One More Thing about the Texas Abortion Bill

One-Star Reviews?

Curmie has been putting off writing about one of the most contentious issues of late, especially to those of us currently inhabiting the 1-star state (kudos to whoever first described the “Lone Star” as representing our Yelp rating), namely the new abortion law.  

What Curmie doesn’t want to talk about is whether abortion should or shouldn’t be legal or under what circumstances it should or shouldn’t be.  There are good, intelligent, and moral people at virtually every spot on the spectrum.  Maybe the absolute extremes in either direction are untenable, but Curmie knows of few zealots who would insist that a fetus should be prioritized over the life of the mother and literally no one who thinks that a late term pregnancy should be aborted simply as a means of birth control.

Determining the beginning of human life, after all, is a matter of philosophy more than biology.  At first breath, as even evangelical churches were proclaiming into Curmie’s teens?  At conception?  At viability?  There are reasonable arguments for any of these positions.  And must these positions be regarded as absolutist?  Might it be reasonable to argue that abortion ought to be illegal as a form of birth control but not for victims of rape or incest?  When two ethical positions collide, a compromise solution may be the best available option.  Or perhaps not.

So whereas Curmie is firmly in the pro-choice camp, and would be particularly insistent regarding rape or incest victims, he holds no animosity for those who have an honest disagreement with his position.  This geniality does not extend, however, to the authors of the Texas bill, those who voted or it, or (especially) the state’s mendacious and misogynistic governor, Greg Abbott.

The bill, of course, is blatantly and no doubt intentionally unconstitutional.  Curmie can’t believe that even Abbott and his cronies are stupid enough to think this monstrosity would actually pass muster in the courts, even the politicized remnant of a once ethical deliberative body that is now SCOTUS.  But that’s the point: winning isn’t the goal.  Playing to the base and having ongoing battles to fight are what bring in the campaign contributions.

But this essay is not about a provision by which those who act on the basis of a lower-court ruling declaring this law unconstitutional can still be charged if that decision is subsequently overturned.  (Curmie is no lawyer, but he does know ex post facto when he sees it.)  Nor is this about a law so sloppily written that it’s not clear if the Uber driver who takes a woman to Planned Parenthood could be charged even if said driver had no knowledge of the woman’s intentions (news flash: PP offers countless services that have nothing to do with abortion).  

It’s not about the bullshit “fetal heartbeat” language when the cut-off date happens long before there’s anything in an embryo that even resembles the specialization of heart muscles.  It’s not even about Abbott’s disingenuous argument that a woman would still have six weeks to decide to get an abortion (it’s maybe as much as a fortnight).

No, this essay is about something that has been little discussed elsewhere, a tactic that would make the KGB blush.  Apart from the constitutional issues involved, there is the apparent desire to turn every Texan (and even non-Texans!) into a nark.  This legislation incentivizes, to the tune of $10,000 a pop, neighbor turning against neighbor, inevitably sowing distrust and even paranoia.  Curmie, being a theatre geek, thinks of Bertolt Brecht’s one-act, The Informer, in which the mother and father of a young boy in the Hitler Youth fret at his absence.  Has he been telling the authorities of his parents’ criticism of the Nazi regime?  He returns home, having apparently only stopped to buy some chocolate… or did he?

Gentle Reader, you are free to blame whichever political party you don’t belong to for the widening schism in American politics: it’s Barack Obama’s fault or Mitch McConnell’s fault, Donald Trump’s fault or Nancy Pelosi’s fault.  (Hint: all of the above.)  But surely you must agree that this new tactic, if ever truly employed, would not only destroy the possibility of civil political discourse, but would bring the entire society to its knees.

Of course, stupid and unethical behavior begets stupid and unethical behavior.  Curmie’s Facebook page has been littered with more than a few memes and political screeds encouraging attempts to crash the system by overloading it with junk: everything from fake names and addresses to Shrek porn.  This isn’t the answer, and “they did it first” smacks too much of a standoff between primary school siblings.

Curmie is certain the pseudo-Christian hacks that comprise the Texas GOP are pretty proud of themselves for their attempted end run around not merely good sense, ethical behavior, a concern for the viability of the state’s government, and… oh yeah… the Constitution.  But as any football fan knows, a good free safety will make any offense attempting an end run wish they hadn’t.  “Free safety”… has a nice ring to it.

Tokens, Talismans, and... Tampons?

Curmie has long argued that there’s nothing like the Republican Party in Texas to make anyone with an IQ over room temperature into a card-carrying Democrat. It certainly worked for me. A lifelong Independent who moved to Texas in 2001, I saw about enough of George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, and similar politicos whose stupidity was matched only by their immorality: even my distaste for political parties in general was ultimately overcome. I became a Democrat in 2008, and even voted in a primary for the first time in the nearly 35 years I’d been registered to vote (N.B., this period included one presidential election in New Hampshire and two in Iowa, where voting in primaries or caucuses would have had an impact).

Of late, the parade of GOP charlatans has included Rick “Governor Goodhair” Perry, Loony Louie Gohmert (Curmie’s very own Congresscritter), and the insufferably inane Ted Cruz. In this company, conventional party hacks like John Cornyn look positively enlightened by comparison.

For all this, however, I’d never witnessed anything quite so—what? arrogant? stupid? tone-deaf?—as the recent display in Austin when the carefully gerrymandered Republican supermajority was in the process of cramming through an unpopular, unconstitutional, and unnecessary (even if you agree with them) bill in the second completely wasteful and self-indulgent special session of the legislature this year to restrict not merely federally-protected abortion rights, but women’s health in general. After all, shutting down the majority of the state’s abortion clinics is one thing, but those facilities are also the only place many Texas women could go for contraception, pap smears, mammograms, and similar services related to women’s health.

