Big Hole News

That's Mitch Daniels there in shirtsleeves. The short one in shirtsleeves. Memo to photo-op co-ordinator: for the next groundbreaking make sure Dr. Ruth is invited.

Note that Mitch is standing between the woman from Black Expo and dashingly handsome Hall-of-Fame lock Peyton Manning, while Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson is at the end of the line, next to Myles Fucking Brand, the man who fired Bob Knight at IU and thus ranks somewhere between Morgan's Raiders and Genital Herpes on the Hoosier popularity charts. This answers the question of to whom the Indiana constitution awards executive power over publicity photos.

Touchdown Jesus H. Christ, it was ground breaking Monday on our new half-billion dollar corporate welfare for the NFL football stadium, and from the artificial excitement generated by the local news hairdos you'd have thought Magic Johnson opened another Starbucks. They all had their anchor duos on remote, and helicopter shots, natch. Channel 8 even filled a little downtime with video of a crane picking up debris from the stuff they knocked down to make room.

In a pregame warm-up last week--I hadn't found time to work this little tidbit in earlier--8's Mary Milz reported that the groundbreaking would use shovels and would just be ceremonial as the real groundbreaking would employ machinery. No, I'm not making that up, and yes, she seemed for all the world to be telling us something she thought we might have questions about.

And Holy John 3:16, they didn't even break ground! They gave 'em a little sandbox to play in. You can see it there in the picture.

I got to see the Daniels interview with 13's crack reporters, who asked him to describe the headaches involved in getting the project off the ground. I'm not sure if Mitch appreciates anyone making public references to his head, which sits atop a rather diminutive body and is covered by hair which seems to come from the side instead of growing straight up like most people's. I waited to hear the Governor explain that the hardest thing he had to do was pretend to be sitting on the sidelines encouraging a deal when in fact he and his party were screwing things up just to make sure the Democratic mayor of Indianapolis didn't get all the credit. Not to mention managing to underfund the project by $450,000 through their own incompetence, money which will now come out of the rainy day fund. Because no one could have predicted we'd get a half-million dollars' worth of rain so early.

It didn't happen. He just made some shit up.

Dear Abby

I've been letting Abby Nye percolate for a couple of weeks. Someone--likely World O'Crap--pointed me to the WorldNetDaily Whistleblower Magazine and its current issue "BRAINWASHING 101", a "stunning" exposé of leftist indoctrination and sexual corruption on America's college campuses "in true Whistleblower fashion". Meaning...well, you know.

I'm glancing down the page, pissed off because there's not even one article available to read online, when I discover that one of the young exposeusses is the aforementioned Ms Nye, the author of Fish Out of Water: Surviving and Thriving as a Christian on a Secular Campus. And that campus is Butler University, a mere six miles from where I currently sit and try to type with one hand while preventing a kitten from climbing on the keyboard with the other.

Now, this is interesting. I have a few contacts at Butler. Two members of my family call it their alma mater and they both seem rather simon pure, although one of them did smoke cigarettes in her younger days. I briefly considered calling around to get the lowdown on Ms Nye, but I realized a) this would involve something like work; b) that would set a bad precedent; and c) I'd probably have to read her book. So here's a collection of half-assed Google searches and educated guesses filtered through my secular worldview. I hope you like 'em.

Butler is a private school. The enrollment is around 3800. It's a lovely, landscaped campus of Collegiate Gothic limestone buildings, a botanical garden, and the glorious Hinkle Fieldhouse. The "secular" demonifier could be disputed, technically: the school was founded by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which has no central governing council, so it's debatable whether you're ever actually out of the fold. The Disciples are a fairly liberal, mainstream bunch who reject denominationalism, including the idea that their own denomination is superior. Butler's divinity school became the independent Christian Theological Seminary in the late 1950s. It's right next door. For the sake of argument we'll grant Ms Nye her contention that she is forced to travel in a heathen country, though we reserve the right to ask why she's not in a bible college or at least at an institution with a tradition of theological constipation more in tune with her own.

