Fact-Checking the Fact-Checker

 

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document offers a glimpse of a dystopian future, even for those who agree with some of its recommendations.  It’s set up as a game plan for a conservative (e.g., Trump) administration.  Donald Trump himself has, characteristically, either lied about it or revealed himself to be less au courant with the world of politics than is the average cocker spaniel.  (Or both.)

In a post on his ironically named Truth Social platform, he wrote, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”  Yeah, right.  The overwhelming majority of the screed was written by former Trump administration staffers; if he doesn’t know that much, it’s not Joe Biden who’s more in need of cognitive testing.

Curmie also confesses to being a little confused as to how Trump can “know nothing” about Project 2025 but also “disagree with some of the things they’re saying.”  The man has always been incoherent, but it’s getting worse.  On the other hand, he does seem to be sufficiently in control of his faculties to avoid saying which parts of the document are “absolutely ridiculous,” as that would alienate the yahoos of his base.  As it is, they know he’s lying, and they’re OK with that: all for a good cause, after all, same as the SCOTUS nominees lying about Roe v. Wade as “settled law.”  Indeed, everyone knows he’s lying, but few Democrats are willing to say so in so many words, and conservatives, even the otherwise intelligent ones, pass it off as everyday “exaggeration.”  Boys will be boys, after all.

Curmie is not at all interested in reading the entire 900ish pages of the Mandate for Leadership; he’s seen quite enough, thank you.  But a Friend of Curmie posted the meme you see above on her Facebook page, and Meta proceeded to label it “partly false” because “independent fact-checkers” had deemed it so. 

The “independent” lads and lasses in question are in fact a single (as in not plural, rather than unmarried) dude named Alex Demas, who writes for a publication called The Dispatch, which describes itself as “conservative,” “center-right,” “unbiased,” and “fact-based”… yet describes the Democratic Party as endorsing “abortion-until-birth… [and] wholesale gun confiscation.”  Curmie considers himself reasonably well aware of political perspectives, and he has literally never seen any significant Democrat argue for either, let alone both, of these things, nor does he know anyone personally who has championed either cause.  So much for Meta censoring the right!  (Well, to be fair, they did move Demas’s “mostly false” verdict to “partly false.”)

But just because The Dispatch straddles the line between “far right” and “wackadoodle” while pretending to be otherwise doesn’t mean that Demas’s commentary is inherently flawed.  And it’s not at all uncommon for some folks on the left to stray from objectivity and truth.  So let’s take a look.

Curmie wants it known that he wrote all of the above without comparing the assertions in the meme with the “Mandate.”  He promised himself that he’d post his findings irrespective of what he discovered.  As noted above, I’m not going to check all 900 pages to see if something that appears in the meme is in the book.  I’m not going to take Demas’s word for it.  But let’s look at two things: those that Demas regards as accurate assessments and those for which the meme provides page numbers.  It’s easy enough to look at page 691 to see if it includes what the meme says it does.  (Well, since the meme-creator was so sloppy, it gets a little harder to see if a passage exists anywhere in the document, but there is a word-search function.)

So: Demas grants the accuracy of the assertions that the Heritage Foundation (hereafter, the HF) is advocating the following: 1). providing additional tax breaks for corporations and the 1 percent, 2). eliminating the Department of Education, 3). using public taxpayer money for private religious schools, 4). increasing Arctic drilling, 5). deregulating big business and the oil industry, 6). promoting and expediting capital punishment, and 7). banning transgender service in the military.  There’s plenty on this list already (especially the odd-numbered ones) that makes Curmie certain to vote against anyone who supports these initiatives, but let’s look at the other stuff.

Let’s shorten this post by noting that Curmie agrees with Demas that the following claims in the meme are indeed false: 1). Cut Social Security, 2). Cut Medicare, 3). End birthright citizenship. 

And Curmie agrees that the following are mostly false: 1). End the Affordable Care Act, 2). End civil rights and DEI protections in government, 3). Use the military to break up domestic protests. 

There are also two “partly false” ratings that seem reasonable to Curmie: 1). Mass deportation of immigrants and incarceration in ‘camps,’ and 2). Eliminates federal agencies like the FDA, EPA, NOAA, and more.  In the latter case, the problem is overreach: the document is replete with commentary on what the FDA should be doing, for example.  There is a suggestion to eliminate NOAA, however.  The storm that passed through town a few days ago had been downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it got here, but it was still powerful enough to rip the roof off a modular home two blocks from Chez Curmie and plonk it down in those folks’ front yard.  Given the utter incompetence of GOP so-called leaders in Texas, Curmie would really like to keep NOAA around to know what’s coming.

It should be noted that Curmie is looking at this specific document.  Some of the meme’s allegations are true of Donald Trump, or of what it has been reported the HF is considering.  Others have been advanced by other conservative organizations or politicians.  But if it’s not in the Project 2025 tome, it’s not in the Project 2025 tome.

So, let’s look at where Demas and Curmie disagree, even if only marginally.  Demas lists all of the following as “false.”