As the ultimate vote loomed—the GOP having been too inept twice to pass a bill they all, in typical mindless lockstep fashion, agreed to—citizens (women) had tampons and maxi pads confiscated before being allowed to enter the state capital to witness the vote that would deny them and their colleagues across the state access to basic reproductive health care (again: yes, abortion rights was one issue, but frankly only one among many). They’re potential “projectiles,” you see. Meanwhile, those with conceal carry permits were still allowed to bring loaded weapons into the chamber. Curmie fancies himself reasonably creative, but he couldn’t make this shit up.

This makes sense to Texas Republicans, even if to no one else. The fact is, it is even sillier to regard a tampon as a potential projectile than it is to treat allergy medicine as meth in potentia. More to the point, anything can be a projectile, including the bullets in one of those oh-so-legal handguns. To be blunt, if someone is going to throw something at me from the balcony, I’d much rather it be a maxi pad than a battery, a bullet, or a quarter.

Never ones to succumb to the powers of logic, however, the Texas GOP, led by Idiot in Chief Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, set about to secure their misogynistic credentials by choosing a particularly gender-specific set of prospective “projectiles” to forbid. After all, the legislation under consideration might possibly (albeit disingenuously) have been construed as the product of legitimate moral concern about abortion and/or sincere interest in the medical well-being of women seeking abortion services. And Texas Republicans simply cannot allow for the possibility that they might not be regarded as woman-hating monsters. Nope. Confiscate those feminine products, irrespective of whether some of those citizens might… you know… have a completely innocent, gender-specific reason for carrying those items in their purses. So, according to a report from the Associated Press/Huffington Post, “Troopers tossed tampons, perfume bottles, moisturizers, pencils and other things into the garbage.”

Now, Gentle Reader, don’t get me wrong. Had any of those women indeed used those items as projectiles, they would and should have been subject to removal and/or arrest. That’s as it should be. But to forbid carrying a feminine product, some moisturizer, or a pencil, in the absence of any indication whatsoever that the citizen in question intends to hurl it at a legislator, is stupid in the extreme… roughly equivalent to arresting one of those gun-toters for contemplating armed robbery despite a dearth of evidence to support the claim.

The GOP, then, unsatisfied with being perceived as misogynistic merely by the liberal women assembled at the Capitol building, chose to screech their hysteria (yes, Gentle Reader, Curmie is aware of the irony of that particular term in these circumstances) from the rafters. One is also bemused at the prospect of a State Senator otherwise oozing with pseudo-machismo cravenly cowering in the corner lest he be struck by a maxi pad hurtling towards him at nearly 20 mph.

Of course, the right-wing blogosphere was abuzz with allegedly corroborated reports that pro-choice advocates attempted to bring jars of urine, feces, and paint into the gallery. If true, obviously, this would be serious, and Curmie is not so naïve as to believe that those who share his views on a particular issue are inherently above doing something stupid. Trouble is, that whereas there are pictures of the Great Tampon Confiscation, there’s not a shred of actual evidence that anyone really did try to disrupt the proceedings in this manner.

Needless to say, with about a gazillion news reporters and twice that many activists on both sides of the issue on site, the chances that somewhere amongst the “one jar suspected to contain urine, 18 jars suspected to contain feces, and three bottles suspected to contain paint” allegedly confiscated by DPS (the state Department of Public Safety), there’s not a single photograph, not a single statement from an officer that he or she had personally made such a confiscation.

Rather, numbers of officers expressed surprise that such rumors had circulated, noting that they were in the Capital that night and had heard nothing of the kind. To justify the lack of evidence, DPS proclaimed that it hadn’t really confiscated anything, after all, and noted that because “no crime had been committed… it would be unreasonable to document names of visitors based on what they might or might not do.”

Chief among the disingenuous GOPsters was Senator Kevin Eltife, from right up the road from Curmie in Tyler, who somehow, apparently, was able to maintain a straight face while intoning that “nobody has a reason to make up a story about this.” Well, no one but lying little weasels like you, Senator, who would cheerfully fan the fires that enable the likes of Freedom Outpost to decry the “Degenerate Pro-Abortion Supporters,” a term, of course, implicitly applied to all opponents of the bill, whether or not they were guilty of the slightest impropriety (remember, DPS excuses the complete lack of evidence for its assertion based on the fact that no crime was committed).

But the salient point is this: even if there were some over-zealous opponents of SB2 (the erstwhile SB5), no one committed a crime—perhaps because they were prevented from doing so, perhaps because they never intended to do so. The fact is that thousands of Texas women—and men who think women are people—gathered in Austin last week to protest a bill they knew they couldn’t stop. That, my friends, was the spirit of the defenders of the Alamo: a defeat that rallied supporters after the fact and ultimately brought about a new age in Texas history. We might just be seeing that again. If so, the GOP’s smirking pride in its misogyny is far more responsible for that revolution than either Wendy Davis or the protesters at the Capitol. One day, they may awaken enough to proclaim, à la Pogo, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

SB5: Some Thoughts from a Male Texan

Curmie doesn’t cry much. Wednesday, a little over a week ago, was an exception.

There was the goodbye scene towards the end of Godspell, which had its first dress rehearsal in the morning and its second in the evening: these were tears of emotion, and of pride that the cast and crew had done such excellent work.

There was the devastating news that a friend and student—and the fiancé of a Godspell cast member—had been killed in a car crash. Those tears were all about pain… I struggled, reasonably successfully, to keep them from hitting my cheeks: I needed to be the strong one for a couple of hours. I blubbered like an infant the next morning, but no one saw me.

