Oh, That’s Different Then

TESTED by fire:

“Some people say, ‘Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney,’ ” Mr. Obama told Charlie Rose on his PBS interview show.

Barack Obama is not a raving liberal. Dick Cheney is merely ravening. Or was. Now I think he’s just rabid. At any rate, those things are neither equal, nor are they the twin poles of our political existence.

“Dick Cheney sometimes says, ‘Yeah, you know, he took it all lock, stock and barrel.’ My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather, are we setting up a system of checks and balances?”

Well, I think it’s always a good idea to mention Dick Cheney if you need to draw attention away from yourself. I'd have advised Putin to do it over that Super Bowl ring business, myself. But, please, “intelligence gathering” and “checks and balances”? Sure. And appoint Stevie Wonder Secretary of Elephant Descriptions while you’re at it.

In perhaps his most expansive explanation of his surveillance policies since leaked documents exposed a pair of secret programs, Mr. Obama said he had made important changes from the policies of George W. Bush, including making sure that surveillance was approved by Congress and a secret foreign intelligence court. “But I think it’s fair to say that there are going to be folks on the left – and what amuses me is now folks on the right who are fine when there’s a Republican president, but now, Obama’s coming in with the black helicopters,” he said.

Was this really the first you’ve heard about the black helicopters? I know you’re busy an’ all.

And, yes, yes Sir, the freakin’ Bush administration wanted to do this crap while bypassing the rubber-stamp FISA courts altogether. You’re still better than him. Congratulations.

I'm Thinking Of Changing The Name Of This Blog To "What Pierce Said"

THE Man at the Final Four:

It's not just the fact that all the coaches now dress like golf pros and talk like salesmen. It's not just the fact that, except for the pep bands, most of the people in the "student sections" look like they haven't been students since about two grand juries ago. It's not just the fact that this weekend is the climax of a month-long event that will net the various luxury-suite cowboys and buffet-table wranglers of the NCAA $800 million, and the naked profiteering goes all the way down to the fact that you are not allowed to bring a beverage into the arena unless it's contained in an authorized NCAA cup that has POWERADE written on it in big (and very lucrative) letters.

(Also, there is no beer served at NCAA events — except, of course, in the luxury suites of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, where you can get hammered just like it's a Saints game or something. Never let it be said that the NCAA doesn't know who it needs to keep happy … or sockless.)

What has happened to college sports over the past fifty years or so has been done by academics, by institutions of Higher Learning eager, above all, that the national cow be milked as often and as thoroughly as possible. Not even as often and thoroughly as practicable. Or in keeping with sound theory. As Possible.

(We in Indiana are most familiar with the practice through the work of the late Myles Brand, the Philosophy professor and IU president who came to the attention of the NCAA through his pledge to clean up college athletics one foul-tempered, chair-throwing coach at a time. Brand packed his bags, wrote himself a golden parachute that would've made Donald Trump blush, and headed north to Indianapolis, where, five years later, malignant karma struck him down before his reform program could be completed. Or implemented. Or thought of again.)

Never trust a Professor of Philosophy. If we can't expect academicians to keep their heads at first whiff of billion-dollar teevee contracts, how can we expect the hardened criminals of the nation's two major political parties to do so?

It's taken longer than it did for golf and tennis, and even longer than it took for the Olympics, but the amateur burlesque in American college sports is on its way to crashing and the only remaining question is how hard it will fall. The farce is becoming unsupportable.

Y'know, I understand the focus on the "amateur student athlete" charade, but in my inimitable, living-in-a-bunker way I find it misplaced. Professionalism didn't change golf or tennis, it just made the venues of an early time open to players who could make a living at it. The Olympics is a can of worms, and not the good kind of worm; the impulse which kinda sorta swapped a previously corrupt amateur system run by a racist for a more contemporary corrupt professional system run by American television networks and their sponsors seems mostly to have solved the pressing problem of Curt Gowdy bitching about how the Soviet hockey team was really a bunch of pros. Never mind, of course, that the sum total of their Red Army wages from 1948-1980 could fit in one of Carl Lewis' Nikes; never mind how the outrage over the East German "women's" swim team contrasts with the deafening silence over the systematic looting of the Track and Field record book. If we'd had the sort of Olympic committees which had reacted to the former, we wouldn't have had the latter.

It's precisely the same with the NCAA. How 'bout we let intercollegiate athletics be intercollegiate athletics, and operate the sort of world where NFL money, and NBA money, doesn't dictate our nation's universities act as an unfunded farm system? Where are the Teabaggers on the socialism of One and Done? If Money corrupts college presidents, how do we imagine we get equitable health care from single-minded capital enthusiasts? How do we imagine we'll get a just system of government? Stench is the new Chanel No 5.

Even The Liberals At NPR Agree, Vol. CCCXXXI

Adam Davidson, "It's Not Just About the Millionaires". November 9

ONCE more, as if it were needed: I'm not an economist, I'm a shit-flinger. There's less money in it, but but it's a more valuable service.

This election is about stark differences on economic policy, but one of the few fiscal issues on which Democrats and Republicans agree — surprisingly — is how to tax corporations. Every Republican presidential candidate, and even the guy who currently has the job they’re after, wants to lower rates. Raising them, or even maintaining them, might satisfy the anti-corporate angst of protesters and populists, but it won’t come anywhere near paying off our debt.

Our old favorite, the opening paragraph that simultaneously gives the game away, and annihilates the thousand words that follow.

Where do we begin? With the notion that the Republican's Absolutely No Taxes, Ever is "starkly opposed" by the Democrats' Historically Low Taxation Unless We Can Possibly Raise It Slightly On The Wealthiest 1%, Without Pissing Off Donors? Or that "Democrats" and "Republicans" represent the Manichaean boundaries of human cogitation and domestic political will? That, in fact, "Democrat" and "Republican" views on corporate taxation are in some way--in any way--the product of objective thought, rather than objective accounting? That one is justified in saying "even" Barack Obama agrees with the Seven Specks of Granite, as though that settles something, let alone in the affirmative?

How 'bout here: the idea that demands for increasing taxation on the wealthiest Americans and our corporate fellow citizens is an idea born of angst, and one which is proffered as a way to "pay off" "the debt"? Boy, those protesters and populists sure are misguided, now that you've explained them to me.

Who actually believes that the solution to a problem lies in defining it in such a way that one's preferred action seems like the only possible choice? Well, politicians and jingle writers. Anyone else? Who out there, facing the horns of a dilemma, the teeth of a difficulty, or the angry shower-stall erection of a predicament, says to himself, "Wait! I should ask a politician!"?

Most people who study the issue agree that the top federal corporate tax rate (35 percent of profits) is simply too high.

Just a note here--all economic pronouncements coming from me are illiteracies--but is it not the case that by "most people" "who study" you mean "people paid to consider the effect taxation has on corporate profitability"? And nothing further? Such as, say, the effect it would have on corporate profitability if their non-corporate (aka "second-class") fellow citizens decided they should no longer pay to support the infrastructure those corporations depend on to make any profits whatsoever? Or for the massive Defense outlays, the mineral and water rights giveaways, and government contracting which represent a sizable portion of, if not the net aggregate profit, for many? What exactly is it worth to American corporate citizens that the United States government has, over the past century or more, sought to enforce capitalism--a capitalism, remember, based on a convenient and spurious reading of a Constitutional amendment designed to protect former slaves--here and around the world? Why shouldn't the government--as the instrument, supposedly, of the general population--do to corporations what corporations do to their fellows: take every possible advantage of every tiny lever within its grasp?

The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you’ll inevitably get less of.

"Cardinal" means "fundamental" (so "inevitability" is a given. Dude.). If I look at the cardinal points of the compass, I find 'em right where I left 'em the last time. This isn't the, or a, cardinal rule of taxation. It's the standard rejoinder of the taxed, who imagine that, if they could just avoid paying the 2¢ they actually pay of the nominal 35¢ they're taxed on a dollar of profit, they'd have $1.02. It's a convenient, and illiterate, reading of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The system isn't closed. The profit maker (sorry, the Benevolent Employer on whom we all rely) doesn't lose that 2¢. He buys something with it. Granted, he has no choice, but then neither do the rest of us have a choice but to grant him, as just one example, a limited liability non-corporate citizens do not share.

Taxing corporate activity means less investing, less hiring, fewer jobs and a smaller economy

of a certain type,

which hurts the rich, the poor and the middle class alike.

in certain (and unequal) ways.

While this may seem like Republican propaganda,

Just because something sounds like Republican propaganda doesn't make it right.

NPR’s “Planet Money,” for which I work, polled many leading progressive policy groups and academics, all of whom told us that they would support lowering the top corporate tax rate.

Which sounds like the precise thing that's behind Republican propaganda.

Here's the interesting thing about this: you sure don't see this sort of analysis done on Social Security, Medicare, or national health care. Not on the business pages, and not from the Republican party, anyway. Should the top corporate tax rates be cut? Maybe. Should Exxon-Mobil and GE be able to avoid taxes altogether? Maybe, depending on the tax structure, but not under the current one. Nevertheless, it moves! You've got a conclusion which arises not from the "evidence" as characterized by what "most people who study the matter" think, but from how you stated the question. It looks at one portion of the tax structure in isolation. And then--and most of all--it simply ignores the history of corporate bad citizenship, of bribery, of criminal collusion, of unequal access to government and the law, and demands that the victims of these behaviors shoulder more of the burden out of fairness.

