Sorry I'm Late, But In My Defense I Don't Watch Fox Sunday, For The Same Reason I Don't Schedule A Weekly Showing Of Titicut Follies.

If you enjoyed Titicut Follies, the Internet Movie Database

recommends Don't Look In The Basement! and Body Double.

SO, President Gingrich would have taken out that North Korean missile on the launching pad for fear that the wily Oriental devils might use three nuclear weapons to de-electrify the US back to the Stone Age. Which includes your car! says Newt, mindful that, thanks to his party, by the time the North Koreans have three nuclear weapons most Americans will be living in theirs. Gingrich added that the Obama policy, presumably including the continuation of the Six Party Talks, diplomatic efforts at the United Nations (demanded by the understandably honked-off Japanese), or, frankly, doing anything whatsoever that includes talking rather than unleashing lasers, robots, or or robots with lasers, a fantasy foreign policy.

It struck me, watching the vid, that Newt Gingrich talking to Chris Wallace is precisely one gamete away from being two guys taking big in order to impress their waitress at Denny's.

And that gamete is Wallace's; Newt's already sitting in a booth, imagining her naked, as witness his "If I was the fuckin' President, I'd show those North Korean fucks what a fuckin' bomb is, I tell ya. Say, darlin', what time they let you leave here?" I mean, you'd like to think that the average Denny's customer has more sense than that. Excepting, of course, that they are eating at Denny's. The real question here is, Which is the most delusional? Newt Gingrich thinking he could stop a North Korean missile on the launch pad, Newt Gingrich conducting an interview in Klingon, or Newt Gingrich thinking he could be President? Okay, the latter.

You'd think that if nothing else had rid us of this maroon in the last twenty-five years gravity would have done the trick. Really, how many bad ideas, demonstrations of professional incompetence, and revelations of personal repugnance can you carry around before you sink directly into the Earth's core? The man is a two-bit huckster. I realize that this is perhaps a little easier to see for those of us who do not automatically assume that anyone granted acceptance into the undergraduate program at Tulane must be some sort of unimaginable Super Brainiac or Something, but, c'mon. I know he's just fleecing Republicans, and I know they've been fleeced by stupider and more venal men, and, lately, women, but for how long?

Look: you got nothin', okay. You've been hoist by your own massive antique petard collection. You've reverted to Clenis™ syndrome, though I don't think "reverted" is quite the right word. Your national political figures are the product of decades of inbreeding, and they keep grabbing at the tiller of a ship that's already sunk while trying to avoid the wrath of a corpulent, racist, drug-addled pervert straight outta A Face in the Crowd. Maybe, just maybe, when you have to go outside the current party structure to try to find someone with enough brains cells for a mathematical possibility of their firing in sequence, you could look for someone who isn't desperately diving for the bottom in his attempt to lose a second-straight Republican nomination without ever managing to enter the race. I know Gingrich is a pathetic excuse for an historian, but he'd have to be suffering severe blackouts as well to have forgotten the administration of George W. Bush this quickly, however many reasons he and his party have to wish to. The OK Corral President wound up negotiating with North Korea from a position of weakness, five years after he threw out diplomacy as insufficiently testicle-exposing. And yet, somehow--somehow!--here we are again. Could someone at least attempt to explain why it didn't work last time?

Gingrich is certainly capable of actually believing this stuff. He's also proven capable of lying about it for whatever temporary political gain he imagines he'll reap, and which generally amounts to "none". As I've said before about the last guy who talked tough about North Korea while asking Americans to wet their pants over the issue: you'd think the party of Bronze Age Superstition would be the first to toss these guys overboard when every omen came up Bad. I know, I know an accurate assessment of the non-threat of North Korean ICBMs is out of the question; these are the people, after all, who marched us off to a couple trillion dollars worth of war-y goodness on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to push an imaginary button, despite the fact that it would have meant he had six seconds, roughly, before being converted, for a microsecond, into a fine red mist. These are the people who screamed for us to do something about the Russian invasion of Georgia, fer chrissakes. Even those who might be capable of rational thought understand it can't be spoken of. But that doesn't mean you have to go Full Freaking Nuts every time there's a new issue of the New York Times.

Nah, really, all I'd like is if just once one of these chickenhawk warriors would act as if his Deep and Abiding Love of Country wasn't permitted to hibernate whenever there was a Democrat in the White House. Sanity's too much to ask.

Uncredited Appropriation: The Eighth Habit Of Highly Effective People

READER, let us suppose that you are the Superintendent of a large urban school district, the largest in your, let's say Midwestern, state, and one which has suffered for years from bad PR, inadequate funding, the lasting effects of de jure racism that lasted well beyond Brown, and forty years of being used as a political football, plus the usual litany of social problems; let us imagine it as a place where former Secretary of State, Four Star General, and Five Star Liar Colin Luther Powell came to town just to trounce your graduation rate, something he felt was so deserved he didn't bother wiping the figures off after he pulled them out of his ass. Let's call you Dr. X.

And let's say that some--critics, naysayers, bloggers--suspect you may be a little more concerned with your own reputation than is strictly necessary from the standpoint of effectiveness. Let's imagine, too, that one of these critics--pecksniff or dirty hippie, perhaps--has some sort of familial relationship to a teacher in your district, and that she (or he! this is hypothetical!) is a hard-copy sort, and prints out much of what is communicated to her professionally by email. And that one day on top of this stack is found a page headed:

Success Classics Top 50 Books

Here are 50 books recommended by Superintendent Dr. X to put readers on the path to success.

And your critic's attention is drawn by the brightly-colored bold font, plus he tends to curiosity, though not snoopishness, and the list is in plain sight, so he takes a seat--it's the dining room table, not his wife's office--and starts to read, and he doesn't get very far:

The Art of War/ SunTzu
The Art of Worldly Wisdom/ Baltasar Gracian
The Way to Wealth/ Benjamin Franklin
Ragged Dick/ Horatio Alger

[the Reader wishing an authentic experience may substitute for the forward slash the author's name being placed as far as possible on the opposite side of the page, far enough to require actual turning of the head and the attendant losing track of what line you were on, if not forgetting what the hell you were doing altogether.]

Okay, we've stopped; we imagine seeing Horatio Alger on a recommended reading list for any reason other than historical curiosity or mild, somewhat nostalgic leg-pull would stop a great many people. So while we're stopped let's mention a couple of things. One: in an academic setting, even a Failing Urban Public School, the basic form of a bibliography is fairly well established, and nowhere does it involve putting the title of the work on one side of the page and the author's name on the other. And two, if possible, could you find someone whose typing skills have been updated since the new century began? We will, later, go online for the full list, only to find the thing has been tabbed into an electronic version of Jumble™, the Scrambled Word Game™.

Okay, back to the list. I'm sorry, but the idea that someone in 2009 would recommend reading Horatio Alger for the inspiration doesn't just surprise me, it makes me a bit, well, suspicious. And let's note here that the idea of recommending a teacher or staffer read Ragged Dick somewhere where students might get a look at the title just beggars belief. Is there some subtle nuance of characterization and plot in Ragged Dick that recommends it over and above Phil the Fiddler or Paul the Peddler or Ben the Luggage Boy, Mark the Match Boy, Nelson the Newsboy, or Frank Fowler, the Cash Boy? And what th' fuck is a Cash Boy? Surely not what the modern reader imagines, however hard he tries not to? Then there's The Art of War, which signals we're right on the cutting edge of 80s pop psychology squish.

Look, maybe I have a character flaw, one not shared by Joe the Hotel Boy or Tattered Tom, the Street Arab. But I glance back down the list, and the Superintendent of this unnamed urban school district seems to be recommending to his staff that in addition to boning up on Ragged Dick, they consume a large, surprisingly neatly-round-numbered quantity of Self-Help treatises aimed at inspiring the mid-level insurance salesman to greater heights of actuarial accomplishment while, whenever possible, picking his pocket for seminar fees. Tony Robbins! Zig Ziglar! Jack Fucking Welch! W. Clement Stone! And I grow even more suspicious. This man has not read all these books he recommends. And the point of the exercise is rather lost on me, unless he was just subtly urging his typist to acquire computer literacy and she misunderstood and cc'd the entire workforce. I can understand an educator might read Lincoln on Leadership, but why not read The Living Lincoln and gain even broader insights into the man? Why The Art of War instead of The Analects? Why 50 books? Why not ten, or two, or one, fer chrissakes? Taken at face value it seems incredibly insular, and something other than discipline specific which, if you were familiar with Indianapo large urban school districts, probably wouldn't surprise you.