Early Wednesday, there were the SCOTUS decisions on DOMA and Prop 8. They brought a tear to my eye, too, especially that this court would align itself on the right (as in “correct”) side of history instead of (as I feared) the right (as opposed to “left”) side.

But the story that made me sob with pride was what transpired in Austin, Texas on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. Most readers of this blog will know the basics already, but I suspect this made fewer headlines nationally than it did here in Texas, so…

Like all the other GOP politicos who pretend to favor small government but are all about intrusion into the lives of anyone who isn’t rich, white, heterosexual, Christian, and male, Texas Governor Rick Perry sure does love to impose his ideological and theocratic will on the populace. Obviously, in the state that has the worst record in the country for job creation relative to changes in the workforce, that has the lowest voter turnout in the nation, that places last in healthcare and in percentage of the population with a high school diploma… surely in such a Utopia, there can be no issue more urgent an issue than regulating the state’s uteruses. After all, if contraception were to be readily available and abortion services within the financial and geographical reach of the state’s women, how could we remain #1 in teen births, let alone let them fillies know who’s boss? And who cares if the bill’s sponsor in the Texas House doesn’t know what a rape kit is? Right? ‘Murica.

And so it was that when Governor Goodhair’s minions couldn’t get their act together to pass the most restrictive anti-abortion bill in the country (at the time… Ohio may have since lurched even more emphatically into a previous century), there needed to be a special session, right? After all, the fact that there is nothing wrong with the status quo except the under-funding of women’s health services shouldn’t be taken to mean that there isn’t an emergency to be solved only by paternalistic intervention, right? Indeed, a bipartisan poll suggests that the majority of the Texas citizenry doesn’t want the bill passed, at least under these circumstances (in much the same way, one suspects, that the attempts to recall hugely unpopular Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker failed: people might not like the status quo, but they don’t like to feel like they’re parties to the manipulation of the system, either).

And let’s be real: there was no real purpose to the special session other than to pass this one bill, outlawing abortions after the 20th week and imposing a series of restrictions on abortion centers and the medical staff who work there. The first part of the bill may have merit, but it is patently unconstitutional (at least in the opinions of SCOTUS, who collectively represent the only opinions that matter); the second half of the bill, like so many causes championed by 21st century Republicans, creates an utterly fictitious problem and solves that phantom dilemma through the most repressive means imaginable, in this case de facto shutting down over 88% of the state’s abortion facilities. But the GOP, for all their gerrymandered supermajority, couldn’t get it done. Oh, sure, the bill sailed through the House, but it got stalled just long enough in the Senate for a Hail Mary pass by a 50-year-old pink-sneaker-clad Senator named Wendy Davis.

Davis announced her intention to filibuster the bill, and then made good on her promise. And off she went. Now, the thing is, Texas filibuster rules are different than those at the national level. You aren’t allowed any breaks at all—not even to pee. You aren’t allowed to as much as lean on your desk for support (one wonders about how someone with a certifiable disability would be treated). You’re not allowed to take even a sip of water. And you have to stay on topic. Jimmy Stewart was a wimp by comparison.

Naturally, there was a cat and mouse quality to the exercise. Davis, needless to say, was searching for anything vaguely on-topic to talk about; the GOP establishment eagerly pounced on anything that might constitute a violation of the rules. The most impressive thing about Davis’s performance wasn’t that she held the floor for nearly 11 hours (she used a catheter to prevent the need to leave her post to obey the proverbial call of nature): it’s that she went that long without straying from the topic even a little. Both of the “violations” cited by Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst, who is trying very hard to be as stupid and corrupt as his boss, were marginal at best: discussions of required sonograms and of Planned Parenthood funding would strike me as germane… but then, I’m not an ideological jackass (a jackass, yes, but not an ideological one). The other “violation” in the three-strikes-you’re-out policy was when a colleague helped her adjust a back brace. It’s a technicality, but at least it’s real.

So Davis’s filibuster didn’t work. The goal was to talk through midnight, when the special session would be officially over. She got shut down at 10:03 pm, after an impressive but nonetheless insufficient 10 hours and 45 minutes. What Davis did, however, was to bring the finish line within sight.

The Guardian (time to ask once again why the best reporting on American politics comes from British newspapers) reports the ensuing events as follows:

A rush of procedural motions and inquiries by Democrat senators delayed the final vote on the bill. [Letitia] Van de Putte asked for a summary of previous points of order, saying she had been away from the senate attending her father's funeral.

The leader of the Democrats in the senate, Kirk Watson, began what amounted to his own filibuster.

With less than 15 minutes to go until midnight Van de Putte asked what a female member of the senate had to do to be heard over her male colleagues. She believed she had raised a motion earlier but was not heard.

It was at this point the crowded public gallery began chanting and cheering. A vote was called on the SB5 bill but the noise was at such a level that voting was suspended until order was restored.

The gallery appeared to take this as an invitation to ramp up their noise for the remaining 15 minutes, with encouragement from Democrats on the floor. The session ended in chaos and confusion, and without the vote being completed by midnight.

Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst promptly declared that the vote had indeed been taken and that the motion had passed. Then he claimed that there was some sort of special time-out—similar to the ones employed by 8-year-olds on the playground, one presumes—that meant that the fact that although the vote wasn’t really taken until after midnight, it should count, anyway. There is considerable evidence that the GOP honchos doctored the official record, which was originally (and accurately) timestamped shortly after midnight, to pretend the vote was taken just before instead of just after the witching hour. When I went to bed that night, it looked like they were going to get away with it. But when I awoke on Wednesday, it was to the news that Dewhurst, confronted with incontrovertible proof that his assertions were… erm… bovine feces, had conceded defeat in the wee hours of the morning.