Y'know something tells me that if most people who study the problem concluded that the solution was to end the phony corporate protection written into the margins of the 14th Amendment in invisible ink, and to revert to an agrarian/barter culture, with a reasonable democratic control of what was produced, when, and for how much, you wouldn't hear a lot of these folks saying, "Welp, okay, let's give it a try."

Any serious analyst who isn’t paid by one of the tax-benefiting industries would suggest eliminating most industry-specific loopholes. But the problem is that cutting them will not even come close to reviving our economy. Alternatively, even if we eliminated all corporate taxes, the extra $250 billion per year at the companies’ disposal wouldn’t be enough to make our $14 trillion economy grow. President Obama tried an $800 billion stimulus, and we’re still debating whether it helped or hurt or did nothing at all.

Okay, for the record: we're in a sixty-five year hole, corresponding to our having added to our WWII indebtedness military expenditures since then which pretty much continued at the same rate. Those aren't recoverable, they aren't readily convertible into something else of value, and they've benefitted very few, financially, at an oversized consequence to our national indebtedness. And we exacerbated that, beginning with the Reagan "Government Debt is Theft" revolution (and how'd that bit of expert wisdom work out for us?) by slashing the top marginal tax rates, which is roughly the level of increased debt we find ourselves dealing with today. The argument for having done so was Jobs. We are now arguing over why there aren't any jobs.

So I'm guessing that most experts who have studied the problem and can be trusted to utter an honest word on the subject would conclude that slashing those tax rates did not work. And doing more of that, while not necessarily contraindicated, is at least lacking in a strong moral or practical imperative. And, further, even a simple history of the public debt--even one which, as this one does, ignores all benefits of public spending--tells us that we didn't get here overnight, so insisting that some action or other "won't solve the problem" is a quacking canard.

It serves the interest of both parties to argue about taxes on corporations and the wealthy because neither wants to discuss the alternative, which is where things get touchy.

S'funny. A couple hundred words ago, what all our politicians agreed on was apodictic.

To solve our debt problems, we have to go to where the money is — the middle class. People who earn between $30,000 and $200,000 a year make a total of around $5 trillion and pay less than 10 percent of that in taxes (owing mostly to tax incentives and the fact that most families make less than $68,000, where larger tax rates begin).

Most make less than $68,000, and are taxed at lower rates, which is why we lump them in with people making $200,000? Because we know you wouldn't do that just to get the required numbers, right? Because there's a cardinal rule about that, somewhere.

Interesting, too, how easy it is to rid ourselves of "middle-class" loopholes.

Increasing the middle-class tax burden an additional 8 percent, however, would actually have a bigger impact than taxing millionaires at 100 percent.

Just for the record, what impact would "killing everyone who doesn't work for a living" have?

Still, many experts say we don’t need to raise the tax rate on the middle class; we just need to get rid of some of those despised loopholes (or beloved incentives). Most reform proposals suggest gradually eliminating the most popular tax deductions, like mortgage interest rates ($120 billion per year) and workplace health insurance ($200 billion per year). Regardless, most economists acknowledge, and most politicians privately concede, that the middle class will have to give up some benefits (Social Security, Medicare) or it will have to pay more in taxes. Actually, it will probably have to do both. The millionaires will be paying more, too. Leading Democrats are proposing a nearly 10 percent hike.

"Leading Democrats" are "proposing a 10% hike"? When, pray tell, was the last time Democrats drove tax policy? When was the last time "leading Democrats" accomplished anything they proposed? Funny how all of a sudden their proposals are supposed to be taken seriously.

It's plain, it's simple, and it's unequivocal: over the past thirty years or more, unequal access to government policy has further enriched the wealthiest Americans at the expense of all other Americans, and has permitted increased protection of huge corporations with fewer and fewer controls on their behavior. The argument is not what math gets us out of the stink this shit created. The argument is how much further do you fucks think you can push it? Paying for today, and paying for the future, is something all Americans should do, including our "corporate" brothers. Paying for the past is the ethical answer to the question of government debt, and that should be done--in addition to what's fair--by those who helped themselves while everyone else sank.

Well, You've Got Plenty Of Dissonance, So I Think The Problem's In Your Cognition

SO a day after the memorial service for those killed and injured in the State Fair stage collapse, a little over twenty-four hours following Governor Mitch "The Only Thing That Could Improve Ayn Rand Is A Little Christianity" Daniels' announcement that the whole thing was the weather's fault, and nobody can prepare for weather; that is, roughly, about the time anyone who's ever paid any attention whatever to such things would have predicted the original story would begin leaking seriously [structure wasn't subject to city inspections, since it's on state property; it's the responsibility of Homeland Security, now, which doesn't consider "scaffolding" to be a "structure" (and hence, required to survive 90 mph winds, or a third-again beyond what the Governor says no one could ever anticipate); it would've been inspected--and would have had to meet our standards for permanent structures--if it was in tax-burdened Illinois; the outdoor venue for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, scheduled to perform fifteen miles north, sent everyone home un-overtured but safe; this is the fourth such rigging collapse this summer, though no one could have anticipated more than three, I suppose; several independent experts have suggested that something was seriously substandard with the set-up, many mentioning a lack of crossbeams and guying; we're really just warming up] the Indianapolis City/County council breaks a land speed record for "shoveling shit at the NFL's behest".

See, Indianapolis has no ticket scalping ordinance. Make that "had". The NFL finds this as unseemly as gambling, but a lot more amenable to public weight-tossing, so it insisted on one as a condition of granting the make-up Super Bowl to the city it promised one to in exchange for using a billion and counting in tax dollars to build a new football barn which seats exactly the same number of people as the old one, but at higher prices. Indianapolis should have gotten the last Super Bowl, but the Cowboys spent even more. God's in His heaven.

And, yes, it is interesting how the whole thing was already in the works with a new city ordinance promised, as though voting didn't mean anything or somethin'. And the city's hosted the NCAA finals at least once a decade over the past thirty years or so, and just shooing scalpers away from the venue (on no authority beyond the NCAAs and the people who stand to make a buck) has been sufficient. But not for the NFL. So, as promised….

Now, look, I do follow politics, in my sleepy fashion, so it's not the toadying, the whiff of corruption, or the willingness to permit high-speed gang anal, sans foreplay, provided there's a nickel involved and one of the guys is on th' teevee that surprises me. Wholly expected. Never even an issue. This city elected a proto-Teabagger mayor in 2007, and you oughta see the public works "improvements" festival going on in preparation for a three-day fucking football game. We already passed--and have steadfastly refused to enforce, so far--an anti-panhandling ordinance of "questionable" legality which will suddenly be remembered about two weeks before the Big Event, and just as quickly forgotten (it happens to place an undue stress on entrepreneurial buyers of gold and operators of franchise fast food abominations who would go out of business if they couldn't dress a minimum-wage employee like a clown and send him out into traffic. Trust me, our scrupulousness has nothing to do with concerns over the Constitutional rights of the unsightly). If the goddam NFL demanded our wimmen the only question would be where we're supposed to meet the bus.

No, it was the local news coverage, which consisted of the sloppiest blowjob possible so soon after a tragedy, coupled with photos of the Large Scary Negro men who scalp tickets. The new law will "protect the consumer" they said. Because ticket resellers--unlike concert-venue managers--will be licensed. It won't affect all the ticket brokers in town, the ones who employ large numbers of Large Scary Negro men to buy up blocks of tickets restricted to "public" sale in order to skirt anti-scalping measures. No. Thank goodness. Because they're entrepreneurs. And because the nice local newshairdos thoughtfully gave them microphones so they could tell us so.

Not a mention of the rest of it, though: not about the NFL pushing the city around, not the sudden loss of your right to go to the venue the day of and sell a ticket you don't need, none of it. In a state whose economic "miracle"--being better than Michigan--has been credited to Mitch Daniels' Economic Freedom agenda, there's not a peep while the game is rigged in plain sight, the little guy takes it in the shorts, and the big operations get their competition swept up alongside the homeless. Because the NFL said so. Because a Super Bowl is so fucking important you can hand over your sovereignty, spend whatever it takes, and take away a right your citizens have had since the invention of the ducat. And it's all Good. Or so the teleprompter says.

Okay, so I expected all that, too.

That Sputnik Moment Was The Problem, Bub.

shown actual size

OKAY, so it's time to admit that it's Public Education which is the failure, that Our Schools are just the bedsores the thing has developed from the inattention of mean-spirited and sadistic family members drooling over the old girl's money, and move on. It's failed, clearly. Nice idea. Successful in its day, the way grandma musta looked hot in that neck-to-ankle swimsuit back before Radio. But fatally flawed. There's no money in Communism *, and Education seeks to make people smarter. People do not take kindly to this.

