Curmudgeon Central

11 Thoughts on the SGK/PPFA Brouhaha

2012-02-04T18:52:00.011-06:00

As you no doubt know by now, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, citing a Congressional inquiry into Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s funding, announced earlier this week that they would no longer provide monetary support for that organization’s breast cancer screenings.

This decision resulted in copious fecal matter interfacing the whirling rotors. In the wake of a couple of 6-figure donations to Planned Parenthood, the SGK brain trust scrambled to get their story straight amid growing acrimony from long-time allies. Ultimately, the funding was restored (sort of), with Planned Parenthood coming out well ahead in at least financial terms, the SGK folks losing prestige and (probably) money in the wake of their decision, and the double standards of virtually all concerned being much in evidence.

I’d make a few points, some of which I haven’t seen discussed in the feeding frenzy of (needless to say, largely incompetent) media coverage:

1. The decision to de-fund Planned Parenthood was made long ago, with the hiring of Karen Handel as vice president for public policy. If the SGT hierarchy hired a failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate who ran on a strong (radical?) anti-abortion platform, pledging to de-fund Planned Parenthood, what did they—or the rest of us—expect? Answer: they’re either even more screamingly inept than they seem, or they knew exactly what they were getting, and indeed hired Ms. Handel for precisely the purpose of severing ties between the two organizations.

That said, we must also consider two things, as pointed out in a Los Angeles Times piece on the controversy surrounding Handel. First, Komen founder/CEO Nancy Brinker said in an interview on MSNBC this week that Handel “did not have anything to do with this decision.” This argument is substantially weakened by the fact that Brinker seems to have a lot of trouble telling the truth (see below) and by the fact that it strikes me as passing strange that an important and newsworthy decision about public policy would be made without considerable input from… erm… the VP for public policy. People who believe this story also believe that Bush the elder knew nothing about Iran-Contra.

More persuasive is the argument that Handel isn’t the frothing-at-the-mouth ideologue being portrayed in the media. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, she was “hammered” during her gubernatorial campaign by Georgia Right to Life because she ~~did her job~~ oversaw federal and state grants to Planned Parenthood while Fulton County Commissioner.

Still, no reasonably clear-eyed observer really believes either that Handel wasn’t promoting a political agenda or that she wasn’t involved in this debacle up to her eyeballs. Curiously, this is not really a criticism of her. We disagree on Planned Parenthood. Fine. But SGK hired a fox to guard the henhouse; they can’t be surprised when there’s just a few feathers where Ol’ Clucky used to be.

Moreover, John Hammarley, former senior communications advisor for Komen, tells reporters for Mother Jones that:

About a year ago, a small group of people got together inside the organization to talk about what the options were, what would be the ramifications of staying the course, or of telling our affiliates they can't fund Planned Parenthood, or something in between. As we looked at the ramifications of ceasing all funding, we felt it would be worse from a practical standpoint, from a public-relations standpoint, and from a mission standpoint. The mission standpoint is, “How could we abandon our commitment to the screening work done by Planned Parenthood?”

Komen’s professional staff recommended continued funding of Planned Parenthood; the board overruled them. That’s not a scandal, but it is suggestive.

2. SGK is free to support (or not) whomever they choose, provided they’re honest about it. It’s the latter part that’s the problem here. Deciding to provide the same services through different means is not unethical. Pretending a decision is apolitical when it obviously is: that’s a different matter. Which brings us to…

3. The announced reason for the decision was disingenuous if not outright mendacious. First off, the provision which allegedly forced Komen’s hand was apparently made up for the purpose. No one seems to dispute that it was a “new rule.” You can’t make up a new rule expressly for the purpose of accomplishing Objective X and then mutter inanities about how regrettable it is to have to make a decision that leads to achieving said objective but, of course, your hands were tied. Anyone who believes that line of crap is one of those folks who believes you when you say there’s no word “gullible” in the dictionary.

Moreover, the dictate seems to have been, shall we say, unevenly applied. Komen funds allegedly couldn’t go to an enterprise “should Komen become aware that an applicant or its affiliates are under formal investigation for financial or administrative improprieties by local, state or federal authorities.” Yeah, well, except for the $7.5 million going to Penn State, for example. “Administrative improprieties”? Yeah, I think you could say that, and yes, there is a formal investigation underway.

Where there isn’t a formal investigation underway is with respect to Planned Parenthood. Yes, Republican Representative Cliff Stearns of Florida, chair of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, did initiate an inquiry into Planned Parenthood’s use of federal funds. Of course, the leftie press is screaming that Stearns is misusing his authority to waste lots of taxpayer-funded time and energy on a politically-motivated fishing expedition, the Congressional equivalent of a SLAPP lawsuit. Chances they’re right: a little over 99%, rounded up to the nearest integer. Chances it’s relevant: 0.

What the pro-choicers (and, let’s face it, that’s who they are: see #7 below) should be arguing is that Stearns’s sally is technically an inquiry rather than an investigation. Those terms might sound interchangeable to you and me, Gentle Reader, but apparently there’s a real distinction there (similar to the difference between a reprimand and a censure) in Washington-speak. As I understand it, an inquiry is a preliminary step to determine whether an investigation (which implies hearings) is necessary and appropriate. Anyway, there’s a difference, and I’m betting the Komen folks could have rounded up a lawyer to explain it to them by… I dunno… walking down the hall or something.

4. The Congressional “inquiry” is in fact political in nature, but that doesn’t (inherently) make it inappropriate. Stearns is seeking to be a pain in the ass to Planned Parenthood, nothing more and nothing less. But this doesn’t mean his alleged concerns—not to be confused with his tactics—are without merit. Money that goes to PPFA for a specific purpose has to be used for that purpose: the Komen money for breast cancer screening, federal funds for virtually anything but abortion.

Stearns argues that the money is fungible, and that ultimately federal funds that go to PPFA end up in a big pot: a dollar Planned Parenthood doesn’t have to spend on breast cancer screening or safe sex education is a dollar they can spend instead on providing abortions. It is illegal for any of the millions of dollars in federal funding PPFA to be used to fund abortions. It is illegal for any of the millions of dollars the Chamber of Commerce collects from foreign corporations to be used influence elections. Guess what? The two cases are identical. Guess what else? Neither side admits it.

5. The money we’re talking about sounds like a lot, but is ultimately pretty insignificant compared to the budgets of either organization. SGK disperses about $89 million a year, and has an annual budget of close to four times that. Planned Parenthood has an annual budget of over a billion dollars. At stake here: about $680,000. So less than a quarter of one percent of the SGK budget was going to be spent in a different place, impacting Planned Parenthood to the tune of two-thirds of one hundredth of one percent of their budget.

6. SGT is now and has been for some time—perhaps since its inception—more interested in its own image than in actually helping people who need it. While Charity Navigator gives them an overall 4-star rating, they do spend a fair amount of money on other than programmatic costs: over three times as much on a percentage basis as Partners in Health, for example. And only 19% of the organization’s budget actually goes to research.

More insidious is the organization’s monomaniacal obsession with branding. It’s pretty clear that the fight against breast cancer is for them more of an opportunity to strut their do-gooder credentials than to accomplish anything tangible towards “the cure.” They are interested in getting credit, even if what they’re getting credit for is, in the words of the KomenWatch blog (yes, there is such a thing, and yes, it’s been around a while), systematic:

• misrepresentation of the realities of the disease
• skewed program allocations
• ongoing misinformation about the role of mammograms and “awareness” as keys to the eradication of the disease
• lack of ethical review processes concerning corporate contributions and “pinkwashing”
• failure to cooperate with other breast cancer organizations

Indeed, there seems to be an organizational culture founded on corporate models to such an extent that competition rather than cooperation with other health-care charities seems to be the goal. Why else, for example, would you sic lawyers on a charity sled-dog race called “Mush for a Cure”? Seriously, these very special little snowflakes think that “cure” is somehow their private preserve. (The good news is that this may spare us a reunion of that execrable ‘80s band.)

It is reasonable to suggest, as does erstwhile Mush for a Cure organizer Sue Prom, that “People are donating money to this organization [Komen] to fight cancer—not to fight another organization fighting breast cancer.” An interest in branding is not an inherently bad thing, but there’s a fair amount of counter-intuitive insensitivity mixed in with the predictable collection of pink crap. After all, nothing says “life-affirming” like a pink Walther .22.

Last May, ChemoBabe lit into the latest (at the time) perverse pseudo-fundraiser, Nancy Brinker’s signature perfume (yes, perfume), Promise Me. Here’s ChemoBabe:

My outrage is simple and comes in three parts: linking cancer to a perfume, the weird beauty breast cancer connection, and the misleading use of the money.

1. Many people in chemo, myself included, become incredibly chemically sensitive. I almost passed out when a woman at my gym sprayed perfume in the locker room. I was shaking and it took a half an hour for the episode to pass. The last thing I wanted to be near or around was any kind of fragrance. There is even evidence that fragrance may be carcinogenic – For the Cure® indeed!

2. Why do we have beauty products to raise funds and awareness for breast cancer alone? It is the only form of cancer that demands that we stay beautiful, even as we puke our guts out and lose our hair. Komen perpetuates this ideal.

Breast cancer is the Beautiful Cancer. Can you imagine a brain cancer perfume? How about anal cancer? Why is there not the same dissonance with breast cancer? It’s all cancer, for crying out loud!

3. This “floriental” scented perfume costs $59.00. Of that, how much do you think goes to research? If you said $1.51, you are correct! (Thanks for the math, Uneasy Pink!)

Since Komen spends a minuscule fraction of that on researching metastatic disease, very little of your fifty-nine bucks is going toward a cure.

Hell hath no fury like a nauseous me involuntarily squirted with perfume, Komen. It’s on now.

Side note: I have no idea who ChemoBabe might be. But I like her, and I wish her well.

Finally, there’s the actual public statement from Nancy Brinker. Direct quote: “Regrettably, this strategic shift will affect any number of long-standing partners. But we have always done what is right for our organization, for our donors and volunteers.” First off, if the effect on “long-standing partners” will be regrettable, maybe you shouldn’t do it. More importantly, the second sentence here is telling. I tend to distrust those who tell me they always do what’s right (see here for a 3-year-old essay on that point), because that implies what is to me a rather horrifying certainty about what is right. With that caveat, however, this is the one place in the speech where I’m pretty sure Brinker is telling the truth: their priorities are 1). themselves, 2). those who fund them, and 3). those who work for them without $400K+ salaries. Notice anyone missing? Like the women they purport to serve, for example?

Obviously, people in the know have been skeptical of SGK for some time. We should be thankful, I suppose, that the rest of us are finding out more about their priorities and their tactics as a result of this brouhaha.

7. The majority of the howls of protest came precisely because the “victim” was Planned Parenthood, not because a foundation dedicated to women’s health issues re-aligned its grants policy. Planned Parenthood has a special place in the hearts of those on the left. Whether this is because the organization is so often demonized by the idiot right (Cf. Jon Kyl), or because they unabashedly provide abortion services, I’m not sure. But other organizations which provide, say, cancer screenings (or mammograms, which Planned Parenthood doesn’t, in fact, provide) don’t generate the visceral protectiveness engendered by PPFA. They’re being attacked on the basis of abortion and defended primarily because of abortion. It would be unfair to say that no one in this equation seriously cares much about breast cancer, but it’s certainly true that the attackers and defenders alike are using that horrible malady simply as an excuse to advocate on their respective sides of a contentious political debate fundamentally unrelated to the eradication of a killer disease.

8. Planned Parenthood will continue to thrive and will continue to be under attack for providing perfectly legal services. The last week has brought a number of supporters out of the woodwork, often to the tune of lots and lots of dollars. The Komen announcement inspired several of my FB friends to break out the checkbook. All told, counting six-figure contributions by billionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, by CREDO, and by Lance Armstrong’s Live Strong foundation, Planned Parenthood brought in $3 million in a couple of days. Yes, that’s over four times as much money as they were threatened to lose per annum. They’ll be fine. Side note: it will be interesting to see what happens when the full provisions of Obamacare kick in, and the need for such services (presumably) decreases.

Meanwhile, you can count on further attacks on Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. State governments are already making inroads, sometimes in places you might not expect, like New Hampshire. And in the wake of the Komen pseudo-reversal, the right-wing usual suspects blared forth even more predicatably, with even more hysteria and even less sense than their leftie counterparts had a couple days earlier.

A sampling:
Catholic Online: “They are a billion-dollar spoiled brat, but unfortunately, no one has the guts to put them in the corner and take away their toys. (This spoiled brat, like a Transformer, morphs into a giant monster bully that will demolish anyone who gets in the way.)”

Fox contributor Sandy Rios (also the VP of Family Pac Federal): “we are witnessing an absolute shakedown or an organization that just wants to save the lives of women through cancer research.”

And, of course, we can count on Rush Limbaugh to have a very high bluster-to-usefulness ratio: “they [SGK] have caved big time to the feminazis at Planned Parenthood.”

9. SGT’s “reversal” wasn’t one; it was merely a cynical, and largely successful, attempt to trick a stupid and compliant media into turning down the heat. They are, if nothing else, smart enough to realize that reneging on current agreements isn’t such a hot idea. So we were already talking about future money, anyway. But, as the leftie blogosphere has figured out but the corporate media hasn’t, there was no guarantee that Komen would continue to fund Planned Parenthood.

Their official statement says only that “We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.” Ooh, golly, they can apply now. Wow. Doesn’t mean the application will be approved. Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect more than that. SGK shouldn’t have to commit now to what they’ll do down the road. But that doesn’t change the widespread perception—including mine—that they’re just kicking the can down the road to take a little of the short-term heat off.

10. SGT’s leadership is incompetent, dishonest, sanctimonious, and narcissistic. They’ll also still be employed at 6-figure salaries, passing out pink t-shirts and running ridiculous overheads, when the smoke clears. They’ll take a short-term hit, then go blithely on their Pepto-pink way, talking about the subject they care most about: their public image.

11. Nancy Brinker says Komen will never bow to political pressure. Fact is, they already did. Twice.

Is it the university's fault if you don't go to class?

2012-01-28T12:15:00.008-06:00

There’s lots of political news, of course, plus several stories from the world of education that merit comment. Given Curmie’s schedule right now, it’s unlikely he’ll even make a dent in the backlog. But here’s a start.

We begin Operation Catch-up with the saga of Balayla Ahmad, a black, Muslim woman who was studying at the University of Bridgeport, hoping to become a chiropractor. Now she’s suing the university, who, she says, ignored her allegations of sexual harassment against a fellow student but called in the FBI when he, in retribution, began spreading rumors alleging she was a terrorist.

Ahmad alleges that the other student “made repeated sexual advances at her, often hurling obscenities such as ‘I want to eat you like I am eating this sub [sandwich]’ or yelling ‘I'm going to cuff you’ while holding a pair of handcuffs.” According to the lawsuit, Ahmad talked to more than one teacher about her situation, one of whom urged her not to go to the dean, as he would speak to the harasser. Eventually, Ahmad—against advice—went to the university president, who apparently wasn’t much help.

Then campus security showed up on her doorstep with allegations of terrorism, threatening her with bringing in the FBI (as, apparently, they did). Ahmad’s attorney says “The sexual harassment investigation never occurred. Instead it became about her.” The FBI found no substantiation for the charges against Ms. Ahmad, but somewhere along the way, she was removed as a student. The university is declining comment—and we’ve heard nothing but Ahmad’s side of the story… this may or may not be a relevant concern.

Assuming what she says is both true and all there is to know, it’s pretty damning for the university. There are three problems: the lack of action on the sexual harassment allegation, the apparently swift action on what turned out to be unfounded reports of terrorism, and the failure to perceive what in retrospect (at least) would seem to be a pretty obvious link between the charges.

Let’s take these one step at a time. The news reports don’t make it clear whether the harasser ultimately stopped as a result of university action; they suggest only that Ms. Ahmad didn’t think they would. A teacher reportedly told Ms. Ahmad that the university normally doesn’t immediately suspend students for the level of sexual harassment she alleges; the dean subsequently told her that his “hands were tied.” The teacher was almost certainly both telling the truth and describing a reasonable policy. The dean, probably not so much.

I’ve dealt with two cases of student-on-student harassment in my career. Both happened to have occurred when I was a graduate student teaching Beginning Acting. One involved two theatre majors and stemmed from the out-of-class rehearsal conduct of the male partner in a two-character scene. The female student brought the case to me. I talked with her for nearly two hours, then took the case to the department chair, complete with a lengthy written report. I don’t know exactly what happened after that in procedural terms, but I do know that the female student agreed to complete the scene with the young man provided there was always another person present at their rehearsals and that she’d never be partnered with him again.

I know, too, that the department chair read the riot act to the male student, who seems to have been more unaware of the inappropriateness of his actions than really being a jackass. He was, I think, not allowed to participate in the next round of departmental auditions, although he subsequently became an active member of the department, as far as I know without further incidents. I received both a personal and a written apology; so did the female student. And that was that.

The other case involved two non-majors, and dealt with in-class activity. The man in question always managed to position himself close to the woman on days when we were talking about concepts rather than rehearsing scenes or doing exercises. He’d then mumble or whisper sexually explicit suggestions to her while covering his face with his baseball cap or when I was looking elsewhere. I suspected that something was going on, but it wasn’t until the young woman talked to me after class that I knew exactly what.

I consulted the chair again about what to do, and he said, and I believe this is a direct quote, “Send him to me. You don’t get paid enough to deal with this shit.” (Good boss!) He asked me when my class met, cleared his calendar for the beginning of the next class period, and told me to send the male student to him as soon as he arrived, without telling him why. I did. I don’t know what was said in that room, but I do know two things: 1). the big tough football player returned to class 20 or 30 minutes later having obviously been crying, and 2). there was never a problem again.

It is unreasonable for Ms. Ahmad or her lawyer to think the university should have expelled the alleged harasser without due process, especially since (as my own experience indicates) there are often less drastic but nonetheless effective means of solving the problem. Plus, of course, as this case itself demonstrates, allegations aren’t always true—there is no objective reason to believe that a specific claim of sexual harassment is any more credible than a specific charge of terrorist sympathies.

All that said, the “my hands are tied” defense is more often than not the go-to position of the lazy, the diffident, and the dishonest. It may be true that the dean was not in position to impose a punishment on the alleged harasser, but that would only be true if a judicial board or some similar agency had reviewed the case and dismissed the charges. (They might have been incorrect to do so, but such a decision might well have been founded on an innocent-until-proven-guilty rationale rather than on a firm belief in the male student’s innocence.) Even if the dean had no authority to exact a penalty, he could certainly use the power of his office—as my former boss used the power of his—to make it very clear that any further complaints against the alleged harasser would be taken very seriously indeed. But—apparently, at least—he punted, instead.

Campus security types always like to pretend they’re more important than they are. If every college and university fired every campus cop who is more interested in strutting than in serving, the unemployment lines in college towns would be out the door. Ahmad argues, according to the Huffington Post, that “college officials recklessly disseminated false accusations by the harasser that they had good reason to believe were unreliable and threatened her with arrest by the FBI.” That’s a serious charge, especially if a). it really was college officials disseminating the accusations, and b). they did so even if they suspected the reports were of dubious provenance.

But imagine what would have happened if the alleged harasser’s claims had been legitimate: if security hadn’t investigated, if the FBI hadn’t been called in… and if there had been an attack of some kind. Yes, it is a threat to say you’re going to call in the FBI. But even a die-hard civil libertarian like me doesn’t read that as inherently creating an environment in which it is impossible to do one’s work.

It’s important to note that Bridgeport apparently didn’t suspend Ms. Ahmad for either her allegations against a fellow student or for his against her. Here’s the ABC report: “Ahmad was dismissed from the school in June 2009 after, she says in the complaint, she was unable to attend class because of the alleged persistent harassment as well as perceived threats of federal prosecution.” Translation: she flunked out.

Forgive me, but I just have a little trouble believing that the harassment was so severe and unchecked, and the (perceived) threat of prosecution so portentous that it was impossible for a 35-year-old woman to go to class. (And if they were, dropping as opposed to failing classes would seem to be an appropriate course of action.) Not that students have ever before blamed their truancy on someone else, of course…

There’s enough on the surface here that the Bridgeport administration might be worth a Curmie nomination. But until we find out a little more information, this one is on hold.

Wicca, Salem, and Glenda the Not Witch

2012-01-10T21:10:00.006-06:00

The ACLU is not without its flaws, but I’m glad they’re around. Case in point: a lawsuit filed by that organization and its Eastern Missouri office against the Salem (MO) Public Library. [Various sources: The Riverfront Times, The Raw Story, Deseret News, the ACLU’s own site.]

It seems that a woman named Anaka Hunter, a Salem resident, was looking for more information about the Native American part of her heritage, specifically with respect to spirituality. So she went to the library, but found all the appropriate websites blocked by filtering software. She asked why, as one might reasonably do under the circumstances.

Library director Glenda Wofford then unblocked a page or two, but kept most blocked because sites devoted to Native American spirituality, Wicca, astrology and paganism are classified (by her) as related to the “occult” and to “criminal skills.” Yes, really. To say this is utterly stupid is merely to state the facts. And yes, we do have a case about witches (of a sort) in a town called Salem, featuring someone named Glenda. [Yes, I know the Good Witch in “The Wizard of Oz” was Glinda, not Glenda: go with me, here.] That doesn’t make Ms. Wofford’s idiocy any more palatable, but it does make the story more fun.

But, as Aimee Levitt writes:

When Hunter protested that she felt it was unfair to classify Native American spirituality along as “occult” or “criminal skills,” Wofford told her that she had an “obligation” to call the “proper authorities” to report anyone who requested access to blocked sites if she thought they were going to misuse the information. Hunter interpreted this to mean Wofford was going to call the police and stopped trying to do her research at the Salem Public Library.

Yikes. An appeal to the library board was unsuccessful at best: “‘They listened to her, but they made no changes,’ reports Tony Rothert, one of the ACLU lawyers who filed the lawsuit on Hunter's behalf.” The lawsuit per se quotes a board member as saying “If that’s all, we have business to discuss.”

There are a host of problems here. First is the filtering software itself, or rather the application of it. There are laws at both the national and state levels requiring that certain kinds of websites be inaccessible from computers in libraries: this inevitably leads to the need to over-ride the software so that patrons doing research on, say, child pornography can have access to information about legal cases and arrest records without being blocked. It is understandable that there are judgment calls here. This, however, doesn’t come close to being one.

There is nothing about any of the topics listed above that remotely qualifies as “criminal skills.” “Occult” may or may not be an appropriate designation, but that’s really an irrelevant consideration, since the occult, whether the Bible-thumpers believe it or not, is a legitimate subject of inquiry. Or are we to ignore the works of Christopher Marlowe, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Edgar Allen Poe, Wilkie Collins, W.B. Yeats, Heinrich von Kleist, Arthur Conan Doyle, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King… and a few hundred others, merely from the realm of literature?

Significantly, someone had to program that software to block, for example, the Wikipedia entry on Wicca, the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, and Astrology.com but not, significantly, a page entitled “Astrology and Horoscopes: The Bible and Christian View.” In Mr. Rothert’s words,

It violates the establishment clause [in the First Amendment]. You can learn what the Catholic Church thinks of paganism, but if you want the pagan view of paganism, it's blocked. It gives preferential treatment to some religions. Any example of a minority religion discussed in a positive way has been blocked.

In my words, to say that there’s a double standard here, a false distinction that reflects all too clearly the arrogance, intransigence and myopia of the library board, is merely to state fact.

But Wofford compounds the apparent bigotry by claiming that it wasn’t she, but the software (apparently endowed with supernatural powers… which patrons at the Salem library couldn’t look up) which prevented Ms. Hunter from accessing the sites of her choice. It was programmed, presumably at her direction. Moreover, she could bypass the software if she chose, as evidenced by the fact that… wait for it… she did, although nowhere near to the extent needed. In other words, Ms. Wofford is not merely a bigoted idiot, she’s a lying bigoted idiot.

True, Ms. Hunter needn’t have been so secretive about the sites she wanted to visit, but then again, Rosa Parks could have just moved to the back of the bus, too. The argument that “legitimate use” ought somehow be limited to school projects and the like is laughable on its face. Ms. Wofford’s responsibility isn’t to decide whether a patron’s desire to visit a site is legitimate; it’s to decide if it’s legal, and if it won’t interfere with the smooth operation of the facility (the way a perfectly legal pornsite would be a distraction, for example).

Beyond that, it’s not her call. Whether this remarkably inept decision-making is based on pseudo-Christian tunnel vision or on a more generic form of stupidity is difficult to determine. But whether this makes the town of Salem look like a different Salem in a different century: that’s self-evident.

Another Story about Education in Georgia. It Ain't Pretty.

2012-01-08T16:02:00.005-06:00

So, Jack Marshall, whose Ethics Alarms blog is linked frequently here, read my piece on the idiot teacher(s) in Georgia who thought that references to slavery, beatings, and baskets of cotton would be appropriate to include in math homework for 3rd graders. And his response:

If your child is taught by a moron—and technical definitions aside, that is not an unfair or uncivil description of a teacher who thinks it’s reasonable to give the question, “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?” to a third-grader, your child’s likelihood of growing up moronic is vastly increased.

And yet, as Richard Dreyfus’s character says to Quint the shark-hunter as they compare scars in “Jaws,” “I got that beat.” In fact, Rick, I got that beat in Georgia.

Trouble is, he’s probably right (although there’s a good chance that both will be Curmie nominees and you’ll get to decide).

Thirteen-year-old Jack Persyn is a student at Lanier Middle School in Sugar Hill, GA. He was at Chess Club before classes started a couple of days ago (obviously, he’s a threat to society—you know those Chess Club types) when he noticed that there was a 1 ½” jackknife in a bag his aunt had given him for Christmas; she’d bought it at a yard sale. So, knowing that there was school rule against having a “weapon” (a knife that size is a weapon?), Jack took it to a teacher. For his honesty, he was rewarded with a four-day in-school suspension.

School officials acknowledged that his possession of the knife on school property was an accident. The official disciplinary report says that he “immediately self-reported.” They punished him anyway. That makes them morons. They claim they don’t have a zero-tolerance policy. That makes them lying morons.

OK. Like most people who have travelled at all extensively, I have inadvertently taken something I shouldn’t have through airport security. No, not something really dumb like a loaded gun (I’m not a football coach or a Tea Party leader, after all). But I remember looking through a pocket in my carry-on bag while waiting for a connecting flight in the St. Louis airport a few years ago and finding… wait for it… a 2 ½” knife. I quickly realized that this was the knife I hadn’t been able to find for several weeks. And that meant I’d taken it through airport security not once but three times, including twice when I’d been singled out for a special search by the hopeless incompetents known as the TSA.

But I digress. The point is that I’m not as honorable as Jack Persyn: I didn’t run scurrying to the authorities to turn myself in. I just threw the knife back in the bag, vowed to remember to take it out when I got home, and went back to reading my book. That’s because I’m old enough and cynical enough to suspect that the powers-that-be would cause me more hassle than the situation merited. Besides, I didn’t want to have that knife confiscated: it was a Christmas present from my (now) brother-in-law before I married his sister. (We’re now four months away from our 30th anniversary.)

Young Mr. Persyn, however, is a better and/or more naïve person than I. He could easily have done precisely what I did. He could have tossed the knife back in his bag and made a mental note to take it out when he got home. But he did the right thing. No good deed goes unpunished.

I’m not sure who the school’s talking head in the TV spot link might be: system spokesperson Jore Quintana, perhaps? Whoever he is, he was tasked with defending the indefensible. A reporter asks, “Isn’t that telling them that you’re doing the right thing by reporting it, but you’re still going to be punished?” His self-righteous response: “That is telling other students that we are trying to keep their school safe, and that we’re trying to keep them safe at school.”

I’m going to say this once: No. It. Freaking. Isn’t.

What this absurd enforcement of an absurd zero-tolerance policy (call it what you will, that’s precisely what it is, and it’s fully as reprehensible as all the others—more so, probably, because of the craven denial of reality), students learn the following:

• if you make a mistake, whatever you do, don’t admit it. We didn’t admit ours, and we punished a 13-year-old for admitting his.
• exercise of discretion or thought is expressly forbidden.
• when you’ve made a really stupid decision, make sure that no one knows it was you. Send a minion out to take the heat.
• if you have a “weapon,” make sure it stays concealed.
• never trust a person in authority to do the right thing, just because you did.

Forgive me for not applauding the fact that the status quo, unlike the previous policy, allows for discretion. Discretion only matters when it’s applied.

Handcuffing Students: Un peu outré?

2012-01-08T09:02:00.006-06:00

This isn’t eligible for the Curmie because the key events took place last year, but boy-oh-boy would it have been a contender.

Last June, the Southern Poverty Law Center brought suit against the Jackson (MS) Public School District, alleging that an Capital City Alternative School routinely handcuffs students to railings as punishment for minor infractions. Jody Owens, the head of the SPLC’s Mississippi office, argued that:

At the highest level of the district, Jackson Public Schools officials have failed to protect students from a prison-like environment where children are subject to regular shackling and chained to poles and railings as a consequence for minor, non-criminal violations of school rules. Not only does this handcuffing policy violate the U.S. Constitution but it demonstrates a diseased school culture and a broken model of school discipline that focuses on criminalizing students at the expense of educating them.

Assuming the allegations to be true, Mr. Owens seems to have hit the proverbial nail squarely on the head.

Here are some of the specifics:

• A 15-year-old female student was handcuffed to a railing for several hours after she was accused of greeting her friend too loudly in the school hallway.

• A 16-year-old student with an emotional disability was shackled to a railing for an entire school day because the student did not wear a belt. The student was even forced to eat lunch while handcuffed.

• One student spent an entire school day handcuffed and shackled to a railing because he wore shoes that school officials deemed to be the wrong color.

Um… wow. My initial reaction is that these charges couldn’t possibly be true. But there are two problems with this view. First off, the SPLC is sometimes given to flights of interpretative fancy, but they generally get their facts right. Secondly, the school actually confirms the allegations, at least in general terms.

Yes, says school principal Marie Harris, the practice of handcuffing students to a railing began in 2006, when a student tried to run from the school towards Interstate 220. She argues the practice is done in good faith, for student safety.

OK, let’s be clear. Students are at this school instead of a regular elementary or high school because they have been “suspended/expelled from the Jackson Public Schools for 10 days or longer. The program also serves as a learning alternative for students who had difficulty adjusting to the regular classroom setting or who were discipline problems in the classroom or school itself.” True, Jackson Public Schools expel students at twice the national average. Even so, it’s reasonable to suggest that every kid at the school presents a set of challenges which require some tough decision-making by administrators and teachers alike.

It is, therefore, easy to believe that handcuffing a self-destructive student to a railing might seem a reasonable short-term alternative. But the examples alleged by the SPLC go far beyond interim fixes, and even further beyond student safety issues. Shackling a student for wearing the wrong color shoes? Are you kidding me?

The reason the case is in the news now is that the SPLC has demanded on discovery the pertinent documents relating to the practice. School officials claim such documents exist, but have yet to turn over any of them, and are resisting doing so.

What is especially disturbing here is the school’s belligerence. They claim that “Jackson Public Schools cooperates in the discovery process, and has asked the court to prevent the Southern Poverty Law Center from engaging in harassing discovery tactics, all in an effort to embarrass and misrepresent the integrity of the school district.” I understand that nobody likes to get sued, and they’re likely to get a little prickly about it. Fine.

But the suit demands no monetary damages. All the SPLC wants to do is to have the school stop “[creating] a prison-like environment.” (Yes, I understand that a decision against the school might serve as an impetus for subsequent suits by specific students’ parents.) The lawsuit exists only because the school apparently refused to change its policies without one.

What the school needs to do is one of three things: a). offer reasonable evidence that the allegations are false, or at least deny that shackling and handcuffing has occurred frequently, for extended periods of time, or as punishment for trivial infractions, b). justify the practice [good luck with this one], or c). just stop it. Instead, administrators and lawyers have chosen to be confrontational and uncooperative, accusing the SPLC of trying to embarrass them. And they do have a point, there. They’re doing very well at embarrassing themselves without any assistance.

When I think of 3rd grade math, the first three words that come to mind are "slaves," "beatings," and "cotton..."

2012-01-07T23:12:00.005-06:00

Maybe I shouldn’t have introduced the Curmie Award, because now everybody seems to want one. I was about 80% done with another essay—about a situation that would have been Curmie-worthy had I seen the story last year, when the most significant events occurred—when I read this story about homework given to 3rd graders at Beaver Ridge Elementary School in Norcross, GA.

Here’s a math question: “Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?” Here’s another: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?” And other: “Frederick had 6 baskets full of cotton. If each basket held 5 pounds, how many pounds did he have all together?”

OK, really? Slaves? Beatings? Cotton? WTF? Who wrote these questions, David Duke?

Parents, not surprisingly, are more than a little irked. Christopher Braxton is one such father: “It kind of blew me away. Do you see what I see? Do you really see what I see? He's not answering this question.” Another father, Terrance Barnett, makes the obvious-to-anyone-with-an-IQ-above-room-temperature point that “Something like this shouldn't be imbedded into a kid of the third, fourth, fifth, any grade. I'm having to explain to my 8-year-old why slavery or slaves or beatings are in a math problem. That hurts.”

School spokesperson Sloan Roach had the unenviable task of justifying such idiocy. She did the best she could: “In this one, the teachers were trying to do a cross-curricular activity.” Uh huh… “We understand that there are concerns about these questions and we agree that these questions were not appropriate.” No kidding?