It didn’t take long, of course, for the GOP to re-group. Governor Goodhair called yet another special session to begin this Monday. The bill will almost certainly pass this time, because the idea that a Texas Republican might actually exercise a little intellect, discretion, or restraint is roughly equivalent to suggesting that a hungry piranha might save a little food for later. And Davis has already said she won’t filibuster this time, acknowledging that “you can’t have a 30-day filibuster.”

My response on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page follows:

To the surprise of absolutely no one who has paid the slightest bit of attention to his ultra-partisan, ideologically-driven agenda, his complete lack of basic human decency, his serial corruption, and his often illegal and almost always unethical political maneuverings, Texas Governor Rick Perry has called yet another special legislative session to ram through the restrictive and patently unconstitutional abortion bill that was derailed last night.

He'll probably get away with it in the short term, too, but even a quick read of Texas history leads inevitably to the realization that the greatest rallying cries are often born of defeat. Or perhaps, given his dim-wittedness, Governor Goodhair thinks the Alamo was a victory for Texas.

There will be repercussions. The attempts to tamper with official records will get publicity. Wendy Davis is already a household name in this state. And the GOP's obeisance to their religio-corporate masters will indeed be chronicled for all to see.

Yes, he'll probably “win” in the short term, but that “victory” won't be out of the public view. We will indeed see the fraud that is the man behind the curtain, and we will be the better for it.

As Curmie's cast sings “Save the People” in dress rehearsal of Godspell tonight, he'll be paying attention to the words:

“Will crime bring crime forever,

Strength aiding still the strong?

Is it thy will, O Father

That men shall toil for wrong?

“‘No’ say thy mountains

‘No’ say thy skies

Man's clouded sun shall brightly rise

And songs be heard instead of sighs...”

We'll be fine, everyone. Some fights take longer than others. We shall overcome someday.

Indeed, whereas the bill will probably pass this time around, it will not do so to the deafening yawns of the corporate media, which studiously avoided coverage of… you know… actual news.

And that is really the most important element of this contretemps: the entrenched establishments of both parties really aren’t fans of allowing citizens to have any real influence over political decision-making. Want to find out if a politician is honest? Ask about the events in Austin last week. Then ask about similar events with Tea Partiers in the roles of the orange-clad (mostly) women. See if one of those events is “what democracy looks like” and the other an “unruly, screaming mob.” Conversely, are we just trying to conduct the “people’s business” or to “suppress actual citizens”? Are our tactics fine until (gasp!) the other guys try them?

All that said, this was an impressive display by opponents of the bill, and I am very proud of the level of civic engagement evidenced by at least four of my former students, who were in the crowd that night. The fact that I agree with them on this issue helps. But part of my job as an educator is to inspire students to engage with the world, whether I agree with their perspectives or not. If I can turn out a theatre person or two, that’s nice. But Job 1 is to help create independent-minded, skeptical, informed, citizens. Spring, Kelli, Meghan, and Mercedes (there may be others who were there, but I’m sure of these) can represent me and my work any time. Even Especially if they’re a little less than polite.

Fracking Frackers.

As a well-informed citizen, Gentle Reader, you are no doubt aware of the state of Texas’s budgetary crisis that’s going to cost, among other things, somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 jobs in the public education sector so we can maintain a “favorable business climate,” or whatever new euphemism Governor Perry is using for “screw everybody but my fat-cat campaign contributors.”

The newest revelation about the true nature of the deficit suggests, unsurprisingly, that Big Energy is not only making obscene profits with little if any regard for trivial inconveniences like groundwater contamination bad enough to set tap water on fire, but they’re apparently gaming the system to avoid literally billions of dollars in taxes. Indeed, a report commissioned by the Texas Legislative Budget Board but oh-so-conveniently not published—the decision to publish or not is made by the “leadership” (Lieutenant Governor and Speaker of the House), not the staff—shows that there has been some pretty shady stuff going on. The result is that a tax of 7.5% of market value has, because of “deductions, exemptions, and rate reductions,” actually generated a yield of only between 1.1 and 1.9%, or somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter of what would otherwise have been owed.

The most significant part of this discrepancy was in a tax benefit accruing to “high-cost operations.” The original rationale for this incentive makes perfect sense: encouraging companies to drill in places they otherwise might not, thereby creating a win-win: the company hires more people, makes more money and can keep more of it; the state collects a lot of tax revenue, even at a reduced rate, when there may not have been a well at all otherwise.

Problem is (quoting from the report):

• High-cost natural gas well certifications are based on 30-year-old production definitions that rely on the type of gas produced and manner of production rather than the actual cost to drill. In fiscal year 2009 this resulted in the certification of a $24,000 gas well as a high-cost operation when the median drilling cost was $2.3 million….

• Since fiscal year 2004, the value of high-cost gas tax rate reductions has totaled $7.4 billion.

• During fiscal year 2010, the State Auditor’s Office documented multiple instances in which tax audit processes did not prevent taxpayers from claiming rate reductions in excess of statutory limits. The Comptroller of Public Accounts later reported 357 natural gas wells had exceeded maximum rate reduction caps.

• [High-cost gas tax rate reductions are projected to account for] state revenue losses of $7.9 billion through 2019, from just the wells drilled in 2009.

