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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week's (Oxy)morons: Republicans in the NEA

A lot has happened since my last essay, but I’ll do what I can to catch up. First on the list is a fairly recent story: yesterday’s piece by Josh Lederman on HuffPo about Republican teachers’ discontent at what the headline describes as an “Obama-Centric Union Conference” of the National Education Association.

It strikes me that three points need to be made.

#1: No union conference ought to have the feel of a political rally. It’s reasonable, I suppose, to endorse a candidate, but it’s another matter altogether to boo or shout down someone with opposing political views at an event which at least ostensibly is not primarily political in nature. Encouraging delegates to hold “house parties” to “educate their friends about why Obama… deserves a second term” and presenting conference attendees with t-shirts inscribed with Obama’s name: a bit much, to say the least. More to the point, if the NEA wants to endorse Obama based on his education policies, that is certainly their right… but singing the praises of the ACA strikes me as being more than a little outside the reasonable parameters of relevance.

#2. Buried in Lederman’s article is a revealing mention of something called the NEA Republican Leaders Conference, an attempt by the national organization to be more inclusive of a wider range of political views. This is apparently not a mere bone tossed to GOP teachers, as it is treated with no little respect by the Republican NEA members themselves. Anne Loeffler of Pennsylvania, for instance,

… reported that the Republican conferences occur because the annual NEA Representative Assembly voted to fund this effort in an attempt to reach out and give a voice to… Republican members. “So often, we hear that NEA and PSEA [Pennsylvania State Education Association] only support Democratic Party candidates. These efforts demonstrate that our union believes in supporting candidates who work to improve our public schools and the lives of the children we educate regardless of party affiliation.”

And, indeed, whereas the NEA has never endorsed a Republican for President, they have done so at many other levels of political office.

#3. While I have some sympathy for the GOP members of the NEA, I confess I’m not all that concerned. Davina Keiser, the head of the Republican caucus in the NEA, whines that “For Republican teachers, it's almost like we're stepchildren in NEA, and then in the Republican Party we're also stepchildren, because we're public schoolteachers, and that's not part of their focus.” She’s kidding, right? “Not part of their focus”?

We’re not talking about just teachers here; we’re talking about members of a teachers union. As such, Keiser and her colleagues are very much “part of [the] focus” of the GOP: as targets, as scapegoats, as cover for failed and often corrupt policies. True, education is not at the center of Governor Romney’s campaign. True, too, that the Obama administration has had what I’d call a spotty record on education issues. But it surpasses credulity that a member of the NEA doesn’t understand that her profession and especially her union affiliation within that profession have been not de-emphasized, but actively demonized, by Rick Snyder, Rick Perry, Rick Scott (why do so many idiot governors have to be named Rick?), Scott Walker, Mitch Daniels, John Kasich... need I continue?

There is a spiral effect here, of course, and I’m not going to attempt to place blame. It’s certainly true that the NEA and the other big public-school union, the American Federation of Teachers, have leaned well to the left for as long as I can remember. And, increasingly of late, the GOP has pushed back with a series of policy initiatives that appear to be based at least as much on pique as on philosophy. All of which means the NEA becomes more skeptical of Republicans—any Republicans, including potential allies—which in turn… well, Gentle Reader, you get the picture.

I am, as I’ve said before, no huge fan of unions, especially in professions. I’ve twice voted against organizing a union, twice passed on the opportunity to join an existing union, and never even joined the “union light” American Association of University Professors. This doesn’t mean, however, that I am unappreciative of the motives or efforts of those who see unionization as the most viable means by which to improve the conditions of employment. Faced with the political climate that exists now, I might have taken a different position with respect to unionization when those decisions were made years ago.

Of course, teachers unions have become a handy whipping-boy for unbalanced budgets actually created by Republican governors and state legislatures granting tax breaks to fat-cats and corporate cronies. Still, some of this derision is in fact deserved: sort of. As I’ve said here repeatedly in the past, anything that is negotiated can’t be blamed on one side alone. If, not-so-hypothetically, the NEA has pushed for policies that have the de facto effect of making it harder to get rid of bad teachers, those initiatives wouldn’t mean anything unless someone on the other side of the negotiating table agreed to them, in exchange for lower pay or larger class sizes or whatever. So don’t give me any “it’s all because of the unions” crap. It isn’t so, and any honest person will admit that.

