You Know, If This Guy Were My Principal, I Might Be Tempted to Skip Class, Too

Carrollton, Ohio, senior Austin Fisher will walk with his class on graduation day. This shouldn’t be the lead sentence in any news story or blog entry by anyone who doesn’t know Mr. Fisher personally. The fact that I mention it is testimony to two things: Carrollton principal Dave Davis is a certifiable idiot, and the Internet does have its uses.

Fisher has known since January that school rules would prevent him from participating in graduation exercises (or prom, or other senior activities) because—get this—although he was passing all his courses, he had racked up too many absences by caring for his mom, who suffers from Stage IV cancer. Really.

Let’s take this step by step. Teri Fisher has breast cancer, diagnosed as terminal although now, hopefully, in remission. Her son, the only other person in the household, took some time off school last fall to look after his Mom on particularly bad days, to drive her to doctor’s appointments and chemotherapy sessions… you know, irresponsible kid stuff like that. “I wanted to take a lot of pressure off of her, because that’s the most important thing when you have a cancer – a stress-free lifestyle, I mean, that’s how you heal the best, so that’s what I was trying to do,” he says.

He also worked two jobs to help with the bills, while maintaining passing grades. But, apparently, all those 16 absences were truancies according to school policy, and if you have more than 14 of them in a semester, you can’t walk. The Fishers went to Principal Davis when Austin was informed that he couldn’t walk with his class, and were told that “rules are rules.” A petition to allow “Fish” to go to his own graduation was “confiscated.”

Skip ahead in time to a few days ago. The exact order of events is unclear, but a few things happened in close proximity. A letter from Angela Howard appeared in the local newspaper. A thank you to Ms. Howard from Teri Fisher followed in short order. Shortly thereafter, Tammy White, a Carrollton alumna, started a petition drive on Change.org which ultimately gathered over 100,000 virtual signatures. A Facebook group, Let Fish Walk!, got over 30,000 “likes.” [The FB page administrator announced he’d be taking the page down soon, so the link may no longer work.] Kids started wearing “Let Fish Walk!” t-shirts to school. The entire town, minus the people responsible for the idiocy, of course, rallied behind the Fishers. And things started to change. All that “we can’t do anything” crap Davis tried to force-feed the Fishers in January suddenly evaporated.

There was a meeting between administrators and the Fishers, and ultimately Superintendent Palmer Fogler unilaterally reversed the earlier decision and announced that Austin will indeed be able to walk with his class. The press release says that:

At the meeting, Teresa Fisher provided additional information to the school administrators concerning Austin’s absences, which had not been previously provided to the district. Based on this new information and after careful consideration by school officials and the board of education, it was decided that Austin would be permitted to participate in commencement. In the interest of all of Carrollton’s students, the district and Teresa Fisher ask that the community respect their decision and that everyone move forward. Carrollton Schools is a great place to work and learn and we do not want to be sidetracked from our mission of educating children.

Apparently Austin may still not be able to do stuff like go to prom: that would be a remarkably stupid call, but asking a gaggle of education administrators to make two consecutive decisions requiring greater intellect than that of particularly dim-witted chipmunk is probably asking rather too much.

Meanwhile, members of the School Board professed ignorance of the situation as it was brewing: Board President Rose Seck claimed that “to be honest, we didn’t know anything about it until it hit the media.”

Indeed, all six Carrollton seniors who were prevented from walking only because of absences are now being permitted to walk. Principal Davis said that the administration and school board “made the decision that if we allow one to walk based on attendance records, all of them should be allowed to walk.”

So, why talk about this now, when everything seems to have worked out? Because the lunatics running the asylum are still in charge.

No one gets off scot-free here. Even the Fishers could have handled the situation better: whereas no one doubts Austin’s priorities, there are consequences to actions, and sometimes “sacrifice” actually has meaning. It’s also problematic that the national attention was initially linked to the fact that Austin is a baseball player. OMG, this awful thing happened to a jock! Good thing he doesn’t, you know, play the sax or hold office in the French Club, ’cause then he’d still be sitting at home on graduation night.

And School Board claims of ignorance are troubling, either way. Either they knew all along and are lying to avoid the consequences of their own moral cowardice, or they really didn’t know about a situation that had, months ago, already resulted in the confiscation of a student-generated petition. Everybody else in town seems to have known. After all, the town of Carrollton has barely over 3000 residents: everybody knows everybody. But the people charged with understanding what goes on in the schools didn’t know what was common knowledge in the high school? If that’s true, it’s an indictment of them, as well as of the high school administration. If it’s not… well, the courses in Prevarication and Avoidance of Responsibility will at least be well staffed.

Indeed, the incompetence shown by the people in a position to make something happen is astonishing, even in high school administrators. I learned long ago that I need to be smarter than my own rules, and I need to apply that intelligence to the benefit of students. If the database says you get an A, you get an A even if I think you deserve a B. If the database says you get a B but I think you could legitimately get an A, I think about it: how close were you? was it just one bad day that made the difference? are you a student who suffers from test anxiety? what was your attendance record? was there a group project in which your grade was dragged down because other members of the team didn’t pull their weight? And so on. Sometimes, the student gets the benefit of the doubt. Usually, not.

Principal Davis’s initial response to the situation was appalling. Confiscating petitions? Really? This silliness (or it would be silliness if he weren’t in a position of authority) is thrown into relief when considered in light of subsequent actions. Lesson #1 from Davis’s guidebook: don’t worry if you look like an authoritarian jackass in front of your students and faculty; it’s only when the school starts looking bad to the outside world that you should capitulate. Petitions by your own students: irrelevant. Petitions on the Internet: determinative.

Then he trotted out his variation on the “my hands are tied” soft-shoe number. This is both craven and mendacious—neither of those is a quality much to be admired. The “rules are rules” mentality is first cousin to “zero tolerance,” a policy system so stupid that even school districts pretend not to follow it (even when they do). It is a mind-set that is explicitly and virulently in opposition to the very foundation of what schools ought to be about: thinking. Different situations are… wait for it… different, and no one-size-fits-all rulebook should apply to all cases. But a system based on evidence, ethics, and contemplation—a Confucian system, if you will—requires both competence and work by administrators. Good luck with that.