The exact ratio of how much of the lost revenue is the result of actual criminality as opposed to simple corruption of the political process is unclear. What is evident is that the natural gas industry, with the active collusion of the state government, is getting enough in tax breaks at the expense of the rest of us to make a serious dent in the deficit. Ultimately, it matters little how Halliburton (to pick one such corporation at something short of random) harvests its taxpayer rip-off: by breaking laws it knows won’t be enforced, or by buying politicians who will do its bidding and legalize that which should be criminal.

To say that I am not a geologist or a tax accountant is rather like saying that water is wet… or that fracking isn’t worth the risk, at least at current technology levels. But it doesn’t take a lot of discipline-specific expertise to figure out what to do: 1). review the current policy, making appropriate accommodation for actual entrepreneurship, but ensuring that multi-billion dollar corporations aren’t screwing the rest of us (again), 2). actually enforce whatever the revised law does decree (collecting what's already owed wouldn't be a bad idea, either), 3). remove the TLBB from partisan control so they can and will release reports like this one, which they claim is an “internal working document,” not even subject to the Open Records Act.

There are legitimate concerns, expressed for example by commenter “L Streets Resident” on the excellent blog post by Jim Schutze on the Dallas Observer site, that a too-precipitous change of policy might turn out not to be cost-effective, costing more in jobs than it would generate in revenue. Perhaps. And Schutze no doubt exaggerates the situation: $8 billion over several years is different from $8 billion right now. But the energy industry’s defenders can’t seem to wrap their head around the idea that, say, cutting a third of the state’s teaching jobs might also have some significant negative repercussions extending well past the immediate families of the laid-off educators themselves.

Frackers.

Anti-Democratic is Fine; Anti-democratic, Not So Much

The fact that the Republican Party doesn’t really believe its own rhetoric about “getting government off people’s backs” has been demonstrated too many times to truly be in doubt. The GOP wants to intercede in our sex lives, our private medical conversations, and our most harrowing end-of-life decisions. But until recently, most of their promotion of local control rang true.

True, there has been more than a little hypocrisy about the horrors of federal spending from Republican governors who quietly accepted billions of dollars of stimulus money, balanced their books because of it, and now are cursed by having received what they pretended to wish for: a significant curtailment of federal spending programs. But while GOP disingenuousness may be a little more qualitatively outrageous than normal, it is not quantitatively abnormal: politicians lie. Often.

Moreover, while there has certainly always been a smack of selectivity in the right’s much-touted belief that local governments are “closer to the people” than the feds are—funny how the presidency and Congress weren’t such bad places to invest with power when the GOP was in control—there was also an apparently sincere invocation of the libertarian spirit that is indeed part of the American psyche. The fact that such local control tended to manifest itself in resistance to, say, civil rights legislation may have been less than a coincidence, but that isn’t an inherent indictment of Republican motives: it would be unfair even for one as cynical as I to pretend to know with certainty that arguments purporting to be grounded in states’ rights or local control are in fact hypocritical.

That said, it is impossible—not merely problematic, impossible—to reconcile many recent actions of the GOP with any real interest in localized control of the political process. One of the first indications of a sea-change came in the form of the totally cynical, totally phony furor over the Park51 project. Apart from the protestors’ utter disregard for the U.S. Constitution, a document which to them takes on the attributes described in Mark Twain’s definition of a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read,” there was the completely disingenuous citation of national polls opposing the construction of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which of course isn’t a mosque and isn’t even within sight of Ground Zero. As I pointed out in an August post, Manhattanites actually approved of the project; it was the folks in Gopher Gulch who didn’t like the idea. But you’d never have known that from listening to the right-wing media, or, frankly, the corporate media in general.

More interesting, to me at least, is what is going on in Texas, especially with respect to education. For some time there has been a mandated state curriculum, complete with assigned textbooks and high stakes standardized testing that structurally encourages teach-to-the-test strategies and memorization. But the new “standards” in social studies, rammed by a cabal of ideological storm-troopers through a state board of education whose arrogance is matched only by their ignorance, are a prime example of how not to conduct educational policy. The principal cause of the Civil War? Sectionalism (whatever the hell that is); slavery is third, behind states’ rights. See what I mean about arrogant and ignorant? And local school districts where people might actually care about real education are powerless to do their jobs in the face of state mandates to the contrary.

I’ve written about this at least twice before, in March and May of 2010. But let’s add on another layer. Governor Perry, in his State of the State address this year, euphemistically offered “to help school districts reduce their expenses in these tight budgetary times.” Translation: we’re unilaterally cutting your budgets. And that inevitably means firing teachers: in a good analysis by Peggy Fikac and Gary Scharrer of the Houston Chronicle, the authors point out that Texas schools could cut

every school superintendent, all principals and assistant principals, every school counselor, every librarian, every school nurse, all cafeteria workers, custodians and bus drivers—all 329,574 non-teacher jobs—and still not save the [mandated] $11.6 billion in public education cuts.

An AP article says that “Independent experts have estimated as many as a third of Texas school teachers could lose their jobs if lawmakers adopt the budget Republicans put forward with the support of Gov. Rick Perry.”

Perry, of course, wants to shift the blame for any layoffs to local school boards, while his proposed budget provides nearly $10 billion less in education funding than current formulas require. Given the fact that Texas is currently is well into the bottom third of states (as high as 36th or as low as 44th, depending on how you figure it) in terms of per pupil spending already, that’s not good news. The headline to an editorial in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram characterizes Perry’s assertion as originating in an “alternate reality.” But the fact remains that nothing that Perry could do budgetarily could have the huge negative impact that his short-sighted and pig-headed policies will in fact precipitate were it not for the fact that the state exercises enormous control over education funding, projected to be about 42%, down from over half just a couple of years ago.