According to Kerry Kavanaugh of WSB-TV, the principal’s (or vice principal’s) response was to collect the assignments and shred them, then to “work with the teachers to develop more appropriate questions, and [school officials] say they’ll do a better job of reviewing them before they go home with students.”

Well, shredding those papers is the right call. But look around. Budget cuts across the country have led to layoffs of hundreds of thousands of teachers, some of them, I’m willing to bet, good ones. If you’ve got some (the news reports all use the plural, “teachers”) so transcendently stupid as to believe there’s any excuse for these questions, “working with them” isn’t the answer. Fire their asses, hire someone with a brain, and then let those people teach.

The solution isn’t to monitor homework assignments. It’s to hire faculty whose homework assignments you don’t have to police. “Working with” a teacher is appropriate if s/he does over-reacts to a stimulus in the classroom and crosses the line a little. Or if s/he develops a reputation, deserved or not, for favoritism. Or if s/he assigns homework that’s either too difficult or insufficiently challenging. But there is no cure for stupid.

It’s probably true that there isn’t a legal rationale for breaking these teachers’ contracts right now, but the integrity of the school really is at stake if there isn’t a clear signal that such assignments are a quantum step or two beyond “inappropriate.” The trouble is, someone thought these questions were OK for 8-year-olds. That same person is going to be making other decisions that require sensitivity, tact, and common sense. Oh, happy day.

Or, perhaps, there could be new homework questions: If a teacher makes $36,000 a year on a 9-month contract, how much money does the school district save if they fire her after four months? If a school principal makes $100,000 a year and doesn’t have the brains or the courage to eliminate idiots on the faculty, how much money will the school district waste on this jackass over five years? If a school has 200 3rd graders, and the parents of 5% of those students sue the school for a million dollars apiece, how much money does the district stand to lose if there’s no settlement?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Artistic License and Singing the Showpieces

2012-01-07T17:50:00.007-06:00

I know, I know. Iowa caucuses. New Hampshire primaries. Gotta write something about the current GOP horserace. Actually, I don’t. I might later, but not now. Today’s topic: songs. Specifically, what can and cannot legitimately (i.e., ethically, as opposed to legally) be done to them? Stated otherwise: what is “artistic license”?

Two recent cases raise this topic. The first one to come to my attention, although not the first in terms of when it actually happened, was Cee Lo Green’s rendition of John Lennon’s signature song, “Imagine,” in the waning minutes of 2011. Green, completely unknown to most of the country and known to most of the rest for a single song in which he oh-so-cleverly utters the phrase “Fuck you” a couple dozen times (to be fair, the tune is actually OK), decided he’d improve on what Rolling Stone declared the #3 greatest song of all time, behind only “Satisfaction” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” Yeah, that’s smart.

OK. There are two things awful about this version. One of these things, the fact that it’s crooned with all the integrity and honest emotion generated by the lounge singer at the DewDrop Inn, falls under the heading of “artistic license.” I literally left the room, it was so bad. But the fact that I didn’t like it (i.e., it wasn’t to my taste) doesn’t make it censurable: it means only that I’m less likely to buy any of the man’s recordings in the future. (But how likely was that, anyway?) My departure, however, meant that I therefore missed (live) the far more serious transgression: changing the lyrics, then tweeting a half-hearted pseudo-apology (very well disguised as defensive self-justification), then cravenly taking the thread down.

Lennon’s song, which he himself described as a sort of “Communist Manifesto” posits religion as one of the central causes of the world’s problems. His utopia, then, is one in which there is “nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.” Green changes that idea to its polar opposite: “… and all religion is true.” Seriously, is it possible to get any further away from Lennon’s intent?

Put it another way. What if an atheist decided to change the words to a well-known Christmas carol? “This, this is Christ the guy, whom shepherds guard while eagles fly.” Catchy, huh? Can you imagine the uproar?

Green, whether aware of having just made a colossal fool of himself in front of a bigger audience than he’ll ever see again without buying a ticket or perhaps, as the Huffington Post suggests, “to preempt criticism,” proceeded to tweet, “Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that's all.”

This would make you about the stupidest person on the planet, then, wouldn’t it, Cee Lo? You’re in New York, you freaking moron. Anything bad happen in New York in the name of religion about a decade or so ago? Anyone?

The fact that Green is quite possibly too stupid to understand that his form of fuzzy-headed and ontologically impossible inclusiveness runs contrary to the original intent does not excuse his actions. Why? Because surely even third-rate crooners can understand that one of two things must be true if you change the lyrics to a song: either you change its meaning, or you needn’t have bothered.

Green took a lot of heat from both atheists and Lennon fans for his transgressions. Here’s @maleficat: “fuck you, @CeeLoGreen. sing it right or don’t sing it at all.” Others—a lot of others, apparently—articulated similar sentiments. The other tack was to point out that wearing a full-length fur coat and a cornucopia of bling might not exactly comport with the song’s wistful longing for a world with “no possessions.”

Needless to say, Green was being (rightly) pilloried. The best any of his defenders could muster was that a). it’s artistic license [Bullshit.] and b). the response considerably outweighed the offense [Quite possibly true.]. So he did what any pusillanimous flavor-of-the-month pseudo-celebrity would do: he pulled his Twitter thread and sulked.

Tempest in a teapot? Maybe. It was just one line (“no hell below us; above us, only sky” remained untouched), and perhaps his (initial) motives if not his actions were good. But there’s something paradigmatic at work here. In a week in which an Eric Cantor minion can interrupt an interview to make the preposterous claim that Ronald Reagan never raised taxes, we are drawing ever nearer to a “We have always been at war with Eastasia” moment. Anything we can do to pull back from that precipice is a good thing. And we must recognize that what Green did, whether we like his sentiments better than Lennon’s or not, was to radically and completely volitionally change the intent of a piece of literature that happens to be in the form of a song lyric and present it as if it were the original. Parody? Fine. But this falls more into the realm of the counterfeit than the satiric.

That someone other than a politician could be that stupid and/or arrogant is troubling. But then, Green really is dumber than the proverbial sack of hammers. How do we know? He messed with John. And not with some B-side, either: with the song Rolling Stone describes as “an enduring hymn of solace and promise that has carried us through extreme grief, from the shock of Lennon's own death in 1980 to the unspeakable horror of September 11th.” You don’t do that. It’s like criticizing Reagan at a Republican debate. The political reality is that Green might have gotten away with blithely screwing around with the lyrics of an old Guess Who song or something by Genesis or somebody. But you do not mess with John. You. Just. Don’t.

Far easier to parse, except for the troubling spectre of trying to wrap one’s head around what goes on in some people’s minds, is the news from Indiana that an idiot state legislator (there I go with the redundancies again, sorry) has decided that the state has so few problems, especially as relate to education, that the highest priority she can imagine is to force public schools and state universities, plus any private school receiving any state or local scholarship funds (including vouchers) to enforce standards for singing the national anthem at public events.

One Vaneta Becker, a Republican (but you knew that), heard last spring from a constituent who was “upset about a school program in which the words of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ were substituted or parodied in a way the caller found disrespectful. The senator said she herself had heard parody versions of the national anthem on television programs.” (N.B., the latter wouldn’t, of course, be covered by Becker’s bill.)

The bill would force schools and musicians to sign a contract to meet “appropriate standards,” whatever the hell that means. Musicians—amateur or professional—could be fined $25 (a huge hardship for the likes of Roseanne Barr, Jimi Hendrix, or Marvin Gaye) for violating those standards, which would be enforced by a panel of judges including a has-been pop star and a bitchy guy with a foreign accent. OK, I made that last part up. It would be “the State Department of Education, with input from the Commission for Higher Education” who would be Lord High Executioners for such matters.

This bill is, of course, transcendently stupid in just about every way imaginable: apart from probably being unconstitutional, it is unenforceable; it is silly; it requires judgment calls by people utterly unqualified to make them; it steers us all just a little closer to creeping Big Brotherism. Jack Marshall makes these points in a little more depth in an excellent piece on Ethics Alarms; I needn’t repeat them.

But let me talk about two things he doesn’t. First, the real progenitor of this bill may not have been that phone call from a constituent at all. Not when there’s this story from January of last year. Sixteen-year-old Shai Warfield-Cross was told by her school that she needed to perform the anthem “in a traditional way” after someone associated with another school altogether complained that—get this—her performance before a basketball game rendered the tune unrecognizable (it wasn’t) and it was “disrespectful to current and former members of the military” (WTF???).

Principal Jeff Henderson, who’d have been a contender for last year’s Curmie if I’d seen this story earlier, promptly capitulated. Whether the racial overtones read into the situation by Warfield-Cross’s family are legitimate, I can’t say: racism isn’t the only form of stupid. But, completely apart from the inanity of deciding that there’s a “traditional” way to perform the tune of an old drinking song, the suggestion that Warfield-Cross’s performance is anything but mainstream and respectful is itself ludicrous. (For what it’s worth, after the administration’s craven and silly decision went viral, they did apologize: better late than never.)

Secondly, this legislation is proposed by a Republican. This makes sense in terms of the hollow pseudo-patriotism. But this proposal runs directly counter to the presumed ideological center of GOP: small government. Not only does it provide one more way in which the government interferes in the lives of private citizens, it also creates yet another layer of bureaucracy: schools are required to tape every performance and keep the evidence for two years!

Becker sniffed that “I don't think it would be very difficult for schools. You could record it on a lot of cellphones or like a small recording device (or) a CD.” Well, yeah, in terms of technology. But somebody has got to record it and store it, somebody has got to figure out written standards… the list goes on. More to the point, it’s just another stupid, useless requirement that distracts from the real work of educators.

And if you think that filling out silly forms and reports doesn’t ultimately add up to a mountain of triviata, let me introduce you to my wife, the community college financial aid director. (Be it noted, a fair amount of the time-wasting paperwork she’s got to do is the result of silliness by Democrats.)

The more perspicacious readers will notice that I’m allowing more leeway in music than in lyrics. Maybe that’s because I’m a whole lot better writer than a singer (this is where, Gentle Reader, you snort that if this is the way I write, you really don’t want to hear me sing). It has a little more to do with the nature of the two arts: music is written to be performed: that is, it is, by definition, mediated between writer and audience. Literature doesn’t work that way. Yes, song lyrics are intended to be performed, too, but I think they’re in a different category.

Even more importantly, there’s no such thing as the polar opposite of a musical arrangement. There is of an idea expressed verbally. Or at least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

And the Winner Is...

2012-01-05T23:38:00.003-06:00

The votes are in, and we have a winner: the no-doubt proud recipient of the prestigious 2011 Curmie Award for Most Embarrassing the Profession of Education is…. (drumroll)… the unnamed teacher at Mercer County (KY) Intermediate School who decided that shoving a 9-year-old autistic boy into a bag intended to store gym balls was an appropriate punishment. Note: it now appears that it was the teacher’s aide, not the teacher per se who put young Chris Baker into the bag. Still, it’s difficult to exempt the teacher from equal if not greater culpability.

All told, some 32 votes were counted. Voters could choose as many candidates as they wanted. I sort of tracked the voting, so I know there was at least one ballot that included votes for six of the eight nominees, and there was at least one “bullet.” The eventual winner was included on exactly half the ballots; all eight nominees received at least two votes.

Thinking about the nominees after announcing them, I came to the realization that the eventual winner was sort of in a category of its own: the only nominee to be a teacher as opposed to some sort of administrator, the only one to deal with the potential for physical harm to a student, the only one in which the victim was a single child as opposed to a group, an adult or an adolescent. It was also the most recent case. One or more of these facts may have contributed to the margin of victory, even if no more than that. In any case, I appreciate and thank all those who voted. I thought this was kind of fun; I hope you enjoyed it, too.

Second-place finisher, and therefore de facto winner of the unofficial Curmie: Higher Education Division award, is David W. Rasmussen, the Dean of the College of Social Sciences at Florida State University, who tried to justify his decision to allow representatives of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation to have veto power over faculty hires in exchange for a substantial grant. His argument that “it seems to me it would have been irresponsible not to do it” proves he is utterly devoid of the ethical sensibility we ought to require of our educational leaders in particular. Our readers agreed, and he attracted nine votes.

Tied for third, with seven votes apiece, were—to steal the phrase from our friends at Popehat—censorious asshats. More to the point, they’re just dumber than dirt: Thomas Fleming of Pennsylvania’s Richland School District decided to shut down a high school production of Kismet because the central characters are Muslims (yes, really).

Lisa Walter of the University of Wisconsin-Stout took down a transcendently innocuous poster of the TV series “Firefly” from a faculty member’s office door, then somehow managed to convince Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen to endorse her arrogant and stupid actions in the face of all reason.

Also in the “dumber than dirt” and “censorious asshat” categories was 6th-place finisher Dwight Probasco of Wasilla High School in Alaska, who refused to let his school’s choir sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” at graduation because it was written by a gay man.

In fifth and seventh places are administrators too biased, cowardly, lazy, or otherwise inept to stay out of the way of faculty who are just doing their jobs. The top brass at the University of Missouri hung two of their faculty out to dry after Andrew Breitbart, perhaps the single least credible person in the country, doctored and distributed a tape he shouldn’t have had access to in the first place.

And Dean Linda Ammons of Widener Law School went after the job of a veteran professor on the pretense that he had constructed a hypothetical scenario of killing his dean… and, because she’s black and female, that makes him racist and sexist, too. Well, she either has the mental capacity of a Cuisinart (without the functionality) or she has an agenda—political or personal. Note: while I continued to track this case, I didn’t write about it further after my initial piece. My blog piece drew some tentative conclusions: it turns out that I was right, but perhaps my reluctance to excoriate Ammons in February the way I would have later in the year accounts for a finish lower than I would have predicted.

Rounding out the group is Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a Trustee of New York University, who, along with his gutless and compliant fellows, initially withheld an honorary degree from Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, because he didn’t support Israel enough. The over-reach and the irrelevance of the rationale netted him a couple of votes, but he wasn’t going to do any real harm to a public figure of Kushner’s status; this may have influenced some readers to vote elsewhere.

So… back to our winner. I confess that this wouldn’t have been my choice for the Curmie, but I said I’d go along with what the readers decided, and I meant it. My initial reluctance was founded on two things: 1). the fact that the story was recent enough that there’s still a possibility of some revelation that would affect our understanding of the story, and 2). the seemingly unpremeditated nature of the act (indeed, it was only the fact that this had occurred before that made me nominate this teacher at all). To some extent, this fiasco could be the result of inadequate training, a spontaneous reaction.

Except… well, no, it couldn’t. It does not require special training to understand that thus confining a young boy—any small child, stricken with autism or not—in this manner is criminal at least in the ethical sense if not the legal one. As reader Kirsten wrote in a comment, “The other stories are appalling on an intellectual level. But the last one is just plain inhumane and could easily have caused physical & mental harm to a child who already has other issues to deal with.” Yes. What she said.

As we look ahead to the rest of 2012, I’m thinking of dividing the Curmie for this year into taxonomies: administrators and teachers in separate categories, universities and primary/secondary schools, likewise. Or not. We’ll see what the year brings. Maybe there won’t be any worthy candidates. Uh huh. That’s likely to happen. The name of the blog is “Sweetness and Light and Everything Right,” after all…

Earthquakes in Ohio: Thank Your Friendly Neighborhood Fracker

2012-01-02T19:10:00.005-06:00

There were several earthquakes in northeastern Ohio in the last few days, making a total of eleven in the last few months in one very small area. I have family there, so the news caught my attention. Now, here’s the thing: they weren’t severe—the biggest one was a 4.0, or, as they say in southern California, “Tuesday.” But the folks around Youngstown and Warren don’t know how to deal with that stuff. Blizzards, sure. Earthquakes, not so much. Guess why… because earthquakes don’t happen there. Or at least they didn’t before fracking.

Ever-so-coincidentally, you see, Dan Popili of TribToday.com (the Website of the Warren Tribune Chronicle) reports that The Ohio Geological Survey placed the epicenter of Saturday's earthquake about a tenth of a mile from a fracking site. Even ~~corporate stooge~~ Governor John Kasich and his minions felt the need to institute a moratorium on activity, in particular the disposal of brine water pumped into wells, within a five-mile radius of the temblor site.

Of course, Jim Zehringer, the director of the state Department of Natural Resources, assures us that “The seismic events are not a direct result of fracking.” OK, two things.

First, whereas one might presume that someone making such a claim would have… you know… some credentials. You know, like being a geologist or something. Zehringer is a farmer, former owner of a poultry and fish farm, probably best known for telling a remarkably stupid birther joke. No, Gentle Reader, I don’t expect everyone in such a position to have expertise in all areas under the purview of the agency. But some expertise in some area relevant to the job would be kind of nice.

Rather, and this is hardly a problem specific to the administration of idiot Republicans (although they have more than their share), Zehringer is a politician (a former county commissioner and state representative) who might actually have been qualified for his last gig, as director of the Agriculture Department. He lasted in that job for less than a year. Any way you slice it, I don’t feel a whole lot better at being reassured by the likes of Zehringer. Oh, and everyone seems agreed that there will be more tremors in the near future.

Secondly, and more importantly, there’s that weasel-word, “direct.” No, this particular problem, this time, isn’t (perhaps) “a direct result of fracking.” It’s an indirect and inevitable result of fracking, but that’s a different thing altogether. You see, it wasn’t the hydraulic fracturing process per se that caused the problem, but rather the necessary disposal of the waste materials of that procedure. Fracking itself causes irreparable groundwater contamination, and it has indeed been linked to seismic disturbances… but in this particular case, it doesn’t seem to be directly to blame. I feel so much better now.

Importantly, this is a situation that cannot be handled on a state-by-state basis. The water that was being pumped into a well in Ohio in this case was apparently wastewater from a fracking operation in Pennsylvania. But, as is the case with respect to the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Obama administration demonstrates its characteristic cravenness and hasn’t seen fit to interfere.

There is no rationale for fracking: the environmental downside is not only quantitatively likely and qualitatively disastrous, it’s also permanent. I’m not saying that similar techniques might not someday be sufficiently low-risk to be cost-effective. But we’re not there yet, and pretending otherwise for the sake of a few dollars in the short term is somewhere between myopic and insane.

Farewell, Fighting Sioux

2011-12-31T23:42:00.004-06:00

I open by quoting myself, over six years ago:

Quick: what's the biggest crisis facing the NCAA? Graduation rates? Steroids? Illicit payments to players? Coaches trying to strong-arm faculty into changing grades for athletes who can't be bothered to go to class? The repercussions of the NBA's decision to impose a minimum age requirement? The fact that some programs produce more convicted felons than they do graduates? Tutors actually writing papers and even taking tests for athletes? The fact that an undefeated Division I football team has been denied the right to play for the national championship two of the last three years... or that a team whose only regular-season loss was to the #1 team in the country lost its BCS bid after beating a bowl team on the road in a rainstorm by “only” ten points (it would have been more except that 1) there was an outrageously bad referee's call and 2) they chose not to run up the score at the end of the game)? No, apparently the big crisis is Native American mascots.

The details have changed, but the NCAA’s absurd priorities haven’t.

I listened via computer today to the radio broadcast of today Kansas-North Dakota basketball game. It was, according to the KU announcers, at least, the last game UND will be allowed to play as the “Fighting Sioux,” because the NCAA still has nothing better to do with their time and resources than to impose Political Correctness on colleges and universities.

Certainly the disaster that is the BCS isn’t a problem. Nor is the considerable evidence that last year’s Heisman Trophy winner was bought and paid for by the eventual national champion. Nor are the proposals to expand the basketball tournament to a ridiculous number of teams, requiring players to spend yet more time out of the classroom for the sole purpose of lining the coffers of the NCAA, the networks, and the athletic departments. Nor is the confusion about eligibility, nor the underhanded attempts to circumvent the rules. Only the specifics of the real issues have changed, in other words, but at least this year’s BCS fiasco is different than the one I wrote about in that earlier post. The NCAA’s go-to choice for avoiding real issues, however, remains absolutely unaltered.

What makes this even more preposterous than the quotidian stupidity of the NCAA and apparently everyone with any position of authority in it is that virtually no one with a legitimate stake in the matter wants the change. The university and its fans like the symbol. Moreover, the Sioux mascot is, unlike, say, the grinning buffoon that is the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo (or the Notre Dame Fighting Irish’s pugnacious leprechaun, for that matter), a simple and respectful emblem.

According to Time’s Sean Gregory,

Spirit Lake, the Sioux reservation closest to the University of North Dakota's campus in Grand Forks, overwhelmingly backs the name. The tribe argues, and evidence seems to support the case, that Spirit Lake and another local Sioux reservation, Standing Rock, actually gave UND its blessing to use the nickname in a religious ceremony over 40 years ago.

In other words, the people who are supposedly insulted by the mascot… aren’t. In fact, they’re suing the NCAA for violation of religious rights.

Here’s Gregory again:

Fighting Sioux supporters argue that the NCAA is violating their religious rights. The Grand Forks Herald reported on July 21, 1969, that “a band of Standing Rock Sioux formally gave UND teams the right to use the name of ‘Fighting Sioux’ for their athletic teams.” [Spirit Lake member Frank] Black Cloud insists that Spirit Lake members also took part in this ritual blessing. (UND recognizes that a ceremony took place but says the intent of it remains unclear.) So why should a current tribal council, the NCAA or anyone else reverse the wishes of the elders who are so respected in Native American culture? “If we let an outside entity dictate to us how we should feel about our sacred ceremonies,” says Black Cloud, “what does that say about us?”

True, when the university sued the NCAA over the latter’s interventionist nannyism, the settlement gave UND three years to secure the blessing of the two Sioux tribes closest to the Grand Forks campus: Spirit Lake and Standing Rock. Of course, the latter had already done so in 1969, and even if Black Cloud is wrong about Spirit Lake joining in, a full tribal vote overwhelmingly supported maintaining the Fight Sioux symbol for the university. “‘UND has allowed us to participate and have input on some of the Indian programs they have developed,’ says John Chaske, a Spirit Lake member. ‘The school deserves to use our name. We should take pride in that. There's nothing wrong with that.’”

Ah, but despite that religious ceremony four decades ago, the Standing Rock tribal council voted against the name, and apparently refuse to put the issue to a full tribal vote, where the results might be different: “‘Aw, man, it's not right for people not to have a say,’ says Archie D. Fool Bear, a member of Standing Rock. Fool Bear says he has petition signatures from 1,000 Standing Rock residents opposing the nickname change, and he is confident his side would prevail in a full vote.”

Of course, other people who have no particular interest have weighed in. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, for example, has voiced its objection. If I remember my history correctly, this is rather like the British Prime Minister condemning a depiction of Frenchmen that the folks in Paris, Calais, and Marseilles think is fine. Black Cloud’s response: “We, as tribal members and Sioux, we don't tell other tribes what to do. We would expect that same respect from them as well.” Good luck with that.

I’d quote myself again:

I come at this issue from three perspectives which some people don't have. I have some Native American heritage: I'm two generations removed from having enough Algonquin to qualify for tribal membership; I've always been at least as proud of that part of my bloodline as I am of any of the rest of the hodge-podge of English, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, Scots, and whatever else which comprises my ancestry. As an undergrad I attended a college which, because it started as a school for the Native American population of western New Hampshire, was for many years represented by an Indian symbol, although its official use stopped a year or two before I matriculated.

I am a former resident of Lawrence, Kansas, where there are two universities with sports teams: the University of Kansas Jayhawks and the Haskell Indian Nations University Indians. That's right, at a school that might reasonably be expected to be as sensitive as any to portrayals of Native American populations, they're not the Haskell Indigenous Peoples Thunderstorms or the Haskell Native American Rottweilers: the word “Indian” appears in the school name, and it is the symbol of the university.

But, of course, the NCAA adopts a profoundly racist attitude in its attempt to be inclusive (or whatever the pet phrase is these days). Essentially it is this: actual members of the Sioux nation aren’t intelligent or worldly enough to know they’re being insulted. That linkage—unlike, say, the Fighting Scots of Monmouth College—is “hostile” and “abusive” because a bunch of people who have never come closer to Sioux culture than buying a cassette tape of Siouxsie and the Banshees (anybody but me remember them?) say so.

One more snippet from days gone by:

Of course, only Native American imagery is affected. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish, a representation which really does perpetuate a negative stereo, is unaffected. So is the oxymoronic Fighting Quaker of the University of Pennsylvania. “Warriors” are OK if they're not Native Americans: apparently Anglo-Saxon Warriors are fine. So are Spartans, Trojans, Vikings, Aztecs, and other no-doubt caricatured representations of real civilizations.

But give the NCAA time. They’ll start coming after parodies of professions next: the Oklahoma State Cowboys, Purdue Boilermakers, Santa Barbara Gauchos, and Nebraska Cornhuskers. The Sooners of Oklahoma will be forced to adopt a less euphemistic mascot and become the Land Thieves. Anyway who lost a loved one to the UDF will be offended by the Syracuse Orangemen. Then, perhaps, the NCAA will start arguing that real people's lives have been disrupted by natural phenomena, so the Miami Hurricanes, Tulane Green Wave, and Iowa State Cyclones will have to go. And just wait ‘til the feminists really start thinking about the implications of the Kennesaw State Hooters or the Oregon State Beavers.

Yeah, what that guy said.

Happy New Year, everyone. And if you haven’t done so already, please vote for the Curmie. Details here.

The Junk and the Junk

2011-12-30T15:29:00.005-06:00

A recent decision by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals simultaneously engenders legitimate debate about the 4th amendment and releases my inner 12-year-old. “The Case of the Rock on the Rod”… “The Stash on the Staff”… “What’s That Sack by Your Sac?”… There, I’m done. For now.

In January 2009, Joseph Edwards was arrested by Baltimore police on a complaint by his ex-girlfriend, who claims he had threatened her with a gun. Quite reasonably, the police patted him down to make sure he wasn’t carrying a weapon at the time of his arrest. He wasn’t.

But, after Edwards had been handcuffed and before he was transported to the police station, officers decided to check one more time. This time, the officers surrounded him and pulled the top of his sweatpants and underwear away from his body, shining a flashlight at his privates. When what to their wondering eyes should appear… not a gun, of course, but a baggie containing 43 smaller plastic bags, which in turn contained just short of three grams of crack cocaine.

But, as you have no doubt already determined from the puerile display in my introductory paragraph, the baggie was tied around Edwards’s penis. Detective Dennis Bailey “put on gloves, took a knife that he had in his possession, and cut the sandwich baggie off Edwards’ penis with the knife.” Edwards was not hurt in the incident. That’s pretty much the entirety of the relevant information: there is much strutting about with respect to whether this constituted a strip search and similar triviata. But the essential facts are noted above.

“So, what’s the problem?,” you might well ask. Well, after a conditional guilty plea to possession with intent to distribute cocaine base, Edwards appealed, arguing that the search was unreasonable. And the 4th Circuit not only agreed, but vacated the conviction.

Ah, you think, that’s because there was no legitimate reason to search inside Mr. Edwards’s underwear: the pat-down, coupled with the fact that Mr. Edwards’s hands were handcuffed behind his back, were surely enough to ensure the officers’ safety. There was no indication that Edwards was in possession of crack, therefore no probable cause for the search. Nope, not it.

Oh, so it was the public nature of what is called a “sexually invasive search.” There was no reason to subject Edwards to search of what’s inside his underwear in public: take him back to the station and do it there. Nope, not it.

What, then? The conviction was vacated because Bailey used a knife to secure the evidence. The finding is based primarily if not solely on the argument that “the drugs were removed from Edwards’ person in an unnecessarily dangerous, and thus unreasonable, manner.” There’s more:

Moreover, assuming, without deciding, that the government’s rationale supports the reasonableness of the decision to search inside Edwards’ underwear, this rationale does not justify the dangerous manner in which the contraband was retrieved from his genital area once the contraband was discovered. In fact, the government provides no reason whatsoever why the concealed contraband, once the police had determined that it clearly was not a handgun, could not have been removed under circumstances less dangerous to Edwards.

Buh?

OK, Gentle Reader, here’s where I remind you that I’m neither a lawyer not a Constitutional scholar, merely a more-interested-than-the-average-person layman. I can’t tell you if, or how, U.S. v. Robinson or Bell v. Wolfish pertain, legally. I’m confused by why the government can’t claim inevitable discovery on the appeal because they didn’t make that point earlier, but Edwards can actually win the case with an argument he doesn’t seem to have made at all. (His argument was that the search was illegal, not that it was inappropriately conducted.)

I am, in other words, just a grumpy old guy arguing on the basis of what makes sense. And what makes sense might conceivably result in what actually happened in this case, but not for the reasons articulated by Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, who wrote the majority opinion.

The Court never made a ruling on the justification for the search per se, which seems to me to be the strongest case Edwards had. The only reasonable criterion to justify a search, even of a known drug dealer (in the absence of specific evidence that he carrying right now) is officer safety. That’s a pretty shaky argument, frankly. The suspect was handcuffed and had been patted down, we presume thoroughly (and, if not, whose fault was that?). This is Joseph Edwards we’re talking about, not Harry Houdini. But apparently there’s legal precedent, so maybe…

There is no doubt that the police could have handled this situation better. Having found something… erm… interesting that clearly wasn’t a weapon, they could easily have transported Edwards to the station and removed the baggie there: this would provide for greater privacy, better light (apparently Bailey didn’t even use a flashlight for better vision during the baggie-echtomy), and probably a safer environment all around. There’s a significant difference, however, between saying that a different course of action would have been preferable and saying the one actually enacted was unconstitutional. And I confess myself unmoved by the suggestion that the use of the knife (as opposed to being arrested in a public venue) “could only cause fear and humiliation.”

After all, who was responsible for the situation? The cops? No, it was Mr. Edwards who decided to attach his stuff to his stuff. I can think of only two motivations. One would be that he knew he might be stopped by the police and suspected (with reason) that cops aren’t exactly thrilled about conducting the kind of search that ultimately uncovered his drugs. The other is a sort of burlesque routine we can see the likes of Benny Hill enacting: “Hmm… I’ve got to carry this baggie full of illicit drugs around and I don’t have any pockets. [loosens drawstring of sweatpants, looks within] Ooooh… what’s that thing? [smirking take to audience] Let’s tie it to that!”

Either way, there’s inevitably a tradeoff between safety and propriety, as dissenting Judge Alberto Diaz notes. He writes that the options proposed by the majority,

… untying, removing, or tearing the baggie—would require that officers physically touch Edwards’ penis. In my view, however, a rule that directs officers to place their hands on a defendant’s genitals as a first option for seizing contraband in a baggie that the defendant has chosen to strap to his penis seems no more attractive than the careful use of a knife.

Let’s face it, I’m guessing the founding fathers didn’t envision a constitutional crisis about the correct means by which to remove baggies of drugs from penii. Is it relevant, by the way, that the two female judges suggested means which, though arguably safer, would involve more physical contact with Mr. Edwards’s genitalia, and the male judge didn’t like those suggestions?

It’s also worth mentioning, as Diaz does, that “The district court, moreover, made no mention of the knife in its ruling. This omission was not an oversight, but rather reflected the fact that the knife was not the focus of the parties’ evidentiary presentations.”

More to the point, if we grant the legitimacy of the search itself, irrespective of the means by which it was conducted, the drugs had already been discovered, legally, by the time the allegedly inappropriate removal. It therefore makes no sense to suppress the evidence. Mr. Edwards might have grounds for a complaint or even a civil suit, but that’s another matter altogether.

Quoting Judge Diaz’s consent, again:

had the officers not used what the majority perceives to be an unreasonable method to remove the drug baggie, they nevertheless would have discovered the contraband and (at some point) seized it in some other manner. Put simply, the plainly visible contraband was already discovered before the officers determined to use a knife to remove it. Thus, I question whether the record supports the causal connection that Hudson [v. Michigan] requires before resorting “to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt.”

The bottom line is that I’m willing to grant suppression of the evidence because the search itself was illegal. But if we’re going to grant the legitimacy of the search, then we need to keep the evidence. The majority decision may be legally sound. If so, it’s a bad law.

But we did get an opportunity to snicker at stupid dick jokes because of this case. At least that’s something.

[Two side notes, completely off topic.

1). Despite not writing here until February, and taking over a month off in October and November, I’ve managed to crank out 100 blog pieces in 2011. That’s small potatoes for many people, of course, but for me it’s something of an accomplishment. I thank you, Gentle Reader, for your support, your commentary and for your “likes” on the Facebook page. I don’t know if I’ll write anything else before Sunday. If not (or even if so, obviously), Happy New Year, one and all.

2). A reminder to vote, if you haven’t already done so, for the 1st Annual (Maybe) Curmie Award, presented to whoever most embarrasses the profession of education. You must vote on the electronic ballot in the upper-right corner of this page; comments with indications of preferences will not be counted. Descriptions of the nominees are found here.]

Announcing the Nominees for the 2011 Curmie Award!

2011-12-29T14:18:00.011-06:00

As 2011 winds down, virtually everyone is compiling end-of-year lists, polls, and the like. Ever the pack-follower, Curmie can’t resist getting in on the act. Inspired by the Censorious Asshat of the Year voting over at Popehat, I have decided to award the 1st Annual (Maybe) Curmie Award.

Here are the rules. Unlike the folks at PolitiFact, I agree to present the coveted honor to whomever my readership selects. Of course, I choose the nominees, so I do have more say in the process than any other individual does. And I also get to decide the category. Being a professor, I have a natural interest in all things related to education.

So: The Curmie is awarded to the person or institution who most embarrasses the profession of education.