Even worse than the fact that Davis’s intellectually lazy unwillingness to consider the specific circumstances of a case that any casual observer could recognize as something other than standard, every-day, truancy, however, is the fact that he lied about it. His hands weren’t tied. How do we know? Because the core facts haven’t changed. Austin Fisher still missed those class days. The rules haven’t changed—what you and I, Gentle Reader, might regard as an absence that ought to be excused (or placed in a separate category of some sort) is still, as far as I can tell, unexcused in the Carrollton Exempted Village School District. So, in other words, the fact that “Fish Will Walk” means that Davis could have done something in January. Apparently he and his colleagues are very concerned that the school looked bad in the recent controversy—enough so that Teri Fisher apparently had to agree not to talk to the press as part of the deal. They aren’t, however, sufficiently concerned with not being doctrinaire buffoons.

It’s not uncommon that I “break the rules.” For example, I might let a student with too many absences according to School policy—to pick a situation purely at random—still pass Theatre History, keeping in mind that the policy was really created for performance courses, which are more experiential in nature. Still, there has to be a reason—a documentable case of an ailing parent, for instance. And then… I make sure my boss knows what I’m doing. You know, zap him an e-mail that says, “I know the rule says X, but this is a special case, and I’m going to do Y unless you tell me not to.” And because he knows that I’m only going to say there are special circumstances when they in fact exist, he generally signs off on my decision. See how easy that is?

All Davis had to do was to say, “you know, I’m not sure there’s anything I can do for you, Austin, because our policies are pretty clear, but let me look into the situation further.” Then he picks up the phone and calls the Superintendent: “You know that policy that says a student can’t walk with the class if he’s got too many absences? Well, I think we ought to make an exception…” And the Superintendent can make that exception. How do we know? Because she did.

Finally, there’s the utter capitulation in allowing everyone who didn’t meet the attendance requirement to walk, provided they met all the other requirements. The problem with the current (now replaced?) policy isn’t that it’s too strict—I’d argue it isn’t strict enough—but that’s it’s too inflexible. One other case about the absence policy was presented to the School Board: it looked to have merit. The other four: probably not so much. The intelligent thing to do is to look at appeals on a case by case basis: sometimes there’s a good reason a kid didn’t show up to school every day; sometimes there isn’t. But that would make too much sense.

No, what we’re going to do instead is to say that rules don’t matter at all; that real, actual, truancy is without consequence; that Emerson’s critique of a foolish consistency was never more apt. And why do we say that? Because we’re too cowardly to admit that we make exceptions to rules, and too craven to look an actual truant squarely in the eye and say, “No.”

Everyone in the Carrollton system, Principal Davis foremost among them, seems to be suffering from the lack of a brain, a heart, and courage. Alas, I don’t see a wizard—or even a man behind a curtain—to make things right.

Maybe a Curmie nomination will help.

Bill Cosby Cuts through the Clutter

It may be a little ironic that I'm the one saying this, but I really do think it’s kind of problematic that entertainers seem to have a more thoroughgoing understanding of the world than the so-called pundits do. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert aren’t watched by so many people just because they’re funny: they’re also a more reliable source of information than most journalists are, especially to those with enough of an understanding of humor to readily differentiate between objective fact-telling and comedic exaggeration.

To these gentlemen, I would add the name of Bill Cosby, whose recent comments on the Trayvon Martin case are as cogent as they are measured. No, I don’t agree with him all the time (what fun would that be?), but Mr. Cosby, unlike a number of other celebrities from Spike Lee on the left to Ted Nugent on the right, is almost always worth listening to. His remarks on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Candy Crowley seem to me to cut to the heart of the issue:

When a person has a gun, sometimes their mind clicks, that this thing… will win arguments and straighten people out, and then in the wrong hands, in the wrong mind, it’s death….

You’ve got to protect yourself in your own home. But I also believe that when you tell me that you’re going to protect the neighborhood that I live in, I don’t want you to have a gun. I want you to be able to see something, report it, and get out of the way…. I don’t want you to get hurt. And I don’t want you to hurt anyone….

What is solved by saying “he’s a racist; that’s why he shot the boy”? …. It doesn’t make any difference if he’s racist or not racist: if he’s scared to death, and not a racist, it’s still a confrontational provoking of something….

I used to have gun. The policeman who okayed it said to me, “Mr. Cosby, when you pull this trigger, you can’t call it back.”

It’s not entirely clear whether Cosby is merely mouthing pedestrian liberal platitudes about gun control. Even if he is, he’s raised the level of discourse on the Martin/Zimmerman case considerably. But he just might be concentrating his attention (and therefore ours) on a more specific issue: the notion that those entrusted with our protection ought not to make us less safe.

The idea of a neighborhood watch, at least in the truest sense, is virtually an inherent good. People who actually live in the area come to know who belongs and who doesn’t, and they’ll have a particular interest in maintaining order. But strap a gun onto an otherwise model citizen, and there’s a good chance he’s going to go all Junior G-Man on you.

I talked last time about the alarming and precipitous decline in the importance of the police and quasi-police officers employing pepper spray irresponsibly. What is shocking here is the increased availability of this stuff to low-level (and presumably relatively untrained) personnel, not that the underlings are likely to abuse what little authority they have: that part is entirely predictable. It’s the same phenomenon that feeds the self-importance of small-town cops: call it the Barney Fife Syndrome.

It may be that George Zimmerman is a racist, but the two central pieces of evidence that he might be are unconvincing at best. Silly me, I believed the tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call released by the media was… you know… real. It turns out to have been manipulated by some unethical jerk of a producer, whether out of political motives tied to ends-justifies-the-means thinking or simply a desire to make the story “sexier,” independent of its veracity.

Seriously, if you believe the “a mistake, not a purposeful act” argument employed by “sources,” please leave this blog immediately. This is fare intended for those with IQs above room temperature. NBC, this go-‘round’s sanctuary of mendacious pseudo-journalism, fired the “veteran producer” involved, but of course never identified the culprit so we have no real assurance other than the word of the people whose truth-telling is specifically under question that a). s/he was really fired or b). s/he won’t be promptly hired by somebody else. Anyway, the transcript of the real, i.e., unedited, tape shows that Zimmerman identified Martin as black only after being asked the suspect’s race by the police dispatcher.

Similarly, it wasn’t Zimmerman who made a big deal out of the fact that Martin was wearing a hoodie: no, that would be Geraldo Rivera, to whom neither truth nor the common weal have ever mattered nearly as much as, well, Geraldo Rivera. A more self-important grand-standing douchebag has yet to have trod the planet. The point here is that Zimmerman’s reference to what Martin was wearing, like the racial description, comes only after a prompt by the police.