But we don't take things at face value, and quit getting ahead of me; ten seconds pasting four random titles into The Google (as it happens, I could have just typed "50 Success Classics") turned up the actual author of the list, one Tom Butler-Bowden, who peddles his commentaries on them, famously enough, it appears, that sticking your own name on top of the list seems rather foolhardy, and simply recommending Mr. Butler-Bowden, or Tom the Annotator, in the first place would have saved a lot of typing and nearly as much tabbing. Here, for the record, is the entire list in someone else's fractured format:

1. Horatio Alger Ragged Dick (1867)
2. Warren Bennis On Becoming A Leader (1989)
3. Frank Bettger How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success in Selling (1947)
4. Kenneth Blanchard & Spencer Johnson The One Minute Manager (1981)
5. Edward Bok The Americanization of Edward Bok (1921)
6. Claude M Bristol The Magic of Believing (1948)
7. Andrew Carnegie Autobiography (1920)
8. Chin-ning Chu Thick Face Black Heart (1992)
9. George S Clason The Richest Man in Babylon (1926)
10. Robert Collier Secrets of the Ages (1926)
11. Jim Collins Good To Great (2001)
12. Russel H Conwell Acres of Diamonds (1921)
13. Stephen R Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
14. Michael Dell Direct From Dell (1999)
15. Henry Ford My Life and Work (1922)
16. Benjamin Franklin The Way To Wealth (1758)
17. Timothy Gallwey The Inner Game of Tennis (1974)
18. Robin Gerber Leadership The Eleanor Roosevelt Way (2003)
19. John Paul Getty How To Be Rich (1961)
20. Les Giblin How to Have Power and Confidence In Dealing With People (1956)
21. Baltasar Gracian The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)
22. Earl G Graves How To Succeed in Business Without Being White (1997)
23. Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich (1937)
24. Napoleon Hill & W Clement Stone Success With a Positive Mental Attitude (1960)
25. Tom Hopkins The Official Guide to Success (1982)
26. Muriel James & Dorothy Jongeward Born To Win (1971)
27. Spencer Johnson Who Moved My Cheese? (1998)
28. Robert Kiyosaki Rich Dad, Poor Dad (1997 )
29. David Landes The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998)
30. Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz The Power of Full Engagement (2003)
31. Roger Lowenstein Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (1995)
32. Nelson Mandela Long Walk To Freedom (1994 )
33. Orison Swett Marden Pushing To The Front (1894)
34. JW Marriott Jnr The Spirit To Serve (1997)
35. Margot Morrell & Stephanie Capparell Shackleton's Way (2001)
36. Donald T Phillips Lincoln On Leadership (1992)
37. Catherine Ponder The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity (1962)
38. Cheryl Richardson Take Time For Your Life (1998)
39. Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power (1986)
40. David Schwartz The Magic of Thinking Big (1959 )
41. Florence Scovell Shinn Secret Door to Success (1940)
42. Thomas J Stanley The Millionaire Mind (2000)
43. Brian Tracy Maximum Achievement (1993)
44. Sun Tzu The Art of War (4 th century BCE)
45. Sam Walton Made in America (1992)
46. Wallace Wattles The Science of Getting Rich (1910)
47. Jack Welch Jack: Straight From the Gut (2001)
48. John Whitmore Coaching For Performance (1992)
49. Richard Wiseman The Luck Factor (2003)
50. Zig Ziglar See You At The Top (1975)

[N.B. Dr. X's list of recommendations had them in a different order. Not to mention widely spaced.]

Okay, so we freely acknowledge a difference of opinion here. Some people think The Business Model is applicable to everything in Life, including education and other expenditures for the public good, whereas I think those people are full of shit. I'm sure there's actually much of value to be found in that list; I myself would pay top dollar to hear what Jack Welch had to say just before the hangman sprung the trapdoor. The problem is that in quantities it would take Hercules to clear out it seems less than worthless, unless you're looking for a way to get hollow people to pay you for other people's advice, and they pay by the piece. As we say in the Art biz, Money is how people with no talent keep score.

And I don't think I'm naive, or particularly cosseted for a Midwesterner, but the older I get the more childlike my wonder at how people will fucking lie to your face just, apparently, for the sense of achievement.

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A Desperate Attempt To Cling To One's Cold War Pathologies Regardless Of Cost (To The Taxpayer Or Foot Soldier)!

THE good news, kids, is that Miller Lite Presents ABC's This Week With George Robert Stephanopoulos, Brought To You By Citgo, the erstwhile This Week, has heard what you're sayin', and dug it, man, and has enshrined two of the younger generation of hip, younger generational interwebnets-savvy youth: David Frum, of newmajority.com--there aren't any spaces, or capital letters, and the "." is pronounced "dot"; it's real flip-your-wig stuff!--and "blogger", which is short for something, Zsa Zsa Arianna Huffington, and boy are her opinions out there! I'm tellin' you. She used to be married to a gay man!

So Youth is Served at the very Covered Walkway to the Portals of the Passenger Elevator to the Mezzanine Floor of the Citaldels of Power. They're from the Internet! That'll stick it to The Man! Not to mention that at long last the Sundays will be acknowledging that the "Conservative" Insider White Male has an opinion too, and it deserves to be heard. So I guess all the kids will stop twigging or twisting or sextaping, or whatever it is they usually do rather than attend church, and "kick back" for a freewheeling hour of talking heads television involving white people from two of the three major sexes debating issues from that morning's New York Times headlines, from perspectives ranging from Still Ambulatory Professional Ass-covering Canadian Wingnut Disasters all the way to Almost Touching the Center.

Ah, but fans of Pseudo-19th Century Tory Global Warming Denial Crypto-Bircherism needn't worry; there's still the G2 Summit. Yesterday's opener:

Geo. Stephanopoulos: George, let's begin with North Korea; that is the news this morning. Clearly the North Koreans seemed to know what they were doing with this timing of, uh, this launch as the President's giving a speech on nonproliferation and...

[Okay, sorry, I wasn't gonna interrupt, but th' fuck is it with this Oooh, Scary Timing! shit? Is it supposed to have a point? Isn't it true that We knew they were planning the test? Isn't it easier to, like, write a speech than launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile of Untold Death and Destruction, especially when, as in the case of the North Koreans, there are any number of holds involved while you re-glue, or touch up some spackle, or spray that expanding foam stuff into a hole somewhere? What is the point? That CommieNaziIslamoTerrorists are so bent on world domination that they won't scruple to ruin a President's speech, or disrupt mass transit schedules? It was right before Holy Week, too. Maybe they were trying to screw up Opening Day for Major League Baseball and forgot to convert for the international date line.

And here's something you weren't going to learn on MLPABC'sTWwGRSBtYbC: the South Koreans just had to scrub a test of their missile, which, unlike the Evil, Bloodthirsty, and Famine-Racked Realm of the World's Worst Elvis Impersonator, is, like, totally designed for the peaceable purpose of putting some more badly-needed junk in temporary orbit.]

...the whole action/reaction cycle here seems to house a ritualistic quality to you. North Korea violates UN resolutions and another one is passed.

[Since we've started borking, or whatever the kids call it: I actually thought for a moment there the "ritualistic action/reaction cycle" George Robert was referring to included the comically hysterical overreaction in the United States to the flaccid provocations of a tenth-rate, second-generation little Hitler in bad sunglasses. But no. The "ritualistic reaction" is to pass another toothless UN resolution, right, Mr. Will?]

Geo. Eff Will: Yes, it's surreal; beyond ritualistic. There's nothing like a ballistic missile to take your mind off Wall Street bonuses.

[Shows how much I know. I thought you would still be trying to hide the cynical exploitation of ginned-up threats to distract from the massive failure of your apodictic ideology. Y'know, like you did for the last eight years.]

In 1960, 50 years ago, since when Jack Kennedy...

[Jack?]

was running for President he said in the life of the next Presidency [sic] there will be 10, 15, maybe 20 nuclear powers. As President he said maybe by 1975 there'll be twenty-five.

[Okay, so unlike Will I don't have a quote boy on the payroll; Kennedy, as quoted by Arthur Schlesinger in A Thousand Days, said, in March of 1963, "ten instead of four by 1970"--I'm not sure how many Presidencies that is--and maybe 15 or 20 by 1975. Maybe he said 25 elsewhere. He was, of course, speaking of what might happen without a Non-Proliferation treaty. It might be pointed out that China was not among the four as Kennedy spoke, wouldn't officially join them until almost a year after his death, although we knew they were bound to soon enough.