Of course, the ratio of state to local funding is in large part the result of a complex balancing act between ensuring adequate educational opportunities for students in poorer districts on the one hand with allowing local municipalities to spend their locally-collected revenues on whatever projects they like, including, of course, education. My purpose here is not to argue that the state’s role ought to be greater or lesser than it is, but rather simply to note that real local control doesn’t exist—not in Texas, at any rate.

But, for once, the ultimate inanity by a politician isn’t committed by a Texan (I should probably downplay this, lest they get any ideas… and it is certainly true that in any normal week our own Louis Gohmert would be a strong contender for Most Embarrassing Politician of the Week). Even Wisconsin’s ample supply of miscreants on both sides of the aisle can’t compare.

No, this week the most awesome, stupendous, outrageous case of political hubris comes from the great state of Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder and the GOP-dominated legislature have colluded to expand the powers of appointed emergency financial managers (EMFs) to exercise a terrifying range of options, from voiding contracts to removing elected officials. EMFs would be appointed by the governor, and would not be answerable to local communities, only to the state legislature; even an amendment that would have limited their salaries to the $159K the governor himself makes failed after Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley broke a tie with a “no” vote.

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that there are municipalities (and especially school systems) that have been mismanaged, but this is a colossal over-reach. Perhaps the stipulation that EMFs can only be appointed if other measures fail is sufficient to prevent abuse, but frankly, I doubt it. This certainly seems to be really frightening legislation. An unscrupulous governor and state legislature (as the incumbents sure as hell appear to be) could deny funds to struggling cities (this is, in fact, happening), force them into “financial martial law,” appoint the governor’s cronies at unlimited salaries (note that the rejected limit on EMF salaries was more than double the average income, including benefits, of those mercenary teachers that Fox News keeps yammering about), wipe out city councils, and basically turn Michigan into that socialist dystopia the GOP has been warning us about. All power, both political and economic, would then reside with the state.

All this, ladies and gentlemen, is brought to you from the party of local control. I understand that the Republicans are feeling their oats after considerable electoral success last November. But their unwillingness to adopt reasonable tax policies has left them with no possibility of intelligent or even ethical governance. Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power pales in comparison to Republican politicians, who are, needless to say, übermenschen only in their own minds. I try to stay clear of “slippery slope” arguments, but this power grab for the politically powerful and connected is more brazen and more audacious than anything any so-called “big government” Democrat has ever contemplated.

Last fall, Texas sued the US government because Rick Perry and his cronies used stimulus dollars earmarked for education on something else, and the feds don’t want to have them do it again, so they’re insisting that any future education funding be spent on, you know, education. As Representative Lloyd Doggett (D, Austin) says, “Federal aid to education should actually aid education in our local Texas schools. It is almost as if the Governor felt he was entitled to his own blank check federal bailout and now he has the lawsuit to prove it."

You see, according to the King of Texas wannabe, actually expecting a governor to obey the law represents an egregious manifestation of top-down interference. Ah, but you see that situation is about the bigger entity insisting that money it provides be used for its intended purpose. In Michigan, it’s about literally displacing the smaller government from above. That’s OK, you see, because… uh… the bigger government would be Republicans.

The Michigan bill has been described as an attack on unions. It no doubt is. But it is also an attack on teacher tenure, on anyone with government contracts, on the very notion of elected government. I have no problem with the Republicans being anti-Democratic, but this is actively anti-democratic. Capitalization matters.

The State of the State of the State

Over at Ethics Alarms a couple of days ago, Jack Marshall excoriated those who took seriously and propagated as if true an obviously satirical story about Sarah Palin supposedly saying that she’d deport Christina Aguilera for botching the lyrics to the National Anthem at this year’s Super Bowl.

I agreed. Even by Palin’s standards, those comments were absurd. Any reasonable reader would at least be suspicious enough to notice that word “comedy” in both the headline kicker and the site’s URL. And condemning Ms. Palin for what she didn’t say is foolish at best and unethical at worst. But, as I said in a comment on the Ethics Alarms post, “[s]ometimes politicians (of all political stripes) say things that are stupid enough to seem to be satire.” And that, my friends, is the cue for Governor Rick Perry’s State of the State address.

OK, let’s just take as given that about all I share with the governor are a first name and a (current) home state. We’re not going to agree on much politically. That happens. And some of the comments below reflect a simple difference of political, economic, and pedagogical priorities. But some go beyond that, suggesting that Governor Perry is a). lying, b). dumber than dirt, or c). flat-out insane.

I cite in their entirety his comments on higher education, a topic I flatter myself that I know something about, having been a professional in that field for over thirty years. The indented block quotes are Mr. Perry's; the comments with “normal” margins, mine.

On the higher education front, we've experienced enrollment growth over the last two years higher than any time in Texas history. Our public institutions had 200,000 more students enrolled in 2010 than they did in 2008, so let's be sure those students and their families are getting the best value for their time and money.

So value wasn’t as important two years ago?

Change does not come easily or naturally to these big institutions, but it is critical to educational effectiveness and efficiency. Back in September of '09, I ordered a review of cost efficiencies at our universities as a way to make education more affordable.

One idea that emerged from that process is called "Outcomes-Based Funding" in which a significant percent of undergraduate funding, would be based on the number of degrees awarded. Texans deserve college graduation for their hard-earned tax dollars, not just college enrollment.