It may be, as the anvil chorus on the left has intoned virtually incessantly, that Zimmerman was treated differently than would have been the case had the races of the two principals been reversed. It does not strain the brain overmuch to imagine that cops and district attorneys in a small southern town might (not to say did) inappropriately factor race into their thinking. But even if that’s true, it’s not Zimmerman’s fault. Was he really supposed to demand to be arrested for actions he apparently didn’t think were criminal, just because the guy with a bullet in him had a little more melanin than Zimmerman himself?

More to the point, however, is Cosby’s point: it doesn’t matter. Zimmerman may or may not be a racist, may or may not have thought himself at risk, may or may not have perceived Martin as a threat based (exclusively, largely, partially…) on the basis of race. But a couple of things are clear: if Zimmerman had listened to the dispatcher and not followed Martin, the latter would still be alive and the former would like his life right now a whole lot more. And if Zimmerman were unarmed, the chances are he’d have stayed put and waited for the cops to show up. Also, of course, it’s a lot harder to shoot someone if you don’t have a weapon.

I’ll leave it to others to cite statistics and to wax rhetorical about the ALEC-driven “Stand Your Ground” law that (wait for it…) may or may not have contributed to the tragic events in Florida. Nor am I interested in debating the intricacies of gun control legislation. Did George Zimmerman have a legal right to carry a gun? Yes. When all the facts are in, might we (meaning all of us but the hopeless ideologues) agree that he did nothing illegal according to the laws of the jurisdiction? Yes. Even in the absence of such consensus, might a “not guilty” verdict be appropriate on the basis of reasonable doubt? Yes. Was it a good idea to have an apparently untrained, slightly paranoid, self-important yahoo carrying a loaded gun through the streets of his neighborhood? Why, no. No, it wasn’t.

Pepper Spray and the Erosion of Legitimacy

It seems hard to believe now, but it wasn’t that long ago that pepper spray was a sort of anachronism—a remnant of a time when altercations between protesters and authorities really might have resulted in injuries to the latter. But that was before pepper spray became the new Taser: a toy to be employed by police and police wannabes who lack the skill, training, intelligence, human compassion, or (apparently) penis size to do otherwise.

The turning point was probably the moment when creep-with-a-badge Anthony Bologna sprayed a group of already-confined female protesters at an #Occupy event in New York in September. The women posed no threat to him or anyone else, but that wasn’t enough to a keep a prick like Bologna from summoning his inner sadist. And he probably figured that the idiots up the food chain from him—Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg—would let him get away with it. He was right: a Staten Island resident, Bologna was (ahem) punished by losing some vacation days and being transferred to a post that shortens his commute. A more appropriate punishment would be to fire his sorry ass and charge him with multiple counts of assault.

Anyway, Bologna immediately started playing the victim, fabricating a story the video doesn’t come close to supporting (he even got a pseudo-journalist or two to take his side), and generally representing in a single man everything that made a lot of folks in my generation refer to the police as “pigs.” Actually, if Tony Baloney is what a $150K a year cop looks like, we owe an apology to our porcine friends for comparing them to such a creature.

Of course, Bologna was just the warm-up act. There were other incidents, too, of course, but the next big step-up in police (or pseudo-police) arrogance and malice came in November on the campus of the University of California at Davis, where campus cop Lieutenant John Pike became a household name—and subject of an Internet meme—for all the wrong reasons by pepper spraying over a dozen student protesters with the same body language one would use to spray weed-killer into the cracks in the driveway. Pike is, of course, the quintessential CamPo idiot, with a self-importance to sensibility ratio that’s off the charts. This week, the Task Force charged with investigating the incident released its report. It ain’t pretty.

The report begins, “Our overriding conclusion can be stated briefly and explicitly. The pepper spraying incident that took place on November 18, 2011 should and could have been prevented.” [emphasis in original] The litany of screw-ups from the Chancellor on down takes nearly 200 pages to spell out. Here are just a few snippets from the table of contents: “failure to investigate,” “ineffectively communicated,” “confusion as to legal basis,” “decision-making process was ineffective,” “Notwithstanding the deficiencies in the operations plan, the incident was not managed according to the plan.”

And then we get to essence: “The decision to use pepper spray was not supported by objective evidence and was not authorized by policy” and “The pepper spray used, the MK-9, First Aerosol Projector, was not an authorized weapon for use by the UCDPD.” And… finally… “Lt. Pike bears primary responsibility for the objectively unreasonable decision to use pepper spray on the students sitting in a line and for the manner in which the pepper spray was used.”

Frankly, all of this was pretty much self-evident at the time; the report merely confirms what we already knew: that the whole incident could have been avoided if any of a handful of people had done their damned jobs, and that John Pike is—or at the very least was, for a telling moment—an amoral bully… and a rather stupid one, at that. Last I could figure out, he was still on paid leave: maybe the report will at least lead to his firing, and/or that of erstwhile Campus Police Chief Annette Spicuzza, also on “administrative leave.” Of course, for the report’s evisceration of Pike to be perceived as having merit, Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi would have to acknowledge that her conduct, too, was blameworthy. They’re all culpable, they’re all incompetent, and they’re all liars. Doesn’t matter. Chances are, all three will be at Davis as long as their little hearts desire. Because California has plenty of money to pay these three buffoons six-figure salaries apiece, after all, right?

Oh, how I wish we had reached the nadir of common sense as regards pepper spray with the events at UC-Davis. Alas, there’s one more step. So far.

A “School Resource Officer” (don’t worry, I don’t know what that is, either--this might help) subsequently identified as Anthony Brown sprayed down a hallway at Jack Robey Junior High (!) in Pine Bluff, Arkansas because the kids weren’t getting to class fast enough. Three students were hospitalized; over a dozen more left school early.

I mean, seriously, how freaking stupid can you get? The list of things transcendently stupid about this tactic would stretch from here to Ashtabula. The National Association of School Resource Officers describes one of the functions of SROs as to “provide a visible and positive image for law enforcement.” Yeah, well, no.