In fact, as we clearly see, people run screaming in the other direction. When I was a lad the Horoscope was a daily feature in the Indianapolis Anti-Fluoridationist. It was buried somewhere; it came with 19th century graphics, and you followed a number code to read your personalized message, which is what drew my seven-year-old self; I remember it taking about a year before I could read all twelve messages by looking at the pile of words, rather than following the code. It was a dumbshit amusement. This was in the day when computers were the size of a house, plate tectonics was scoffed at, and Velcro was for plants. Today, you may have noticed, astrology is fucking news. What's the point of education? At the twenty-minute mark of Monday night's NBC News With Brian Williams' Suit he read the story of Oprah's imaginary sister. Let's leave alone the woman's public relationship with Honesty over the years; Jesus Fucking Christ, if I wanted Oprah news I think I could find it. Lemme know when she cures cancer. Or books bin Laden.

Now, I'm not saying that the President's Sputnik reference wasn't a fairly slick political move, or what must've seemed like a slick political move, grading on a Slick Political Move scale, which is to say bullshit in pursuit of self-aggrandizement at the expense of your fellows. Let's hit Republicans right in the American Exceptionalism! Boy, that'll mean they have to adjust their Budget Cutting Rhetoric to reflect their easy platitudes!

Listen, if there are educated men out there who still believe that Pointing Out Their Total Fucking Cognitive Dissonance has any effect on the Republican party then there's simply no point in educating anyone.

The American government--hell, every American with a subscription to Popular Mechanics--knew that Sputnik was a gimmick. Same as we fucking knew twenty years later that the Soviets were bankrupt. Nobody let on, because panic is good for business. At least the Defense business.

This is the goddam fucking hell of it, Mr. President: we came out of WWII as the only major power whose hair was still in place. Global economic hegemony, aside from our erstwhile Allies the other side of the Dnieper. So, of course, we started a religious war with them--because otherwise our own religious paranoids would have voted Republican--and set about gobbling up all we could everywhere else, rather than establishing sustainable growth patterns. This is known as the genius of capitalism.

The program started cracking in the late 50s, about the time Sputnik launched. Death from Above! Nukes on the Moon! Our response, sir, was to use this to justify continuing "Defense" expenditures at WWII levels in perpetuity. This was back, of course, when you actually had to justify that sort of thing. Quaint, really.

What did we get out of it, besides Tang, a multi-billion-dollar Space War Agency with nowhere to go now, and massive debt? This is the problem, sir. The same way all those qualities you admire in Ronald Reagan are the problem. We can't go on peddling this shit to ourselves. We can't go on letting "does it make money for Congressmen and GE?" be a final arbiter. That's the goddam thing that has to stop. American Exceptionalism is the fucking reason America is no longer exceptional. I sympathize with your plight. No one realizes more than I that the fight was given up decades before you came around. But then, I didn't ask you to run for President. And this shit ain't helpin'.

_______________
* Where is A. Whitney Brown?

EduMEcation

Michelle Rhee, "What I've Learned". December 6

I HAD to run to the drugstore last night to get some more Cobra Venom for my Poor Wife's ailing foot (not really, but doesn't the whole OTC section being taken over by actual snake oil give anyone pause? Remarkable thing, really, how much the Invisible hand busies itself with updating the labels of one generation's nostrums for the next). I cut down the magazine aisle. And Michelle Rhee was staring at me (from Newsweek. Tina Brown, du bist eine Genie!).

So, first, someone needs to explain to me how it is that, in the late 1970s some time, we decided that the real problem with this country is that the privileged didn't have enough privilege. I don't recall being asked. And why thirty years of results don't seem to budge the idea. Thirty years of tax cuts somehow has not led to the conclusion that wealthy individuals keep the windfall, and wealthy corporations use it to ship jobs to wherever's cheapest. Because, I guess, iPhones.

Then at various way stations on the route we've restated the original problem which, of course, our "efforts" have done nothing to alter, in order to justify doing some more.

If we really want to condemn American education as a failure, why do we look any farther than that? Why don't we point to our politicians? Our issues? Our public forums and private Twitterings? It's just one man's opinion, but you're welcome to it: Shelf Life. I've not exactly made a study of it, but from the various sounds of shit raining down on me over the years I've convinced myself that the 60s was when we stopped making things and started figuring out how to sell the things we didn't make anymore; the 70s was when this began to turn a profit. The 60s, then, would be the time when "cutting edge" multi-megacorporations began shaping our brave new world, when Coca-Cola went from selling the unspeakable concoction which for an earlier, saner world had merely camouflaged the taste of cocaine, to plastering the Coca-Cola name on everything, on the grounds that the high level of quality the name conveyed to the swilling public would allow it to produce even cheaper versions of the product and make more money.

And the point, of course, is not that someone discovered the idea--GM had been marketing cars that way for decades, and if George Westinghouse didn't invent Planned Obsolescence it's because someone else already had. It's that this is the point where we reach critical mass, where post-War economic hegemony begins to lose some steam, where we speed the process along trying to keep some sorry-assed mandarins in power in Southeast Asia, where little brown people fuck with our right to cheap and limitless gasoline, and where the technological wizardry that will have us all in videophones, robot sex, and up to eight channels on your satellite teevee by 1980 raises the happy dream that someday, someday, corporations will be able to actually market the Fascist Soul-Death they can, at that point, only practice on their employees.

And Lo, it came to pass.

And no small part of this, of course, is the way people began to internalize feel-good fraudulence for themselves (again, we may have invented snake oil, and it's not like our history books were models of dispassionate scholarship prior to Reagan; it's just that before his time a portion of the populace actually frowned on mendacity). It's but a half-step from there to believing that the most honest-seeming liars are the most trustworthy, rather than the ones who ought to get the first-run tar and virgin feathers.

And then there was Michelle Rhee staring at me.

Two years teaching experience parlayed into the post of superintendent of DC schools. That's not a tribute to her "ideas" mind you, but a mile marker on the off-ramp to Hell. Three years as superintendent, spent in stereotypical union bashing and all-too-familiar resumé padding. Injected herself into this year's DC mayoral race in support of her boss--who was running way ahead--then griped that the voters didn't understand all she'd done for them when he lost. Refused to resign after the general election until cornered, apparently sensing there's good money in martyrdom, but not realizing that voters who tossed her man out on his graft-padded keister wouldn't consider her one. Tried to parlay Waiting for Superman into a job she insisted she was refusing to look for. Now has "her own" lobbying group, StudentsFirst, hoping to prove that a plucky little Mom&Pop startup can compete with the big boys in the rough-and-tumble world of funneling cash to crooked politicians.

All of which makes her the perfect person to write about Education reform for the new Newsweek. Or, rather, to write about herself writing about Education reform:

After my boss, Washington, D.C., mayor Adrian Fenty, lost his primary in September, I was stunned. I had never imagined he wouldn’t win the contest, given the progress that was visible throughout the city—the new recreation centers, the turnaround of once struggling neighborhoods, and, yes, the improvements in the schools. Three and a half years ago, when I first met with Fenty about becoming chancellor of the D.C. public-school system, I had warned him that he wouldn’t want to hire me. If we did the job right for the city’s children, I told him, it would upset the status quo—I was sure I would be a political problem. But Fenty was adamant. He said he would back me—and my changes—100 percent. He never wavered, and I convinced myself the public would see the progress and want it to continue. But now I have no doubt this cost him the election.

The timing couldn’t have been more ironic. The new movie Waiting for Superman—which aimed to generate public passion for school reform the way An Inconvenient Truth had for climate change—premiered in Washington the night after the election. The film championed the progress Fenty and I had been making in the District, and lamented the roadblocks we’d faced from the teachers’ union. In the pro-reform crowd, you could feel the shock that voters had just rejected this mayor and, to some extent, the reforms in their schools.

When I started as chancellor in 2007, I never had any illusions about how tough it would be to turn around a failing system like D.C.’s; the city had gone through seven chancellors in the 10 years before me. While I had to make many structural changes—overhauling the system for evaluating teachers and principals, adopting new reading and math programs, making sure textbooks got delivered on time—I believed the hardest thing would be changing the culture. We had to raise the expectations that people had about what was possible for our kids.

I quickly announced a plan to close almost two dozen schools, which provoked community outrage. We cut the central office administration in half. And I also proposed a new contract for teachers that would increase their salaries dramatically if they abandoned the tenure system and agreed to be paid based on their effectiveness.

Though all of these actions caused turmoil in the district, they were long overdue and reaped benefits quickly. In my first two years in office, the D.C. schools went from being the worst performing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress examination, the national test, to leading the nation in gains at both the fourth and eighth grade in reading as well as math. By this school year we reversed a trend of declining enrollment and increased the number of families choosing District schools for the first time in 41 years.

Y'know, it's funny. Decades of blather about education reform, and school accountability, and such, and the NAEP is the only test we have that can be used for those sorts of comparisons. But it's not comprehensive; the test is given to a representative sample of schools. And the results are on the state level, which means it's an accident of geography that DC is the only single school district competing against other state's averages.

As such it's not really designed for, or intended to be used as, a comparison of the ring records of All-Star Superintendents. Even so, DC could crow about its achievements, excepting that little matter of Rhee comparing ordinal rank ("worst performing") with "leading the nation in gains", which might send the cynic off to check the actual NAEP figures, assuming he wasn't already familiar with Rhee's creative relationship with the truth.