There are two further stipulations. First, the nominees will all be people I’ve written about in the past year and the events in question must also have occurred in 2011 (this leaves out, therefore, the Silsbee High brain trust who saw fit to throw a cheerleader off the squad for refusing to cheer her rapist by name, as the actual events happened prior to this year; the lawsuit made news this year, but the case is a couple years old). I also acknowledge that some folks will have slipped through the cracks while I was in rehearsal or whatnot.

Second, the transgressions in question must be directly related to the profession, to someone acting in an official capacity: junior high teachers who sleep with their students are abhorrent, but there’s nothing about that act that links directly to education. That there are unethical teachers is not news, and the same person might initiate a similar relationship with a child s/he knows through church, Little League, or the neighborhood.

I have narrowed the field to the eight candidates I consider most outstanding. There are no write-ins. If you wish to comment, please do so here rather than at the Facebook page. You may vote for as many nominees as you choose, although I ask that you not vote for the same candidate more than once. (I suspect the poll app at Blogger isn’t able to shut down multiple submissions from the same person. Please don’t try to find out.) The poll will be up for a week, with a winner to be announced in early January. So: there are the rules. Don’t like ‘em? Fine. Write your own damned blog.

I compiled a list of well over a dozen perfectly reasonable nominees. It was quite difficult narrowing the field, and I do apologize if your (no doubt worthy) favorite got left out. But after some thought, I present the nominees for the 2011 Curmie, in the order I wrote about them:

Dean Linda Ammons and Widener Law School, for threatening the job of law professor Lawrence Connell because he had constructed an obviously hypothetical story about killing the dean, accusing him of racism and sexism because the dean happens to be black and female.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld and the rest of the Trustees of New York University, for overstepping the largely ceremonial function of Trustees in such matters and overturning the selection of Tony Kushner for an honorary degree on the grounds that the Pultizer Prize-winning playwright was insufficiently supportive of Israel.

David W. Rasmussen of Florida State University, for allowing Charles Koch’s foundation to have veto power over faculty hires in exchange for a grant, then claiming there are no repercussions to his program’s academic integrity as a result.

Dwight Probasco, Principal of Wasilla (AK) High School, for caving to pressure “from at least one parent” and (initially) suppressing the Symphonic Jazz Choir’s rendition of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” because it was written by a gay man. He… erm… changed his tune when the ACLU got involved.

The administration of the University of Missouri for censuring two faculty members and pressuring one into writing a letter of resignation based solely on an obviously edited video compiled by serial prevaricator Andrew Breitbart: a tape which was (of course) subsequently proven to have been maliciously edited to show something quite the opposite of what actually happened. (By the way, even if the tape were accurate, the administration should have backed the faculty.)

Thomas Fleming, Superintendent of Schools in the Richland School District in Pennsylvania, for shutting down an upcoming high school production of Kismet (of all things!) because the characters are Muslims.

Police Chief Lisa A. Walter, Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen, and the rest of the gang at the University of Wisconsin-Stout for threatening to arrest (!) theatre professor James Miller for having an utterly inoffensive poster on his door, then lying about whether they’d censored him or not.

The unnamed teacher at Mercer County (KY) Intermediate School who thought that cramming an autistic 9-year-old into a bag intended for gym balls was an appropriate form of punishment.

So there you have it, Gentle Reader. Make your voice heard! The poll box is in the upper right-hand corner of this page. Polls close at 2:10 pm CST on January 5.

“Firefly” and “Fosh”: Around Every Silver Lining, There's a Dark Cloud

2011-12-28T22:29:00.018-06:00

You may recall that I wrote in September about theatre prof James Miller at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, who was threatened with a charge of disorderly conduct by university police chief Lisa Walter because he had a “Firefly” poster on his office door. No one with the intellect of a rather dim-witted chipmunk would think that the poster was a threat to anyone (in fact, it is precisely the opposite of a threat), but Chief Walter apparently doesn’t clear that heady threshold. What’s worse, even as the situation escalated, the administration—Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen and his ~~stooges~~ provost, vice-chancellor, and general counsel—backed the stupid and hubristic Walter over the stubborn but justified Miller.

Eventually, of course, they backed down to a tumult of public pressure and, frankly, well-deserved humiliation. Of course, there was no real apology, and the Idiot Sorensen continued to babble nonsensically about how the censorship he had tried to impose wasn’t really censorship, but rather sensitivity. Here was my response to that argument:

True, technically this was not an act of censorship. That would imply that the state qua state was prohibiting free expression. No, you gaggle of dimwits are acting not as the state but as employer, thereby possibly rendering your inanity legal, although still ethically unsupportable and professionally incompetent. And puh-leeze, spare me your sanctimony, your sensitivity, and your caring. Give me instead, please, an institution that values reason, personal liberties, and the free exchange of ideas… because this ain’t it, and an out-of-the-closet intellectual such as myself does not feel the slightest bit “welcome, safe, [or] secure” in this “shared community.” Indeed, you three, the chief of police, and the general counsel all terrify me.

I was rightly challenged by reader James, who pointed out that the threats to Prof. Miller were legal (criminal charges) rather than job-related (loss of job, pay cut, new assignment, etc.). So it really was censorship.

The snarkier of my readers might appreciate a new tidbit of information I only recently discovered. The whole force of the Walter/Sorensen argument relies on the notion that “it is unacceptable to have postings that refer to killing,” which, they assert, inherently involve a threat. Except that, as Ed Morrissey at Hot Air points out, “during the debate over the Scott Walker bill that limited collective bargaining for most public employee unions to wages only, this poster was seen on campus without any attempt to consider it a specific threat.”

Oops.

Anyway, two separate posts I encountered in the last couple of days have reminded me of the case. The first was Popehat’s Censorious Asshat of the Year contest, for which Chancellor Sorensen is a nominee:

...for defending the censorship of obviously satirical and non-threatening posters on a college campus and disrespecting Firefly. In Aggravation: even when he caved, could not resist justifying his clearly unlawful actions. In Mitigation: did eventually, belatedly, do the right thing. Also, Chancellor job market is awful right now, so unable to get other work.

The second prompt was a Facebook post by a friend of a video about the case created by FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). In the video, FIRE president Greg Lukianoff says that the case had a special appeal to him because he is “a huge fan of “Firefly.” In the intro, popular author Neil Gaiman warns (tongue in cheek, but not altogether inaccurately) that among “the people you do not want to upset,” that “out on the edges, beyond any of those [revolutionaries] are science fiction and fantasy fans whose favorite show has been cancelled in an untimely way.” Indeed, Lukianoff adds that after Chancellor Sorensen’s defense of the indefensible policy, “I knew that they were utterly underestimating the power of the friends of ‘Firefly’.” Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin got on board, but “when Neil Gaiman tweeted about this case to his 1.6 million Twitter followers, it was a game-changer.” It turns out the Gaiman actually knows Prof. Miller, but his tweet preceded that realization.

Gaiman makes the salient point: “what’s disappointing is that the university administration backed their police officer rather than quietly taking her aside and pointing out that she had done something that was stupid, wrong, and that would embarrass all of them.”

Finally, the university backed down, but without giving any assurance that a similar case won’t arise next year… or next week. Sorensen is either too stupid to realize the enormity of his blunder or too arrogant to admit it. Neither is a good sign for the future of UW-S.

Unfortunately, the most significant point is made by Lukianoff at the end of the video:

Something that really strikes me about this case is that one of the reasons we why won it is because the case has a built-in constituency of fans of the show “Firefly.” But what’s heartbreaking about this is that we deal with hundreds and hundreds of cases like this that don’t have a constituency. And you’d think and you’d hope that there was a constituency out there just for free speech.

This is sobering because it is true: petty morons like Walter and Sorensen can endure a little criticism; they just can’t stand up to the onslaught of celebrity. A few letters of protest: no problem. Nationwide humiliation in front of literally millions of people: that’s different.

I was thinking about this phenomenon in relation to a hot story in my own hometown (links here, here, and here). Farshid Nourimand has been soccer coach at Nacogdoches (TX) High School for three decades. He built the program from scratch, and it has been a consistent winner when bigger-name sports, to be polite, have been less successful. His former players include Clint Dempsey, now of Fulham in the English Premier League, quite possibly the best American-born soccer player now active, arguably the best ever. More importantly, Nourimand is, according to literally everyone I’ve talked to, the quintessence of “tough but fair.” He is loved in this community with a depth of sincerity and real admiration that coaches who merely win will never achieve.

One of his rules was that if you are arrested or caught with alcohol or drugs, you’re off the team for a year. Along comes a new superintendent, Fred Hayes, who thinks that’s too unforgiving a policy, and there’s a crisis… especially when three kids show up drunk at the Homecoming dance, at least one of whom had been at a party at the home of School Board President Matt Rocco. But there was no alcohol there. Nope. I believe him. My eyebrows are like that naturally.

Importantly, Nourimand’s policy had to do with athletes and athletics. He wasn’t proposing throwing kids out of school, merely saying you can’t be on my team if you don’t obey the rules. Needless to say, Board President Rocco radically misinterpreted that stance (intentionally, because he knew he’d been busted and was desperate? or unintentionally, because he has the IQ of a corn dog?): “Throwing them in DAP [NISD correctional facility] where they do nothing is not placing kids in a chance where they can win. The new policy allows students to return to school after a suspension, be monitored for drug use and undergo a rehabilitation program.”

This is, of course, classic misdirection. No one is saying the students can’t return to school after a short suspension. They just can’t play for “Coach Fosh.”
We have a similar policy in the theatre program in which I work. True, most programs require only that students merely not be on probation to be eligible for productions work. But our standards are unquestionably, unabashedly, higher. We understand that stuff happens, so there’s an appeal process, but the bottom line is that if you don’t have a really good reason why you aren’t making progress towards your degree, you’re going to sit out a semester to get your priorities straight.

Do I agree that athletes should have to sit out a full year for an arrest or a drug/alcohol related offense? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether it’s reasonable, and it is. If Coach Nourimand wants to hold his troops to a higher standard, so be it, as long as the rules are applied equally across the board.

Now, the lightened sanctions imposed against these (white, well-connected) students may or may not be a case of favoritism, because a new policy may or may not have already been railroaded into place over “Coach Fosh’s” objections. Anyway, there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by the superintendent Hayes’s decision to re-assign Nourimand from his position as Director of Athletics. Here’s Hayes’s rationale: “The challenges I had with him had to deal with the management of people, specifically coaches that work with him and then the issue of response of consequences.” Gentle Reader, if you understand that nightmare of edu-speak, I pity you. Seriously, this is a university town. One would think that after several tries just in the eleven years I’ve lived here, we could find a superintendent who isn’t too stupid to pour piss out of a boot.

The coach didn’t feel he could continue under the proposed circumstances, so he announced he’d be leaving, although he hadn’t yet decided whether to resign or to retire. On to more posturing on all sides (except by Coach Nourimand, whose gentle grace stands in glaring contradistinction to the whirlwind around him). A petition garnered over 1900 signatures; a Facebook group, over 2700 likes: this in a city of 30,000. A logo (seen here) was plastered all over town.

Ultimately, Hayes backed down, even making public a letter of apology. So it all came down to a school board meeting. The meeting was moved to the high school auditorium to accommodate the expected crowd, but even that facility proved too small for the throng of Fosh fans. Two things happened: Farshid Nourimand stayed, his announcement meeting with a standing ovation from literally hundreds of people. And Matt Rocco, who had expressed a desire to have two board members communicate with him only through his attorney, was given the boot. And there was much rejoicing.

This wasn’t Penn State fans upset at the firing of Joe Paterno, despite both declining ability and clear evidence of ethical failings resulting in the ongoing abuse of perhaps dozens of boys. No, this was a community standing up for ethics, for a coach whose won-loss record is impressive, but whose positive influence in the lives of the young men he coaches is paramount.

But we’re back at the fame thing. Just as Mr. Lukianoff, though happy for the victory, frets that the next case won’t have a “constituency” of “Firefly” fans or a famous author publicly supporting one’s cause, we can fear that the next victim of a superintendent and a school board president run amok won’t have thousands of supporters, won’t have dozens of on-field victories, won’t get a public, trans-Atlantic, call of support from one of the world’s best-known athletes.

What if the next coach to run afoul of the power-hungry and boorish (why must those two characteristics so often go together?) is new and unknown to the community? What if Coach Fosh had been just as good a role model but only a good, as opposed to great, coach? What if Clint Dempsey had lived a few miles thataway, and had played his high school ball for someone else? What if the best player Fosh had ever produced got a scholarship to play Division I soccer, and used that educational advantage to become a librarian or a social worker or an optometrist? What if it isn’t a coach, but a choir director or a history teacher?

The lessons that monomaniacs like Walter, Sorensen, Hayes and Rocco will take away from this isn’t that thinking before acting is a good thing. Alas, it’s political, not ethical: that one has to pick one’s fights. Don’t go after someone who’ll call FIRE or who can get a couple million people agitated; don’t mess with a local legend. Other than that, though…

And that makes all of us a little poorer.

Do you really need special training to know not to cram an autistic 9-year-old into a duffel bag?

2011-12-27T23:21:00.008-06:00

Every once in a while, I come across a story so mind-meltingly unbelievable I think I’m reading something from the Onion. This is one such case. I sincerely hope that this is a false allegation (which would be troubling enough in its own right) and not what it appears to be.

Anyway… there’s a story coming out of Mercer County, Kentucky about a 9-year-old boy—an autistic child—named Chris Baker who appears to have been punished for some transgression at school by being crammed into a bag intended for gym balls. Yes, really.

This much of the story seems not to be in doubt: The boy is enrolled in a program for children with special needs at Mercer County Intermediate School. He was apparently misbehaving at school to the extent that two things happened: 1). he was restrained in the bag and 2). his mother, Sandra, was called to the school.

Here’s her description of what happened next, pieced together from a number of news reports (the one linked above, plus here, here, and here):

“When I walked in, I went down his hallway, and I saw this big green bag laying in the floor beside the aide that was sitting beside the bag. And I saw it moving.” As she approached, a familiar voice from within the bag asked “Momma, is that you?”

The bag had “a drawstring at the top and it had a hole about this big around left in the top of it,” (she made a motion with her hands.) “There was no way he could get out of it, could not get his head through if he needed to.” Ms. Baker expressed concern about what would have happened in the case of an emergency: if, for example, there were a fire: “The comment I got on that was, well, we would have drug the bag out of the school. Okay. It's okay. Just drag my son down some steps and break his bones.”

A teacher’s aide was present when Ms. Baker arrived. “I told her, I said you need to get him out of the bag and you need to get him out of the bag now.” At first, the aide struggled with the drawstring, but Chris was eventually pulled out of the bag, which also had some small balls in it. “When I got him out of the bag, his poor little eyes were as big as half dollars and he was sweating. I tried to talk to him and get his side of the reason they put him in there, and he said it was because he wouldn't do his work.” Ms. Baker says that the school subsequently alleged that Chris had smirked at the teacher when she asked him to put down a basketball and threw it across the room; he was “jumping off the walls.” This was apparently not the first time he had been punished by being put in the bag as punishment.

Afterwards, Chris “was to himself, went to his room, was in there all night, didn't communicate with anybody,” and has been especially taciturn since then: “It's to the point that I don't even know he's here. That's how quiet he is.”

I yield here to Landon Bryce, a San Jose-based teacher and tutor to students with Aspergers and autism, who describes young Baker’s treatment as “careless and disrespectful.” His website, thAutcast, is subtitled “A Blogazine for the Aspergers and Autism Community.” He cites reporting from April Ellis of the Harrodsburg Herald (sorry, I can’t link it directly):

The next day, Baker said she met with MCIS principal Dana Cobb and District Special Education Director Emma Jean Tamme to discuss the incident and told them her son was not to be put back in the bag. “No matter what my son did, he did not deserve to be put in a bag and set out in the hallway like trash, and I feel like that's what they did,” Baker said.

She added she knew the bag and balls were being used as part of her son's sensory therapy, but said she did not know he was being placed inside the bag. “I think they should have made themselves more clear, and I do not approve of it,” she said. “It disturbs me and makes me mad. I want other parents to know this is going on in the school system, because they may be like me and not fully understand what's going on.”

Superintendent Dennis Davis responded to Bryce’s signing of an online petition with an apparently pro forma e-mail (but a response of any kind is welcome). Mr. Davis may or may not be engaging in lawyerly disingenuousness: his hint that there is more to the case than meets the eye (“I am not empowered to correct misinformation and misconception”) does make a certain amount of sense.

On the other hand, the missive is rife with platitudes about “qualified professionals who treat students with respect and dignity while providing a safe and nurturing learning environment” and similar slop. More to the point, the confidentiality concerns cited by Mr. Davis are relevant only with respect to student behavior. The fact that there is no denial of the salient pieces of evidence is not legitimately attributable to confidentiality. The only reasonable interpretation of Davis’s remarks that doesn’t make him simply an accomplice is that the essential facts are true, but we may not be getting the full context.

Interestingly, none of the players here—not Ms. Baker, not Mr. Bryce, not petition-creator Lydia Brown—are out for blood. Here’s the first demand of the petition, for example:

That the teacher(s) responsible for confining and restraining Christopher Baker inside the Abilitations BagOBalls bag be dismissed from position for abusing a vulnerable person (a person with a disability) OR be required to successfully complete extensive continuing education professional training in interacting with and educating Autistic students and students with other disabilities, not to be fewer than at least the equivalent of a semester-long graduate level course developed using existing standards and best practices in model state systems, and which shall specifically include techniques for appropriate de-escalation and crisis intervention.

And here’s (most of) Mr. Bryce’s response to Davis’s e-mail:

Without discussing the specifics of this case, I think it is reasonable to ask you to do the following:

1) Assure us that equipment not intended to be used for restraining students will be not be used in that manner in your district in the future, regardless of whether or not it has been used in that way in the past.

2) Provide a copy of your district policy on the use of restraint with students who have disabilities.

3) Describe the training that your district has done with staff, or required staff to do elsewhere, regarding the appropriate use of restraint with students.

4) Describe any training that your district plans to do in the future on the appropriate use of restraint.

I understand that you cannot discuss the specifics of the allegations. However, you can provide us with information that will tell us about how seriously you have previously taken the issue of ensuring that students are only restrained appropriately. Certainly you can tell us that nothing like what is alleged to have occurred will happen again, and let us know about your plans for making sure of that.

And Ms. Baker is described as having “stopped short of calling for the dismissal of school employees, but she said they should be suspended. They also need more training, she said.”

I guess I’m sort of at a loss here. I couldn’t possibly handle being a special ed teacher. I have a couple of friends who do those jobs, and I marvel at their patience and fortitude. But what kind of special training does it require to figure out that acting like a junior high bully is not appropriate behavior for any teacher with any student, special needs or not? How is this not self-evident? There may well be something else that we don’t know to this story, but I can envision no justification for what is alleged to have happened. That means either the facts as we know them are wildly distorted and Ms. Baker is flat-out lying, or firing is too easy on the (unnamed, curiously) teacher. Assuming the facts are pretty much as we have them, in a just universe, she’d be dragged off campus crammed into a duffel bag, preferably going down as many stairs as possible.

Facebook Follies

2011-12-27T00:03:00.016-06:00

As I write this, I am partially banned from Facebook. Sort of. I tried to access the site this afternoon, and got a message that I needed to log in again. Then, I couldn’t. I got a message that my computer is infected with malware. OK, so if it really is, I’ve got no problem with a little security. Buuuuuuut… (You knew this was coming, didn’t you, Gentle Reader?)

OK, there are two problems here. Problem #1: My computer is not infected with malware. Or so says my Norton Anti-Virus package, after a full-system scan totaling about 1.2 million individual items. What got turned up was a few dozen tracking cookies: another day online, in other words. Malware? Not a bit. Perhaps the problem is related in some way to my inability to post links to this blog on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, a problem I’ve been experiencing for a couple of days. Perhaps not. Anyway, given the choice between believing what Norton tells me (good or bad) and what Facebook tells me (good or bad) about whether I have a problem with my computer, guess how many times out a 100 I’m going to believe the latter. Hint: it’s an integer, and it’s less than 1.

Problem #2: After running the aforementioned scan, I tried to sign back into my Facebook account. Having dutifully checked the box swearing I had indeed checked and my computer was malware-free, I could then check into my account… with the proviso that I can’t post anything (status updates, comments, messages) for 24 hours. This means both as myself and as the admin of the Curmudgeon Central site (and of a couple of others about which most of you rightly couldn’t care less). Of course, I had to test this proposition… on line it says “for a few days.” So, we’ll see.

In any case, we’re back at two problems. Problem #1: if your super-whingy-dingy program doesn’t detect any malware now, then what is accomplished by keeping me from posting? (If it does show malware, then f*cking fix it!) Problem #2: if my computer has a problem, then shut off the IP address, not my account in general. Actually, it turns out that this is what really happened, an eventuality I discovered by taking the rather reasonable precaution of not believing anything Facebook tells me. Which brings us to Problem #2A: shouldn’t FB provide accurate information to its clientele?

All of this would pre-suppose, however, that Facebook actually cares about getting things right. They never did before, why should they now that Google+ has turned out to be so little competition? More to the point, getting it right would require a higher degree of technical sophistication than arrogance: a hierarchy of priorities with which they have little if any experience. Needless to say, Facebook provides no means of contacting whatever moron made the erroneous call or programmed the software or whatever. They’re invincible, you see. No one can survive without them, so they can do whatever they damned please. Just like MySpace. Or LiveJournal. Or VHS tapes.

So here’s the deal. Not being able to post from my laptop is not an enormous deal: I can use my phone or the desktop in the next room. And really, no one particularly cares whether I had a good Christmas, nor will they experience severe distress at missing out on some wry comment I might otherwise have made. My friends will even bear up under the strain of not seeing photographs of my cats being adorable. It’s a bigger pain in the ass that I still can’t seem to post links to this page on the CC FB page. Still haven’t figured out how or why that happened. But the annoyance, however mild, does serve to remind us all of how much Facebook has taken over many of our lives.

I get a good share of my news via Facebook posts: between my personal account and the CC page, I “like,” meaning in effect that I subscribe to newsfeeds from, literally dozens sites dealing with news and/or news analysis and commentary: The Guardian, a couple of Huffington Post pages, AlterNet, Media Matters for America, Talking Points Memo, Rachel Maddow, and a lot more. Plus, I also get news feeds from a host of other Facebook pages much like my own (although most have more subscribers than I do): Being Liberal, The Athena Tree, Proud to Be a Filthy Liberal Scum, Carlinist, Don’t Invite Anyone Who Thinks Ayn Rand Makes Sense to Your Next Party… you get the idea.

These sources provide me with not only the raw materials for most of my own blog-writing, but also with a sizeable percentage of the information that shapes my world view. Not all, of course: I still access the websites of MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc., with some regularity. Hell, I even look at the Fox News site on occasion, though more often than not I end up in disbelief that anyone would regard them as more credible than the National Enquirer. But I’m lazy. When news comes to me, it’s easier. Presumably most readers of this blog also “like” the CC Facebook page, meaning you’re even further down the food chain than I am: if you read the stuff I link to, it’s because you haven’t already seen it elsewhere.

So what we need to do—or at least be prepared to do—is to go to Plan B in a not-so-hypothetical scenario in which Facebook screws up. This might be an appropriate time to suggest that if you are a regular reader of this blog, you might glance to the right side of your screen and fill in your e-mail address where it says to do so. You won’t get an immediate notification when new material goes up, but you’ll at least get an e-mail once a day if there’s a new piece.

More importantly, we need to begin to prioritize differently. That’s been true for a long time, of course. But we need to go to news sites proactively, to talk to our friends live and in person when possible, to be a little more self-reliant and a little more truly social rather than to fritter away time on a “social network.” You and I will both readily survive my reduced Facebook presence for a day or two. Take the few minutes you might have been reading my stuff to track down an article on your own, to pet your dog, to kiss your sig-o, to play with your kids.

Thanks, Facebook. I’m most appreciative of you when you’re not working properly. As luck would have it, that’s not infrequently.

Standardized Testing and the Myth of the Meritocracy

2011-12-26T12:35:00.005-06:00

Curmie is a little behind on his reading, or at least at writing about his reading, so it’s only now we discuss an article that appeared some three weeks ago in the Washington Post (or at least on their website). The original post, by Marion Berry (no, not the crooked DC mayor, that was Marion Barry), provides a single anecdote which, he claims, provides “A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

Well, as I became notorious for saying to my Asian Theatre class a few years ago, yes and no.

Let’s start with Berry’s credentials. According to Valerie Strauss at WashPo, he’s a “veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.” According to his own website, he began his teaching career in 1952. That would make him roughly 80 years old. The last time he was actually in a classroom? Can’t say, but I’m willing to bet it wasn’t in this millennium. So while Strauss may see Berry as an authority, I see—at first glance, at least—an old guy who wants to sell more books and collect more speaking fees.

I really don’t want to denigrate Mr. Berry’s credentials, especially since I think he has a lot that’s good to say. But, much as I agree with his general assessment of standardized testing, it’s important to realize that a lot of his argument here is sheer crap.

Berry’s friend, Rick Roach, oh-so-courageously (Gasp!!!) took the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The version Roach took was administered to sophomores. (Roach’s identity and the test in question are revealed here.) Miraculously, Roach lived to tell the tale. Of course, Berry reveals a lot about himself in his description of what makes Roach “successful”: “His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles.” Ooooohh… I’m impressed.

Anyway, here’s Roach’s commentary:

I won’t beat around the bush. The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62%. In our system, that’s a ‘D,’ and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities....

It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.

At first blush, this would seem a pretty damning indictment of the test.

Trouble is, some of those questions were revealed in a subsequent post: the reading test here and the math test here. OK, we can, perhaps, criticize these questions for relevance, but not for difficulty. We’re encouraged to see how we’d do. So I checked them out. Needless to say, I got them all right. That means I’m sufficiently well-educated to survive as an above-average high school sophomore. Somehow I don’t feel the urge to add that line to my CV. I do confess that I actually had to think about one of the math questions a little, but I ask you, Gentle Reader, to remember that I haven’t been in a math class at any level in almost 37 years.

Here’s the point: if those reading questions are in fact indicative of the difficulty of the test, then Mr. Roach’s score is indeed appalling. His claim not to have known any of the math questions reveals one of two things: he is—multiple Masters degrees, well-educated children, and Caribbean condo notwithstanding—a blithering idiot, or he’s a mendacious dirtbag, willing to say anything to advance an agenda. Either way, the fact that the likes of Mr. Roach occupy any sort of leadership role in the education establishment certainly dispels any myth of a meritocracy in these matters.

Roach’s comments also include this:

If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t “college material,” would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

From what I’ve seen of Mr. Roach, I kinda wish that had happened.

I’m also impressed (not!) by this quotation from a piece by Michael Winerip in the New York Times, cited with approbation by Mr. Berry: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state [New York] had signed a letter—488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began—protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.” I am, in fact, disturbed by using standardized testing as the sole criterion to measure, well, anything or anyone: teachers, principals, schools, and students alike. But I’m more distressed by the fact that someone writing in the NYT would employ such an egregiously misplaced modifier, and that such a preposterous grammatical error would be quoted without comment by someone who purports to have solutions to all that ails American education. Irony abounds, to say the least.

Berry and Roach are absolutely correct in two areas. First, the tests are indeed designed by educationists (often Education majors who couldn't get an actual teaching job) who are granted virtual free reign, accountable to no one. Secondly, performance on a standardized test should never completely override a student’s achievements (or lack of them) for the academic year as a whole. I’ve been thinking about both these issues for a while—here’s a blog post I wrote six and a half years ago on the subject; my views haven’t changed in the interim.

Moreover, to say that cheating on these exams is endemic is rather like saying Tim Tebow is annoying. A couple of reports on recent cases are here and here.

But this doesn’t mean that standardized tests ought to disappear. At their best, they do distinguish between students from different schools, different backgrounds, different priorities. As I said recently, “there is [a] wide disparity between schools and their populations—being at the top of a weak class might be better or worse than being in the middle of a strong one. It’s useful to have some means of comparing such students.” Yes, it would be nice if the questions were devised by actual educators, if the scorers for these exams had real credentials, if there were legitimate oversight. But it’s not the test’s problem if Mr. Roach can’t handle algebra problems I was doing in 7th grade.

For all this, thanks are due to Mssrs. Roach and Berry for calling attention to some of the inadequacies in the system. Even though I strongly suspect that both of these guys are charlatans.

Ebenezer Scrooge and the Battle Against Ignorance and Want

2011-12-24T16:55:00.007-06:00

The first character with an actual name I ever played was Ebenezer Scrooge. I was in the 5th grade, and I got the role (without anything that resembled auditions) probably because my teacher, Mrs. Hamilton, figured I could learn the lines. She was right about that part, at least. I won’t say that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has been an annual ritual for the subsequent 46 years, but if you add up all the times I’ve read it, seen it staged, or watched any of six or eight different film versions, the total has to be a couple dozen or more. (And that doesn’t count the brilliant Blackadder version, which has indeed become a Yuletide tradition at Chez Curmie.)

Last night, my wife and I watched, for the first time I can recall, the Guthrie Theatre version from 1982, directed by Paul Miller. There were a lot of things I didn’t like: I thought the framing device of Dickens trying to finish writing the story while being interrupted by Christmas celebrants was too cute by half; found it a little creepy that the same actress (Keliher Walsh) played Scrooge’s lost love, Belle, and also his nephew Fred’s wife; got more than a little bored at the overly-extended Fezziwig scene.

Still, it is an effective adaptation, with a strong performance from Richard Hilger in the leading role. What works particularly well in this version is Dickens’s undercurrent of social commentary: it is not exactly a revelation that he was a keen observer of his culture, and that from Bleak House to Oliver Twist to Great Expectations, he showed a profound understanding of the effects of poverty.

Virtually any version of A Christmas Carol will play up the notion that Scrooge, prompted by visitations from the ghost of his partner Jacob Marley and of the three apparitions representing Christmases past, present and future, comes to appreciate the true meaning of Christmas. But this version is simultaneously more and less “Christian” than the norm. References to Jesus per se, for example Tiny Tim’s famous declaration (quoted by his father) that he hoped people had seen him in church that day because it “might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see,” are relatively speaking downplayed. But the implicit message that Christian behavior is antithetical to the Scrooge of the prologue could not be clearer. It struck me that there’s a universality to this Scrooge that is often lacking. Maybe it’s just my mood, or that I’m particularly attuned to discussions of poverty and its manifestations in the wake of the recent squabble over the extension of the payroll tax cut, the manifold demonstrations of income inequality, the #Occupy movement, and so on.

But it sure seemed to me that we find Hilger’s Scrooge rather charmingly curmudgeonly early on. He is an eccentric, but a person, not a gross caricature of a miserly 1%-er. We have sympathy if not empathy for him when he is terrified by Marley’s warnings.

There is a melancholy feel to the visit of the Ghost of Christmas Past, and a cautionary tone to Christmas Yet to Come’s revelations. But what happens with Christmas Present, in the scenes at Bob Cratchit’s and at Fred’s, but perhaps even more so subsequent to those moments, with Scrooge alone with the Spirit, defines this production.

At the Cratchits’ house, the goose, says the Narrator (Charles Dickens himself, played by Marshall Borden), “Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family… everyone had had enough.” The notion of “enough” is twice admired in this version; although such discussion isn’t in the book, per se, the original story does indeed make the same point in a different way.

One other change is the shortening of Mrs. Cratchit’s denunciation of Scrooge. In the book, she calls him an “odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man”; Dickens tells us “Scrooge was the Ogre of the family. The mention of his name cast a dark shadow on the party, which was not dispelled for full five minutes.” Here, she makes her point, is mildly admonished for being uncharitable at Christmas, and she and everyone else move on. Similarly, there is teasing of Scrooge (in absentia) at Fred’s party, but Scrooge is an object of pity more than contempt. Fred says, “I am sorry for him; I couldn't be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims? Himself, always.” Later, he adds, “He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can't help thinking better of it—I defy him—if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after year, and saying Uncle Scrooge, how are you? If it only puts him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds, that's something; and I think I shook him yesterday.” Against all odds, apparently, Fred turns out to be correct.

Most dramatized versions of this story, whether play or movie, show the arc of Scrooge’s character in a more or less linear progression from “humbug”-ing misanthrope to munificent benefactor. Not here. The visit of Christmas Future is nothing more than a coda; the heavy lifting has already been done by his brethren. There is little doubt that the climactic moment here is in a scene which is actually dropped in many adaptations. Here’s the text of the original—this production shortens it but also calls attention to it:

“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw!”

“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. “Look here.”

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man's,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!”

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

The bell struck twelve.

From here on, it’s all coda. Scrooge’s transformation is complete; the scene with Christmas Yet to Come merely confirms it.

Like any great artwork, and A Christmas Carol is no less, this novella/play/film resonates in different ways at different times to different people. But this time, in this place, it speaks of the terrors associated with Ignorance and Want. We need to beware them both, that Doom might be erased. The essence of Christmas—the real stuff, not the commercialized nightmare in which trips to Walmart will outnumber those to Church by a factor of… what?... 10? 100?—is in love and compassion: qualities not unique to Christians, nor, alas, universally practiced by those claiming religious authority.

Dickens knew that, of course. The Religious Right has always been with us: “There are some upon this earth of yours,” says Christmas Present, speaking for his fellow Spirits, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.” Words to live by.

Whatever seasonal holiday you celebrate, Gentle Reader, may it be filled with love, peace, joy, and charity. And as we enter a New Year, let us re-double our efforts to put an end to Ignorance and Want.