The provocation was miniscule enough as is, but if, as one report suggested, the problem was that students were obstructing the hallway, then the logical surmise is that some of those caught in the logjam might actually be trying to get to class. In other words, innocent people were going to be harmed by the precipitous and bone-headed act. Rather than risk the health and well-being of innocent bystanders, the military and the police will often allow the most heinous of miscreants to escape. This idiot is willing to send people to the hospital (or worse) because somebody else was late for pre-algebra.

Ah, well, but according to the Doofus in Charge Superintendent Jerry Payne, the canister was pointed downward, not directly at the students. Like Jonathan Turley and Jack Marshall, I’m more than a little unimpressed. For one thing, as Turley points out, “The idea of spraying a painful caustic substance into a hall as a crowd motivator is the definition of not just negligence but assault and battery.” For another: if this is the damage caused by pointing the spray away from students, what the hell is in there, and what kind of damage could it do if, like the women in New York or the students at Davis, someone were actually to catch this right in the nose or eyes? Student Faith Forney says she “walked right into it.” And what assurance do we have that similar circumstances wouldn’t lead to someone catching this junk square in the face?

There are serious problems here. What the hell is an SRO doing with spray this potent? Who authorized it, either for the police or for the school district? Who hired this idiot? And—assuming (safely, I suspect) the blame doesn’t all fall to Officer Brown—who was responsible for training people carrying this grade of pepper spray around as to why, when, and how to use it appropriately? And why wasn’t that person fired, along with Brown and Payne?

Three disturbing trends present themselves with respect to the three incidents I just described. First, the officers in question—those with access to this hideous stuff—are increasingly less important: we go from a Deputy Inspector for a major city police force to a lieutenant for a UPD, to a School Resource Officer. The victims went from adults to college students to junior high kids. And the provocation went from yelling at armed policemen to organized passive resistance to walking too slowly. By all three of these taxonomies, then, the situations keep getting more egregious. And that’s after acknowledging that Bologna’s actions were appalling and indefensible.

Another source of some concern is that we, as a culture, seem to be developing a tolerance for this sort of misbehavior by the authorities. The Pine Bluff incident wouldn’t have shown up on my radar screen if I hadn’t read about it on the Ethics Alarms blog. Maybe it wasn’t as “sexy” because it couldn’t be linked to the #Occupy movement, which the media had a grand time covering (as usual) simultaneously too much and too little. But it sure as hell should be a major story: after all, the right likes to blame schools for society’s woes; the left likes to blame the police. Here’s the intersection of both: everybody wins!

Seriously, though, there needs to be some uproar over this stuff. Because the next step in the progression is crossing guards’ pepper spraying kindergartners for wearing mismatched socks.

[The post was edited slightly on 4/15 to clarify that Chief Spicuzza of the UCDPD has also been on administrative leave since shortly after the incident there.]

Mitt Romney's Taxes: The Story That Isn't (But Is) Relevant

Readers of a certain age will remember one of the most oft-spoken lines of the Watergate scandal: “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” I’m reminded of that in looking at the mini-controversy over GOP front-runner Mitt Romney’s tax returns. There’s not really a whole lot to the case itself: Romney is stinking rich, has a gaggle of high-priced accountants and tax lawyers and similar minions who stretch the law to precisely the breaking point and ethics a little further than that. In other words, he’s no different from any other ridiculously wealthy politician, whether that be Jon Corzine or Meg Whitman or Michael Bloomberg. There is, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, no there there.

Still, there was a Washington Post story by Tom Hamburger detailing how Governor Romney “has taken advantage of an obscure exception in federal ethics laws to avoid disclosing the nature and extent of his holdings.” Curiously enough, Cleta Mitchell, “a Republican lawyer who has represented dozens of candidates and officials in the disclosure process, including [oh, so coincidentally] Romney’s leading challenger for the GOP nomination, Rick Santorum,” thinks Romney’s secrecy about his finances “turns the whole purpose of the ethics statute on its ear.”

And “Joe Sandler, a Democratic Party lawyer who has shepherded candidates and nominees through the disclosure process for 26 years [including for the John Kerry Presidential campaign],” proclaims that “Romney’s approach frustrates the very purpose of the ethics and disclosure laws.” Go figure: political rivals think (or purport to think) that Romney is up to no good. In other news, dry ice is cold.

But despite the arcane nature of the allegations, Governor Romney saw fit to send forth an emissary to articulate the reasons we should all believe the rich guy. Unfortunately for the Governor, the talking head chosen for this assignment was senior advisor Eric Fehrnstrom, best known as the guy who committed this year’s signature campaign gaffe, the Etch-a-Sketch line. He didn’t do a whole lot better with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. Even a lightweight like Todd sets up a fairly tough question: “I understand you guys are following the letter of the law, but are you following the spirit of sort of what presidential campaign candidates have done in the modern era of releasing more details, more tax returns, than what you’ve released?”

Fehrnstrom is, presumably, a really bright guy. He just doesn’t play one on TV. He sniffed that:

The Governor has provided all the disclosure that’s required by law, and that is significant, but then he’s gone one step further than that: he’s voluntarily put forward hundreds of pages of tax return information…. we’ve put out 2010 tax return information; we had an estimate for 2011, and we think that’s sufficient.

Let’s parse that, shall we? First off, it’s significant that a candidate for President of the United States obeyed the damned law? Is that what he’s saying? That’s the impression one gets from the tape, although the transcript alone might be read to mean that what’s required by law is significant disclosure. It isn’t, by the way, given the public’s right to know whether a decision is based on the good of the country or of the President’s portfolio.

Secondly, Governor Romney has put forward “hundreds of pages of tax return information,” but it’s all from the same year. That’s right: hundreds of pages from the same year. My most complicated year had some stuff most people don’t, at least all at once—moving expenses, a little rental income, some capital gains, some dividends and interest, enough mortgage payments to make for itemized deductions, and so on. It totaled maybe 15 pages; throw in my scratch pads for calculations and you might get to 20. I’m pretty certain that if you added up all my tax returns for the 30+ years I’ve been filing tax returns, they’d barely total “hundreds of pages.”

One of two things is true: either Mitt Romney’s taxes are so complicated they require such documentation, or they aren’t, and all the excess is intended simply to obfuscate, to make it more difficult for journalists and opposition researchers to find the problematic needle in the haystack of irrelevant data. Romney, of course, makes more money (without actually, you know, working) in a month than a lot of people will make in a lifetime of labor. (Yes, really.) And he pays less, in percentage terms, in income taxes than taxi drivers and 3rd grade teachers do.