Maybe the NAEP has a page which compares such things, or gives out awards for Most Improved, or whatnot. I didn't find it. I did find the state-by-state results which--sitting down, are we?--show that the improvement in DC schools has been going on for the last decade, long before Rhee's Three Year Miracle began, and following closely the improvement in African-American test scores nationwide over that period.

Oh, she manages to lie about the PISA results, too, though she's altered her numbers somewhat (apparently there've been new results since her appearance on Colbert. This was also her MO with her miracle two-year stint in Balamer; the numbers fly high and then disappear altogether, just after independent observers train on 'em.)

Mea, meet culpa:

Still, I could have done a better job of communicating. I did a particularly bad job letting the many good teachers know that I considered them to be the most important part of the equation. I should have said to the effective teachers, “You don’t have anything to worry about. My job is to make your life better, offer you more support, and pay you more.” I totally fell down on doing that. As a result, my comments about ineffective teachers were often perceived as an attack on all teachers. I also underestimated how much teachers would be relying on the blogs, random rumors, and innuendo. Over the last 18 to 24 months, I held teacher-listening sessions a couple of times a week. But fear was already locked in. In the end, the changes that we needed to make meant that some teachers and principals would lose their jobs in a punishing economy. I don’t know if there was any good way to do that.

Some people believed I had disdain for the public. I read a quote where a woman said it seemed like I was listening, but I didn’t do what she told me to do. There’s a big difference there. It’s not that I wasn’t listening; I just didn’t agree and went in a different direction. There’s no way you can please everyone.

Or fool them, as a wise man, who really did listen, once noted.

I'm destroying your union protections to help you! Why, oh why, must you listen to the internet? Once I get rid of all those bad teachers--it's not you, of course--why, everyone left will share in a King's ransom, which the legislature will keep turned on full forever! I mean, just take a walk down any charter school hallway, and note all the highly experience, well-paid, proven performers on the staff.

I'll say this for Rhee. She's right about how we can't keep politics out of school reform. Because doing what that requires would land you in the Big House for life.

Who Asked For It?

IF there's anything that'll turn my congenital but wholly defensible dyspepsic outlook on American culture, or "culture", damn near homicidal quicker'n a David Brooks column on how iPhones prove our innate superiority, it's those times when Americans get all pissy about Rights.

Well, let's rephrase that in recognition of another gleaming facet of our junk culture: I hate it when the Press tells me that Americans are getting all pissy about Rights, since in the present case CBS also tells me that 80% of Americans support body scanners in airports, and only 15% oppose them. You can add to that the fact that half of all Americans don't fly at all in any given year, and another 30% fly once or twice, and the "groundswell" begins to look like it consists of disgruntled network executives.

Of course no consideration of Rights would be complete without hypocrisy and ignorance, the ubiquitous garden gnomes of the American political landscape; Americans are a lot more ambivalent about defending the rights of others than they are about insisting on their own, and those rights are often Actually Something Else. Smokers' rights. The rights of the Unborn. The Right of the Bush Twins to Use a Fake ID to Get Roaring Drunk on Mojitos Just Like Everybody Else Did in College. (And this is distinct from the utterly convenient pop-confusion over what actual Rights actually are, as in "The First Amendment gives me the right to teach Creationism in public schools.")

All of this is directly traceable to the rightwing reaction to the post-war judicial trend emphasizing personal over property rights, with the Civil Rights movement being the most glaring example. But there's also the school prayer decisions, and Miranda, which the Right's rabid reaction to, much like the National Review's history on race, we're all now supposed to ignore, have forgotten, or never learned of the first place. The American Right was outraged when the Court ruled that police power did not include the right to shine a light in your face for 87 hours and beat you with a garden hose until you signed a confession. Outraged. This is the genesis of the Law N' Order campaign that brought us Richard M. Nixon.

Of course if you're old enough to remember this, and not so old that you've forgotten, or if you're independent of mind enough to have learned about it yourself in the interim--since they weren't going to teach it that way in history class--you know there was an odd reversal of sorts that occurred once it became obvious that Jim Crow was a lost cause; enforcing someone else's rights ("judicial activism") itself became a violation of your rights, and shortly after ("reverse discrimination") you granted yourself the right to pretend that enforcement was the right, and you were entitled to your share. It's not hard to trace from there to the complete linguistic confusion that attends matters today.

So, forgive me, but I'm not joining in until you choose one: America's right to beshit itself about Homeland Security, or America's right to gripe like a sleep-deprived eight-year-old every time it is personally inconvenienced. You gave the fucking Cheney administration carte blanche on domestic spying, and now you're outraged at a service charge. The lot'a ya ought to be strip-searched every time you go out in public, by poorly-trained, mentally defective, roided-up inverts, until you agree to think things through in the future.

Which doesn't mean I'm taking the side of the fucking TSA, or DHS on this, especially with that whole "flying is a privilege, not a right" routine:

49 U.S.C. § 40103 : US Code - Section 40103: Sovereignty and use of airspace

(a) (2) A citizen of the United States has a public right of transit through the navigable airspace. To further that right, the
Secretary of Transportation shall consult with the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board established under
section 502 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (29 U.S.C. 792) before prescribing a regulation or issuing an order or procedure
that will have a significant impact on the accessibility of commercial airports or commercial air transportation for
handicapped individuals.

I guarantee you, anybody sticking his latexed fingers up the fundament of some Forbes 500 CEO before he gets on his private jet is getting paid a lot more than minimum wage.

It's driving which is a privilege. And driving while yammering on a cellphone which is a right. Try to keep this shit straight.

Riley™ Brand Balm Of Gilead. Act Now And Get A Second Allusion Free! (Just Pay Separate Shipping & Handling)

OUR Uncle Kvetch, at Roy's:

[Roy] I'm beginning to think this game isn't worth the candle. [/Roy]

I'm with you. What with Mr. Hope & Change revealing himself to be the Clinton redux I suspected he was all along, and with the less-awful party poised to go down as only they know how -- viz., with a 50-foot bellyflop into an empty swimming pool, and with the prospect of a President Snowbilly or Aw-Shuckabee getting less absurd by the day, I'm feeling an ever-greater need to disengage myself from this whole pathetic spectacle and leave it to the pathetic people who inhabit it. But that would mean no longer enjoying the high-octane snark of Roy and those of his ilk, and snark is one of my basic food groups.

What to do?

Which, mind you, doesn't prompt me to offer advice, fer chrissakes, but to consider that I've been trying to answer this since the '68 elections, and if anything I'm further asea. "Become a Midwestern suburban schlub, yell at the teevee, and grow your own pot in the basement," well, it doesn't work for everybody.

Yesterday Brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson pointed us at Oliver Willis' "The Liberal Blogosphere Goes Fox News," a remarkable document, assuming you need to be reminded that the argument never fucking ends, or changes:

"Oh, if only everyone to the Left of me would agree to see things my way purely out of fear of a Republican planet, what a bright shiny place this world would be. Instead, they're ruining it for everybody!"

Or maybe my mind's playing tricks on me. Could'a sworn, though, that I heard this 1) through the slow-motion Health Care cave-in; 2) in the run-up to Surge II: Smack Down in Smack Town; 3) after the Nobel speech; 4) as both President and Candidate Obama reneged on FISA; 5) about Tim Geithner, and pretty much everything Tim Geithner has done; 6) as Candidate Obama shamelessly pandered to the anti-choice Right after securing the nomination; 7) excusing the 98% Centrist Democratic field that spawned him, except for Hillary Clinton, who was pilloried for being a Centrist; and 8) enough other times that I could have made it a Top Ten list if I'd bothered to think before typing. Come to think of it, the only time it stops is when the people such types don't agree with are in power, at which point it's just ducky to rail against our corporate imperial masters, at least until we get close enough to an election for Amy Sullivan to lecture us on how to behave in church.

So, lemme just ask ya: Who's in charge here? Who asked for the nomination? Who's supposed to be courting whom? I've got a lot worse to say about that other "major" political "party", but at least it doesn't stint on the lip service to its base, come Hell, high water, or a brick wall Reality facial.

Y'know what else? Spare me th' fucking "Well, those are the positions he took as a candidate" routine, and the attendant "It's the voters' fault if they thought he'd suddenly transform into Howard Zinn" crap. It was the President's stanchest supporters I heard trawling that Mystical, Post-Inaugural Metamorphosis during the campaign (and when those of us who had read his positions pointed them out, what I heard was The Sounds of Silence). Ditto that "Sure, Democratic Presidents don't do enough for their base"--wait for it!--"but…." Acknowledging the facts ("by God you'd better!") doesn't grant you license to ignore them from then on out.

(Incidentally, nice job of defining yourself, Barack Obama, and, by extension, Joe Lieberman, as "center-leftists". When I need Ronald Reagan's opinions I'll ask him.)

Let's try this another way. Suppose that you love country music, and as a young person decide it's the career path you'd like to follow. You have, more or less, two choices: try to insert yourself into the star machinery, at whatever cost to yourself and your self-esteem (maybe none, maybe considerable), or you can do what you want to do from day one, and hope to get recognized for it at some point (probably the only possible path in this day and age if you happen to have been born ugly). Barack Obama wanted to be a star. He's not exempt from critics pointing out he's flat. That goes with the fucking territory. He's obliged to play for applause. He's also obliged to sell a persona. He chose "Really Thoughtful, Well-Spoken Guy Who Considers All Sides of the Issue Without Regard for Ugly Partisanship". This alone calls his judgment into question, not to mention the depth of his understanding of the Reagan Presidency. This was the absolute wrong fucking choice at the absolute wrong fucking moment. It was precisely the time for the anti-Reagan. There's no protecting him from the fallout of that choice. Go argue with the Republicans who claim he's the first Commie in the Oval Office.