We might also note that since the NPT was signed in 1968, every new member of the Nuclear Club (non-signators all, except the on-again, off-again North Koreans) has owed the technology, directly or via Pakistan, to the West. Which means:]

Geo. Eff Will: The Non-Proliferation regime has worked until now; and now it's breaking down.

[Just in case you weren't paying attention, or you were but can't believe exactly what you're hearing, this means that NPT, which was opposed at the time by the same Right-wing Pro-Apocalyptic faction which George Eff Will now imagines is cunningly hidden from us by his bowtie, worked, so long as the only one violating it was us, or our surrogates, in defense of large, happy, democratic regimes such as Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan, which we had to arm because we armed India, which we hoped would nuke the Chinese for us. But once this cozy little arrangement got away from us (Who could have Known?) it became a crumbling edifice which demonstrates the inherent philosophical failure of that very Head-in-the-Sand Liberal International Do-Gooderism Will's Strangelovian predecessors warned us about forty-plus years ago, just before the period where Will now says it worked. So they were right twice.]

And kids, look, this show is actually funnier than Saturday Night Live, or The Hills, or that singing dachshund on the YouTube. Will was led to point out the fallacy of the whole "Community of Nations" claptrap, which gave Liberal Blogger Eva Arianna Huffington just the opening she had been preparing for in her dreams as she slept through the discussion up to that point:

"But [a Community of Nations] is an aspiration, and ve haff to keep verking towards it, dollink..."

Wait, that's not the funny part. To which Will--that Jimmy Fallon of yours wishes he could be this funny--interrupted to say:

"I would just remind you that when Woodrow Wilson said to Clemenceau..."

I'm tellin' ya, I went into the kitchen and fixed a cup of coffee just so I could spew it. It was, by the way, the last peep we heard from Liberal Blogger Magda Arianna Huffington on the subject.

Or, y'know, maybe she was quiet so that her fellow Internet Youthquaker Frum could get his turn to say that, while International Non-Proliferation efforts, like all internationalism in general, was a Liberal Pie-in-the-Sky Pipe Dream of Delusion that could only lead to Unintended Consequences, all of them bad, which was why Liberals support such things in the first place, in the event We did make such a mistake the US would have to be prepared to guarantee the defense of Israel, which, as its long record shows, would be the first to unilaterally destroy the hundreds of nuclear warheads it officially denies having, because of its perfect record of acceding to international norms on this and every other subject.

Or maybe that struck her dumb, which would be understandable, but my take was she didn't need any help.

Yes, within two-point-five minutes of the top of the discussion we had veered from North Korea, speaking of veering, which has the somewhat proven ability to launch ginormous Roman candles out into the Pacific, somewhere, to poor defenseless Israel, which can only respond with US-assisted accuracy to a distance of 4000 miles, to Iran, which can't do any of that, or make its women behave. And yet somehow--you tell me--that's the discussion. The country which responded to the Vast International Communist Global Domination Conspiracy, which was once bristling with hydrogen warheads, particularly when you used our accounting system to tote 'em up, now wets itself in terror because the Herve Villechaize of International Diplomacy, a man who is wholly dependent on the Chinese, launches a board with a nail in it over the ocean. Nobody--certainly not Liberal Blogging Sensation Jolie Arianna Huffington--says Vat th' fuck? let alone "What exactly do you plan to do about it now that, given free rein, your people proved we can't invade a tenth-rate military power with no nuclear weapons and keep our army or our budgets intact?" Nobody. Clemenceau references are too fucking scary, apparently.

Epilogue: The rest of the day's dog cuisine featured the New York Times periodically finding slightly different ways to claim the Entire World was thinking of nothing else beyond imminent trans-Pacific nuclear annihilation, followed by the later announcement that the North Koreans had actually been trying to launch a payload into orbit (O, silly man in sunglasses!), and had Failed Miserably. So I guess things worked out well all the way around; piss your pants in the morning and laugh it off by nightfall. Lil' Kim was now said to be telling his people that the Successful People's Democratic Satellite was now in orbit and broadcasting away. Dear Lord, is there no end to the lies people in Communist countries have to endure from a transparently disingenuous Press?

Don Marsh's Dating Tips

#6 Red: It's the Color of Romance.

Racist Star photo/Matt Kryger

SAD internet obsessives may recall a few mentions of Marsh Supermarkets, an Indianapolis-based regional grocery chain. In particular we've asked how it is that "normal", everyday Americans--let alone supposed beneficiaries of her fancier educational establishments, such as Meganjane McArdle-Galt--could follow a weekly regimen of grocery/drug store visits without understanding, and likely screaming about, the vast gulf between the high-school text version of How Your Economic System Works they're regularly fed--or regularly feed others--and the grade-school-playground shenanigans not just baldly pulled on them, aisle after aisle, but rubbed in their faces, in the name of Retail. Although with Meganjane we figure it involves "having The Help do the shopping".

One could not shop at Marsh for the better part of a month without understanding that the portion of Free Market Theorization which involves the Customer--namely, that the Business tries to please him by providing the product, or the choices of products, he votes for with his dollars, at the Lowest Possible Price--is in reality so far down the list that it qualifies as a sick joke. What determines 90% of what's on your grocers' shelves is vendor relations; either how much money national brands spend on advertising, or (and this was clearly of more importance at Marsh) what they're coughing up in terms of ducats, freebies, skybox invites, kickbacks, and free golf clubs, and what brand of golf clubs, in exchange for shelf space. My local Marsh has six framed head shots of the management team above the office window. The only time you ever see any of them is when they're out schmoozing some sales rep. If you see one engaging an actual customer in conversation it's either a friend, relative, or someone with some golf clubs to give away. You can't even get those guys to run a cash register for five minutes at Holiday time while one of their preternaturally cold-sensitive cashiers gets treated for chilblains.

Couple this with the fact that these guys know, or imagine they know, exactly what makes you buy something, how items sell in each and every shelf position in the store, the exact amount of aisle space, in millimeters, they can take up with "special" displays before people begin hurling jumbo bottles of ketchup at the apparently abandoned children who are taking up the rest of it. The last time You, the Customer, were given the slightest thought was back when they were scouting the real estate, and even then they were only interested in how much you paid for your house.

I've detailed some of the results at Marsh: the disappearance of national brands; the rapid transmogrification of a brand of deli products from The Greatest Ever Produced to Something We've Never Heard Of; the day I--then forbidden the dark and Arab delights of coffee, turned again into the tea aisle for my regular purchase of Twinings Prince of Wales, only to find a) English Breakfast, b) Earl Fucking Grey, and c) 72 cubic feet of flavored chais. Tell me, please, what sudden Free Market outpouring of Hoosier New Age Aquarian consumer demand was behind that one.

The other spur for bringing up Marsh was that, beginning in 2005 or so, its business problems (generally blamed, in the local press, on "outside Big-Box competition with its Unfairly Lower Prices"), which led to it seeking, in order, a White Knight, a Soiled Knight, a Desperate Suitor, an inheritor of vast larders of cash even more gullible than the Marshes, and, finally, a capital-investment firm willing to take the thing off their hands. It was during this time that the Big Secret leaked out: that the descendants of those Marshes who had founded the thing in the 30s, taken it public in the 50s, managed to survive the national-chain invasion of the 60s, and started one of the first convenience-store chains were lying so thick on the ground at company headquarters that you could walk across 'em, like the dead at the Somme. And a couple hundred of them were bailing out with parachutes made of million-dollar bills.

Full disclosure: a certain portion of my attitude, not large, is probably also due to the fact that Don Marsh, second-generation patriarch of the clan, is not merely a right-wing extremist--which is only to be expected--but an extremely loud one. He took the operation over in the late 70s, spent the 80s and 90s buying up regional businesses--an ice cream producer/retailer, a caterer, convenience stores, restaurants, and opening a pharmacy operation and various "concept" groceries designed to compete with various Vague Economic Threats like Cub foods or natural food stores. All this, of course, made Don Marsh an Heroic Reagan Entrepreneurial Achiever, and, like apparently every other one of those geniuses, the minute business conditions changed he was cooked.

So Marsh finally locates a buyer in leveraged-buyout specialist Sun Capital, and Central Indiana rests easy, secure in the knowledge it has seen the last of Don Marsh sniffing Larry Bird's or Peyton Manning's jocks in his own commercials. Until this week.