So it’s not surprising that his taxes go on for days: those hired guns have got to earn their keep, after all… it’s probably not literally true that he spends more to get his taxes prepared than the average American makes in a year, but it sure seems that way. Given Romney’s apparent embarrassment at being who he is—rich, well-educated—reminding us of the “hundreds of pages” of tax information for a single year might not be the most ideal strategy. The idea of the diffident übermensch doesn’t work very well to begin with; calling attention to it is as long on stupid as it is on disingenuous.

Then, of course, there’s the concept of “sufficient.” Frankly, that seems to be a theme for the Romney campaign: he’s not exciting, he’s not interesting, he’s not consistent, he’s not honest… but he’s sufficient. Sufficiently not crazy. Sufficiently not ideological. Sufficiently prepared for debates. Oh, and sufficiently not Obama.

Finally, this little escapade allows reporters and prospective voters to remember the last go-round. Sam Stein of the Huffington Post quotes Jim Messina of the Obama campaign:

Governor Romney provided 23 years’ worth of tax returns to the McCain campaign so they could determine if he would make a suitable Vice President. He must meet that same standard now so that the American people may judge whether he would be a suitable President, and whether there are any conflicts of interest that could cloud his judgment.

One is tempted to wonder what nefarious dealings might be brought to light if, having actually considered ol’ Mitt as a running mate, John McCain passed on him for a dimwit like Sarah Palin.

What we do know of Romney’s finances from his 2010 tax returns shows millions of dollars of income and offshore accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands. That’s not likely to win him a lot of credibility in the “just folks” sweepstakes, but few people who’d have considered voting for him anyway are likely to be bothered much by those revelations. Further disclosures, should they happen, will be predicated on political motivations alone… is it better to maintain one’s privacy and have people suspect you’re hiding something or to release all that data and remove any doubt.

My suspicion is that more tax returns and accompanying information will appear shortly after the nomination is completely wrapped up. This stuff isn’t going to go away as a side-story, and dealing with it now is better than dealing with it later. Besides, people’s imaginations will conjure worse transgressions and creative accounting than Romney is likely to have committed. Or at least that can be proved. Probably. We hope.

Arrogant Intrusions into Personal Freedom and the House GOP (not about women's health issues)

“No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up.”

—Lily Tomlin

Okay, so when was the last time Facebook was on the right side of a privacy issue? Well, they are this time—of course, it’s also in their selfish interest to be on the right side of this one, so they don’t get a lot of credit, but still….

Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Eric Egan, issued a statement about the abhorrent policy adopted by some potential employers, including (especially?) law enforcement agencies, of requiring job applicants to surrender their passwords to Facebook and similar social media accounts as part of the interview process. Egan points out that:

As a user, you shouldn’t be forced to share your private information and communications just to get a job. And as the friend of a user, you shouldn’t have to worry that your private information or communications will be revealed to someone you don’t know and didn’t intend to share with just because that user is looking for a job. That’s why we’ve made it a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to share or solicit a Facebook password.

The legalistic tone is actually supported here: the insistence that an applicant reveal private information is indeed a violation of the TOS agreement with Facebook. In other words, the request is a de facto demand to break a contract: the fact that the most egregious offenders are law enforcement agencies—as, for example, the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services and the McLean County, IL, sheriff's office, as spelled out in Manuel Valdes’s AP article last week—adds a piquant savor of irony to the whole mix.

It is, of course, all well and good for those of us not on the job market to be righteously indignant about this policy—and certainly all prospective employers who try this kind of crap should be called out on it, publicly—but the fact is that in this economic environment, applicants will do pretty much anything to get a job. This makes it all the more important that employers act responsibly, and all the less likely that they’ll actually do so.

Employers can get away with being arrogant asshats, so they’ll jerk off to their little power plays at least until such time as the pool of well-qualified candidates is significantly affected either by lack of applications to begin with or by enough job-seekers telling the personnel office to perform an act most easily accomplished by especially limber hermaphrodites. More importantly, this affects all of us, not just those who are being extorted directly. If you give up your password, my privacy as your friend is compromised, even to the extent that an employer who has no real intention of hiring you, anyway, now has access to my private communications to you.

It’s no wonder Facebook is a little grumpy about this. I find myself constantly warning my students about things they have released to the public. And Facebook has always been rather free and easy with other people’s privacy—making default privacy settings as loose as possible, sometimes without as much as telling users of new policies. This Machiavellian hellishness is worse, however: if I’m taking reasonably good care of my own privacy, I have relatively little to fear from your actions—I need to expect that anything I post to your wall, for example, will be read by people who are strangers to me or even antagonistic towards me. But I can do something about that, simply by not posting anything I’m not perfectly happy to have associated with me by everyone from my boss to my students to my teenaged niece.

Giving over your log-in credentials, however, means that your prospective employer has access to my private messages to you: the one about my loved one’s terminal illness, my decision to look for another job, my venting about my boss (which I’d only do to you, because I rightly trust your integrity and trustworthiness, although I underestimate your economic desperation). And as if that weren’t enough, some hack in the personnel office also gets to find out what sites I’ve liked: they’re not interested in the fact that I’m a New York Rangers fan, or even that I like the Grateful Dead… no, they care about the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network; Being Liberal; Don’t Invite Anyone Who Thinks Ayn Rand Makes Sense to Your Next Party; The Other 98%. Because thus invading my privacy means, to their McCarthyite mentality, that you hang around with undesirables… even if I haven’t seen you since we were in high school together almost 40 years ago and we weren’t really close even then. Of course, this all presupposes that the little parasites are even pretending to be doing their job and not just feeding their voyeuristic fantasies: a hasty assumption, to be sure.

Oh, how I wish the people conducting these little assaults on a free society weren’t dead stupid. I’d love it if someone asked for a Facebook password and hired the first person who showed appropriate common sense and discretion and told them fold it five ways and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Alas, the folks perpetrating this unethical and sleazy attack on personal freedom are generally dumber than the proverbial box of rocks. One of my students reminded me this morning of the late, great, George Carlin’s observation: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that.” Yeah, that seems rather pertinent about now.