Which brings us to that other party. And, as is so often the case, there's a near-perfect example of our point to be found among the cornfields and the steel mills, the limestone quarries and the Linens 'N Things of the great state of Indiana. We mentioned last week, after the Brown victory (damned Leftists!), that there was a sudden groundswell of sump water over a potential challenge to Evan "Damn Leftists!" Bayh by Congressional Choirboy Mike Pence; this was followed by a poll showing Pence leading a theoretical head-to-head matchup. We asked, at the time, what Under God would possibly keep Pence from running, under the circumstances. After all, Bayh's vote is 1% of the Senate total, and (Gentle Reader, hold onto something!) he's pretty much, oh, Howard Zinn with a $500 haircut to the Hoosier Republican laity. And we answered: that shitpot full of money he's been sitting on rather than helping actual Democrats in the actual Indiana. And yesterday Pence announced he wouldn't run, since his expectation of enormous secular power in the Kingdom of the next Republican majority in the House is so great. Meaning that the entire episode played out so we could get one half-truth once it ended. In other words, par.

(By the way, actual Republican functionaries in Indiana--at least the ones who aren't secretly whipping themselves in supplication, or in a men's room, at this hour--know that Bayh's a not-so-closeted Republican. But they also know he's capable of just about anything where money's involved, so they try to keep him on his toes now and again.)

In other words, furthering the cause of True Conservatism, of which Mike Pence is said to be the purest-hearted champion, is less important than holding onto your own fucking perks, even when the Son of a Castroite is in your sights.

So, to return to the real world, Whaddya do when Reason has been dealt out of the hand, and you're escorted from the casino for kibitzing? Wish the fuck I knew. What I do know, though, is this: the Republican party--and the base it manages to cater to, at least in words--is just as fucked as always, and more fucked than ever. Whether this President decides, belatedly, to fight 'em, or just continues to collude, the die is cast. I am at heart a humanitarian; I would sincerely regret seeing my neighbor devoured by wolves, or governed by Mitch Daniels (more than he already is). But what's the prospect of Palin 2012? What th' fuck do they do with the ongoing Reagan-Bush disaster? Cut taxes? What taxes? Figure out how to toss what's left of the working class on the street, and what used to be the middle class into poverty? For a while even Reagan understood he couldn't risk invading even half-assed countries with a depleted military, though you always knew the itch was there and he'd overstep in the Middle East at some point. There are only so many Grenadas, or reasons to send Armadas to 'em. One more military blunder and we'll be fortunate to find the troops to defend Sault Ste. Marie. You don't fix healthcare, the economy follows, and your soft power is tottering, too, not that Repugs care much for that. Sure, Oliver, I admit that a Republican majority means we'll be relaxing pollution standards so they can maximize profits before the Big Flood; who's to blame for letting them up out of the muck in the first place? We've got a party that can't govern, and a party that's afraid to, and both have had a shot in the past decade and chose to keep things just the way they are. I got nothing left to cheer about, so it sure ain't gonna be your custodianship. And, really, I've got little left to fear from a resurgent GOP that I won't get from the "Center Left", except up a different orifice. The American public has decided--in no small part with help from a tenth-rate actor with memory bubbles--that it will have to drown before it recognizes moisture. You can send in the therapists, or send in the clowns. I think regular readers know my preference.

On The Anodyne Qualities Of The Wicked, Squawking Box In The Living Room

LET us suppose that you suddenly find yourself a middle-aged Midwesterner at the tail end of this previous weekend, slowly being forced to admit to himself that this time, just like fifteen times before, he has not managed to fight off whatever godawful respiratory disfunction his Poor Wife brought home from public school, aka Hell's Culture Medium, with the twin amulets of zinc lozenges and vitamin C, which have, at best, somewhat lessened its effects--to that point--while making the inside of his mouth taste, and feel, as if he'd been keeping a chaw of tin foil there for thirty-six hours. That--again! Groundhog Day!--the tiny incidence of sore throat two mornings ago, the one which has steadily gotten worse, is, in fact, connected to the lethargy so profound it's even noticeable in a man not particularly given to long-term exertion in the first place, and presages a similar slow breech of the mucous-control system, like the end of Force 10 from Navarone.

You will find yourself tempted to turn on the television, because listening to the enormous clogged drain inside your skull has become tedious, but this will only make things worse. For one thing, back when the Mutual Happy Ending Broadcast Committee that determines who gets what NFL game looked at Week Four, the Green Bay/ Minnesota match-up had to look like ratings dynamite or a roadside bomb. Would perennial sportscaster Marry or Fuck? Object Brett Fah-vuh-ruh be on the Vikings roster? Or re-re-re-retired? If he was playing, could he still actually grip a football? So they split the difference and gave it to ESPN for Monday night, meaning they missed out on having the real professional fluffers do tricks on NBC Sunday night, but they got an extra day to convince football fans to watch despite the Ultimate Junior High Grudge Match PR campaign. The catch here being that it seems, on Fahrrrve's part, to have actually been some sort of grudge match against the organization which had heartlessly decided a couple years ago that it would like to stop paying him $150,000 a minute to play a kid's game, which it had been doing for the previous fifteen seasons, and go with an outstanding prospect by the name of Aaron Rodgers, thirty years Faaahve-ruh's junior, despite the fact that F*vre's father is still tragically dead.

And despite the fact that this fucks the loyal fans of Lambeau Field, who were just months ago the loyalest, heart-warmingest aficionados in all of Sport, but who, it turns out, cannot collectively move razor blades, big-screen teevees, or sodium-laden cans of soup. Oh well, at least I didn't get sick on Sunday night, when I would have been forced to listen to Professional Decent Guy and Biblical Homo Abhorrer Tony "One and Done" Dungy.

Speaking of people who are willing to turn their life's love into a professional wrestling story arc for quarters, NASA, the not-quite-crypto-military agency which hasn't found anyone to torture yet, is all set to blow up the Moon as part of the Cowboys, Pirates, and Hunky ER Doctors in Space Program. Y'know, to see if there's enough theoretical water on the place to support a massive colonization program before anyone starts asking why we need a massive colonization program, or pointing out the track record of white people invading things. I learned this shortly after throbbing sinuses, burning throat, and fawning sportscasters had driven me to explore the uncharted reaches of Stuff I Recorded A Year Ago And Never Watched, specifically some PBS deal about Life On Mars? featuring scientists from NASA's Space Junk Division asking the eternal question: Does the possibility that Life evolved on other planets mean a lifelong employment opportunity, or what?

And don't get me wrong: I'm all for basic research for its own sake, and unlike lunar real estate scams, the Mars missions at least have some small justification, assuming all these people and all those millions were just sitting around going to waste otherwise. But, please, knock off the Search for Extraterrestrial Life routine, huh? Didn't that rock with the "wormholes" thing embarrass you enough? We know the conditions under which Life began on Earth. We know how unknowably vast are Time and Space. We're trying to "find" "Life" nearby not because it means anything, but because we can, and on everyone else's dime.

Look, think archeology. There's tons of banknotes out there for "Biblical" archeology, which employs plenty of archeologists willing to look for Noah's Ark, but which counts for precisely nothing, which everyone smart enough to be involved realizes. Meanwhile, finding the money to do real archeology is like asking for divine intervention. It's one thing to hope to find liquid water on Mars, or microbes on Enceladus; it's another to be seen openly rooting for that result, on camera, in a roomful of cheering nerds all working for Uncle Sugar, when you're all smart enough to find jobs elsewhere.

Which reminds me: as long as you're at it, could you do something about a diversity program, fer chrissakes? And a cure for the common cold would be nice, too.

Just Say No

DOC Stripes points us to Popehat's Why I Oppose President Obama's Speaking to the Nation's Schoolchildren. More irritability ensues.

I was--you might find this a little farfetched--already irritable on the subject of the public schools, having just yesterday managed once again to come in in the middle of something on the Sundance Channel (Motto: The Only Cable Network Which Does Not Endlessly Repeat Its Programming!), that something being Ron Mann's documentary Grass. Having gone through all this a mere month ago with A Skin Too Few, a documentary on Nick Drake, I'm already reasonably certain that 1) it will be replayed late this month; 2) that date is so far off that it will not appear on the DVR schedule until the odds that I will forget to check for it have risen considerably; and 3) that recourse to the Sundance Channel website is fine if you're a big fan of viewing two pages over and over, each of which links to the other, or if Giving Up is something you find difficult to accomplish without help. Either I'm missing something important, or they are, which means for the individual, of course, that you're left yelling at the Hold music.

What I did catch of Grass included clips from two of the three anti-marihuana films I was shown in my own high school days. The first two came as I, neophyte doper, joined dozens of other aspiring sophomores in getting the fucking State-Mandated Hygiene Class out of the way at the same summer school session where one took Driver's Ed; this was convenient for the school, too, as it could just rotate the stable of dumbass coaches whose teaching competence was stretched to the limit by the requirements of answering questions about contacting the syph from toilet seats and showing car-crash snuff films, respectively. And who needed the work as they were otherwise unemployable.