Well, the most obvious way to make education more affordable is to increase, not slash, state appropriations to educational institutions. That would reduce the amount of money universities would need to make from tuition, thereby lowering costs to students. This is not to say that there isn’t some streamlining that could in fact make the higher education more economical without reducing quality. There isn’t an intercollegiate athletics program in the state that breaks even, for example. (N.B.: the foregoing statement, while true, is intended purely as snark, not as a serious proposal, although the fact that I have to say this certainly indicates where the sacred cows are, and they’re not in classroom learning, the library, faculty salaries, the arts…) But with greatly reduced state funding, universities already need to cut muscle rather than fat just to break even, let alone reduce costs.

If there is an idea stupider than Outcomes-Based Funding, I haven’t heard it. What this proposal ultimately says is that we really don’t care if our workforce has any skills, as long as they have diplomas. While this provision might conceivably prompt admissions offices to enforce the standards they claim to uphold, which would certainly be a good thing, the pressure would be far greater on administrations to graduate students who, frankly, don’t deserve a degree. Inevitably, that pressure is transferred to faculty: “I know Johnny the History major said the American Revolution happened in 1941, but really, when you think of it in geological terms, he was actually pretty close. So give the lazy little moron a passing grade, or we’ll hire someone who will.” It’s a variation on the “everybody gets a ribbon” mentality that values self-worth over actual achievement. I always sort of thought of this particular manifestation of soft-headedness masquerading as soft-heartedness as more of a liberal failing than a conservative one. No, huh?

This kind of thinking is already far too prevalent. Texans do not “deserve college graduation for their hard-earned tax dollars.” They deserve college graduates who know something: about their major subject, about the world of ideas, about life in general. And students who actually earn a degree deserve to have it mean something. Ironically, of course, we are also in the age of assessment. I’m already spending literally dozens of hours a year—time that could otherwise be spent preparing for classes, working with my advisees, advancing my research, or (gasp!) reducing my work week below 55 or 60 hours—preparing essentially meaningless statistics to justify that which ought to require no justification. That I know of no one in my business who just does a Fox News and makes these numbers up is little short of a miracle.

In other words, especially for a university like the one where I work—not a flagship, in other words—we are structurally encouraged to reward mediocrity at every step of the process. It may be the admissions office who admitted the kid with an 11 ACT and a felony conviction (yes, I had a student not long ago who met both of those criteria), but it’s not their fault—or indeed the student’s—if the kid flunks out. It’s the faculty’s, at least in the parallel universe inhabited by Rick Perry. And here I was thinking the Republicans were the party of personal responsibility, and of “equal opportunity, not necessarily equal results.”

As families continue to struggle with the cost of higher education, I am renewing my call for a four-year tuition freeze, locking in tuition rates at or below the freshman level for four years.

Brilliant. “You have more students than ever before, and we’re cutting your state funding, so let’s also prevent you from raising funds virtually any other way.” No, I do not believe that throwing money at a problem necessarily solves it. But when streamlining the budget means classrooms are over-crowded, when the library can’t stay current with new publications, when faculty leave (or don’t come) because the salaries that are already miniscule compared to those of professionals in other fields with equivalent training and intellectual demands are cut—these are signals of calamity, not economy. I do, by the way, support the option of allowing universities to offer such pledges—as my doctoral institution does—as a recruiting tool. But, given his rhetoric on the health care bill, no one should understand better than Governor Perry the difference between allowing and requiring, or between that which is decided upon locally and that which is imposed by government.

As leaders like Senator Zaffirini search for more low-cost pathways to a degree, it's time for a bold, Texas-style solution to this challenge, that I'm sure the brightest minds in our universities can devise. Today, I'm challenging our institutions of higher education to develop bachelor's degrees that cost no more than $10,000, including textbooks.

OK, here’s where the governor needs to check in with the known universe, although I understand that the roaming charges for such a venture would add another couple of billion dollars onto the deficit his policies went a long way toward creating. These are the comments of someone who knows nothing about the cost of education, nothing about the ancillary benefits expected by students and parents (computer centers, free counseling services, infirmaries, etc.), and certainly nothing about the cost of textbooks. I don’t have specific numbers to back up my claim, but I strongly suspect it’s a very conservative estimate to suggest the average course has over $100 in textbooks; many (and I do mean many) cost three or four times that. Even this low-ball number, however, translates into over $4000 just in textbooks over the course of a baccalaureate degree.

And, NEWSFLASH: universities have virtually no control over the cost of books. True, we might be able to choose the terrible $80 book instead of the good $120 book, but quality really does matter, and books are expensive. I know of literally no one in my profession who doesn’t try valiantly to keep the textbook costs to students from being even more outrageous than they are: not merely comparison shopping for texts, but also, for example, using web-based sources like Google Books for texts that have entered the public domain. But while such strategies may work in some courses (I’ve done this twice already in Asian Theatre this spring, for example), it doesn’t work so well in, say, Physics, where a five-year-old textbook is already out of date.

If the proceeds went to the authors, that would be one thing. But the majority of that profit margin goes to Governor Perry’s friends in Big Business: the publishers, the transport companies, the chain bookstores. (Sidebar: my dissertation advisor co-wrote one of the standard textbooks in our field. He showed me his annual royalty check once: $141 and change. Somehow I suspect the publisher did a little better than that, or the book would never have been reprinted.) Curiously enough, however, there was no gubernatorial call for McGraw-Hill, UPS, or Barnes & Noble to cut their profit margins to help those poor, struggling Texas families be better able to afford a university education.

That leaves us with $6000 to cover tuition and fees for four years. The fees mount up, of course, because states across the country have figured out ways of financing big-ticket construction projects (both the student center and the rec center at my university, for example) on the backs of future students. Library fees are another common scam: the library doesn’t actually get all the income, and students enrolled in overseas programs are still expected to pay. Nice racket. Figuring $100 a semester, or $800 over four years, for unavoidable fees, often for things that should have already been paid for by the state, would be a conservative estimate.