The only slightly less sleazy first cousin of this tactic is to insist that employees “friend” their boss or some minion in the personnel office or whatever. This is still intrusive, still unethical, but it can be circumvented, and it’s not going to open up other people’s lives to scrutiny. Of course, there’s still something creepy about this business: I consciously avoid friending students or others who might think they’re under some obligation to respond favorably to a friend request. I will respond to their requests to me, but they must initiate the process. The result is that there are a number of students with whom I’m rather close but who are not FB friends, whereas others whom I know only slightly are friended (some are granted only limited access to my page, however). But that’s OK. I really have no particular desire to be a stalker.

The reason I’m writing about this is more than simply astonishment at the audacity of the perpetrators, however. You see, Congressman Earl Perlmutter (D-CO) tried to do something about this situation. He introduced an amendment to a House bill, attempting to allow the FCC to prevent the practice:

Nothing in this Act or any amendment made by this Act shall be construed to limit or restrict the ability of the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a rule or to amend an existing rule to protect online privacy, including requirements in such rule that prohibit licensees or regulated entities from mandating that job applicants or employees disclose confidential passwords to social networking web sites.

And not a single Republican in the whole damned House of Representatives voted for it. Really.

OK, OK, so Perlmutter’s scheme may have been more political than substantive. It was a motion to re-commit. That means he wanted to send the whole bill (the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012, to be precise) back to committee. He wanted to delay the passage of the bill, in other words. He could have introduced the amendment per se, and didn’t. He chose instead a tactic that, had it been successful (in legislative as opposed to political terms), would have thwarted, at least for a while, legislation intended to make the FCC more transparent. Wait… I thought it was the Democrats who wanted transparency and the Republicans who were obstructionists. But, then again, it was the Democrats under Clinton who played around with the Clipper Chip and similar nonsense (albeit the erosion of 1st Amendment rights by the PATRIOT Act—the most perversely ironic political term since Bolshevik—trumps all). You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

Anyway, Greg Walden (R-OR), the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, argued that Perlmutter’s amendment “wouldn’t protect the consumer.” Ummmm… were any of us talking about consumers? In any case, Walden argued that the amendment wouldn’t work (why not?), all the while pretending that his objections weren’t just as disingenuous as Perlmutter’s motion. The Republicans wanted their bill passed, and the Democrats wanted to play for time. But Perlmutter and his cohorts also know that this topic is a political winner for their side, especially if they can maneuver the GOP into opposing this obviously people-friendly legislation. The House Republicans would have to be pretty stupid to fall for that little subterfuge. Needless to say, they are, and they did.

Walden might even be telling the truth that he really is interested in privacy issues and really is willing to talk further about the topic. But the political horse is already out of the barn. The Democrats might not have gotten everything on their wish list, but they accomplished their principal objective of those within their reach: not really able to influence legislation, they succeeded in making the Republicans look bad… not that those guys need any help. It was a cynical ploy, and it worked. Ah, the political life…

There’s a Bob Dylan lyric that sums up the Democrats’ strategy:

You didn't know it
You didn't think it could be done
In the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle.

The song? “Idiot Wind.”

Apt.

Another Pseudo-Educator Defames Those of Us Who Actually Do Something.

So, there was this op-ed piece in the Washington Post a couple days ago, entitled “Do college professors work hard enough?.” After I finally stopped laughing, I realized that the author, one David C. Levy, was actually serious. Really, he was. He actually argues that escalating tuition costs are the product of faculty salaries, not the fact that administrative positions are multiplying faster than a particularly horny warren of rabbits (and at absurdly high salaries relative to faculty), that services from psychological counseling to high-end computer access are now de rigeur, that new student centers and recreation facilities are sprouting faster than zits on prom night, and that states are myopically slashing their support for higher education even while wailing about how expensive college is.

The problem with giving a forum to misinformed and arrogant cretins like Levy, of course, is that people who don’t know anything about what the professoriate does don’t realize that he doesn’t have a clue, either. He’s currently the president of something called the Cambridge Information Group (a “family-owned management and investment firm,” according to their website), and he’s a former chancellor of the New School University. He also headed the Parsons School of Design for two decades. Pretty impressive, huh? Well… sort of. He hasn’t been associated directly with an institution of higher learning in quite a while, never (as far as I can tell) at a state university, and if he ever set foot in a classroom on my side of the lectern, it was a). forty years ago, and b). not worthy of mention on his official bio. In other words, to say that Dr. Levy knows shit from apple butter about what professors do is roughly akin to saying the CEO of McDonald’s knows what it’s like to be a chef—hey, he’s successful in the restaurant business, right?

Levy is, in short, every real professor’s nightmare: the poseur, the self-proclaimed “career-long academic” who couldn’t find his way to a classroom with a guide dog, and who pretends that his (apparently considerable) skill as an administrator has anything to do with what my colleagues and I actually do. I am reminded of a former dean, whom I knew was going to be trouble when he informed me that he understood what theatre faculty are like because he’d once written a chancel drama for his church. Certainly there are some university presidents and provosts and deans (oh my!) who had previously prospered in the classroom: my father was one, my current provost another. But I fear they’re the exception.

None of this is to say that Dr. Levy’s commentary ought automatically to be discarded, any more that you, Gentle Reader, ought to ignore my commentary on fracking because I’m not a geologist. No, it’s not Levy’s lack of specific expertise that deserves derision: it’s the fact that he doesn’t have a fucking clue is sadly, perhaps willfully, misinformed about virtually everything he says.

Let’s start with the basic assertion that “Happily, senior faculty at most state universities and colleges now earn $80,000 to $150,000, roughly in line with the average incomes of others with advanced degrees.” Dr. Levy, it’s really rude not to share whatever the hell it is you’re smoking… because you are seriously out to lunch. I am a tenured full professor (one becomes “senior faculty” at the associate professor level, one step down from my current rank) at a state university. I have a PhD and a little over 20 years of full-time teaching experience, plus another several years of part-time teaching, both as a teaching assistant (with full responsibility for my courses) and as an adjunct faculty member. The low end of that salary range would represent better than a 25% raise for me.

True, I work at a teaching-oriented university (a.k.a. not a “Research 1” institution), and in a field that doesn’t pay terribly well compared with the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines. But there are a lot of people like me: far more than community college profs making $88K. I mean, seriously, Dave, do a little damned homework.

What is particularly offensive in Levy’s screed is the suggestion that whereas faculty at research institutions might actually do some work, the rest of us clearly don’t:

But we all should object when they receive these [“upper-middle-class”] salaries for working less than half the time of their non-academic peers….