The bottom line here is that an NEA delegate—not merely a member, a delegate—who actively identifies as a Republican is probably an idiot, just as a member of the #Occupy movement who buys a single share of Bank of America and expects to be granted a platform at a stockholders meeting is an idiot. Being an active Republican and being an NEA delegate are indeed in opposition, far more so now than was the case only a couple of years ago, before the recent flurry of GOP rhetoric blaming teachers in general, unions in general, and teachers unions in particular for everything from budget deficits to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

So Ms. Keiser and her compatriots really do have to choose between their politics and their profession (or at least their union engagement). They can have either, or neither, but they can’t have both. And being butt-hurt in the first degree doesn’t change that.

A little old-fashioned outrage

My plan was to have this post be about the recent SCOTUS ruling in US v. Comstock, which found that the government does in fact have the right to hold indefinitely “sexually dangerous” inmates already in custody, even after their sentences have expired: the so-called Adam Walsh Act. I found it interesting that, based on what I know now, at least, I would have dissented from this decision, and that my colleagues in this opposition, apart from the four sex offenders who brought the case, would have been Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and whoever wrote the editorial on the case for the Wall Street Journal. (I should note that my argument would have been different than any expressed by any of these folks.) I’m not sure which of those potential allies scares me the most, although I’m pretty sure it’s not the guys who did their time for possession of child pornography but weren’t released because some political appointee Attorney General was trying to look “tough on crime.”

But a headline caught my eye yesterday, and I recognized the fact that I have written a half-dozen blog pieces in the last five weeks, precisely none of them about what may be the most significant single event not merely of the year, but in decades. True, part of the reason is that the story is huge and ever-changing, so it’s hard to wrap one’s head around. But ultimately I do need to talk about what is the most significant story of the last month—yes, more so than Rand Paul’s “libertarian Tourettes” (to borrow a phrase from an old friend), more so than the demise of the widower of a minor movie star (that’s news? really?), more so even than the much-hyped finale of a television show I never watched. What is transpiring in the Gulf of Mexico right now could literally change the world permanently. And we concentrate on what? Fergie’s selling access to her ex? Yes, indeed… WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?.

Where is the outrage that BP sold this project to the authorities based on assurances that something like this wouldn’t happen, or—in the extremely unlikely event that it did—that it would be promptly contained?

Where is the outrage that no one in the US government expressed a little skepticism at BP’s grandiose claims?

Where is the outrage that the Mineral Management Service people who were supposed to be ensuring safety at oil rigs were in fact getting all manner of gifts—everything from crawfish boils to bowl game tickets to jobs in the industry—from the people they were supposed to be monitoring? We’ll leave aside the sex, the snorting coke off toaster ovens, etc., that seems to have characterized the MMS’s relationship with the oil industry during the Bush administration. (Nice apophasis, huh?) There’s even a report that the new Inspector General’s report to be released later this week will reveal that “Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil—and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency.” Wow.

Where is the outrage that, when there was a squabble between BP and Transocean representatives shortly before the disaster, BP’s desire for speed and their “we’re paying the bills” argument trumped Transocean’s safer approach?

Where is the outrage that minions of Transocean allegedly rounded up survivors, and wouldn’t allow them to talk to their families, even to assure them of their survival, until they’d signed waivers proclaiming themselves unhurt and Transocean not responsible. (Interesting that “not responsible” and “irresponsible” don’t mean the same thing here… I think we can agree that Transocean’s actions tended more to the latter than to the former.) Come to think of it, screw the outrage, where the hell are the indictments for kidnapping?

Where is the outrage that Texas Governor Rick Perry’s initial response wasn’t to express sympathy to the families of the eleven men killed in the explosion, but to describe the events as an “act of God,” to make excuses for the corporations involved, and indeed to encourage more drilling operations? This was a completely man-made disaster, an “accident” in the sense that someone who runs a red light in his car creates an “accident,” but what happened in the Gulf was completely preventable. Come to think of it, though, the only God Perry actually worships is his Lord and Master, the Big Corporation… and if it happens to be a big oil company, so much the better. So, you see, in Perry’s world, this really was an Act of God.

Where is the outrage that a week after the explosion, we were being assured not merely by BP but by the government that the spill was in fact much less serious than initially feared—when in fact it was at least 20 times worse than it was being portrayed?

Where is the outrage that, according to prominent scientists, NOAA responded very slowly, failed to conduct adequate scientific analysis of the damage, and allowed BP to consistently and brazenly under-represent the significance of the ongoing spill?