Indianapolis Racist Star, March 31:

The new owner of Marsh Supermarkets has hit the former CEO with a lawsuit, claiming Don E. Marsh improperly spent millions of dollars of the Indianapolis grocery chain’s money to pay for a luxury lifestyle before he retired in 2006.

Claiming the grocery executive spent as much as six months of every year traveling for pleasure, the lawsuit contends the former CEO ought to reimburse the grocery chain an unspecified amount for breaching his 1999 employment agreement with Marsh Supermarkets.

Indianapolis Racist Star, April 1:

According to the lawsuit, Don Marsh made personal use of the corporate jet for hunting trips, business meetings and jaunts to the four family vacation condominiums at Aspen, Colo.; La Romana, Dominican Republican [sic]; Naples, Fla.; and Saugatuck, Mich.

In addition to the Macy's 2005 parade, the lawsuit says, the CEO used company money to pay for his son's family excursions in 2004 and 2005 to Africa and New Zealand at a total cost of $149,000.

The CEO also attended what were called executive outings in Alaska that the lawsuit claims were fishing trips that involved few employees and cost $100,000 or more per outing.

According to the lawsuit, the CEO often flew on the company jet "to take female employees on vague business trips to places such as Chicago or New York City" and New Orleans, where he sometimes "spent significant amounts of money at various department stores.''

And it's been a rough week overall, but I gotta tell ya, when you live long enough to hear Don Marsh use "out-of-state venture capitalist group" as a pejorative, every day is just a little sunnier.

Echo Chamber

WE'RE always a day behind on Daily Show/Colbert viewing around here; the first run is on too late for my Poor Wife, especially for the nine months of the year that Indiana is on Newfoundland Time, plus she's a read-until-lights-out type. So it was yesterday evening when we saw Monday's quickie Colbert appearance of Slate's Emily Yoffe, erstwhile global climate change denier, now the world's leading non-expert authority on a psychological disorder that doesn't exist*.

And I'm reasonably sure it was Emily Yoffe, because we've been watching old Larry Sanders Shows recently, and Mimi Rogers is much better at faking sincerity. And I don't think Scientologists go around touting psychological disorders, even the risible or indefensible. But it might have been. Both women have that hyperthyroid stare and pasted-on public smile, either of which taken alone is more disturbing than a little narcissism, and which manage to escape the easy public opprobrium of professional yentas by merest historical chance: because Phrenology, Mesmerism, and Anthropometrics evolved into the study of emotional traits instead of physical features. I don't want to get into a long historical discussion here, so let's just say the money was better, and it's proven slightly more difficult to laugh off.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder! I suppose we should be grateful that it's difficult nowadays for these people to get a license to hack the offending area of the brain loose and suction it out through the nose, or hook the afflicted up via jumper cables to old Army field telephones. NPD--of course it's a fucking acronym--was added to the Psychological Liturgical Calendar in 1980. Before that we had to make do with saying, "Jeez, she's stuck up!" or "Boy, what an asshole!" Another sparkling example of how modern psychology, like the old Soviet system, solves problems you wouldn't have otherwise.

And 1980 does not really come as a surprise to us, since contemporary psychology and Reaganism go together like Pam Anderson and Whatever Loud and Talentless Tattoo Model She's Presently Dating. Prior to Reagan, psychology was just about at the point of admitting that the two things it did well--the two things it did at all--namely, running behavior tests on captive college freshmen and keeping people locked up indefinitely, with or without trial, were really of use only to the people who periodically re-wrote entry-level college psychology texts.

Yes, it was a great time to combine Authoritarianism, Small-Town Snoopery, and a supple and utterly valueless willingness to trumpet any sort of public behavior that promised to put you back in the majority. It was in the 1980s that we decided that the sort of people who might actually benefit in some way from the machinations of modern psychology would actually be even better off turned loose on the streets to fend for themselves. This was, I think, merely fortuitous, in that the Reagan administration was just trying to trim the books of any federal spending that appeared to help people who weren't donors. This was also the time when we expanded the disposable incomes of the well-off, and convinced them via Public Service Announcement that their surly teenagers were like two fried eggs on drugs. This fortunately kept us from having a lot of spare psychologists hanging around with nothing to do, and over the past twenty-five years has made Making Young People Less Inconvenient a growth industry to match Producing Unarmored Combat Vehicles, Unfettered Near-Banking, and Herbal Supplement Informercials.

But the thing that got to me about Ms Yoffe's reverse-Scientologist performance Monday night was the urgency with which she pushed John Edwards as the poster-boy for this pseudo-disorder. He outed himself by having an affair! she insisted, before babbling on about his hair-combing proclivities. The Slate piece goes even deeper into non-clinical diagnosis by rank amateur:

John Edwards outed himself as one when forced to confess an adulterous affair. (Given his comical vanity, the deceitful way he used his marriage for his advancement, and his self-elevation as an embodiment of the common man while living in a house the size of an arena, it sounds like a pretty good diagnosis.)

Yes, yes it does, and I'd like to offer my congratulations, except you just congratulated yourself enough for both of us, and the rest of the globe.

Lessee, we've got A) inability to distinguish the trivial from the serious; B) willingness to swallow silly propaganda pieces provided they reinforce your own point of view; and C) spouting Class Traitor nonsense that doesn't survive a minute's reflection. Is "Journalist" an analytical category yet?

So we've turned to Yoffe's actual piece while our concern over whether a Colbert booker got fired over her appearance is still fresh. And there's Edwards, still being pushed to the fore, still having his marriage analyzed by long distance by a careerist scrivener who's never met him or his wife, whose diagnosis is confirmed by the subject himself, which seems a smidge self-defeating, if not a confirmation of the whole thing as a sort of late-20th century materialist version of a round of slumber-party OUIJA. And that paragraph ends with the classic philosophical conundrum:

And what other malady could explain the simultaneous phenomena of Blago and the Octomom?

To which we are brave and ignorant enough to answer, well, that might depend on if you mean "Blago" and "Octomom" personally, or the massively stupid fifteen minute's entertainment either provided the easily amused. But in either case we'd like to offer the possibility of "Stupidity", "Venality", and "News coverage that unceasingly dives for the Bottom while the Bottom unceasingly recedes". There. Didn't have to pretend I knew what made either of 'em tick, didn't have to pretend I gave a shit anyway, and didn't have to read any pop psychology texts.

A small theme has developed; let's count the politicians who get mentioned here, and ignore, for the moment, the fictional characters from The Sopranos, The Wizard of Oz, and The Wall Street Journal. Edwards the Poster Boy. Blago the Hairdo. Ah-nuld the Insufficient Budget Squeezer. And, of course--surely you didn't imagine otherwise?--Clinton the Dick.

It's interesting: we start off using this junior-high analytical category on Wall Street, but that disappears before the opening paragraph is over. Then we bring in four politicians, none of whom has any noteworthy connection to, or power over, the economic meltdown--except the one who's being blamed for the perpetual constitutional and crackpot tax-cutting religious parties cluster-fuck that is California's--and we haply have some Op-Ed guy from the Wall Street Journal and Dr. Chuckles Merkwürdigeliebe Krauthammer standing by to help with the sidewalk psychoanalysis. Not a mention of the major political party which turned the Myth of Narcissus into a parable for Eternal Economic Reflected Sunshine. Hmmmm. Though now that I think about it, it is damn near impossible to find a single Republican who fits the bill, aside from that guy in Cali they elected without realizing his was quoting from his own movies.

For that matter, nothing about Botox and Boob Lifts, nothing about Religion, nothing about People Who Pretend Expertise Where There Is None Just To Get On Teevee. Hardly surprising. Hey, Ms Yoffe: I promise not to analyze your marriage via the aether if you'll promise to publish an honest photo of your shoe closet.

__________

* or does, but fuck it; these are the people who told me, as a youth, that "while Marihuana is not physically addicting, it is psychologically addicting," Psychological Addiction being a category unknown until the previous Marihuana is Addicting business had proven, oh,absolute bullshit is the scientific term, I think, and carrying all the philosophical weight of any other concept made up on the spot to cover Your Venal Lying Ass. These same people will be happy to tell you that You Like Sex Too Much, provided you've demonstrated a willingness to be gulled that completely. It is probably true that a large number of people consumed by "narcissist tendencies" have some difficulty maneuvering through Life, in no small part because such maneuvering generally includes pleasing some employer or other supervisor who's at least as narcissistic as you. We note that this is also the case with people who are inordinately fond of Twinkies, or Jesus, and nobody ever suggests that Haley Barbour would be President otherwise.