Seeing that this blog is legally constrained from deficit spending, I have not purchased a copy of Ms Nye book. Thanks to Amazon I was able to read the Introduction, but whether the author bothers to document charges like this:

[Freshman] English class...required reading included not Shakespeare or Milton, but essays on why America deserved the terrorist attacks of 9/11, why we should listen to the kid killers at Columbine, and why "under God" should be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance.

is unknown. My own idea, that perhaps like many a Freshman before her Ms Nye had simply turned up in the wrong class, will have to go unresearched for now.

And here's the deal...she's now a senior. This would have taken place in late summer 2002. She may have been offended by the reading assignment, but it's difficult to imagine she was forced to battle the outrage all alone. As we shall see in a moment, Ms Nye is not exactly a lone voice in the dark and scary wilderness of Butler Secular University, Home of the Fighting (But Tolerant) Bulldogs.

Then there's this:

The first shocker I received when I arrived on campus was Freshman Orientation...the correct term would be Freshman Indoctrination. Many schools basically hold students hostage for three or four days and attempt to reprogram their brains on matters of moral relativism, tolerance, gay/lesbian/transgendered/whatever rights, postmodernism, New Age spirituality, and savvy substance abuse. [emphasis mine]

Wow. It's still the introduction and already we've abandoned our personal narrative in favor of tales of virtual slavery at "many" schools. Something tells me if I run into this thing at Borders I'm not gonna find it's extensively footnoted.

And this is Central Indiana we're talking about, not the Peoples' Republic of Santa Cruz. The claim of some superpatriot political science instructor at IUPUI that he was being denied tenure due to a leftist/lesbian cabal was front page news in the Star (and the subject of a follow-up column in the front of the Metro section).

So why haven't I heard about any of this? Why do I have to go to WorldNetDaily to learn of Ms Nye's existence?

In fact, I have to ask why I haven't heard it a thousand times. Because it turns out that Abby is an active member of Campus Crusade for Christ. And Campus Crusade for Christ is...ready?...the largest student organization at Butler.

I guess "How to Survive Being in the Majority" just didn't have much zing.

The book promises to help Poor Persecuted Christian students deflect criticism that they are "intolerant" or "judgemental". Why modern Christians are so touchy about what other people call them I'm not sure, but as to why some might wish to call them that, we can examine the Butler student newspaper in April 2003, when Ms Nye was a freshman. An (avowed Christian) columnist for the paper wrote an article criticizing Campus Crusade for Christ for, among other things, being funded by right wing extremists like the Coors family and Bunker Hunt; sexism; anti-Catholic attitudes; and rabid homophobia. The young Ms Nye displayed her nascent Christian self-defense techniques in a letter to the editor the following week:

From the points brought up in this column, including multiculturalism, homosexuality, tolerance and a woman’s role in the home, it is obvious that Mr. DeGraff’s opinions on these topics run counter to the orthodox tenants of Christianity...

So there.

I haven't been able to find any response to her book from anyone at Butler. That's probably wise. She's absent from the school paper since that freshman outburst. I'm giving some consideration to writing to Ruth Holladay, the Star's former religion writer and current opinion columnist (and a woman who used to use "unchurched" as a collective noun in every third column) about the rampant secular leftism at Butler. Maybe a little spotlight in her home town is just what Abby Nye needs.

Happy Birthday

Bill Murray--born September 21, 1950

Testing

Home life is more or less officially wrecked for the week as this morning marks the beginning of three days of public school testing, the ISTEP (Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress-Plus; I'm not sure what the plus is), and my wife goes from skilled and caring educator to warden at a juvenile detention center. We both know she will not be a happy camper. I've already planned on serving up her favorite foods and a fully-stocked bar.

Hey, stick around. Mitch Daniels will make an appearance shortly. Maybe he'll even cut a ribbon.

Indiana instituted statewide standardized testing, in stages, beginning more than a decade ago. We now test students in grades 3-10 yearly; the 10th grade test (the one my wife will be administering this week) is a Graduation Qualification Exam which must be passed before a student receives a diploma.

And as we all know, the Bush administration, proudly upholding the tradition of a political party which wanted to abolish the federal Department of Education as little as ten years ago, has added requirements via the Infinite Justice for Left Behind Children Act designed to prove that inner-city schools are failures right before we slash their funding, put the students in a lottery to attend schools run by the private sector, and call the whole thing off before it affects too many white people.