Where is the outrage that BP actively sought to thwart scientists from determining the true severity of the leak?

Where is the outrage that BP had already repeatedly violated numerous environmental laws, actually being convicted of two felonies, yet was allowed to continue to do business as usual?

Where is the outrage that Transocean is trying to invoke some obscure 159-year-old law to try to wriggle out of its responsibilities in repairing the damage caused by this disaster.

Where is the outrage that the representatives of BP, Transocean and Halliburton all pointed their fingers at each other at Congressional hearings instead of taking any responsibility for what happened? Where are the firings or the falling-on-swords of the people who made the risky choices that led to the disaster? And where were the Congressional interrogators asking the most basic of questions, like, “so, you all disagree about whose fault this was, but you’re all agreed that if someone hadn’t prioritized greed and convenience over safety, you wouldn’t have caused billions of dollars of short-term damage and possibly permanently destroyed an entire ecosystem? ‘Yes’ or ‘no,’ please.”? (N.B.: exemption to Senator Bernie Sanders on this one… sometimes I wish the family homestead in New Hampshire was about eight miles further west…)

Where is the outrage that the likes of Senator Lisa Murkowski—who would have a legitimate chance of being named Stupidest Political Figure in the State most places, just not in Alaska—want to limit BP’s liability to $75 million, roughly three days’ profit. Where is the outrage, in particular, of the Tea Party at the $10+ billion expense tag Sen. Murkowski would present the American taxpayer for someone else’s screw-up?

Where is the outrage at the utter audacity that even as there was (and is) a gusher on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, BP representatives were trying to convince the Canadian government that their existing laws—requiring relief wells to be drilled essentially simultaneously with exploratory wells—are too restrictive and too expensive. The pessimists—some might say “realists”—are now suggesting that it may not be until a relief well is drilled that the situation in the Gulf has even a chance to get better instead of worse. This is a process which could take weeks or even months. While we’re on the subject, where is the outrage that we don’t have that law?

Where is the outrage that the dispersant BP insists on using—despite directives from the EPA—is both less effective and more toxic than alternatives. Anybody wanna bet it’s maybe a couple bucks cheaper?

Where is the outrage that the Obama administration claims to have issued a moratorium on drilling, but continues to pass out environmental waivers like they were comp tickets to a bad musical? Do they need a vocabulary lesson? Cuz that’s not what “moratorium” means, guys. Sarah Palin’s complaint that Obama is too linked to the oil companies is remarkably disingenuous, considering the source. Still, while oil company largess tends to be visited disproportionately on Republicans, the nearly $900,000 they funneled into the Obama campaign’s coffers represents a fair amount of money in my neighborhood. The difference between the two parties with respect to Big Oil is that the Republicans are completely bought and paid for, and the Democrats would just like to be.

Interestingly, when I posted the “Where’s the outrage” link on my Facebook page yesterday, the responses from three of my recent students were swift, engaged, and specific: comments on previous oil spills around the world, an analysis of the Gulf spill’s effects on oxygen levels, a clear articulation of the real severity of what is currently happening. Oh, yes, and this: “I think people forgot how to get upset after Vietnam.” 

Of course, coming off a semester of teaching a topics course on the Vietnam War and the American Theatre, I’ve been thinking that for a while. The Catonsville 9 calmly waited for the police to arrive so that they could be arrested: indeed, their arrest and conviction was part of their plan. The Kent State travesty wouldn’t have happened, at least in the way it did, had not a group of students been willing to go face-to-face with armed National Guardsmen. 668 protesters were arrested and over 1000 were injured, just in Chicago the week of the 1968 Democratic Convention. It would be difficult to get that many people today to take a shortened lunch break for a cause. Because it isn’t cool? Maybe. Because Kids These Days are spoiled, entitled, egocentric? Maybe. Because people just don’t care as much? Maybe.

But I know two things:

1). When They Make Me Tsar, BP CEO Tony Hayward will make good on his pledge to “clean every drop of oil off the shore.” With his tongue.

2). Where is the outrage? Right here.

Scott Walker’s Real Anti-Intellectual Agenda

It’s still up for grabs as to who the Most Dangerous Governor in the Country is. Curmie’s current and immediate former states certainly provide contenders: Greg Abbott of Texas might just make us yearn for the halcyon days of Rick Perry. Kansas’s Sam Brownback is compiling an impressive résumé of utter incompetence, prevarication, and fellating rich folk. Elsewhere, Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin scores high on the hypocritometer, and Florida’s Rick Scott is probably in the lead in the coveted “Most Corrupt” category. Let’s put it this way: if John Kasich, Rick Snyder and Jan Brewer aren’t even finalists for the award, the competition is fierce.