By the Way, Sixty Years After Hiroshima A Guy Standing In Front Of A Blackboard Covered With Arcane Formulas Does Not Really Inspire Confidence

Nicholas Dawidoff, "The Civil Heretic". March 25

SUNDAY was busy; we've got the neighbor's animals to look after while they join in the mass Hoosier migration to the swamplands of Florida, which I'm pretty sure Juan Ponce de Leon named The Land of Flowers for the same reason Erik the Red called it "Greenland": to separate real-estate suckers from their gold. You're heading to sunny climes just as the weather gets nice here. By the time it reaches an average daily temperature here matching the one you've escaped to--two months, tops--you'll be cowering indoors with the AC up full blast. Yes, the ocean and the beach are invigorating for as many as forty-eight hours provided you manage to get through them without second-degree burns, which I guarantee you my neighbors will not.

So it wasn't until yesterday evening that I finally dug down through the Sunday Times pile and came face to face with Freeman Dyson, those titular blackboard scribbles, and the boilerplate note that he "infuriated environmentalists".

I had, in fact, read much of the piece the previous Thursday, and if someone can explain to me what's up with the Times publishing its Sunday Magazine cover story four days early it will probably go a long way towards understanding how it could have imagined hiding the online David Brooks and Maureen Dowd would increase paid subscriptions. So I was already aware that the infuriated environmentalists featured on the cover were the species who write stinging emails and subject their targets to well-timed WTFs in "Chat rooms [and] Web threads". Which--I'm just playing a hunch, here--are not the best locations to contact an 85-year-old mathematician, or to gauge the reactions of the "Environmentalist" community at large.

They are, however, good places to find anonymous people hurling shit anonymously, as you may have heard. Which, of course, is right in the best traditions of modern journalism.

We think we know enough about academics and academicians to understand that some discipline-poaching octogenarian eminence insisting that the overwhelming consensus in someone else's field is Just Plain Wrong probably draws fifty good-natured smiles to every instance of outrage. But then we also know that academic rifts can be as vicious as a reality show. And we don't object to that any more than we object to Professor Dyson's opinion. It's just that by and large we conclude that that front-page outrage is, well, a journalistic invention.

And we don't quite understand it, really; does the Times imagine its Sunday Magazine readers wouldn't take to a cozy feature story about a still-kickin' 85-year-old physics legend without a phony Intellectual Celebrity Feud! hook? Because the whole frickin' article goes out of its way, roughly every 75 words, to paint Professor Dyson as Otherwise A Liberal Dreamboat Emeritus. He's an Obama man! He opposes nuclear weapons! His Christianity is more a Guide to Living than a system of belief! He's tolerant of the Lower Classes, and opposed to Star Wars. Though, somehow, this did not lead to "Freeman Dyson Pisses Off Right-Wing Munitions Magnates" ending up as the cover sub-head.

Professor Dyson can go on believing whatever he wishes, and best wishes for him continuing to do so for another thirty years, assuming either that Princeton isn't underwater at that point, or that the superannuated are more naturally buoyant. I happen to be a Global Climate Change Heretic myself, of a sort: I think mass drownings are something the human race has got comin' to it, though this doesn't mean I don't support every effort being made to avert catastrophe, including the liberal use of volcanoes and sacrificial Global Warming deniers found to be on corporate payrolls.

Nah, his opinions are okey by me. What the piece made me wonder about is why Noam Chomsky or Ward Churchill never appear on the cover of the Times Sunday Magazine with an examination of how either enrages the Right. (Chomsky did get to play 20 Questions with Deborah Solomon in 2003; she went so far as to read the blurbs on the back of his most recent book, or, in other words, two solid weeks of research.) And I was thinking about this while searching for the cat food next door ("in the garage" the note says, without mentioning which pile it was hiding under) when it hit me: you can't really make that big a deal out of someone infuriating the Right when that's the default setting.

Look, Kid, I'm Sorry To Have To Tell You This, But If You Think Nobody Cares About You Now...

Andy Gammill,"Students Give Lawmakers a Bleak View of IPS". March 28

THIS was front-page Saturday stuff in the Racist Star (meaning, again, that you can read it in the next twelve minutes or watch it disappear into the pay-per-view archives), and it's been smoldering and re-erupting at Casa Riley ever since; let's take it from the top:

Margrette Lowe wants state legislators to understand that they have given her a raw deal when it comes to her education.
She and a dozen other Tech High School students met with eight lawmakers Friday and painted a bleak portrait of their district: Many teachers don't care; the district doesn't offer the challenging classes commonly offered elsewhere; and some students receive such bad guidance that it can affect whether they graduate.

Indianapolis Public Schools students have to fight to get what is considered basic in many communities, said Margrette, 16.

"For the past 11 or 10 or 12 years, through every single class, we've always had to go around asking teachers for extra help or extra work or extra projects or extra mentors," she told them, "just so we can get what is considered as basic education."

In a heartfelt outpouring that surprised lawmakers, the students drew attention to administrative problems in IPS and inequities in teachers, facilities and school environments between their district and suburban ones.
Students told how they weren't allowed to take an Advanced Placement U.S. history course that is standard at most schools. One boy said his brother might not graduate because he didn't know he had to make up geometry credits.

IPS' low test scores and high dropout rate are well known, but Friday's meeting was an urgent plea of raw emotion from college-bound students who said they weren't getting an education equal to that of their suburban peers.

Make no mistake about it; the complainants have our utmost sympathy here, and if we happen to feel that "Students Dislike Teachers" is not exactly news we'll recuse ourselves. The problem here is that we have a loose thread or two to pick, and once we do so the whole thing winds up on the floor and the story's standing there in its boxer shorts.

As I say, the thing kept flaring back up all weekend. My Poor Wife, the one with the expert knowledge, first wanted to know Who booked the meeting? Who chose the students? The story, at least, gives the impression that this was a sort of command performance; are state legislators in the habit of taking children out of class? At the very least one imagines somebody from the Tech administration would have attended, but none comments, or even refuses comments. We do hear from Mary Louise Bewley, who did attend, and who is IPS Superintendent Eugene White's designated mouthpiece for stories he doesn't want his name anywhere around (as well as those times when he's left early for Spring Break):

The students raised real concerns, said district spokeswoman Mary Louise Bewley, who attended the session. But the picture isn't as bleak as they made it seem, she added.

"I think a lot of positives came out of today's session," she said. "I think we already have some solutions."

The AP class, for example, shouldn't have been canceled because IPS can offer such courses via computer when classes can't be scheduled, she said.
Most alarming was students' perception that many teachers did not care about them or their education, Bewley said.

"I'm sure there are isolated instances where they have teachers that aren't caring," she said, "but I think the majority of their teachers do care."

Damn loose threads...look, we're glad to hear that Ms Bewley thinks that Teachers Who Care still constitute a majority, however slim. We think her concerns show that she'd make an excellent candidate, should she decide to get into the actual education side of Education, and we hope that she's spending her vacation week examining the resumés of all the cashiered administrators littering the halls of the IPS administration building for other caring individuals with time on their hands. Which reminds us: before we grab a dustpan and broom and start dealing with the cotton fillament...

Why th' hell was the meeting on a Friday? And the Friday before Spring Break?

Oh, do not get ahead of us! We have a tiny inkling about that which'll turn up later.

Ms Bewley was at the meeting; Ms Bewley has the answer about the AP History class. Ms Bewley is therefore presumed to be aware that this is a guidance counseling problem--and therefore an administration fuck-up--regardless of how little a large minority of teachers cares for the little bastards. Same with the brother lacking geometry credits. The grand academic overview of a student's career is the business of the school and the district administrations, not the people known as "teachers", whose job involves , uh, teaching.

Another Riley flare-up here, as this caused me at some point to relay my own guidance counseling stories. There aren't many of them, since there wasn't any guidance or counseling to speak of.

And that's in a middle-class, suburban, mostly white establishment, though long before we as a nation started to get really manic about testing little Connor and Melissa to death lest they wind up at a state school. I went to see a counselor the summer before I changed junior highs; he managed to enroll me in the wrong math course, which I, district neophyte, had no way of knowing until months later, and which resulted in my being a year behind in math studies. I got called in twice to see a high school counselor: the first time as an incoming sophomore, except it wasn't my counselor, it was the new basketball coach who was using his office as an excuse to interview all his new players. The second time was late in my senior year, when whoever it was informed me how sorry he was he'd somehow forgotten to make sure I signed up for the National Merit Scholarship test the previous week.