“Complete ban on abortions without exceptions.”  Demas is splitting hairs.  The document doesn’t use those words, but who does Demas think he’s fooling?  The chapter defines human life as beginning at conception (because they say so), argues that “abortion and euthanasia are not healthcare,” objects to the CDC using fetal cell lines to search for a solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, outlaws chemical abortifacients (Demas does acknowledge this one), and doesn’t seem to even consider exceptions for rape or incest.  The folks that pretend to be in favor of small government and personal liberty also lay out a series of bureaucratic intrusions into the lives of women who seek or receive abortions where they are legal.  The proposal does stop just short of an outright ban, but it sure looks like this is the thin edge of the wedge.  Curmie’s verdict: mostly true.

Ban contraceptives.  This time, it’s the meme that quibbles.  Yes, one particular contraceptive would be banned, but there’s no comprehensive policy recommendation.  That said, if we’re going to take as given that human life begins at conception, then the fact that a goodly number of contraceptives are designed to prevent fertilization (which happens after conception) becomes relevant.  I don’t think that’s what they’re going for, though, at least not yet.  Mostly false.

Elimination of unions and worker protections.  Demas is pretty accurate on this one.  There is nothing to suggest that unions should be eliminated (and there’s nothing even vaguely relevant on page 581).  There is, however, a push for “Non-Union Worker Voice and Representation,” which certainly seems like an attempt to reduce unions’ power.  Curmie says mostly false.

Teach Christian religious beliefs in public schools.  The relevant chapter includes a couple of interesting ideas and a plethora of utterly horrific ones, including, as Demas acknowledges, using taxpayer money to support private religious schools.  So it’s being just a little too cute to say the document doesn’t advocate teaching Christian ideology in public schools, because their little end run around the First Amendment makes religious schools de facto public schools.  Red state pols have been trying to enact this crap for years, and it’s not difficult to see the dominionists at the Heritage Foundation urging them on.  Curmie isn’t buying this charade, and although tempted to moderate his stance and say “mostly true,” it’s a full-throated true on this one.

Ban African American and gender studies in all levels of education. Demas admits that Critical Race Theory would indeed be de facto outlawed at all levels.  Those conservatives sure are champions of free speech… when they agree with it.  The rest of Demas’s analysis is reasonable enough, at least on the surface, since the HF is a little cagier than the Ron DeSantises of the world.  Mostly false.

Ending climate protections.  True, some of what is being proposed here amounts to little more than re-allocating resources, especially from the federal level to regions and states.  But a good deal of it prioritizes short-term economic advantages to corporations over the environment and the interests of the nation.  If Demas honestly believes that “the changes do not broadly curtail efforts at climate protection,” he needs to share what he’s smoking.  Mostly true.

End marriage equality.  Oh, puh-leeze.  As usual, the page numbers aren’t even close to accurate.  But the “Mandate” as a whole hyperventilates over “Biblical” marriage, going so far as to encourage heterosexual Christian couples (you know, the important ones) to marry even if they’re not quite ready to do so.  It argues that Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) Grants should be available, apparently exclusively, “to faith-based recipients who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.”  It advocates “policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families” with a father and a mother.  That’s defined elsewhere as “healthy marriage.”  There’s nothing to say that same-sex marriages can’t happen, but the authors advocate a “biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” which is the only kind that really matters to them.  And “equality” means more than just “legal.”  Mostly true.

Defund the FBI and Homeland Security.  Another “it isn’t on the page the meme says it is.”  The lead proposal in the relevant chapter is to “dismantle the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”  On the one hand, it’s clear that what the HF seeks is a restructuring whereby the DHS’s responsibilities would be assigned to other government agencies.  It is more than a little difficult, however, to reconcile Demas’s assertion that “There are no calls to defund the FBI or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the plan” with the document’s promise to “cut billions in spending” by enacting the proposed changes to DHS.  (Such a reassignment of tasks may be a good idea, but that’s not the issue here.) 

The document also recommends that “[t]he next conservative Administration should eliminate any offices within the FBI that it has the power to eliminate without any action from Congress.”  It’s unclear whether those offices would be assigned elsewhere (if not, then we’re definitely talking about “defunding”), but it’s clear that the HF wants the FBI to be more subservient to the (politically appointed) Attorney General, who, in a conservative administration, would be answerable directly to the President.  It will be interesting to see how much the HF still advocates that policy should President Biden be re-elected.  Mostly true.

OK, so where does this all leave us?  Of the sixteen allegations Curmie checked out, he found nine that were in his opinion mostly false or worse, and two others that were partly false.  That’s not good.  The meme-maker did us all a profound disservice by being lazy, irresponsible, and, frankly, stupid.  The legitimate objections to this abominable and occasionally unconstitutional “Mandate” are severely undercut by its proponents’ ability to point to the manifold errors in the critique.

Unfortunately, this sloppiness is unsurprising.  Nor should anyone be shocked by the fact that Demas seeks to downplay the document’s privileging of rich cishet Christians (Jews are borderline acceptable), preferably white males, or by Curmie’s desire to highlight those very points.  We all see the world, and indeed what we believe to be objective truth, through the lens of our own experience and political philosophy.

Facebook was ill-served by relying on a single, far from neutral, fact-checker, but their ultimate conclusion that the meme is “partly false” is difficult to dispute.

We need to be right on the facts, but we also need to be united in our criticism.  The Mandate for Leadership is a nightmarish document.  If nothing else, any text that includes the phrase “human resources onboarding operations” needs to be rejected immediately.