PolitiFact Earns Its Own "Pants on Fire"

2011-12-22T18:16:00.012-06:00

There was a time not long ago that PolitiFact, the fact-checking project initiated by the St. Petersburg Times, was widely and universally acclaimed. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and might well have deserved it. But that was back in those halcyon days when politicians of both parties at least pretended to care about the truth.

Since then, three things have happened. I suspect they’re not unrelated, although teasing out the causal links is a little more than my feeble brain can handle, at least at present.

• 1. News sources have become increasingly polarized—not partisan, necessarily, but locked into a narrative that is seldom shaken even with facts. The corollary to this point is that an increasing number of Americans get their news from sources that make only token attempts at objectivity (cough… FoxNews… cough).

• 2. Largely because of the Tea Party—the largest ever assemblage of misinformed knuckle-draggers—the lunatic fringe of the Right has become mainstream in the GOP. This isn’t to say that the left is devoid of loonies, but they still tend to be thought of as outsiders. There is no liberal counterpart to Glenn Beck, to Michele Bachmann, to Louis Gohmert. Are there progressives that stupid and that crazy? Sure. But they don’t get the platforms of their right-wing brethren.

• 3. It’s become Amateur Hour at PolitiFact. Despite great bluster and pseudo-solemnity from the PF muckety-mucks, it is certainly true that they apply different standards to different claims. I talked about this phenomenon in June, wondering when “when PolitiFact got into the implications business. They sometimes consider a statement based on its literal truth, sometimes (apparently) on what someone might think it implies. Sometimes they give a speaker the benefit of the doubt as to what s/he might have meant….”

In April, I somewhat presciently called attention to what I called a “particularly inept” analysis of claims that the Paul Ryan budget plan would “eliminate Medicare.”

Why “prescient,” you ask? Well, the incompetent, misleading, illogical pronouncement that Democratic claims about the Ryan plan merited a “Pants on Fire” rating (to be fair, the ads weren’t exactly above reproach) served as the foundation for declaring those Democratic assertions the “Lie of the Year” for 2011. I call Bullshit.

There are several parts to this story. Let’s start with the original analysis itself. PolitiFact “rulings” (yes, that’s their term for it—they take themselves, if not their work, very seriously) tend to be anonymous. This one is. The author, whoever he or she may be, grants that the Ryan plan would be “a huge change” and “a dramatic change of course,” and that “seniors would have to pay more for their health plans if it becomes law.” But s/he takes issue with the characterization of “ending” Medicare, calling it “a major exaggeration.” This is interesting terminology, by the way, because even if true this wouldn’t qualify for “Pants on Fire” status, let alone “Lie of the Year.”

The PF Pundit (let’s call him/her something non-gender specific, like “Moe,” which could be short for Maurice or Maureen, and has the advantage of identifying the writer as a Stooge… no offense to my friend Mo—no “e”—who is anything but stupid) sniffs that “Democrats, including Obama, have said the plan would end Medicare ‘as we know it,’ a critical qualifier. But the 30-second ad from the DCCC makes a sweeping claim without that important qualifier.” So we’re basing the decision for Lie of the Year not on an actual lie repeated ad nauseum (e.g., “The economic stimulus created ‘zero jobs.’”).

No, Moe—and Moe’s masters—decided that a single, arguably accurate, statement in a single web ad ought to be the centerpiece for our collective indignation. (Be it noted, other Democrats have echoed the claim, but nowhere near to the extent of all the “failed stimulus” crap that passes for objective analysis in the corporate media. And the original article takes issue only with a single web ad.) Let’s face it, if the concession that Democrats in general aren’t really making the “exaggerated” claim isn’t enough, then the fact that under the Ryan plan Medicare would pay for only 32% of seniors’ health-care costs by 2030 (and get worse from there) isn’t going to matter to ol’ Moe. By the way, the link I provided here isn’t to some commie pinko website; it’s to the official report of the Congressional Budget Office.

Moe then whinges that the DCCC ad in question “claims that participants would have to find $12,500 to pay for Medicare.” Two points. First, Moe, if you’re going to get all pissy about minor details of accuracy, you might notice that the ad says “health care,” not Medicare. The Dems are saying the GOP is ending Medicare, remember? Really, Moe, try to keep up. Secondly, the claim is absolutely, unequivocally, factually true. Nowhere in the ad is there any claim that seniors will have to spend $12,500 more. If I’m contemplating buying a new house and tell my friend that I’m worried about finding $1700 a month in mortgage payments, I shouldn’t have to footnote my remarks by saying that I’m already paying half of that. Moe’s argument is unadulterated bovine feces.

Ah, but Moe isn’t done: “Still another problem with the ad involves who’s immediately affected by the Republican proposal. In one scene, the ad shows a senior citizen pushing a walker behind a lawn mower. A teenager looking on eats an apple and says, ‘You missed a spot.’ In reality, people 55 and older won’t see changes under the Ryan plan.” Seriously, Moe? That’s what you’ve got? Perhaps, just perhaps, the scene in the ad is intended to take place in a (thank God) fictional future… when people a couple of years younger than I (my wife, for example) are trying to figure out how to stay alive because Paul Ryan won’t tax his fatcat friends at the rate they paid under the sainted Reagan. Indeed, the entire ad can be taken as representing a “what would happen if…” scenario. No one believes the spot represents a literal representation of the present. I understand, Moe, that you can’t comprehend that line of reasoning. It requires the barest sliver of imagination, a quality that you and your masters evidently lack. Sorry, hallucinations don’t count.

Finally, there’s the utterly ridiculous claim that when the Republicans voted to end Medicare (as we know it), they didn’t really vote to end Medicare because it was a non-binding resolution. Moe, you crack me up. Seriously, that one idiot pseudo-journalist can go through this many contortions to justify an utterly absurd conclusion is really amusing. Or at least it would be if your organization didn’t have a little residual credibility: enough so that someone somewhere might think you have the integrity of snake-oil salesmen and/or intellectual superiority to a watermelon. We get it, they didn’t end Medicare. But that little dog and pony show they staged sure as hell included a vote on “a budget” (your description, Moe, not mine), and they sure as hell did vote as pretty little lockstep drones to radically reduce medical coverage for people who have been paying taxes for years.

Had it been a “real vote,” and been shot down in the Senate or vetoed by a President who’s pretty inept but not that brain-meltingly stupid, the pragmatic effect would have been precisely the same. Not sure if that would have satisfied Moe, however. And this, of course, is only the first salvo in the Republicans’ attacks on everyone not rich enough, scared enough, or stupid enough to sign on to their greed- and paranoia-induced assault on every social program that doesn’t benefit primarily those who don’t need the help.

Fast forward a few months. PolitiFact, as usual, announces its “Lie of the Year” voting. For at least two years in a row, the site’s viewers and editors/staff selected the same contender. In 2009, it was “Death panels,” capturing an impressive 61% of the vote against some pretty good competition (the birthers, for example). Last year, the readers and editors alike selected “A government takeover of health care,” with 44% of the readers’ votes, again against some pretty good whoppers (my personal favorite, that “94 percent of small businesses will face higher taxes under the Democrats' plan”—the actual number is under 3%—came in fourth).

This year’s finalists, in addition to the eventual winner:

• “President Obama ‘went around the world and apologized for America.’”

• “The Obama administration's review of obsolete regulations was ‘unprecedented.’”

• “The vaccine to prevent HPV can cause mental retardation.”

• “Abortion services are ‘well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.’” [this absurd claim by Jon Kyl was the actual subject of my April piece, linked above; this one, by the way, got my vote]

• “Because of more restrictive voting laws, Republicans ‘want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.’”

• “Scientists are ‘questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. … (It is) more and more being put into question.’”

• “Congressional Republicans have introduced dozens of bills on social issues and other topics, but ‘zero on job creation.’”

• “The economic stimulus created ‘zero jobs.’” [You didn’t think I’d pulled that example I used earlier out of thin air, did you, Gentle Reader?]

• “I didn't raise taxes once.” (President Obama)

A decent enough list, although some are merely poor choices of phrasing, others are pretty much insignificant, and others are so preposterous that no rational person would believe them (which after all, is what keeps Michele Bachmann at least marginally amusing instead of terrifying).

Two things out of the ordinary happened when the finalists were announced. First, the leftie blogosphere lit up about the stupidity of including a “100% True” statement as a contender for “Lie of the Year.” CrooksandLiars’ Susie Madrak wrote, “Capping costs to beneficiaries, closing the traditional fee-for-service program, and forcing seniors to enroll in new private coverage, ends Medicare by eliminating everything that has defined the program for the last 46 years.” In other words, “ending Medicare” isn’t far off the mark. At the very least, it falls under the category of unexceptional political hyperbole which, for example, declares the current President a socialist.

Secondly, Paul Ryan started soliciting supporters to stuff the ballot box, as it were, encouraging them to “Help me fight the lies, falsehoods, and attacks of the Left by casting a vote to show the Democrat’s lie that Republicans voted to ‘end Medicare’ is the worst political lie of 2011.”

Despite this anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) maneuver, however, the actual readers of PolitiFact prevailed, and the “killing Medicare” claim came in only third, behind the “zero jobs” claim and the ridiculous distortion of Planned Parenthood’s priorities. So far, so good.

But, as you know, the editors over-rode the readers. This is troubling for a variety of reasons, not least because Bill Adair and Angie Drobnic Holan (they have names!) admit that even conservative think-tankers like Norman Ornstein agree that a slight tweak to the language of a handful of progressives would satisfy even him. Adair and Holan proceed to note that

At times, Democrats and liberal groups were careful to characterize the Republican plan more accurately. Another claim in the ad from the Agenda Project said the plan would “privatize” Medicare, which received a Mostly True rating from PolitiFact. President Barack Obama was also more precise with his words, saying the Medicare proposal “would voucherize the program and you potentially have senior citizens paying $6,000 more.”

In other words, even though more incendiary language has been employed, the de facto leader of Democrats wasn’t the one to do so.

Ah, but, quoth the PF morons, “more often, Democrats and liberals overreached.” More often? Evidence, please. You’re supposed to be freaking journalists. If your claim is true, back it up. If it isn’t, then, to steal a line I saw posted on Facebook today, off is the general direction in which I wish you would fuck. Adair and Holan then proceed to run through the same tired and unconvincing litany employed by our friend Moe in the original post. Oh, and they point out that other ~~self-appointed incompetents~~ “fact checkers” agree with them. Trouble is, they’re still wrong.

Steve Benen sums up the argument this way:

I’ve been trying to think of the best analogy for this. How about this one: imagine someone owns a Ferrari. It’s expensive and drives beautifully, and the owner desperately wants to keep his car intact. Now imagine I took the car away, removed the metallic badge off the trunk that says “Ferrari,” I stuck it on a golf cart, and I handed the owner the keys.

“Where’s my Ferrari?” the owner would ask.

“It’s right here,” I’d respond. “This has four wheels, a steering wheel, and pedals, and it says ‘Ferrari’ right there on the back.”

By PolitiFact’s reasoning, I haven’t actually replaced the car — and if you disagree, you’re a pants-on-fire liar.

Not bad. Medicare is more of a Toyota, and the Ryan plan a Yugo for the price of a Cadillac, but the point is still pretty clear.

Interestingly, Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard agrees:

Truthfully, the notion that Paul Ryan's plan will “end Medicare as we know it” is a fair assessment. The idea it flatly “ends Medicare” might be a bit too reductive, as there will still obviously be a federal program to help seniors get medical coverage and those currently over a certain age will be guaranteed to get Medicare as we know it. But broadly, I don't think it's a lie. In fact, “ending Medicare as we know it” is a good thing. The program is over $30 trillion in debt. Any politician who tells you that that they can preserve the program as it is and still get costs under control is probably lying to you. And I think Paul Ryan has basically been open about the fact that the status quo in Medicare must change.

See what he did, there? He calls the Dems’ claim “a bit too reductive,” then argues why Medicare as we know it should end. We can agree or disagree with his opinion (I personally think there should be some tightening of the belt in Medicare, but it is hardly the first place I’d go to reduce the federal deficit), but it is honest and thoughtful: two things PolitiFact is not.

The howling on the left, therefore, may be a trifle overwrought, but it is not without legitimacy. Paul Krugman, who I venture to say knows more about economic structures than Adair, Holan, Moe and me combined, agrees. He also writes that:

... the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear ‘balanced’—and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

I’m not as ready as Mr. Krugman to ascribe motives to PolitiFact’s inane choice. There’s nothing inherently political about their decision—utterly unjustified, yes, but not necessarily political. Fact is, they’re just inept. An earlier piece by Hemingway, written just before instead of just after PolitiFact’s big announcement, demonstrates pretty clearly that they’re just as inept at criticizing the right as they are the left.

PolitiFact’s problem is that they started to believe their own press clippings. They got lazy, smug, and arrogant. They substituted sloth for research, acquiescence for skepticism, petulant defensiveness for argumentation. They aren’t fact-checkers at all—fact-checkers would understand that the denotative and connotative accuracy of a statement are often radically different. They would understand that an argument can be literally true but ultimately irrelevant: but that doesn’t make it anything less than true. They would understand that there’s a continuum between fact and opinion, and that the latter is almost always going to come into play: and the way to deal with that is to acknowledge it rather than pretend to a fallacious pseudo-obectivity. They would, in short, not be PolitiFact.

Did PolitiFact render themselves “useless and irrelevant”? Yes. But that, of course, is only my opinion.

NDAA, Take 2. What's Really In It?

2011-12-20T23:54:00.006-06:00

The day after I posted my most recent piece, on the National Defense Authorization Act, I received a Facebook message from a reader who also happens to be a personal friend. He didn’t want to get into a public debate, he said, but he encouraged me to check out this article by Adam Serwer in Mother Jones. My friend continued, “And it's not as if Mother Jones is some right-wing outlet, either. If this was a Constitutional tragedy, MJ would be howling about it.” As it happened, I’d seen it, and, shortly thereafter, a similar essay by Wendy Gittleson on AddictingInfo and a rant by Milt Shook on AngryBlackLady.

Minor point first: I’m not convinced. Given a choice between Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian on the one hand and a couple of bloggers I’ve never heard of on the other, I find it difficult to come down hard on the side of the latter.

More importantly, as I fancy myself more interested in the ideas than in their proponents, even those who aren’t as appalled by the NDAA as I am are hardly enthusiastic. Serwer writes that the language of the bill “allows people who think the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks gives the president the authority to detain US citizens without charge or trial to say that.” Later he adds that “Codifying indefinite detention on American soil is a very dangerous step, and politicians who believe the military should have an even larger domestic counterterrorism role simply aren't going to be satisfied with this.” Gittleson calls the legislation “a stab to basic civil liberties, and possibly unconstitutional.” On PoliticsUSA, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, arguing that the legislation does not apply to Americans, nonetheless write, “Yes, NDAA was poorly written originally and even after the changes is a crappy bill.” These are the people, mind you, who argue that it isn’t as bad as some of us worry.

Moreover, whatever else may or may not be true, Serwer’s argument that the bill is more or less benign because “A last minute compromise amendment adopted in the Senate, whose language was retained in the final bill, leaves it up to the courts to decide if the president has that power [to indefinitely detain without trial an American citizen suspected of terrorism who is captured in the US], should a future president try to exercise it” is flat-out inane. The courts will always decide on the constitutionality of a law, but 1). to argue, as Serwer does, that this bill won’t provide current or future Presidents cover to over-reach is naïve to the point of absurdity, and 2). do you really want to entrust your civil rights to the Roberts court?

All that said, I might well be wrong; I certainly hope I am. And that, more than the specifics of the case, is what I want to talk about this time around: the fact that we’re about to get another piece of legislation about which intelligent people disagree. That contention, however, is not so much about whether the policies are appropriate: I’ve yet to see any positive commentary about the NDAA that isn’t either bellicose blathering or a milquetoast assertion that it isn’t as bad as it might have been (“the version the President is going to sign is better than the version he was going to veto,” in Gittleson’s words).

No, the question here isn’t whether this is a good bill—it isn’t—but, rather, what it actually says. Serwer is right that the provision to exempt American citizens, that “Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities,” is “cop-out language.” It allows itself, presumably intentionally, to be a Rorschach test for policy-makers: megalomanical Presidents (apologies for the redundancy) can see what they want; those capable in both intellectual and ethical terms of reading the Constitution will see it differently. All bets are off when the goobers that gave us Citizens United are making the call.

But it seems clear that at some level the legislators themselves can’t agree on what the legislation means. I’m not talking here about some purely active and 100% volitional misreading (cf. “death panels”). Nor am I talking about the all-too-common practice of voting on a bill without actually having, you know, read it. (Rep. John Conyers took a lot of heat a while back for admitting he didn’t actually read 1000-page documents crammed full of legalese. Neither do his colleagues, of course, presenting us with the dilemma of whether to condemn Conyers for his lack of shame at not doing his damned job or to grudgingly admire him for confessing to a sin we’re pretty damned certain he shares with literally every other member of Congress on either side of the aisle.)

Rather, in this case, the debate isn’t about whether it’s a good idea to allow potentially dangerous American citizens arrested in this country to be detained indefinitely without trial based on suspicion of terroristic affiliations: it’s whether this bill does that or not. Senators Franken and Paul think so; Senators Feinstein and Kirk don’t.

Senator Carl Levin, who co-authored the bill and therefore ought to know what was intended, said that although some changes were not made to the bill’s language after consultation with the Administration, these discrepancies are “relatively modest because the provision already excludes all U.S. citizens. It also excludes all lawful residents of the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution.” But that, of course, isn’t necessarily what the bill says. And to say that Sen. Levin is pretty much a buffoon (just not quite as scary as his GOP counterpart, John McCain) is to engage in understatement rather than hyperbole.

Moreover, that same session in the Senate produced this exchange:

Senator Durbin: Section 1031, as I understand it, would be a departure from current law and would say that those who are American citizens can be detained indefinitely if they are suspected of certain terrorist conduct. I ask the Senator from Colorado: Is that the point the Senator made in his statement?

Senator Udall: The Senator from Illinois is correct. Mr. President, 1031 would do just that, and it would come directly at a piece of law, posse comitatus, which dates back to the Civil War, that is held dear by all of us in America because it distinguishes between the military used to protect us against foreign foes and how we manage our own civil affairs here at home. Also, as the Senator alludes to, it causes questions to be raised about something that is very sacred in our system of law, which is the writ of habeas corpus. You have to prove why you hold someone. You cannot detain an American citizen indefinitely in any other circumstance.

So where does that leave us? Damned if I know.

The media, useless as always, have generally avoided the issue altogether. Here’s the entirety of Charlie Savage’s discussion of the subject in the New York Times about President Obama’s decision to remove the veto threat:

…the bill includes a narrower provision, drafted by the Senate, authorizing the government to detain, without trial, suspected members of Al Qaeda or its allies—or those who “substantially supported” them—bolstering the authorization it enacted a decade ago against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Notice anything missing? Like any mention of a). the temporal parameters of this detention, b). who determines (without a trial) what constitutes “substantial support,” c). whether this provision does or does not pertain to U.S. citizens (not the same thing as whether it changes existing law with respect to citizens), or d). whether the location of the arrest is relevant.

There’s a difference between arresting a Saudi national in Cairo and shipping him off to Gitmo for indefinite detention (not that I approve of that, either) and picking up an American citizen in Peoria based on the pretense of terroristic sympathies. The possibilities for abuse in the latter case are manifold. Seriously, if Newt Gingrich wants to arrest judges who don’t rule the way he wants them to, can you imagine what he or some like-minded lunatic might do to someone named Abdul Mohammed (or Bob Smith, for that matter, if ol’ Bob pissed him off enough), evidence or no evidence?

If you’re reading this blog, chances are pretty good you’re not a fan of the civil liberties implications that might be at play here. But are they at play? Neither the United States Senate nor the press seems to know. Perhaps, just perhaps, that’s not such a good thing.

We Won't Get Fooled Again... except this time

2011-12-15T22:42:00.009-06:00

That the US Senate would pass a bill I consider an abomination is not really that shocking. But that my allies would be the likes of Rand Paul, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn, or that my opposition would include Amy Klobuchar, Sherrod Brown, and Patrick Leahy… that is seriously weird. Of course, I’m also on the same side as Al Franken, Tom Harkin, and Bernie Sanders, and opposed by Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell… and now everything makes sense again. Sort of.

I’m talking, of course, about the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, with its controversial provision which allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. When this frankly scandalous piece of legislation got the White House imprimatur yesterday—President Obama had been threatening to veto it, but now says he’ll sign it tomorrow—I linked to this article and wrote on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, “WHAT??? Is there really a difference between being actively evil and merely capitulating to evil at every opportunity?”

That was unfair. I apologize to the legitimately craven, those who would like to stand up to the Dark Side, but just can’t muster the gumption to do so. On this issue, at least, they have nothing in common with Barack Obama, who is indeed actively evil… or, at the very least, whose vaunted knowledge of constitutional law seems to have a blind spot on that whole habeus corpus thing that has only been the hallmark of English and subsequently American jurisprudence since the 13th century. (I mean, really, you can’t expect the poor lad to keep up with all the new developments, right?)

Okay, before we go any further, it’s time to reiterate that I’m neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar, and to concede that we’re not really talking about habeus corpus, per se, but rather a first cousin of it. Habeus corpus, after all, is a means of securing the release of those illegally detained. This bill provides a means by which an obviously unethical and unconstitutional practice that runs counter to centuries’ worth of legal precedent is rendered “legal.”

My mistake was in believing, perhaps more on faith than on evidence, that the President’s early objections to this legislation were based on civil libertarian concerns. They weren’t. They were, apparently, all about turf wars, making sure that it was the President and not (gasp!) Congress who had the prerogative to violate the civil rights of American citizens. Glenn Greenwald’s piece on Salon.com is more comprehensive than I could be, and includes valuable links to statements by the likes of the ACLU and Human Rights Watch. Here’s a little of HRW executive director Kenneth Roth’s commentary:

By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law. In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side….

It is a sad moment when a president who has prided himself on his knowledge of and belief in constitutional principles succumbs to the politics of the moment to sign a bill that poses so great a threat to basic constitutional rights….

President Obama cannot even justify this serious threat to basic rights on the basis of security. The law replaces an effective system of civilian-court prosecutions with a system that has generated the kind of global outrage that would delight recruiters of terrorists.

It’s not often that I quote Rand Paul with approbation, but I can’t find anything to argue with here:

… detaining citizens without a court trial is not American… [if the law passes] the terrorists have won.

We're talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk. Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.

Of course, there’s also Mark Kirk:

We as Americans have a right to a speedy trial, not indefinite detention. We as Americans have a right to a jury of our peers, which I would argue is ... not enlisted or military personnel sitting in a jury. You cannot search our businesses or place of business or our homes without probable cause under the Bill of Rights. You cannot be deprived of your freedom or your property without due process of law, and that, I would say, is not indefinite detention. I would actually argue that no statute and no Senate and no House can take these rights away from you.

And yes, having essentially articulated the manifold reasons this legislation is unconstitutional, misrepresented and downright scary, Senator Kirk proceeded to vote for it, anyway.

Kirk wasn’t alone. Here’s Dianne Feinstein: “Congress is essentially authorising the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge. We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge.” Then she voted for the bill, too.

OK, could we have one big chorus of “W.T.F.”?

Supporters of this bill claim that it merely codifies existing practice (in which case, why do we need it?), and doesn’t extend the tentacles of governmental power. There may, unfortunately, be some truth to this allegation (if so, I assure you that it’s purely coincidental). The notion of constitutional rights became distorted beyond recognition in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the desperate passage of the PATRIOT Act, which managed somehow to be frighteningly repressive and downright silly at the same time. Similar, and further, invasions of personal privacy became central to the legacy of a power-hungry President named ~~Dick Cheney~~ George W. Bush.

Those of us who voted for Mr. Obama in part because of Mr. Bush’s cynical and indeed Machiavellian assertions of executive power to do essentially whatever the hell the President wants have been, to say the least, bitterly disappointed. The Obama administration has extended chronologically and in some cases substantively about every Bush-Cheney over-reach. Rep. Jerry Nadler sums this up nicely in his response to the assertion that this bill doesn’t really make substantive changes to civil liberties:

It doesn't codify existing law. It codifies claims of power by the last two administrations that have not been confirmed by [the Supreme Court]—rather terrifying claims of power, claims of the right to put Americans in jail indefinitely without a trial, even in the United States.

Nadler makes an important distinction: what is existing law and what a pair of megalomanical administrations claim it to be are hardly interchangeable concepts.

Tellingly, if Obama had any real principles, he could have asserted them on this issue. In political terms, there was an opportunity here: some 40 Republicans in the House voted against this bill, and another half-dozen in the Senate joined them. On one of the few occasions GOP legislators haven’t been in lock-step, the Obama administration characteristically fumbled the ball. But, as noted above (and with striking clarity by Greenwald), no one in the executive branch seems to have had the slightest inclination to follow the path of civil liberties… not when there is power to be consolidated, at any rate.

Ultimately, it all boils down to the lyrics of the great Who song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Three years ago, we were all thinking, “Change it had to come. We knew it all along.” Trouble is, the more salient part of the song comes later: “Meet the New Boss. Same as the old boss.” Don’t you hate it when Pete Townshend is right?

The Blaze: Sanity Is Not Always on the Menu

2011-12-13T22:35:00.010-06:00

I actually remember citing Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze, a while back because, curiously enough, they had the best analysis of one of Andrew Breitbart’s scams (unfortunately, the links to video evidence no longer work). Ah, but it is Glenn Beck’s website, after all, so we can’t expect the tin-foil hat brigade to be entirely silent.

This week, you may recall, was the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. It got less hype than I would have expected—it wasn’t until I was chatting with one of my students before my 11:00 a.m. class that I even realized what day it was. Curious, really… as Americans, we’re good at remembering our defeats (Alamo, anyone?). Anyway, apparently I wasn’t the only one who sort of forgot that Wednesday wasn’t just Wednesday.

At Sidwell Friends School, the chichi private school attended by the Sasha and Malia Obama, the lunch menu that day included the following:

Asian Mushroom Soup
Oriental Noodle Salad
Classic Spinach Salad
Teriyaki Marinated Chicken Strips [the virulently un-American repast pictured above]
Szechuan Tofu & Veggies
Garlic Roasted Edamame
Vegetable Fried Rice
Fortune Cookies

O.M.G. It’s Arma-freaking-geddon. Or so our friends at The Blaze would have us believe. Some pseudo-journalist named Eddie Scarry sniffs, “It’s obviously not Sasha and Malia Obama‘s fault but Sidwell Friends School, the private school they attend in Washington, is serving Japanese food on Wednesday–Pearl Harbor Day.” After listing the menu, he pulls out the big guns for his big boffo conclusion, which reads, in its entirety, “Up until 9/11, the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by the Japanese in 1941 was the bloodiest day in U.S history.”

Anyone else find something a little flawed in this story? I mean, apart from the fact that Antietam was nearly ten times worse than Pearl Harbor in terms of casualties? Like the fact that the “Japanese” cuisine that’s so horrible to serve is mostly Chinese, for example? Most of the items on that menu are either generically Asian or specifically not Japanese. The exceptions would be the edamame and the teriyaki: but neither of them is Japanese-specific. Edamame is more Japanese than anything else, but is also used in Chinese and indeed in Hawaiian cooking. To call teriyaki intrinsically Japanese at this point is the equivalent of insisting that hot dogs are German.

Even if we grant the edamame and teriyaki as Japanese, however, that leaves the tofu (Sezchuan: inherently Chinese) and the fried rice and fortune cookie (both Chinese-American). Most “Oriental” salads have more in common with Chinese (or Thai or Vietnamese) rather than Japanese traditions. I do know it requires a 6th-grade education to know this, but perhaps someone might mention to the crack staff at the Blaze that the Chinese were the good guys during WWII. Not all Asians are the same, Eddie.

The leftie-leaning blogosphere (here are Gawker, DeathandTaxesMag and DCJunkies, for example) has been having a good time with this (ahem!) story, largely because it demonstrates so clearly that the Blazes of the world will say anything to try to denigrate Mr. Obama. Well, of course, they’re actually too ~~chicken shit~~ coy to say something offensive; rather, in their craven smarminess, they insinuate it. The ploy is transparently stupid, complete with the snarky admission that the girls aren’t really responsible for the menu at the school they attend. (Curiously enough, the parent of a student at the school does appear to be culpable in their eyes.)

It will come as no surprise that the intellectual giants who read the Blaze rose quickly to the bait. Duffer319 opines, “this is sad. leave it up to Obama” [I kept the original capitalization just for you, Gentle Reader.] ReaganThatcherChurchill (could I make this shit up?) proclaims “This is Meechelle’s Childhood Obesity Program. She wants kids starving while trying to use chopsticks.” PhilipZhao chimes in, “Under Obama, Americans will have to forget Alamo, forget Pearl Harbor and forget 9/11.” But it’s some cretinous yahoo who goes by SeeJaneMom who really gets to the point, calling Sasha and Malia “smugly a$s-ed First Rug Rats.” How dare those girls… um… whatever they did?

Not everyone who commented is a moron, however. There’s some sage commentary by FidelCashFlo44: “Pearl Harbor was almost a century ago. The Japanese are our allies. The menu is mostly Chinese food. You’re upset about.. a lunch menu. How insecure about your patriotism could you possibly be?” Charlots adds, “How is eating asian food going to somehow dissolve our identity as Americans. Do you eat Chinese or Japanese food? You sound like an idiot.”

The clincher, however, comes from WarrenFl:

Oh, Please.

Glancing at the school lunch calendar for the local Hillsborough County elementary schools, I see our students were served Teriyaki Chicken Rice Bowl, Stir Fry Vegetables, and Pineapple Tidbits. (Secondary students had Orange Pineapple Fruit Slushi instead of the Tidbits.)

There was no public outcry here in Tampa, Florida–and I don’t recall seeing any public outcry in years past. In fact, there was no public outcry anywhere in the country this year.

Sure enough, here’s the evidence. But gloriosky, that would mean there really isn’t a story there.

Let’s review the bidding, shall we?
• The Sidwell Friends School contracts out its meal services, and, by unhappy coincidence, that service scheduled Asian food on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
• A different contractor printed the menus to say “Pearl Harbor Day.”
• Most of the food in question is either generically Asian or specifically Chinese.
• None of the food is inherently Japanese.
• The Chinese were our allies in World War II; the Japanese are among our staunchest allies now.
• No parent, including the POTUS, has any say over the menu at Sidwell Friends.
• Other school systems served essentially the same thing without as much as a murmur.
• Speaking of menus, some people seriously need a little more bran in their diet.

None of this is to excuse a screw-up: the teriyaki could have waited another day, methinks. But this sort of mountains-out-of-molehills mentality is—consummation devoutly to be wished—going to be perceived eventually as the desperate, despicable, and often racist crap it truly is. May that day come sooner rather than later.

The Raised Fist and the Flying Flag

2011-12-08T22:36:00.013-06:00

There’s a high school football story that’s getting a lot of attention of late. Facing Blue Hills in the 4A state championship game in Massachusetts (I refuse to call it the “Super Bowl”) this week, Cathedral High quarterback Matt Owens made what appeared to be a game-winning, or at least lead-changing, 56-yard run. But just inside the Blue Hills 25-yardline, with the ball tucked under his right arm, he raised his left hand over his head, taking two strides that way before finishing his jaunt into the endzone.

His little mini-demonstration, however, was enough to draw a penalty for taunting, nullifying the touchdown. The ball was placed at the spot of the foul; Owens threw an interception on the next play, and Cathedral never scored again, losing 16-12. Owens’s coach and father all-too-predictably whined.

Here’s the coach, Duane Sigsbury:

In the game being played, we won the game. Give Blue Hills a lot of credit. They are a great football team, but we deserve better. The game got taken away from us. If you’re going to take a game away from a kid being excited because he just made the play of his life, shame on you.

And here’s the father, Kenneth Owens:

He raised his hand because he knew was going to the pinnacle. There was nothing dishonorable about the play. There was no doubt it was a touchdown. He gets 20 yards in—and he's not thinking about the rule—and he just raised his hand. He handed the ball to the referee. He didn't spike it. He goes to a Catholic school where they are taught that their God is in the sky. So I know when he raised his hand, he was thanking his Lord for what happened to him today. Football is a team sport. There's lot of kids that are hurting today.

Assigner of officials Joe Cacciatore insisted that:

It’s tough, but the official absolutely made the right call according to the letter of the law. It says it right there in the rules that any attempt to draw attention to yourself, whether it is pointing the finger, raising a fist or anything like that, is a penalty. We’ve been instructed to call it when it happens, it’s zero tolerance now.

Don’t come to me looking for support for zero tolerance policies in general. But you know what? Sometimes they’re appropriate. Don’t tell that to sniveling sportswriters, like MSNBC’s Rick Chandler, however:

File this along with the first graders suspended for bringing a plastic knife to school to spread butter. Where’s our zero tolerance for blundering idiots? Taking common sense and individual judgement [sic.] out of the equation is never a good idea. And besides, if the player was actually praising God as his father claimed, he wasn’t calling attention to himself, now was he?