Hygiene had recently been renamed Health & Safety as part of the NASA-inspired movement to match post-war standards and practices with late pre-war technical knowledge. This mostly involved swapping Old Gold and Chocolate Brown textbook covers for something with bold orange stripes, a process which apparently left no money for upgrading the stock of classroom films. And so it was that one fine summer day I spent two hours in a windowless classroom watching a pair of Harry Anslinger classics from the early 50s, with Asphalt Jungle JDs in black leather smoking reefers they'd obtained from the Panama-hatted Pusher who hung around the schoolyard, which led, of course, directly to heroin addiction when the Kick just wasn't enough anymore. But not before, high on happy weed, the punks stole a case of Cokes and, lacking openers, smashed the bottles on a handy window sill and manically drank down the broken glass without noticing. The ensuing "discussion" was led by the Wrestling coach, a man who had received his drug abuse education direct from Art Linkletter and Joe Friday, and whose teams posted a combined dual-meet record of 3-39 the three years I was there. I was tempted to say, "Wow, I've had really bad cottonmouth before, but Coke's too goddam sweet," but had decided, I think wisely, to hold off getting known as a wiseass until I'd gained twenty-five pounds.

This followed, by two years and one school system, the "Sex" "Ed" film I--and the rest of my gender-separated class--had been shown as a 7th grader, in which a Panama-hatted pervert lured teenaged boys into his ranch-style home, located conveniently across the street from where someone was teaching himself how to hold a 16mm camera. What happened after that was entirely unclear; I blamed the editing. One of my fellows, who'd seen the thing in a different period, informed me that afterward the teacher had advised his charges that if anyone ever tried to play with them they should just piss on him. I suspected a leg pull, but those were simpler times.

By 1971 they'd noticed the Sixties, and Nixon had ponied up for a film that Told It Like It Was, starring Sonny and Cher, in which a thirty-eight year old man with a Moe Howard haircut who had turned a marginal songwriting ability, a showbiz sense borrowed from William Castle, and a half-Cherokee jailbait girlfriend into the world's most unfortunate pop career, and no, I'm not forgetting Gary Glitter, solemnly informed Today's Youth that if they took drugs they'd miss out on the best part of being a teenager, namely, preparing to become housewives, actuaries, and hopeless alcoholics. Babe.

Which is to say, I agree wholeheartedly that Presidential platitudes are probably a waste of good study hall time, and that politically motivated speeches like Reagan's (h/t Roy) are worth objecting to. And I do wish the administration, having tried to make a virtue of pretending the entire Republican party--let alone its base, which Ronald Reagan shrewdly de-institutionalized in the 1980s--could be reasoned with, would at least figure out how to de-Malkinize its press releases. But then, students are forced to waste time on all sorts of things.

It’s not just the fact that he’s doing it. That’s part of it — and I’ll get to that in a second. What’s really pissing me off is that it’s highlighting how hopelessly and insipidly partisan our national discourse is. On the one hand, the loudest voices decrying the speech are offering bizarre hyperbole about how Obama is going to indoctrinate our children in Marxist ideology, and suggesting that only sheep will let their children listen. On the other hand, you’ve got the smirking, eye-rolling folks who are suggesting that if you don’t support the speech you must be stupid or a Glenn-Beck-level frothing nutcase. I’ve tried discussing this and explaining my viewpoint several places, only to have supporters of the speech furiously attack strawmen they have erected rather than reading what I actually wrote.

Our national discourse--could we please stop pretending it's sunk to New Lows, or that such is even theoretically possible?--isn't helped by False Equivalence Syndrome, which holds that what some guy said on the internets cancels out an organized and systematic anti-Obama campaign run by a cable network. It's the old "story on A-1, correction on A-17" routine. The story is the bizarro world of Kenya Hussein Obama, Marxist Nazi indoctrinator. It's not "should Presidents take up school children's time?" They probably shouldn't, but when they do they should be accorded the same respect that every other President who's chosen to do so received. In particular, the argument over "political content" was ripped to shreds by Reagan's performance. At the same time, citizens should be accorded their full First Amendment rights, and, as Wolcott said the other day, if Obama was half the CommieNazi he's portrayed it's the muzzling of his opponents we'd be talking about. This should not rise to the level of mob-induced school cowardice, which is my main concern, by the way. Bear in mind that this is the end of the political spectrum which howled in protest at the teacher "being fired" for "posting a picture of President Bush", although none of that was actually so, and which routinely posits any show of timidity, equanimity, or cultural diversity in the public schools as a "PC Police" action.

The President has unequal access. Not news. Sometimes used in ways that suggest, at the least, unfair advantage. Also not news, and true of every President, if we're going to be honest about it. We get to complain about it when we don't like him, without losing our right to clam up when we do. Also all well and good. But when we decide that now would be a good time to raise a principled objection, we shouldn't be surprised to be splashed with a little tar.

Suffice it to say that I think our political leaders have no business using a captive audience of schoolkids to make a stump speech. The nation’s students are not the property of the government. The government is there for them, not vice-versa.

You'd like to think so, but the task would be more difficult if you'd have spent ten days arguing the suspension of 150 students at Richmond (IN) High School over violations of a Dress Code lots of people (including a lot of Richmond parents) considered draconian, if not plain bizarre (no stripes!), and which had been sprung on them two weeks before school began. Let's just say that a surprising number of our fellow citizens believe Sit Down, Shut Up, and Do As You're Told is the most important lesson we can impart to public school students, and that a depressingly large percentage of them believe it's the best preparation for Life, and the most important determinant of future employment prospects.

Look, a speech by the President is by its nature political

And, by the nature of the Office, stereotypically American, which might explain the "anti-American ideals" routine hurled at him, except it's too common to require explanation.

That’s okay for adults who are voluntarily present at the speech. But it’s not appropriate for children who are there involuntarily.

How many times did George W. Bush--or his co-President--use the military as a backdrop?

Not only is student attendance compelled 180 days a year, and frequently directed by people with all sorts of ulterior motives, but the distinction between This President and The President is being blurred here to create political prisoners. When I was in high school our band--it was renowned--was chosen to play for a Nixon appearance in town. Height of Vietnam. I knew people in the band who hated Nixon as much as I did, but they were thrilled to death at getting to play for the President of the United States. Protesting his appearance, or the things he has to say, is distinct from trying to eliminate the symbolic power of the office. Which I'd actually be happy to help achieve if it were a neutral act, but it ain't. As Stanislaw Lec said, "When smashing monuments, take care to save the pedestals. They always come in handy."

The fact that this form of using kids as props is so common as to be banal is not a reason to support it; it simply means that we should put the speech in a larger context. But social attitudes towards government are built slowly, over time, one incident at a time. We have to start somewhere in making the point that politicians are there to serve us, not vice versa. It’s reasonable to start with kids, and it’s reasonable, when politicians decide to make a big deal of something, to make an issue of it in return.

Look, I've been urging the Obama organization to purge itself of tone-deaf hagiographers since back when he trailed Hillary Clinton. But concession to "principle" in this case wouldn't establish a new paradigm of government, or re-establish an old one; it would damage this President and benefit his opponents, the ones whose disastrous Era of Misfeasance he was elected to help us shovel our way out of. And they have clearly demonstrated the principle to which they owe allegiance. It's the principle of Whose Ox Is It?

1. Make Car Phone Use Mandatory. 2. Eliminate Nanny-State Stop Lights and Speed Limits. 3. Problem Solves Itself, Six Months, Tops.

OH, Touché, sir:

I’ve seen studies that rate eating in a car as roughly equivalent to talking on the phone.

Shall we then ban McDonald’s drive-thru lanes, or force Starbucks to serve only in porcelain cups for local use? That would be enforceable and probably save far more lives than an unenforceable law against talking on a phone.

--Some Guy on the Internets

Save more lives? You mean, if people refused to eat at McDonald's altogether as a result?

Okay, so they tell me one of the benefits of Age [strike benefits as too strong] is the learning to roll with the punches, the mastery of the sad, knowing smile, the philosophical shrug, the strategic hearing-aid disconnect, but I don't think They properly reckoned the accumulated perniciousness of Reaganism, Ayn Rand, and Reality Teevee. I can handle the repetition of fallacious arguments my grandfather brushed aside in ten seconds flat, even when those arguments are presented--as they frequently are--as the brilliant insight of the current speaker; I can take internet dumbassery in general, or rampant public cupidity; though I'm far from inured to political corruption, perpetual personal grievance, the Business Model of Everything, the substitution of "Hucksterism" for "Business" in the previous example, as well as everywhere else, the substitution of a Continual Repaving Project for Learning from our Mistakes, hypocrisy, hyperreality, Bronze Age superstition, and the current American propensity to root against the underdog, I'm able to deal with them, in the abstract, at least. What I'm finding to be a greater challenge than I anticipated, back in the green fields of Youth, when I dreamed of one day being a cranky geezer subsumed with writing Letters to the Editor and chasing dogs off my property with a pool cue, is managing to lift all this crap when it all piles together.