But whereas all of the pretenders—Brownback, Scott and Snyder in particular—have particularly odious records in the area of education, Curmie plumps for Wisconsin’s Scott Walker as the quintessential combination of hubris, misplaced priorities and general inanity. His latest ploy—to tuck a re-write of the university system’s mission into the middle of a budget proposal running just short of 2000 pages.

Actually, yes.

What such a proposal is doing in a budget document at all is a matter for some skepticism, but Walker clearly isn’t a fan of universities that do what universities are meant to do: search for truth, serve the populace, that sort of thing. Of course, Walker doesn’t actually have a college degree (he dropped out of Marquette with a passable but below average academic record), so maybe he just doesn’t get it. Anyway, here are Walker’s proposed changes to the “Wisconsin Idea,” the foundational principles of the state university system. He proposed to excise what’s crossed out below and to insert what’s underlined; regular text indicates no change:

The mission of the system is to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs, to discover and disseminate knowledge, to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society by developing develop in students heightened intellectual, cultural, and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional, and technological expertise, and a sense of purpose. Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition. Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.

Apart from the elimination of the Oxford commas, thereby rendering the entire editing process extremely suspect in Curmie’s eyes before even getting to the subject matter, the amendments show that Walker and his minions believe that universities exist for the benefit of corporations, supplying cogs for today’s machines with no thought to tomorrow’s, much less to the possibility that life might be more fulfilling than mechanization.

More disturbing, of course, is what Walker saw fit to exclude from the universities’ mission—not merely to omit, mind you, but rather to excise from the existing text. That list includes extending knowledge beyond the campuses themselves, serving society (as opposed to employers per se), educating people, improving the human condition… oh, yeah, and caring about the truth. Certainly we can’t have any of that! (Given Governor Walker’s track record, a search for truth could indeed prove rather embarrassing.)

Curmie should note that the amendments in Section 1111 of the budget bill have been getting all the press, but the proposals in Section 1110 are just as terrible. (The entire budget can be found here; see pages 545-46 for the relevant sections.) Those changes—apparently made without any consultation with people who… you know… have the slightest comprehension of what universities do—include a change from recognizing the “public interest” of having a first-rate university system to merely acknowledging the “constitutional obligation” to do so, eliminates “undergraduate teaching as [the system’s] main priority,” and cuts the section on “graduate and research programs with emphasis on state and national needs.” It also eliminates the mandate to “[make] effective and efficient use of human and physical resources” and to “[function] cooperatively with other educational institutions and systems.”

Of course, the ploy was so ham-handed that people noticed PDQ, and Walker proceeded to throw some anonymous staffer under the proverbial bus… without punishment, of course. It was all a “drafting error,” you see. The explanation is that Walker wanted to add the bit about churning out appropriately competent drones for the state’s important, i.e., rich, people to underpay and underappreciate (perhaps not his exact words), and said something about “keeping it simple,” which he now alleges was misinterpreted by some (anonymous) underling (who, of course, won’t be disciplined).

Except that that’s a load of crap, and apparently literally everyone knows it. Walker is a notorious micromanager, so he knew exactly what was in that document. His condescension to faculty and apparent utter miscomprehension of what academics do provides a useful context for this kerfuffle. More importantly, it’s very clear that Walker’s top staff, if not the governor himself, knew exactly what was on page 546. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dismantled Walker’s claims to ignorance. Even PolitiFact, which (despite right-wing wailing about liberal bias) will do about everything possible to keep from saying a GOP pol is lying (see, for example, their “Half True” ruling on an outright prevarication by Eric Cantor because, although it was obviously a lie, the statement might someday turn out to be true), trotted out their “Pants on Fire” rating for Walker’s protestations of ignorance. Finally, budget director Michael Heifetz fell on his sword.

So we’re left with only one question: what the hell was Walker thinking?

Look, the guy is an idiot in the sense that he pays no attention to facts that run counter to his ideology. He has less credibility than the average politician, and that’s saying rather a lot. But he’s got a fair amount of political acumen (being completely devoid of integrity helps in that regard), and—even as stupid as he is—he can’t really have believed either than no one would read the budget proposal or that there wouldn’t be profound objections from both university officials and legislators with an interest in higher education (alas, this latter designation now translates into “a few Democrats”).