Where to begin? Let’s start here: it doesn’t matter whether the young man intended anything “dishonorable”; it matters what he did. Was he taunting? Not literally, perhaps, but the rule is pretty specific and pretty clear; it has been a point of emphasis among officiating crews all year, and players were specifically reminded of the rule immediately before the game. Moreover, while I’m not a mind-reader, I do make my living in part by relating gestural patterns to intentions. Young Owens may not have been intentionally taunting, but he sure as hell wasn’t praising God. One looks skyward to do that; Owens didn’t. One points with one’s index finger to God; Owens had a clenched fist. (One might also hope that there are more important things on God’s agenda than intervening in interscholastic athletic competitions.) Matt Owens was celebrating; end of discussion. Is that the same as taunting? It is according to the rulebook if it happens while the play is still underway. (Predictably, of course, only 14% of those responding to an online poll on the Boston Herald site agree with the call.)

Is it a stupid rule? Probably. I do understand the desire to curtail the narcissistic displays that have filtered down from the pros to the high school game. All that’s needed to cut that crap out, of course, is for television networks to cut away from the prima donna moments the way they used to do… and the way they agreed, for example, not to show the idiots who run onto a baseball field. Once pros don’t get airtime for being egocentric buffoons, the emphasis on maturity will find its way into the college and prep games, just as the puerile posturing has done for the past generation. Of course, that won’t happen, because television executives have the minds of 12-year-old boys. Still, there’s a difference between a spontaneous exuberance on the one hand and calculated, vainglorious indulgence on the other. Whereas the recent rule change helps referees in the sense that they no longer need to determine intent (just as a player accidentally grabbing a facemask will still get a personal foul call), it does allow a little less discretion.

Would I have called the penalty had I been that referee? Yes, although not making the call would also be defensible. Rules are rules, and this one doesn’t go away because some kid just made a great run. Indeed, it’s more important then than ever. But there’s a more significant point here.

A long time ago, I went to a Little League baseball game. My cousin Dick, two years older than I, was coaching, and his young son was on the team. The players were probably eight or nine years old. One of Dick’s young charges was called out on strikes. Returning to the bench, the boy complained that the pitch was really a ball. He was right: the pitch was outside and probably high, as well. Dick said, simply, “if you’ve got two strikes on you, and a pitch is close enough that the umpire might call it a strike, swing. We’ve talked about this.” And he patted the kid on the back and sent out to play defense.

Dick’s wisdom in that moment has stuck with me for over 20 years. If you don’t want the officials to decide the game, don’t let them. Swing at close pitches with two strikes. Keep your stupid arm down when you’re about to score the go-ahead touchdown in the state championship game. Don’t let the referee make a judgment call against you when there’s no reason in the world not to obey the rules. Score the touchdown, then celebrate. Eight-year-old kids can wrap their heads around this concept. So can 18-year-olds, if we insist on it.

The referee, as far as I’m concerned, is blameless. Owens the younger did something dumb, but he’s a kid. I’m perfectly willing to believe he intended no disrespect to his opponents, but that of course doesn’t really change anything. Owens the elder, on the other hand, is an ignoramus. Your kid made a mistake. Stand by him. But don’t give us this line of crap about praising God. The penalty against your son was reasonable if not right. Shut up.

The biggest jackass, of course, is the coach. You’ve still got a chance to win this game if you keep your head. So, what are you going to call? Hint: maybe you don’t have your “visibly upset” quarterback throw the ball on a 1st down play when your line just opened a hole I could have run through for good yardage. You’re not only a petulant, unsportsmanlike ass, you’re also a moron. Shut up.

As for Rick Chandler: he, no doubt, gets paid to say snarky things on the internet. He is uncritical, unthinking, and unable to separate real justice from B-movie plots. He wants to know where is the zero tolerance policy for “blundering idiots.” Right here. Bye, Rick.

More Incompetence in SAT-Land, But This One's Not All on Them

2011-11-28T07:28:00.007-06:00

As an educator at the post-secondary level, I have deeply ambivalent feelings about standardized testing. The teach-to-the-test mentality engendered by high-stakes exams like the fetishistic stupidity propagated in my adopted state of Texas, for example, is as antithetical to real education as it is possible to be. There also are, or at least have been, serious concerns about cultural bias. Still, I won’t pretend that I don’t look pretty carefully at ACT and SAT scores when evaluating prospective students for admission into our program or scholarships.

This is a function of two things. First, there is the wide disparity between schools and their populations—being at the top of a weak class might be better or worse than being in the middle of a strong one. It’s useful to have some means of comparing such students.

Second, most recommendations written by high school teachers and administrators are utterly useless. I do understand that writing an effective, accurate recommendation takes time; I’ve written a fair number of them, after all. But in my time as coordinator of Theatre Day (that’s our tri-annual on-campus recruitment event) I’ve read recs that are a single sentence long, that are incoherent and/or ungrammatical, that praise a student in the bottom 20% of her class for excelling in the classroom (without any explanation why the little darling consistently gets C’s and D’s, including in that teacher’s classes), that talk more about the student’s parents than about him. One teacher in Dallas obviously has a template singing the praises of some generic student; she just swaps out one student name for another and sends it along. (We once had two students at the same Theatre Day with recs from her. The letters were identical except for the students’ names and the gender-specific pronouns.)

Standardized test scores aren’t the only criterion by which to measure a student’s academic skills, of course. Grades (and class rank relative to class size) count a lot; if we happen to get a well-crafted, individualized, recommendation that actually gives us insight into the student, that’s incredibly helpful. The résumé counts: both how it’s structured and what it contains. If you want to be a designer and your layout is cluttered, unimaginative, and unattractive, you’ve got some work to do. If you want to be an actor, your teacher can talk about how wonderful you are all she wants, but if you’ve never played anything but Chorus in a musical or Third Spear-Carrier from the Left, she’s really not all that impressed with your work.

Nor do minor differences in scores matter. A 550 and a 560 in Critical Reading are, for our purposes, identical. A 440 and a 650 aren’t. If you’re smart and can really handle the language, it doesn’t matter if your acting skills are marginal: a). you’re teachable and b). there are plenty of non-acting jobs in theatre (mine, for instance). On the other hand, you may audition well with carefully-chosen pieces, but if we’re not reasonably certain you can handle the work of a freshman-level Play Analysis course, we’re not going to invest our limited scholarship money on you.

Good scores matter, in other words. And whereas a fair number of high school seniors don’t seem to comprehend much else, they do get that much. All of which means there’s a lot of pressure to perform well. For those with more money than brains or morality, that means an increased temptation to cheat: specifically, to hire a similarly immoral, but intelligent, surrogate to take the test in your stead. And that is what happened, repeatedly, in an upscale suburban area of Long Island over at least a three-year period.

The New York Times reports that some 20 people have been arrested over the past two months for being at one or the other end of such transactions: either paying someone to take the exam or accepting payment to impersonate someone else in order to take the test. The group faces felony charges of scheming to defraud, as well as misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records and criminal impersonation.

The victims here are of two kinds: the middling but honest students whose chances of getting entrance to the university of their choice or receive a scholarship to do so have been compromised by a competition that cheats, and (now) every honest and gifted kid in the area, whose own good scores, the product of native intelligence and hard work, are now (alas, quite reasonably) viewed as suspect.

There are two problems here. One is that the College Board/Educational Testing Service folks (who administer the SAT), in particular, have been more than somewhat less than diligent in preventing or prosecuting cheating. An earlier NYT article quotes Bernard Kaplan, principal of Great Neck North High School, lambasting the administrators of the SAT: “The procedures E.T.S. uses to give the test are grossly inadequate in terms of security. Furthermore, E.T.S.’s response when the inevitable cheating occurs is grossly inadequate. Very simply, E.T.S. has made it very easy to cheat, very difficult to get caught.” Mr. Kaplan adds:

It is ridiculously easy to take the test for someone else. That’s why when E.T.S. says this kind of impersonation is a rare occurrence, you just have to laugh. How would they know? All they can say is they are unaware of a large number of impersonations. I’m sure, that’s true. They are most assuredly unaware.

OK, you know how this blog consistently reams high school principals and school superintendents? Credit where it’s due: Mr. Kaplan seems to be the exception that proves the rule. It was his initial investigation that led to the arrests: “I think it’s [cheating] widespread across the country,” he said Tuesday. “We were the school that stood up to it.” And to say that the security has been lax with respect to ensuring that test-takers are who they claim to be is sort of like saying that NBA power forwards tend to be large men. [Side note: sign off on the damned agreement and play ball!]

After all, Samuel Eshaghoff is accused of impersonating six different students, including a girl to take the SAT for them at $3500 a pop, earning scores up to the 97th percentile. (I guess it wouldn’t have been worth it for me to hire him, as I did better than that on my own.) And, write the Times’s Jenny Anderson and Winnie Hu, “Currently, if a score is suspect, E.T.S. investigates. If cheating is uncovered, the score is canceled and the student is permitted to get a refund and take the test again. Neither the student’s high school nor any college is notified.” Seriously? No penalty at all?

Here’s the College Board’s attitude:

You got sick and couldn’t make the test? Sorry, no refund. Need to change the date of your test more than two weeks in advance? Well, OK, but it’ll cost you $25. Oh, you’re an immoral, self-entitled little weasel who thinks rules are for other people? Sorry, sir/madam, we thought you might be an honest kid with a legitimate excuse. Of course you can have a refund. Of course we won’t notify anyone who might be interested in whether you’ve already proven that you have no intention of actually learning anything at their academic institution. Would you like us to give you the names of a few really smart, dishonest people whom we’re far too stupid to catch if they impersonate you next time?

Not being a lawyer, I don’t know whether this qualifies as “criminal negligence” according to our legal system. But in a just universe, the cretinous yahoos at the CB/ETS who decided on this policy would lose their jobs, have “unethical moron” branded into their foreheads, and be publicly pilloried. Preferably literally.

Still, the fact that everyone in the ETS hierarchy seems to be terminally incompetent does not absolve the little urchins from taking responsibility for their actions. The recent economic meltdown may have been facilitated by de-regulation, but it was caused by specific immoral, greedy wheeler-dealers. Whether what these students did was criminal may be up for debate (I can’t imagine that there’s a legitimate legal argument there, but Dickens’s Mr. Bumble is, alas, too often correct in his assertion that “the law is an ass”). If not, every college that admitted one of these lying little bastards based on false information should immediately expel those students and sue the ETS. Actually, they should do that, anyway.

The defendants’ lawyers are paid to defend their clients, and they should do so as vigorously as they can. They are not, however, entitled to spew forth such rubbish as this from Gerald McCloskey: “My feeling is that it should be handled administratively by the College Board and the school board, not criminally, especially when the county is experiencing budget issues and resources are limited to begin with.” How noble of him to be so concerned with the county’s fiscal restraints. Translation: “My client is guilty as sin. Obfuscate!” Or Melvin Roth: “I think this is overkill for this kind of thing.” Yes, stealing is only stealing when someone other than Mr. Roth’s client does it. These guys are why there are lawyer jokes.

I strongly suspect that the ETS’s estimate of perhaps 150 cases of cheating a year is off by a factor of 100 or so. So it’s up to people like me to make sure no one gets a college diploma without earning one. Time to go to work…

Walter Vance and the Expansiveness of Culpability

2011-11-27T13:39:00.011-06:00

Want to know what’s wrong with America? Two words: Walter Vance. No, not the man himself, who was apparently a lovely person. No, it was the manner of Mr. Vance’s death in the early hours of Friday morning that ought to send shivers up our collective spines.

Mr. Vance, a pharmacist in Logan County, WV, was shopping for some Christmas decorations for his drug store shortly after midnight, i.e. at the very beginning of “Black Friday,” when he collapsed onto the floor of a Target store in South Charleston. And then… nothing.

Multiple reports suggest that shoppers and employees alike paid no attention, even stepping over him as he struggled for his life. Finally, a nurse and a paramedic who happened to be shopping in the store came to his aid. 911 was called, but Mr. Vance died at the hospital. Frankly, he may not have made it, anyway. He had a history of heart trouble, and, in his widow’s words, “I think it was time for him to go. The Lord called him home.”

But here’s the point: It doesn’t matter. A man needed help, and the overwhelming majority of people who were in position to offer it, even to the extent of comforting a dying man, did precisely bupkes. There was a sale on, after all. Gotta get that crappy over-priced toy or the tacky outfit for a couple bucks less than normal. “Sorry, old man. Geez, would you get the hell out of the way. You’re dying? You think that’s an excuse? Get out of the damned aisle!”

With the exception of the two professionals who did what they could (another report suggests as many as six nurses offered aid), and the woman who apparently fished Vance’s cell phone out of his pocket to call his wife, everyone else in that building deserves coal in their stocking this year: not enough to heat their home with, however. Seriously, how many people don’t have cell phones with which to call 911? How many of the phoneless don’t have a voice with which to demand that someone else make that call? How many of us are really so important that we can’t spare a few words of comfort for a fellow traveler in distress?

There are, apparently, lots of eye-witness reports about other people’s inhumanity. But… uh… if you were there to see it, what did you do to help? Not much, I’d be willing to bet. True, once there’s someone who knows what s/he’s doing on the scene, it’s better to stay out of the way. But stepping over a prostrate body to get to the great mark-downs on Chia Pets doesn’t qualify as ethical behavior.

Target employees told television station WSAZ that “company policy” forbids them from offering physical assistance. (Interestingly, that detail is omitted from the updated written story on the station’s website, but the broadcast story includes it.) This leaves us with two alternatives: either the employees are lying to cover up their own inadequacies as human beings, or there really is such a policy.

It terrifies me that I believe the latter. That sounds exactly like the kind of inanity cooked up by the litigation-shy and utterly amoral jackals that run all too many corporations. Still, that doesn’t let the employees off the hook. A man is dying and you don’t help because you might lose your barely-above-minimum-wage (if that) job at a store that insists you work the graveyard shift on Black Friday because they’ve got to unload their stock of crap that will actually be cheaper in a couple of weeks? Really? That’s what you’re going to tell St. Peter at the Pearly Gates?

Mr. Vance’s friend and colleague Sue Compton sums the whole business up pretty well: “Where is the good Samaritan side of people? How could you not notice someone was in trouble? I just don’t understand if people didn’t help, what their reason was, other than greed because of a sale.”

Christmas in America. Bah, humbug.

Flying While Islamic Is the New Driving While Black

2011-11-26T08:24:00.004-06:00

One of the sadder legacies of 9/11 is the legitimization of cowardice in the name of prudence. True, both political parties are trying to out-macho each other with respect to foreign policy, but when it comes down to real, day-to-day existence, Americans behave like the schoolyard bully confronted with an antagonist who doesn’t just meekly hand over his lunch money.

We’ll drive way too fast for the conditions, even after having one beer too many. We’ll eat crappy “food” with levels of saturated fat, sodium, and sugar so high that just talking about them can cause heart attacks. We’ll swagger around talking about how tough we are because “we” managed to capture or kill the likes of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.

But ask us to get on a plane that might also be carrying someone named Mohammed or Abdul, and we’ll cheerfully relinquish all our Constitutional rights and meekly slink into the corner with our proverbial tail between our legs while some idiot with a TSA (which, contrary to popular opinion, does not, in fact, stand for “Terminally Stupid and Arrogant”) badge ostentatiously goes through the motions of “protecting the public.” The agency does this by invading our privacy, fondling us, proclaiming our toothpaste a potential weapon, and generally doing everything possible to instill a feeling of Exceeding Great Trepidation.

Trouble is, it’s all a charade. The system itself acknowledges that all the shoelessness and shampoo confiscations don’t mean anything: what else is a no-fly list, or a random (or not-so-random) search at the gate if not a tacit admission that any serious terrorist with an IQ above room temperature can get past the security screening without breaking a sweat? I’ve been saying this for years, of course. Here’s me in 2005:

The idea that someone who can pass through security can still remain a threat is in fact an admission that the security screenings don't work except as a cosmetic deterrent. It is difficult to go a month without the news that some test of security at some airport has demonstrated conclusively that the average TSA screener lacks the training, the intelligence, or the vigilance to actually thwart a real threat. We'd be better off hiring out of Central Casting: at least they'd look like they might be able to stop a terrorist. Of course, news reports that yet another fake bomb made it through security at a major American airport are slowly gravitating towards the back of the newspaper, because it no longer shocks us that airport security is intrusive and demeaning, but completely ineffective.

But we continue, as a nation, to pretend that the false security offered by TSA is “worth it” somehow. It is not.

Of course, our collective cravenness is really a manifestation of xenophobia more than anything else. Homeland Security and all its various permutations exist for the sole reason of feeding the populace’s quaking terror at The Other. Oh, sure, they’ll annoy the rest of us—virtually anyone who has travelled very much at all will have been subjected to some form of humiliation to ~~distract the agents from what a pathetic job they have~~ re-affirm the security of the nation. But it’s the spectre of actually sharing an airplane with (gasp!) a Muslim that can be counted on to legitimize the most outrageous over-reach of authority.

I remember flying home from a conference in New York several years ago. As it happened, I was seated immediately behind two men who clearly fit the profile of a “terrorist,” at least as conjured up in the fevered imaginings of a TSA agent: young, obviously middle-Eastern, male. One was bearded; the other had a thick mustache. I don’t recall their names, but they were stereotypically Arab: Ali and Farooq, or something like that. They were laughing about the difficulties they’d had in passing through security, based solely on the way they look. And, hearing them speak, I can assure you that the fear and trembling of the security folks was entirely visual: two more readily identifiable New York accents would be difficult to imagine.

But the latest victims of TSA over-reaction weren’t New Yorkers. They were students from the United Arab Emirates who were removed from a Charlotte-to-Washington flight and questioned for nearly five hours, embarrassing them (despite the fact that they had clearly not done anything to deserve this treatment) and—of course—inconveniencing every other passenger on that flight, not to mention the family, friends, and business associates of everyone who should have been in DC in time for dinner but didn’t arrive until close to midnight. And for what?

Well, according to WSOC-TV, U.S. Airways is calling it simply a “security issue” that led to the students’ being led from the plane and all their bags being re-screened. (Again, how about we screen them right the first time?) The story says that “passengers reported they heard the group talking about airplanes and the military while on board. Sources said that's when some passengers reported them.” It’s unclear exactly who initiated the process of removing the UAE students, but it appears to have been the airline, whose employees are perfectly well trained to distribute tiny packets of pretzels, but perhaps not to judge the severity or likelihood of a potential terrorist threat. Forgive me if I don’t choose to live my life based on the prognostications of the most wild-eyed, xenophobic paranoid in the room.

I do understand that a student named Yaqoob Al-Shamsi is probably a higher risk than a grandmother named Cindy Robinson would be. But there are literally hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who pose precisely zero threat. A little acknowledgment of that would not come amiss. What is troubling here is that the Islamophobia of the more ignorant members of society will eventually create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This seems to be the lesson of Guantánamo, which has apparently more than once transformed petty nuisances into card-carrying Bad Guys. And if we keep down the present path, the next Hadef Al-Dhaheri won’t simply be upset that “they treated us different than the others”; he’ll want to do something about it. It’s a delicate balancing act, and we need someone with a little more sophistication in charge of the operation.

Teenager Reveals Brownback's Real (Lack of) Character

2011-11-25T15:32:00.014-06:00

It has become something of a specialty of this blog to highlight stories involving controversies with no good guys. This is another one. Almost.

Attending a Kansas Youth in Government event in Topeka this week, registered Democrat Emma Sullivan (pictured here), a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School, tweeted “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.”

Had she actually engaged in the conduct she describes, one could reasonably criticize her for vulgarity but, considering what a disaster Governor Sam Brownback is for the citizens of my former state, not for inaccuracy. He does indeed suck. She hadn’t actually made those comments, of course, but she’s 18. There are two types of people who claim to have never engaged in a little adolescent braggadocio: those who aren’t yet adolescent, and liars.

Moreover, her Twitter account has (well, had) only a few dozen followers. So what’s the problem, right? Ah, Gentle Reader, you’re forgetting the Twin Towers of contemporary GOP politics: paranoia and hubris. What happened, you ask? Well, according to the Wichita Eagle,

... Brownback’s office watches Twitter for comments about him. Brownback spokeswoman Sherriene Jones-Sontag told the event organizers about the comment, “so that they were aware what their students were saying in regards to the governor’s appearance…. We monitor social media so we can see what Kansans are thinking and saying about the governor and his policies…. We just felt it was appropriate for the organizers to be aware … because of what was said in the tweet.”

OK, so it’s perfectly reasonable that the governor’s staff monitors the ‘Net for commentary on his performance. But to call up event organizers to complain about what a high school kid says to a few friends on Twitter suggests a level of perceived entitlement that is staggering even by the lofty standards of Republican politicians. One might have hoped that the governor’s staff might have something more constructive to do. Engaging in this kind of petty strutting might, after all, suggest to those of a cynical disposition that Gov. Brownback is more interested in throwing his weight around than in actually listening to his constituents. Oh, yeah, that’s right: he is more concerned with suppressing dissent than with responding to Kansans’ concerns. Sorry.

Still, the pomposity and arrogance of the terminally officious Ms. Jones-Sontag would have had no real-world effects had not those event organizers capitulated rather than, as they should have done, telling the pushy politico to take a long walk on a short pier. But they’re craven idiots, so they contacted the principal at Shawnee Mission East. They needn’t have bothered, of course. Turns out another Brownback minion, scheduling secretary Niomi Burget, had already e-mailed a screenshot of Sullivan’s tweet to the SME Youth in Government sponsor, sniveling, “I don’t know if this was someone with your group, but thought if it was, you might want it brought to your attention.” Really? Why? And while we’re on the subject, what the hell business is it of the scheduling secretary? And does it really take two different staffers to whinge that a post-adolescent has the audacity to say something unkind about your sorry-ass boss?

Here’s the thing. For the past seven years, I administered a One-Act Play Festival which brought as many as 400 or more high school students to our campus each year. During that time, I contacted teachers about student behavior exactly twice: once when a group of students were disruptive during another school’s production, once when a school pretty well vandalized one of our dressing rooms. I didn’t call the principal; I talked to the responsible teacher directly. More to the point, I’m willing to bet that some kid tweeted something unkind about our facility, our people, whatever. But you know what? I don’t care. I’m a grown-up. I have more important things to worry about. Apparently the Governor of Kansas isn’t thus encumbered with actual responsibilities, however.

Once again, of course, we’re at another crossroads. All that had to happen for this not to be an embarrassment for all concerned would be for the high school officials to respond to the political interference with a politer version of the following: “We’ll handle it. Fuck off.” But that would pre-suppose a high school principal somewhere in the country who isn’t a gutless moron. Karl Krawitz is not such an exception to the rule: far from it, in fact. He complained that ~~he was expected to do his damned job~~ he had to do damage control, and insisted that Sullivan write apologetic letters to everyone this side of the Easter Bunny. “Censorship” isn’t quite the right word, but “repressive self-importance” sure seems apt.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to portray Sullivan as a hero: her tweet was inappropriate, after all, although I do give her credit for not bowing to pressure to remove it from her account, and she appears to be considering not writing those apologies. Still, she’s not guilty of anything in particular, either. She’s 18, and sometimes she acts it. Stop the presses!

On the other hand, the adults in this story—Jones-Sontag, Burget, Krawitz—all come off as boorish, self-entitled, authoritarian jackasses. It’s unclear whether Gov. Brownback didn't know what his staff was up to (one set of problems) or if he endorsed their pretentious meddling (a different set of problems). Any way you slice it, though, the lesson learned by Ms. Sullivan and all the other high school students in the state had a lot more to do with the way the political system really works than anything the Youth in Government folks ever offered.

[By the way, I just found a good post on the subject on that noted left-wing rag, Forbes. Not bad, Alex Knapp!]

UPDATE (11/27 @ 8:15 pm): Ms. Sullivan has decided not to apologize, saying that she in fact isn't sorry, and that any letter suggesting that she was would be insincere. Now she's a hero.

Sorry: Patriotism Is Not Welcome Here

2011-11-20T21:54:00.009-06:00

It has been too long since I posted here, and much has happened in the interim. I do want to talk about the #Occupy movement, both in theory and in practice, but that post will require more time than I have tonight, and I want to get something posted (among other things, I promised someone who included me on their blogroll that I’d post at least once a month… a promise I technically didn’t quite keep, as it is).

Anyway, one of the stories that attracted little attention amidst the horrific actions of police across the country and the antics of whoever happens to be the current GOP Flavor of the Month, is the follow-up to an incident I outlined a year and a half ago. Here was my take at the time:

In Morgan Hill, CA, a group of five boys wore American flag clothing—bandanas, shirts, shorts—and were told that such apparel was inappropriate. So far, it sounds like something from my youth: in those halcyon days, clothing featuring a flag motif was often worn by protesters against the Vietnam War, and, because such designs tended to be found on the seats of jeans, or in other places where the symbol might touch the ground or otherwise be defaced, we were forbidden to wear anything with an American flag. Now, of course, such apparel is considered patriotic.

Anyway, these guys show up at school wearing this stuff and the ~~Head Moron~~ Assistant Principal tells them they’ve got to take it off, go home, or face suspension. You see, it was Cinco de Mayo, and expressions of American patriotism were deemed insensitive to Hispanic students. OK, I’ll say this once: Give me a damned break.

A month or so later, the boys’ parents filed suit: their lawyer spelled out what they wanted: “‘We’re not seeking money damages, we are asking the court for an order that the school acted unconstitutionally by restricting the students first amendment rights. And we are also asking the court for an injunctive relief, indicating the school is forbidden from practicing those policies in the future,’ said Attorney William Becker.”

All things considered, that was a pretty reasonable demand, given the state of the American judicial system, in which suing people for the most insignificant of slights has become de rigeur.

Now comes word that the suit was dismissed by federal judge James Ware (yes, that would be the James Ware whose nomination to the Court of Appeals in 1997-98 was derailed by evidence that he is a serial liar. For the record, he was appointed to his current post by Bush I and subsequently nominated to the Court of Appeals by Clinton: he is, then, a non-partisan incompetent). The defendants—the school district and the (now former) Principal and (still, apparently) Assistant Principal—argued:

• that the claim against the district was banned by the 11th amendment
• that free speech rights don’t apply in this case because the school officials suspected the potential for “disruption”
• that the plaintiffs offered no evidence they were discriminated against
• that the school’s dress code provides “adequate notice of what attire is prohibited”

OK, I’m not a lawyer, so I look at what makes sense, not what legal precedent might be. The fact that “the Ninth Circuit has consistently held in California, because of the manner in which funds are dispersed to school districts by the state, school districts are agencies of the state for sovereign immunity purposes” tells me only that the Ninth Circuit may well have been home to some rather dim bulbs over the years.

More importantly, the whole “potential for disruption” argument is now, and frankly always has been, little more than an excuse for intellectual cowardice. It’s what gets controversial speakers uninvited from college campuses. It’s what justifies the worst excesses of “political correctness.” It’s what craven administrators, mayors, and police chiefs hide behind when they really, really, really want to censor speech (cf. the #Occupy folks) but know they have to circumvent that pesky First Amendment somehow.

Which brings us to the most colossally, stupendously, mind-meltingly inane part of Judge Ware’s cretinous decision:

Defendants have provided a non-discriminatory basis for asking Plaintiffs to remove their American flag attire. Defendants have put forth significant evidence demonstrating that Plaintiffs were asked to change clothes in order to protect their own safety. Plaintiffs have not offered any evidence demonstrating that students wearing the colors of the Mexican flag were targeted for violence. To the contrary, the undisputed evidence shows that Plaintiffs were the only students on campus whose safety was threatened that day, at least to the knowledge of Defendants. In addition, Defendant Rodriguez [the Assistant Principal] has testified that he did not see any students wearing the Mexican flag on their clothing during the day. He also testified that he did not see any students with Mexican flags displayed on their person until he saw photos in the newspaper in the days following Cinco de Mayo.

Ware therefore dismissed the “equal protection” argument. Please, someone, tell me that Ware is indeed the stupidest federal judge in the country, because if he isn’t, then all is lost. Let’s parse out what passes for argument here. Basically, it boils down to this:

“You have freedom of speech unless you do something completely inoffensive—as evidenced by the statement at the time that the students are free to wear American flag clothing any other day of the school year—that some over-sensitive jackass who disagrees with you might use as a pretense for violence. In that case, of course, it is not that student’s right to commit a felony that ought to be curtailed, but your 1st Amendment rights to free expression. Moreover, since the Assistant Principal can’t be expected to do his damned job and know what’s going on in the school, he can claim that your self-evident claim to unequal treatment doesn’t really hold because he didn’t see what everyone else in the school saw... and what appeared in the local media.” [I think he’s bucking for a job in the UC-Davis administration.]

Seriously, what would happen if the roles were reversed: if it were the Hispanic students who were prevented from expressing their ethnic pride on this trumped-up holiday little celebrated in their ancestral homeland because of the threat of violence from a gang of Anglo punks? How condescending would the “for your own protection” pabulum sound? How stupid would suppressing the inoffensive in order to pander to the potentially violent seem? How outraged would the left-leaning punditry (other than moi, bien sûr) be?

I have little doubt that the plaintiffs in this case are right little assholes, and quite possibly racists. But anyone who thinks Judge Ware would have ruled the same way had it been the “minority” students whose rights were being infringed is stupider than he is. And that’s saying rather a lot.

Stupidest Legislative “Money-Saving” Plan of the Month: The First Three Nominees

2011-10-15T22:45:00.009-05:00

It’s true: I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks. Still, it surprises me that I apparently missed the memo announcing the contest for Stupidest Legislative “Money-Saving” Plan of the Month. Apparently there are some really cool prizes involved, as the contestants are lining up, each with a scheme a little more insane than the one before. Here are three contenders I found out about within about roughly a six-hour stretch a few days ago. (I really have been busy; that’s why I’m only now writing about it.) For the purposes of this contest, the Alabama town that demanded proof of American citizenship—indeed of Alabama citizenship—to get (and pay for) clean water, and the Let Women Die law that sailed through the US House are not eligible, as they are merely mean-spirited and depraved, and don’t even pretend to save money.

We still have some really good entrants, however:

Representing the great state of Kansas, we have the Topeka City Council’s decision to repeal the city ordinance banning domestic violence. Really. OK, so this isn’t quite as colossally cretinous as it might initially appear: this is really a petty and petulant jurisdictional dispute between the city and the county, neither of whom want to accept responsibility for misdemeanor cases (half of which involve domestic violence) because their respective budgets have been cut. So now the Shawnee County DA has in fact capitulated and agreed to ~~do his freaking job~~ prosecute such cases, clearly as a direct response to public outcry. This apparently includes re-visiting the cases of between 18 and 30 (sources differ) alleged criminals released because no one would take the case. Who’s right in the turf squabble? I. Don’t. Care. The council vote would be unconscionable and unsupportable under any circumstances.

Is it a coincidence that the 7-3 vote to de-criminalize such cases corresponds exactly to the ratio of men to women on the city council? I don’t know; I can’t find a record of who voted which way. But I’ll say this: I’m betting they weren’t going to de-criminalize the completely understandable crime of kicking idiot city councilmen squarely in the balls.

Next up: Camden County (Georgia) is contemplating a measure that would put two inmates—convicted of things like drug offences and theft—in each of three existing fire stations as a money-saving measure. What could go wrong, after all? Let’s see, we’re not only expecting professional firefighters to do their own highly risky jobs, but to “monitor” the inmates: a term I take to imply both supervision of their work and serving as guards. Put simply, the real firefighters would be under-trained to watch the inmates, who would not only be under-trained as firefighters, they’d also require constant scrutiny because, well, they’re inmates. The people of the area, no doubt, would be ever-so-happy to be suffering from the anxiety accompanying a fire, only to have a convicted thief wandering through their homes.

Stuart Sullivan, a firefighter, spoke to the Board of County Commissioners, urging them to drop the plan: “If you vote to bring these inmates into our working environment, you jeopardize not only the employees' well-being, but the safety of our citizens.” Well, duh. Seriously, Mr. Sullivan, when did coherent argument start becoming a legitimate way to influence government policy? True, the proposal is insulting to professional firefighters by suggesting they can be readily replaced both those Jack Marshall describes as “not just … barely-trained amateurs, but barely-trained amateurs who can’t be trusted to walk free in the community.” True, it unnecessarily endangers good citizens whose focus in a literally life-and-death situation is inherently distracted by supervisory responsibilities they shouldn’t have to perform. True, it serves to undermine the trust and camaraderie necessary for any such venture, and not for some legitimate ancillary benefit like civil rights: this isn’t eliminating DADT we’re talking about. But, Mr. Sullivan, these are county commissioners we’re talking about: you’d have a better chance of making your case to a collection of corn cobs.

After all, it might save a fair amount of money, although I’d be willing to bet that even the short-term savings are unlikely to approach, let alone equal, the $500K estimate that’s being tossed around: 20% of that would be a more plausible figure. But you can’t expect a county commissioner to have the mental capacity of a bottle of olive oil. Think I’m being too harsh? Here’s Commissioner Jimmy Starline (apparently his real name): “I've been told these inmates are very enthusiastic about being a firefighter. It's an opportunity to break that cycle. This is not like a chain gang. Life at a fire station could be a whole lot more pleasant than life in jail.” Oh, well, then. As long as the freaking prisoners like the idea, then it’s OK, right?

Finally, there’s Pinellas County, Florida, whose County Commissioners voted to stop fluoridating the water supply. You, Gentle Reader, might have been under the impression that this battle had been fought and won by the forces of science two generations ago. Ah, but the Tea Party crowd and their enablers (I’m looking at you, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, et al.) have successfully brought us to the point at which that which has long been accepted as scientifically proven is now up for grabs, not on the basis of new evidence, but based simply, in Isaac Asimov’s words, on “the false notion that democracy means ‘my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.’” I’m pretty sure gravity is next on the hit list for the tin-foil hat crowd.