From most teachers' point of view, at least those I know or my wife talks to, testing is a sick joke, a waste of one week out of the school year, which takes far too long to get the results back to the teacher and offers little meaningful information once they do arrive. Of course, we're talking about the high school, pass-this-or-don't-graduate test. Elementary teachers may have a different perspective, but Indiana has the longest lag time in returning test scores in the nation, for some reason.

Standardized testing used as a political weapon is a costly fraud which does a considerable amount of harm in the name of proving that public schools are "failing". It's a philosophically unsupportable position, but worse, it's a racially motivated one. We're still fighting integration under the guise of concern for underachieving students in the poorest school districts.

We've known since the Coleman Report in 1965 that the major determinant of scholastic performance is income and socio-economic level. If we want to improve academic achievement among our most disadvantaged citizens the place to start is by improving nutrition and providing health care, not by administering tests designed to slap a big red F on our inner-city schools. Now that our President has recognized the role of racism in the chasm between rich and poor, perhaps he'll turn that sharp legal mind back to education, which was once such a hot topic for him.

Oh, and Mitch? Well, he's decided that his campaign position on moving testing to the Spring was such a solemn pledge he's going to ignore the fact that the legislature turned in down and achieve it by packing the state Board of Education with people who agree. Suellen Reed, the (elected, Republican) Superintendent of Public Instruction, who favors continuing Fall testing, says the move will cost $14 million, require reworking of the tests and pilot testing for fairness, and render useless previous statistics. Daniels says the disruption will "only" amount to a year or two, and that the publisher (CTB McGraw-Hill) has written him promising to move the test for free in exchange for keeping the state's business.

[This is another one of those head-scratchers for me, since Daniels' party is the one that insists corporations don't actually pay taxes, they just pass taxes on to their customers, but they're the first one to tout some public/private bargain as providing "free" goods.]

Of course you always need to keep in mind that this is coming from a state that can't decide what time it is. And speaking of campaign promises, Mitch declared a preference for Central Time back then, but once the issue got hot he kicked it off ol' RV-1 and sped off down our underfunded highway system. I guess some promises are more equal than others.

A Hundred Dollars Makes It Dark Inside

I was prepared for it. A few years back my Poor Wife and I saw Lyle Lovett at Clowes Hall on the Butler campus, and ever since then I've been on their mailing list. I got the 2005/2006 calendar about a week ago, and I flipped through it idly. The schedule is generally pretty dance heavy, since they've got a fairly serious dance school, and there's an assortment of Indianapolis Opera Company performances, and some theatre and a speakers series. Generally there'll be one or two pop artists I'd be happy to see at half the price and that aren't really my wife's cup of eggnog. Somebody might get written on our calendar in a sort of half-assed, what-the-hell-if-we're-dying-to-go-out way that we know won't come to pass.

So I'd flipped through the first five pages when I saw him, looked at the date, and saw the price. And so I was prepared when the ad turned up in the Sunday Star. ELVIS COSTELLO. Saturday, October 15 8:00 PM And immediately underneath: $100.

Yeah, there are cheaper tickets--down to 25 bucks for the third balcony. I don't sit in cheap seats anymore. I don't sit back beyond row 15 or so. At my age if I'm going to a show it's to see the show, not to be there, if you know what I mean.

But $200 for a couple of ducats? For a solo performance? Richard Thompson was in town last month for $30 (we had to pass; it was a school night). Don't get me wrong--in a just universe El'd get the highest ticket prices in the business (and the Strolling Bones would be playing high school auditoriums), but still. It feels more like tribute rather than a ticket price.

I've seen the man every time he's come to Central Indiana, or a grand total of three. Each show was great, and the first one is my fondest concert memory of all time. It was really painful to see those three digits there and say, "No way." And the most painful part is there wasn't any hesitation. In the old days I'd have sent the phone bill in late or lived on American cheese for a week if necessary. Now, when the money really isn't any object, I balk. What the hell happened?