An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom. Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation, their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals. Yet they receive the same compensation….

…the notion that faculty in teaching institutions work a 40-hour week is a myth.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Seriously, how can anyone this stupid feed himself, let alone be placed in a position of authority? He does, of course, have the advantage of blissful ignorance, having apparently never set foot on the campus of such an institution.

I’d be willing to bet that I’ve never spent a year on a full-time faculty in which I worked less than 2500 hours, and I know for a fact I’ve topped 3000 several times. “The unlikely event” that I spend as much time grading and prepping as physically in the classroom? What planet is this guy from? I generally spend about an hour and a half or two hours of prep for every hour in class… it’s that low compared to many of my peers because I’ve been doing this a while, and I occasionally (gasp!) re-cycle old notes without updating them. Not much has changed about the history of the ancient Greek theatre since last year. (By the way: when a book came out 20 years or so ago that really did change the way we looked at Greek theatre… yeah, I published a review on that.)

The foregoing number does not include grading, by the way. That adds another ten hours or so a week, on average, to my workload. I’ve also got about 30 advisees. Because I take my advising responsibilities seriously, that’s another 100 hours a year or so in formal advising, probably three times that in informal advising. I spend probably 50 hours a year writing recommendations, another 100 in meetings, another 100 preparing for those meetings. I direct a show most years: 200 hours. And then there’s recruiting, supervising student productions, seeing all 30 productions my department produces in a year (yes, I enjoy it, but it’s still work), advanced preparation for courses (not included above), serving on committees and in elected positions in my professional organization, reading shows for possible production down the road… oh, and I really do need to publish and present with some regularity, even here in the hinterlands. Oh, and reading books and journals just to stay current in the field. So much for all that “time off” in summers and such.

If I in fact worked a 2000-hour year for the $80K that’s at the low end of Levy’s scale for senior faculty, let alone for full professors, it would represent a raise of about 55-60% in terms of my hourly wage. If Dr. Levy would be willing to arrange that, I sure would appreciate it. Somehow, however, I doubt that’s gonna happen.

The point is this: judging how much a professor works based on how much time is spent literally in the classroom is akin to judging the workload of that “executive” Dr. Levy is perfectly willing to grant a 2000-hour workload based on how much time s/he spends in formal meetings. No agenda, no credit. Colleague comes by to discuss an idea for two hours? If it’s not in your Blackberry, it doesn’t count. Spend the evening working out a problem? No documentation, then it didn’t happen.

So, I hereby challenge you, Dr. Levy, to follow me around for a week. I’ll do the work; you just sit and watch. Let’s start on a Saturday. If you’re still with me on Wednesday afternoon, I’ll tip my hat to you. Stay with me until Friday and I’ll buy you dinner and offer a formal apology. But if, you sorry sack of equine excrement, I run you into the ground, as I fully expect that I will (and as I’m dead certain that some of my friends and colleagues in the profession would), you will kindly STFU for the rest of your days about subjects you don’t begin to comprehend.

David C. Levy would be a strong contender for a Curmie Award, but unfortunately, he’s not eligible. That distinction is reserved for educators who embarrass their profession. Dr. Levy is no educator. Not now, not ever. And I, for one, am glad about that.

Why This Blog Isn't Migrating to Wordpress

As virtually anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows, I have become a consistent if not avid reader of Jack Marshall’s Ethics Alarms blog. We agree more often than not, argue sometimes, tweak each other’s commentary sometimes, and sometimes just allow the other to go off on a rant, figuring some battles aren’t worth fighting. In other words, we’ve become friends, even though we’ve never actually met (I hope to change that this summer).

Anyway, I have been a frequent commenter on his blog (and he on mine, although since he cranks out his original material at a prodigious rate—probably 10 times as often as I—I comment a lot more on his site than he on mine). A couple of days ago, I went to comment on something Jack had written. The comments section on Jack’s blog asks for your e-mail address, your name, and (optionally) your website. As a commenter there, I’ve been “Rick” at my hotmail account, with a link to this page for over a year. But now, the cookie brings up something else: because, ages ago, I set up a Gravitar account as the only way I could comment on something somewhere, and because Wordpress (which hosts Jack’s blog) is linked to Gravitar, and because the people who run those sites are amoral and/or incompetent, my e-mail account now automatically generates a link to my Wordpress identity. Not only that, I can’t change it!

I must sign in through my Wordpress account, which I have never used, and which I can’t delete (not sure if this link will work, but here it is. Trust me, it reads: “WordPress.com accounts cannot be deleted.” It graciously offers that I can delete my (entirely non-existent) blog, however. Asshats.

I know, I know—it’s pretty much a first-world problem not to be able to have readers of Jack’s blog click over to mine. But it’s a problem that ought not to exist, and indeed didn’t exist a week ago. Someone at Wordpress thinks this apparent new policy (there’s no statement from them that they’re doing this) is a good idea. Someone at Wordpress is wrong about that.

More to the point, there’s no reason for the change. I could understand (not like, but understand) a monetary motive, but given the fact that I’m not paying anything for either the Blogspot site I actually use or the Wordpress site I don’t, that reasoning doesn’t seem to work. If the idea is to attract more users to Wordpress, it’s a stupid strategy. I’m not thrilled with Blogspot, and had considered migrating to Wordpress. Needless to say, that ain’t gonna happen if the latter site is run by idiots, as it appears to be. And I’m now less inclined to comment on Jack’s posts (or those of a couple other Wordpress-hosted blogs I read at least occasionally), meaning less traffic on Wordpress sites: I’d presume that more traffic is good, but what do I know?

So I went to my Wordpress account, which until less than a week ago I didn’t even know I had, and changed the e-mail address associated with the account… to my (also) unused gmail address, which I had to add to do something with my work iPad. I figured this little stratagem might make sense: divert the stuff I don’t want to an account I don’t use. Nope. Didn’t work. I’m still unable to use my preferred e-mail to comment on Jack’s posts: important because that’s the address used to inform me of follow-up comments on that post. There’s something on the Wordpress site that suggests that this situation might change, because they’re fucking incompetent it takes time for changes to completely register. I can’t sign in to that account using my Hotmail account any more, but it might take a day and a half—so they say—for that address to become “available” again. Riiiiiiiiiight.