Honestly, here’s some of the reporting of David DeCamp of the St. Petersburg Times:

Some speakers Tuesday compared it to Soviet and Nazi practices and warned of cancer, reduced IQ and deteriorating bones.

“Fluoride is a toxic substance,” said tea party activist Tony Caso of Palm Harbor. “This is all part of an agenda that's being pushed forth by the so-called globalists in our government and the world government to keep the people stupid so they don't realize what's going on.” [Note: it seems to be working.]

He added: “This is the U.S. of A, not the Soviet Socialist Republic.”

The fact that the medical and dental communities are unanimous in support of such programs means nothing to the self-appointed authorities, the Tea Partiers. Lunatics on the left and the right have been part of the American political system for as long as I can remember, and I suspect for a good while before that. Up until recently, however, the mainstream politicians and commentators kept the crazies in check. True, the anti-war crowd made life a little difficult for mainstream Democrats during the Vietnam War, but that was primarily because there was little difference in either the rhetoric or the policies of the two major parties at the time. Generally, the fringe elements of both parties have been recognized as precisely that: the fringe. That changed recently, though. The mainstream GOP loathed Obama with such a passion that they sold their soul to the Tea Party to gain a majority in the House of Representatives. The result is a pandering to the rampant anti-intellectualism of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and similar shills.

The Democrats have their own populist movement, the #Occupy crowd, to deal with. But whereas there may be more of them than there are Tea Partiers, and those folks have far higher approval ratings than the Tea Party ever did—a 54-23% positive rating according to a poll just published in Time magazine—they will have far less impact on actual policy because they aren’t just a front for some left-wing equivalent of the Koch brothers or Dick Armey, and are therefore uninteresting to the pols who care far more about donors than about constituents.

Ultimately, what these stories show is an affirmation of legitimate uses of government. Punishing those who beat up women, preventing or extinguishing fires in the most efficient manner possible, providing at least base-line dental care that benefits all citizens: these are, it seems to me, undeniably good things, and appropriate uses of government resources. I bet it wouldn’t be difficult to find other available cuts, things far less self-evidently essential at the very least, in any of those jurisdictions. Or—God forbid!—there might even be additional revenue enhancements. But the country is long on stupid right now. There will be more idiotic ideas… and I’ll do what I can to give you the opportunity to laugh at them.

The really bad news: the month is still young.

Prejudice and Ignorance: The American Idiocracy

2011-10-09T21:59:00.008-05:00

There are two kinds of polls about politics: the ones about which candidate we prefer and the ones about more fundamental underlying attitudes. The former are, at this point (relative to the 2012 election) somewhere south of useless. Want proof? Well, take a look at the Gallup poll taken on October 12-14, 2007: Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama by a 50-21 margin; Rudy Giuliani led Fred Thompson 32-18, with John McCain at 14%. Importantly, neither Clinton nor Giuliani (nor Thompson, for that matter) made any enormous gaffes that made them instantly less popular with either major donors or the electorate: no Howard Dean screech, for example. Their only problem was that they didn’t attract enough support when it counted as the other guy did. So I really don’t care who won what straw poll or who is October’s flavor of the month on the Republican side: things won’t get interesting until after Thanksgiving, at least, even if the mad rush to move the primary season earlier continues unabated.

The other kind of poll, however, always interests me in that it gives us a glimpse of who we are. If the polling sample is broad-based enough, and most of the prominent pollsters know what they’re doing in that regard, at least, then any specific incident that would affect the results would be known by everyone and could be factored into the analysis. In other words, our collective view of Muslims changed significantly the second week of September, 2001, but everyone knew why. Some individual’s view may have been changed by a more local incident a couple of weeks earlier or later, but that single re-evaluation wouldn’t affect the overall poll numbers much.

So, let’s look at two polls I read about this week. The first was actually taken this summer, but I hadn’t seen it until reading about it in a piece by David Kopel at the Volokh Conspiracy. A Gallup poll taken in June shows attitudes towards hypothetical candidates. Here’s the question:

Between now and the 2012 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates—their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be [black, a woman, etc.], would you vote for that person?

Lydia Saad, who wrote up the results, seems most interested in whether people would vote for a Mormon: reasonable enough, given the fact that Mitt Romney is a front-runner for the GOP nomination. I confess that I’m a little more intrigued by the remarkably low numbers, even now, for gays/lesbians and atheists. True, the trend line for those groups is heading in the right direction, but that 49% wouldn’t support a well-qualified atheist candidate of their own party is kind of scary. Of course, there is a not insignificant contingent in the Republican party in particular which clings to a pseudo-Christian dogma—justifying prejudice in the name of the Bible, declaring a desire to help the poor as “socialist”—so one suspects those numbers are skewed. Unfortunately, I can’t find any further break-outs of that information, although Saad does provide some with respect to Mormons… more on that in a moment.

The linked pdf file (alas, I can’t seem to link to it directly) shows trend lines—atheists were opposed 18-77 in 1958, and are 49-49 now; blacks were opposed 37-53 in 1958, and are 94-5 now; gays/lesbians weren’t part of the discussion until 1978, when they were opposed 26-66 as compared to 67-32 today. The trends are interesting. If we look at the numbers in plus-minus terms (50-40 is +10, 30-70 is -40, and so on), we see a more or less steady increase in acceptability for some groups. Blacks, for example, are -16 in 1958, +25 in 1965, +46 in 1971, +66 in 1987, +89 today. Women are at -31 in 1937, +8 in 1955, +50 in 1975, +70 in 1987, and +87 today.

Not all the trends look that way, however. Whereas gays/lesbians were at -40 in 1978 and are at +35 today, there was a huge jump from 1983 (-35) to 1999 (+22) and actual back-sliding from then until 2007 (+15) before another surge to the present. Atheists made good progress from 1958 (-57) to 1983 (-9), but then stalled, making it to +1 in 1999 and actually losing that margin-of-error point since then.

Of course, there are also glitches caused by individual candidates: a Democrat asked about female or African-American candidates in the last election cycle or a Republican asked about a Mormon would have been forgiven for transposing the question from the general to the specific: would you vote for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney if that person were nominated by your party? Hence the trend line for Mormons goes a little berserk four years ago. And, of course, the John Kennedy phenomenon with respect to Catholics causes its own set of ripples. Today, interestingly, although all of these groups tend to lean more to the Democrats than to the Republicans, there’s at least some chance that a woman (Michele Bachmann) or an African-American (Herman Cain) could be the GOP nominee, and of course Eric Cantor, who is Jewish, is likely to become a contender in years to come. We’ll see if people are lying, because, you know… they do, sometimes.

Anyway, revenons aux nos moutons. Attitudes towards Mormons are broken out further than for other groups in the article. Unsurprisingly, increased education also leads to increased tolerance for the Other, however that Other is defined. Thus, college graduates are at +74, those with some college are at +59, those with no college are at only +35. Significantly, there seems to be little if any difference between men and women, or among age groups or geographical locations. Everything is either within the margin of error or pretty close to it. It might be worth mentioning that Catholics give Mormons a +64 vs. a +51 from “Protestants and other Christians” [whatever that means]. Then again, it might not.

I was intrigued, however, by the fact that Republicans are a little more open-minded towards Mormons than Democrats are. That wouldn’t have been what I predicted, but it makes sense when I think about it. First off, with two prominent Republicans—Romney and John Huntsman—both in Presidential bids, anyone who supports either, and they are the two most mainstream candidates, is reminded that maybe they could support a Mormon. Conversely, name a prominent Mormon Democrat. (Yes, I know, Harry Reid, but that connection isn't made very often.) Mormons tend to be Republicans (see, for example, this poll in which President Obama’s approval ratings are shown to be about 20 points lower, in good times and bad, among Mormons than among the general population). And, of course, the LDS Church has figured prominently in the campaign against gay marriage, dumping literally millions of dollars (directly and indirectly) and thousands of volunteer hours on Proposition 8 in California, for example: enough so that a New York Times headline says that “Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage.” That might not be enough to win them friends among Republicans, but it isn’t difficult for a Democrat to be rather more disinclined to support a Mormon after that bitter (if transient) defeat.

Anyway, bottom line: I don’t think Mitt Romney (or, rather more hypothetically, John Huntsman) would be hurt significantly by religion. Only 18% of Republicans and 19% of Independents show reluctance to vote for a Mormon, and one suspects those numbers will drop, just as the numbers for a host of other groups have dropped with greater visibility and knowledge: especially for the not terribly well educated, it’s easier to fear the unknown than to fear Mitt Romney.

Besides, a fair number of voters won’t know he’s Mormon, anyway. The ignorance of the American electorate is terrifying. There’s a statement virtually everyone will agree with, as precious few folks voted for the winner in both of the last two Presidential elections… presumably somebody did, but Democrats are even more convinced that George W. Bush was the worst President in American history than Republicans are that Barack Obama is.

But it’s probably even worse than you thought. A recent Pew Research poll reveals that nearly half of Americans and fully a third of Republicans can’t name, unprompted, a single GOP candidate for President. Only three—Romney (27%), Rick Perry (28%), and Michele Bachmann (15%)—reached double-digits in the general population. Even among Republicans (and Independents who lean Republican), only Perry and Romney were named by 1 in 5 respondents. I guess the good news is that the magical 10% mark was passed by all the candidates currently given any real chance to win the nomination: the two front-runners, Bachmann, Cain, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich (not that anyone currently considers Gingrich a legitimate contender for the nomination). All of which makes for a bad day for the likes of Rick Santorum, who could be named by only 4% of Republicans as even being a candidate; John Huntsman did only half that well, despite a well-publicized roll-out. Even more frighteningly, if you add up all the numbers, you get an average of less than one candidate recognition per respondent among the general population: all the numbers add up to exactly 100%, but that figure includes Chris Christie and Sarah Palin, both of whom have said they’re not in the race.

Think about that. 46% can’t name anyone. That means the remaining 54% average (if we drop Palin and Christie) average less than 1.8 apiece. Let’s say there’s 1 in 100 who are the same kind of political junkie that I am (and I’m not exactly a fanatic) and could name eight candidates (I’m kicking myself that I had to be reminded of Gary Johnson’s name). And let’s say that another 5% can name the two front-runners and the three others who have won a straw poll already. That leaves only 64 identifications to split among 48 people. In other words, if another 8% of the population can name only Perry, Romney and Bachmann, then we get this:

1% can name 8 candidates.
5% can name 5 candidates
8% can name 3 candidates
40% can name 1 candidate
46% can’t name any candidates

This strikes me as a reasonable breakdown, given the numbers we have to work with… which means that 86% of the American population can’t name more than a single Republican Presidential candidate. Wow.

Republicans, of course, do a little better—it’s their party’s candidates we’re talking about, after all. They came up with 132 identifications per 100 respondents, with “only” (shudder) 34% who couldn’t name anyone. That works out to exactly two identifications per Republican who could name a candidate. Again, figure 1% at 8, 5% at 5, and we’re still at only about 13% at 3, and another 13% at 2, leaving 34% at 1. In other words, roughly two-thirds of Republicans can’t name more than one GOP contender.

So before anyone in any of the candidates’ camps starts crowing about leading in this or that poll, or winning this or that straw poll, or scoring points in this or that debate, there’s this to consider: the American electorate’s ignorance of the field is mind-boggling in its scope. If they can’t even name a couple of options, how can they hope to know whose policies they like (or don’t)? The answer is obvious: they can’t. The manifold failures of the media are partially responsible for all this, of course, but, in the words of the great sage Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is us.

I have a fond hope that the situation may change by the time votes actually count for something in the primary season, or at least by the general election. I get that way sometimes… it’s probably indigestion.

Because the DOJ has nothing better to do...

2011-10-08T16:01:00.005-05:00

One of the truisms of American politics is that no politician is as interested in libertarianism (civil or otherwise) as (s)he pretends to be. Otherwise they wouldn’t be interested in being part of the government, right? And I’m not talking here about the garden-variety Republican hypocrisy of claiming to want smaller government while sticking the elephant’s nose into health care decisions and underwriting certain forms of religious expression while seeking to prohibit others. Nor is this about the equally preposterous Democratic claims to personal liberties while pushing for a national ID card or cranking up the silliness required to board a flight. No, this is about the betrayal of what really are the tattered remains of core values in both parties.

Thus, the Crown Prince of Small Government, Ronald Reagan, not merely (almost) tripled the national debt, but did so largely by having federal spending reach as high as 23.5% of GDP (Jimmy Carter never reached 22%; wild-eyed spendthrift Obama in 2010: 23.8%). That’s also how Barack Obama’s Justice Department is being even more stupid than their predecessors with respect to medical marijuana.

I am not a lawyer, so I’m not going to try to interpret the intricacies of the law, but I’ve been told by a really smart man that I “know something and can read.” I know, if nothing else, that justifying the federal ban on medical marijuana, even when states allow it, based on the interstate commerce clause is insane. It was when I wrote about it in 2005, and it is today. Whether there are other legal grounds for upholding federal jurisdiction, I don’t know. But I do know that in a time of scarce resources, a program which alleviates pain for some of the citizenry, generates tax revenues, and would cost a bunch of money to shut down ought to stay around because of inertia if nothing else.

This is not the time to re-visit the old arguments about whether medical marijuana is a good idea or not. But it may be time for a reminder that proponents of states’ rights generally mean that Alabama ought to be able to discriminate against minorities despite the US Constitution, not that Californians ought to be allowed to have medical marijuana when that same Constitution (as read by anyone with an IQ above their shoe size) specifically tells the feds to butt out.

More importantly, the time is definitely ripe to look at the arguments being made in favor of this stupid and wasteful initiative. Here’s a good chunk of the announcement by Melinda Haag, the US Attorney for the Northern District of California.

More than 40 years ago our elected federal representatives determined that various substances have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use in the United States. Based on these findings, Congress passed laws making it unlawful for people in this country to manufacture, cultivate or distribute various drugs, including heroine, MDA, LSD, and marijuana, among others.

In other words, the fact that there now is an “accepted medical use” is irrelevant, at least until the Congress does something about it. I’d comment further, but I can’t improve on the wisdom of the great Mark Twain: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Many in the marijuana industry have portrayed the Oct 2009 Department of Justice guidance as giving a free pass to any marijuana business that invokes state law or calls its customers patients. That was frankly never correct.

Precisely. If it is a violation of California law, prosecute it… or, rather, assist California in prosecuting it. But Californian authorities, not a US Attorney, get to decide what violates California law.

In the Northern District of California marijuana cultivators are converting our public lands and pristine forests into large-scale clandestine marijuana grow operations. They are cutting down trees and plants; they are diverting streams, polluting the water table, and the land with toxic pesticides. They are starting wildfires, bringing in undocumented workers from Mexico, some of whom may be the victims of human trafficking. Many of these workers who guard the grow operations do so with firearms, thereby endangering hikers who might unwittingly stumble in.

[And when the growers are through] they harvest their crops and leave behind literally tons of trash, unused pesticides, hundreds of miles of plastic piping, camping equipment and human waste…

Then maybe you ought to… you know… go after them for: unauthorized use of public lands, pollution, vandalism, littering, reckless endangerment, smuggling, immigration violations, hiring violations, weapons charges… and maybe, just maybe, you could just go ahead and do that without making a speech about it.

Even under California law, marijuana cultivation is supposed to be not for profit. What we are finding is that people are using the cover of medical marijuana to make extraordinary amounts of money, in short to engage in drug trafficking. And many of these drug trafficking operations are in plain sight. In many communities, like mine, you can't walk a mile without seeing multiple retail marijuana stores, sometimes surrounded by fences and patrolled by security guards. If you sit and watch for a moment, you see cars pulling over, seemingly young healthy people jumping out of the cars, running into the store, and emerging with paper bags full of marijuana.

Some of these operations allow their customers to smoke marijuana while on the premises. Presumably at least some of them get back into their cars and drive away impaired. There’s a reason for the security guards and fences; where there's marijuana there's money and lots of it. These places are prime targets for robberies and violence...

Again, prosecute, or help California to prosecute, these people. If they’re actually “drug trafficking,” arrest them. The fact that I think marijuana probably ought to be de-criminalized (at least) doesn’t change the fact that people are currently breaking the law and endangering other people. So do something about the real law-breakers. But don’t do this:

[Because of limited resources] I have decided to focus initially on stores that sell marijuana and allow people to smoke marijuana very close to schools, parks and other places where children learn and play.

Would someone please knock it off with this utterly phony concern for children? There are lots of things wrong in the lives of America’s kids, but being in the proximity of a medical marijuana dispensary doesn’t make the Top 100 list. I presume the California law authorizing medicinal use of marijuana says something about proximity to schools and parks. If it doesn’t (and an article in the not-exactly-leftist Wall Street Journal suggests precisely that), then you, Ms. Haag, are a moron of the first order. Even if it does, I shudder to think about what some over-zealous cop (there’s another kind?) will make of “other places where children learn and play.” This fuzzy-mindedness isn’t merely an example of perverse priorities, it veritably begs to be abused.

Last week we sent letters to the landlords and lien holders of these stores, putting them on notice that marijuana is being sold and used on their property in close proximity to children and that the operations must cease. I understand that there are people in California who believe that marijuana stores should be allowed to exist. But I trust these same people would all agree we don't need marijuana retail outlets across the street from playgrounds and schools and little league fields.

Actually, no, I wouldn’t agree, for the reasons just noted. And I sure as hell wouldn’t agree that landlords and lien holders ought to be threatened with prison sentences of up to 40 years. Those are goon tactics, throwing your weight around simply because you can. If someone is doing something really illegal, or really likely to undermine the safety and stability of a community, stop them. But unless your goal is to make the Obama administration look like right-wing caricatures of it, you need to stop with the absurd threats against those who have done nothing wrong. And that would include all the other stupid stuff your colleagues across the country are doing. Quoting the MSNBC article:

•In Colorado, which also allowed medical marijuana, the Treasury Department is requiring that banks close accounts of legal medical marijuana businesses.
•The IRS says dispensaries may not deduct standard business expenses such as payroll, security or rent. “The result will be closure of the most well regulated dispensaries and loss of millions of dollars in tax revenue for local governments,” the group stated.
•The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives last month ruled that medical marijuana patients sanctioned by states cannot legally possess firearms.

Seriously, are you people insane? You can’t come up with a higher priority than hassling people who are obeying state laws, especially when you’ve pretty much indicated that you weren’t going to be doing anything drastic.

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance puts the situation this way: “Barack Obama is betraying promises made when he ran for president and turning his back on the sensible policies announced during his first year in office.” The extent to which Mr. Obama is personally responsible for this misguided policy initiative is unclear. That it reflects poorly on his administration is not.

Tennessee's State Bird Is Apparently the Homophobe (no offense intended to our avian friends)

2011-10-06T22:00:00.008-05:00

DADT is gone and DOMA may follow, but no one will be surprised to learn that the country is still well-populated with homophobic idiots. Nor do I suspect that many will be shocked to hear that Tennessee has more than its share of this particular variety of vermin. But I confess that I was a little taken aback to encounter these two stories within about an hour of each other a couple of days ago.

The first story I read concerned a gay couple, Jerry Pittman Jr. and Dustin Lee, attacked as they arrived at a worship service by deacons of the Grace Fellowship Church in Fruitland, TN. (Seriously, what self-respecting violent anti-gay moron would live in a place called Fruitland?) Did I mention that the instigator was the minister, Jerry Pittman Sr.?

Having been assaulted by three deacons (including his uncle), the younger Pittman called the cops, for all the good that did. According to a story on the AddictingInfo site:

The attackers also verbally assaulted the couple continually with anti-gay verbiage which continued even after a Sheriff’s Deputy arrived on the scene. Bystanders and other congregants made no effort to stop the assault. For that matter, neither did the Deputy Sheriff. Once the barrage of punches ended, the Deputy refused to let the two victims press charges.

The young men eventually filed charges the next day. But the case gets weirder: one of the attackers (and yes, I’m calling him an attacker before “all the facts are in”) apparently filed charges of his own a few days later, claiming it was Pittman Jr. who initiated the incident. Uh huh. No, really, this is my “I believe you” face; it just looks like my “you’re full of shit” face. Another attacker was allegedly stabbed in his own garage. Then the first guy packed up and moved, only to have his house burned down the next day. This is getting creepy.

And, of course, the two young men are finding it difficult to secure legal representation, the local lawyers being too ~~homophobic themselves~~ ~~chicken-shit~~ concerned with their image in the community to take on a “gay case.”

There’s more to the story, too. Apparently the elder Pittman had been arrested earlier in the day for the theft of $10,000 related to his imminent divorce from the woman whose presence in his life was the primary reason he hadn’t given in to the raving lunatic side of his personality earlier. This is the preacher, remember. OK… I’ll grant that you can use a selective reading of Leviticus and Deuteronomy to justify your homophobia. But I’m pretty sure I recall something about stone-casting, and I’m virtually certain that stealing and bearing false witness show up among the “shalt nots.” Those Old Testament dudes weren’t very liberal about divorce, either, if I recall correctly.

The failures of Pittman senior as father, minister, (apparently husband)—indeed as person are too manifold to enumerate. I’m not optimistic, of course, but there’s an outside chance he might yet turn out to be someone who could be mentioned in the same breath as Jesus without incurring laughter. Nah, who am I kidding?

Meanwhile, to the east, students at Sequoyah High School in Madisonville, tired of bullying and gay-bashing, attempted to form a Gay-Straight Alliance. According to student Zachary Piccione, he spent all spring semester “trying to find a sponsor, someone who would be willing to start one with me. And everyone's thing was that they didn't have time.” If this is true, then Sequoyah High School has a lot of craven and stupid teachers. They certainly have a bone-headed bully for a principal.

One Maurice Moser seems never to have outgrown his schoolyard bully phase. Trouble is, he’s the principal now. Nathan Carroll, a student who says he’s been bullied since the 6th grade for his sexual orientation and for “acting gay,” met with Moser twice this fall to try again to start an apparently much-needed GSA. He got nowhere, so he started a petition drive, collecting some 150 signatures, a fair number for a school of barely over 1000 students.

If you go to the school’s website, the first thing you see is the mission statement: “Our mission is to provide a safe, educational environment with academic and technical programs that will prepare each student to enter post-secondary institutions and/or the work force upon graduation.” The more perspicacious among you, Gentle Readers, will note the prominence of the word “safe” in the school’s mission. If you’re a little curious, you might also check out the Academics/Faculty page, where you’ll find this: “Every student should have an environment that is safe and conducive to learning.” Trouble is, apparently nobody at the school really believes that. (Given the fact that the Academics/Faculty page also says that “Faculty, students, and community support is necessary to accomplish the school's mission,” I’m guessing their mission doesn’t have much to do with teaching English grammar, either.)

Anyway, there was apparently an anti-gay group that wanted to stop the formation of the GSA. (As if they had any legitimate reason to prevent the club from forming.) A principal with a spine would tell the haters to go fuck themselves (perhaps not in precisely those words), allow the GSA to get started, and go back to trying to figure out the difference between singular and plural nouns. Not Moser. He outlawed any discussion of the proposed group by supporters or opponents (he being an equal opportunity civil rights violator), thereby ensuring that the GSA would not be formed while cravenly pretending to be even-handed. In Carroll’s words, Moser “said anything going pro or against GSA... if any petition is found, it is to be torn up and thrown away. Any student caught with it will be sent to his office for further punishment.”

Moser, of course, ducked press inquiries, passing the buck to the Director of Schools, Mike Lowry, who (surprise of surprises) issued a mealy-mouthed and ungrammatical diversion from the issue at hand and an avowal that students who follow the rules (what rules didn’t these follow?) will be treated “fairly and equally,” which one presumes is sort of like “separate but equal” for the 21st century.

Ah, but Gentle Reader, we’re not done yet. It seems that a young man named Chris Sigler wore a shirt on Tuesday that said “GSA: We’ve Got Your Back.” Oh, the humanity! According to the ACLU, here’s what happened next:

A teacher ordered Sigler to cover up the shirt in the future. Sigler, knowing he had a right to wear the shirt, wore it again Friday, and resisted an order to remove the shirt. Sigler says that Moser then ordered all students out of the classroom, except for Sigler’s sister Jessica, who refused to leave. According to both students, Moser then grabbed Sigler’s arm, shoved him, and chest-bumped him repeatedly while asking “Who’s the big man now?” [Are you freaking kidding me? The guy ought to be fired for being a bad pop culture cliché, if nothing else.] Sigler’s mother reported that when she arrived at the school, she saw her son seated in a desk with Moser leaning over him and shouting in Sigler’s face.

True, we haven’t heard Moser’s side of the story, but I have this nagging feeling that an authoritarian homophobe (and I’m pretty confident of both of those descriptors) probably doesn’t have a lot of defense. Denial, maybe. Bluster, perhaps. Excuse? Doesn’t seem possible, does it?

We’ve been acculturated into keeping our respective heads down. Jerry Pittman Jr. may not have had a choice, but at least he filed charges. Chris Sigler didn’t duck at all. This may or may not have been “his fight”: the article doesn’t say whether he’s gay or straight. I like that. Because I don’t care, and I really couldn’t care less about anyone who does. Chris, when you graduate, you’re welcome in my class.

O'Reilly and Cain Do Their Best to... Defend Obama?

2011-10-05T22:16:00.006-05:00

There’s a lot to contemplate in the Occupy Wall Street protests: why are they only now gaining any sort of mainstream press coverage? why do we as a culture seem to condone the brutality evidenced by some of the cops? why have arrests led to even more protests? who are these people, anyway? what do they really want? how “spontaneous” is this stuff? do we need to send emergency supplies of granola and patchouli to New York?

All of these are legitimate questions, and all—no doubt—have complex but ultimately comprehensible answers. I’ll even try to provide some of those insights in the days ahead. But the protests and their aftermath have also generated a question in my mind for which the response can only be a disbelieving head shake: what the hell is the Right thinking?

I get the whole “class warfare meme” being mouthed by the likes of Mitt Romney, but the more strident tones adopted by Presidential candidate flavor-of-the-month Herman Cain and veteran Fox News windbag Bill O’Reilly are harder to fathom. Cain says “if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself!” This is pretty much an echo of O’Reilly’s “they’re jobless because they don’t want to work…. All they have to do is take a shower and they can get a job if they went to college.”

Apart from the obvious factual errors and interpretative horror-shows (the protests are more about corruption than about jobs, the complaint is the compensation for jobs rather than the jobs themselves, etc.), and even leaving aside the fulfillment of every Democratic strategist’s wet dream by alienating the under-employed and the simply angry, there’s something very odd indeed here. The Right is so terrified of some sort of conspiracy of the Left to distract our attention from bad economic numbers (that’s Cain’s argument) that they don’t recognize that the actual protesters (rightly) regard the Democrats, whose whimpers of protest die away when the campaign contributions roll in, as only slightly less complicit in the sorry state of economic affairs than the Republicans, who are more eagerly evil.

Herman Cain is a bigot and a bloviating jackass, but presumably he has at least a modicum of sense or he couldn’t have risen to the top of his profession. Bill O’Reilly is also a bright guy: not as bright as he thinks he is, but, of course, you could combine the best qualities of Aristotle, Einstein, Mozart, Lincoln, and da Vinci and not be as smart as O’Reilly thinks he is. But here, Cain and O’Reilly just got flat suckered. Whether the bait was dangled in front of them intentionally is not clear; that they bit, absolutely intentionally, is.

In Oedipus the King, the title character brings about his own demise by hubristically attempting to circumvent his fate: he abandoned Corinth in the mistaken belief that he could thereby protect his father and mother there, little realizing that his biological parents were in fact in Thebes. And so he kills his father on the road and is awarded the hand (and other body parts) of his mother as a reward for solving the riddle of the Sphinx. But it all starts with the belief that he can cheat the gods.

What happens to our two 21st century blowhards is similar: undeterred by reality, they forged ahead with their talking points, oblivious to the consequences. What consequences, you ask? Well, how about this: in their zeal to paint the protesters as whiners and chronic malcontents, these two paragons of the Right are arguing in no uncertain terms that the economic malaise felt by many people in the country is illusory. If all you have to do is take a shower to get a job, then all those unemployment figures don’t mean anything.

Commentators on both sides of the political divide agree on one thing: that the albatross around the neck of President Obama’s re-election bid is that 9.1% unemployment rate, up from less than 8% when Obama took office. And for all the CBO figures that suggest the President’s stimulus package saved us from a much greater disaster, the fact remains that jobs—the lack of them—will prove to be the biggest drag on the Obama 2012 campaign. Nor does it seem the President has much to offer. True, there’s that jobs bill, but neither John Boehner, who would cheerfully destroy the economy if it results in putting a Republican in the White House, nor Harry Reid (of “with friends like this…” fame) seem much interested in passing it, even in modified (read: “eviscerated”) form. The unemployment rate is therefore a virtual certainty to be higher on Election Day 2012 than on Inauguration Day 2009: and we can pretty much count on the Republicans to chant in unison that “he made it worse,” caring not a whit, of course, whether actually he did or not.

Indeed, it was beginning to look like Mr. Obama had no rejoinder to those charges. But wait, who’s that riding in on a white charger to whisk our beleaguered hero away from the clutches of electoral disaster? Why, it’s Bill O’Reilly and his faithful retainer Herman Cain! (Or is that Herman Cain and his faithful retainer Bill O’Reilly? I can never remember.) The unemployment problem isn’t systemic! It isn’t a failure of leadership! It’s completely unrelated to politics altogether! People are unemployed for two reasons only: they’re lazy, and they stink. The current economy is not, therefore, Mr. Obama’s fault, and no, the Republican House isn’t going to sign off on a stimulus package consisting of buying and distributing a few million crates of deodorant body wash. So our slothful and aromatic work force remains un- or under-employed, but at least we know whom to blame: not the guy we’re trying to defeat, but rather the voters themselves.

These guys are just too inscrutable for me.

All His Rowdy Friends Still Had Jobs on Monday Night

2011-10-03T21:49:00.015-05:00

Hank Williams, Jr. is an idiot. But we knew that.

His pathetic display of borderline seditious boneheadedness on Fox & Friends this morning earned him the title of former singer of the intro song for Monday Night Football. His on-air comparison of the President of the United States to Hitler and his description of Mssrs. Obama and Biden as “the enemy”—an enemy so horrible, apparently, that John Boehner’s playing golf with the POTUS was “one of the biggest political mistakes ever”—was so outrageous that even Gretchen Carlson backed away from his lunacy. Let’s face it, if there are four people in a conversation and Gretchen Carlson is the smart one, you’re in serious trouble.

OK, Brian Kilmeade’s silly introduction notwithstanding, Hank Williams, Jr. does not “[know] a lot about politics.” He is, in fact, a buffoon. The fact that he has arrogantly-asserted opinions and a boorish smirk does not make him knowledgeable, although he could probably hold his own against the majority of the guests on Fox & Friends, including most of the alleged political experts and undoubtedly all of the presumed journalists. That he was previously enamored of Sarah Palin tells you that, let’s say, his politics and mine are not terribly well aligned. That he—or anyone—thinks Herman Cain is a reasonable candidate sends chills up my spine. But that’s not a reason to fire his sorry ass. Comparing the President to Hitler is.

By the way, this isn’t a partisan issue. A few years ago Senator Dick Durbin was describing conditions at Guantanamo Bay and suggested (accurately, I might add) that:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings.

True, we expect a little more from a US Senator than from a pompous country singer the majority of the country knows for a single song from a generation ago. But Durbin was describing conditions, not people… and mentioning Nazis in general isn’t the same as a direct analogue to the guy with the funny mustache. Still, here’s what I said at the time: “… you don't mention Nazis. You just don't. Even if you're not really making a comparison, even (no, make that especially) if the point you make is legitimate, you've got to understand that all people are going to hear is a slur.” Williams’s walk-back appears to be even less sincere than Durbin’s, and demonstrates his fundamental failure to comprehend even the most basic of political realities: that Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner have to work together at least a little bit or everyone loses.

There will be those, including over 40%—as I write this, at least—of those responding to an online poll by USA Today, who think ESPN was “wrong” to fire Williams because “there’s free speech.” OK, once more: “free speech” means only that the government can’t prosecute you for what you say (with a few exceptions: incitement to riot, slander, perjury, etc.). It doesn’t mean that you can say whatever you want without repercussions. Sarah Palin may not comprehend this; Hank Williams, Jr. may not comprehend this. But it is a fact nonetheless: a private company can get rid of you for embarrassing them. Indeed, it is their responsibility to their stockholders and to their employees who aren’t dumber than the proverbial box of rocks to do so.

What will be really interesting to watch will be Fox News’s response to all this. They (or at least Carlson) backed away from Williams’s more incendiary rhetoric, but don’t be surprised to see them suddenly trumpeting his “right” to do whatever he chooses without restriction. (Watch the fireworks fly if one of their employees has the apostasy to question the Solomonic wisdom of Michele Bachman, however.)

Most significantly, of course, all of this leaves ESPN without a singer for their self-indulgent, over-produced and hellaciously boring intro. Luckily, I’m here to help them out. In Williams, they had a bigoted, reactionary has-been country singer. The reasonable replacement: a bigoted, reactionary has-been rock singer. And the Lions are on next week: “Cat Scratch Fever” seems particularly apt.

"Fuck Obama" and the Mad Mathematician

2011-10-02T22:15:00.010-05:00

In doing a little research for my last piece about the kerfuffle at UW-Stout, I came across another article at Popehat, this one by Patrick, about freedom of expression on yet another college campus. This one particularly caught my eye because the university in question in Sam Houston State University, my current institution’s arch-rival. The Popehat article gives only the bare bones; the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) site has more of the details.