1. Talking on the phone while driving leads to accidents.

2. The Bush administration apparently sat on revelation #1.

Now, don't get me wrong; these matters ought to be reported, even if they ought not surprise anyone. And in an age where you don't just have a fortnight's wall-to-wall panegyric for a deceased professional boy dancer who mere hours before his untimely death was considered, with more than a little justification, to be a child-molesting freak of the first order, but that it must include some massive lying-in-state routine whose $multi-million cost falls to a bankrupt government in a bankrupt state of tax revolters which then, as nineteen ravening networks, and their nineteen gunky eyes, look on, turns out to have involved countless layers of grifting--who'd'a thunk it?--well, it's practically Pulitzer material. The question isn't even How'd We Get To This Point?; it's How'd We Get To The Point Where There's Nothing Whatsoever We Can Do About It, Except Engulf It In Flames?

The goddam onion is all skin! Fer chrissakes: no one could possibly have ever imagined that talking on the phone while driving was anything other than an unconscionable hazard to everyone else sharing Your Road (I almost said "innocent drivers", but they're all on the fucking phone, too). No one could have thought, in 2003, 2001, 1999, or whenever the words "Bush" and "for President" were linked a second time that it was anything other than a publicity stunt and a recipe for (further) disaster, though the scale was a bit surprising. And no one who claims to believe that that administration didn't take "Criminal collusion with any and all potential Republican donors" as part of that Unwritten Constitution only it could read is either a dolt or a Republican donor. If the Bush administration--in fairness, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which, whatever the natural proclivities of bureaucrats to snuggle up with the nearest warm pile of Loot, surely needed no Interagency Liaison with the National Weather Service to know which way the Wind blew--was keeping mum, exactly what was stopping the crackerjack actuaries at all those AIG auto insurance subsidiaries? Ah, but, y'know, "Hey, what about fast-food drive ups?" is a terrific rejoinder, sonny.

And, as keen-eyed readers know, I'm from Indiana, which means that it's utterly immaterial to me whether hands-free is more safe, as safe, or less safe than holding the fucker to your ear while attempting to lurch your way through a 90º turn in the same direction, because The World's Third Worst State Legislature™ won't even ban those. (Although, in a nod to a disastrous multi-fatality summer for suburban teenaged drivers last year it did ban their use for people too young to vote.) Which is particularly interesting for anyone old enough to remember the Analog Days of Yore, and Hoosier enough to remember the efforts to ban the Walkman, on grounds that some theoretical boogier would be lost in his Race music and fail to hear the 200 decibel firetruck behind him. Cynics might note that the Walkman was a device of pure hedonism, while the cell phone gets to hide under the rubric of Business. And quite possibly legitimately so, since its public use--say the woman explaining, at a volume normally reserved for communicating with the elderly, the vicissitudes of scheduling her upcoming Pap smear to the person at the other end of the connection, the cashier, the bagger, myself, and the two other people in the checkout line with us--she is not apocryphal, Reader! She's typical!--is highly suggestive of what one imagines most Americans do at work all day.

Sure, I'm old, but I suspect it's the mere wearing-down process, and not some organic mellowing on the way to the compost pile, which has eased the homicidal fantasies such behavior used to engender. I do think that I have the moral obligation to mention that should I keep my faculties in spite of it all for another decade or so the prospect of Life in prison will begin to lose some of its terror, and the equation might be reworked. On a more positive note, you Kids out there might want to consider that strangling this sort of thing in its crib, though it require something approaching attention to real life, vigilance, even, will yet pay dividends in the long run. If you live that long.

Here's $150 Billion. Call Someone Who Cares.

NASA flag-waving-in-zero-atmosphere technology would later make it possible

for NASCAR to put headlights on stock cars.

Tom Wolfe, "One Giant Leap to Nowhere". July 19

FIRST, the housekeeping: the Guy with the Seaweed is the late Lowell George, an angel who flew too low, not a callow youth with wings of wax, and, according to Rolling Stone, the self-styled US News and World Report of the Counterculture, not one of the 100 Greatest Guitar Players of All Time, a matter which I've yet to hear death-penalty opponents address.

Speaking of executing the mentally incompetent: thanks to the beneficence of AT&T, and their keen corporate appraisal of my wants and needs, for sending us free Showtime, et. al., for the summer, though my own unlettered marketing opinion is that if they want people to subscribe, and pay money for the thing, they're better off not showing it. But that's not the death penalty issue. Two words: Beowulf. Let me tell ya, you're better off reading the book--and, no, I've actually read the book and still think so--as the worst that will happen is the periodic urge to blind yourself. This may not sound like much of an improvement, but I remind you I said periodic, and blind; it would not include the subsequent hammering of sharpened #2 pencils down both auditory canals--unless someone was reading it out loud in Old English, maybe--plus you will not be tempted to hunt down everyone even remotely connected with it and flay them to death.

Finally, if you're CBS, and you want to honor Walter Cronkite, maybe you could have done so by continuing to report the news these past thirty years instead of turning it into infotainment, emphasis on the final two syllables.

I admire Cronkite, certainly, and not just because he single-handedly invented opposition to the Vietnam War--in fact, what I will miss most about Uncle Walter was his post-retirement disgust of Million-Dollar Anchor Syndrome--and CBS is certainly entitled to turn over its remaining "news" programming to his memory. But, again, is there no one left with any notion of taste or good sense? Cronkite covered everything from WWII to the ascension of That Hollywood Actor. Emphasis on covered. That goddam CBS Sunday Morning News for Shut-Ins was like watching a remake of Zelig. Or, god help us, Forrest Gump. Misty monochromatic mem'ries of Civil Rights and the Kennedy assassination, and washed-out video recollections of Vietnam, Be-Ins, and Nixon send-offs as told to you, in the main--even on CBS Sunday Morning Festival of Late Middle Age--by people who have no recollection of them, no interest in them other than as a sort of nostalgia reel racked up during a rain delay, and no talent for doing anything about it if they did. So thank you, Katie Couric, for your touching recollections of a man who retired four years before you became a local teevee news stringer, and thank you, Charlie Gibson, for the obsequies to a man, and an era, of which both you and ABC are the antithesis. If either of you respected the man so much, why didn't you stick with the morning news shows, which had already been debased by the time you arrived?

Oh, and the Moon Landing, the Fortieth Anniversary of which gets Tom Wolfe to stop contemplating belly shirts for a moment, long enough to bemoan the fact that NASA has been insufficiently hucksterish since:

NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.

It’s been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.

Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.

Yeah. How come it couldn't find a nice domestic Nazi spokesmodel? Alternately, didn't Operation Paperclip turn up anyone without an accent?

Look, I've read The Right Stuff three times; I probably prefer Of a Fire on the Moon, but in terms of rereading it's sipping a frothy chocolate soda through a colored bendy straw vs. wrestling the guy who broke your nose, and your glasses, last time out. And that doesn't mean I bought into the Single Combat gag, and it doesn't mean that any of the times I finished it I came away thinking I'd been wrong, and maybe that $150 billion We Know Of in 1960s dollars really was well spent. Opinions vary; mine is that the last time anything connected with engineering was of more than passing interest, or particularly beneficial, the Romans still ruled the West, or what the West refers to as "The World".

I mean, please, On to Mars! didn't die simply because we'd run out of money to feed all those other military programs that killed people cheaper and more manageably. It died because it's damned near at the edge of what we might accomplish provided we threw everything we've got into it (and if we haven't learned from doing that several times over that the main thing it accomplishes is bankruptcy, then we've been paying even less attention than we appear to be), and means fucking nothing whatsoever to anyone above the mental age of eleven, by which we mean the mental age of the eleven-year-old male, since females are much too smart for that sort of thing even at puberty. Powered, heavier-than-air flight is but a century old; human beings have been pondering Tricky Moral Problems, in print, for eight millenniums. If we really think, in 2009, that handing over the keys to future human development to engineers is a good idea, without first arranging to provide every citizen of Earth a double dosage of potassium cyanide, then our time here has been wasted. Which sorta begs the question of our Reaching for the Stars then, donnit?

Not to mention the fact that at this point--I'm unsure where we stood when The Right Stuff was published in 1979, but suspicions were not exactly unknown--we're well aware that the Eisenhower administration knew the Soviet space program was pretty much a joke--they were tied to tube technology, fer chrissakes, which is great if you're trying to put an amp on the Moon--and we continued to play up their ham-fisted propaganda routines just to separate the Rubes from their tax money. Incidentally, what's even more curious than the fact that the Public has swallowed this stuff hook, line, sinker, bobber, and elbow, is just how bad the goddam Soviets were at propaganda, despite practicing it constantly. It's sort of like trying to figure out Hugh Hefner's taste in women.

Anyway, here's a thought, Tom: why don't you pay for the next round if it's so important? Gin and Tang for you, Booker Noe's with a splash of recycled urine for me. And $3 trillion for the Brainiacs Without Boundaries down there in Florida. And Texas. Neither location can be a coincidence, by the way.

Up To A Point, M'Lord

Frank Rich, "Some Things Don't Change in Grover's Corners". March 7

Stanley Fish, "Neoliberalism Is a Pejorative Aimed At Me By People Who Are Insufficiently Pro-Israel". March 8

IT'S good to see Frank Rich returning to theatre criticism; we'd like to see him make it permanent, and the Times replace him with Glenn Greenwald, though we suspect they'd make a pitch to Stanley Fish.