Facebook and Other Censorious Asshats

Curmie is indebted to Ken White at Popehat for the term “censorious asshat” that serves as part of the title of this piece.

Here’s the deal. When Curmie awoke this morning he checked in with Facebook, as usual. One of Curmie’s posts on the Facebook page had been deemed “false” by “an independent fact-checker,” specifically by that paradigm of journalistic mediocrity, USA Today. The offending meme, riffing on the anti-maskers, shows a soldier carrying a donkey across a field. The cutline reads:

This picture is from World War II, a soldier carrying a donkey. It is not that the soldier loves donkeys or has some sort of perversion. What’s happening is that the field is mined and that if the donkey was allowed to wonder [sic.] as it pleased, it would likely detonate a charge and kill everyone. The moral of the story is that during difficult times the first ones you have to keep under control are the jackasses who don’t understand the danger and do as they please.

Ah, but the geniuses who have no understanding of humor decided to point out that the photo wasn’t really from World War II. [I know, the horror!] OK, first off, Curmie doubts that anyone looking at that meme, especially anyone seeing it on Curmie’s page (I attract a pretty intelligent clientele, if I do say so myself), unquestioningly believed that the details provided in the meme were literal fact. They existed not to be regarded as truth, but to set up a joke. No one cares that it was really the French in Algeria, or even that the field wasn’t actually mined. Seriously, if we were talking about a gag that starts “A priest walks into a bar,” these morons would feel compelled to point out that there’s no solid evidence of such an event, that all we know is that the man was dressed as a priest, that it’s true that he entered but we don’t know if he walked, and really, it was more of a pub than a bar. Curmie also awaits Facebook’s revelation that Abraham Lincoln didn’t really say not to believe everything you see on the Internet.

Curmie would be pleased to send them all a box of laxative and get on with his day, except that having the post labelled as “false” means that Curmie’s posts, already seldom seen by more than 10% of the people who like his page, will show up on the feeds of even fewer folks who don’t actively seek out his posts. Oh, by the way, the photo you see here: taken from someone else’s Facebook page; there’s no disclaimer on that page. Ah, equity…

This is, by the way, the third time Curmie’s posts have been questioned. In one of the other cases, Curmie did post something from a clearly partisan source that seemed at the time to be a little devoid of context. It was not intentionally misleading (on my part, at least), and indeed the “ruling” from the Grand Poobahs of fact-checking was only “partly false.” Still, it was a moment of intellectual laziness, and Curmie was rightly dinged for it.

The other time, Curmie posted something that looked interesting but a little suspicious: and he said so, specifically requesting his readers who knew more about the subject would help separate fact from fiction. Ah, but he posted something that turned out to be incompletely contextualized (fact-checkers care about context when it suits them to do so; otherwise, they’re the quintessence of literality). The fact that Curmie labelled it as questionable is irrelevant to the bot that enforces the “rulings” of PolitiFact (or whoever). [Note: Curmie has had his issues with PolitiFact in particular for some time. See here, here, and here, for example.]

Of course, there’s one category of posters who aren’t subject to Facebook’s faux interest in the truth: politicians and their minions. It’s right there on FB’s self-righteous ”Business Help Center” page:

Posts and ads from politicians are generally not subjected to fact-checking. In evaluating when this applies we ask our fact-checking partners to look at politicians at every level. This means candidates running for office, current office holders - and, by extension, many of their cabinet appointees - along with political parties and their leaders.

Why, you ask? Well, free speech, of course! A candidate for office is even allowed to post outright lies: “If a claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third party fact checking program — even if the substance of that claim has been debunked elsewhere.” Riiiiiiiiiiight. Trump or Biden or their respective parties can repeat nonsense that was proven to be false months ago—and a). it’s actual mendacity rather than a misinterpretation or an unintentional omission of context, and b). the falseness of the statement is actually relevant—but the likes of Curmie will be censured because a joke meme misidentifies a soldier in a way that doesn’t change a thing.

Still, not to worry. Surely only three such instances (even if two of them shouldn’t count at all) over a period of several months shouldn’t make much difference, right? Well, this is Facebook, so who knows.

But the day’s saga doesn’t end there, Gentle Reader. It’s Thursday, and Curmie has taken to posting reminders on Wednesday or Thursday to remind Curmiphiles to vote for the Political Asshole of the Week. So I went to the Facebook page to re-post last Saturday’s link. Gone. Indeed, Sunday’s post had disappeared, as well. In fact, I can’t post anything from this blog, either to the Curmudgeon Central page or on my own personal page. Of course, I received literally no notification that (or when) the posts had been removed. When I went to post directly from the blog to either of my Facebook personae’s pages, I got a pop-up that said it was a violation of Facebook’s community standards. That’s it. Nothing more specific than that, and not just the inability to post a particular article, but to post literally anything from manjushri924.blogspot.com. I honestly have no idea what’s going on. Curmie has never advocated violence or criminality, and whereas there’s some adult language now and then, the blog itself is behind a warning that “This post may contain sensitive content.” You’ve got to say you’re OK with that to see the posts themselves.