It seems that a coalition of student groups from across the political spectrum—the SHSU Lovers of Liberty, Bearkat Democrats, Young Democratic Socialists, and College Republicans—joined together a fortnight or so ago to protest a proposed university social media policy. The groups co-sponsored a “free speech wall” on which students could write anything they chose. You see where this is going, don’t you, Gentle Reader? Post-adolescents, complete freedom to say anything… somebody is going to think the quintessence of wit is to use the so-called F-word. Aaaaaaannnd: they did. A letter from FIRE’s VP for Programs to SHSU President Dana L. Gibson spells out some of what appeared on that wall:

Many students wrote a variety of political and other messages on the wall, including “don't hate against Gays ...,” “If you make less than $200,000 Republicans don't care about you,” “God so loved the world He sent His one and only son ...,” “Best thing I've ever seen at this raggedy school!!!,” “Life's not a bitch, Life is a beautiful woman ...,” “Han Solo Shot First,” “My boyfriend is a liar!,” “Legalize Weed!!!,” “NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF!!!,” and “FUCK OBAMA.” In response to “FUCK OBAMA,” others continued the conversation. One person wrote “BUSH” under “OBAMA.” Another added “you,” apparently to signify saying “fuck you” to the person who had written “FUCK OBAMA.”

You can see part of this, at least, in the photo above. Anyway, along comes Math professor Joe E. Kirk, who was offended by the Anglo-Saxonism, specifically in reference to the President of the United States. He demanded the profanity be removed or covered up. The students refused. Kirk then went to his office, returned with a box cutter (yes, really) and performed a fuck-echtomy.

As far as I can tell, no one has actually asked Dr. Kirk exactly why he did that. He’s not a young man (if his college graduation year is an indicator, he’s in his early seventies), and the expletive may have actually bothered him. Maybe he’s a die-hard Democrat—apparently the wall featured a number of f-bombs, but only one was cut out. Or maybe “fuck [anybody but the POTUS]” is OK.

Anyway, according to Morgan Freeman (that would be the president of the SHSU chapter of Lovers of Liberty, not the one you’ve heard of), the students then:

called [their] advisor, who called one of the deans. The dean said to call the police because Joe Kirk had used a potential weapon. The police (UPD) came and interviewed us and then went to talk to Joe Kirk. They returned and said we had to either cover up the profanity or take it down. There was too much profanity to cover it all up. We decided if we were not really free to exercise our freedom of speech, then there was no point in having a free speech wall. So we removed the paper, and then disassembled the wall, packed it up and left.

And there you have it: a neat little free-speech episode with no one to root for.

The administration? Well, they were willing to create a social media policy that was imposed from above without appropriate consultation with students, staff, or faculty. It’s also incompetently written: if parallelism means anything anymore (and if the draft version posted online hasn’t been corrected), there’s a section that reads: “[The] University claims the right to remove comments and content from social media accounts if they… Do not violate the terms of use/service of the social platforms you use.” (pp. 8-9 of the pdf file) Yes, that’s right, you’ll be censored if you do not violate the TOS of the provider. That’s not what was intended, but that’s what it says. And the ultimate response to this brouhaha? “The incident… is currently under investigation.” I feel better already.

The student protesters? Well, they got their skivvies in a twist over a policy that is really only intended to protect the university from unauthorized or inappropriate use of the school’s brand: you can say whatever you want, but you can’t say it as a representative of SHSU. As an administrator of our School of Theatre Facebook page, I’ve removed spam, and I would, if necessary, remove posts which would reflect poorly on our program… whatever the reason. There is no right being violated by removing graffiti, whether the medium is paint or a Twitter feed.

Moreover, they had to have known that their little exercise in “free speech” would degenerate into a battle of who could say “fuck” with the most fervor. While there are a couple of expressions on the wall that actually qualify as political speech—the protection of which was the real intention of the 1st amendment—most are, to use a term that’s probably literally true in some instances, sophomoric. There’s no law against that, and their right to free expression should not be abridged simply because they nothing of value to say, but it would be nice if they didn’t feel so compelled to demonstrate their vacuity.

Professor Kirk? He had the right to be upset, but not to wield a box-cutter. Vandalism isn’t cool. The end.

The dean? Suggesting that the real problem was that Dr. Kirk “had used a potential weapon”? Assuming Ms. Freeman reported the dean’s words correctly, this is right up there with the stupidity manifested at UW-Stout. Other potential weapons that clearly were not used as such would also include the hot sauce in Prof. Kirk’s chili and the car he drove home in. Dean = Moron.

The campus police? The words on the protest wall were pretty clearly intended for no reason other than to be offensive, but they didn’t rise to the level of disorderly conduct, regardless of what the university’s Deputy Police Chief may think. The Houstonian, the student newspaper, reports that the statute in question reads as follows: “A person commits an offense if he intentionally or knowingly; (1) uses abusive, indecent, profane, or vulgar language in a public place, and the language by its very utterance tends to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” The first part happened; the second didn’t. It wasn’t the language that incited a breach of the peace, and whatever breach there was wasn’t immediate.

Still, we can make a case that the situation at least neared a grey area. It was the dithering that really looks bad: clearly there was no violation if the investigating officers didn’t think so when they first showed up. Leaving and then returning with threats is tacky at best.

This case is nowhere near as clear-cut as the one at UW-Stout. There, no reasonable person could possibly have read the “Firefly” poster as a threat. Here, well, “fuck” bothers some people, especially when applied as an insult to the President. Moreover, while a university does not have the right to limit student speech per se, they do have a right to maintain order on their campus and to apply rules of conduct for the use of university facilities. It is this same principle that allows universities to forbid firearms or alcohol on campus, or that allows me to throw someone out of my classroom or my office, even though they’re in a state-owned building.

The students in question are jerks. But they’re politically active post-adolescents: it’s sort of their job. Still, the conflation between that which is legal and that which ought to be done continues to be troubling. Professor Kirk needs to chill, possibly in retirement. The campus police need to enforce the law and the Constitution, not their personal agendas. And the administration would do well to talk to, instead of at, students and faculty. Because they fucked this shit up.

"Firefly," Fascists, and Freedom of Speech

2011-10-01T22:05:00.018-05:00

For a year or two, there was a sign on my office door that read “Perge, scelus, mihi diem perficias.” That translates roughly as “Proceed, varlet, and render the day perfect unto me,” or, more colloquially, “Go ahead, punk, make my day.” It was, of course, a joke: the merging of a popular culture reference with my projected self-image both as intellectual and as (pedagogical) tough guy. Anyone who felt threatened, even after having the saying translated, is too stupid to be in my classroom.

Now a different professor of theatre at a different non-flagship state university is at the center of a controversy involving a very similar door decoration. James Miller teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. He put a poster (shown at right) from the now-cancelled television show “Firefly” on his office door. It reads “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.” Much to the consternation of some of my students, past and present, I’ve never seen the show, but commentators who are fans assure me that the quotation in question comes from the pilot episode, in which the hero responds to a question about whether the other character will be killed in his sleep.

I can’t confirm that, but anyone with any right to be in a theatre building can read a text well enough to understand that the meaning of the line is the precise opposite of a threat: “You have nothing to fear from me unless you take up arms against me, in which case I will annihilate you.” All of which proves that the Chief of the University Police, one Lisa A. Walter, is an idiot. She removed the poster and then informed Mr. Miller by e-mail that she had done so, claiming that “it is unacceptable to have postings such as this that refer to killing.” Seriously? I'm glad she wasn't the one deciding whether we could advertise our recent production of Yeats one-acts, including (OMG!) The Death of Cuchulain.

Miller reacted pretty much as I would have if my sign had been removed by some moronic campus cop who was as incapable of reading comprehension as she was of respecting personal liberties. (I hope I wouldn’t have called her “fascistic,” as Prof. Miller did in his response, but I make no guarantees.) And then the escalation began. Not content with being merely stupid, Chief Walter ratcheted up the stakes:

My actions are appropriate and defensible. Speech can be limited on a reasonable expectation that it will cause a material and/or substantial disruption of school activities and/or be constituted as a threat. We were notified of the existence of the posting, reviewed it and believe that the wording on the poster can be interpreted as a threat by others and/or could cause those that view it to believe that you are willing/able to carry out actions similar to what is listed. This posting can cause others to fear for their safety, thus it was removed.

I am willing to schedule a meeting with you to discuss this further, if you wish. If you choose to repost the article or something similar to it, it will be removed and you could face charges of disorderly conduct.

Well, no, Chief, your actions were inappropriate and indefensible. No rational human being would come to a “reasonable expectation” that a poster from a television show (you might not have known that, but surely you could figure out that the poster was mass-produced, right?) could possibly cause a “disruption of school activities,” “material and/or substantial” or otherwise, or that the words on the piece of paper constitute a threat of any kind. If other people “fear for their safety” because of that poster, it is your responsibility to escort them to the psychiatric ward, not to confiscate private property without as much as a warrant. Certainly it is you, with your terrifying admixture of stupidity, arrogance, and simple bravado, that constitutes a threat: charges of disorderly conduct? Really?

Miller then raised the tension level again, e-mailing Walter in apparent disbelief:

Postings that "refer" to violence constitute a threat? As in a poster from Hamlet? Or a news clipping about Hockey players that commit violent murder? [EDIT: This last line seemed a bit strange, so I looked it up: sure enough, there was a local story about a group of hockey players allegedly causing the death of a fellow student. Two were charged with felony murder; ten were suspended from the team but not from the university: actual violence apparently fits in fine with the sense of warm fuzzies sought by the Stout administration.]

Don't threaten me with charges that have no basis in reality—I am a committed pacifist and a devotee of non-violence, and I don't appreciate card carrying members of the NRA who are wearing side arms and truncheons lecturing me about violence.

And, of course, he put a different poster on his door: the one to the left, showing a beat-down of a citizen by a cop, with the cutline “Warning: Fascism. Fascism can cause blunt trauma and/or violent death. Keep Fascism away from children and pets.” Whether Chief Walter was really too dim-witted to know that she was the target of the commentary or just wanted to pretend that she wasn’t, her response was sadly predictable: another removal, another inane justification e-mail:

My office removed another posting from the outside of your office. The posting depicts violence and mentions violence and death. The campuses [sic.] threat assessment team met yesterday and conferred with UW System Office of General Counsel and made the decision that this posting should be removed. It is believed that this posting also has a reasonable expectation that it will cause a material and/or substantial disruption of school activities and/or be constituted as a threat.

Notice that the precise “charge” is never spelled out. More importantly, it’s no longer just Walter who is on the silly side. I’ve spent the vast majority of my adult life on college campuses (I’ve taken or taught college courses for at least one semester in every calendar year since 1973), and I’ve known, at least in passing, a few dozen campus cops. Many are nice people, the majority are no doubt perfectly qualified to hand out parking tickets and break up parties that get too loud, but I don’t think many will ever be accused of being intellectual giants. Conversely, more than a few are self-important jackasses. It would be an exaggeration to say that I expected Chief Walter to fall into this latter category, but it certainly didn’t surprise me.

But now we have the portentous-sounding “threat assessment team” and indeed the university system’s General Counsel getting into the act. These people should know better. It is more than a little distressing that they do not. This is where I yield to Ken at Popehat:

If a rational person wouldn’t take it as an actual threat of violence, then it’s not a true threat that can be censored, however much the hysterical, irrational, nanny-stating, coddling, or professionally emo think about it, and however much university chancellors would like to believe otherwise….

A system in which what we can say is premised upon the likely reactions of the mentally ill and the undernourished pussywillows of the world is a system that encourages suppression of all unpopular, forceful, interesting, or challenging speech. The irrational and the morally and mentally weak are not entitled to have their feelings protected through the force of law, however prevalent they are on campus….

If your “UW System Legal Counsel” told you that these posters could be censored based on their content, then stop hiring lawyers out of the back of a bait shop.

Anyway, about the same time as Walter and the Minions launched into their tap-dance routine, Dr. Miller brought FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) on board. FIRE is best known for rallying around right-wing students whose tender sensibilities have been affronted by rationality (expecting students in a biology class to articulate the principles of evolution, for example), but, like the ACLU from the other direction, they actually do believe in a philosophy rather than an ideology. In other words, they really do care about free expression. And, alas, I must tell you that in my experience there have been more assaults on academic freedom and 1st amendment rights on campus from the left than the right.

Anyway, this is right up FIRE’s alley, and they blasted away with an article on their website and an all-out publicity blitz, sending an open letter to Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen of the Stout campus, and enlisting directly or indirectly the assistance of actors Adam Baldwin and Nathan Fillion from the “Firefly” series (that’s Fillion on the poster), plus such decidedly disparate sites as Reason.com and Gawker. (Gawker’s story is particularly snarky and therefore dear to my heart.) Unfortunately, rather than listen to reason or to argumentation (and derision) from the left, right, and center, Chancellor Sorensen punted.

He and his equally craven, hubristic, and vacuous senior staff—Provost Julie Furst-Bowe and Vice Chancellor Ed Nieskes—sent an e-mail to all faculty and staff at the Stout campus, attempting to spin their thuggishness, repressiveness, and outright fatuousness into something comprehensible if not noble. I include the entire e-mail here, with my commentary inset and in brackets:

There have been recent news reports about an incident in which two posters hung by a UW-Stout professor outside his office were removed by campus police. There are some important points to consider in the wake of these incidents:
[Indeed, there are…]
UW-Stout administrators believe strongly in the right of all students, faculty and staff to express themselves freely about issues on campus and off. This freedom is fundamental on a public university campus.
[Then STFU.]
However, we also have the responsibility to promote a campus environment that is free from threats of any kind—both direct and implied. It was our belief, after consultation with UW System legal counsel, that the posters in question constituted an implied threat of violence. That is why they were removed.
[Bullshit. The first poster was removed before any such consultation, and everything after that came as a result of trying to justify that initial stupidity. So, first of all, stop lying. Secondly, if you think those posters “constituted an implied threat of violence,” you are barely intelligent enough to feed yourself, let alone sit behind a desk—even as students—at a reputable university. Finally, it is not your “responsibility” to enforce a threat-free environment, certainly not if the standard for an “implied” threat is what the most moronic reader (such as yourselves) might contort a perfectly innocuous expression into potentially meaning.]
This was not an act of censorship. This was an act of sensitivity to and care for our shared community, and was intended to maintain a campus climate in which everyone can feel welcome, safe and secure.
[True, technically this was not an act of censorship. That would imply that the state qua state was prohibiting free expression. No, you gaggle of dimwits are acting not as the state but as employer, thereby possibly rendering your inanity legal, although still ethically unsupportable and professionally incompetent. And puh-leeze, spare me your sanctimony, your sensitivity, and your caring. Give me instead, please, an institution that values reason, personal liberties, and the free exchange of ideas… because this ain’t it, and an out-of-the-closet intellectual such as myself does not feel the slightest bit “welcome, safe, [or] secure” in this “shared community.” Indeed, you three, the chief of police, and the general counsel all terrify me.]

There is one piece of good news… I have another reason to be happy where I am.

(Thanks to my netfriend Jack Marshall for alerting me to this story. You can read his commentary here and here.)

College Republicans Think They're Smarter than They Are. (In other news, lead appears to be heavier than shaving cream.)

2011-09-29T21:55:00.006-05:00

Driving home from a recruiting trip to Houston a couple nights ago, a colleague from the School of Art and I were discussing the nature of satire. It strikes me that three things make satire work: 1). enough similarity to the referent that the ironic juxtaposition is apparent, 2). enough difference from the referent that the ironic (i.e., “not real”) intent is clear to the observer, and 3). recognizable referents. Stated more simply, satire must be comprehensible, funny, and recognized as a joke.

The example I used was this photo that’s been making the rounds on the Internet of late. I think it’s funny, and it’s clearly intended to be so. Understanding it requires a series of data which all must be known to the observer for the joke to achieve its effect: we need to know who McCoy and Spock are; what their relationship to each other is; who Sulu is; the fact that Sulu was played by George Takei, who is openly gay; what “being in the closet” means; and the fact that in the Chronicles of Narnia series of C.S. Lewis, that enchanted kingdom is entered from our world through a closet. Only a viewer with all that information will completely “get” the humor.

Anyway, the notion of satire in real life has arisen of late, thanks to a story from the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, where the College Republicans sponsored a bake sale at which prices for the items on offer varied according to the demographic profile of the buyer: $2 for whites, $1.50 for Asians, $1 for Latinos, $.75 for African-Americans, $.25 for Native Americans. Women of all races get a $.25 discount. Now, as mentioned earlier, for satire to work, the spectator needs to be in on the joke—that’s why the only Aristophanes play that works anymore is Lysistrata, which is about sex (and the threatened withholding of it), which people understand. The transgressions of Cleon (The Wasps) or the purported links between Socrates and the Sophists (The Clouds), not so much. So I was curious what prompted this apparently unfunny parodic outburst.

Turns out it’s something called SB 185, a bill which would moderate but not overturn 1996’s Proposition 209, the Ward Connerly-inspired initiative to disallow Affirmative Action in admissions decisions at California’s state universities. Well, that and the fact that the student government had organized a phone bank to call Governor Jerry Brown’s office to urge him to sign SB 185. As Shawn Lewis, the president of the College Republicans at Berkeley, explains in an opinion piece in The Daily Californian, the bake sale was specifically intended to be offensive:

Some members of the community have been outraged by our event, as they should be! Treating people differently because of the color of their skin is unquestionably wrong, and that’s how we hope people react to the satirical bake sale, along with SB 185. The point is that considering race in university admissions does exactly that — it treats people differently because of their race.

So now that you understand the gag, it’s funny, right? Well, no, I don’t think so, either, but I can see why it passes for terribly clever in College Republican circles.

Indeed, I generally understand those who are suspicious of the alleged need for, or advantages of, Affirmative Action. I’d go so far as to endorse their skepticism. Still, we differ in one significant regard: I kind of like the truth. By that, I refer not merely to analytical things like the fact that research tends to show that minority college students outperform their white peers with the same high school academic profile and board scores, or that significant exposure to other cultures and sub-cultures seems to me an inherent positive. Nor am I talking about the fact that the pricing hierarchy implies (but, of course, never states) that white males would be the most adversely affected by SB 185. In fact, of course, women outperform men in high school and Asians outperform whites, meaning that someone named Jessica Wong is a lot more likely to be disadvantaged by the proposed law than would someone named, say, Shawn Lewis, who, as you no doubt already suspected, is white and male.

Be it noted in this regard that Lewis specifically calls attention to the unanimous support for the “Increase Diversity Bake Sale” by the College Republicans board, which, he tells us, “includes Hispanic, Chinese and Taiwanese representation, with over half of the board being female. The notion that this event was planned by a bunch of insensitive white guys is harshly inaccurate and draws on false, negative stereotypes about Republicans.” I, for one, stand corrected. This inane idea was planned by a bunch of insensitive multi-ethnic men and women, who of course can be just as stupid as white guys.

But what really bothers me here is the bald-faced lying. Here’s Lewis: “The [Associated Students of the University of California, in other words the student government] phone bank intends to send the message to Gov. Brown that all UC Berkeley students support SB 185, but that is not true.” It seems pretty clear to me that two things are true: the student body is largely but of course not unanimously in favor of SB 185, and Lewis has no evidence to support his claim that the ASUC is misrepresenting student opinion. How do I know? Because I’ve spent over 30 years on college campuses less liberal than Berkeley’s; because this guy is, after all, the president of the College Republicans; and because he is demonstrably lying elsewhere.

To wit, here’s Lewis again:

SB 185 does nothing to connect any of this information to the actual socioeconomic status of a college applicant. As the bill is written, public universities would be authorized to use race alone as a factor in the admissions process, but certainly the color of one’s skin is not the only factor contributing to one’s opportunity or access to higher education. Socioeconomic status is a fundamental component of the debate of equity and inclusion on our college campuses, but this bill fails to include it.

This is a compelling argument, and it is certainly true that the left often conflates race and economics. Trouble is, they didn’t this time. It took me about one minute to find the actual bill, which clearly states: “the University of California may, and the California State University may, consider race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, geographic origin, and household income (emphasis mine), along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions, so long as no preference is given.”

Of course, the reaction on the left—accusations of racism and the like—are just as silly. What Mr. Lewis is doing is exactly what one might expect from the College Republicans at a place like Berkeley: it is smug, sophomoric, provocative for its own sake, and fundamentally dishonest. The first three of these descriptions apply to a good many post-adolescents, the fourth to most political causes, especially (these days) on the right. But, as I’ve suggested before, while all racists are jerks, not all jerks are racists. Mr. Lewis is Exhibit A for this assertion.

Idiot of the Month: Amateur Theatre Division (Runner-Up and Champion)

2011-09-22T20:45:00.011-05:00

Two amateur theatre productions in different parts of the country have been shut down this month for offending the tender sensibilities of idiots with the power to censor their enterprises.

Of the two suppressions, far and away the less troublesome is the decision by Wayne Garner, the mayor of Carrollton, GA, to overturn a decision by the board of the city’s arts center to present The Rocky Horror Show, long after the show was in rehearsal and a fair amount of city money had presumably already been expended.

Mr. Garner is a prude and an imbecile, of course, but at least it’s possible to see his point: while defenders of the production can quite reasonably wonder what the city was expecting when they booked Rocky Horror, implicit in that argument is an acknowledgment that the play is “risqué.” Indeed, naughtiness is no small part of the charm of a musical that features bi-sexual seductions, R-rated choreography, and song titles like “Sweet Transvestite.”

Still, Mayor Garner over-reacted, imposed his personal prejudices on the community, over-rode the board charged with making the very kind of decision he claimed for himself, and generally acted like a schmuck. In a normal month, this would have made him a contender for Idiot of the Month, Amateur Theatre Division. But he’s mayor of a jerkwater town in the Deep South: I confess I don’t expect a lot more from such people.

Besides, Garner’s escapades came before we heard about Thomas Fleming, Superintendent of Schools in the Richland School District in western Pennsylvania. He shut down a high school production of Kismet. Yes, really. Kismet. The quintessentially 1950s musical that gave us songs like “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” and “Stranger in Paradise”: that Kismet, one of the most innocuous plays ever staged. Ah, but (wait for it): the central characters are Muslim. Seriously. That’s it. That’s the concern.

“After reviewing the script, the decision was made to move on rather than risk controversy. We're in the business of trying to do what’s best for the kids—not to do anything detrimental if we can avoid it.” That’s the official declaration of the Superintendent of Schools: an ungrammatical (don’t get me started on that part) celebration of cowardice, bigotry, and censorship. Mr. Fleming may be incompetent, unethical, and craven, but at least he serves a function: definition by example of everything that is wrong with the nation’s schools.

I’m so old I remember when educational leaders sought to instill free-thinking, moral courage, and the values that made the country great. The Flemings of the world engage in pabulum-speak, capitulate to the most moronic elements in society, and stifle students while pretending to take care of them.

The correct response to those cretinous yahoos who believe that scheduling a production of Kismet “not long after the tenth anniversary of 9/11” is the slightest bit problematic is easy for anyone with a brain and a spine, two organs not prominent in Mr. Fleming. It would look something like this:

STFU. [OK, maybe that part should just be inner monologue.] Criticizing this play choice simply because the characters are Islamic is both an egregious misreading of the central themes of the script and an outrageous insult to one of the world’s great religions. To suggest that the Muslims of Kismet bear any real resemblance to the 9/11 hijackers is to say we can’t produce The Sound of Music in Oklahoma City because Timothy McVeigh was raised Catholic. It is an inane and illogical argument; it could not be advanced by an intelligent and rational person, and is therefore unworthy of legitimate consideration.

We seek to create young men and women who are empowered by the world of ideas and energized by the vast panoply of human culture, who view free expression as central to the American way of life, who believe in facts and reason rather than bigotry and hysteria. Such students, such citizens, cannot be cowed by the rantings of hand-wringing zealots of any description. Censorship of this musical, which, after all, won the Tony Award over a half century ago, and was produced at this very school without incident in 1983, would send all the wrong messages to our adolescent population: that being ignorant and loud trumps being intelligent and respectful, that capitulation to extremism is appropriate if it averts controversy, that the exchange of ideas should be subordinated to a doctrinaire religio-political orthodoxy, that the most innocuous of artistic events ought to be subject to prior restraint.

We do not ignore these arguments; we reject them as ill-founded, irrelevant, and repressive. Our production of Kismet will go forward as scheduled, and we have every confidence that it will be a source of pride for our students and our community. We’d be happy to sell you a ticket. Or you can stay home and pout. Your call.

Of course, as noted, such a response would require an IQ above room temperature and the leadership skills of the assistant captain of the 6th grade intramural flag football team: considerably more credentials than Mr. Fleming and his equally gutless minions have manifested. I offer best wishes to those student thespians unlucky enough to be subject to the pusillanimous posturings of Mr. Fleming. I hope they have fun and learn a lot on their production of Oklahoma… which will presumably be staged without the character of Ali Hakim.

All is not lost, of course. In a country as large as this one, there are bound to be some real idiots. I just wish fewer of them were school superintendents and principals.

Troy Davis, Capital Punishment, and the Battle between Law and Justice

2011-09-20T23:18:00.009-05:00

I am a long-standing and proud supporter of Amnesty International, but there’s one of that organization’s core tenets that I can’t completely support: their unequivocal opposition to the death penalty. Don’t get me wrong. Just because I live in Texas and my name is Rick doesn’t mean I break into a Pavlovian slobber at the thought of breaking out the electric chair. But there are those of our species whom, to be frank, we’d be better off without. To qualify for this dubious designation, however, one would have to meet two specific and independent criteria: the crime(s) one committed must have been so depraved and/or egregious as to transcend the merely felonious, and there must be absolutely no doubt about one’s guilt.

Troy Davis, whose execution by lethal injection by the state of Georgia is imminent and now probably inevitable, fails to qualify on either count. His conviction 20 years ago was for the 1989 killing of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail by shooting him in the face in what has been described as a brawl in a Burger King parking lot. That’s certainly not something one brags about on a résumé, but it was a single event, the cop was off duty, there was no particular malice shown, and no suggestion of anything like torture.

More importantly, there’s a reasonable chance that Davis didn’t do it. There is no physical evidence, the gun has never been found, and seven of the nine non-police witnesses who testified against Davis have subsequently not merely recanted their testimony but alleged that they were coerced into perjurous statements by a police force more interested in solving a case than in whether it was solved correctly. Indeed, multiple sources now point the finger at another witness against Davis, Sylvester “Red” Coles.

Time for skepticism. If you, Gentle Reader, believe that Georgia cops wouldn’t go out of their way to convict and indeed execute a black man for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’re probably too gullible to be reading this blog. On the other hand, if you think that no guilty defendant has ever rallied cause-obsessed lefties to follow an utterly mendacious claim, you’re definitely too trusting. Ultimately, while I am sure the various powers that be think they’ve really proved Davis’s guilt, even in the light of post-trial revelations, I’m persuaded by the skepticism of the likes of William S. Sessions and Bob Barr, neither of them exactly bleeding hearted liberals.

I do not contend that Davis is necessarily innocent, or even that there’s enough evidence to overturn his conviction, but if we’re going to execute a man for a particular crime, it would be a really good idea if we were more than pretty sure he was guilty. Here’s Sessions, who sums up my argument rather well:

What the hearing demonstrated most conclusively was that the evidence in this case—consisting almost entirely of conflicting stories, testimonies and statements—is inadequate to the task of convincingly establishing either Davis’ guilt or his innocence. Without DNA or other forms of physical or scientific evidence that can be objectively measured and tested, it is possible that doubts about guilt in this case will never be resolved.

However, when it comes to the sentence of death, there should be no room for doubt. I believe there is no more serious crime than the murder of a law enforcement officer who was putting his or her life on the line to protect innocent bystanders. However, justice is not done for Officer Mark Allen MacPhail Sr. if the wrong man is punished.

The case is particularly noteworthy not merely for itself, however. First, there are the comments at the recent Republican debate by Governor Rick Perry, the current front-runner for the GOP nomination. Responding to a question by Brian Williams about whether he ever worried about killing an innocent man among the 234 executions he authorized, Perry crowed,“I’ve never struggled with that at all.” Ultimately, that tells us all we need to know, especially since there have been a couple very controversial cases, e.g., Cameron Todd Willingham, convicted and sentenced to death for murdering his three daughters, although a). he quite possibly didn’t do it, at least in the way alleged by prosecutors and b). Perry shut down an investigation that might well have proved that, prior to Willingham’s execution.

Still, Governor Perry’s amoral braggadocio pales in comparison to the mind-boggling jitbaggery that is Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. When the Davis case percolated up to the SCOTUS a couple of years ago, Scalia proclaimed, in dissenting with a decision to order a federal court in Georgia to examine the evidence, that “actual innocence” (his quotation marks) is insufficient to overturn a conviction: “This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

A zillion years ago, I was in a production of a rather bad (who am I kidding? very bad) play called The Downstairs Dragon. The play is set in a small-town museum, and there’s a dragon in the basement. I played a gray-bearded (I needed makeup then) member of some learned society—the Society for the Encouragement of Wisdom in America, or something like that. Rather than opening the trap door and seeing the beast, however, we all debated whether or not a dragon could exist: one of us argued psychologically, another sociologically, another zoologically. I was the religious zealot. Anyway, we all decided that there couldn’t possibly be a dragon there. It was a little difficult to finished our debate, of course, because we had to shout to be heard over the roaring of the dragon.

Scalia’s position strikes me as about as intellectually coherent. The Constitution doesn’t forbid the execution of an innocent man? I’m no lawyer, but killing someone for something he didn’t do smacks of cruel and unusual punishment to me. This is the same Antonin Scalia, of course, who argues that corporations are people, based on… well, damned if I know. (Best snarky political line I’ve seen in a while: I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.)

More to the point, I really don’t care if the Court has never prohibited the execution of the innocent. It bloody well should have. Prior to 1954, that same court had never had a problem with “separate but equal.” No one whose surname isn’t Paul is sad that the SCOTUS overturned Plessy v. Ferguson. If Mr. Davis could have proved his innocence (not merely “reasonable doubt,” or even the “preponderance of the evidence,” but demonstrated his actual innocence), Scalia would still have cheerily allowed the execution to continue, caring more about his idiosyncratic reading of the Constitution than about the obviously just decision. I’m beginning to think Sonia Sotomayor’s “empathy” is not a bad thing at all. As a reader of the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page put it, “There are a surprising number of people in high, influential positions in this country who would greatly benefit from being punched really hard right in the fucking face. I'm pretty sure that's constitutional too.” I’m not sure that would knock the supercilious smirk off Scalia’s face, or even get his attention, but I’m willing to try.

And so… I’m still not entirely convinced that there isn’t a place for the death penalty in carefully delineated circumstances. But the Troy Davis case weakens my resolve. Unlike Justice Scalia, I’d rather not cling to legal niceties if the result is, or even very well might be, the state-sanctioned murder of a non-murderer.

The Idiot Right's New Poster Boy

2011-09-19T22:29:00.006-05:00

The Idiot Right has a new poster boy. He’s Louisiana Congressman John Fleming, and he is a piece of work. He was interviewed by MSNBC’s Chris Jansing today. At first there was nothing new: the same old talking points bullshit (“if you go after the high income earners, you go after the job creators” and similar pseudo-economic slop). But Jansing is a good interviewer, and Fleming was, shall we say, not ready for that.

Here’s the exchange, starting at about the 2:26 mark of the link. I've taken the liberty of supplying the Congressman's inner monologue in brackets:

Jansing: Well, with all due respect, Congressman, the Wall Street Journal estimated that your businesses, which I believe are Subway sandwich shops and UPS stores—very successful—brought you last year six million dollars.

Fleming: Yeah, that’s before you pay five hundred employees, you pay rent, you pay equipment and food. The actual net income of that was only a mere fraction of that amount.

If he’d shut up right then, he might have escaped without serious damage. But he’s a politician, and apparently a remarkably dim-witted one even in comparison to the rest of the cretinous yahoos who populate the House. Here’s the follow-up [OMG—my staff didn't warn me she could ask me something else!].

Jansing: So, you’re saying that if you have to pay more in taxes, you would get rid of some of those employees? These are not as successful businesses as what we want to indicate?

Fleming (interrupting): [Shit, I’m trapped. I can’t tell the truth or my hypocrisy is on display. But if I don’t strut a little, she just got away with calling me unsuccessful. Quick! Change the subject!] I would say that since my net income, and again, that’s the individual rate that I told you about, the amount that I have to re-invest in my business and feed my family is more like 600,000 of that 6.3 million. And so, by the time I feed my family, I have, you know, maybe 400,000 left over to invest in new locations, upgrade my locations, buy more equipment, all of that.

Jansing: You do understand, Congressman, that the average person out there, who’s making forty, fifty, sixty thousand dollars a year, when they hear that you only have four hundred thousand dollars left over, it’s not exactly a sympathetic position. You understand that?

Fleming: Well, again, class warfare has never created a job. [Ah, relief, back on Talking Points!] And that’s people that will not get jobs. This is all about creating jobs, Chris, this is not about attacking people who make certain incomes. You know, in this country, most people feel that being successful in their businesses is a virtue, not a vice. And once we begin to identify it as a vice, this country is going down.

Before you ask, Gentle Reader, yes, he really is that stupid. Yes, he really is that arrogant. And yes, he really does think his shit don’t stink.