All of which means the strategy was deliberate. On the one hand, he threw a little more red meat to the howling wolves of ignorance—those who hope for it in others (people named Koch, for example) and those who manifest it in themselves (e.g., anyone not a millionaire who would vote for an ass like Scott Walker). More importantly, it is a Wag the Dog moment, deflecting attention away from the real centerpiece of Walker’s plans for higher education in his state: a $300,000,000 cut in state support in “exchange” for a level of autonomy which should have already existed. Walker’s is a dangerous game, sacrificing what few shreds of his own credibility may have remained, but, then again, he’s a dangerous man. (Anyone whose prospective Presidential bid is being so ardently pitched by Matt Drudge is by definition both potentially powerful and nuttier than squirrel turds.)

But people aren’t talking about how f*cking stupid it is to make cuts of that size to what used to be the state’s crown jewel, its university system. No, we’re talking about the arrogance of trying to get away with those changes to the mission statement. He never thought he’d get the mission statement revisions, but the more we talk about them, the less we examine the idiocy of the actual budget items in the budget package. Chances he’ll get away with it: given the partisanship and sloth of contemporary journalism and the short memories of too much of the citizenry, probably pretty good.

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.

Is This Any Way to Run a Democracy?

There has been much in the news worthy of commentary in the far-too-long since I’ve written here: a number of worthy Curmie nominees, some political specifics (the Benghazi kerfuffle, the Hamas/Israel showdown, etc.). But most of all, there’s the election earlier this month. I’ll try to get to some of those other topics over the next few days or weeks, but I know where I have to start.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time analyzing the results themselves, which could be described as a rather predictable but thorough ass-whipping by the party that has lost its soul over the party that has lost its mind… or, rather, over the party that has lost its mind as well as its soul. The Democrats put forward some pretty sketchy candidates of their own, but neither party has nominated a presidential candidate so completely mendacious and two-faced as Mitt Romney in at least my lifetime… still, who was the alternative?

Newt Gingrich, who is at best a caricature of the smart and savvy (utterly unethical, but smart and savvy) Speaker he once was? Rick Santorum, whose only saving grace is that he might actually believe some of the nonsense he spews? Ron Paul, who has a handful of good and interesting ideas but is from another planet on too many issues to be taken seriously as a contender? One-time leader Herman Cain, who was slightly less qualified to President than someone chosen random from the phone book? Certifiably certifiable Michele Bachmann? Or one-time “sure thing” Rick Perry, who proved to be too incompetent even for Republicans in any state where he doesn’t have a political machine beholden to him?

The good news is that the likes of Romney and Allen West and Todd Akin lost. Indeed, there was a pretty good house-cleaning. And marriage equality won in four out of four states in which it was on the ballot, either positively (specifically legalizing) or negatively (refusing to pass a constitutional amendment against it). But Bachmann squeaked out a re-election and idiots like Tom Coburn and Louis Gohmert coasted to victory. And a fresh new crop of morons, headed by Texas’s own Ted Cruz, will be descending on Washington, DC and on state capitols over the next few weeks.

What I really want to consider, however, is not who won, but what it means. Specifically, do the Democrats have a “mandate”? Short answer: sort of.

Certainly November 6 was a better day to be a Democrat than a Republican. But President Obama’s re-election was hardly a landslide. Yes, a difference of over 100 electoral votes is pretty impressive. Candidate Romney took precisely one, one state (North Carolina) that anyone considered anything like a tossup two months before the election. He took one other state (Indiana) that Obama won in 2008. That’s it. And when the conservative pundits emerged from their fact-averse bunkers to assure the Fox News-watching sheeple that “their” candidate (whom they actually hated nearly as much as they did… you know… the black guy) would win by a “landslide” (here, here, and here, for example), they meant something precisely on the order of the 100+ EV victory Obama actually achieved.

Still, Mr. Obama barely eked out a popular vote majority. Votes are still being counted in some jurisdictions, but it looks like the President will get a little less than 51% of the popular vote to Mr. Romney’s 47.5% or so, with the remaining votes divided among Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, et al. Yes, that’s about a 4 million vote difference, but it falls well short of my definition of “landslide,” which would involve a 10-point difference. Obama’s victory margin was roughly a third of that.