Were I of a cynical disposition, of course (perish the thought!), I’d suspect that some pol who got nominated as Political Asshole of the Week decided to throw his weight around. Oh, by the way, the fun folks at Opinion Stage shut down the poll because it’s been seen too many times? Yeah, right. The days when Blogspot had their own polling apparatus are missed. Or perhaps it’s time to migrate to another platform? We shall see…

Anyway, readership here will likely go down, as Facebook has been the principal means by which most readers find their way here. But Curmie writes mostly for himself, anyway, to keep his writing skills sharp and to clarify his own thinking on matters of the day. And who knows? Maybe someday Curmie will be told what exactly is so offensive about this blog, so he can either fix it or tell Zuckerberg to perform an action best suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites. In the meantime, Curmie will try to revive his dormant Twitter account to announce his blog posts, to continue to post to his Facebook page but list this page as manjushri924 dot blogspot dot com in doing so, and to urge you to follow this page directly. Oh, and to try to figure out how to do the Political Asshole of the Week poll without having to pay for it.

The Jurisdictions Here are Backwards... Aren't They?

Both of these stories have been around a while, but I didn’t get a chance to post on them when they first appeared, and it seems to me that they fit together in a way that hasn’t yet been discussed by anyone whose commentary I’ve read.

First up is a story out of Houston. Diane Tran is an honors student at Willis High School. She works a full-time job and a part-time job, and goes to school full-time, taking advanced placement and dual-credit courses as a high school junior. She uses the money she earns to support two siblings; her parents divorced and both left town. Not surprisingly, even the most focused and responsible adolescent will sometimes buckle under that kind of pressure. Ms. Tran sometimes overslept, and missed school because of it.

Her case ended up in the Justice of the Peace court of Lanny Moriarty, who (of course) sentenced her to 24 hours in jail and a $100 fine for truancy. Yes, really. Moriarty, of course, is a moron, as only a Texas Republican can be. He sputtered “If you let one [truant student] run loose, what are you gonna do with the rest of ‘em? Let them go too?” Well, no, sir, you’re supposed to exercise a little judicial discretion: that’s why you have your cushy job, because you are alleged to have more critical thinking skills than a banana peel. Sorry to have over-estimated you. Because if you want to use someone like Ms. Tran as the vehicle by which to “send a lesson,” the only lesson in question is that you are a heartless douchebag who shouldn’t ever be allowed into a courtroom except as a defendant (again).

It didn’t take long for an on-line petition on Ms. Tran’s behalf to get started, initially with a goal of 5,000 signatures. That number was shattered within an hour or so. The petition closed with over 277,000 virtual signatures, when Moriarty, his profound unfitness for office now trumpeted around the world (the Internet is sometimes a wonderful thing), decided to cut his losses, reverse himself, and vacate the charges. Oh, did I mention the $100,000+ in donations to Ms. Tran?

Somehow I suspect that Mr. Moriarty might not run unopposed next time, as he did last. He’s not important enough to be this embarrassing.

The other case is from Indiana, where three 8th-grade girls were suspended for the remainder of the school year for joking (obviously) on Facebook about which of their classmates they’d like to kill. As Gavin Rose, an ACLU lawyer, points out:

The fact of the matter is that no reasonable person looking at this conversation would think that these girls were going to go out and inflict harm on anyone. If you make a legitimate threat against someone ... you don't follow it up with an emoticon.

Moreover, the “threats” were not directed at the presumed “victims,” as they were visible only to the Facebook friends of the girls. Of course, some officious mother called attention to the posts, and the Facebook conversation, conducted outside school hours, on personal rather than school computers, was seen by idiot administrators (apologies, as ever, for redundancy) as somehow disruptive to schoolwork—it would have to be, as even the megalomaniacs as Griffith Middle School don’t claim jurisdiction otherwise.

I am reminded of one of the first essays I wrote in this iteration of my blogging life, about Gloria Gadsden, who was suspended by her employer, East Stroudsburg State University, for posting the following two Facebook status updates: “Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ...” and “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete [sic] hitman, it's been that kind of day.” No rational person would think there was any real threat to anyone involved here, but educational administrators at any level don’t necessarily meet that “rational person” threshold.

And so we have the ACLU filing a lawsuit to protect what they describe, quite accurately, as “teenage banter.” The salient part of the ACLU suit follows:

At no point in this conversation were the girls expressing any actual intentions to inflict harm on any person, nor were they threatening or attempting to intimidate any person. Rather, they were simply engaging in a casual conversation and joking with one another. A reasonable person would interpret the entirety of the conversation as made in jest, and would not interpret any portion of the conversation—or the conversation as a whole—as threatening or as a true threat.

The conversation did not cause an actual disruption at school, nor was it likely to or foreseeable that it would substantially disrupt the school or the educational environment. All three (3) girls attended school for the entire day after this conversation took place, and nothing out of the ordinary occurred. To their knowledge, the conversation was not even mentioned at school by any person, and it certainly was not mentioned by them.

But that, of course, didn’t stop the Amalgamated Hand-Wringers from punishing a trio of 8th-graders for the crime of acting like teenagers while on their own time.