As I write this piece, I realize that tearing this douchebag’s argument to shreds is more difficult than I’d originally thought… because he has so many mind-bendingly inane things to say it’s difficult to decide where to start.

OK. So we’ll take what he says and doesn’t say chronologically. So, we start with where the majority of that $6.3 million went. He nets $600K. Therefore, he spends about $5.7 million on business expenses ranging from rent to equipment to personnel. And he’s got 500 employees. Anyone notice a problem? The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Multiply that times a 40-hour work week, times 52 weeks, times 500 employees, and you get $7.54 million, which, where I come from, takes up a sizeable chunk of that $6.3 million in gross income. And that’s with everyone working at minimum wage, with no benefits. It doesn’t include rent, utilities, equipment, or inventory.

So one of the following must be true: A). a huge percentage of those 500 employees are not merely making crappy wages, they’re also part-time, B). he’s lying about the number of employees, or C). he’s lying about his gross income. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume it’s choice “A.” According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know, but the internal link doesn’t work), he owns “owns 33 Subway sandwich shops in northern Louisiana and owns Fleming Expansions, LLC, a regional developer for The UPS Store, which supports stores in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.”

So that’s at least 34 locations. Let’s say rent and utilities are a steal… say $2000 a month per venue. Let’s see… there’s $816K. The food for those Subway stores… a markup of what? Well, standard appears to be about 300%, but let’s give him a little lower expenses to maximize what he pays his workers. How about 400%? That would mean an expenditure of $1.26 million. Insurance and other overhead… again, let’s be conservative. $5000 per venue? Another $170K. So that leaves us a whisper over $4 million to be divided among those 500 employees: wages, benefits, payroll tax, everything. In other words, $8000 per employee per year. This, ladies and gentlemen is what the fat-cat “job creators” have to offer.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand that a business like Subway is likely to have a lot of part-time, short-term workers. But these aren’t the kind of jobs the country needs to recover its economic footing. And if Rep. Fleming thinks otherwise, he’s even stupider than I thought.

OK, next point. Now it’s time to notice that he never answered the question about whether he’d lay people off if his taxes went up. Of course, he wouldn’t: he needs those drones to work for subsistence wages to finance his lifestyle. He hires people because it’s more profitable to do so than to lose business because customers, miffed at the lack of service, go elsewhere. He can, poor lamb, try to figure out a way to survive on a mere half million or so.

Oh, and since small businesses pay taxes on their profits, not their gross sales, Mr. Fleming wouldn’t be affected by the proposed tax on those making over $1 million a year. That’s because he’s destitute.

Moving on. He nets $600K, but after “feeding [his] family,” he has only about $400K to re-invest into his business. His official website says his children are grown, so his family consists of himself and his wife. My wife and I can eat pretty well on considerably less than $10,000 a year. He, on the other hand, needs $200,000. Perhaps he is married to an allosaurus?

OK, OK, I get it. He’s talking about all the expenses of running a household, meaning that he’s scraping by on about twice what my wife and I make between us (I’m a Full Professor at a university; she’s the Director of Financial Aid at a community college). Well, of course, that doesn’t count all his other sources of income… like the $174K (plus an extraordinary benefit package) he makes as a Congressman, for example. Or whatever he makes in his medical clinic. Or…

But the impoverished Mr. Fleming says he’s left with a mere $400K to re-invest on things like “upgrading [his] locations” and “equipment.” Uh, Congressman… how does that create jobs? Really. How? Still, he clearly believes that having that kind of money to invest is his sovereign right. Newsflash: it isn’t. Not to mention the fact that it’s very clear that he does little if anything to actually earn any of that money. Being a Congressman is—or damned well ought to be—a full-time job. He’s almost certainly making over $1000 for every hour of actual work at his private business: money he can make because he has assets to begin with, not because he’s doing anything noble now.

Faced with a perfectly reasonable point that the average person isn’t going to weep for him, Fleming reverts to inane platitudes about “class warfare.” As I’m not the first to note, they only call it class warfare when the rest of us fight back. And “virtue” is an ironic word coming from an acquisitive ass like Fleming. There is nothing either virtuous or vicious about wealth. There is something virtuous about labor, but Fleming does little of that. Nor is asking the wealthy, the greatest beneficiaries of what the nation has to offer, to contribute a little to the common weal—to pay as high a percentage of your income in taxes as a cop or a schoolteacher do—an “attack.” But, sir, if you and your gluttonous and avaricious co-conspirators continue to adopt the smug, supercilious, and hubristic attitude you seem unable to suppress… well, the attack will come soon enough.

Another Power Play Masquerading as Democracy

2011-09-18T12:29:00.006-05:00

A few days before the 2000 election, there was speculation amongst the Talking Heads world that whereas George W. Bush seemed poised to win the popular vote, Al Gore had a reasonable chance of winning the only vote that mattered by means of a victory in the Electoral College. Republican spewers of talking points bemoaned the archaic system whereby the Voice of the American People (Always capitalized. Always.) was subject to such flagrant misrepresentation; their Democratic counterparts babbled about how “rules are rules,” and both sides knew them from the outset.

Of course, the actual election was as close as it was expected to be, but it was Gore who won the popular vote and Bush who (with a little help from the Supreme Court) claimed the presidency. I need hardly mention that the airwaves were promptly filled with more blatherers from both sides, making precisely the opposite points from what they’d been saying only a few days earlier. Neither side as much as missed a beat. One was indeed reminded of Lili Tomlin’s sage observation that no matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.

Since then, there have been numerous attempts to tinker with the electoral process. Mostly, these have consisted of Democratic attempts to register more voters in urban areas with significant minority populations, and Republican efforts to require more identification than had hitherto been necessary. Both these campaigns seem legitimate on their surface: the ethical position must be that every effort should be made to allow all qualified voters the opportunity to exercise that franchise while exercising appropriate controls to prevent abuse (voting by non-citizens, multiple votes by the same person, etc.).

Of course, both sides were actually engaged in largely disingenuous endeavors not to provide a comprehensive and legitimate electoral base, but to help their side win. Indeed, about the only thing more outrageous than the campaigns themselves was the opposition to them. That is, while Democratic efforts to register voters were unquestionably more self-serving than altruistic or patriotic, the GOP’s hysteria about ACORN and the like was as disingenuous as it was voluminous. Similarly, Republican efforts to require photo identification of prospective voters purported to be a response to a problem that was largely imaginary, but actually expecting some sort of real identification from someone attempting to vote hardly qualifies as the sort of diabolical voter suppression the left would have us believe.

True, there are exceptions: Steve Krieser, the jackass in Wisconsin who decided that state employees shouldn’t tell citizens that government-issued ID cards are in fact free (if you ask specifically), not $28, should be bitch-slapped; whoever was responsible for firing a state employee for having the audacity to inform the public of their rights should face a worse fate than that. But I confess myself unable to work up much righteous dudgeon at the idea of actually needing the card (provided that it’s free).

The latest attempt to fiddle with the system seems on the surface to be innocuous enough, even though everyone on both sides knows it’s a power play. Pennsylvania is contemplating, and—given who’s currently in power in the state—may well pass, legislation to change the way its electoral votes are allotted. Needless to say, Republicans, who currently control state government but haven’t won the state in a presidential contest in a generation except in the blowout of 1988, claim that their proposition is intended only “to more fairly distribute our electoral votes based on the popular vote in Pennsylvania.” Meanwhile, Democrats argue that the problem with the idea is that it would reduce the influence of Pennsylvania on the national election. I need hardly mention that both sides are lying.

This is all about gaining a political advantage, and has nothing to do with providing a real voice for voters or ensuring an accurate representation. Why else would the Dems have thought this was a good plan a couple years ago and the GOP hated the idea? Of course, the cleanest and most sensible solution would be to adopt the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would ensure that the Presidency would be won by whoever gets the most votes. The ploy here is to entice enough state legislatures to vow that the entirety of their state’s electoral votes would go to the national popular vote winner, regardless of who wins their state.

If states totaling 270 electoral votes sign on (they’re currently at 132), the problem is solved. Don’t expect it to happen any time soon, however: the Pennsylvanias, Ohios, and Floridas have too much to lose if presidential campaigns—and the accompanying media buys, demand for office space, hotel rooms, restaurants, and the like—were to afford them only the same interest those of us in states dominated by one party (whichever one it is) receive. Indeed, of the eight states (and the District of Columbia) which have passed this legislation, which would kick in if and only if the 270 vote threshold is achieved, only one, New Jersey, is ever seriously in play in a close election.

The system being proposed in Pennsylvania has already been adopted by Maine (in 1972) and Nebraska (in 1996), but those deviations from the norm have swung a grand total of one electoral vote ever, giving then-Senator Obama a slightly larger margin of victory over John McCain than he otherwise would have. But it is perfectly plausible that a state like Pennsylvania, with a heavy concentration of Democratic voters in and around Philadelphia but a largely Republican electorate elsewhere in the state, could vote for Obama’s re-election but he not only wouldn’t take all the state’s electoral votes, he might not even get the majority. Yale University constitutional law professor Akhil Reed Amar argues that “[it] might be very likely to happen in [Pennsylvania], and that’s what makes this something completely new under the sun. It’s something that no previous legislature in America since the Civil War has ever had the audacity to impose.”

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with dividing a state’s electoral votes. But, even apart from the obvious partisanship that underlies this proposition, there are problems here. First off, it leads to a bizarre patchwork of state policies that leads to a system even more arcane and, frankly, stupid, than even the silliness that is the Electoral College to begin with. Indeed, about the only thing more inane than giving a state’s entire complement of electoral votes to someone who wins by a couple hundred votes is to give the majority of electoral votes to a candidate who doesn’t even win the state. The Republicans don’t care, of course, and I’m not naïve enough to think the Democrats would be any different if the shoe were on the other foot.

More importantly, especially in the short term, this change provides a further incentive for the shameless gerrymandering characterized by post-Tom DeLay Texas. Politicians’ first instinct, alas, has little to do with service and everything to do with power: theirs, and that of their ideological brethren. The Republican Congressmen and their staffers who are quoted periodically admitting that they don’t want to do anything to help the President—as agreeing to a jobs package that they implicitly admit would have benefits to the country would do, for example—are different from their colleagues on either side of the aisle only by the frankness with which they confess their unfitness for office.

So it comes as no surprise that we get districts—state and federal alike—that look like butterflies, cobras, and coatimundis (complete with tails). Indeed, identifying the shape of gerrymandered districts is the 21st-century equivalent of naming constellations a couple of millennia ago or playing “that cloud looks like…” when you were a kid. The inevitable result, however, is a democracy in name only. The majority of the population voted for Al Gore and we got George W. Bush. I think that’s a calamity: not (just) because Bush was the worst President in American history (although he was), but because of the means by which he was… ahem… elected. But at least (with the possible exception of the Florida debacle) that was “by the rules.” More significantly in the here and now: gerrymandered state districts lead to gerrymandered federal districts, which could reasonably lead to tipping an election by means of the kind of vote-splitting now being contemplated.

Indeed, the only significant officials at the state and national level who are elected directly by voters without artificial and often dishonest districting policies are governors and US Senators. There are a lot of idiot governors out there—there’s one in my current state and another in the state I lived in before moving here—but at least the people actually had a voice, however much the Citizens United decision may have skewed their ability to discern the actual characteristics of the people they were electing.

But nothing can pass the US Senate if Senators representing a pretty damned small percentage of the population decide to filibuster (or, given the fecklessness of today’s Democrats, even threaten to do so). The 15 states with two GOP Senators total less than 27% of the population. Add in 11 other Republicans (from states with one Republican and one Democrat) representing another 10% of the population, and you’ve gummed up the works for everyone. Meanwhile, over 42% of the population lives in a state that elected two Democratic Senators, and another third live in a state with one Democratic Senator. And, of course, citizens of the reliably Democratic District of Columbia, with essentially the same population as reliably Republican Wyoming, have no representation in the Senate at all. For all this, we get gridlock… if we’re lucky.

Choosing electoral votes by Congressional districts is not the end of the world. But taking one more step down the road towards re-writing laws to benefit those currently in power might be. And that’s where this proposed legislation will take us. In a just universe, of course, if the bill passes, the Republican nominee (whoever that may be) will squeak out a narrow victory in Pennsylvania, but the handful of electoral votes President Obama gets by winning Philadelphia tips the election to him. It could happen. Hey, it’s even possible the GOP will nominate someone sane. Just don’t hold your breath.

The Jobs Speech and the Bi-Partisan Failure of Leadership

2011-09-05T15:33:00.020-05:00

The prelude to President Obama’s forthcoming address to a joint session of Congress has probably already generated more buzz than the speech itself will. Let’s face it, Obama’s speeches are more heavily weighted to the ornamental than the pragmatic, and the GOP will bellow in full-throated opposition regardless of what he says, even if he adopts the policy they themselves wanted twenty minutes ago.

The people who got Mr. Obama elected—progressives and labor—will be temporarily buoyed by the soaring rhetoric only to be profoundly disappointed a few days later when he trades away anything of substance in what are euphemistically referred to as “negotiations”: John Boehner or Mitch McConnell or whatever other corporate flunky happens to be in the room will demand something so outrageous that no rational being could even ask for it with a straight face, and Obama will give them about 98% of it. (To pick a number at somewhat less than random.) The corporate media will give equal credit for compromise to both sides, even though all the Republicans gave up was their initial insistence that Mr. Obama drop to one knee and sing “Mammy” at Eric Cantor’s nephew’s Bar Mitzvah.

So there’s a very real sense in which the speech itself will carry only a ceremonial function, if that. Still, a presidential address to a joint session of Congress to talk about what everyone says they believe is the number one issue facing the country ought to be a pretty big deal. Of course, it’s difficult to believe that either side, especially the GOP, really believes its own rhetoric. This Congress has been in place for several months now, and we’ve had legislation to restrict abortions, eviscerate the EPA, eliminate NPR, PBS and the CPB, etc. The party that claimed in the most recent election and its aftermath that its priorities were “jobs, jobs, jobs” has yet to propose a jobs bill. Funny thing, that.

The Democrats haven’t been much better, but at least they recognize that the GOP’s new-found interest in balanced budgets after years of profligacy cannot manifest itself solely through budget cuts without having a lot of people lose their jobs. Curiously enough, the Dems seems to think that cops and teachers and secretaries for government agencies are actually contributing members of society and of the workforce.

So… Obama decides he wants to talk about jobs, and although he apparently intends to circumvent Congress with a sizeable chunk of his plan, he wants to give a speech to them rather than to the rest of us. OK, whatever. But, of course, oh-so-coincidentally, he wanted to do this little exercise in pontification on Wednesday night. Let’s see… is there something else happening that evening? Oh, yeah, the Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library, the GOP’s opportunity to worship yet again at the shrine of the man they all naïvely, ignorantly, and/or disingenuously purport to revere. I knew there was something.

In one of the most egregious fits of childishness of an administration that, not without reason, fancies itself the grown-ups in the room, Obama and his minions forged ahead. Apparently, John Boehner initially seemed amenable, but then a staffer probably reminded him that professionalism and civility were specifically outlawed by the creed of the new GOP. So Boehner, good soldier that he is, obeyed the marching orders of whatever corporate master called his private number first and became righteously indignant. Except… not really (see below).

The kerfuffle serves as an effective Rorschach test for all observers. The right-wing media were, needless to say, outraged at the maneuver: they call it “petty, hyper-partisan political gamesmanship,” “a silly request,” and “an unbelievable example of chutzpah.” They are in unanimous agreement that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was lying in his protestations that the proposed scheduling of the speech was not designed specifically to trump the GOP debate. And they’re right.

The left-leaning press, meanwhile, are outraged at the “unprecedented” rejection of President Obama’s proposed time. They noted that the debate organizers agreed to delay the debate by an hour to accommodate the Presidential address. They point out that this is the second of twenty (count ‘em, twenty) Republican debates, that no one is really paying any attention yet: front-runners four years ago at this time, after all, were Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. They cite the fact that Speaker Boehner didn’t watch the first debate, that it’s carried by only one television channel (MSNBC… let’s face it, there’s a healthy subset of Republicans who think they’d be possessed by demon spirits if their sets stayed tuned to that channel for an hour), that if, as both parties claim, jobs are the central issue facing lawmakers and the President alike, then having a Presidential speech on the subject immediately on Congress’s return from hiatus seems like the reasonable thing to do. They’re right, too.

It is certainly true, as James Taranto points out, that it’s really “supporters of both parties,” rather than Messrs. Obama and Boehner themselves, “that are squabbling.” I’m reminded of the closing scenes in one of the most under-appreciated plays of the 20th century. In La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (literally The Trojan War Won’t Happen, but translated—for reasons beyond my feeble ken—most often as Tiger at the Gates), Jean Giraudoux shows the heroes Achilles and Hector finalizing negotiations of a peaceful settlement even as their belligerent underlings are in fact starting a conflict that, once initiated, cannot but engulf both the Greek and Trojan civilizations. And, of course, we know that the war lasted a decade and resulted in the deaths of thousands, not least Achilles and Hector themselves. That Giraudoux was writing as much about current events (the play was written in 1935, when the prospect of a World War was still a spectre rather than a reality) is undeniable. But his portrayal of the systematic undermining of leadership by a cadre of bomb-throwers resonates all too well today.

In fact, it would offer some consolation to believe that Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner aren’t quite the irresponsible ignoramuses they appear to be in this exchange. After all, both official letters were professional and cordial. Obama’s calls for the need to “put aside politics and start making decisions based on what is best for our country and not what is best for each of our parties.” He says he intends to “lay out a series of bipartisan proposals… to rebuild the American economy by strengthening small businesses, helping Americans get back to work, and putting more money in the paychecks of the Middle Class and working Americans, while still reducing our deficit and getting our fiscal house in order.” He concludes by urging the Speaker (and the Senate Majority Leader) to “put country before party.”

Of course, he did so by demonstrating the precise opposite: the scheduling was perhaps the most stupidly partisan political gambit of his administration. We are presumably to believe that an administration already in re-election mode really thought there would be no public relations repercussions to such a ham-handed decision. (To be fair to Mr. Carney, the tape makes clear he never tried to pretend that the administration didn't know about the conflict, even though some right-wing commentators have accused him of doing so.) Our choices are that a). Obama’s people believed they really had an agreement, when any sentient adult would have waited to make a public announcement until the formal invitation was in hand, or b). they somehow thought there would be no political downside to acting like a playground bully. Not happy choices, these.

Mr. Boehner fares little better, despite the fact that whereas the overwhelming majority of left-leaning commentators are on record criticizing Mr. Obama, there are those on the right who think Boehner acted nobly. At first glance, he did. After all, his letter to the President, though slightly partisan (as was Obama’s), contains phrases like “thank you,” “I agree,” and “look forward to hearing your ideas.” It never mentions the debate at all. The stated reason for asking the President to compete with the opening game of the NFL season instead of with a debate that I can’t imagine more than 10% of the population would watch at gunpoint was logistical: the need to adopt a Concurrent Resolution on short notice and security issues. The Speaker suggests the following night, when there would be “no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.” I mean, really, how accommodating could he be?

Except, of course, for the fact that everyone—left, right and center—knew damned well he was lying about the reason for the delay. I won’t claim to have read every article, watched every news clip, or scoured every blog on the topic, but I’ve certainly read a lot. I’ve yet to find anyone of any political stripe who believes that either a). Boehner’s letter was prompted by its stated rationale or b). it wasn’t intended to disrespect the President (there’s dispute over whether Obama deserved to be thus disrespected, but that’s another matter).

Luckily for Mr. Obama, the Speaker of the House is just as silly and politically tone-deaf as the President of the United States. (How jolly for the rest of us!) Even a twit like Charles Krauthammer gets this one right:

If he [Boehner] had just accepted this, the President would look small for stepping on the debate. Secondly, I think the Republicans could easily have moved the debate to 9:00 o’clock, and then had eight people on the stage gang up on Obama with essentially the biggest response to a Presidential speech ever done, rather than one person in a room with a camera… which never stands up to the majesty and the grandeur of a Presidential speech in Congress.

Krauthammer is thinking in purely political terms, but there are other reasons to believe that Boehner’s posturing is problematic.

For one thing, don’t you think it’s a little outré for the de facto leader of a major political party (at least until there’s a Presidential nominee) to be so… dare I say it… unpatriotic as to dis the POTUS? When the President of the United States asks for a moment of your time, you freaking give it. Period. Secondly, does the prevarication need to be quite so transparent? Finally, to the extent that Mr. Boehner is supposed to be the leader of the Republican majority in the House, isn’t it fair that he accept at least some of the responsibility for the even more irresponsible and juvenile antics of Joe Walsh (yes, the one who owes $100K+ in back child support), Todd Rokita and (of course) the reliably loathesome Eric Cantor and Jim DeMint?

But ultimately, the buck stops at the desk of the POTUS. A.B. Stoddard sums it up pretty well:

And they [the President and his team] absolutely knew, even if John Boehner said, “You’re welcome here on Wednesday, September 7, at 8:00 pm,” they knew that that long-scheduled debate was taking place. And this was the kind of thing that was going to come up regardless. It’s just too cute. And it’s not the type of thing that they should have done if they wanted the whole attention and the focus of independent voters, who can’t stand these kind of reindeer games, anyway, but might be shopping the Republican ticket eventually, or considering staying with President Obama, and wanting to also hear his jobs message, perhaps on another evening. It was just a bad call to begin with, no matter how silly the Republicans were in their response.

So it’s time to generate a final grade for both the principal players in this brouhaha, based on ethics, maturity, and political savvy:

Obama: F

Boehner: were I in a good mood, I could swing a D-. Do I seem to you like I’m in a good mood?

About that 46%...

2011-08-22T23:53:00.007-05:00

One of the points I was trying to make in my last piece is that we have two different kinds of income-related taxes in this country: the one we call “income tax” and the one we call “payroll tax.” The former is putatively progressive, although it is demonstrably not necessarily so. The latter is unquestionably regressive, since it applies only to the first $106,800 of earned income per wage-earner: not only do people making a million dollars a year pay a far lower rate than ordinary folks do, but the kinds of income that tend to be reserved, at least at significant levels, for the wealthiest among us (capital gains, dividends, interest, rent) aren’t taxed at all.

But just as those on the left too frequently conflate Exxon’s or GE’s failure to pay federal income tax with not paying taxes at all, those on the right—Rick Perry being the latest, particularly stupid and/or disingenuous, example of this phenomenon—holler about the 46% of Americans who don’t pay income tax. It’s true, of course, and also a completely conscious fabrication: a family of four making $26,000 in 2010 would indeed pay no income tax. ($26K = 4 exemptions @ $3650, plus the standard deduction of $11,400.) That family would pay $1092 in payroll taxes, however, even at the reduced rate used in 2011. This figure doesn’t count the additional $1612 paid by their employers, which, as Syracuse University professor Len Burman points out in an article on the website of that leftist rag, Forbes, “economists believe is ultimately paid by the employee in the form of lower wages.”

But the fact that virtually any GOP politician you can name is completely and utterly mendacious on this point isn’t news. What I’d like to discuss instead is the underlying truth that goes too often unspoken: the problem with the country isn’t that nearly half the people don’t pay income tax, it’s that nearly half the people don’t make enough money to be taxed. I’m not the first to talk about this, but certainly there are far too few politicians or commentators, even on the left, who make this observation.

Here’s the reality: study after study shows that economic disparity in this country is bad and getting worse. Just a few examples: a study by sociologist G. William Domhoff of the University of California at Santa Cruz shows that nearly 43% of the financial wealth (net worth minus home value) in the country is controlled by just 1% of the population. The top quintile controls 91.3%, the bottom two quintiles combined, 40% of the population, own only 0.3% of the wealth. These figures are very much tied to race, as well; whereas whites (in 2006) had household incomes about 67% higher than African-Americans and 43% higher than Hispanics, their net worth exceeded African-Americans’ by a ratio of over 15.4:1 and Hispanics’ by more than that. But if you take homes out of the picture, the ratios become 87:1 and 109:1, respectively.

Still, while race clearly plays a part in this scenario, the division between rich and poor—or, more accurately, between the ultra-rich and everybody else—is what really matters. The richer you are, the less of your net worth is tied up in your home: an article by Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot in Mother Jones this spring points out that “The 2007 data (the most current) doesn't reflect the impact of the housing market crash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of Americans had 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1%, in contrast, had just 10%. The housing crisis has no doubt further swelled the share of total net worth held by the superrich.”

Particularly interesting in the Mother Jones piece is a chart based on the work of Jacob Hacker of Yale University and Paul Pierson of UC-Berkeley. These two political scientists charted what actually occurred in the generation from 1979-2005 compared with what would have been projected based on the data of the previous few decades. You will not be surprised, Gentle Reader, to learn that the richest 1% fared quite well over that period, raking in some $673 billion (nearly $600,000 per family) per year more than would have been predicted. The hardest hit in percentage terms, of course, were those at the bottom, but the biggest losses in dollar terms came from those at the very center: families in the third quintile made over $10,000 a year less than would have been predicted.

Finally, let’s look at how America compares to other countries in terms of wealth equity. Hint: it ain’t pretty. There’s some complicated mathematics that goes into figuring the Gini index—I won’t attempt to explain it here, but basically there are two things you should know: it’s an objective number rather than an analysis of any kind, and the lower the number, the more equitably a nation’s wealth is distributed among the population. According to the CIA, the most recent number for Sweden is 23; Hungary, 24.7; Slovakia, 26; Canada, 32.1; the United Kingdom, 34. The United States: 45 in 2007, up from 40.8 a decade earlier. True, that’s not as bad as Swaziland (50.4), Honduras (53.8), or Namibia (70.7), but are those really the economies we want to be comparing ourselves to? We’re behind the likes of Albania (26.7), Bangladesh (33.2), and Yemen (37.7). The European Union as a whole: 30.4. China: 41.5. India: 36.8.

Another metric would be the ratio of the average income of the top 10% to the average income of the bottom 10%. Using this statistic, Japan has the most equitable economy at a ratio of 4.5:1; Bolivia is the worst of those surveyed, at nearly 94:1. The United States, at 15.9:1, is behind every other first-world country, not to mention the likes of Bosnia and Herzogovenia, Tanzania, and Liberia.

Of course, having a high degree of income disparity is neither the full measure of an economy nor an inherently bad thing: I’d rather have our economy that Greece’s or Ethiopia’s, even though they both beat us in both the metrics listed above. That said, however, Domhoff’s statistics are revealing:

Americans from all walks of life were also united in their vision of what the "ideal" wealth distribution would be…. They said that the ideal wealth distribution would be one in which the top 20% owned between 30 and 40 percent of the privately held wealth, which is a far cry from the 85 percent that the top 20% actually own. They also said that the bottom 40%—that's 120 million Americans—should have between 25% and 30%, not the mere 8% to 10% they thought this group had, and far above the 0.3% they actually had. In fact, there's no country in the world that has a wealth distribution close to what Americans think is ideal when it comes to fairness.

There’s an outstanding graph that originally accompanied an excellent article by James Fallows in The Atlantic last fall about a study similar to Domhoff’s, this one by Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Daniel Ariely of Duke. The chart, which I put on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page last September, shows that whereas there are perhaps predictable variances between people who voted for Bush as opposed to Kerry, or who make more than $100K a year as opposed to less than $50K, literally every demographic both underestimated the existing disparity and believed that there should be more equity. Those making over $100,000 a year, for example, predictably showed the highest “ideal” percentage of wealth to be controlled by the top 20%. But their ideal would be 40%. They thought the reality was 62%. The actual reality: 84%.

So there seems to be some interest in a more balanced economy in which the gaps between the top and the bottom are less pronounced. This is true in theory, anyway—whether there’s actually as much egalitarian spirit as the subjects surveyed in either of these two studies seem to pretend is another matter. But the studies do highlight both the central flaw in the right-wing rhetoric in logical and ethical terms, and indeed the reason this spurious argumentation is effective. If, as the populace believes, those not paying income tax account for even the 15% of so of the nation’s wealth, that’s a fair amount of money not to be drawing any tax revenue at all. Trouble is, that bottom 46% make less than 3% of the income and have well under 1% of the wealth.

And so we’re back to where we started: if the right wants to make a big deal out of “nearly half” of the population not paying taxes (there were also a few thousand millionaires who didn’t, either, but that doesn’t bother them so much), then the appropriate response is not merely to point out that virtually everyone with a job of any kind pays payroll tax. It’s also to ask what the GOP is going to do to raise people up economically to the point where they’re going to be called upon to pay taxes. How do you do that, Governor Perry? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not by leading the nation in minimum-wage (and sub-minimum-wage) jobs.

Just when you thought the GOP couldn't get any more hypocritical...

2011-08-21T20:51:00.006-05:00

Seems like we just got over a skirmish on taxes and there’s another one looming. The Republicans decided in the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling that allowing the Bush tax cuts for the stinking rich to expire qualified as a tax increase, so they couldn’t possibly support it. Well, now the one-year break on payroll taxes (a.k.a. FICA), not to be confused with income taxes, is nearing its expiration, and President Obama wants to continue it. And the Republicans are opposing him! So much for any credibility any of them ever had.

GOP ~~Grand Exalted Hypocrite~~ Ways and Means Committee Chair David Camp says that tax reductions, “no matter how well-intended,” will add to the deficit. That’s true, of course, but where was that line of reasoning a month ago, when Republican petulance prevented any increase in revenue in any form from being part of the deficit deal?

The difference, say truth-impaired asshats like Lamar Alexander (I’m so old I can remember when he was sane) and Eric Cantor (he was never sane), is partially that the Bush tax cuts were intended to last for 10 years. Uh huh, and that decade was about to run out, and… Also, of course, Cantor “has never believed that this type of temporary tax relief is the best way to grow the economy.” Cantor is loony, lying or an idiot. My choice is D, all of the above, but you’re free to differ. Anyone not rendered brain-dead by adherence to the silly, demonstrably-failed, regressive policy known as supply-side (a.k.a. “voodoo”) economics realizes that the way to stimulate the economy is to put more money in the hands of people who will spend it. Logically, that means if we’re going to do tax cuts, they should go primarily to poorer people, who will purchase things they otherwise couldn’t afford, rather than banking the difference.

The Republicans, whose rhetoric, even more than Democrats’, concentrates on manifestations of the Puritan work ethic, don’t really value work. Thanks to them, for example, capital gains and most dividends are taxed at a significantly lower rate than earned income. (This is why the “hedge fund exemption” is so outrageous.) And FICA taxes are ultimately regressive, since they apply only to the first $106,800 of income.

A DINK (dual income, no kids) family making $50,000 a year will pay $5961 a year (11.9%) in taxes, between federal income tax and FICA. (In all three hypothetical families, we’re assuming they don’t itemize, although of course the wealthiest family would be far more likely to do so, since the percentage of income necessary to make itemization work to their advantage would be negligible.) A second family, making $100,000, would pay $16,894 (16.9%) in those combined taxes. But what of a third family, making, say, $1,000,000 in earned income and another $19,000,000 in capital gains? Their total tax would be $3,202,479 (16.0%). Yes, that’s a lower rate than the middle-class family.

Allow the payroll tax cut to expire, and the $50K family will see a $1000 increase in their taxes. It would be $2000 for the $100K family, and $4272 for the $20M family (assuming both spouses made at least $108K; otherwise, the increase would be smaller). That already tells you something: that the increase is barely over twice as high for the last family as for the middle one, even though their total income is 200 times as much. But let’s look at those numbers another way: allowing those cuts to expire would raise the first family’s total federal income-related tax burden by close to 16.7%, the second family’s by 11.8%, and the third family’s by about .1%. The tax increase as a percentage of income would be 2% for the working class and middle class families, .04%, or 1/50 as much, for the wealthy one.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of revenue enhancement the Republicans can get behind. I posted the AP article linked above on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page earlier today. The first comment read, “If the GOP are for it, it must be a tax on the poor.” Well, actually, yeah. It’s a big increase on the poor, a fairly substantial one on the middle class, and an almost imperceptible one on the wealthy.

A caveat: I’m not convinced in policy terms that extending this cut is actually a good idea. I do think revenues need to be raised, and I don’t think allowing this short-term cut to actually expire ought to be off the table. Then again, I wasn’t the one yammering into every available microphone that raising taxes in any way would be the moral equivalent of allowing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to gang-rape your sister. No, that was the guys now nattering about fiscal responsibility and fighting to raise taxes on the poor and middle class.

Here’s the deal. I’m willing to pay a little more in taxes if it’s part of a comprehensive approach to raise revenue and decrease the deficit/debt. Such a policy initiative would necessarily include closing loopholes, ending or drastically reducing subsidies of corporations making literally billions of dollars in profits, increasing the rates on capital gains, and returning the top marginal rate to at least near Clinton-era levels. But until and unless I hear something that sounds like genuine willingness to negotiate in good faith (and actually to compromise) coming from Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, et al., then I’m going to fight these disingenuous and venal corporate water-carriers for every penny.

More to the point, one of my most significant disappointments with the Obama administration is in how inept they seem to be in political as opposed to policy terms. The President’s use of the bully pulpit has been sporadic, truncated, and diffident. Here is a gold-plated, gift-wrapped, all-expenses-paid donation from the GOP. If Plouffe, Axelrod, Messina, Carney, and indeed Mr. Obama himself aren’t bellowing from the rooftops at every opportunity for the next 15 months that the GOP was perfectly willing to let the country default in order to save tax breaks for billionaires, but want to raise your taxes, Mr. and Mrs. America, they truly deserve to lose the next election. Unfortunately, the rest of us don’t deserve the inevitable result of their cravenness, timidity, and overall political ineptness.