The guidance office was widely known around the school, among teachers and students, as what became of teachers who couldn't teach, or, in one case, as where they sent the woman who couldn't go an entire class period without a cigarette, whose desk drawer was a notorious spot for glomming free smokes during her regular, King-sized absences.

So, y'know, you kids have my sympathy, but I'm holding onto to my sense of amazement.

Oops, there's another hot ember, as Mr. Riley reacts to something Ms Too-Feminist-To-Be-Called-"Mrs. Riley" says by replying that, again, he learned fairly early that he could read ahead in class textbooks and go to the library study halls, convocations, and after school and read to his heart's content without any guidance from anybody. To which The Expert he married replies--and rightly so--that The System doesn't work that way anymore, that nowadays children need every bit of Official involvement, and every last credit they can get, to compete for schools and scholarships. Which prompts Riley--whose colossal ignorance is largely self-taught--to remark that the complaints themselves, sadly, sounded too much like bright students in urban districts who've been forced to adopt the very attitudes of the people who have been keeping them in underfunded programs since the Klan ran Indiana, and Whoosh! it's a flashover. Somebody call the Student Fire Brigade! Oh, right; they're busy elsewhere:

March 28, 2009

North Central is preparing its pool and natatorium for an April opening



The nearly $14 million project has stirred much debate about taxes in the township



By Gretchen Becker


gretchen.becker@indystar.com

Water filled the new pool at the North Central High School natatorium this week as officials began testing the facility and planning its unveiling next month.

To begin the testing, three garden hoses slowly spilled water in to cover tiles on the bottom of the pool, said Phil Smith, Washington Township Schools director of operations. Then a 2-inch pipe was used to add more. Thursday, the J. Everett Light Career Center firefighting students used fire hoses to fill the pool to its brim.

Damn, and on the very same day. Curse the luck.

Four locker rooms -- two for physical education classes and two for the swim teams -- with plastic lockers instead of metal ones, which can rust from exposure to pool chemicals.

A wet classroom, for students in their swimsuits.

Walls and ceilings designed to endure harsh natatorium conditions.
Measures to ensure high air quality.

25-yard lanes and a diving well, or 50-meter lanes, depending on how it's set up, Smith said.

It's an Olympic-sized pool -- just like Carmel and Fishers high schools have -- and will let North Central host large meets. All NCHS students will use the pool for physical education classes, and the Washington Township Swim Club also will use it....

The $13.8 million natatorium became a symbol of the debate about tax reform in Indiana in 2007, when Washington Township residents fumed about double-digit increases in property tax bills. Homeowners began complaining in May 2005 about the district's decision to proceed with the renovation.

The district is in the midst of renovating its football stadium, a $5.7 million project to repair bleachers, improve the press box and replace 50-year-old locker rooms.

'Cos nothin' says Education like a spacious new pressbox.

I've lived in Indianapolis proper for thirty years, and I was born and raised in its suburbs. If you were to write me some snail mail, or send me a box of origami cranes, you'd send it to Indianapolis. I vote for the mayor of Indianapolis and for representatives on its City/County Council. My US Representative's district includes most of Marion County and all of the IPS district. And my tax dollars went to filling that fucking Olympic-sized pool. I've never bought those Tech students so much as a pencil.

Wow, I didn't realize loose threads burn so fast. The Indiana State Legislature shows up right at the exact moment when they're sure no teacher or school administrator will be available for a week to answer any of this and they bleed all over the fucking floor about the poor students who suffer in an underfunded program mostly because the property taxes from wealthy Indianapolis districts go to their "own" schools, not every school in the city, thanks to the system put in place by--you did get ahead of me, didn't you?--the Indiana State Legislature, the same organization which rubber-stamped Mitch "The Education Governor" Daniels' across-the-board cuts in education in the name of artificially balancing the budget and getting re-elected. Gosh. The same Legislature that approved the consolidation of Marion County while preserving its de facto segregated school systems when these kids' grandparents were in school.

And thanks for orchestrating a front-page effort to blame teachers for the hated Indianapolis Public Schools and its well-known distaste for the skinned and scorned it must try, however futilely, to educate, just as teachers complete another full year of working without a contract and begin making noises about "working the contract" instead of putting in extra effort for a district that doesn't give a shit about them. Save me from Holy Coincidence, St. Teresa!

"To have to beg for rigorous courses and qualified teachers is not something a 17-year-old should have to do," said Sen. Teresa Lubbers, R-Indianapolis, chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee. "What I heard them saying was the most legitimate thing in the world to ask for"....

Reached a few hours after she left Tech, Lubbers said she hadn't been able to stop thinking about the comments.

And thanks for taking time out of your busy evening of empathy in the face of sudden discovery in the inequities in public education in Central Indiana to take a call from the reporter writing up the story for Saturday's deadline.

And look: Teresa Lubbers, R-Indianapolis, is not just the chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, or a seventeen-year-member of that body which her party has controlled all that time. She's also the wife of Mark Lubbers, arguably the most powerful and best-connected Republican insider in the state, a man whose career dates to his work for Governor Bob Orr in the early 80s, and who was Senate campaign manager for Dick "Nixon's Favorite Mayor" Lugar, the man who set up that fabulously successful exercise in pocketing white votes for a generation in the first place.

We have to admit that we sincerely hope this was just an exercise in public hypocrisy; the idea that Teresa Lubbers, et. al., were actually that ignorant of what they and their party has been doing to public education in poor districts for the last forty years is probably more knowledge than anyone should bear.

Oh, I Thought They Said $800,000 For The Toastmaster General. My Bad.

THIS from Wapo's Joe Davidson got dropped from yesterday's olio when it suddenly developed a theme; it may be added to the growing Then They Came for My Roth IRA, and There Was No One Left To Publish a Specious Defense of Cosseted Entitlement file. And, in fact, it actually introduces the "refutation" of those horrid, horrid things people have been saying about the Seventy-Second Postmaster General of the United States, the Hon. John E. "Jack" Potter, with the very words, "Now the sideshow."

And here's the first thing, I think: we are, nominally, a Republic; we've certainly played off our heritage as the world's unwashed and unwanted for a couple hundred years now. So I think we can say that something is seriously wrong already if we actually number our Postmasters General.

In fact, it occurs to me that the political impulse to look for big matters and give the trivial the short shrift has led us to focus on the wrong things, on the GOP's thirty-five year war on the lower classes, rather than how it actually spends all the money it "needs" to keep the economy humming along so the rest of us can eat. Forget $1.25 M in antique commodes and wallpaper made from hummingbird skin; forget $100 toilet seats and $300 hammers and $45 billion worth of aircraft carriers frequently named for racist dickheads. Remember C. Everett Koop (13th Surgeon General of the United States) and Bill Rehnquist (her 16th Chief Justice) dressed like a pair of Gilbert and Sullivan spear carriers. These things were reported as sort of comical personal aberrations, when the fact is they pointed clearly and directly to the fact that the Great Goldwater Purge had left one of our two political parties in the hands of a vast, sweeping array of Douglas MacArthur-level, silk dressing gown/gold brocade/aviator shades-affecting lunatics. There's a reason why people in authority assume the airs of imperial heirs, and it generally has to do with erectile disfunction or poor potty training, and almost never with any demonstrable need for an actual emperor, nor any particular aptitude for the job if one were required.

Yes, indeedy: there was Nixon's palace guard and Nancy Reagan's Tinseltown Empire Revival chic, plus her hubby's love of the empty spectacle part of the job and distaste for the rest of it. Sure, it was all reported, but as is now becoming abundantly clear, generally by a profession filled with people who found nothing particularly odd, let alone disturbed, or Simply Wrong, about public servants of the Great Melting Pot behaving as if they were the consort of the Sun King. Who, in fact, secretly longed for the day when they too could afford to dress the servants up in an Arabian Nights fantasy and drink Romanée Conti on ice while eating their salads with their dessert forks.

Who decided this was America, and how'd they get away with it for so long?

On Feb. 17, ABC News reported: "Potter's base salary went from $186,000 in 2007 to more than $260,000 last year. On top of that, an incentive bonus of $135,000. Add in retirement benefits and other perks, total compensation was more than $850,000."

But Potter's salary was not that high, as this and other reports would lead you to believe, if you miss the point about retirement. Almost $381,500 of the $850,000 was due to an increase in the value of his retirement fund, which will be paid, of course, after he retires. Another $70,000 covers the cost of his security detail, insurance, annual physical and other items.