As I wrote in April of 2010 about the Gadsden case,

I have an inkling that about midnight at some tech rehearsal somewhere along the line, I’ve probably told my stage manager not that I’d like to kill some actor or designer or props person, but that I was going to do so. I never followed through, though, curiously enough. I don’t recall ever posting on Facebook that I’d like to kill a student, a colleague, or a boss, but I might have… if I did I, like Prof. Gadsden, would have been careful to ensure that anyone with an IQ over room temperature would know I was joking. And I’m certain that I’ve volunteered to be the “discreet hitman” (I’d have spelled it correctly) for a friend. I was, however, never actually engaged to perform such duties. One of my favorite people, a former student, now a teacher, posted a Facebook status not long ago that suggested her desire to “beat someone to a pulp.” I even endorsed that sentiment because… wait for it… I’m not a moron, and I know—not just think, know—that she didn’t plan, literally, to commit assault.

We saw the same phenomenon play out in the case of Widener law professor Lawrence Connell, whose obviously hypothetical scenario about killing his dean got him in deep doo-doo. Inability to recognize humor, even humor we don’t think is terribly funny, is a crippling malady in an irony-rich society such as ours. It is sad that so many people in the education hierarchy seem to suffer from this affliction.

But there’s something else that ties these two cases together—apart, that is, from the rampant stupidity of the people with decision-making power. What I find fascinating is how the logical jurisdictions of the school system and the courts seem to have reversed. Once again, Gentle Reader, I remind you that I am not a lawyer, and that I’m arguing what should happen, not what current laws dictate. This is, in short, another When They Make Me Tsar© musing.

OK, so I wonder if I’m alone in this. When I first read about Diane Tran’s story, my first thought wasn’t that Lanny Moriarty is a cretinous yahoo, although that idea did occur pretty quickly. My first response, however, was to wonder what the hell Ms. Tran was doing in a courtroom at all. I suppose I had some dim recollection of students being charged with some sort of legal transgression for truancy and/or chronic tardiness, but it makes no sense. And, as an intriguing if perhaps over-wrought article by Sarah Seltzer on AlterNet suggests, the incarceration of teenagers for the most minor of transgressions ultimately independent of even minor-scale criminality poses a series of rather disturbing questions about American culture in general. In other words, even if we leave out the whole backstory to Ms. Tran’s case—say she’s just an ordinary kid with an ordinary family, getting ordinary grades—one is still tempted to wonder what the hell she’s doing in court.

Truancy is, in a reasonable universe, its own punishment. And if Ms. Tran can successfully complete her coursework without necessarily being in class every day, it’s really not a matter for the courts. True, some courses have legitimate attendance requirements, and the school should have the right to deny advancement to students who fail to comply with those rules. But I’m hard-pressed to understand a rationale for transferring the decision-making power out of the hands of the schools themselves.

Conversely, what happens outside school hours and outside school property is none of the school’s concern, yet there are myriad instances of absurd intrusions into students’ private lives: the Indiana case discussed here, the Illinois case of a principal’s prowling through a student’s Facebook account, the Kansas case of a school district going apoplectic because of a student’s Twitter feed… you get the picture.

If, for example, in the Indiana case, there really was a suspicion that this trio of (barely) adolescent girls was plotting some sort of violence, then the authorities—the criminal justice system, in other words—needed to be called in. But either that didn’t happen, or the cops took one look at the alleged “evidence,” laughed in the sniveling administrators’ faces, and told them to call back if and when there was anything a sane person would deem problematic. In my dream scenario, they also prescribed a couple of bowls of All-Bran.

When They Make Me Tsar©, in other words, school decisions will be made by schools, and non-school activities will be regulated only by legitimate law-enforcement authorities, and only to the extent that there is probable cause that a real crime has been committed or is about to be committed.

I know, I know. I’m a cockeyed optimist. But I’d rather be from South Pacific than Les Mis on this one.

The “Creepiness Curmie”: Two Nominees

May seems to be a very good month for stories about idiot educators, as two stories from today alone attest. Today’s topic: downright creepy middle school/junior high principals and their unseemly interest in girls in their early teens.

First, there’s the middle school principal in Geneva, Illinois, who thinks it’s OK to force students to allow him to rummage around in their Facebook accounts. This sort of Big Brotherism is problematic enough when it’s done to a job-seeker, but at least there the victim is an adult, and has the right to tell the meddlesome HR person to perform an act best suited to especially limber hermaphrodites. Adolescent kids whose fondest desire is just to make it through the 7th grade don’t have the luxury of just walking out.

Here’s the story: Pam Broviak’s daughter attends Geneva Middle School South. According to Broviak’s blog piece on the incident [obvious typos corrected]:

It started because a teacher heard another student spreading rumors about my daughter-–all of it unrelated to school and nothing against the law. So the school called in my daughter to demand to know if the rumors were true. This went on for some days, without my knowledge, and culminated in them asking her to open her Facebook account to them which she did. Then the vice principal called me to demand I come to the school immediately to read through her private messages. At the time I was out of town for work and could not make it back until later that night. She had obviously kept the account open long after my daughter had left and told me she would keep it open until I got there. She was almost hysterical about the whole situation also demanding I punish my daughter for what she had allegedly done. …

Of course I found out when I got home that this had taken a huge toll on my daughter who ended up crying through most of the rest of the day and therefore missed most of her classes. She was embarrassed and very upset. Particularly so because their line of questioning had also been sexual in nature with them demanding she share with them everything she had done sexually. In this day and age, I just cannot imagine how a school adminstrator could confront a 13-year old girl and demand to know the extent of her sexual experience. …

So the next day, I spoke with the principal.... He explained that the reason they had to interrogate my daughter was because the punishment for spreading rumors is different depending on if the rumor is true or not. So he insisted on his need to conduct an investigation into the truth each time they hear a rumor about a child....

