Money.

It might make you want to join the mob and go shopping for pitchforks.

Yes (12)—in favor of approval:

Jose Alvarado, D-Yonkers; Lois Bronz, D-Greenburgh; Willliam Burton, D-Ossining; Peter Harckham, D-Katonah; Kenneth Jenkins, D-Yonkers; Michael Kaplowitz, D-Somers; Judith Myers, D-Mamaroneck; John Nonna, D-Pleasantville; Vito Pinto, D-Tuckahoe; William Ryan, D-White Plains; Bernice Spreckman, R-Yonkers; and Lyndon Williams, D-Mount Vernon.

No (5)—against approval:

Thomas Abinanti, D-Greenburgh; Gordon Burrows, R-Yonkers; James Maisano, R-New Rochelle; George Oros, R-Cortlandt; and Martin Rogowsky, D-Harrison.

While the new housing — for both sale and rental — would be open to everyone, based on specific income guidelines, the agreement requires that the county affirmatively market the units to racially and ethnically diverse households.

Here’s our editorial from Sunday. It calls on the Board of Legislators to Ok the agreement, which would have the county build some 750 units of affordable housing in mostly white communities that have long been resistant to housing choice. The county has always been in the affordable housing business, so to speak (it has built some 1,700 units over the last  decade); the difference here is, the county would be obliged to spread out that housing among more communities and be more assertive with local governments that play the NIMBY game. In other words, the settlement would have the county do what it is obligated under the law to be doing.

Here’s another piece from the previous Sunday. It sheds more light on how Westchester got into this soup in the first place.

For another view, here’s a link to a piece by Jim Russell, a former GOP candidate for Congress. He argues that Westchester taxpayers would be much better off continuing the legal fight, which would open the door to some $500 million in liability, according to an analysis that Board of Legislators Chairman Bill Ryan shared with me. Here’s Russell’s article.

Here’s another on the “con” side, from Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute. He writes in relevant part:

“Westchester may be forced to sign the settlement, but it has already been pursuing a far better policy: using federal funds to upgrade poorer neighborhoods and build subsidized housing in areas where beneficiaries will have incomes and education similar to their neighbors’.”

Of course, some opinions are worth more than others. To read U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote’s, its available here, along with other documents in the case.