What we’re left with is a site more arrogant and less competent than Facebook, and that’s saying rather a lot. What I find most amusing about this whole situation, of course, is the fact that the blog I’m trying to access and comment on without interference from some officiously over-reaching site administrator’s unethical brainchild is… yeah, a site about ethics. I do enjoy irony. Usually, that is.

For the record, no, I am not going to stop posting comments on Jack’s site, even if I have to do so without allowing a reader to move over to this blog with a single click. And no, I don’t think Jack should stomp off in a huff and never post on Wordpress again because of their unconscionable assholitude. But I am a firm believer that karma returns, and there will be a serious come-uppance down the road for whatever knuckle-dragger came up with this scheme. In the meantime, I’ll just snarl a little when trying to post comments. Luckily, such behavior is well within my range.

UPDATE (3/25, 11:21 pm CDT): I just tried to post a comment on Ethics Alarms. It wouldn't let me post without signing in to my Wordpress account, which it insisted was linked to my hotmail address. Of course, I couldn’t actually sign in using that address, since I changed it on the site. So I signed in using my gmail address. I then posted my comment, which promptly vanished into the ether. It may have been sent for moderation (since it’s an address that’s new to the site, and Jack gets lots of spam comments); it may have been sucked into a vortex, never to return. We shall see.

Political Hackery in the Classroom

[It’s been too long… New story first, then maybe some catch-up.]

When I was in 8th grade, I was Richard Nixon. That is, I played him, in a manner of speaking, for a Social Studies project. It was the fall of 1968, and Nixon was challenging incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the presidency. My class was divided in half, with half of us taking Nixon’s side and the other half Humphrey’s. Because the class actually was roughly evenly divided in political terms, we had at least some say in which side we ended up on: like most kids that age, my politics, such as they were, were those of my parents, and my folks were avid Republicans. (I often wonder… perhaps “doubt” would be a better word, whether they’d be so today were they still alive, given the fact that my Dad was a biologist, a conservationist, and in his 21st year as an employee of a state university, having received both his MS and PhD from other state universities. But that’s not the point, here.) So I was a Republican, too.

Anyway, everyone in the class was assigned to a particular policy issue: the Vietnam War, civil rights, tax policy, etc., with the whole project culminating on the day before Election Day with a debate between students playing the two presidential and vice presidential nominees, drawing on material collected by classmates. Then there was a straw poll taken on Election Day itself. What I remember most about the project was that I didn’t want to be Nixon—not because I didn’t like him or his policies, but because I wanted to be Spiro Agnew, whom I regarded as the weak link for the GOP ticket: I thought our side needed me more there. But I was persuaded to be Nixon… only to see the girl playing Ed Muskie mop the floor with our Agnew. We lost the straw poll, as we probably would have in any case, but the lessons were manifold:

If you really bother to find out about the issues, the chances are very good you’ll prefer one candidate’s position on Topic X and his opponent’s position on Topic Y.

The press must not be trusted implicitly to provide accurate and unbiased reportage.

Real candidates’ real positions are far more nuanced than the average person will ever comprehend. (Or be encouraged, by either side, to comprehend.)

Strategy matters.

And so on.

The point is, I wasn’t the only student in that class to learn a lot about the candidates, the issues, the campaigns, and the electoral process. That’s a good thing.

To say that these were not the lessons imparted this year by one Michael Denman at Liberty Middle School in Fairfax County, Virginia, would be to err more on the side of understatement than of hyperbole. Mr. Denman divided his class into four groups, one for each of the remaining Republican candidates (well, the ones virtually anyone has voted for). The students’ assignment? Prepare for a “primary” debate? Delineate the candidates’ positions relative to each other and to President Obama’s? Predict the chances of each candidate to get the nomination or, failing that, to have a significant effect on the party’s platform? Nope, nope, and nope.

Give up? Why, to do opposition research on their candidate, determine his weaknesses, and find the name of a specific individual on the Obama re-election team to receive the gift-wrapped offerings of attack fodder, of course. OK, really?

This project is stupid in almost more ways than you can count. It is clearly partisan—no one was assigned to do similar research into Mr. Obama’s weaknesses, a point subsequently made to the apparently dim-witted Mr. Denman by his principal. According to a news report, “The principal advised the teacher that he should emphasize to his students that this assignment was meant to learn a process and not to endorse a particular candidate…. The teacher agreed with the principal’s direction.” One imagines Denman sitting starry-eyed in the principal’s office, blissfully unaware of the sheer idiocy of his assignment.

Of course, whichever way a particular teacher’s political leanings may go, there’s likely to be at least a few students who (or whose parents) disagree: this means the project is problematic not only in terms of professional ethics, but as political strategy as well. In other words, the one of the most things that I learned about in 8th grade—the fact that preaching to the choir is ineffective and indeed fraught with peril—was specifically and intentionally undercut by this 8th-grade teacher. Maybe if he hung a sign around his neck that read “don’t do what I just did,” it would have helped.

Finally, there’s the part about sending the collected materials on to the Obama campaign. This is just weird, even if we grant the assertions that the attack strategies weren’t really to be forwarded—students just needed to locate a prospective recipient. Seriously, the re-election process might not be going as well as it might—the idea that even a flawed President/candidate like Mr. Obama wouldn’t have long since wrapped up the 2012 election, bringing both Houses of Congress with him, when the GOP can’t do better than a quartet of buffoons the likes of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul, ought to be troubling.

But even the President’s harshest critics can’t seriously think that his campaign’s opposition research program would be much enhanced by a couple dozen 8th-graders doing a class project, working on it a few hours a week for a month or two. Really, they have people whose job it is to do that work…people with degrees and stuff, even. Moreover, I find it difficult to believe that it takes two students to track down an Obama staffer but only two to write the opposition research strategy paper. And what, exactly, is a “weakness,” anyway? Inconsistent or wrong-headed policies? Positions that can be “spun” to appear horrific even if sensible? Nah, probably not—more likely, something about dogs on car roofs, ex-wives, or racist newsletters.

To be fair, the notion that this assignment was “like something out of East Germany during the Cold War,” as one anonymous [i.e., cowardly] “frustrated [i.e., partisan in the other direction] father” put it, is a bit foam-flecked. But worthy of consideration for a Curmie Award? Oh, yeah.

[Thanks to my netpal Jack Marshall. You can see his take on this story on his Ethics Alarms blog here.]

11 Thoughts on the SGK/PPFA Brouhaha

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.