A bonus of $135,041 also is included in the $857,459, but that will be paid out over 10 years after he leaves federal service. And note this: Postal operations and salaries, including Potter's, are funded by the postage we buy and not the taxes we pay. Congress, however, has said that postal employee pay should be comparable to that in the private sector.

Okay, okay, Joe. Get back up and wipe your face. First, whether the "bonus" is paid in ten or twenty or a hundred years it's part of his compensation, and apparently for one year's work, while he was earning a base of over a quarter-million bucks, plus perks, plus retirement. Not to mention that that "bonus", equal to half his salary, arrives with no explanation of what it was for. And, look, I think we all know what last year's going rate for a CEO who can manage to lose $2 billion a year was; maybe the argument now is about how it ought to be adjusted in the current environment of a modicum of sense among the rampant plunder. If General Potter's so hot, perhaps he should be applying for that $9 M a year he'd get at UPS, and stop having his flunkies lament what he's losing.

But mostly, it is always interesting to see just what you people imagine the rest of us will fall for. $70,000 for security? What, is he leading us into battle with Chinese letter carriers? Has he pissed off some rogue Ninja Philatelists with his penny-pinching regime? Is he trying to protect his new uniform design from John Roberts?

Olio, Ab Ovo Edition

• Recommended reading: Dahlia Lithwick, "Irony Board: How many ways can Senate Republicans show intellectual hypocrisy?"

Or, for that matter, How did Dahlia Lithwick come to be writing for Slate? (Our theory is that she's the Anti-Contrarian Double Reverse with a Half Twist version of their staff, just as it's likely they have a water cooler somewhere where the water is dispensed downward.)

So the very gang responsible for the Filibuster Is a Sacred Rite! No, Wait, It's an Unconstitutional Pillaging of Our Sacred Order! Oh, Sorry, It's a Rite Again! routine, and the very guy who publicly defended the stealth confirmation of Sam Alito, now demand answers! and more answers! from Elena "There Is A Good" Kagan on the grounds that she may have supported reproductive rights at some point in her life.

And, y'know, fine by me; the Senate is supposed to be the deliberative body, and this is the modern substitute. I'd just like to know where Chuck Todd is, and what th' hell happens to all those people who pop up to complain about Congress wasting precious time on, say, AIG bonuses, or overt cheating in a designated anti-trust proof professional sport, the other 51 weeks of the year?

• Southern Baptists may wish to readjust their ballast when Newt Gingrich converts to Roman Catholicism this Easter. And remember, a nice Thank You note is always a sign of good breeding.

• This plan, not surprisingly, has already given quick theological study Newtie a free hand to call the President "anti-Catholic" and object to his speaking at Notre Dame.

Although if Newt were really savvy you'd have expected a religion where your own sins are kept private, but you get to complain loudly and long about everyone else's, would have attracted him much earlier. And if you're like me, familiar with both the details of Newt's romantic history and the techniques of the fight game, you're counting the days until he suddenly finds himself trapped in an elevator with a supple and accommodating Hindu woman.

• The Notre Dame thing--can you guys not shut up about anything?--prompted Richard Viguerie--I've got no idea how I wound up on his mailing list--to email his shock! shock! at the school's abnegation of sacred religious principles to which Viguerie himself does not, apparently, subscribe. (He did, however, get his start working for ambidextrous kiddie diddler Billy James Hargis, so there's some degree of kinship.)

And look, Carter, Reagan, and Bush II all spoke at Notre Dame, despite the latter two being, respectively, the guy who denied working people their just wages and rejected the idea of community obligation to the Poor, and the guy who took a, well, rather rampant delight in executing prisoners, and the former being a religious non-hypocrite.

• Meanwhile, America's Third-Worst State Legislature™ (Motto: So "Bobby" Jindal's A Foot Taller Than Our Man. What National Economy Did He Ever Set On The Road To Utter Disaster?) ponders requiring hospital admitting privileges for any doctor who performs an abortion in the state, based on allegations of complications linked to a Fort Wayne doctor.

(Again, you can find the details at the Racist Star if you wish, at least for the next few hours, but I'm not linking you to it when there's any chance at all you'll see the comments.)

Abortion would be the only out-patient surgery affected, of course, since Jesus was notably silent about the morality of installing big plastic hooters. And this is the same Third-Worst State Legislature™ which continues to shield faith-healing cults from the advances of 19th century medicine, including, especially, dependent children and women in childbirth.

The good news is that we've made our peace with irrational numbers.

Recommended Reading

Matt Taibbi, "The Big Takeover".

Glenn Greenwald, "Howard Kurtz: government and media need a "cease-fire" now and then".

Joe Conason, "AIG is Chump Change--Let's Find Corporate America's Hidden Billions".

Paul Krugman, "Financial Policy Despair".

(bonus corporate media cluelessness, via Digby:)

John Harwood: Well Chuck, I was going to say, if the White House to choose between praise from Paul Krugman or plus 300 points on the Dow, I suspect that they would happily take the latter.

Ah, Schooldays! The Friends, The Pep Rallies, The Strip-Searches...

ITEM: "Strip-Search of Girl Tests Limit of School Policy".

ITEM: "Racy Phone Images Can Haunt Teens". (N.B., Indianapolis Racist Star link, so it will disappear behind a Pay For Reprint wall in several hours, a policy which, so far at least, has had the unfortunate effect of keeping the paper afloat. Also, and as always, do not read the comments in the Racist Star, which are right there at the bottom of the page and require no clicking to link, particularly if you have recently eaten, have sensitive digestion generally, or are literate.)

YES, the savviest of Hoosier school administrators have tumbled onto the cryptic and deliciously dirty teen world of "sexting", which means the local media types they cultivate like a rosarian with a tender new hybrid are now hip to it as well. So we've had three public cases in five days, and all the local stations had to come up with graphics. It is the rare instance of public stupidity that nonetheless manages to contribute to the Arts.

In each instance the girls were underage and were reportedly filmed surreptitiously. One vid was making the rounds of John Marshall High School in Indianapolis, which led school officials to call in the girl's grandmother (her guardian) and show her the tape.

And here's the odd thing about that: I'm married to an IPS teacher, and I'm involved in local educational issues, and I never realized that public school officials have plenary powers which allow them to posses, and display, child pornography. I'm thinking we have a whole new avenue to help with school funding which is being underutilized.

[You'll note that, as always, the ubiquitous electronic gizmos which make all this possible get a free pass, especially in the wealthier districts, such as Carmel, which says it managed to reduce the problem by making it against the rules to have sexual materials in school (it wasn't before?), thereby avoiding hundreds of calls from the parents of thousands of Meghans and Joshuas who just had to have their cellphone/camera/text messenger/mp3 player/vibrator at hand at all times, in case of emergency.]

And this comes as the Arizona strip-search case nears its date with the rabid defenders of personal rights the current Court comprises. Presumably that one did not involve videotaping, since the equipment six years back was a lot bulkier. It did involve forcing thirteen-year-old Savana Redding to disrobe for a school nurse and a secretary--both of whom, I trust, have now completed their prison sentences and are fully rehabilitated--on the grounds that another student, caught with prescription ibuprofen, had (falsely) named her as the source. And all this apparently took place without so much as a phone call to the girl's parents, let alone any of the adults menacing this eighth-grader, this thirteen-year-old, showing the least sensitivity for her rights or the slightest compunction to inform her she had any, because they apparently thought she had none that weren't superseded by their own.

For fuck's sake, listen to what these people are saying now, six years and an Appeals court loss later, apparently secure in their belief that the Court will sanction anything remotely resembling brute authoritarian force. It raises the question of how John McCain manages to get re-elected in Arizona time and again despite the occasional bout of lucidity:

• the search was “not excessively intrusive in light of Redding’s age and sex and the nature of her suspected infraction.”

• In a sworn statement submitted in the case, Mr. Wilson [the vice-principal in charge of inmate relations] said he had good reason to suspect Ms Redding. She and other students had been unusually rowdy at a school dance a couple of months before, and members of the school staff thought they had smelled alcohol.

• The fact that she had a clean disciplinary record is irrelevant.

“Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules,” the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, “only that she was never caught.” [emphasis mine; you can't expect the Times to highlight official insanity. I hope that, in the event the Court finds in Ms Redding's favor, the school is forced to adopt this as its official motto.]