And I'm glad, I guess, that Thornton Wilder is back on Broadway, if for no other reason than it means there's one less theatre contemplating commissioning a musical about the lives of The Monkees. I'm just more than a little wary about Depression chic making the rounds of people who have no intention, and little fear at present, of becoming one of them, and who will likely get no closer to the Dust Bowl this summer a strong breeze on a private beach.

I don't mean to be flippant, or dismissive; I just wanna know why the profession of journalism is so flippant and dismissive of its own role.

The simplest explanation for why America’s reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as “socialist” (“fascist” can’t be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s.

And which just happens to coincide with the rise of Happy Talk News, faux-balance and fake reports, with the end of legitimate commentary on the "liberal" teevee networks, and the insertion of not-quite-crypto commentary into actual news reports, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, with the lapdog treatment of Ronald Reagan and the wishful thinking and willful blindness that protected his "legacy" like a dainty parasol. It's a period that includes the stalking of Bill Clinton, led by the New York Times, the only President who reversed those trends. It's the same period which has seen the degrading of the political process into a species of celebrity gossip, the delimiting of the public debate to "Democratic" and "Republican" positions, frequently pre-shaped and pre-chewed for easy, unthinking digestion, and the unspeakable abdication of all journalistic principles in exchange for a flak jacket and a ride through Iraq on an M1 Abrams. And, no surprise, the cowardly Who Me? retreat that followed that disaster, much like the fast walk-and-whistle George W. Bush got from a couple of Times Op-Ed columnists who'd help sink his opponent in 2000.

And it corresponds precisely to that period when huge media operations were permitted to become behemoth media-company conglomerates thanks to, let's say favorable, decisions by the aforementioned Mr. Reagan, and the creation of the Heroic Entrepreneur Bravely Creating Wealth Despite Government Regulation mythos, which led us directly to CNBC.

Ah, not to mention the Times' own pledge to become more relevant to, and sensitive about, all the Right-wing Yahoo religious nuts which blanket all the arable land in this country wherever there're no subways. What is it now, two years old? How's it goin'?

But what the average man tries to skirt, the superior man obfuscates th' fuck out of. Here's Fish's capsule description of the Grand Unified Solution So Powerful No Level of Repudiation Can Stop It, Apparently:

In a neoliberal world, for example, tort questions — questions of negligence law — are thought of not as ethical questions of blame and restitution (who did the injury and how can the injured party be made whole?), but as economic questions about the value to someone of an injury-producing action relative to the cost to someone else adversely affected by that same action. It may be the case that run-off from my factory kills the fish in your stream; but rather than asking the government to stop my polluting activity (which would involve the loss of jobs and the diminishing of the number of market transactions), why don’t you and I sit down and figure out if more wealth is created by my factory’s operations than is lost as a consequence of their effects?...

Notice that “value” in this example (which is an extremely simplified stand-in for infinitely more complex transactions) is an economic, not an ethical word, or, rather, that in the neoliberal universe, ethics reduces to calculations of wealth and productivity. Notice too that if you and I proceed (as market ethics dictate) to work things out between us — to come to a private agreement — there will be no need for action by either the government or the courts, each of which is likely to muddy the waters (in which the fish will still be dying) by introducing distracting moral or philosophical concerns, sometimes referred to as “market distortions.”

Notice, too--and this is also an extremely simplified stand-in--that if you'd simply behaved as though your property rights ended where mine began you wouldn't have killed my fish in the first place, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Fish, though, is willing to give the other side a hearing:

The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs “freely” pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

Well, yes. Of course "morality, justice, fairness and empathy" are redefined or abandoned, generally as part of the construction of the cosy sleeping bag of consent. And, of course, it begs the question: how did we get from a system based on morality and justice to one based on coercion without violating the terms of morality and justice to begin with? How does that simple guy with his simple pond of dead fish "deal" in fairness with the man whose position allows him to define not just the terms, but the definitions of "deal" and "fairness" into the bargain? At what point does the little guy get to redefine morality to make poisoning a two-way street? When he's gathered enough simple townsfolk with torches and pitchforks together?

And, above all, does this mean it's a good time to invest in farm implement and tar and pitch stocks?

Why Is The President Of The United States Apologizing To Brian WIlliams?

POP quiz time; close your books:

1) Name the first Bush II administration Commerce secretary.

2) Name the first Bush II cabinet nominee to be withdrawn.

3) Name all the Democrats who served in the Bush cabinet.

4) Who is Thomas E. White?

• Extra credit: find a YouTubes video featuring Brian Williams in January 2001, expressing concern over, say, Dick Cheney's failure/refusal to divest himself of stocks or create a blind trust in a timely fashion, despite the obvious conflicts of interest. Or Donald Rumsfeld, same. Or Karl Rove. Or Paul O'Neill. Or Mitch Daniels. Or video of George W. Bush apologizing for that. Or for anything.

(As always, any little brown-noser seeking extra credit is dropped one letter grade.)

Okay, okay. That's the point. It's different this time. It's called getting off to a good start. Surely you agree that doing what Bush did is the absolute wrong way to go about things?

Well, yeah and no, as Ron Nasty would say. The President is really good in this format, as good or better than Bill Clinton, without the baggage; as good, maybe, as Kennedy. It could be a very effective way of neutralizing bullshit. But it runs the opposite risk, of making bullshit seem valid, and for now it's leaving the tinny aftertaste of unrequited post-partisanship. See Lance. At some point this PR fest is over, and once it's over, it's dead. Nobody remembers who the Secretary of Commerce is, or what he does, let alone that he's a Republican. Heaven forfend that someone mistake me for a Beltway insider or Inside Baseball type; I'll be happy to concede that you and half the population know more about it than I do. But the counter-argument is that it doesn't matter, whether or not it works. Crack open the skulls of half the Republican House members, and fill the empty space inside with a tantalizing mélange of arugula, organic chickpeas, and cruelty-free figs in a marsala/honey reduction with artisan pygmy-goat cheese; it doesn't matter. If some vast pacific calm settles on the world for the next four years, and no one ever finds anything else to talk about, it still won't matter. God help us, maybe you really do believe this post-partisanship business. Still, at some point, it'll reverse course and begin to look like a dodge.

This is certainly not the complaint of a Democrat who thinks he deserves more, nor of a Leftist left out in the cold (from My First Book of Democratic Primary Verses--like you need to explain to the American left that it might experience mild disappointment in a Democratic administration!). It's simple experience: not rushing off to apolo-splain every misstep sure didn't impede the Reagan or Bush administrations.

You wanna be better than them? Fine. Get rid of whomever thought Tom Daschle was a good idea in the first place.

If post-partisanship leads you to believe that Tom Daschle was an effective leader (or even an explicable one) in the United States Congress, or that his career since is one which inspires confidence, then Post-Partisanship should be a psychiatric diagnostic category. The vetting process is supposed to catch things that might otherwise slip through. It's not a substitute for judgment. Still, let's set his vetting aside, even though his tax returns seem to have come chewed by rodents. Forget his regrettable Congressional leadership. Let's table the question of whether he skirted lobbying laws after he was voted out. Daschle, and Mrs. Daschle, the former Linda Hall, gorge themselves at the public/private K-street buffet, a fact that casual acquaintance, let alone serious investigation, should have told you. Daschle spent twenty-five years in Congress (and what a twenty-five years those were for Democrats!). That ought to earn you, maybe, a gold watch. Not the keys to a gold Rolls.


__________

1) Donald Evans 2) Linda Chavez 3) Norman "Lonesome Norm" Minetta 4) Enron-linked contract-peddling Secretary of the Army who wasn't fired until he sided with General Shinseki on Iraq troop levels in 2003

Score: 25 points for each correct answer; 2 points if you vaguely recalled any of it after you saw the answers

Your Presidential Candidate Gets His Point Across In Just One Mess O' Pottage. My Senator Has To Eat Four Bowls.

MUCH appreciated, Glen Greenwald:

Dodd-Feingold-Leahy amendment
Every Republican (and Lieberman) voted against removing immunity (including Arlen Specter, who spent all day arguing against immunity). Democrats voting against removing immunity: Bayh - Carper - Conrad - Feinstein - Innouye - Johnson - Kohl - Landrieu - Lincoln - McCaskill - Mikulski - Nelson (FL) - Nelson (Neb.) - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar - Webb.

Specter amendment
All Republicans (and Lieberman) voted against, and these were the Democrats voting against: Bayh - Carper - Johnson - Landrieu - Lincoln - Mikulski - Nelson (FL) - Nelson (Neb.) - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar.

Bingaman amendment
The Democrats voting against: Bayh - Landrieu - Nelson (Neb.) - Pryor - Rockefeller.

Democrats voting in favor of final passage of the FISA bill: Bayh - Carper - Casey - Conrad - Feinstein - Innuoye - Kohl - Landrieu - Lincoln - McCaskill - Mukulski - Nelson (Neb.) - Nelson (Fla.) - Obama - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar - Webb - Whitehouse.

Thanks, Evan, and good luck with that Vice Presidential thing. Oh, and say hello to your Dad, the last Democrat elected in the state of Indiana.