I told him not to pry into the private lives of my children. And he said he cannot do that-–it is his obligation to look out for the morals and ethics of the children at his school. And if he feels they are not leading a moral life (obviously according to his standards), he is going to launch an investigation. And only if he finds they are in fact exhibiting poor behavior will he contact parents. And even then he said he doesn't like contacting parents because most kids don't want their parents to know anything and would rather just talk to him.

Gentle Reader, Curmie knows better than to form an opinion with only one side of the argument expressed. But he also knows creepy when he sees it.

Assuming Ms. Broviak’s account to be accurate, here’s what we’ve got. A 13-year-old girl is the subject of rumors, apparently about sex. The principal, rather than squelching the rumors (or admitting that he’s unlikely to be able to do so), uses them as an excuse to pry into this girl’s private life. Sorry, sir, that’s not due diligence; that’s prurience. It is not the principal’s job to snoop into the morals or ethics of his students, certainly not unless there is a provable and direct link to the efficient functioning of the school, and certainly not without parental knowledge. And if a misbehaving student doesn’t want his/her parents to know, that’s all the more reason to call them in.

Moreover, the way to encourage high ethical standards amongst one’s students is most assuredly not to adopt an unethical and (literally and figuratively) unwarranted subterfuge to access personal information not only about them, but about their friends, families, and acquaintances, as well. That, sir, is NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS.

Neither the blog piece nor the MSNBC article by Bob Sullivan where I first heard about this case refers to the principal by name. I’m guessing that it’s Terry Bleau, who is indicated as such on the school web page. That would certainly make sense. Click on his name on that page and you get his autobiographical blurb, which includes the following: “I am a devoted family man.” Those of you, Gentle Readers, who know me personally have probably heard me say, “If you have to tell me, it ain’t so.” If you have to tell me you worked hard on that project, you didn’t. If you have to tell your cast that you’re in charge of a rehearsal, you aren’t. If you have to tell me you’re a devoted family man… well, you get the idea.

But if the principal isn’t identified, the superintendent is: one Kent Mutchler. He seems indignant about the suggestion that school officials demand students’ passwords. “Nay!,” quoth he, “we simply demand that students sign into their accounts and then we don’t close out of their private affairs until we get our voyeuristic little rocks off.” OK, so maybe that’s not a direct quote.

Mutchler also disputes Broviak’s claim that this kind of amoral intrusion is common. “It happens a half-dozen to a dozen times per year.” Let’s see, that’s roughly once a month, figuring nine as the average between the two extremes mentioned, and a school year lasting about that many months. That doesn’t strike me as remarkably rare, even if we believe him. But let’s look at it another way. The population of Geneva is 24,391, as of July 2009. The population of the country at that time was 306,771,500, or roughly 12,577 times as big. So, if there’s one such incident per month in Geneva, and if Geneva is average, that means there are over 12,500 invasions of students’ privacy happening somewhere in the country each month of the school year. The average school day is about seven hours, with maybe 22 or so days of school in an average month. Let’s say 150 hours a month of school being in session.

Uh oh. This is looking unpleasant. That makes 83 such events per hour. In other words, either Geneva schools aren’t normative, after all, or there is some creep in a school administration somewhere in the country demanding access to personal information from students in this particular manner about every 43 seconds that classes are underway. Sure doesn’t sound “very rare” to me. Wanna know something else that’s all too common? Idiots in charge of schools.

For further proof of this assertion, we turn to Tooele, Utah. There, the blogger known as “adult onset atheist” has a 14-year-old daughter who attends one of the local junior highs. On Wednesday, he was called to the school, where his daughter has apparently committed some grievous offense against humanity. I’ll let him tell it:

The office has large windows so that the student is on display to their peers throughout the interminable wait time. The bell rings and hundreds of students rush past the offender-on-display; some linger long enough to make obscene gestures. There are some sociopaths that would revel in the attention, but in most adolescent minds this is cruel and unusual punishment.

What had AYD done to deserve this punishment? Was it some valiant gesture of defiance against a fascist dehumanizing system, or was their [sic.] cruelty and torture involved? I found it hard to picture AYD engaged (or at least being caught) in either of these types of actions, but I was hoping for the first. …

After spinning up the possibilities in my mind I was not prepared for the actual nature of her offense. AYD was dressed inappropriately. I am not the best judge of “appropriate” dress for a 14-year-old girl. I try, but it is a skill I have no intention of using for very long. I tried to circumvent my need for it at all by suggesting that both AOD and AYD wear hospital scrubs till they graduate the 12th grade, but that was apparently “not happening”. I know that if I dressed myself from AYD's wardrobe it would be wildly inappropriate regardless of what I chose. Now my lack of attention had forced AYD into a life of crime. It is always the parents’ fault.

Luckily I was working at home, so I took a camera and rushed over to the junior high school with some dungarees and a sack-like shirt for AYD to change into. This is a picture of her in the school's front office, and this is the apparently inappropriate outfit she was wearing.

Yes, really. I don’t know about you, Gentle Reader, but I, for one, would be immensely comforted to believe that 20% of the adolescent girls in the country dressed as appropriately. The outfit is attractive, conservative, and appears comfortable without being scuzzy. If I had a 14-year-old daughter, I’d want her to dress like that to go to school.