So: $5200 for 120 credit hours. The current tuition structure for the University of Texas varies from college to college, but the cheapest, Communication, costs $4646 for a single long semester, or $37,168 for eight such semesters. Of course, if you happen to take five years’ worth of 12-hour loads instead of four years of 15-hour loads, it’ll run you $46,460. But let’s go with the lower figure. For the governor’s idea to come to fruition, there would need to be cuts totaling 86%! True, it wouldn’t hurt us as much: we’d only have to cut about 64%. Easy-peasy. Of course, this doesn’t factor in the reduced income from cuts in the state allocation.

In other words, Governor Perry is living in Cloudcuckooland (I’d be happy to explain the reference to him, as I suspect Aristophanes has never been on his reading list). True, this rhetoric is consistent in some respects with the inane “trickle down” economics Republican snake oil salesmen economists have been selling for 30 years: deficits created by lack of income aren’t really deficits (unless we can use them as an excuse to eliminate programs that help the 98% instead of the 2%, of course), tax cuts stimulate the economy (despite mountains of evidence that all they do is increase the wealth disparity), the only legitimate programs are those which can be quantified, unless a). there’s reams of evidence about, say, the economic value of the arts and we choose to ignore it, or b). we’re talking about religion Christianity Fundamentalist Protestantism.

But the degree of the inanity in this particular proposal dwarfs the merely logically insupportable and becomes a nightmarish dystopia in which no means yes, and where we have always been at war with Eastasia. (I’d be happy to explain that reference, too, Mr. Perry.) This proposal is beyond silly, beyond mere political posturing, because it could never happen.

Well, actually, it could. We could choose the kind of system that the UK supported quite well for generations until they decided to let the bankers and the war profiteers take over their country. We could, in other words, actually create a meritocracy, and put our (tax) money where our mouth (instead of our trigger-finger) is. But the idea that Rick Perry’s policies would take us in that direction is the stuff of hallucinogens, not satire. His suggestions make as much sense as decapitation as a weight-loss strategy.

Let's leverage web-based instruction, innovative teaching techniques and aggressive efficiency measures to reach that goal. Imagine the potential impact on affordability and graduation rates, and the number of skilled workers it would send into our economy.

Ah, yes. Web-based instruction, this year’s pedagogical panacea. You know those assessment reports I complained about earlier? About the only thing they’ve actually shown us over the past however many years I’ve been doing the damned things is that students in web-based courses don’t do as well as those in face-to-face environments on either objective tests or response papers. And it’s not the instructor, who has taught (and taught well) in both structures.

Twenty years or so ago, before there was such a thing as the internet (or at least before the general population knew anything about it), the trend of the future was going to be distance learning. I remember going to a conference and hearing a particularly impassioned speaker tell us that “whether you like it or not, distance learning professionals are meeting in Detroit [or wherever it was] this very week to talk about ways of offering more courses through their programs.” I raised my hand and asked, “why do they have to meet?” I made both friends and enemies in that three seconds, but the point remains: even the distance learning people recognize the need for person-to-person, in-the-same-room interactions. And if it wasn’t Detroit, it was someplace similar, as opposed to Orlando or Las Vegas or Honolulu: they weren’t using their conference as an excuse for a resort vacation.

This is not to say that there aren’t uses for distance learning, for the web, and for technologies yet undiscovered. But the physical presence of the professor in the classroom is still going to be a required part of any educational system in which quality matters, not just in my field, but across the curriculum.

Speaking of skilled workers, we have a ready source of technical skills living among us that too often goes untapped. Countless Texas veterans receive top-level training in the military, but have a hard time getting credit for their knowledge and skills when they return to civilian life. We should support what one school calls "College Credit 4 Heroes."

With the support of Senator Van de Putte, the Texas Workforce Commission is working with Higher Education Coordinating Board and our community colleges on a plan to offer veterans credit for their skills & experience. The goal is to accelerate them into the Allied Health Occupations, which are critically needed across our state, and offer immense opportunity to these brave men and women.

Apart from the gag-inducing name of the program at whatever school that is, there’s actually some potential here. But, again, quality matters. I can certainly see that someone trained as a medic in the military might be able to transfer those skills into, say, a nursing career, and shouldn’t be expected to start at square one to do so. The same would hold true for a number of other military specialties in areas like supply, communications, and security. But there’s not a lot of call for missile-launchers in the private sector (I hope!), and smearing on camouflage grease for a night mission doesn’t mean you should get credit for a course in stage makeup. I’m skeptical of the idea of pushing veterans—or anyone else—into the health field if that’s not where they want to be: it could be bad for them and for their clients alike. But here, at least, is a proposal that isn’t freaking ridiculous on its face. Perhaps there is solace there.

To recap: diplomas = skills. Low graduation rates are the product of poor teaching, not possibly of lazy or stupid students who are actually being held to a standard of competence (I started to say “excellence,” but there are a whole lot of not excellent students getting degrees all the time). Cutting well over half of a student’s cost of education while at the same time slashing universities’ income (and hence their ability to make up the loss of tuition revenue) will actually improve the quality of higher education. Wow.

Regardless of how bad an undergraduate paper is, I try desperately to find a way to give it a passing grade. If I can look at myself in the mirror and swing a D-, I’m going to do it. That last point, about finding legitimate ways to recognize what veterans learned during their service? Not bad. But the speech was already irredeemable. F.