Moreover, Obama lost ground in a host of states: he won by less or lost by more in 46 states and DC relative to his performance against John McCain four years ago. And whereas McCain was less than an ideal candidate and chose a certifiable idiot as a running mate, he was still more experienced, more intelligent, more principled, more charismatic, more populist, and in general less of a plutocratic jackass than Romney. That doesn’t exactly add up to a full-throated endorsement of President Obama.

What really did break for the Democrats was the legislature. Yes, the Republicans maintained control of the House. With a couple of races still up in the air, it looks like a comfortable 235-200 GOP advantage, give or take a vote or two. Trouble is, Democrats actually got more votes: about a half a million more votes, to be a little more precise. Why the disparity between the number of votes and the number of those elected? In a word, gerrymandering.

This isn’t (just) a screed against evil Republicans. The excellent analysis by Adam Serwer, Jaeah Lee, and Zaineb Mohammed at Mother Jones shows that Democrats aren’t above a little… erm… massaging themselves, as evidenced by Maryland and Illinois. But there’s relatively speaking more manipulation by Republican governors and state legislators than by their Democratic counterparts: a function of opportunity rather than relative perfidiousness, no doubt. The seven states highlighted in the Mother Jones piece that were gerrymandered by Republicans all voted for Obama at least once; six voted for him twice. Yet all have majority Republican House representation. Pennsylvanians, for example, cast about 60,000 more votes for Democratic candidates than for Republicans. Their Congressional delegation? 13 Republicans and 5 Democrats. Coincidence? Justice? Honest representation? I think not. Slimebag politicians more interested in their party than in their constituents? Oh, yeah.

In the Senate, the Democrats really cleaned up. Without equivocating about the two “independents” who caucus with the Democrats, the Democrats defended 23 seats compared to only 10 for the GOP. And the Dems actually gained seats. They replaced the squirrelly Joe Lieberman with “real Democrat” Chris Murphy, regained Ted Kennedy’s seat with populist favorite Elizabeth Warren, and—thanks to the GOP’s nomination of the moronic Richard Mourdock—flipped Dick Lugar’s seat in Indiana. Honest-to-God independent Angus King replaced retiring Republican Olympia Snowe. The only bad news for Democrats was Bob Kerrey’s inability to hold Ben Nelson’s seat in Nebraska… but Nelson’s was never a reliable vote, anyway.

Where does all this leave us? With a President who claims a mandate despite getting less than 51% of the vote against a terrible candidate. With a Speaker who claims a mandate despite losing the popular vote. With a clear statement only with respect to the Senate, but with that body saddled by inane filibuster rules and personal privilege nonsense that allows a single obstructionist to derail, well, virtually anything.

With an arcane and anti-democratic Electoral College system that skews proportional representation: there are about 677,000 Californians per electoral vote, vs. 209,000 Vermonters per electoral vote. Yes, that’s more than a 3:1 ratio. Worse, there is no incentive for Barack Obama to care in the slightest about my vote because I live in Texas, or for Mitt Romney to care about the votes of my high school friends who still live in New York. Worse still, the resulting over-emphasis on places like Ohio and Florida leads not merely to an inundation of political advertising in those states, but to a level of pandering to special interests that ought to be unacceptable even in our all-too-venal political system: would we even be talking about crap like “clean coal technology” if it weren’t for the fact that a few thousand votes in southern Ohio might actually tip a national election even if the rest of the country decides otherwise by literally millions of votes.

Finally, fraud has a greater chance of mattering. Flipping 100,000 votes wouldn’t have made any difference in the popular vote in any election since 1960. Flipping the right 100,000 votes—in Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004—would have changed outcomes. Thus, the claims of the Anonymous (?) folks that they prevented Karl Rove and his nasty little minions from stealing Ohio for Romney are… well, they’re a lot of things, including a little more plausible. True Believers like Thom Hartmannare are convinced that’s why Rove was so smarmily confident on Fox News on election night: that he thought (incorrectly) that the fix was in. (Of course, Hartmann is convinced the 2004 election was stolen, too.) At best, the Electoral College helps to erode the confidence of the public that election results are accurate. At worst, we get a President and a Congress whom most of us voted against.

What’s to be done?

When They Make Me Tsar ©:
We do away with the Electoral College, or at least circumvent it.
We eliminate the arcane rules of the Senate, especially but not exclusively the filibuster.
We pull re-districting from partisan control.
We overturn the legalized anonymity part (at least) of the Citizens United decision.

Can all this happen? It must. Because the status quo is well short of a democracy.