But… erm… her skirt was apparently ½” too short. Actually, no. No, it wasn’t. If there’s a rule that says it was, then perhaps the dress code should have been revised at least once since 1962. Moreover, AOA says the yearbook (coincidentally distributed that very day) “had many photos of students with much higher hems on their skirts or pants. The yearbook photos raise the issue of selective enforcement.” More to the point, for that outfit to be regarded as provocative, we’d have to be looking at an intentionally deceptive view of a get-up in which there’s really no back to the skirt and the girl’s butt is hanging out. Why do I not think that’s the case?

The more trenchant issue, though, is this: given the fact that the skirt is obviously not provocative at all (unlike a good share of what teen-age girls wear these days), what kind of perv does it take to look at it long enough and hard enough to start calculating hem lengths to the half-inch? Here’s AOA, again [a couple of obvious typos corrected]:

I began to think: “luckily the school administration can look at AYD and see her as a provocative female,” but then I thought… no… that is extremely creepy. I tried to think: “luckily the school administration can look at AYD through the eyes of hormone addled teenage boys to see her as provocative,” but then I thought… no… that is weird-creepy.

So I began to imagine some teacher thinking inappropriate things about AYD, and she being punished for it. Imagine sitting in a class where you knew the teacher was literally looking through your clothing to see you as a provocateur? I began wondering if transferring her to a new class in the last two weeks of school would do more harm than good.

It turns out that the principal himself had personally identified her as inappropriately dressed. He had walked up to her during lunchtime and identified her crime where nobody else could. I can’t help but think that the principal’s action creates an unhealthy atmosphere in his school. What does it say to the teachers who had her in class earlier in the day, and not noticed her inappropriate dress? Will there be punitive actions taken against the teachers who could not look at my daughter with perversion in their eyes?

Is AYD safe?

Beneath AOA’s snark is the legitimate concern of a good father. Who is this principal, and WHAT IS HIS PROBLEM?

As I’ve said, I don’t want to leap to conclusions about either of these cases. In one or both, we may be hearing about events only as interpreted by a parent who is, quite reasonably, not the most objective of observers. But based on what is available to us right now, both of these principals seem to be struggling to keep their minds on their real jobs. Both seem to have just a liiiiiiittle too much interest in the sexuality of their adolescent female charges. In one case, it’s a perverse desire to intrude into their private lives; in the other, it’s a rather unsettling if not fetishistic determination that an outfit the rest of us would consider positively demure is somehow arousing.

I posted the latter story on the CC Facebook page, and got the suggestion of a special Creepiness Curmie award. I must say, it’s kind of disturbing to get two nominees on the same day.

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.

Facebook Follies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupid Legislation of the Month (and it isn't the debt deal)

No one knows for sure who came up with the maxim that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, but no one doubts its wisdom, either. And the bill to raise the debt ceiling is a particularly ugly camel, at that. It is the product of weeks of partisan posturing, a complete lack of presidential leadership, an uncommonly high level—in both qualitative and quantitative terms—of hypocritical and indeed mendacious declarations by virtually any Republican you can mention (except the really stupid ones who may even believe some of the drivel they spout) and more than a few Democrats.

It really doesn’t do what it says it will do, but manages nonetheless to encapsulate the GOP’s proclivity for extortion and the Democrats’ equally well-developed propensity for cravenness and capitulation. It kicks the overwhelming majority of decisions down the proverbial road a little further, and creates a “super-Congress” of people the rest of us don’t get to vote on who will dither and pontificate for a while longer before coming up with a proposal acceptable to the Koch brothers and Grover Freaking Norquist: the only people in the country who appear to count, anymore. The bill may have needed to be passed, but it’s a terrible horrible no good very bad piece of legislation in about every conceivable way.

Still, for absolute, mind-blowing, glow-in-the-dark stupidity, it pales in comparison to this bill from Missouri, passed a couple of weeks ago but only finding its way into the public consciousness over the last couple of days. The Amy Hestir Student Protection Act is named for a student who was molested by a teacher over three decades ago (!). Ms. Hestir testified a couple years back before the Missouri House Education Committee; needless to say, legislators are incapable of reason when confronted by anecdotal evidence that feeds their prejudices, so we now get a bill which apparently prohibits teachers from being Facebook friends with their students.

I suspect that there are constitutional issues involved here: being a teacher doesn’t mean you give up your right to choose your own friends. But it gets worse. Here’s the exact wording of the part I’m talking about:

Teachers cannot establish, maintain, or use a work-related website unless it is available to school administrators and the child's legal custodian, physical custodian, or legal guardian. Teachers also cannot have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student.

OK, a few points. First, it is reasonable to exercise caution, regardless of one’s age or profession, in one’s interactions on social media. My students are older than those in question here. Even so, I won’t initiate a friend request for one of my students (even if I’m confident that the reason the student hasn’t started the process him/herself is oversight rather than choice). I often allow students to see only a limited profile, or block their posts from showing up on my news feed. Even more trepidation is in order when dealing with high schoolers (and younger).