I got to wondering what might induce me to pay $100 for a show. Elvis and the Imposters with Gillian Welch opening? Probably. Tom Waits with his Big Time-era band including Marc Ribot on guitar? I imagine so. Anything else would require certain performers of my choosing rising from the dead.

Rhymes With "Rich"

Last Friday (don't imagine he didn't learn anything about the timing of announcements in his previous job) Governor Mitch "You're No Napoleon. For One Thing, He Was 5'6" Daniels revealed his plan to fell up to five times as many trees as previous in the state's public forests.

Let's jump right to what the Indianapolis Star thought were the 19th and 20th most important paragraphs in the story. I'm doing this only because I suspect you may be ahead of me:

The timber industry was a supporter of Daniels' 2004 campaign. In the December 2004 issue of Hard News, a publication of the Indiana Hardwood Lumbermen's Association, the group's lobbyist, Ray Moistner, penned a celebratory column about the GOP's statewide election victory.

"We have before us an opportunity to move forward, and make hay while the sun shines," Moistner wrote in the newsletter, which is available on the association's Web site ( www.ihla.org ). "I think it's safe to say the elections were very good for IHLA."

Don't get me wrong; I'm grateful the Star got around to mentioning it at all. But first we had to wade through Daniels' cover story and the support of a rather curious ally.

Daniels--who travelled to Morgan-Monroe State forest for his photo op--insists that logging is not the real purpose here. Nope, Mitch is interested in making our forests "more robust". I suppose we might find it in our hearts to understand why Mitch might confuse "robustness" with "shorter", but that doesn't mean we've got to accept the explanation.

Mitch's trusty sidekick in auctioning off handing over our state resources, Kyle J. Hupfer, the commissioner of the state DNR, (who, unlike Mike Brown, actually was a mergers and acquistions lawyer before being handed the reins of a public trust) said the effort was based upon sound science. When a Republican uses the phrase "sound science" you know you're about to take it in the shorts. But the surprise guest at Mitch's little picnic was Dan Shaver, a project director for the Indiana chapter of the Nature Conservancy, which either owes somebody big time or has enough cash flow it doesn't have to worry about dropping the mask from time to time. Shaver said that clearing older groves of trees prevents the spread of harmful insects like gypsy moths, and also curtails broader epidemic tree diseases such as looper, which in recent years has afflicted more than 100,000 acres of Southern Indiana forest.

Well, maybe that's the "sound science" they're talking about, but prior to the Daniels administration sound science involved testing and eradication programs, not bringing in bulldozers.

And before you write a check to the Nature Conservancy to help make public lands private, give this some consideration. We have a minor gypsy moth problem in Indiana; nothing like Michigan's. Here's a map:

There's not a whole lot of state forest land in that corner. In fact the worst infestation reported so far has been at Parkland Hospital in Fort Wayne, which is not a notable destination for Indiana's nature lovers, unless they happen to be nearby and have appendicitis.

Loopers, though, have been defoliating oaks in eight Southern Indiana counties, just as they did in 1978-1981. Using that as a guide, 2005 was the highpoint of the infestation, which will now collapse for another twenty five years. Or for good, if Mitch's boys get to remove all the oaks in the meantime. In the name of sound science, naturally.

Mind you, our state forests are set aside for multiple use. Nobody's saying that timbering hasn't traditionally been a part of that. But most of Indiana's commercial hardwood industry utilizes trees from private lands, and there's no particular reason other than greed to increase the harvest. But, golly, with Republicans in charge that seems to be reason enough.

Fareed Of All Constraints

Someone pointed me in the direction of this Fareed Zakaria column in Newsweek:

Leaders Who Won't Choose
In Washington, it's business as usual in the face of a national catastrophe

People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years. To take one example, if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate $290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq.

Yeah. As long as we don't need to spend money on anything else in the next decade, we'll be home free.

Mind you, it's not that it isn't gratifying to see public intellectuals from the Council on Foreign Relations recognizing, however belatedly and however imperfectly, that somebody has to pay for their little excellent adventure that the Bush administration screwed up and let them down on. Maybe in three more years Zakaria will discover a solution to the rest of the debt Bush has saddled us with. Too bad his support for generating revenues through taxes won't be as influential as was his support for the war.