Note that Ms Redding says she was never asked whether she had the pills before she was searched. The fact that she was being accused by a former friend was the sort of detail school officials needn't find out about until after a lawsuit is filed. Note, for fuck's sake, that school staff members thought they smelled alcohol on rowdy junior high students at a school function and did nothing.

LET'S part the beaded curtains of memory and step into my own high school days for a moment.

I had a standard white suburban 60s upbringing, which is to say that my parents started fighting when I was in fourth grade, separated in the fifth, divorced in the sixth, and my mom married an alcoholic salesman and moved us to a new district in the eighth. Sports were my social entrée; playing in garage bands was my real love. I tired quickly of the bullying Neanderthals who coached football and basketball; when I entered George S. Patton High I switched to track and cross-country, where the coach was a cool guy, an actual teacher (chemistry) instead of a drivers-ed functionary, and an early adopter of environmental concerns. I was no distance man, but I was a pretty fair quarter-to-half-miler, and qualified for the regionals in the latter my sophomore year. Then I got called into the athletic director's office, along with my best friend on the team.

"The state athletic commission passed a new rule. You can't run in state meets unless your hair is above your ears. You two get haircuts or you're off the team."

Now, neither of us exactly looked like Mark Farner at this point; more like George W. Bush in college. My buddy cut his hair. I drove over to my dad's apartment, bummed his Brylcream, and slicked mine back. It is, to this day, my most cherished memory of high school, when the AD called us back into his office and shook our hands for our compliance while I grinned back at him like a moron.

So we get to the stadium, and they call the race, and I go to line up; we're being seeded according to our qualifying times. And number one is a guy from a county school, the fastest half-miler in the state. And the guy has a Jewish Afro that Darnell Hillman would have been proud of.

So thanks, guys. Learning the vital lesson about trusting adults at such a young age has stood me in good stead ever since. Mere telling wouldn't have had near the impact.

And look: it's a lesson we need to re-learn. We jumped the rails a quarter-century ago. Abuse of power, by petty tyrants, cops, prosecutors, politicians, yes, even military heroes, is a constant, and serious, threat. Check the dissenting opinion from the Ninth:

Judge (Michael Daly) Hawkins concluded, “I do not think it was unreasonable for school officials, acting in good faith, to conduct the search in an effort to obviate a potential threat to the health and safety of their students.”

Now, I'll tell ya, I smoked my share of reefer in high school, and a couple of other kid's shares as well, and I still maintain that a far greater threat to my health and safety were the parallel bars in gym class. And I've had the occasional sweet, sweet illicitly-dispensed-in-violation-of-Federal-law prescription ibuprofen, which moderately dulled the pain in my knee for a time. I'm not sure how many would be required before you jumped off the junior high roof while imagining you could fly, or stared at the sun until your eyeballs melted, but a rough guess is "more than a thirteen-year-old girl could comfortably hide in her "underwear".

And, y'know, in a long and varied career I can't even recall ever having drunk enough that I'd've ordered the strip-searching of a girl barely in her teens and under my legal guardianship, or obeyed someone else's orders to do so, or rolled film of one having sex. They do have some shade in Arizona, right?

1. Find Money. 2. Start Getting It Back. 3. Finish Getting It Back.

Here's the dirty little secret, though. Most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal. And that is a sign of how much we've got to change our laws -- right?

-Barack Obama

What this story needs is a good gibbet.

-with apologies to Rex Stout

WHO'S up for a morning stroll? Good. The neighborhood's full of historical interest. For example, just ahead is the Roberts Commission, the first inquiry into the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which began eleven days after the attack itself, and was tasked, by Franklin Socialist Roosevelt himself, with determining if there had been any dereliction of duty. (I suppose if David Brooks had been columnizing in those days he'd have explained to President Pinko that he had enough on his plate already.) Over here on your right is the US War in Afghanistan. It's only seven years old, but if you'll look closely at the foundation you'll note it consists of coarsely-ground international law produced by our insisting that the then-government of the World's Most Godforsaken Country hand over some criminals we wanted, and make that before sundown. This was despite the fact that said government's expertise lie more in stoning to death young girls who tried to go to school, and despite the fact that said criminals were ensconced in an area so hostile that, as it turned out, we couldn't get them out ourselves without huge bombs and huger* bribes. The hole there across the street is all that remains of the old Justice for War Profiteers Place, which stood from the Civil War up unto the time that some bright boys figured out how to go to war every 4.5 years, on average, without ever declaring one. Which, by the President's formulation, makes profiteering perfectly legal.

I first learned about our latest difficulty on Sunday, as I took a break from lawn care, head cold, and brunch-level Alcohol Ingestion Syndrome to catch up on newspapers and breeze through tapes of the Sunday shows. The Market, that arbiter of the Good and the Reasonable, was having another one of its spells, due to the possibility of the Evil Congress (how dramatically Life would improve in the instant that Harry Reid, let alone Nancy Pelosi, turned up before the cameras with Spock's goatee!) would just Keep Coming Back for Our Gallant Traders' Hard-Earned Money Until It Was All Gone. This was also apparently the one question of substance Leno couldn't help but sneak in: the "frightening" effect of the supposed precedent-setting post-facto bonus taxation. Then they came for my warehouses of antique vehicles, and there was no one left to protest!

The absolute nadir, though, was Meet the Press, where half the program was given over to CNBC anchor Erin "Just Remember, Without The Lead Paint The Price Of Chinese Toys Will Skyrocket" Burnett, and Tom Fucking Brokaw; apparently she was his choice as designated NBC henchnetwork artificial resuscitator, which is now in his contract like the Red White and Blue M&Ms only, motherfuckers! clause. Burnett explained that this violation of our sacred prohibition on Ex Post Facto laws Just wouldn't fly! at which point I was hoping David Gregory would thank them both and spend the final twenty-five minutes of the program playing an imaginary jew's-harp. Thanks for putting your personal stamp on the program so quickly, Dave! By god, when the nation faces towering financial collapse the first person I think of turning to is a guy who used to read a teleprompter twenty years ago, and whose one real claim to fame was coining the term "The Greatest Generation" while the Generation in question still had enough disposable income and visual acuity left to buy his crappy book. The great thing about Brokaw is the way he combines Conventional Wisdom banality with the sort of personal intellectual banality that really sells it, and which makes you want to invite him right into your living room to bore you to death in person. "They (the administration)'ve got to get their act together", he said, suggesting that he's now zeroing in on the Last of the Hippies and their bread stash.

(Yes, I know he's already "written" a "book" about the Sixties. If you've read it feel free to leave a review, and also a description of the people who forced you to do so, including their weapons.)

The Times, either fearing it was falling behind in the Meaningless Blather race, or else contractually obligated to fill the Week in Review section down to the fold, minimum, with vapidity, had Sheryl Gay Stolberg compare the "distraction" over AIG bonuses with the "distraction" over Reagan's Ketchup as a Vegetable and $1000 Military Hammers, and Bill Clinton's commerce-halting haircut. Never mind that a simple, straightforward understanding of those earlier trivialities might have produced some benefit: the Ketchup as School Vegetable story showed, not just the tone-deafness of that administration, but the preposterous levels it was willing to sink to in pursuing budget cuts that actually hurt people, while claiming it would all be made up by putting an end to Big Guvment Waste, and the military procurement scandals were less the fault of bad Reagan administration actors than they were the continuation of decades-old military graft now even more flush with cash. As for the Clinton story, which the Times apparently needs to bring up at least once every year or two, consider all the good the ability to lie, boldly and in public, has done for us in the interim. (And, fer chrissakes, would have led us to the Times while Judith Miller was still a star. Stolberg mentions the Clinton story twice without ever mentioning it was fiction; that tidbit is left to a quote from Stan Greenberg, who was Mr. Clinton's pollster. It comes as the article nears twice the 350-word length it had achieved when the charge was relayed, baldly.)

Dirty little secrets? Fuck, I wish we had only little secrets to worry about. It may very well be that none of the derivatives shenanigans reached the level of explicit illegality--I'm an idiot, if that tempers my doubt, Mr. President--but in aggregate they amounted to the largest robbery in the history of the world, and if we can't find any illegality we can certainly assign blame with the same ethical certitude we applied to the Taliban. And if our carrier force is inappropriate, or busy elsewhere, and our ground forces depleted, well, we've sure used RICO statutes for much smaller outrages in the past. I think it's time to consider just what side of the torchlight you'd care to be on. And you've got til tomorrow night to consider it.

__________

* Attempted enallage thwarted when the spell checker, to my astonishment, passed huger, which turns out to be an actual word, though not a very good one.