But to say that this law is clumsily written is like saying that Barney Frank isn’t likely to endorse Michele Bachmann for president. First off, it’s ill-conceived in that it targets teachers for no clear reason. I do not doubt that Ms. Hestir was molested by a teacher, and that she suffered considerably from that ordeal. But the creep in question could just as easily have been her church choir director, rec league softball coach, mom’s co-worker or dad’s bowling team buddy... or Dad, himself. But teachers are currently the flavor of the month on the right-wing idiot hit list, so guess who gets the brunt of the stupid rule? (By, the way, shock of shocks, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Jane Cunningham, is the Tea Partier who proposed eviscerating the state’s child-labor laws a few months ago.)

Secondly, it criminalizes not only innocent behavior, but, at least potentially, innocent inertia. It is unclear whether simply being a Facebook friend is forbidden. Cunningham tells CNN not: “The law doesn't prohibit social media contact. If anybody says it does then they have not read the law. It just stops exclusivity, we just want those conversations to be available to the parents and school districts.” I have read the law, and I’m not so sure. The legislation does not, in fact, prohibit employing “exclusive access.” It forbids teachers from having a website that allows such access. Facebook, for example, allows exclusivity through both chat and message features. Of course, what the law actually does is to prevent teachers from having accounts with Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc., altogether. And forget about a personal blog!

That may not be what Ms. Cunningham intended, which means only that she as incompetent at writing as she is at legislating. My guess, however, is that even the mental deficients who run the state of Missouri aren’t really going to try to keep teachers from having a Facebook page. Rather, they will send out the Friend Police to scour the friends lists of students and teachers alike, trampling willy-nilly on 4th as well as 1st Amendment rights, chasing after what is public already. (Note: a student and a teacher can engage in an on-line messaging conversation without being “friends.”)

Teachers know people through other means than their jobs. I have a teenaged niece who is my Facebook friend. If I taught high school instead of college and lived in the same town as her, I’d be fine to continue our Facebook friendship up until the day she enrolled in my class (or perhaps in my school—the law is unclear on this point, as on so many others). But if I forgot to de-friend her, I’d be in violation of the law. It’s not clear what the penalty would be: probably losing my job. Think the regulation wouldn’t be pursued with that level of ardor? Well, people moronic enough to pass or sign a law like this are fully imbecilic enough to demand its enforcement… or, conversely, they were just showboating all along. You choose.

Thirdly, this law wouldn’t work, even if there were a serious problem (“serious” here is intended only in quantitative terms; obviously even a single case is a problem in qualitative terms). The legislation precludes only websites. Are you seriously going to tell me that a pervy teacher isn’t going to figure out that (s)he can still communicate by cell phone, text message, or e-mail? Kids really do know how to delete messages, and the average parent would have no clue how to retrieve them once that happens. This legislation is equivalent to mounting an anti-obesity campaign by outlawing licorice, while leaving unregulated the chocolate-covered marshmallows next to it on the supermarket shelf.

Fourthly, forbidding contact between teachers and “former students” is absurd on its face. I started teaching in 1979, and I’ve still got another decade or more to my career. Even if I were dealing with junior high kids instead of college students, I’d now have “former students” well into their forties. But, as the law is currently written, they’d still be off limits. Nowhere in the bill is there any mention of “minor students” or similar language.

Fifthly, the legislation forbids all manner of positive interactions—not merely the high school teacher who can calm the apprehensions of the former student now experiencing the trauma inherent in the freshman year of college, but also, as pointed out to MSNBC by University of Missouri information services professor Vicki Sauter, specifically professional assistance: “There are social media sites like LinkedIn where a student may want to put together a page for their career and get advice from a teacher. With this law they can’t do that, so I think it’s short sighted.”

Social media also have a positive function during times of crisis. Randy Turner, a teacher at Joplin East Middle School, whose blog piece on the topic is more specific and more eloquent than I can be, describes “the positive effect that teachers and students being Facebook friends had on Joplin Schools’ effort to locate students after the May 22 tornado.”

Finally, there is simply no need for this legislation. Ms. Turner makes this point brilliantly:

The laws are already in place, something Sen. Cunningham never mentions. During the mid 1990s, the state enacted laws which toughened background checks on teachers, expedited the removal of criminal teachers from the classroom, and ensured that their teaching licenses would be revoked.

And those laws have worked. Ironically, the success of that legislation has been used as a weapon against teachers by Sen. Cunningham. Each year as she pushed this legislation, she cited an Associated Press survey which showed Missouri ranked high in the number of teachers whose licenses were revoked for sexual acts with students.

In other words, these people were already being removed from having contact with students and their licenses were being revoked. The law was working. The very success of the law served as ammunition for Sen. Cunningham, since the AP study was comparing Missouri to states that have taken no action to cut down on the minority of teachers who bring shame to the whole profession.

In short, what this bill does is to outlaw positive interactions between teachers and students while doing bupkes to prevent the tiny minority of abusers from continuing their already-criminal ways. It serves as a direct and quite intentional insult to the overwhelming majority of teachers who would no more abuse a child in their care than chew off their own leg. It costs school districts time and, by extension, money, while budgets are being shrunk—and without a whiff of an upside. It reveals a profound lack of understanding of how social media operate, the technology involved, or the adolescent mind-set. Its sponsor is either horrifyingly stupid or outright insane. In other words, it is the quintessence of what passes for “common sense” among the Tea Party crowd.