Happy Birthday

Ken Kesey: September 17, 1935--November 10, 2001
author, farmer, cornstarch user

Friday Cat Blogging (Worksafe Edit)

The Speech

I taped it and watched the whole thing. Really.

My general impression is this: in five years, with the nearly unlimited resources of the White House and the RNC, and the efforts of who knows how many highly paid consultants, we have finally reached the point where, given enough practice, George W. Bush can be made to sound like the lieutenant governor of one of our least populous Western states giving a welcoming speech to a bunch of trade association conventioneers. "We've got a real fine breakfast spread set up next door. They'll make waffles for ya. And we'd be grateful if you take the time to look over our brochure."

Not to belittle the accomplishment. On the contrary, it's little short of miraculous. Going back to the first campaign, it's been six years of watching a George W. Bush who was obviously only comfortable when surrounded by people who were required to pretend, because of his money and/or power, that they weren't listening to a lazy, dim-bulb son of privilege. And now he's comfortable presenting that image to the world at large, at least in a prepared speech. It was my first sustained look at the "real guy you'd like to have a beer with" I could never figure out people claiming to see. Tonight, there he was. A real guy you'd like to have a beer with, assuming that category includes for you some out-of-town Jaycee in a hotel bar who after the fourth one will ask you where the "real action" is in town, about the time you notice he swiped the tip you just left.

Substance? Well, the substance of the speech seems to be "Please make my poll numbers go back up. Please? I'll be your friend." Though for the life of me I can't figure out why. Iraq has already sunk him. Katrina, whatever he does, is not going to refloat his presidency. You'd think by now the man was used to walking away from total failures. Mr. President, your party controls both houses of Congress. You're going to hand them a couple hundred billion more in debt...in the fall session before an election year...full of handouts to the same people they've been blaming for getting into the disaster in the first place? Am I missing something?

Anyway, here's the funny thing, and by that I mean the thing that generated the same maniacal laugh you'd use on a cliff as you went over it, at a high rate of speed: the Republican party ran against the New Deal for 70 years. Once they came into complete control of government they had no idea what to do with it, except for petty theft and making sure kids were forced to say the Plejullegance every morning. Then when a real disaster strikes, the nominal leader of that party turns into a tenth-rate FDR impressionist, except they've got nobody to ask for the money. Ha, ha, ha, aiiiiiiyyeeeeeeeeee....

Oh, I almost forgot the best part. We're gonna house all the displaced persons working to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina in mobile homes! Good god damn, Kafka wouldn't believe this stuff.

Happy 80th Birthday

Riley B. King, born September 16, 1925

Back Home Again

You may recall Joel Silverman, High Exalted Grand Pooh-bah of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles and shining inspiration to all Hoosiers who aspire to succeed in business by allowing their businesses to be run out of business. Well, you'll be glad to know that Assistant Head Chief CEO Silverman hasn't allowed the "terrible terrible things" we've been watching on our teevees lately to cloud his judgment.

Silverman's latest money-saving plans include closing the only license branch in Gary. In case you're unfamiliar with the vacationer's paradise that is Indiana, Gary, located on Lake Michigan, is the rustiest point in the Rust Belt. It was once Indiana's second-largest city, until the steel mills closed in the 70s. It's now Indiana's fifth-largest city, and its major industry is boarding up shop windows. It has the highest percentage of African American residents (85%) of any city over 100,000 population in the country.

The citizens of Gary marched on the state capitol Monday to protest the closing. Emperor Governor Mitch "Robert Blake And I Are Exactly The Same Height" Daniels was unavailable to meet with them as he was in Cincinnati meeting with the Japanese. In his defense, Daniels pointed out that he hadn't met with the Japanese in over a month, and besides, his poll numbers go up whenever he leaves the state. So he tabbed Silverman to meet the somewhat restless natives.

Apparently it was not exactly a love fest. State Senator Earline Rogers called him "rude" and "abrasive". It should be pointed out that she's a Democrat, and for them those are undesirable qualities in a public servant.

But Silverman wasn't finished. He had a 30-minute phone interview with the Star's Matthew Tully, and explained why the Gary branch should close:

"Our customers are people who have cars," he said.